“And in those manifestations of sentiment, what odious injustices! Was the Restoration not accused, still because of the circumstances in which it had been made, of humiliating France before foreigners? Well, that was false; the Restoration was very proud, and, as much as its situation as a vanquished power permitted, very independent. Louis XVIII, at the Congress of Vienna, and later Charles X , were veritable Kings of France with regard to foreign cabinets, and not for a single day did they conduct themselves other than as Kings of France.
“The war that was waged against the Bourbons was extremely disloyal. The politics of the opposition often consisted of preventing the government from taking liberal measures, in frightening the Court with ultra-liberal amendments, in rendering the collaboration of the government and the Chambre impossible, and in precipitating a coup d’état by disturbing and agitating the country.
“I will show you shortly a monument to the infamy of a certain opposition party in that epoch: an article in Le Globe of 24 October 1830, which sets out with an odious cynicism the shameful means of which use was made to wage war against the fallen government.
“When the revolution was made, a question arose. It had been accomplished in the name of certain liberties; it was necessary to institute them; that they would be instituted was not open to doubt. But what government would replace the former monarchy?
“The Republic had few adherents; Napoléon II was a prisoner in Austria; to whom should great France be given? It did not have time to interrogate itself; it was hoodwinked.
“There was, among the number of the most cunning and most active conspirators whose work had just come to fruition a prince belonging to a house whose founder had been famous for his perpetual conspiracies and for the facility with which he had abandoned his accomplices; the last head of that house had extended a regicidal hand toward the crown. It was his son, ambitious without grandeur and without dignity, who was suddenly made king by a few friends that he had inserted into the bosom of the liberal party. Two hundred and twenty-nine députés modified the Constitution without a mandate, pronounced the fall of one dynasty and erected a new dynasty in a single session lasting seven hours! And those députés, elected under the empire of a charter that they remade at their whim, under the reign of a man whose family they proscribed, awarded the crown of France as they would have voted a regulation, and went to fetch their candidate without even waiting for the assent of the Chambre of peers.
“Assuredly the choice was singular. The Bourbons were overthrown and replaced by a Bourbon; they were rejected because they had re-entered France ‘on the ammunition-wagons of cossacks’—that was the conventional expression and their throne was given to a prince who, an émigré like them, had returned like them, the same time as them, and with them, on the cossacks’ ammunition wagons. They were reproached for having borne arms against their country, and if he had not fought against us, that was not his decision, for he had gone over to the enemy with weapons and luggage in the company of Dumouriez, but the enemy had peremptorily refused his services. His proclamation of Tarragona, the commandment in chief of the army of Catalonia that was given to him by the governmental junta of Cadiz, and the withdrawal of that commandment on Wellington’s orders, are indestructible facts.
“How did France let that happen? Two things allowed that improvised king to pass. He had made himself a reputation as a liberal, and he was known to be an enemy of his elders. There were, therefore, points of similarity between him and the country. Finally, and above all, the tricolor cockade, the imperial cockade, covered the merchandise.
“What proves that in advance is the first proclamation of the Duc d’Orléans: ‘As I enter the city of Paris I wear with pride these glorious colors that you have taken up again, and that I have worn for a long time.’ There are also these words, which Monsieur Boinvilliers addressed to him on 30 July 1830: ‘Supposing that you become king, what is your opinion of the treaties of 1815? Take note that it is not a liberal revolution that is being made in the streets; it is a national revolution. The sight of the tricolor flag, that is what had excited the people, and it would certainly be easier to push Paris toward the Rhine than over Saint-Cloud.’
“Whatever the principle and causes were of the July Revolution, and the double usurpation of the man who profited from it—a usurpation to the detriment of his family and to the detriment of France—it briefly took on the appearance of a transformation and a partial progress.
“It was only for a moment. That deceit, which stained the debut of the reign, characterized it from one end to the other. It was one long duel with discourteous weapons between the government and liberty; the government was often the victor; every time, and as much as he could, he tied the hands of liberty; but liberty ended up being the stronger and by killing the government, the king and the dynasty.
“Louis-Philippe had failed in his mandate. Raised to the throne—or, to be more exact, accepted, more or less—on condition of combating reaction, of developing liberty and repairing the defeats of 1814 and 1815, or at least holding the flag of France high, he had combated liberty and humiliated France before the powers. All the internal and external politics of Louis-Philippe gravitated around his preoccupation with dynastic interests; always fearful that cabinets might oust him, he let them do anything; the fall of Laffitte in 1831 had no other cause than the secret and individual politics of the king with regard to Austria, politics contrary to that of the Council. It was in those paltry endeavors that the maladroitly clever prince, too fecund in expedients, incapable of broad vision, who mistook knavery for politics, used himself up,
Let us now consider the first fifty years of the nineteenth century from the special viewpoint of the rights of the people in general and democracy.
