THE DEAD ARE RIGHT AND THE LIVING ARE NOT WRONG.
The death-struggles of the barricade were about to begin, and
everything added to the tragical majesty of this supreme moment,--a
thousand mysterious sounds in the air, the breathing of armed masses
set in motion in streets which could not be seen, the intermittent
gallop of cavalry, the heavy rumor of artillery, the platoon firing and
the cannonade crossing each other in the labyrinth of Paris, the smoke
of the battle rising all golden above the roofs, distant and vaguely
terrible cries, flashes of menace everywhere, the tocsin of St. Merry,
which now had the sound of a sob, the mildness of the season, the
splendor of the sky full of sunshine and clouds, the beauty of the day,
and the fearful silence of the houses. For since the previous evening
the two rows of houses in the Rue de la Chanvrerie had become two
walls,--ferocious walls with closed doors, closed windows, and closed
shutters.
At that day, so different from the present time, when the hour arrived
in which the people wished to be done with a situation which had lasted
too long, with a conceded charter or a restricted suffrage, when
the universal wrath was diffused in the atmosphere, when the city
consented to an upheaving of paving-stones, when the insurrection made
the bourgeoisie smile by whispering its watchword in their ear, then
the inhabitant, impregnated with riot, so to speak, was the auxiliary
of the combatant, and the house fraternized with the improvised
fortress which it supported. When the situation was not ripe, when the
insurrection was not decidedly accepted, when the masses disavowed the
movement, it was all over with the combatants, the town was changed
into a desert round the revolt, minds were chilled, the asylums were
walled up, and the street became converted into a defile to help
the army in taking the barricade. A people cannot be forced to move
faster than it wishes by a surprise, and woe to the man who tries to
compel it; a people will not put up with it, and then it abandons the
insurrection to itself. The insurgents become lepers; a house is an
escarpment, a door is a refusal, and a façade is a wall. This wall
sees, hears, and will not; it might open and save you, but no, the wall
is a judge, and it looks at you and condemns you. What gloomy things
are these closed houses! They seem dead though they are alive, and
life, which is, as it were, suspended, clings to them. No one has come
out for the last four-and-twenty hours, but no one is absent. In the
interior of this rock people come and go, retire to bed and rise again;
they are in the bosom of their family, they eat and drink, and are
afraid, terrible to say. Fear excuses this formidable inhospitality,
and the alarm offers extenuating circumstanced. At times even, and this
has been witnessed, the fear becomes a passion, and terror may be
changed into fury, and prudence into rage; hence the profound remark,
"The enraged moderates." There are flashes of supreme terror, from
which passion issues like a mournful smoke. "What do these people want?
They are never satisfied; they compromise peaceable men. As if we had
not had revolutions of that nature! What have they come to do here? Let
them get out of it as they can. All the worse for them, it is their
fault, and they have only what they deserve. That does not concern
us. Look at our poor street torn to pieces by cannon: they are a heap
of scamps; above all do not open the door." And the house assumes the
aspect of a tomb: the insurgent dies a lingering death before their
door; he sees the grape-shot and naked sabres arrive; if he cries out,
he knows there are people who hear him but will not help him; there are
walls which might protect him, and men who might save him, and these
walls have ears of flesh, and these men have entrails of stone.
Whom should we accuse? Nobody and everybody,--the imperfect times in
which we live. It is always at its own risk and peril that the Utopia
converts itself into an insurrection, and becomes an armed protest
instead of a philosophic protest,--a Pallas and no longer a Minerva.
The Utopia which grows impatient and becomes a riot knows what awaits
it, and it nearly always arrives too soon. In that case it resigns
itself, and stoically accepts the catastrophe in lieu of a triumph.
