Les Misérables, v. 4/5: The Idyll and the Epic

  CHAPTER II.

  THE BOTTOM OF THE QUESTION.

  There is riot, and there is insurrection; they are two passions, oneof which is just, the other unjust. In democratic States, the onlyones based on justice, it sometimes happens that the fraction usurpspower; in that case the whole people rises, and the necessary demandfor its rights may go so far as taking up arms. In all the questionswhich result from collective sovereignty, the war of all againstthe fraction is insurrection, and the attack of the fraction on themasses is a riot; according as the Tuileries contain the king or theconvention, they are justly or unjustly attacked. The same guns pointedat the mob are in the wrong on August 14, and in the right on the 14thVendémiaire. Their appearance is alike, but the base is different; theSwiss defend what is false, and Bonaparte what is true. What universalsuffrage has done in its liberty and its sovereignty cannot be undoneby the street. It is the same in matters of pure civilization, andthe instinct of the masses, clear-sighted yesterday, may be perturbedto-morrow. The same fury is legitimate against Terray and absurdagainst Turgot. Smashing engines, pillaging store-houses, tearingup rails, the demolition of docks, the wrong ways of multitudes,the denial of popular justice to progress, Ramus assassinated by thescholars, and Rousseau expelled from Switzerland by stones,--all thisis riot Israel rising against Moses, Athens against Phocion, Romeagainst Scipio, are riots, while Paris attacking the Bastille isinsurrection. The soldiers opposing Alexander, the sailors mutinyingagainst Christopher Columbus, are the same revolt,--an impious revolt;why? Because Alexander does for Asia with the sword what Columbus doesfor America with the compass; Alexander, like Columbus, finds a world.These gifts of a world to civilization are such increments of light,that any resistance in such a case is culpable. At times the peoplebreaks its fidelity to itself, and the mob behaves treacherously tothe people. Can anything, for instance, be stranger than the long andsanguinary protest of the false salt-makers, a legitimate chronicrevolt which at the decisive moment, on the day of salvation, andin the hour of the popular victory, espouses the throne, turns intochouannerie, and from an insurrection against the government becomesa riot for it? These are gloomy masterpieces of ignorance. The falsesalt-maker escapes from the royal gallows, and with the noose stillround his neck mounts the white cockade. "Death to the salt taxes"brings into the world, "Long live the king." The killers of St.Bartholomew, the murderers of September, the massacrers of Avignon, theassassins of Coligny, of Madame de Lamballe, the assassins of Brune,the Miquelets, the Verdets, and the Cadenettes, the Companions of Jehu,and the Chevaliers du Brassard,--all this is riot. The Vendée is agrand Catholic riot The sound of right in motion can be recognized, andit does not always come from the trembling of the overthrown masses;there are mad furies and cracked bells, and all the tocsins do notgive the sound of bronze. The commotion of passions and ignorancesdiffers from the shock of progress. Rise, if you like, but only togrow, and show me in what direction you are going, for insurrectionis only possible with a forward movement. Any other uprising is bad,every violent step backwards is riot, and recoiling is an assault uponthe human race. Insurrection is the outburst of the fury of truth; thepaving-stones which insurrection tears up emit the spark of right, andthey only leave to riot their mud. Danton rising against Louis XVI. isinsurrection; Hébert against Danton is riot.

  Hence it comes that if insurrection in given cases may be, as Lafayettesaid, the most holy of duties, riot may be the most fatal of attacks.There is also some difference in the intensity of caloric; insurrectionis often a volcano, a riot often a straw fire. Revolt, as we have said,is sometimes found in the power. Polignac is a rioter, and CamilleDesmoulins is a government. At times insurrection is a resurrection.The solution of everything by universal suffrage being an absolutelymodern fact, and all history anterior to that fact being for fourthousand years filled with violated right and the suffering of thepeoples, each epoch of history brings with it the protest which ispossible to it. Under the Cæsars there was no insurrection, but therewas Juvenal. The _facit indignatio_ takes the place of the Gracchi.Under the Cæsars there is the Exile of Syene, and there is also theman of the "Annals." We will not refer to the immense Exile of Patmos,who also crushes the real world with a protest in the name of theideal world, converts a vision into an enormous satire, and casts onRome-Nineveh, Rome-Babylon, and Rome-Sodom the flashing reflection ofthe Apocalypse. John on his rock is the sphinx on its pedestal. Wecannot understand him, for he is a Jew, and writes in Hebrew; but theman who writes the "Annals" is a Latin, or, to speak more correctly,a Roman. As the Neros reign in the black manner, they must be paintedin the same. Work produced by the graver alone would be pale, and soa concentrated biting prose must be poured into the lines. Despotsare of some service to thinkers, for chained language is terriblelanguage, and the writer doubles and triples his style when silenceis imposed by a master on the people. There issues from this silencea certain mysterious fulness which filters and fixes itself in bronzein the thought. Compression in history produces conciseness in thehistorian, and the granitic solidity of certain celebrated prose isnothing but a pressure put on by the tyrant. Tyranny forces the writerinto contraction of the diameter, which is increase of strength. TheCiceronian period, scarce sufficient for Verres, would be bluntedupon a Caligula. Though there is less breadth in the sentence, thereis more intensity in the blow, and Tacitus thinks with a drawn-backarm. The honesty of a great heart condensed in justice and truth isannihilating.

