بخش 4 کتاب 1

PART FOUR

THE IDYLL OF THE RUE PLUMET AND THE EPIC OF THE RUE SAINT-DENIS

BOOK ONE

A FEW PAGES OF HISTORY

WELL CUT

THE TWO YEARS 1831 and 1832, following hot on the heels of the July Revolution,1 make up one of the most peculiar and most striking moments in history. These two years, seen between those that came before and those that came after, are like two mountains. They have revolutionary grandeur. You can make out sheer precipices in them. The social masses, the very bedrock of civilization, the solid cluster of interests, layered yet sticking together, the secular strata of the ancient formation of France, all appear and disappear there at every instant through the stormy clouds of systems, passions, and theories. These appearances and disappearances have been named resistance and movement. At intervals we see truth, that sunshine of the human soul, glimmering away there.

This remarkable epoch is fairly circumscribed and is now far enough away from us for us to be able to seize the main outlines.

This, we will try to do.

The Restoration had been one of those intermediary phases that are hard to define, in which there is weariness, buzzing, murmuring, dozing, uproar all at once—phases that are nothing more or less than a great nation coming to a standstill. These epochs are singular and manage to baffle politicians who hope to exploit them. In the beginning, the nation demands only rest; there is only one thirst, for peace; there is only one ambition, to be small. Which is a translation for being quiet. People have had enough of great events, great risks, great adventures, and more than enough, Lord knows, of great men; they are sick and tired of them. They would swap Caesar for Prusias, and Napoléon for the king of Yvetot2—“What a good little king he was!” They have been marching since first light, they have come to the end of a long, hard day; they did the first stretch with Mirabeau, the second with Robespierre, the third with Bonaparte; they are absolutely worn to a frazzle. Everyone wants to go to bed.

Weary devotions, worn-out heroisms, sated ambitions, fortunes made, all search, clamour, beg, implore—for what? A place to rest. They have it. They take possession of peace, of tranquillity, of leisure, move in and are content. Yet at the same time certain facts crop up, make themselves known, knock on the door to be let in, too. These facts emerge from revolutions and wars, they exist, they are alive, they have the right to settle in to society and they do settle in; and most of the time the facts are sergeants and billeting officers simply getting the billet ready to accommodate principles.

So this is what appears to political philosophers:

At the same time that tired people demand rest, established facts demand guarantees. Guarantees are to facts what rest is to people.

That is what England demanded of the Stuarts after the Protector;3 it is what France demanded of the Bourbons after the Empire.

These guarantees are a necessity of the times. They must be extended. Princes “grant” them but in reality it is the force of circumstances that gives them. This is a profound and useful truth to know, one the Stuarts did not have an inkling of in 1660 and the Bourbons did not have a clue about even in 1814.

The fated family that came back to France when Napoléon went down had the fatal naïveté to believe that they were the ones doing the giving, and that what they had given, they could take back; that the House of Bourbon had divine right, that France had nothing; and that the political rights conceded in Louis XVIII’s Charter were nothing more than a branch of divine right, snapped off by the House of Bourbon and graciously given to the people until such time as it should please the king to grab it back. Yet, from the displeasure that the gift cost them, the House of Bourbon should have realized that it was not theirs to give.

The Bourbons were very bad-tempered in the nineteenth century. They pulled a sour face at every flourishing of the nation. To use a trite word, which is to say a popular and a true one, they balked. The people couldn’t help but notice.

They thought they were strong because the Empire had been swept away before them like a theatre set. They didn’t see that they had themselves been swept onto the stage in the same way. They didn’t see that they were in the same hands that had cleared Napoléon out.

They thought they had roots because they were the past. They were wrong; they were part of the past, but the whole of the past was France. The roots of French society did not lie in the Bourbons but in the nation. These obscure and vigorous roots did not constitute the right of one family, but the history of a people. They were everywhere—except beneath the throne.

The House of Bourbon was for France the illustrious and bloody heart of its history, but it was no longer the main element in its destiny or the essential basis of its politics. The Bourbons could be done without; the Bourbons had been done without for twenty-two years; there had been a break in continuity; this never occurred to them. And how could it occur to them, they who imagined that Louis XVII reigned on the ninth of Thermidor4 and that Louis XVIII reigned on the day Marengo took place? Never, since the beginning of history, had princes been so blind in the face of the facts and of the portion of divine authority that the facts contain and promulgate. Never before had this pretention here below known as the right of kings denied to such an extent the right that comes from on high.

A capital error that led this family to lay its hand once more on the guarantees “granted” in 1814—concessions, as they called them. Sadly enough! What they called their concessions were actually our conquests. What they called our infringements were actually our rights.

When the time seemed ripe, the Restoration, assuming it had beaten Bonaparte and that it had roots in the nation, that is, believing itself to be strong and believing itself to run deep, suddenly came out and risked its coup. One morning it rose up and faced France head on, and, raising its voice, it disenfranchised the collective and the individual, it contested the sovereignty of the nation and the liberty of the citizen. In other words, it denied the nation what made it a nation, and the citizen what made them a citizen.

This is the essence of the famous decrees known as the July Ordinances.5

The Restoration fell.

And rightly so. But, we have to say, it had not been absolutely hostile to all forms of progress. Great things had been done while it sat on the sidelines.

Under the Restoration the nation had grown accustomed to calm discussion, something that was missing in the Republic; and to greatness in times of peace, something that was missing in the Empire. France, free and strong, had been an encouraging spectacle for the other peoples of Europe. The Revolution had had its say under Robespierre; the cannon had had its under Bonaparte; under Louis XVIII and Charles X it was intelligence’s turn to hold the floor. The wind died down, the torch flared up again. The pure light of intellect was seen flickering on serene mountaintops. A magnificent spectacle, useful and lovely. For fifteen years, in complete peace and completely in public, these great principles, so old for the thinker, so new for the statesman—equality before the law, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and equal accessibility to all positions for people at all levels of ability—were seen at work. This lasted until 1830. The Bourbons were an instrument of civilization that broke in the hands of Providence.

The fall of the Bourbons was full of greatness—not on their side, but on the side of the nation. They stepped down from the throne with gravity, but without authority; their descent into the night was not one of those solemn disappearances that leave history with a sombre feeling; it did not have either the spectral calm of Charles I,6 or Napoléon’s eagle cry. They went, that’s all. They laid down the crown and did not keep the aura. They were dignified, but they were not august. They failed to live up to the majesty of their misfortune. On the long trip to Cherbourg, Charles X, having a round table cut into a square table,7 seemed more worried about imperiled etiquette than about the crumbling monarchy. This decline saddened the devoted men who loved them personally and the serious men who honoured their race. But the people were wonderful. Attacked one morning by force of arms in a sort of royal insurrection, the nation felt so strong that it had no anger. It defended itself, restrained itself, put things back in their place—the government in the hands of the law, the Bourbons, alas! in exile—and stopped there. It removed old king Charles X from under the canopy that had sheltered Louis XIV and gently set him down on the ground. It handled royal persons only in sorrow and with care. It was not just one man, it was not just a few men, it was France, the whole of France, France victorious and intoxicated with its victory, that seemed to remember and put into practice before the eyes of the whole world these grave words of Guillaume du Vair after the Day of the Barricades:8 “It is easy for those who are accustomed to skimming the favours of the great, and to flitting like birds from branch to branch, from a grievous to a flourishing fortune, to show themselves bold toward their prince in his adversity; but to me the fortune of my kings will always deserve reverence, especially in their grief.” The Bourbons took respect with them, but not regret. As we said, their misfortune was greater than they were. They sank out of sight below the horizon.

The July Revolution immediately had friends and enemies throughout the entire world. Some rushed to embrace it with enthusiasm and joy, others turned their backs on it, each according to their nature. At the outset, the princes of Europe, owls at this dawn, closed their eyes, hurt and stunned, and only opened them again to issue threats. Understandable fear, excusable rage. This strange revolution had scarcely amounted to a clash; it had never even paid vanquished royalty the honour of treating it as an enemy and shedding its blood. In the eyes of despotic governments, which are always counting on liberty slandering itself, the July Revolution made the mistake of being formidable but remaining mild. Nothing, moreover, was attempted or plotted against it. The most dissatisfied, the most irate, the most tremulous, embraced it. However selfish and bitter we may be, a mysterious respect attends events in which we feel the collaboration of someone working on a higher plane than man.

