Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [295]
According to the clever, therefore, revolutions such as the Revolution of July [1830] are severed arteries; prompt ligature is needed. Rights, too grandly proclaimed, are disquieting. So once those rights have been affirmed, the State must be reaffirmed. Liberty having been assured, we must think about power.
Up to this point, the wise do not think differently from the clever, but they begin to feel distrust. Power, very well. But first, what is power? Second, where does it come from?
The clever seem not to hear the murmurs of objection, and they continue their work.
According to these politicians, ingenious in putting a mask of necessity upon profitable fictions, the first need of a people after a revolution, if this people forms part of a monarchical continent, is to procure a dynasty. In this way, say they, it can have peace after its revolution, that is to say, time to staunch its wounds and to repair its house. The dynasty hides the scaffolding and covers the ambulance.
Now, it is not always easy to procure a dynasty.
In case of necessity, the first man of genius, or even the first adventurer you meet, suffices for a king. You have in the first place Bonaparte, and in the second Iturbide.ee
But the first family you meet with does not suffice to make a dynasty. There must be a certain amount of antiquity in a race, and the wrinkles of centuries cannot be improvised.
If we adopt at the statesmen’s point of view, of course with every reservation, after a revolution, what are the qualities of the king who springs from it? He may be, and it is well that he should be, revolutionary, that is to say, a participant in his own person in this revolution, that he should have taken part in it, that he should be compromised in it, or made illustrious, that he should have touched the axe or handled the sword.
What are the qualities of a dynasty? It should be national; that is to say, revolutionary at a distance, not by acts performed, but by ideas accepted. It should be composed of the past and be historic, of the future and be sympathetic.
All this explains why the first revolutions content themselves with finding a man, Cromwell or Napoleon; and why the second absolutely insist on finding a family, the house of Brunswick or the house of Orleans.
Royal houses resemble those banyan trees of India, each branch of which, by bending to the ground, takes root there and becomes a banyan. Each branch may become a dynasty. On the sole condition that it bend to the people.
Such is the theory of the clever.
This, then, is the great art, to give a success something of the sound of a catastrophe, in order that those who profit by it may tremble also, to moderate a step in advance with fear, to enlarge the curve of transition to the extent of retarding progress, to tame down this work, to denounce and restrain the ardours of enthusiasm, to cut off the corners and the claws, to put protective padding over triumph, to swaddle rights, to wrap the people-giant up in flannel and hurry him off to bed, to impose a diet on this excessive health, to put Hercules in a convalescent home, to dilute the event within the expedient, to offer minds thirsting for the ideal this nectar stretched with barley-water, to take precautions against too much success, to provide the revolution with a sunscreen.
The year 1830 carried out this theory, already applied to England by 1688.
The year 1830 is a revolution arrested in mid career.ef Half progress, partial right. Now logic ignores the Almost, just as the sun ignores the candle.
Who stops revolutions half way? The bourgeoisie.
Why?
Because the bourgeoisie is the interest which has attained to satisfaction. Yesterday it was hungry, to-day it has been fed, to-morrow it will be sated.
The phenomenon of 1814 after Napoleon was reproduced in 1830 after Charles X.
There has been an attempt, an erroneous one, to make a special class of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is simply the contented portion of the people. The bourgeois is the man who has now time to sit down. A chair is not a caste.
But, by