Les Misérables
France had sold an old horse in order to obtain bread. At Reichenau, he
gave lessons in mathematics, while his sister Adelaide did wool work
and sewed. These souvenirs connected with a king rendered the
bourgeoisie enthusiastic. He had, with his own hands, demolished the
iron cage of Mont-Saint-Michel, built by Louis XI., and used by Louis
XV. He was the companion of Dumouriez, he was the friend of Lafayette;
he had belonged to the Jacobins’ club; Mirabeau had slapped him on the
shoulder; Danton had said to him: “Young man!” At the age of four and
twenty, in ’93, being then M. de Chartres, he had witnessed, from the
depth of a box, the trial of Louis XVI., so well named _that poor
tyrant_. The blind clairvoyance of the Revolution, breaking royalty in
the King and the King with royalty, did so almost without noticing the
man in the fierce crushing of the idea, the vast storm of the
Assembly-Tribunal, the public wrath interrogating, Capet not knowing
what to reply, the alarming, stupefied vacillation by that royal head
beneath that sombre breath, the relative innocence of all in that
catastrophe, of those who condemned as well as of the man condemned,—he
had looked on those things, he had contemplated that giddiness; he had
seen the centuries appear before the bar of the Assembly-Convention; he
had beheld, behind Louis XVI., that unfortunate passer-by who was made
responsible, the terrible culprit, the monarchy, rise through the
shadows; and there had lingered in his soul the respectful fear of
these immense justices of the populace, which are almost as impersonal
as the justice of God.
The trace left in him by the Revolution was prodigious. Its memory was
like a living imprint of those great years, minute by minute. One day,
in the presence of a witness whom we are not permitted to doubt, he
rectified from memory the whole of the letter A in the alphabetical
list of the Constituent Assembly.
Louis Philippe was a king of the broad daylight. While he reigned the
press was free, the tribune was free, conscience and speech were free.
The laws of September are open to sight. Although fully aware of the
gnawing power of light on privileges, he left his throne exposed to the
light. History will do justice to him for this loyalty.
Louis Philippe, like all historical men who have passed from the scene,
is to-day put on his trial by the human conscience. His case is, as
yet, only in the lower court.
The hour when history speaks with its free and venerable accent, has
not yet sounded for him; the moment has not come to pronounce a
definite judgment on this king; the austere and illustrious historian
Louis Blanc has himself recently softened his first verdict; Louis
Philippe was elected by those two _almosts_ which are called the 221
and 1830, that is to say, by a half-Parliament, and a half-revolution;
and in any case, from the superior point of view where philosophy must
place itself, we cannot judge him here, as the reader has seen above,
except with certain reservations in the name of the absolute democratic
principle; in the eyes of the absolute, outside these two rights, the
right of man in the first place, the right of the people in the second,
all is usurpation; but what we can say, even at the present day, that
after making these reserves is, that to sum up the whole, and in
whatever manner he is considered, Louis Philippe, taken in himself, and
from the point of view of human goodness, will remain, to use the
antique language of ancient history, one of the best princes who ever
sat on a throne.
What is there against him? That throne. Take away Louis Philippe the
king, there remains the man. And the man is good. He is good at times
even to the point of being admirable. Often, in the midst of his
gravest souvenirs, after a day of conflict with the whole diplomacy of
the continent, he returned at night to his apartments, and there,
exhausted with fatigue, overwhelmed with sleep, what did he do? He took
a death sentence and passed the night in revising a criminal suit,
considering it something to hold his own against Europe, but that it
was a still greater matter to rescue a man from the executioner. He
obstinately maintained his opinion against his keeper of the seals; he
disputed the ground with the guillotine foot by foot against the crown
attorneys, those _chatterers of the law_, as he called them. Sometimes
the pile of sentences covered his table; he examined them all; it was
anguish to him to abandon these miserable, condemned heads. One day, he
said to the same witness to whom we have recently referred: “I won
seven last night.” During the early years of his reign, the death
penalty was as good as abolished, and the erection of a scaffold was a
violence committed against the King. The Grève having disappeared with
the elder branch, a bourgeois place of execution was instituted under
the name of the Barrière-Saint-Jacques; “practical men” felt the
necessity of a quasi-legitimate guillotine; and this was one of the
victories of Casimir Périer, who represented the narrow sides of the
bourgeoisie, over Louis Philippe, who represented its liberal sides.
Louis Philippe annotated Beccaria with his own hand. After the Fieschi
machine, he exclaimed: “What a pity that I was not wounded! Then I
might have pardoned!” On another occasion, alluding to the resistance
offered by his ministry, he wrote in connection with a political
criminal, who is one of the most generous figures of our day: “His
pardon is granted; it only remains for me to obtain it.” Louis Philippe
was as gentle as Louis IX. and as kindly as Henri IV.
Now, to our mind, in history, where kindness is the rarest of pearls,
the man who is kindly almost takes precedence of the man who is great.