The July Revolution is the triumph of right bringing down might. A thing full of splendour.

Right bringing down might. Hence the brilliance of the 1830 revolution, hence its goodwill, too. Right that triumphs has no need to be violent.

Right is what is just and true.

The peculiarity of right is to remain eternally beautiful and pure. Might, even the most apparently necessary, even the most accepted by contemporaries, if it exists only as might and if it contains all too little right or no right at all, is infallibly doomed to become warped, vile, maybe even monstrous over time. If you want to gauge in a glance the degree of ugliness that might can achieve, viewed at a distance of centuries, just look at Machiavelli.9 Machiavelli was not an evil genius, or a fiend, or a miserable coward of a writer; he is nothing but might. And not just Italian might, but European might, sixteenth-century might. He seems hideous, and so he is, in the light of nineteenth-century moral notions.

This struggle between right and might has been going on ever since society began. To end the duel, to meld the pure ideal with human reality, to peacefully rub right into might and might into right—this is the work of the wise.

BADLY STITCHED TOGETHER

BUT THE WORK of the wise is one thing, the work of the clever is something else again.

The revolution of 1830 rapidly came to a halt.

As soon as a revolution runs aground, the clever carve up the wreck.

The clever, in our century, have given themselves the title of statesmen, so much so that the term statesman has wound up being something of a slang word. We should not forget, in fact, that wherever there is only cleverness, there is necessarily pettiness. To say “the clever” is the same as saying “the mediocre.” Similarly, saying “statesmen” is sometimes the equivalent of saying “traitors.”

And so, if you believe the clever, revolutions such as the July Revolution are like severed arteries; prompt ligature is required. Right, too grandly proclaimed, is disturbing. So once right has been asserted, the state must be shored up. Liberty being assured, power must be looked to.

Here the wise have not yet parted ways with the clever, but they have begun to smell a rat. Power, so be it. But, first, what is power? Second, where is it coming from?

The clever do not seem to hear this murmured objection and they carry on with their manouevres.

According to these politicians, so ingenious at wrapping profitable fictions in the cloak of necessity, the first thing a nation needs after a revolution, when this nation is part of a monarchic continent, is to get itself a dynasty. In this way, they reckon, it can have peace after its revolution, that is, time to bandage its wounds and get its house in order. The dynasty hides the scaffolding and covers the ambulance.

Well, it isn’t always easy to get yourself a dynasty.

At a pinch, the first man of genius or even the first man of fortune who happens along will do as a king. In the first case, you have Bonaparte and in the second, Iturbide.1 But the first family that happens along is not enough to make a dynasty. There is necessarily a certain amount of antiquity in a race and the wrinkles of centuries cannot be improvised.

If you look at it from the point of view of “statesmen,” with, of course, all due reservations, after a revolution, what are the features of the king who emerges from it? He may be, and it is useful if he is, himself a revolutionary, meaning that he has taken part in this revolution in person, actively, that he has either compromised himself or distinguished himself in it, that he has either handled an axe or wielded a sword.

What are the features of a dynasty? It should be national, meaning remotely revolutionary, not because of any deeds performed, but because of ideas accepted. It should be made up of the past and so be historic, and made up of the future and so be sympathetic.

All this explains why the first revolutions were content just to find a man, a Cromwell or a Napoléon; and why the next revolutions insisted on finding a family, a House of Brunswick2 or a House of Orléans.

Royal houses are like those Indian fig trees whose every branch hangs down all the way to the ground and takes root there to become itself a fig tree. Every last branch can turn into a dynasty. On the sole condition of reaching down all the way to the people.

That is the theory of the clever.

And this is the great skill of alchemy: to make a success look like a catastrophe so that those who benefit from it also quake in their boots over it, to season any step forward with fear, to increase the transition curve so much that progress is slowed, to make the dawn dull, to denounce and discount the bitter struggles of enthusiasm, to cut corners and fingernails, to dampen triumph, to muffle right, to wrap that giant, the people, in flannel and put them swiftly to bed, to impose a diet on such excessively good health, to put Hercules on a convalescent’s regime, to water down the event with the expedient, to offer minds thirsty for the ideal this nectar diluted with herbal tea, to take all precautions against too much success, to stick a lampshade over the revolution.

The year 1830 put this theory into practice, as had already been done in England in 1688.3

The year 1830 is a revolution stopped midway. Half-progress, semi-right. But logic ignores the near miss as absolutely as the sun ignores the candle.

Who stops revolutions midway? The bourgeoisie.

Why?

Because the bourgeoisie is self-interest that has attained satisfaction. Yesterday there was appetite, today there is fullness, tomorrow there will be satiety.

The phenomenon of 1814 after Napoléon was reproduced in 1830 after Charles X.

People have tried, wrongly, to make the bourgeoisie a class. The bourgeoisie is quite simply the contented section of the people. The bourgeois is the man who now has time to sit down. A chair is not a caste.

But by being in too much of a hurry to sit down, you can even stop the march of the whole human race. This has often been the mistake of the bourgeoisie.

Making a mistake does not make you a class. Selfishness is not one of the categories of the social order.

But to be fair, even to selfishness, the state to which that part of the nation that we call the bourgeoisie aspired after the shake-up of 1830 was not inertia, which gets tangled up with indifference and laziness and contains a bit of shame; it was not sleep, which assumes a momentary forgetfulness accessible to dreams; it was a halt.

Halt is a word with a peculiar double sense that is very nearly contradictory: It implies troops on the march, that is, movement; and a stop, that is, rest.

A halt is for getting your strength back; it is rest, armed and awake; it is the fait accompli that posts sentinels and keeps itself on guard. A halt supposes combat yesterday and combat tomorrow.

It is the in-between of 1830 and of 1848.

What we call combat here can also be called progress.

And so the bourgeoisie, like the statesmen, needed to have a man who embodied this word halt. An Although-Because. A composite personality, signifying revolution and stability at once—in other words, shoring up the present by bringing out the compatibility between the past and the future.

This man was ready-made. His name was Louis-Philippe d’Orléans.

The 2214 made Louis-Philippe king. Lafayette took on the coronation. He called it “the best of republics.” The Hôtel de Ville of Paris replaced the cathedral of Rheims.5 This substitution of a half-throne for a full throne was “the work of 1830.”

When the clever had finished the job, the immense flaw in their solution became apparent. All this was done without reference to absolute right. Absolute right cried out: I protest! Then a shocking thing happened: It sank back into the shadows.

LOUIS-PHILIPPE

REVOLUTIONS HAVE TREMENDOUS arms and lucky hands; they hit hard and choose their targets well. Even when they are incomplete, even when they are bastardized and crossbred and reduced to the state of junior revolutions, like the revolution of 1830, they nearly always retain enough providential lucidity not to come at the wrong time. Their eclipse is never an abdication.

Still, let’s not crow too loudly; revolutions, too, can go wrong, and serious mistakes have been known to happen.

Let’s go back to 1830. In its deviation, 1830 was lucky. In the establishment that called itself order after the revolution was cut short, the king was better than royalty. Louis-Philippe was a rare man.