It serves, without complaining, and almost exculpating them, those
who deny it, and its magnanimity is to consent to abandonment. It is
indomitable against obstacles, and gentle toward ingratitude. Is it
ingratitude after all? Yes, from the human point of view; no, from the
individual point of view. Progress is the fashion of man; the general
life of the human race is called progress; and the collective step of
the human race is also called progress. Progress marches; it makes the
great human and earthly journey toward the celestial and divine; it
has its halts where it rallies the straying flock; it has its stations
where it meditates, in the presence of some splendid Canaan suddenly
unveiling its horizon; it has its nights when it sleeps; and it is one
of the poignant anxieties of the thinker to see the shadow on the human
soul, and to feel in the darkness sleeping progress, without being able
to awaken it.
"God is perhaps dead," Gérard de Nerval said one day to the writer of
these lines, confounding progress with God, and taking the interruption
of the movement for the death of the Being. The man who despairs is
wrong: progress infallibly reawakens, and we might say that it moves
even when sleeping, for it has grown. When we see it upright again
we find that it is taller. To be ever peaceful depends no more on
progress than on the river; do not raise a bar, or throw in a rock,
for the obstacle makes the water foam, and humanity boil. Hence come
troubles; but after these troubles we notice that way has been made.
Until order, which is nought else than universal peace, is established,
until harmony and unity reign, progress will have revolutions for
its halting-places. What, then, is progress? We have just said, the
permanent life of the peoples. Now, it happens at times that the
momentary life of individuals offers a resistance to the eternal life
of the human race.
Let us avow without bitterness that the individual has his distinct
interest, and can without felony stipulate for that interest and defend
it; the present has its excusable amount of egotism, momentary right
has its claims, and cannot be expected to sacrifice itself incessantly
to the future. The generation which at the present moment is passing
over the earth is not forced to abridge it for the generations, its
equals, after all, whose turn will come at a later date. "I exist,"
murmurs that some one, who is everybody. "I am young and in love, I am
old and wish to rest, I am father of a family, I work, I prosper, I do
a good business, I have houses to let, I have money in the funds, I
am happy, I have wife and children, I like all that, I wish to live,
and so leave us at peace." Hence at certain hours a profound coldness
falls on the magnanimous vanguard of the human race. Utopia, moreover,
we confess it, emerges from its radiant sphere in waging war. It, the
truth of to-morrow, borrows its process, battle, from the falsehood
of yesterday. It, the future, acts like the past; it, the pure idea,
becomes an assault. It complicates its heroism with a violence for
which it is but fair that it should answer,--a violence of opportunity
and expediency, contrary to principles, and for which it is fatally
punished. The Utopia, when in a state of insurrection, combats with
the old military code in its hand; it shoots spies, executes traitors,
suppresses living beings and hurls them into unknown darkness. It makes
use of death, a serious thing. It seems that the Utopia no longer pats
faith in the radiance, which is its irresistible and incorruptible
strength. It strikes with the sword, but no sword is simple; every
sword has two edges, and the man who wounds with one wounds himself
with the other.
This reservation made, and made with all severity, it is impossible for
us not to admire, whether they succeed or no, the glorious combatants
of the future, the confessors of the Utopia. Even when they fail they
are venerable, and it is perhaps in ill-success that they possess
most majesty. Victory, when in accordance with progress, deserves the
applause of the peoples, but an heroic defeat merits their tenderness.
The one is magnificent, the other sublime. With us who prefer martyrdom
to success, John Brown is greater than Washington, and Pisacane greater
than Garibaldi. There should be somebody to take the part of the
conquered, and people are unjust to these great assayers of the future
when they foil. Revolutionists are accused of sowing terror, and every
barricade appears an attack. Their theory is incriminated, their object
is suspected, their after-thought is apprehended, and their conscience
is denounced. They are reproached with elevating and erecting against
the reigning social fact a pile of miseries, griefs, iniquities, and
despair, and with pulling down in order to barricade themselves behind
the ruins and combat. People shout to them, "You are unpaving hell!"
And they might answer, "That is the reason why our barricade is made
of good intentions." The best thing is certainly the pacific solution;
after all, let us allow, when people see the pavement, they think of
the bear, and it is a good will by which society is alarmed. But it
depends on society to save itself, and we appeal to its own good-will.
No violent remedy is necessary: study the evil amicably, and then cure
it,--that is all we desire.