“A distinguished historian has said, and I share his opinion, although I do not admit the consequences that he has drawn from his assertion, that the reign of Louis-Philippe was the triumph of the bourgeoisie over the monarchy, over the aristocracy and over the people. Under the Restoration there was a real, if not very apparent, struggle between the debris of the aristocracy, which wanted to reconstitute itself, and the crown; at the same time there was a real, if not very apparent, struggle between the crown and the bourgeoisie; finally, there was a struggle between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. The aristocracy defended the crown, but at the same time wanted to diminish it to its advantage; the bourgeoisie wanted very nearly the same thing; 1830 was the triumph of the bourgeoisie over the crown and the aristocracy—but in all of that, where were the people?
“I accept that theory, and I recognize that the people began to become something in 1848. But universal suffrage, precarious then, led, by an accident in which, I must admit, the people had not played any part, the fact coinciding with the institution of a government antipathetic to the country, on which it had been imposed in the most insulting fashion, which did not really exist, did not pass into the realm of right and legality, and was only consecrated and guaranteed on the day when it became the basis of the sole veritably legitimate government that France had had, along with those of the Consulate and the Empire, to the election of Prince Louis-Napoléon to a decennial presidency.
“I emphasize this point: the revolution of 1848 came as a profound surprise to the bourgeoisie. There was, alongside it, a smaller bourgeoisie that wanted its share of power and had demanded reform; suddenly, a revolution emerged therefrom.
“On the other hand, who had demanded the Republic? Who had consulted the country in order to establish it? That form of government, antipathetic to our genius, to our historical past, to our religion, to our mores, was imposed on France by a small group of wayward individuals. And that is so true that, on the day when the people were consulted, when they could finally express their sentiment and their opinion, in spite of the maneuvers of the parties, in spite of the energetic action of the existing power, they proclaimed the monarchy by summoning to the presidential seat an imperial pretender. That day,
the people took their revenge, and repudiated the bloody, insane and grotesque Republic that had emerged behind the muddy paving-stones.
“Again the people rejected that wretched government—whose short existence had also been sent struggling against liberty, exhausting itself withdrawing or limiting the impracticable liberties that it had inflicted on the country—when from all parts, almost unanimously, with an indefatigable persistence, ardently and proudly, they told the man who held the destiny of France in his hands to save it from the ruination with which it was threatened. They insinuated to him, they counseled him, they begged him, they rejoined him, and they summoned him to action. And, detested and scorned as it deserved to be, the Republic fell like a rotten fruit under the finger that pushes it. In this case, the pushing finger was that of the people.
“A Head of State who senses an entire people behind him, who hears their supplications, their universal incitements, who has measured the extent of the danger by which the people are menaced, who knows that he is able to save them but who does not do so is the greatest of criminals. By what evils the world would have been overwhelmed without the second of December! How far and for how long would civilization have been held back in Europe!
“For a third time, the people trampled the Republic underfoot when, consulted again, it consecrated by the glare of a solemn vote the great action that had been carried out. It did so once by demanding the reestablishment of the Empire, and again in voting for it.
“Such were the ordeals through which France passed before becoming the France of Napoléon III, the last form of which was a democracy invested with all the liberties and only having for a counterweight the Crown and the Senate. Such is the route that the people—which does not mean only the poor classes but the whole ensemble of citizens—traveled before arriving at the democratic monarchy, before being, in security, their own masters.
“At the succession of Napoléon IV, quasi-unlimited liberty had been founded for twelve years; already the acts of 24 November 1860, 19 January 1867 and 16 March 1876, among others, had had the result of disorganizing the parties, reducing them to impotence and causing them to fall into oblivion. What could they demand, in fact, and what remained to promise them? What could the pretenders—who were relived of their exile with the accession of the prince—have brought as a dowry to free France, the France of universal suffrage, to France the mistress of the Rhine? One of them, in any case, the most august, had died without noise and without lineage, and all the old French nobility had immediately rallied en masse to the Empire, only recognizing after the legitimacy of divine right the legitimacy of the rights of the people.
“Under Napoléon IV, therefore, there was no longer, either in the Chambres or in the press, any constituted, permanent and, in consequence, systematic opposition, ever-ready to form a coalition, and having only one goal, the overthrow of the dynasty, or at least the rise to power. There were no longer anything but momentary and partial oppositions based on real interests put in question, agitated because a projected measure affected them; when the debate was over, those oppositions dissolved of their own accord, to be replaced by others whose objective was entirely different. There were public questions and opposition, no longer political questions and opposition.
“The political history of France since then has been entirely comprised in the social history of Europe, which I shall trace for you briefly.
Chapter XV
If it is true that individual interest ought
to be subordinate to that of society, it is
no less true that it is an essential interest
of society that the individual should be
respected and independent.
