For the rest, Monsieur Mabeuf continued on his downward course. His experiments with indigo were no more successful in the Jardin des Plantes than they had been in the Austerlitz garden. Last year he had owed his housekeeper her wages, this year he owed the rent. The pawnbroker had sold the plates of his Flora after thirteen months, and a tinker had made them into saucepans. Deprived of his plates, and unable even to finish off the incomplete sets of the Flora that he still possessed, he had sold the sheets of text and illustrations to a secondhand dealer at a knock-down price as ‘remainders’. Nothing was now left to him of his life’s work. He lived for a time on the proceeds of the sheets, and when he found that even this meagre nest-egg was nearly exhausted he gave up gardening and let his plot lie fallow. He had long ago given up the two eggs and occasional piece of beef on which he had once lived; his meals now consisted of bread and potatoes. He had sold the last of his furniture and everything he could spare in the way of clothes and bedding, also the majority of his books and engravings. But he still kept the most precious of his books, some of which, such as La Concordance des Bibles, by Pierre de Besse, and Les Marguerites de la Marguerite by Jean de la Haye, dedicated to the Queen of Navarre, were extremely rare. Monsieur Mabeuf never had a fire in his bedroom and went to bed when it grew dark to save candles. He seemed no longer to have neighbours; people avoided him when he went out and he was aware of this. The plight of a child concerns its mother and the plight of a young man may concern a girl; but the plight of an old man concerns no one, it is the most lonely of all despairs. Nevertheless Monsieur Mabeuf had not wholly lost his childlike serenity. His eyes still lighted up when they fell upon a book, and he could still smile while he pored over his edition of Diogenes Laertius, printed in 1644, which was the only copy extant. His glass-fronted bookcase was the only article of furniture he had retained, apart from bare essentials.
Mère Plutarque said to him one morning:
‘I’ve no money to buy dinner.’
By ‘dinner’ she meant a small loaf and four or five potatoes.
‘Can’t you owe for it?’ asked Monsieur Mabeuf.
‘You know very well they won’t let me.’
Monsieur Mabeuf opened the bookcase and spent a long time contemplating his books, each one in turn, like a parent compelled to sacrifice one of his children. Finally he snatched one off the shelf and went out with it under his arm. He returned two hours later with nothing under his arm and laid thirty sous on the table.
‘That will do for dinner.’
But the same thing happened next day and the day after and every day. Monsieur Mabeuf went out with a book and came back with a trifling sum of money. Seeing that he was forced to sell, the secondhand bookseller paid him twenty sous for a volume he had bought for twenty francs, sometimes at the same establishment. Thus his library dwindled. He remarked now and then, ‘After all, I’m eighty’ - perhaps with a lingering thought that he would come to the end of his days before he came to the end of his books. His melancholy increased. But one day he had a triumph. He went off with a Robert Estienne which he sold for thirty-five sous on the Quai Malaquais and came back with a volume of Aide which he had bought for forty sous in the Rue des Grès. ‘I owe five sous,’ he said happily to Mère Plutarque. That day he had no dinner.
He was a member of the Société d’Horticulture. When his state of impoverishment became known the president of the society undertook to speak on his behalf to the Minister of Agriculture and Commerce. ‘Why certainly!’ said the minister. ‘A worthy, harmless old man, a scholar, and a botanist – certainly we must do something for him.’ Next day Monsieur Mabeuf received an invitation to dine at the minister’s home, which, trembling with delight, he displayed to Mère Plutarque. ‘We’re saved!’ he said. Arriving on the appointed evening, he noted that his ragged cravat, his rusty, old-fashioned jacket and his shoes, which had been polished with white of egg, greatly astonished the footmen. Nobody spoke to him, not even the minister. At about ten o’clock, still hoping for a word from someone, he heard the minister’s wife, a handsome lady in a low-cut evening dress whom he had not ventured to approach, ask, ‘Who is that old person?’ He went home on foot, at midnight and in pouring rain, having sold a volume of Elzevir to pay for a fiacre to take him there.
