CHAPTER II

THE ROOT OF THE MATTER


There is such a thing as an uprising, and there is such a thing
as insurrection; these are two separate phases of wrath; one is
in the wrong, the other is in the right. In democratic states,
the only ones which are founded on justice, it sometimes happens
that the fraction usurps; then the whole rises and the necessary claim
of its rights may proceed as far as resort to arms. In all questions
which result from collective sovereignty, the war of the whole
against the fraction is insurrection; the attack of the fraction
against the whole is revolt; according as the Tuileries contain
a king or the Convention, they are justly or unjustly attacked.
The same cannon, pointed against the populace, is wrong on the 10th
of August, and right on the 14th of Vendemiaire. Alike in appearance,
fundamentally different in reality; the Swiss defend the false,
Bonaparte defends the true. That which universal suffrage has effected
in its liberty and in its sovereignty cannot be undone by the street.
It is the same in things pertaining purely to civilization;
the instinct of the masses, clear-sighted to-day, may be troubled
to-morrow. The same fury legitimate when directed against Terray
and absurd when directed against Turgot. The destruction of machines,
the pillage of warehouses, the breaking of rails, the demolition
of docks, the false routes of multitudes, the refusal by the people
of justice to progress, Ramus assassinated by students, Rousseau driven
out of Switzerland and stoned,--that is revolt. Israel against Moses,
Athens against Phocian, Rome against Cicero,--that is an uprising;
Paris against the Bastille,--that is insurrection. The soldiers
against Alexander, the sailors against Christopher Columbus,--
this is the same revolt; impious revolt; why? Because Alexander
is doing for Asia with the sword that which Christopher Columbus
is doing for America with the compass; Alexander like Columbus,
is finding a world. These gifts of a world to civilization are such
augmentations of light, that all resistance in that case is culpable.
Sometimes the populace counterfeits fidelity to itself. The masses
are traitors to the people. Is there, for example, anything stranger
than that long and bloody protest of dealers in contraband salt,
a legitimate chronic revolt, which, at the decisive moment,
on the day of salvation, at the very hour of popular victory,
espouses the throne, turns into chouannerie, and, from having been
an insurrection against, becomes an uprising for, sombre masterpieces
of ignorance! The contraband salt dealer escapes the royal gibbets,
and with a rope's end round his neck, mounts the white cockade.
"Death to the salt duties," brings forth, "Long live the King!"
The assassins of Saint-Barthelemy, the cut-throats of September,
the manslaughterers of Avignon, the assassins of Coligny, the assassins
of Madam Lamballe, the assassins of Brune, Miquelets, Verdets,
Cadenettes, the companions of Jehu, the chevaliers of Brassard,--
behold an uprising. La Vendee is a grand, catholic uprising.
The sound of right in movement is recognizable, it does not always
proceed from the trembling of excited masses; there are mad rages,
there are cracked bells, all tocsins do not give out the sound
of bronze. The brawl of passions and ignorances is quite another
thing from the shock of progress. Show me in what direction you
are going. Rise, if you will, but let it be that you may grow great.
There is no insurrection except in a forward direction. Any other sort
of rising is bad; every violent step towards the rear is a revolt;
to retreat is to commit a deed of violence against the human race.
Insurrection is a fit of rage on the part of truth; the pavements
which the uprising disturbs give forth the spark of right.
These pavements bequeath to the uprising only their mud.
Danton against Louis XIV. is insurrection; Hebert against Danton is
revolt.

Hence it results that if insurrection in given cases may be,
as Lafayette says, the most holy of duties, an uprising may be
the most fatal of crimes.

There is also a difference in the intensity of heat; insurrection is
often a volcano, revolt is often only a fire of straw.

Revolt, as we have said, is sometimes found among those in power.
Polignac is a rioter; Camille Desmoulins is one of the governing powers.

Insurrection is sometimes resurrection.

