Les Misérables
rioting. The final extinction of that vast people which had been in
eruption for twenty-six years—such was the dream. The solidarity of the
Brunswicks, the Nassaus, the Romanoffs, the Hohenzollerns, the
Hapsburgs with the Bourbons. Waterloo bears divine right on its
crupper. It is true, that the Empire having been despotic, the kingdom
by the natural reaction of things, was forced to be liberal, and that a
constitutional order was the unwilling result of Waterloo, to the great
regret of the conquerors. It is because revolution cannot be really
conquered, and that being providential and absolutely fatal, it is
always cropping up afresh: before Waterloo, in Bonaparte overthrowing
the old thrones; after Waterloo, in Louis XVIII. granting and
conforming to the charter. Bonaparte places a postilion on the throne
of Naples, and a sergeant on the throne of Sweden, employing inequality
to demonstrate equality; Louis XVIII. at Saint-Ouen countersigns the
declaration of the rights of man. If you wish to gain an idea of what
revolution is, call it Progress; and if you wish to acquire an idea of
the nature of progress, call it To-morrow. To-morrow fulfils its work
irresistibly, and it is already fulfilling it to-day. It always reaches
its goal strangely. It employs Wellington to make of Foy, who was only
a soldier, an orator. Foy falls at Hougomont and rises again in the
tribune. Thus does progress proceed. There is no such thing as a bad
tool for that workman. It does not become disconcerted, but adjusts to
its divine work the man who has bestridden the Alps, and the good old
tottering invalid of Father Élysée. It makes use of the gouty man as
well as of the conqueror; of the conqueror without, of the gouty man
within. Waterloo, by cutting short the demolition of European thrones
by the sword, had no other effect than to cause the revolutionary work
to be continued in another direction. The slashers have finished; it
was the turn of the thinkers. The century that Waterloo was intended to
arrest has pursued its march. That sinister victory was vanquished by
liberty.
In short, and incontestably, that which triumphed at Waterloo; that
which smiled in Wellington’s rear; that which brought him all the
marshals’ staffs of Europe, including, it is said, the staff of a
marshal of France; that which joyously trundled the barrows full of
bones to erect the knoll of the lion; that which triumphantly inscribed
on that pedestal the date “_June_ 18, 1815”; that which encouraged
Blücher, as he put the flying army to the sword; that which, from the
heights of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean, hovered over France as over
its prey, was the counter-revolution. It was the counter-revolution
which murmured that infamous word “dismemberment.” On arriving in
Paris, it beheld the crater close at hand; it felt those ashes which
scorched its feet, and it changed its mind; it returned to the stammer
of a charter.
Let us behold in Waterloo only that which is in Waterloo. Of
intentional liberty there is none. The counter-revolution was
involuntarily liberal, in the same manner as, by a corresponding
phenomenon, Napoleon was involuntarily revolutionary. On the 18th of
June, 1815, the mounted Robespierre was hurled from his saddle.
CHAPTER XVIII—A RECRUDESCENCE OF DIVINE RIGHT
End of the dictatorship. A whole European system crumbled away.
The Empire sank into a gloom which resembled that of the Roman world as
it expired. Again we behold the abyss, as in the days of the
barbarians; only the barbarism of 1815, which must be called by its pet
name of the counter-revolution, was not long breathed, soon fell to
panting, and halted short. The Empire was bewept,—let us acknowledge
the fact,—and bewept by heroic eyes. If glory lies in the sword
converted into a sceptre, the Empire had been glory in person. It had
diffused over the earth all the light which tyranny can give—a sombre
light. We will say more; an obscure light. Compared to the true
daylight, it is night. This disappearance of night produces the effect
of an eclipse.
Louis XVIII. re-entered Paris. The circling dances of the 8th of July
effaced the enthusiasms of the 20th of March. The Corsican became the
antithesis of the Bearnese. The flag on the dome of the Tuileries was
white. The exile reigned. Hartwell’s pine table took its place in front
of the fleur-de-lys-strewn throne of Louis XIV. Bouvines and Fontenoy
were mentioned as though they had taken place on the preceding day,
Austerlitz having become antiquated. The altar and the throne
fraternized majestically. One of the most undisputed forms of the
health of society in the nineteenth century was established over
France, and over the continent. Europe adopted the white cockade.
Trestaillon was celebrated. The device _non pluribus impar_ reappeared
on the stone rays representing a sun upon the front of the barracks on
the Quai d’Orsay. Where there had been an Imperial Guard, there was now
a red house. The Arc du Carrousel, all laden with badly borne
victories, thrown out of its element among these novelties, a little
ashamed, it may be, of Marengo and Arcola, extricated itself from its
predicament with the statue of the Duc d’Angoulême. The cemetery of the
Madeleine, a terrible pauper’s grave in 1793, was covered with jasper
and marble, since the bones of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette lay in
that dust.
In the moat of Vincennes a sepulchral shaft sprang from the earth,
recalling the fact that the Duc d’Enghien had perished in the very
month when Napoleon was crowned. Pope Pius VII., who had performed the
coronation very near this death, tranquilly bestowed his blessing on
the fall as he had bestowed it on the elevation. At Schoenbrunn there
was a little shadow, aged four, whom it was seditious to call the King
of Rome. And these things took place, and the kings resumed their
thrones, and the master of Europe was put in a cage, and the old regime
became the new regime, and all the shadows and all the light of the
earth changed place, because, on the afternoon of a certain summer’s
day, a shepherd said to a Prussian in the forest, “Go this way, and not
that!”