However this may be, those men, even when they have fallen, and
especially then, are august, who at all points of the universe, with
their eyes fixed on France, are struggling for the great work with the
inflexible logic of the ideal; they give their life as a pure gift
for progress, they accomplish the will of Providence, and perform a
religious act. At the appointed hour, with as much disinterestedness as
an actor who takes up his cue, they enter the tomb in obedience to the
divine scenario, and they accept this hopeless combat and this stoical
disappearance in order to lead to its splendid and superior universal
consequences. The magnificent human movement irresistibly began on July
14. These soldiers are priests, and the French revolution is a gesture
of God. Moreover, there are--and it is proper to add this distinction
to the distinctions already indicated in another chapter,--there are
accepted insurrections which are called revolutions; and there are
rejected revolutions which are called riots. An insurrection which
breaks out is an idea which passes its examination in the presence of
the people. If the people drops its blackball, the idea is dry fruit,
and the insurrection is a street-riot. Waging war at every appeal and
each time that the Utopia desires it is not the fact of the peoples;
for nations have not always, and at all hours, the temperament of
heroes and martyrs. They are positive; _a priori_ insurrection is
repulsive to them, in the first place, because it frequently has
a catastrophe for result, and, secondly, because it always has an
abstraction as its starting-point.
For, and this is a grand fact, those who devote themselves do so for
the ideal, and the ideal alone. An insurrection is an enthusiasm, and
enthusiasm may become a fury, whence comes an upraising of muskets. But
every insurrection which aims at a government or a regime aims higher.
Hence, for instance, we will dwell on the fact that what the chiefs of
the insurrection of 1832, and especially the young enthusiasts of the
Rue de la Chanvrerie, combated was not precisely Louis Philippe. The
majority, speaking candidly, did justice to the qualities of this king
who stood between monarchy and revolution, and not one of them hated
him. But they attacked the younger branch of the right divine in Louis
Philippe, as they had attacked the elder branch in Charles X., and what
they wished to overthrow in overthrowing the Monarchy in France was, as
we have explained, the usurpation of man over man, and the privilege
opposing right throughout the universe. Paris without a king has as its
counterstroke the world without despots. They reasoned in this way.
Their object was far off without doubt, vague perhaps, and retreating
before the effort, but grand.
So it is. And men sacrifice themselves for these visions, which are
for the sacrificed nearly always illusions, but illusions with which
the whole of human certainty is mingled. The insurgent poetizes and
gilds the insurrection, and men hurl themselves into these tragical
things, intoxicating themselves upon what they are about to do. Who
knows? Perhaps they will succeed; they are the minority; they have
against them an entire army; but they are defending the right, natural
law, the sovereignty of each over himself, which allows of no possible
abdication, justice, and truth, and, if necessary, they die like
the three hundred Spartans. They do not think of Don Quixote, but
of Leonidas, and they go onward, and once the battle has begun they
do not recoil, but dash forward head down-wards, having for hope an
extraordinary victory, the revolution completed, progress restored to
liberty, the aggrandizement of the human race, universal deliverance,
and at the worst a Thermopylæ. These combats for progress frequently
fail, and we have explained the cause. The mob is restive against the
impulse of the Paladins; the heavy masses, the multitudes, fragile
on account of their very heaviness, fear adventures, and there is
adventure in the ideal. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that
these are interests which are no great friends of the ideal and the
sentimental. Sometimes the stomach paralyzes the heart. The greatness
and beauty of France are, that she does not grow so stout as other
nations, and knots the rope round her hips with greater facility. She
is the first to wake and the last to fall asleep; she goes onward. She
is seeking.