The solution of everything by universal suffrage being an absolutely
modern fact, and all history anterior to this fact being,
for the space of four thousand years, filled with violated right,
and the suffering of peoples, each epoch of history brings
with it that protest of which it is capable. Under the Caesars,
there was no insurrection, but there was Juvenal.

The facit indignatio replaces the Gracchi.

Under the Caesars, there is the exile to Syene; there is also
the man of the Annales. We do not speak of the immense exile
of Patmos who, on his part also, overwhelms the real world with a
protest in the name of the ideal world, who makes of his vision
an enormous satire and casts on Rome-Nineveh, on Rome-Babylon,
on Rome-Sodom, the flaming reflection of the Apocalypse. John on
his rock is the sphinx on its pedestal; we may understand him,
he is a Jew, and it is Hebrew; but the man who writes the Annales
is of the Latin race, let us rather say he is a Roman.

As the Neros reign in a black way, they should be painted to match.
The work of the graving-tool alone would be too pale; there must be
poured into the channel a concentrated prose which bites.

Despots count for something in the question of philosophers.
A word that is chained is a terrible word. The writer doubles and
trebles his style when silence is imposed on a nation by its master.
From this silence there arises a certain mysterious plenitude
which filters into thought and there congeals into bronze.
The compression of history produces conciseness in the historian.
The granite solidity of such and such a celebrated prose is nothing
but the accumulation effected by the tyrant.

Tyranny constrains the writer to conditions of diameter which are
augmentations of force. The Ciceronian period, which hardly
sufficed for Verres, would be blunted on Caligula. The less
spread of sail in the phrase, the more intensity in the blow.
Tacitus thinks with all his might.

The honesty of a great heart, condensed in justice and truth,
overwhelms as with lightning.

Be it remarked, in passing, that Tacitus is not historically
superposed upon Caesar. The Tiberii were reserved for him.
Caesar and Tacitus are two successive phenomena, a meeting between
whom seems to be mysteriously avoided, by the One who, when He sets
the centuries on the stage, regulates the entrances and the exits.
Caesar is great, Tacitus is great; God spares these two greatnesses
by not allowing them to clash with one another. The guardian
of justice, in striking Caesar, might strike too hard and be unjust.
God does not will it. The great wars of Africa and Spain,
the pirates of Sicily destroyed, civilization introduced into Gaul,
into Britanny, into Germany,--all this glory covers the Rubicon.
There is here a sort of delicacy of the divine justice, hesitating to
let loose upon the illustrious usurper the formidable historian,
sparing Caesar Tacitus, and according extenuating circumstances
to genius.

Certainly, despotism remains despotism, even under the despot
of genius. There is corruption under all illustrious tyrants,
but the moral pest is still more hideous under infamous tyrants.
In such reigns, nothing veils the shame; and those who make examples,
Tacitus as well as Juvenal, slap this ignominy which cannot reply,
in the face, more usefully in the presence of all humanity.

Rome smells worse under Vitellius than under Sylla. Under Claudius
and under Domitian, there is a deformity of baseness corresponding
to the repulsiveness of the tyrant. The villainy of slaves is a
direct product of the despot; a miasma exhales from these cowering
consciences wherein the master is reflected; public powers are unclean;
hearts are small; consciences are dull, souls are like vermin;
thus it is under Caracalla, thus it is under Commodus, thus it
is under Heliogabalus, while, from the Roman Senate, under Caesar,
there comes nothing but the odor of the dung which is peculiar
to the eyries of the eagles.

Hence the advent, apparently tardy, of the Tacituses and the Juvenals;
it is in the hour for evidence, that the demonstrator makes
his appearance.

But Juvenal and Tacitus, like Isaiah in Biblical times, like Dante
in the Middle Ages, is man; riot and insurrection are the multitude,
which is sometimes right and sometimes wrong.