Louis Philippe having been severely judged by some, harshly, perhaps,
by others, it is quite natural that a man, himself a phantom at the
present day, who knew that king, should come and testify in his favor
before history; this deposition, whatever else it may be, is evidently
and above all things, entirely disinterested; an epitaph penned by a
dead man is sincere; one shade may console another shade; the sharing
of the same shadows confers the right to praise it; it is not greatly
to be feared that it will ever be said of two tombs in exile: “This one
flattered the other.”
CHAPTER IV—CRACKS BENEATH THE FOUNDATION
At the moment when the drama which we are narrating is on the point of
penetrating into the depths of one of the tragic clouds which envelop
the beginning of Louis Philippe’s reign, it was necessary that there
should be no equivoque, and it became requisite that this book should
offer some explanation with regard to this king.
Louis Philippe had entered into possession of his royal authority
without violence, without any direct action on his part, by virtue of a
revolutionary change, evidently quite distinct from the real aim of the
Revolution, but in which he, the Duc d’Orléans, exercised no personal
initiative. He had been born a Prince, and he believed himself to have
been elected King. He had not served this mandate on himself; he had
not taken it; it had been offered to him, and he had accepted it;
convinced, wrongly, to be sure, but convinced nevertheless, that the
offer was in accordance with right and that the acceptance of it was in
accordance with duty. Hence his possession was in good faith. Now, we
say it in good conscience, Louis Philippe being in possession in
perfect good faith, and the democracy being in good faith in its
attack, the amount of terror discharged by the social conflicts weighs
neither on the King nor on the democracy. A clash of principles
resembles a clash of elements. The ocean defends the water, the
hurricane defends the air, the King defends Royalty, the democracy
defends the people; the relative, which is the monarchy, resists the
absolute, which is the republic; society bleeds in this conflict, but
that which constitutes its suffering to-day will constitute its safety
later on; and, in any case, those who combat are not to be blamed; one
of the two parties is evidently mistaken; the right is not, like the
Colossus of Rhodes, on two shores at once, with one foot on the
republic, and one in Royalty; it is indivisible, and all on one side;
but those who are in error are so sincerely; a blind man is no more a
criminal than a Vendean is a ruffian. Let us, then, impute to the
fatality of things alone these formidable collisions. Whatever the
nature of these tempests may be, human irresponsibility is mingled with
them.
Let us complete this exposition.
The government of 1840 led a hard life immediately. Born yesterday, it
was obliged to fight to-day.
Hardly installed, it was already everywhere conscious of vague
movements of traction on the apparatus of July so recently laid, and so
lacking in solidity.
Resistance was born on the morrow; perhaps even, it was born on the
preceding evening. From month to month the hostility increased, and
from being concealed it became patent.
The Revolution of July, which gained but little acceptance outside of
France by kings, had been diversely interpreted in France, as we have
said.
God delivers over to men his visible will in events, an obscure text
written in a mysterious tongue. Men immediately make translations of
it; translations hasty, incorrect, full of errors, of gaps, and of
nonsense. Very few minds comprehend the divine language. The most
sagacious, the calmest, the most profound, decipher slowly, and when
they arrive with their text, the task has long been completed; there
are already twenty translations on the public place. From each
remaining springs a party, and from each misinterpretation a faction;
and each party thinks that it alone has the true text, and each faction
thinks that it possesses the light.
Power itself is often a faction.
There are, in revolutions, swimmers who go against the current; they
are the old parties.
For the old parties who clung to heredity by the grace of God, think
that revolutions, having sprung from the right to revolt, one has the
right to revolt against them. Error. For in these revolutions, the one
who revolts is not the people; it is the king. Revolution is precisely
the contrary of revolt. Every revolution, being a normal outcome,
contains within itself its legitimacy, which false revolutionists
sometimes dishonor, but which remains even when soiled, which survives
even when stained with blood.
Revolutions spring not from an accident, but from necessity. A
revolution is a return from the fictitious to the real. It is because
it must be that it is.
Nonetheless did the old legitimist parties assail the Revolution of
1830 with all the vehemence which arises from false reasoning. Errors
make excellent projectiles. They strike it cleverly in its vulnerable
spot, in default of a cuirass, in its lack of logic; they attacked this
revolution in its royalty. They shouted to it: “Revolution, why this
king?” Factions are blind men who aim correctly.
This cry was uttered equally by the republicans. But coming from them,
this cry was logical. What was blindness in the legitimists was
clearness of vision in the democrats. 1830 had bankrupted the people.
The enraged democracy reproached it with this.
Between the attack of the past and the attack of the future, the
establishment of July struggled. It represented the minute at
loggerheads on the one hand with the monarchical centuries, on the
other hand with eternal right.
In addition, and beside all this, as it was no longer revolution and
had become a monarchy, 1830 was obliged to take precedence of all
Europe. To keep the peace, was an increase of complication. A harmony