Son of a father1 to whom history will certainly grant extenuating circumstances, but just as worthy of esteem as that father had been worthy of blame; having every private virtue and several public virtues; mindful of his health, his fortune, his person, his affairs; knowing the cost of a minute and not always the cost of a year; sober, serene, peace-loving, patient, a good man and a good prince; sleeping with his wife and having lackeys in his palace whose job it was to show the conjugal bed to the bourgeois, an ostentation of regular intimacy that had become useful after the old illegitimate displays of the elder branch of the family; knowing all the languages of Europe and, what is rarer still, all the languages of all the interests, and speaking them fluently; admirable representative of the middle class, but outdistancing it and in every way greater than it; having the excellent sense, even while appreciating the blood from which he sprang, to esteem himself for his intrinsic worth, and on the very particular question of his race, declaring himself Orléans and not Bourbon; very much the first prince of the blood2 as long as he had been only a Most Serene Highness, but an honest bourgeois the day he became Majesty; diffuse in public, concise at home; a declared, but not proven, miser, and at bottom, one of those economical types who are easily moved to extravagance when the whim or duty takes them; literate yet not too fussed about literature; a gentleman, but not a knight; simple, steady, and strong; adored by his family and by his household; a winning conversationalist; a savvy statesman, cold inside, ruled by the immediate interest, always sailing close to the wind, incapable of rancour or gratitude, pitilessly wearing out his superiority on mediocrities, skilled at proving wrong through parliamentary majorities, those mysterious unanimities that grumble quietly beneath thrones; expansive, sometimes imprudent in his expansiveness, but showing marvellous adroitness in this imprudence; rich in expedients, faces, masks; frightening France with Europe and frightening Europe with France; incontestably loving his country but preferring his family; prizing domination more than authority and authority more than dignity, a disposition that is disastrous in that, by turning everything toward success, it accepts ruse and does not absolutely repudiate baseness, but profitable in that it preserves politics from violent clashes, the state from fractures, and society from disasters; meticulous, proper, vigilant, attentive, sagacious, indefatigable; contradicting himself sometimes, and giving himself the lie; daring against Austria at Ancona, relentless against England in Spain, bombarding Antwerp and paying off Pritchard;3 singing the “Marseillaise” with conviction; impervious to despondency, to world-weariness, to any yen for the beautiful and the ideal, to reckless generosity, to any utopia, to any chimera, to anger, to vanity, to fear; having every form of personal fearlessness, a general at Valmy, a soldier at Jemappes;4 having had brushes with death by regicide eight times and still smiling; brave as a grenadier, courageous as a thinker; anxious only when faced with the chances of a European uprising, yet unfit for the great political adventures; always ready to risk his life, never his life’s work; disguising his will as influence in order to be obeyed as an intelligent man rather than as king; endowed with powers of observation but not divination; taking little notice of minds but knowing a lot about men, that is, needing to see in order to judge; prompt and penetrating common sense, practical wisdom, ready speech, prodigious memory; delving endlessly into that memory, his sole point of resemblance to Caesar, Alexander, and Napoléon; knowing the facts, the details, the dates, the proper names; ignorant of the tendencies, the passions, the diverse genies of the teeming hordes, the inner aspirations, the hidden and obscure upheavals of souls, in a word, all that might be called the invisible currents of people’s consciences; a bit out of touch with the France below the surface; getting by on finesse; ruling too much and not reigning enough; his own prime minister unto himself; excelling at making the pettiness of daily reality a bulwark against the immensity of ideas; adding to a real creative faculty for civilization, order, and organization some indefinable spirit of procedure and chicanery; founder and lawmaker of a dynasty; having something of Charlemagne about him and something of an attorney—all in all, a lofty and original character, a prince who knew how to govern with authority in spite of France’s anxiety and how to hold on to power in spite of Europe’s jealousy. Louis-Philippe will be classed among the eminent men of his century, and would be ranked among the most illustrious rulers in history, if he had only loved glory a little and had appreciated what is great to the same extent as what is useful.

Louis-Philippe had been handsome and he remained graceful even in old age; not always approved of by the nation, he was always approved of by the multitude; he was pleasing. He had this gift, charm. He lacked majesty; he did not wear the crown even though he was king and he did not wear white hair, either, even though he was old. His manners were those of the old regime and his habits those of the new, a blend of noble and bourgeois perfectly appropriate to 1830; Louis-Philippe was transition itself reigning; he had kept the old pronunciation and the old spelling, which he put to work in the service of modern opinions; he loved Poland and Hungary,5 but he wrote “les polonois” and said “les hongraïs.”6 He wore the costume of the National Guard like Charles X, and the sash of the Légion d’Honneur like Napoléon.

He rarely went to church, did not go hunting, and never went to the opera. Incorruptible by sacristans, by whippers-in, or by dancers; this had something to do with his popularity with the bourgeoisie. He had no court. He went out with his umbrella tucked under his arm and this umbrella was part of his aura for a long time. He was something of a mason, something of a gardener, something of a doctor; he bled a postilion once when he fell off his horse; Louis-Philippe never went around without his lancet any more than Henri III did without his dagger.7 The royalists scoffed at this ridiculous king, the first to have spilled blood as part of a cure.

In history’s grievances against Louis-Philippe, there is a balance sheet to be drawn up: There is what is to be charged to royalty, what is to be charged to the reign, and what is to be charged to the king; three columns that each add up to something quite different. Democratic right having been confiscated, progress deflected, street protests violently put down, insurrections met with military force, riots resorting to arms, the rue Transnonain,8 the war councils, the absorption of the real country by the legal country, the government sharing profits with three thousand privileged people—these are the acts of royalty. Belgium rejected,9 Algeria conquered too brutally10 and, like India by the English, with more barbarity than civilization, the breach of faith with Abd-el-Kader,11 Blaye, Deutz bought off, Pritchard paid off—these are the acts of the reign. Policy more familial than national is the act of the king.

As you can see, once the sum is done, the king’s load decreases.

His great mistake was this: He was modest in the name of France.

Where does this mistake come from?

We might as well spell it out.

Louis-Philippe as a king was too much a father; this incubation of a family that is supposed to hatch a dynasty is afraid of everything and has no intention of being disturbed; whence all the excessive timidity, a liability for a nation that has July 14 in its civilian tradition and Austerlitz in its military tradition.

Still, if we take away public duties, which demand to be carried out first, this profound tenderness of Louis-Philippe for his family,12 the family deserved. As a domestic group, they were admirable. Their virtues sat well with their talents. One of Louis-Philippe’s daughters, Marie d’Orléans,13 placed the name of her race among the artists as Charles d’Orléans had placed it among the poets. She turned her soul into a block of marble that she called Joan of Arc. Two of Louis-Philippe’s sons had wrung this demagogic praise from Metternich:14 “Those are young men of a kind we rarely see and princes of a kind we never see.” There you have the truth about Louis-Philippe, without holding anything back, but also without aggravating anything.

To be “prince égalité,” to get around bearing the internal contradiction between the Restoration and the Revolution, to have the disturbing look of the revolutionary who becomes reassuring as the ruler, that was Louis-Philippe’s fortune in 1830; never has a man adapted more completely to an event; the one blurred into the other and the incarnation was carried off. Louis-Philippe is 1830 made man. On top of that, he had in his favour that great promotion to the throne, exile. He had been banned, errant, poor.15 He had lived off his labour. In Switzerland, this monopoly-holder of the richest princely domains in France had sold an old horse to be able to eat. At Reichenau, he had given lessons in mathematics while his sister Adélaïde16 did embroidery and sewing. Those memories associated with a king galvanized the bourgeoisie. He had torn down with his own hands the last iron cage17 of Mont Saint-Michel, built by Louis XI and used by Louis XV. He was Dumouriez’s18 bosom companion, he was the friend of Lafayette; he had belonged to the Jacobin Club; Mirabeau had slapped him on the shoulder; Danton had said to him, “Young man!”19 In ‘93, at twenty-four years of age, he had sat at the back of the Convention on an obscure bench as Monsieur de Chartres20 and witnessed the trial of Louis XVI, so aptly dubbed “that poor tyrant.” The blind clairvoyance of the Revolution, smashing royalty in the king and the king in royalty almost without noticing the man in its savage crushing of the idea, the vast storm of the assembly tribunal, the public wrath putting the questions, Capet21 not knowing how to reply, the terrifying stunned vacillation of that royal head under that grim blast, the relative innocence of everyone in this catastrophe, of those who condemned as well as of the man who was condemned—he had looked on these things, he had contemplated these dizzy excesses; he had seen the centuries appear at the bar of the Convention; he had seen, behind Louis XVI, that poor hapless passerby who was held responsible, the formidable accused, the monarchy, rise up in the dark; and in his soul what had remained was a respectful horror of the immense justice of the people that is almost as impersonal as the justice of God.

The impact of the Revolution on him was tremendous. His memory was like a living impression of those great years, minute by minute. One day, in front of a witness beyond all possible doubt,22 he corrected from memory the entire letter A of the alphabetic roll of the Constituent Assembly.

Louis-Philippe was a broad-daylight kind of king. With him reigning, there was freedom of the press, freedom of opinion, freedom of conscience, and freedom of speech. The laws of September23 are as clear as day. Well aware of the corrosive power of light on privilege, he left his throne exposed to the light. History will take his loyalty into account.

Louis-Philippe, like all men of history who have left the stage, has today been put on trial by the conscience of humanity. His trial is still only at the first hearing.