He had fallen into the habit, before going to bed, of reading a few pages of his Diogenes Laertius, having sufficient knowledge of Greek to be able to savour the particulars of the version he possessed. This was now his only pleasure. A few weeks after the dinner-party Mère Plutarque fell suddenly ill. There is something even more distressing than the lack of means to buy a loaf of bread, from the baker, and that is to lack the means to buy drugs from the apothecary. The ailment grew worse, and the doctor prescribed a very expensive medicine. Monsieur Mabeuf went to his bookcase but it was now empty. The last volume had gone. All he had left was his Diogenes Laertius.
Monsieur Mabeuf put the unique volume under his arm and went out. This was on 4 June 1832. He went to Royol’s successor in the Rue Saint-Jacques and came back with a hundred francs. He put the pile of five-franc pieces on his old servant’s bedside table and retired to his bedroom without saying a word.
At dawn the next day he sat down on the overturned milestone which served him as a bench, and contemplated the still morning and his neglected garden. It rained now and then, but he did not seem to notice. During the afternoon he heard a strange commotion coming from the direction of the town, sounds that resembled rifle fire and the clamour of a vast crowd.
Monsieur Mabeuf looked up, and seeing a gardener passing on the other side of his hedge asked him what was happening. The gardener, with a spade over his shoulder, answered in the most unconcerned of voices:
‘It’s a riot.’
‘What do you mean, a riot?’
‘The people are fighting.’
‘What about?’
‘Blessed if I know,’ said the gardener.
‘Where is this happening?’ asked Monsieur Mabeuf.
‘Round by the Arsenal.’
Monsieur Mabeuf went into the house for his hat, looked round automatically for a book to tuck under his arm, found none, muttered, ‘Oh, of course,’ and set off for the town with a wild light in his eyes.
Book Ten
5 June 1832
I
The outward aspect
OF WHAT does a revolt consist? Of everything and nothing, a spring slowly released, a fire suddenly breaking out, force operating at random, a passing breeze. The breeze stirs heads that think and minds that dream, spirits that suffer, passions that smoulder, wrongs crying out to be righted, and carries them away.
Whither?
Where chance may dictate. In defiance of the State and the laws, of the prosperity and insolence of other men.
Outraged convictions, embittered enthusiasms, hot indignation, suppressed instincts of aggression; gallant exaltation, blind warmth of heart, curiosity, a taste for change, a hankering after the unexpected; the impulse which makes us look with interest at the announcement of a new play, and the delight we take in those three knocks on the stage; vague dislikes, rancours, frustrations – the vanity that believes Fate is against us; discomforts, idle dreams, ambition hedged with obstacles; the hope that upheaval will provide an outlet; and finally, at the bottom of it all, the peat, the soil that catches fire – such are the elements of a revolt.
The greatest and the smallest; the beings on the fringe of life who wait upon chance, the footloose, men without convictions, hangers-on at the crossroads; those who sleep at nights in the desert of houses with no roof of their own other than the clouds in the sky; those who look to luck, not labour, for their daily bread; the unknown denizens of misery and squalor, bare-footed and bare-armed – all these belong to the revolt.
All those who cherish in their souls a secret grudge against some action of the State, or of life or destiny, are attracted to the revolt; and when it manifests itself they shiver and feel themselves uplifted b
y the tempest.
A revolt is a sort of whirlwind in the social atmosphere which swiftly forms in certain temperatures and, rising and travelling as it spins, uproots, crushes, and demolishes, bearing with it great and sickly spirits alike, strong men and weaklings, the tree-trunk and the wisp of straw. Woe to those it carries away no less than to those it seeks to destroy; it smashes one against the other.
It inspires those it lays hold of with extraordinary and mysterious powers, raising everyman to the level of events and making all men weapons of destruction; it makes a pebble into a cannon-ball, a labourer into a general.
