Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [292]
This remarkable period is short enough, and is beginning to be far enough from us, so that it is henceforth possible to catch its principal outlines.
We will make the endeavour.
The Restoration had been one of those intermediate phases, hard to define, in which there are fatigue, buzzings, murmurs, slumber, tumult, and which are nothing more nor less than a great nation making a temporary halt. These periods are peculiar, and deceive the politicians who would take advantage of them. At first, the nation asks only for repose; men have but one thirst, for peace; they have but one ambition, to be little. That is a translation of being quiet. Great events, great fortunes, great ventures, great men, thank God, they have seen enough of them; they have been submerged in them. They would exchange Cæsar for Prusias, and Napoleon for the king of Yvetot. “What a good little king he was!” They have walked since daybreak, it is the evening of a long, hard day; they made the first relay with Mirabeau, the second with Robespierre, the third with Bonaparte, they are thoroughly exhausted. Every one of them asks for a bed.
Devotions wearied, heroisms grown old, ambitions sated, fortunes made, all seek, demand, implore, solicit, what? A place to lie down? They have it. They take possession of peace, quietness, and leisure; they are content. At the same time, however, certain facts arise, compel recognition, and knock at the door on their side, also. These facts have sprung from revolutions and wars; they exist, they live, they have a right to instal themselves in society, and they do instal themselves; and the most of the time the facts are pioneers and quartermasters that merely prepare a bivouac for principles.
Then, this is what appears to the political philosopher.
At the same time that weary men demand repose, accomplished facts demand guarantees. Guarantees to facts are the same thing as repose to men.
This is what England demanded of the Stuarts after the Protector; this is what France demanded of the Bourbons after the empire.
These guarantees are a necessity of the times. They must be accorded. The princes “grant” them, but in reality it is the force of circumstances which gives them. A profound truth, and a piece of useful knowledge, of which the Stuarts had no suspicion in 1662, and of which the Bourbons had not even a glimpse in 1814.
The predestined family which returned to France when Napoleon fell, had the fatal simplicity to believe that it was it that gave, and that what it had given it could take back; that the house of Bourbon possessed Divine Right, that France possessed nothing, and that the political rights conceded in the Charter of Louis XVIII were only a branch of the divine right, detached by the house of Bourbon and graciously given to the people until such day as it should please the king to take it back again. Still, by the regret which the gift cost them, the Bourbons should have felt that it did not come from them.
They were surly with the nineteenth century. They made a sour face at every development of the nation. To adopt a commonplace word, that is to say, a popular and a true one, they looked glum. The people saw it.
They believed that they were strong, because the empire had been swept away before them like a stage set. They did not perceive that they themselves had been brought in in the same way. They did not see that they also were in that hand which had taken off Napoleon.ea