The hour when history speaks in its venerable and free tone has not yet sounded for him; the moment has not yet come to deliver the final judgment on this king; the austere and illustrious historian Louis Blanc24 himself recently softened his initial verdict; Louis-Philippe was the chosen representative of those two approximations known as the 221 and 1830, that is, a semi-parliament and a semi-revolution; and in any case, from the lofty vantage point at which philosophy should position itself, we could only judge him here, as you might have gathered from the above, with certain reservations in the name of the absolute principle of democracy; in the eyes of the absolute, beyond these two rights, the right of man first, the right of the people next, everything is usurpation. But what we can say at present, these reservations made, is that, all in all and however you look at it, Louis-Philippe, taken by himself and from the point of view of human goodness, will remain, to use the old language of ancient history, one of the best princes ever to sit on the throne.

What is there against him? That very throne. Take the king out of Louis-Philippe, there remains the man. And the man is good. He is sometimes good to the point of being admirable. Often in the middle of the most serious troubles, after a day of struggle against the entire diplomatic world of the Continent, he went back to his apartment in the evening and there, thoroughly exhausted, bowed down with the need to sleep, what did he do? He took a file and spent his night going over some criminal matter, feeling that it was one thing to stand your ground against Europe, but a greater thing still to snatch a man away from the executioner. He put up a strong show of resistance against his keeper of the seals; he disputed every inch of ground the guillotine stood on with the public prosecutor’s department, “those windbags of the law,” as he called them. Sometimes the piles of documents covered his table; he examined all of them; it was sheer anguish for him to abandon those miserable condemned heads. One day he said to the same witness we mentioned a moment ago: “Last night, I won back seven of them.” During the early years of his reign, the death sentence was more or less abolished, and when the scaffold was rebuilt, it was a severe blow to the king. La Grève having disappeared with the elder branch, a bourgeois Grève was set up under the name of the barrière Saint-Jacques;25 pragmatists felt the need for a quasi-legitimate guillotine; and that was one of the victories of Casimir Périer,26 who represented the narrow-minded side of the bourgeoisie, over Louis-Philippe, who represented the liberal side. Louis-Philippe had annotated Beccaria27 in his own hand. After the Fieschi plot,28 he cried out: “What a pity I wasn’t wounded! I could have pardoned him.” Another time, alluding to his ministers’ resistance, he wrote concerning a political prisoner, who is one of the most generous figures of our times: “His pardon is granted, all I have left to do now is to obtain it.” Louis-Philippe was softhearted like Louis IX29 and good like Henri IV.

Now, to our mind, goodness is the rare pearl in history and the good almost come before the great.

Louis-Philippe was judged severely by some, perhaps harshly by others, and so it is only right that a man who knew the king and who is himself a phantom these days, come out and testify in the king’s favour before history; this testimony, whatever else it may be, is clearly and above all disinterested; an epitaph written by a dead man is sincere, one shade may console another shade; the sharing of the same darkness gives right of praise; and there is little fear that it will ever be said of two tombs in exile:30 This one flattered the other.

CRACKS BENEATH THE FOUNDATION

AT THE MOMENT that the drama we are relating is about to pierce through one of the tragic clouds densely blanketing the beginnings of Louis-Philippe’s reign, we had to be unambiguous, this book needed to explain itself in relation to the king.

Louis-Philippe had assumed royal authority without violence, without direct action of any kind on his part, simply by virtue of the fact that a revolutionary change of tack had occurred, evidently perfectly distinct from the real aim of the revolution, but in which he, the duc d’Orléans, had no personal initiative. He was born a prince and believed himself to be elected as king. He had not given himself this mandate; he had not seized it; it had been offered to him and he had accepted it, convinced as he was, wrongly, certainly, that the offer was consistent with right and that acceptance was consistent with duty. And so he held tenure in good faith. Now, we will say in all conscience, Louis-Philippe being in good faith in his tenure, and democracy being in good faith in its assault, the degree of horror that attaches to the social struggles cannot be charged either to the king or to the democracy. A clash of principles is like a shock in the elements. The ocean defends water, the hurricane defends air; the king defends royalty, democracy defends the people; the relative, which is the monarchy, resists the absolute, which is the republic; society bleeds under the conflict, but what is its suffering today will later be its salvation; and, in any case, there is no point here in blaming those who struggle; one of the two parties obviously got it wrong; right is not, like the colossus of Rhodes, able to straddle two shores at once, with one foot in the republic and one foot in royalty; it is indivisible, and all on one side; but those who get it wrong do so sincerely; a blind man is no more guilty of blindness than a Vendéen1 is an outlaw. So let us then impute these fearsome collisions to the inevitable alone. Whatever such tempests are, human irresponsibility is mixed up in them.

Let’s polish off this exposé without further ado.

The government of 1830 had a hard time of it from the outset. Born only yesterday, it was forced to fight today.

It had only just been set up when it already felt the apparatus of July, still so newly put in place and so unsteady on its feet, being beset on all sides in a general tug-of-war.

Resistance sprang up the day after; maybe it sprang up the very same night.

From month to month, the hostility grew and went from being hidden to being blatant.

The July Revolution, so little accepted by the kings outside France, as we’ve seen, had been variously interpreted inside France.

God delivers his will as visible in events, an obscure text written in a mysterious tongue. People toss off instant translations of it, hasty translations that are incorrect, full of faults, omissions, and misreadings. Very few minds understand the divine tongue. The wisest, the calmest, the deepest, set about slowly deciphering it, and when they finally turn up with their text, the job has long been done; there are already twenty translations in the marketplace. From each translation a party is born, and from each misreading a faction; and each party believes it has the only true text, and each faction believes it holds the light.

Often the government itself is a faction.

In revolutions, there are some who swim against the current; these are the old parties.

For the old parties, who hang on to heredity by the grace of God, revolutions stem from the right to revolt, and there is always the right to revolt against them. Wrong. For in revolutions, the party in revolt is not the people, it is the king. A revolution is precisely the opposite of a revolt. Every revolution, being an ordinary achievement, contains within itself its legitimacy, which false revolutionaries sometimes dishonour, but which persists, even when sullied, which survives, even when soaked with blood. Revolutions stem not from some accident, but from necessity. A revolution is a return from the false to the real. It happens because it has to happen.

The old legitimist parties nonetheless assailed the revolution of 1830 with all the violence that comes from false reasoning. Mistakes make excellent projectiles. They hit home cannily just where it was vulnerable; they attacked this particular revolution in its royalty. They shouted at it: “Revolution, why this king?” Factions are blind men with perfect aim.

This cry was also made by the republicans. But coming from them, the cry was logical. What was blindness on the part of the legitimists was clairvoyance on the part of the democrats. The year 1830 had gone bankrupt as far as the people were concerned. Indignant democracy reproached it on those grounds.

Between the attack of the past and the attack of the future, the July establishment thrashed about. It represented one tiny moment grappling with centuries of monarchy on the one hand and, on the other, eternal right.

On top of that, externally, not being the revolution anymore and turning into the monarchy, 1830 was obliged to keep step with Europe. Maintaining the peace was an added complication. An attempt at harmony, only going about it the wrong way. Going against the grain is sometimes more onerous than a war. From this muted conflict, always muzzled but always growling, armed peace was born, this ruinous expedient of a civilization that has begun to suspect itself. The July royalty reared and bucked, despite getting whipped, in the harness of the European cabinets. Metternich would happily have put it in kicking-straps. Spurred on in France by progress, in Europe it spurred on monarchies, those lazy sloths. Towed along, it towed in turn.

Yet internally, poverty, the proletariat, wages, education, sentencing laws, prostitution, the fate of women, wealth, misery, production, consumption, distribution, exchange, money, credit, the right of capital, the right of labour—all these issues were escalating and hanging over society; a frightening overhang.

Outside the political parties properly so-called, another movement popped up. The democratic ferment was answered by philosophical ferment. The elite felt troubled just as the teeming hordes did—in a different way, but every bit as much.

The thinkers pondered while the grass roots, meaning the people, run through by revolutionary currents, trembled beneath them with who-knows-what epileptic shocks. These dreamers, some isolated, some gathered in families and almost in communities, stirred up the social issues, peacefully but profoundly; imperturble miners that they were, quietly boring their tunnels deeper into a volcano, barely disturbed by the muted commotions and the half-glimpsed furnaces of lava.

This tranquillity was not the least beautiful spectacle of that stormy period.