If we accept the doctrine of certain exponents of political strategy, a weak revolt, from the point of view of those in power, is not undesirable: in principle any revolt strengthens the government it fails to overthrow. It tests the reliability of the army, unites the bourgeoisie, flexes the muscles of the police, and demonstrates the strength of the social framework. It is an exercise, almost a course of treatment. Power feels revived after a revolt, like a man after a massage.
But thirty years ago revolts were viewed differently.
There is in all matters a theoretical approach which calls itself ‘common sense’. It is Molière’s Philinte as opposed to his Alceste: the offer of compromise between what is true and what is false; discourse, admonition, rather patronizing extenuation which, because it is a mingling of blame and excess, supposes itself to be wisdom and is often no more than sophistry. A whole school of political thought, called ‘moderate’, springs from this approach. It is something between hot and cold – the tepid water. This school of thought, superficial but with simulated depth, analyses effects without looking to their cause, and with the loftiness of a pseudo-science rebukes the fever of the market-place.
This is what they say:
The riots which succeeded the achievement of 1830 robbed that great event of something of its purity. The July Revolution was a salutary blowing of the popular wind which instantly cleared the air. The subsequent rioting brought back the clouds, debasing a revolution that had been remarkable for its unanimity to the level of a brawl. In the July Revolution, as always when progress proceeds by jerks, there were hidden lesions; the rioting brought these to light. One could see that this or that thing had been broken. The July Revolution itself brought nothing but a feeling of deliverance; but after the riots one had a sense of catastrophe.
Any uprising causes the shops to shut and the funds to fall; it creates consternation on the Bourse, interferes with trade, causes bankruptcies; money runs short, the rich are apprehensive, public credit is shattered and industry thrown out of gear; capital is withheld and employment dwindles; there is insecurity everywhere, and countermeasures are adopted in every town. Hence the great fissures that arise. It has been estimated that the first day of the revolt cost France twenty million francs, the second forty, and the third sixty. Simply in financial terms, the three days’ revolt cost a hundred and twenty million – that is to say, the equivalent of a lost naval battle ending in the destruction of sixty ships-of-the-line.
In the historical perspective, no doubt, the rioting was not without beauty: the war of the street barricades is no less grandiose and dramatic than war in the undergrowth, the one being inspired by the spirit of the town, the other by the spirit of the countryside. The riots threw a garish but splendid light on what is most particular to the character of Paris – hot-blooded devotion and tempestuous gaiety, students who proved that courage is a part of intelligence, the unshakeable Garde Nationale, the encampments of shopkeepers and fortifications of street-urchins, and the defiance of death displayed by the ordinary man in the street. The schools did battle with the soldiery. When all is said, between the combatants there was only a difference of age; they were of the same race; the young men who at twenty were ready to die for their ideas would at forty be ready to die for their families. The army, always unhappy in times of civil disturbance, opposed prudence to audacity. The riots, while they made manifest the reckless daring of the masses, stiffened the courage of the bourgeoisie.
All this is true, but did it justify the blood that was shed? And to the shedding of blood must be added the darkened future, the setback to progress, the disquiet of decent people, the despair of honest liberals, wounds inflicted by foreign absolutism on the revolution it had itself provoked, and the triumph of those defeated in 1830, who could now proclaim, ‘We told you so!’ It may be that Paris was aggrandized, but certainly France was diminished. Nor may we ignore – for everything must be taken into account – the massacres which too often dishonoured the forces of order grown ferocious in their repression of the spirit of liberty run mad. All in all, this revolt was a disaster.
Such is the summing up of that approximation of wisdom which the bourgeoisie, that approximation of the people, is all too ready to accept.
For our part we reject that over-flexible and, in consequence, over-convenient term ‘revolt’. We seek to distinguish between popular movements. We do not ask if a revolt costs as much as a battle. In any case, why have a battle? This brings us to the question of war. Is external war less of a disaster than internal revolt? And is every insurrection a disaster? And what if the insurrection of 14 July did cost a hundred and twenty million? The installation of Philip V upon the throne of Spain cost France two milliards. Even had the cost been the same, we should prefer 14 July. Moreover, we do not accept those figures, which sound like argument but are simply words. Accepting the fact of a revolt, we seek to examine the thing itself. The doctrinaire attitude depicted above deals only with effects: we must look for the cause.