In the majority of cases, riot proceeds from a material fact;
insurrection is always a moral phenomenon. Riot is Masaniello;
insurrection, Spartacus. Insurrection borders on mind, riot on
the stomach; Gaster grows irritated; but Gaster, assuredly, is not
always in the wrong. In questions of famine, riot, Buzancais,
for example, holds a true, pathetic, and just point of departure.
Nevertheless, it remains a riot. Why? It is because, right at bottom,
it was wrong in form. Shy although in the right, violent although
strong, it struck at random; it walked like a blind elephant;
it left behind it the corpses of old men, of women, and of children;
it wished the blood of inoffensive and innocent persons without
knowing why. The nourishment of the people is a good object;
to massacre them is a bad means.

All armed protests, even the most legitimate, even that of the 10th
of August, even that of July 14th, begin with the same troubles.
Before the right gets set free, there is foam and tumult.
In the beginning, the insurrection is a riot, just as a river
is a torrent. Ordinarily it ends in that ocean: revolution.
Sometimes, however, coming from those lofty mountains which dominate
the moral horizon, justice, wisdom, reason, right, formed of the
pure snow of the ideal, after a long fall from rock to rock,
after having reflected the sky in its transparency and increased
by a hundred affluents in the majestic mien of triumph, insurrection
is suddenly lost in some quagmire, as the Rhine is in a swamp.

All this is of the past, the future is another thing.
Universal suffrage has this admirable property, that it dissolves
riot in its inception, and, by giving the vote to insurrection,
it deprives it of its arms. The disappearance of wars,
of street wars as well as of wars on the frontiers, such is the
inevitable progression. Whatever To-day may be, To-morrow will be peace.

However, insurrection, riot, and points of difference between
the former and the latter,--the bourgeois, properly speaking,
knows nothing of such shades. In his mind, all is sedition,
rebellion pure and simple, the revolt of the dog against his master,
an attempt to bite whom must be punished by the chain and the
kennel, barking, snapping, until such day as the head of the dog,
suddenly enlarged, is outlined vaguely in the gloom face to face
with the lion.

Then the bourgeois shouts: "Long live the people!"

This explanation given, what does the movement of June, 1832, signify,
so far as history is concerned? Is it a revolt? Is it an insurrection?

It may happen to us, in placing this formidable event on the stage,
to say revolt now and then, but merely to distinguish superficial facts,
and always preserving the distinction between revolt, the form,
and insurrection, the foundation.

This movement of 1832 had, in its rapid outbreak and in its
melancholy extinction, so much grandeur, that even those who see in it
only an uprising, never refer to it otherwise than with respect.
For them, it is like a relic of 1830. Excited imaginations, say they,
are not to be calmed in a day. A revolution cannot be cut off short.
It must needs undergo some undulations before it returns to a state
of rest, like a mountain sinking into the plain. There are no Alps
without their Jura, nor Pyrenees without the Asturias.

This pathetic crisis of contemporary history which the memory
of Parisians calls "the epoch of the riots," is certainly
a characteristic hour amid the stormy hours of this century.
A last word, before we enter on the recital.

The facts which we are about to relate belong to that dramatic
and living reality, which the historian sometimes neglects
for lack of time and space. There, nevertheless, we insist
upon it, is life, palpitation, human tremor. Petty details,
as we think we have already said, are, so to speak, the foliage
of great events, and are lost in the distance of history. The epoch,
surnamed "of the riots," abounds in details of this nature.
Judicial inquiries have not revealed, and perhaps have not sounded
the depths, for another reason than history. We shall therefore
bring to light, among the known and published peculiarities,
things which have not heretofore been known, about facts over which
have passed the forgetfulness of some, and the death of others.
The majority of the actors in these gigantic scenes have disappeared;
beginning with the very next day they held their peace; but of what
we shall relate, we shall be able to say: "We have seen this."
We alter a few names, for history relates and does not inform against,
but the deed which we shall paint will be genuine. In accordance
with the conditions of the book which we are now writing, we shall
show only one side and one episode, and certainly, the least known
at that, of the two days, the 5th and the 6th of June, 1832, but we
shall do it in such wise that the reader may catch a glimpse,
beneath the gloomy veil which we are about to lift, of the real form
of this frightful public adventure.