These men left to the political parties the issue of rights; they busied themselves with the issue of happiness.

Man’s well-being—that is what they wanted to extract from society.

They elevated material questions, the question of agriculture, industry, and commerce, almost to the level of a religion. In civilization as it is set up, a bit by God and a lot by man, interests combine, coalesce, and fuse in such a way as to form a veritable deposit of hard rock, according to a law of dynamics patiently studied by the economists, those geologists of politics.

These men, grouped together under various names but who could all go under the generic title of socialists, tried to drill through this rock and make the fresh running water of human felicity gush forth.

From the issue of the scaffold to the issue of war, their works embraced everything. To the rights of man2 proclaimed by the French Revolution, they added the rights of women and the rights of children.

It will come as no surprise that, for various reasons, we won’t delve too deeply into the theory behind the questions raised by socialism. We will limit ourselves to pointing those questions out.

All the problems that the socialists listed, aside from cosmogonic visions, dreams, and mysticism, can be reduced to two main problems: First problem: how to produce wealth.

Second problem: how to distribute it.

The first problem contains the question of labour. The second contains the question of wages.

The first problem is about the use of force. The second is about the distribution of pleasure.

From the right use of force, public power results.

From the right distribution of pleasure, individual happiness results.

By right distribution, we mean not equal distribution but equitable distribution. The prime equality is equity.

From these two things combined, public power without, individual happiness within, social prosperity results.

Social prosperity means the human being happy, the citizen free, the nation great.

England solves the first of these two problems. It creates wealth to a wonderful degree; it distributes it badly. This lopsided solution, complete on one side only, inevitably leads it to these two extremes: monstrous opulence, monstrous misery. All the pleasure is for the happy few, all the deprivation is for the rest, that is, the people; privilege, favour, monopoly, feudalism, are born of labour itself. A false and dangerous situation that seats public authority on private misery, and that plants the greatness of the state in the suffering of the individual. A greatness that is badly constituted, in which all the material elements combine without a single moral element entering into the mixture.

Communism and agrarian law think they have solved the second problem. They are wrong. Their kind of distribution kills production. Equal parceling out abolishes emulation. And as a consequence, labour. It is a parceling out performed by the butcher, who kills what he carves up. It is thereby impossible to stop at these self-proclaimed solutions. To kill wealth is not to share it.

The two problems need to be solved together to be properly solved. The two solutions need to be combined to provide a single solution.

Solve only the first of the two problems and you will be Venice, you will be England. Like Venice, you will have an artificial power, or like England a material power; you will be the evil rich. You will perish by assault and battery, as Venice died,3 or by bankruptcy, as England will one day fall. And the world will let you fall and die because the world lets everything fall and die that is nothing but self-interest, everything that does not represent for mankind some virtue or idea.

Naturally it is clear here that these words, Venice and England, designate not peoples but social constructions; the oligarchies superimposed on nations and not the nations themselves. The nations always have our respect and our sympathy. Venice, as a people, will rise again; England, as an aristocracy, will fall, but as a nation it is immortal. That said, we will plow on.

Solve these two problems, encourage the rich and protect the poor, eliminate misery, put an end to the unjust exploitation of the weak by the strong, curb the iniquitous jealousy of the man on the way up for the man who has arrived, adjust, in a manner that is both mathematical and fraternal, wages to work, add free and compulsory education to the growth of the child and make science the basis of manhood, develop the intelligence while keeping the hands busy, be at once a powerful nation and a family of happy people, democratize property ownership, not by abolishing it but by universalizing it, so that every citizen without exception is a property owner, which is easier to do than you think, in short, work out how to produce wealth and work out how to parcel it out, and you will have material greatness and moral greatness all in one—and you will be worthy of calling yourselves France.

And that, above and beyond a few sects that went off the rails, is what socialism was saying; that was what it was looking to put into action, that is what it was roughly sketching out in men’s minds.

Admirable efforts! Sacred attempts!

These doctrines, these theories, these forms of resistance, the unexpected necessity for the statesman to consult the philosopher, blurry half-glimpsed evidence, the need to create new policy in accord with the old world without causing too much discord with the revolutionary ideal, a situation in which Lafayette had to be used to defend Polignac,4 the hint of progress transparent in the riot, in the Chambers, and on the street, rivalries to balance all around him, his faith in the revolution, maybe some indefinable sense of resignation deriving from vague acceptance of a definitive and superior right, his desire to remain true to his race, his sense of family, his sincere respect for the people, his own honesty—all these preoccupied Louis-Philippe almost painfully at times, and as strong and courageous as he was, overwhelmed him with the difficulty of being king.

He felt a dreadful disintegration beneath his feet, though this was not a crumbling into dust, as France was more France than ever.

Dark clouds piled up on the horizon. A shadow came closer and closer and gradually spread over people, over things, over ideas; a shadow that came from anger and sundry systems. All that had swiftly been stifled was stirring and fermenting. At times, the honest man’s conscience got its breath back, there was so much malaise in this air thick with sophisms and truths fused together. Minds trembled in the social anxiety like leaves at the approach of a storm. The electric tension was such that, at certain moments, the first person to happen along, a stranger, shone out. Then the crepuscular darkness fell again. At times, deep and muted rumblings gave an indication of the amount of thunder stored in the cloud.

Barely twenty months had gone by since the July Revolution, and the year 1832 had begun5 with a look of imminent menace. The distress of the people; labourers with no bread; the last prince de Condé vanishing into the shadows; Brussels chasing Nassau out6 the way Paris chased the Bourbons; Belgium offering itself to a French prince and handed over to an English prince; the Russian hatred of Nicholas; at our rear two demons from the south, Ferdinand in Spain, Miguel in Portugal; the earth quaking in Italy, Metternich extending his hand over Bologna; France manhandling Austria at Ancona; in the north the mysteriously sinister sound of a hammer nailing Poland7 back into its coffin; in all of Europe furious eyes on France; England, a suspect ally, ready to shove over whatever might bend and to throw itself on whatever might fall; the peerage taking refuge behind Beccaria just to keep four heads from the law; the fleur-de-lis scratched off the king’s carriage, the cross torn down from Notre-Dame;8 Lafayette diminished, Laffitte ruined, Benjamin Constant dead in dire poverty, Casimir Périer dead in the exhaustion of power; the political disease and the social disease breaking out at the same time in the two capitals of the realm, the one the city of thought, the other the city of work: in Paris, civil war, in Lyon, servile war; in both cities, the same laval glare of the furnace; the crimson of the crater reflected on the forehead of the people; the south fanaticized, the west churned up; the duchesse de Berry in the Vendée;9 plots, conspiracies, uprisings, cholera, added to the grim noise of ideas the grim tumult of events.

DEEDS FROM WHICH HISTORY EMERGES AND WHICH HISTORY IGNORES

TOWARD THE END of April everything got worse. The ferment turned to boiling. Since 1830, there had been small halfhearted riots here and there, swiftly put down but breaking out again, a sign of a vast underlying conflagration. Something terrible was brewing. You could glimpse the makings, still fairly indistinct and shadowy, of a possible revolution. France had its eyes on Paris; Paris had its eyes on the faubourg Saint-Antoine.

The faubourg Saint-Antoine, silently stoked, was starting to boil.

The cabarets of the rue de Charonne were serious and stormy, though the conjunction of the two adjectives seems odd when applied to cabarets.

There, the government was purely and simply called into question. There, whether it was “the thing to fight or to remain calm” was debated in public. There were back rooms where workers were made to swear that they would be on the street at the first cry of alarm and “that they would fight without counting the enemy’s numbers.” Once this commitment was made, a man seated in a corner of the cabaret put on a ringing voice and boomed, “You know what you’re saying! You’ve taken an oath!” Sometimes people went upstairs to a closed room, and there scenes occurred that were practically Masonic. Initiates were put under oath “to render service as they would to their own fathers.” That was the formula.

In the lower rooms they read “subversive” pamphlets. “They crucified the government,” a secret report of the day claimed.