II
The root of the question
There is the street riot and the national insurrection: two expressions of anger, the one wrong and the other right. In democratic states, the only ones based on justice, it may happen that a minority usurps power; the nation as a whole rises, and in the necessary assertion of its rights it may have recourse to violence. In any matter affecting the collective sovereignty, the war of the whole against the part is an insurrection, and the war of the part against the whole is a form of mutiny: the Tuileries may be justly or unjustly assailed according to whether they harbour the King or the Assembly. The guns turned on the mob were wrong on 10 August and right on 14 Vendémiaire. It looks the same, but the basis is different: the Swiss guards were defending an unrighteous cause, Bonaparte a righteous one. What has been done in the free exercise of its sovereign powers by universal suffrage cannot be undone by an uprising in the street. The same is true of matters of pure civilization: the instinct of the crowd, which yesterday was clear-sighted, may tomorrow be befogged. The fury which was justified against Terray was absurd when directed against Turgot, since the one stood for privilege and the other for the reform of abuses.* The wrecking of machines, looting of warehouses, tearing up of railway lines, destruction of docks; mobs led astray, the denial of progress by the people’s justice, Ramus murdered by his own students, the stoning of Rousseau – all this is mob violence; it is Israel in revolt against Moses, Athens against Phocion, Rome against Scipio. But Paris rising against the Bastille – that is insurrection. His soldiers rising against Alexander, his sailors against Christopher Columbus, these are mere acts of mutiny. Alexander with the sword did for Asia what Columbus did for America with the compass – he opened up a world; and the gift of a new world to civilization is so great a spreading of light that resistance to it is culpable. Sometimes the mass counterfeits fidelity to itself. The mob betrays the people. Can anything be more strange, for example, than the action of the salt-makers who, after a long and bloody and wholly justified revolt, at the very moment of victory, when their cause was won, went over to the King in a counter-revolution against the popular uprising on their behalf. A sad triumph of ignorance! The salt-makers escaped the royal gallows, and, with the rope still round their necks, donned the white cockade. ‘Down with the salt-tax!’ became ‘Long live the King!’ The massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve, the September mas
sacre, the massacre at Avignon (Coligny murdered in the first, Madame de Lamballe in the second, Marshal Brune in the third) – these were all acts of riot. The Vendée was a huge Catholic revolt.
The sound of righteousness in movement is clearly recognizable, and it does not always come from the tumult of an over-excited mob. There are insane outbursts of rage just as there are flawed bells: not all tocsins sound the true note. The clash of passion and ignorance is different from the shock of progress. Rise up by all means, but do so in order to grow. Show me which way you are going; true insurrection can only go forward. All other uprisings are evil. Every violent step backwards is mutiny, and to retreat is to do injury to the human cause. Insurrection is the furious assertion of truth, and the sparks struck by its flung paving-stones are righteous sparks. But the stones flung in mutiny stir up nothing but mud. Danton versus Louis XVI was insurrection, but Hébert versus Danton was mutiny.
Thus it is that if, as Lafayette said, insurrection is the most sacred of duties, sporadic revolt may be the most disastrous of blunders.
There is also the difference of temperature. Insurrection is often a volcano, revolt often a hedgerow fire.
Sometimes insurrection is resurrection.
Since the solution of all problems by universal suffrage is a wholly modern concept, and since history prior to it has for four thousand years been a tale of violated rights and the suffering of the masses, every period of history discloses such acts of protest as are within its means. There was no insurrection under the Caesars, but there was Juvenal, who wrote: ‘Si natura negat, facit indignatio versum.’* There was also Tacitus.
Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774) Page 105