This 1815 was a sort of lugubrious April. Ancient unhealthy and
poisonous realities were covered with new appearances. A lie wedded
1789; the right divine was masked under a charter; fictions became
constitutional; prejudices, superstitions and mental reservations, with
Article 14 in the heart, were varnished over with liberalism. It was
the serpent’s change of skin.
Man had been rendered both greater and smaller by Napoleon. Under this
reign of splendid matter, the ideal had received the strange name of
ideology! It is a grave imprudence in a great man to turn the future
into derision. The populace, however, that food for cannon which is so
fond of the cannoneer, sought him with its glance. Where is he? What is
he doing? “Napoleon is dead,” said a passer-by to a veteran of Marengo
and Waterloo. “He dead!” cried the soldier; “you don’t know him.”
Imagination distrusted this man, even when overthrown. The depths of
Europe were full of darkness after Waterloo. Something enormous
remained long empty through Napoleon’s disappearance.
The kings placed themselves in this void. Ancient Europe profited by it
to undertake reforms. There was a Holy Alliance; _Belle-Alliance_,
Beautiful Alliance, the fatal field of Waterloo had said in advance.
In presence and in face of that antique Europe reconstructed, the
features of a new France were sketched out. The future, which the
Emperor had rallied, made its entry. On its brow it bore the star,
Liberty. The glowing eyes of all young generations were turned on it.
Singular fact! people were, at one and the same time, in love with the
future, Liberty, and the past, Napoleon. Defeat had rendered the
vanquished greater. Bonaparte fallen seemed more lofty than Napoleon
erect. Those who had triumphed were alarmed. England had him guarded by
Hudson Lowe, and France had him watched by Montchenu. His folded arms
became a source of uneasiness to thrones. Alexander called him “my
sleeplessness.” This terror was the result of the quantity of
revolution which was contained in him. That is what explains and
excuses Bonapartist liberalism. This phantom caused the old world to
tremble. The kings reigned, but ill at their ease, with the rock of
Saint Helena on the horizon.
While Napoleon was passing through the death struggle at Longwood, the
sixty thousand men who had fallen on the field of Waterloo were quietly
rotting, and something of their peace was shed abroad over the world.
The Congress of Vienna made the treaties in 1815, and Europe called
this the Restoration.
This is what Waterloo was.
But what matters it to the Infinite? all that tempest, all that cloud,
that war, then that peace? All that darkness did not trouble for a
moment the light of that immense Eye before which a grub skipping from
one blade of grass to another equals the eagle soaring from belfry to
belfry on the towers of Notre Dame.
CHAPTER XIX—THE BATTLE-FIELD AT NIGHT
Let us return—it is a necessity in this book—to that fatal
battle-field.
On the 18th of June the moon was full. Its light favored Blücher’s
ferocious pursuit, betrayed the traces of the fugitives, delivered up
that disastrous mass to the eager Prussian cavalry, and aided the
massacre. Such tragic favors of the night do occur sometimes during
catastrophes.
After the last cannon-shot had been fired, the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean
remained deserted.
The English occupied the encampment of the French; it is the usual sign
of victory to sleep in the bed of the vanquished. They established
their bivouac beyond Rossomme. The Prussians, let loose on the
retreating rout, pushed forward. Wellington went to the village of
Waterloo to draw up his report to Lord Bathurst.
If ever the _sic vos non vobis_ was applicable, it certainly is to that
village of Waterloo. Waterloo took no part, and lay half a league from
the scene of action. Mont-Saint-Jean was cannonaded, Hougomont was
burned, La Haie-Sainte was taken by assault, Papelotte was burned,
Plancenoit was burned, La Belle-Alliance beheld the embrace of the two
conquerors; these names are hardly known, and Waterloo, which worked
not in the battle, bears off all the honor.
We are not of the number of those who flatter war; when the occasion
presents itself, we tell the truth about it. War has frightful beauties
which we have not concealed; it has also, we acknowledge, some hideous
features. One of the most surprising is the prompt stripping of the
bodies of the dead after the victory. The dawn which follows a battle
always rises on naked corpses.
Who does this? Who thus soils the triumph? What hideous, furtive hand
is that which is slipped into the pocket of victory? What pickpockets
are they who ply their trade in the rear of glory? Some
philosophers—Voltaire among the number—affirm that it is precisely
those persons who have made the glory. It is the same men, they say;
there is no relief corps; those who are erect pillage those who are
prone on the earth. The hero of the day is the vampire of the night.
One has assuredly the right, after all, to strip a corpse a bit when
one is the author of that corpse. For our own part, we do not think so;
it seems to us impossible that the same hand should pluck laurels and
purloin the shoes from a dead man.
One thing is certain, which is, that generally after conquerors follow
thieves. But let us leave the soldier, especially the contemporary
soldier, out of the question.
Every army has a rear-guard, and it is that which must be blamed.
Bat-like creatures, half brigands and lackeys; all the sorts of
vespertillos that that twilight called war engenders; wearers of