There you could hear people saying things like the following: “I don’t know the names of the leaders. The likes of us, we’ll only know two hours beforehand on the day.” A worker said: “There are three hundred of us, let’s put in ten sous each, that makes a hundred and fifty francs to manufacture musket balls and powder.” Another said: “I’m not asking for six months, I’m not asking for two. Before the fortnight’s out, we’ll be on a par with the government. With twenty-five thousand men, we can face them.” Another said: “I don’t go to bed because I’m up making cartridges all night.” From time to time, men “decked out like bourgeois in good clothes” turned up, “making a fuss” and having an air “of command,” shook hands with “the more prominent” and took off again. They never stayed more than ten minutes. They exchanged meaningful words in very low voices: “The plot is ripe, the thing is ready to go.” “Everyone there was buzzing with it,” to borrow the very expression of one of those taking part. The exultation was such that, one day, in the middle of the cabaret, a worker shouted: “We don’t have any weapons!” One of his comrades replied, “The soldiers have got some!” thereby parodying, without realizing it, Bonaparte’s proclamation to the Army of Italy.1 “Whenever they had something more secret,” adds one report, “they would not communicate it there.” One can scarcely imagine what they could have to hide after saying what they did say.

Meetings were sometimes intermittent. At certain of them, there were never more than eight or ten—always the same eight or ten. At others, anyone could walk in off the street and the room was so full, people were forced to stand. Some were there out of enthusiasm and passion; others because it was on the way to work. As during the Revolution, there were patriot women in the cabarets who embraced the newcomers.

Other expressive deeds came to light.

A man went into a cabaret, had a drink, and went out again, saying: “Wine seller, what is owing will be paid by the revolution.” At one cabaret opposite the rue de Charonne, revolutionary agents were appointed. The ballots were collected in caps.

Workers gathered at a fencing master’s who gave lessons in the rue de Cotte. There was a trophy of arms there made of wooden swords, canes, truncheons, and foils. One day the buttons were removed from the foils. One worker said: “There are twenty-five of us, but they don’t count me because I’m regarded as a machine.” That machine later became Quénisset.2 Any small thing that was premeditated gradually took on some strange notoriety. A woman sweeping her doorstep said to another woman: “We’ve been hard at it for a long time making cartridges.” Proclamations addressed to the National Guard of the départements were read in the middle of the street. One of these proclamations was signed: Burtot, wine seller.

One day, at a liquor seller in the Lenoir market, a man with a thick collar of a beard and an Italian accent hopped up on a milestone and read out loud an odd text that seemed to emanate from some occult power. Groups of people had formed around him and they clapped. The passages that most stirred the crowd were taken in and noted. “… Our doctrines are trampled underfoot, our proclamations are ripped up, our bill posters are watched and thrown in jail …” “The debacle that has just taken place in the cotton industry has converted many moderates to our cause.” “… The future of nations is taking shape in our obscure ranks.” “… This is how it is: action or reaction, revolution or counterrevolution. For in our times no one believes in inertia anymore or in immobility. For the people or against the people, that is the question. There is no other.” “… The day when we no longer suit you, crush us, but until then, help us to walk.” All this in broad daylight.

Other acts, even more audacious, were suspicious to the people because of their very audacity. On April 4, 1832, a man strolling by suddenly got up on the milestone at the corner of the rue Sainte-Marguerite and shouted: “I am a Babouvist!” But behind Babeuf, the people could smell Gisquet.3 Among other things, this same passerby said:

“Down with property! The left-leaning opposition are cowards and traitors. When they want to be in the right, they preach revolution. They’re democrats so they won’t get beaten up and royalists so they won’t have to fight. Republicans are two-faced. Watch out for republicans, citizen workers.” “Silence, citizen spy!” yelled a worker.

That yell put an end to the speech.

Mysterious incidents occurred.

At nightfall, one worker met “a well-heeled man” down by the canal who said to him: “Where are you going, citizen?” “Monsieur,” the worker replied, “I don’t have the honour of knowing you.” “I know you, though,” the man said, adding, “Don’t be frightened. I’m the committee officer. You’re suspected of not being fully convinced. You know that if you give anything away, we’ve got our eye on you.” Then he shook the worker’s hand and went on his way, saying: “We’ll see each other again soon.” The police, ears to the ground, intercepted very odd conversations not only in the cabarets but also on the streets: “Get yourself admitted quick,” said a weaver to a cabinetmaker.

“Why?”

“There’s a bit of shooting that needs to be done.”

Two passersby in rags exchanged these remarkable lines, full of apparent jacquerie:4

“Who governs us?”

“It’s Monsieur Philippe.”

“No, it’s the bourgeoisie.”

You would be wrong to think we use the word jacquerie perjoratively. The Jacques were the poor. And those who are hungry are right.

Another time, as two men walked past each other, one was overheard saying to the other: “We’ve got a good plan of attack.” Of a private conversation between four men squatting in a ditch at the barrière du Trône roundabout, all that could be gleaned was this: “Everything possible will be done to see he struts about Paris no more.”

Who was he? Menacing obscurity.

“The main leaders,” as they said in the faubourg, kept out of sight. It was thought they got together to thrash things out in a cabaret close to the point of Saint-Eustache.5 A man named Aug——, head of the Tailors’ Benevolent Society, rue Mondétour, was thought to act as principal intermediary between the leaders and the faubourg Saint-Antoine. However, there was always a fog hanging over these leaders, and no actual fact could shore up the odd pride of this response made later by a defendant before the Court of Peers:6 “Who was your leader?”

“I didn’t know any and I didn’t acknowledge any.”

It was scarcely anything more than words, transparent, but vague; sometimes words floating in the air, as they say, hearsay. Other indices emerged.

A carpenter, busy in the rue de Reuilly nailing up posts for a fence around a lot where a house was going up, found on this lot a fragment of a torn-up letter in which the following lines were still legible: “… The committee must take measures to prevent recruiting in the sections for the different societies …” And this postscript: “We have learned that there were guns at no. 5a, rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière, in the number of five or six thousand, in a courtyard at an armourer’s. The section does not have any weapons.” What moved the carpenter to show this to his neighbours was that, a few steps farther on, he picked up another note, also ripped up and even more interesting. We reproduce its layout below due to the historic interest of these strange documents: L.

u og a fe

Those who were let into the secret of this discovery at the time, only found out later what those four capital letters referred to: quinturions, centurions, décurions, éclaireurs, and the meaning of the letters u og a fe, which formed a date, namely, this 15th April, 1832. Under each capital letter, names were listed followed by perfectly typical indications. So: Q. Bannerel. 8 muskets. 83 cartridges. Solid. C. Boubière. 1 pistol. 40 cartridges. D. Rollet. 1 foil. 1 pistol. 1 pound of powder. E. Teissier. 1 sabre. 1 cartridge-box. Exact. Terreur. 8 guns. Brave. Etc.

Finally this same carpenter found, in the same enclosed space, a third bit of paper on which was written, in pencil but very legibly, an enigmatic kind of list: Unité. Blanchard. Arbre-sec. 6.

Barra. Soize. Salle-au-Comte.

Kósciuszko. Aubry the butcher?

J. J. R.

Caius Gracchus.

Right of revision. Dufond. Oven.

Fall of the Girondins. Derbac. Maubuée.

Washington. Pinson. 1 pist. 86 cart.

Marseillaise.

Souver. Of the people. Michel. Quincampoix. Sabre.

Hoche.

Marceau. Plato. Arbre-sec.

Warsaw. Tilly, crier for the Populaire.7

The honest bourgeois in whose hands this list ended up knew its significance. It appears that the list was the complete nomenclature of the sections of the fourth arrondissement for the Society of the Rights of Man, with the names and the addresses of the section leaders. These days, when all these facts that remained in the shadows are no more than history, they can be published. It should be added that the Society of the Rights of Man seems to have been founded later than the date on this note. Perhaps it was just a draft.

Meanwhile, with all the talk and speeches and written clues, material facts began to emerge.

In a chest of drawers at an old curiosity shop in the rue Popincourt, seven sheets of grey paper were seized, all of them folded lengthwise and then in four. These sheets of paper held twenty-six squares of the same grey paper folded in the form of cartridges, and a card on which the following could be read: The official report of the seizure observed that the drawer gave off a strong odour of powder.

A mason going home after a day’s work left a small packet on a bench near the pont d’Austerlitz. This packet was taken to the guardhouse. It was opened and in it were found two printed dialogues signed Lahautière, a song called “Workers Unite,” and a tin box full of cartridges.

A worker having a drink with a friend got him to pat him down to see how hot he was; the other man felt a pistol under his jacket.