“I said just now that the French Revolution, which has become the universal Revolution, was both political and social. The spirit of the Revolution was essentially Christian; it was equitable and charitable; it was an aspiration toward human happiness. Télémaque, which is the most ancient of our revolutionary monuments, is nothing else.
“Later, Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau modified that spirit in the direction of philosophy and right, but fundamentally, it remained the same.
“The memoranda of the Estates General, which are the definitive formula of the wishes of the new France, and the acts that realized those wishes, tended above all to the amelioration of the civil and social condition of individuals. Suffering had been traced back to abuses; the abolition of the abuses tended toward wellbeing.
“But the struggles that were produced from the very beginning of the Revolution had the effect of giving the first place to politics, and questions of wellbeing were almost forgotten. The warrior workers of the Empire also lost sight of them.
It was only in peace that the chain was reconnected; Fourier and Saint-Simon took it up. Their doctrines rested on two completely false bases: one was the very folly of their projects, the other that the first illuminate who comes along has the right to exterminate society, if he has the strength, in order to apply he formulae that have emerged from his lucubrations: a detestable and deadly principle that was emitted and practiced by the Convention and had long hung over Europe.
“That hideous doctrine of public salvation has led many people astray in the pursuit of human wellbeing, in making the seek absolute formulae that they do not despair of applying some day by means of force and the aid of the guillotine; whereas, without the precedents of the Republic, they would have limited themselves to inventing practical means of relieving general suffering. From that comes the communist and socialist constellation that does so much harm, alarming minds and exciting resistance to useful and just reforms that are confounded with chimeras, awakening unrealizable hopes and desires, deceiving intelligences and hearts, exciting evil passions, advocating systematic depredation and murder. Hence, a considerable delay in the solution of questions and the foundation of economic liberties, which, presented in several works of the school, at the same time as new political organizations from which they show them as inseparable, were thus subordinated to extravagances with which, however, they had no connection. Hence, in brief, the slowness of economics to make itself plain.
“It finally triumphed. The Republic of 1848 permits the judgment of almost all those projects of radical reorganization; several were applied and for the others, their authors made them well-known; the effects of both could be seen in the street, at the barricades.
“Fortunately, order having been rapidly reestablished, nothing remained of that bad dream but the fact that they had been close enough to the edge of the abyss to measure its depth. The peace that reigned under the Empire, in the cities as in souls, permits the discernment of what good there might have been in the dangerous plans that had nearly wrecked society, and to separate the politics from the economics. Then, socialism, having been by turns feared, hated and ridiculed, fell into the domain of forgetfulness, and, alongside their labor of external and internal politics, governments and peoples devoted themselves to a permanent investigation of the suffering and wellbeing of the masses, and the means of attenuating or making the former disappear, while developing the latter.
“Everything, moreover, concurred with that movement. The Revolution became scientific. The progress of science, its marvelous applications, communications of all kinds rendered so facile, the borrowings of very kind that peoples were able to make from one another, the softening of mores produced by the multiplicity of relations founded commercial liberty in a few years, caused individual liberty to take full flight, and, thus permitting everyone to give all that they could, also led, in general, to everyone receiving everything they needed.
It is necessary to recognize that, in the époque we have now reached, under the reign of Napoléon III and his contemporaries, especially at the beginning of the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century, governments were practicing a little socialism. That is what they were doing when they took from the pockets of all the taxpayers in order to help a particular class of citizens—the
workers, for example—charging some in order to compensate others. That is what they were doing when they exempted the poor from direct taxation. Undoubtedly, it was charity, and well-placed charity; undoubtedly, political reasons motivated that privilege, and I’m not taking about the argument that consists of saying: ‘Let’s satisfy the people, stuff them and corrupt them, and they’ll shut up.’ No, there were in measures of that sort a nobler political reason, which was this: ‘Let us help those who are weak, in order that none of society’s strength shall be wasted.’
“Undoubtedly, that was not to constitute a caste, for in a democratic society everyone can be great one day and petty the next; but it was to constitute a privilege in favor of a condition. Undoubtedly, it was not a principle, a general system that was being followed; it was, on the contrary, an exception, a detail, whose application was secondary and the inconvenience light for those on whom it fell, and of which the benefit was enormous for those who profited from it. But fundamentally, rigorously, theoretically, it was an imposed charity, an injustice and an action stained by socialism, in a measure of which no one ever thought of complaining, so excellent was it in practice and so much did the idea present itself naturally to the mind. Let us therefore pass over that purely incidental point.
“The state of affairs in 1876, therefore, gave the maximum possible satisfaction to everyone; it procured the greatest sum of possible good for the greatest number. It lasted for some time.
“But there is one law that takes precedence over all the other laws to which the destinies of humankind are subject. It is neither good nor evil of which the reign is established, although, over time, one can observe that the domain of good extends little by little. It is movement, it is transformation, that is the supreme law.
The Humanisphere Page 25