  We must observe, by the way, that Tacitus is not historicallysuperimposed on Cæsar, and the Tiberii are reserved for him. Cæsarand Tacitus are two successive phenomena, whose meeting seems to bemysteriously prevented by Him who regulates the entrances and exitson the stage of centuries. Cæsar is great, Tacitus is great, and Godspares these two grandeurs by not bringing them into collision. Thejudge, in striking Cæsar, might strike too hard and be unjust, and Goddoes not wish that. The great wars of Africa and Spain, the Cilicianpirates destroyed, civilization introduced into Gaul, Britain, andGermany,--all this glory covers the Rubicon. There is in this a speciesof delicacy on the part of divine justice, hesitating to let loose onthe illustrious usurper the formidable historian, saving Cæsar fromthe sentence of a Tacitus, and granting extenuating circumstances togenius. Assuredly despotism remains despotism, even under the despot ofgenius. There is corruption under illustrious tyrants, but the moralplague is more hideous still under infamous tyrants. In such reignsnothing veils the shame; and the producers of examples, Tacitus likeJuvenal, buffet more usefully in the presence of this human race thisignominy, which has no reply to make. Rome smells worse under Vitelliusthan under Sylla; under Claudius and Domitian there is a deformity ofbaseness corresponding with the ugliness of the tyrant. The foulness ofthe slaves is the direct product of the despots; a miasma is extractedfrom these crouching consciences in which the master is reflected; thepublic power is unclean, heads are small, consciences flat, and soulsvermin; this is the case under Caracalla, Commodus, and Heliogabalus,while from the Roman senate under Cæsar there only issues the smell ofdung peculiar to eagles' nests. Hence the apparently tardy arrival ofJuvenal and Tacitus, for the demonstrator steps in at the hour for theexperiment to be performed.

  But Juvenal or Tacitus, like Isaiah in biblical times and Dante in theMiddle Ages, is the man; riot, and insurrection are the multitude,which is sometimes wrong, sometimes right. In the most general casesriot issues from a material fact, but insurrection is always a moralphenomenon. Riot is Masaniello; insurrection is Spartacus. Insurrectionis related to the mind, riot to the stomach; Gaster is irritated, butGaster is certainly not always in the wrong. In questions of famine,riot, the Buzançais one, for instance, has a true, pathetic, and juststarting point, and yet it remains a riot. Why? Because, though rightin the abstract, it is wrong in form. Ferocious though legitimate,violent though strong, it has marched haphazard, crushing things in itspassage like a blind elephant; it has left behind it the corpses of oldmen, women, and children, and has shed, without
knowing why, the bloodof the unoffending and the innocent. Feeding the people is a good end,but massacre is a bad means.

  All armed protests, even the most legitimate, even August 10 and July14, set out with the same trouble, and before right is disengagedthere are tumult and foam. At the outset an insurrection is a riot, inthe same way as the river is a torrent, and generally pours itselfinto that ocean, Revolution. Sometimes, however, insurrection, whichhas come from those lofty mountains which command the moral horizon,justice, wisdom, reason, and right, and is composed of the purest snowof the ideal, after a long fall from rock to rock, after reflecting thesky in its transparency, and being swollen by a hundred confluents inits majestic course, suddenly loses itself in some bourgeois bog, asthe Rhine does in the marshes. All this belongs to the past, and thefuture will be different; for universal suffrage has this admirablething about it, that it dissolves riot in its origin, and, by givinginsurrection a vote, deprives it of the weapon. The disappearance ofwar, street wars as well as frontier wars,--such is the inevitableprogress. Whatever To-day may be, peace is To-morrow. However, thebourgeois, properly so called, makes but a slight distinction betweeninsurrection and riot. To him everything is sedition, pure and simplerebellion, the revolt of the dog against the master, an attempt tobite, which must be punished with the chain and the kennel, a barking,until the day when the dog's head, suddenly enlarged, stands outvaguely in the shadow with a lion's face. Then the bourgeois shouts,"Long live the people!"

  This explanation given, how does the movement of 1832 stand tohistory? Is it a riot or an insurrection? It is an insurrection. Itmay happen that in the course of our narrative of a formidable eventwe may use the word "riot," but only to qualify surface facts, andwhile still maintaining the distinction between the form riot and thebasis insurrection. The movement of 1832 had in its rapid explosionand mournful extinction so much grandeur that even those who only seea riot in it speak of it respectfully. To them it is like a remnantof 1830; for, as they say, excited imaginations cannot be calmed ina day, and a revolution does not stop short with a precipice, buthas necessarily a few undulations before it returns to a state ofpeace, like a mountain in redescending to the plain. There are no Alpswithout Jura, nor Pyrenees without Asturia. This pathetic crisis ofcontemporary history, which the memory of the Parisians calls the "timeof the riots," is assuredly a characteristic hour among the stormyhours of this age. One last word before we return to our story.

  The facts which we are going to record belong to that dramatic andliving reality which the historian sometimes neglects through want oftime and space, but they contain--we insist upon it--life, heart-beats,and human thrills. Small details, as we think we have said, are, so tospeak, the foliage of great events, and are lost in the distance ofhistory. The period called the riots abounds in details of this nature,and the judicial inquiries, through other than historic reasons, havenot revealed everything, or perhaps studied it. We are, therefore,going to bring into light among the peculiarities known and published,things which are not known and facts over which the forgetfulness ofsome and the death of others have passed. Most of the actors in thesegigantic scenes have disappeared. On the next day they held theirtongues, but we may say that we saw what we are about to narrate. Wewill change a few names, for history recounts and does not denounce,but we will depict true things. The nature of our book will only allowus to display one side and one episode, assuredly the least known, ofthe days of June 5 and 6, 1832; but we will do so in such a way thatthe reader will be enabled to catch a glimpse of the real face of thisfrightful public adventure behind the dark veil which we are about tolift.