In a ditch on the boulevard between Père-Lachaise and the barrière du Trône, at the most deserted spot, children playing discovered a bag under a heap of wood shavings and peelings that contained a bullet mould, a wooden mandrel for making cartridges, a begging bowl in which there were a few grains of gunpowder, and a small cast-iron pot the insides of which revealed obvious traces of molten lead.

Police officers turning up without warning at five in the morning at the home of one Pardon, who was later a member of the Barricade-Merry section and who got himself killed in the insurrection of April 1834,8 found him on his feet by his bed, holding cartridges that he was in the process of making.

Around the time when workers take a break, two men were seen meeting between the barrière Picpus and the barrière Charenton in a little covered way between two walls near a barkeeper’s who had a Siamese draught board on a card table out front. One pulled a pistol out from under his smock and showed it to the other one. Just as he was about to hand it over he noticed that the sweat from his chest had made the powder somewhat damp. He primed the pistol and added more powder to what was already in the pan. Then the two men went their separate ways.

A man named Gallais, later killed in the rue Beaubourg during the April affair, boasted of having seven hundred cartridges and eighty gun flints at home.

The government got word one day that weapons had just been handed out in the faubourg along with two hundred thousand cartridges. The following week, thirty thousand cartridges were distributed. What was amazing was that the police couldn’t lay their hands on any of them. An intercepted letter went like this: “The day is not far off when, at four by the clock, eighty thousand patriots will be armed.” All this ferment was out in the open, public, you might almost say serene. The imminent insurrection was gathering momentum calmly as the government looked on. No weirdness was lacking in this crisis, as yet subterranean but already perceptible. The bourgeois talked peacably with the workers about what was ginnying up. They would say “How’s the riot going?” in the same tone in which you might have said “How’s your wife?” A furniture dealer in the rue Moreau asked: “So, then, when do you attack?”

Another shopkeeper said: “We’ll attack soon, I know. A month ago, there were fifteen thousand of you, now there are twenty-five thousand of you.” He offered his gun, and a neighbour offered a small pistol that he was hoping to sell for seven francs.

Revolutionary fever was gaining, in any case. No part of Paris or France was exempt from it. The same artery was throbbing everywhere. Like those membranes that flare up in certain inflammations and spread through the human body, the network of secret societies began to spread throughout the country. From the Association of the Friends of the People, which was both public and secret at once, emerged the Society of the Rights of Man, which dated one of its orders of the day like this: Pluviôse, Year XL9 of the Republican Era. This society was to survive even the decrees of the court of assizes pronouncing its dissolution. It did not hesitate to give its sections such loaded names as: The Pikes.

Tocsin.

Alarm Gun.

Phrygian Cap.

21st January.

Beggars.

Vagrants.

Forward March.

Robespierre.

Level.

Ça ira.10

The Society of the Rights of Man engendered the Society for Action. This was a group of impatient types that broke away and hurtled ahead. Other associations sought to recruit from among the great parent societies. The sectionaries complained of being plagued by such touting, pulled in all directions. Thus the Gallic Society and the Organizing Committee of the Municipalities. Thus the associations for the freedom of the press, for the freedom of the individual, for the education of the people, against indirect taxes. And after that, the Society of Egalitarian Workers, which split into three factions: the Egalitarians, the Communists, and the Reformists. Then there was the Army of the Bastille, a sort of cohort organized along military lines, four men commanded by a corporal, ten by a sergeant, twenty by a second lieutenant, forty by a lieutenant; there were never more than five men who knew each other. An arrangement whereby precaution was combined with audacity and which smacked of the genius of Venice. The central committee, which was the brain, had two arms, the Society for Action and the Army of the Bastille. A legitimist association, the Faithful Knights, moved among these republican affiliations, but it was denounced and repudiated.

The Parisian societies grew branches in the other main towns. Lyon, Nantes, Lille, and Marseilles each had its own Society of the Rights of Man, the Carbonari, the Free Men. Aix had a revolutionary society known as the Cougourde. We have already mentioned that word.

In Paris, the faubourg Saint-Marceau was almost as hectic as the faubourg Saint-Antoine and the schools were buzzing just as much as the faubourgs. A café in the rue Saint-Hyacinthe as well as the Sept-Billards bar in the rue des Mathurins-Saint-Jacques served as rallying points for the students. The Society of the Friends of the ABC, an affiliate of the mutualists of Angers and the Cougourde of Aix, gathered, as we saw, in the Café Musain. These same young men also met up, as we said, in a cabaret-restaurant near the rue Mondétour that was called Corinthe. These meetings were secret. Others were as public as possible and you can judge how reckless this was by this fragment of a statement submitted in one of the subsequent trials: “Where was the meeting held?” “Rue de la Paix.” “Whose place?” “In the street.” “What sections were there?” “Only one.” “Which one?” “The section Manuel.” “Who was the leader?” “Me.” “You are too young to have taken on the serious business of attacking the government on your own. Where did you get your instructions from?” “From the central committee.” The army was mined at the same time as the general population, as was later proved by the Belfort, Lunéville, and Épinal movements.11 “They were counting on the 52nd regiment, on the 5th, on the 8th, on the 37th, on the 20th Light. In Burgundy and in the towns of the south they planted “the Tree of Liberty”12—a mast surmounted by a red cap.

Such was the situation.

And this situation was, as we said at the beginning, made more palpable and urgent by the faubourg Saint-Antoine than by any other part of the population. This was where the thorn in the side was.

This old faubourg, teeming with people like an anthill, industrious, brave, and angry as a beehive, quivered with anticipation and the desire for commotion. Everything was heating up there, though without the daily grind being interrupted for all that. Nothing can give a clear idea of the lively yet grim face of this district. The faubourg hides poignant cases of distress under mansard roofs; there are also people of rare and ardent intelligence there. When it comes to distress and intelligence it is especially dangerous for the two extremes to meet.

The faubourg Saint-Antoine had still other causes for excitement, for it takes the brunt of the commercial crises, bankruptcies, strikes, and unemployment inherent in great political conflagrations. In times of revolution, misery is both cause and effect at the same time. The blow it strikes comes back to haunt it. This population, full of proud virtue, capable of the highest degree of latent heat, always ready to take up arms, quick to explode, irritable, deep, ground down, seemed to be waiting only for a flying spark to fall. Every time certain sparks fly across the horizon, driven by the wind of events, you can’t stop yourself thinking of the faubourg Saint-Antoine and of the dreadful fate that placed this powder keg of suffering and ideas at the gates of Paris.

The cabarets of the faubourg Saint-Antoine, which have been drawn more than once in the sketch you have just read, have a historic notoriety. In times of trouble, people there get more drunk on words than on wine. A sort of prophetic spirit and a whiff of the future wafts through them, swelling hearts and expanding souls. The cabarets of the faubourg Saint-Antoine are like those taverns of the Aventine Hill built over the sibyl’s cave and communicating with deep and sacred spirits; taverns whose tables were virtually tripods and where they drank what Ennius13 calls “sybilline wine.” The faubourg Saint-Antoine is a reservoir of people. Revolutionary agitation opens up fissures there out of which popular sovereignty flows. This sovereignty can do damage; it can go wrong like any other; but, even when led astray, it remains great. You could say of it, as of the blind Cyclops, Ingens.15—Power!

In ‘93, depending on whether the idea floating around was good or bad, depending on whether it was the day for fanaticism or for enthusiasm, either legions of savages or heroic bands set out from the faubourg Saint-Antoine.

Savages. Let’s explain what we mean by that word. What did they want, these bristling men who, in the Genesis-like days of revolutionary chaos, ragged, screaming, fierce, clubs raised, pikes held high, dashed all over old shattered Paris? They wanted an end to oppression, an end to tyranny, an end to the broadsword, work for men, education for children, social ease for women, liberty, equality, fraternity, bread for all, ideas for all, the Edenization of the world, Progress; with their backs to the wall, beside themselves, terrible, half-naked, maces in their fists and a roar in their mouths, they reclaimed that sacred thing, so good and so sweet, Progress. They were savages, yes; but savages of civilization.

They proclaimed justice with fury; though trembling with fear and horror, they wanted to force the human race into paradise. They looked like barbarians yet they were saviours. They reclaimed the light wearing the mask of night.