The reason of this is because she is artistic. The ideal is nought else
than the culminating point of logic, in the same way as the beautiful
is only the summit of the true. Artistic peoples are also consistent
peoples; loving beauty is to see light. The result of this is, that
the torch of Europe, that is to say of civilization, was first borne
by Greece, who passed it to Italy, who passed it to France. Divine
enlightening nations! _Vita lampada tradunt._ It is an admirable thing
that the poetry of a people is the element of its progress, and the
amount of civilization is measured by the amount of imagination. Still,
a civilizing people must remain masculine; Corinth yes, but Sybaris
no, for the man who grows effeminate is bastardized. A man must be
neither dilettante nor virtuoso, but he should be artistic. In the
matter of civilization, there must not be refinement, but sublimation,
and on that condition the pattern of the ideal is given to the human
race. The modern ideal has its type in art and its means in science. It
is by science that the august vision of the poet, the social beauty,
will be realized, and Eden will be remade by A + B. At the point which
civilization has reached exactitude is a necessary element of the
splendid, and the artistic feeling is not only served but completed
by the scientific organ; the dream must calculate. Art, which is the
conqueror, ought to have science, which is the mover, as its base. The
strength of the steed is an imported factor, and the modern mind is the
genius of Greece, having for vehicle the genius of India,--Alexander
mounted on an elephant. Races petrified in dogma or demoralized by time
are unsuited to act as guides to civilization. Genuflection before
the idol or the crown-piece ruins the muscle which moves and the will
that goes. Hieratic or mercantile absorption reduces the radiance of a
people, lowers its horizon by lowering its level, and withdraws from it
that both human and divine intelligence of the universal object which
renders nations missionaries. Babylon has no ideal, nor has Carthage
while Athens and Rome have, and retain, even through all the nocturnal
density of ages, a halo of civilization.
France is of the same quality, as a people, as Greece and Rome; she
is Athenian through the beautiful, and Roman through her grandeur.
Besides, she is good, and is more often than other nations in the
humor for devotion and sacrifice. Still, this humor takes her and
leaves her; and this is the great danger for those who run when she
merely wishes to walk, or who walk when she wishes to halt. France
has her relapses into materialism, and at seasons the ideas which
obstruct this sublime brain have nothing that recalls French grandeur,
and are of the dimensions of a Missouri or a South Carolina. What is
to be done? The giantess plays the dwarf, and immense France feels a
fancy for littleness. That is all. To this nothing can be said, for
peoples like planets have the right to be eclipsed. And that is well,
provided that light return and the eclipse does not degenerate into
night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous, and the reappearance
of light is synonymous with the existence of the Ego. Let us state
these facts calmly. Death on a barricade, or a tomb in exile, is an
acceptable occasion for devotion, for the real name of devotion is
disinterestedness. Let the abandoned be abandoned, let the exiles be
exiled, and let us confine ourselves to imploring great nations not
to recoil too far when they do recoil. Under the pretext of returning
to reason, it is not necessary to go too far down the incline. Matter
exists, the moment exists, interests exist, the stomach exists, but the
stomach must not to the sole wisdom. Momentary life has its rights, we
admit, but permanent life has them also. Alas! To have mounted does not
prevent falling, and we see this in history more frequently than we
wish; a nation is illustrious, it tastes of the ideal, then it bites
into the mud and finds it good, and when we ask it why it abandons
Socrates for Falstaff, it replies, "Because I like statesmen."
One word before returning to the barricade. A battle like the one which
we are describing at this moment is only a convulsion toward the ideal.
Impeded progress is sickly, and has such tragic attacks of epilepsy.
This malady of progress, civil war, we have met as we passed along, and
it is one of the social phases, at once an act and an interlude of that
drama whose pivot is a social condemnation, and whose veritable title
is "Progress." Progress! This cry, which we raise so frequently, is our
entire thought, and at the point of our drama which we We reached, as
the idea which it contains has still more than one trial to undergo,
we may be permitted, even if we do not raise the veil, to let its
gleams pierce through clearly. The book which the reader has before him
at this moment is, from one end to the other, in its entirety and its
details, whatever the intermittences, exceptions, and short-comings may
be, the progress from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from
falsehood to truth, from night to day, from appetite to conscience,
from corruption to life, from bestiality to duty, from hell to heaven,
and from nothingness to God. The starting-point is matter, the terminus
the soul; the hydra at the commencement, the angel at the end.