Opposite these men, wild, we admit, and frightening, but wild and frightening for the good, there are other men, smiling, prettily primped up, gilded, beribboned, spangled, in silk stockings, white feathers, yellow gloves, brightly polished shoes, who, leaning on velvet tables at the corners of marble fireplaces, gently insist on the maintenance and preservation of the past, of the Middle Ages, of divine right, of fanaticism, ignorance, slavery, the death penalty, war, politely glorifying in hushed voices the sabre, the stake, and the scaffold. As for us, if we were forced to choose between the barbarians of civilization and the civilized representatives of barbarity, we would go for the barbarians.

But, thank heaven, another choice is possible. No sheer plummet is necessary, no more forward than backward. Neither despotism nor terrorism. We want progress that has a gentle incline.

God provides for this. The softening of inclines—that is God’s whole policy.

ENJOLRAS AND HIS LIEUTENANTS

ROUND ABOUT THIS time, Enjolras, in view of possible events, did a sort of mysterious stocktaking.

They were all at a conference in the Café Musain.

Throwing a few semi-enigmatic but meaningful metaphors together, Enjolras said: “It would be good to know where we stand and who we can count on. If we want fighters, we have to create them. Have the wherewithal to strike. That can’t do any harm. Passersby always have more chance of being gored when there are bulls on the road than when there aren’t any. So let’s count the herd for a bit. How many of us are there? We can’t put this work off till tomorrow. Revolutionaries have to always be in a hurry; progress has no time to lose. Look out for the unexpected. Let’s not let ourselves be caught short. It’s a matter of going back over all the seams we have sewn and seeing if they hold. We’ve got to get to the bottom of this business today. Courfeyrac, you go and see the polytechnic students.1 It’s their day off. Today, Wednesday. Feuilly, isn’t it? You go and see the students at La Glacière. Combeferre promised me he’d go to Picpus. There’s a whole excellent batch of them there. Bahorel will visit the Estrapade. Prouvaire, the Masons are cooling off; you go and bring us the latest from the lodge in the rue de Grenelle-Saint-Honoré. Joly will go to Dupuytren’s2 clinic and take the pulse of the school of medicine. Bossuet will make a little tour of the Palais de Justice and have a chat with the law students. As for me, I’ll tackle the Cougourde.” “So everything’s all set,” said Courfeyrac.

“No.”

“What’s left?”

“Something very important.”

“What?” asked Courfeyrac.

“The barrière du Maine,” replied Enjolras.

Enjolras spent a moment lost in thought, then resumed: “At the barrière du Maine, there are marble cutters, painters, sculptors’ assistants from the sculpture studios. They’re an enthusiastic family, but subject to sudden chills. I don’t know what’s been up with them for some time. Their minds are on something else. They’re losing heart. They spend their time playing dominoes. It’s rather urgent to go and have a word with them—a firm word. They hang around Richefeu’s place. They can be found there between twelve and one. Someone needs to go and blow on these particular embers. I was counting on the absentminded Marius, who is pretty good on the whole, but he doesn’t come here anymore. I need someone for the barrière du Maine. I haven’t got anyone spare.” “What about me?” said Grantaire. “I’m here.”

“You?”

“Me.”

“You, indoctrinate republicans! You, warm cold feet in the name of principles!”

“Why not?”

“Can it really be that you’re good for something?”

“Well, I have a vague ambition to be,” said Grantaire.

“You don’t believe in anything.”

“I believe in you.”

“Grantaire, do me a favour, would you?”

“Anything. I’ll even polish your boots.”

“No need, just keep your nose out of our business. Sleep off the absinthe.”

“You’re an ungrateful bastard, Enjolras.”

“I can just see you at the barrière du Maine, ha! As if you were capable of it!”

“I’m perfectly capable of walking down the rue des Grès, crossing the place Saint-Michel, cutting through the rue Monsieur-le-Prince, taking the rue Vaugirard, going past the Carmes, turning into the rue d’Assas, reaching the rue du Cherche-Midi, leaving the Conseil de Guerre behind me, striding down the rue des Vieilles-Tuileries, bounding over the boulevard, following the chaussée du Maine and stepping into Richefeu’s. I am perfectly capable of doing that. My shoes are capable.” “Are you at all familiar with our Richefeu friends?”

“Not really. Only to say hello to.”

“What’ll you say to them?”

“I’ll speak to them of Robespierre, in faith. Of Danton. Of principles.”

“You!”

“Me. But you don’t do me justice. When I put my mind to it, I am daunting. I’ve read Prudhomme, I know the Contrat Social. I know my constitution for the Year II3 by heart. ‘The liberty of one citizen ends where the liberty of another citizen begins.’ What do you take me for, a brute? I have an old assignat4 in my drawer. The rights of man, the sovereignty of the people, heavens! I’m even a bit of a Hébertist.5 I can jabber on for six hours at a stretch by the clock, watch in hand, about such wonders of the world.” “Be serious,” said Enjolras.

“I am unflinching,” answered Grantaire.

Enjolras thought for a few seconds before making the gesture of a man who has made up his mind.

“Grantaire,” he said gravely, “I consent to trying you out. You will go to the barrière du Maine.”

Grantaire lived in a furnished room quite close to the Café Musain. He ducked out and returned five minutes later. He had been home to put on a waistcoat in the style of Robespierre.

“Red,” he said as he came in, eyeing Enjolras steadily.

Then, with an energetic sweep of his palm, he smoothed the two scarlet points of his waistcoat down flat against his chest.

And, going over to Enjolras, he whispered in his ear: “Don’t worry.”

He jammed his hat down resolutely and left.

A quarter of an hour later, the back room of the Café Musain was deserted. All the Friends of the ABC had gone, each on his way to his own task. Enjolras, who had kept the Cougourde all to himself, was the last to leave.

Those members of the Cougourde of Aix who were in Paris gathered at the time on the Issy plain, in one of the numerous abandoned quarries on that side of Paris.

As he made his way toward the meeting place, Enjolras went back over the situation in his head. The gravity of events was plain for all to see. When events, those early warning signs of a sort of latent social disease, move slowly, the slightest complication can stop them in their tracks and tangle them up. A phenomenon leading to collapse and revival. Enjolras glimpsed a luminous uprising beneath the dingy folds of the future. Who knows? Perhaps the moment was coming. The people grabbing back their rights, what a beautiful sight! The revolution majestically taking back possession of France and telling the world: to be continued tomorrow! Enjolras was happy. The furnace was heating up. At that very moment he had a powder trail of friends scattered all over Paris. He was putting together in his mind, using the penetrating philosophical eloquence of Combeferre, the cosmopolitan enthusiasm of Feuilly, the verve of Courfeyrac, the laughter of Bahorel, the melancholy of Jean Prouvaire, the science of Joly, the sarcasm of Bossuet, a sort of crackling electric fire more or less everywhere at once. Everyone on the job. The result would surely be worth the effort. All was well. This made him think of Grantaire.

“Wait,” he said to himself, “the barrière du Maine is hardly out of my way. What if I went on as far as Richefeu’s? Let’s have a peek at what Grantaire is up to and how far he’s got.” One o’clock rang out from the Vaugirard bell tower as Enjolras reached the Richefeu tobacconist’s. He pushed the door open, went in, and stood, arms folded, letting the door swing shut and hit him in the shoulders, and peered around the room full of tables, men, and smoke.

A voice burst out in the smog, sharply cut off by another voice. It was Grantaire arguing with an adversary he had found.

Grantaire was sitting down opposite another figure at a table of Saint Anne marble, which was strewn with bran and dotted with dominoes; he was banging his fist on the marble and this is what Enjolras heard: “Double six.”

“Four.”

“The swine! I’m out.”

“You’re finished. Two.”

“Six.”

“Three.”

“Ace.”

“My turn to put down.”

“Four points.”

“Only just.”

“Your turn.”

“I made a huge mistake.”

“You’re doing all right.”

“Fifteen.”

“Seven more.”

“That brings me to twenty-two. [Musing.] Twenty-two!”

“You weren’t expecting the double six. If I’d played it at the start, it would’ve changed the whole game.”

“Two again.”

“Ace.”

“Ace! All right, five.”

“I don’t have any.”

“You’re the one who put down, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Blank.”

“Does he have a chance! Ah, you have one chance! [Long reverie.] Two.”

“Ace.”

“No five, no ace. Take that!”

“Domino.”

“Of all the rotten luck!”