THE BOTTOM OF THE QUESTION.
There is riot, and there is insurrection; they are two passions, one of which is just, the other unjust. In democratic States, the only ones based on justice, it sometimes happens that the fraction usurps power; in that case the whole people rises, and the necessary demand for its rights may go so far as taking up arms. In all the questions which result from collective sovereignty, the war of all against the fraction is insurrection, and the attack of the fraction on the masses is a riot; according as the Tuileries contain the king or the convention, they are justly or unjustly attacked. The same guns pointed at the mob are in the wrong on August 14, and in the right on the 14th Vendémiaire. Their appearance is alike, but the base is different; the Swiss defend what is false, and Bonaparte what is true. What universal suffrage has done in its liberty and its sovereignty cannot be undone by the street. It is the same in matters of pure civilization, and the instinct of the masses, clear-sighted yesterday, may be perturbed to-morrow. The same fury is legitimate against Terray and absurd against Turgot. Smashing engines, pillaging store-houses, tearing up rails, the demolition of docks, the wrong ways of multitudes, the denial of popular justice to progress, Ramus assassinated by the scholars, and Rousseau expelled from Switzerland by stones,—all this is riot Israel rising against Moses, Athens against Phocion, Rome against Scipio, are riots, while Paris attacking the Bastille is insurrection. The soldiers opposing Alexander, the sailors mutinying against Christopher Columbus, are the same revolt,—an impious revolt; why? Because Alexander does for Asia with the sword what Columbus does for 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 people breaks its fidelity to itself, and the mob behaves treacherously to the people. Can anything, for instance, be stranger than the long and sanguinary protest of the false salt-makers, a legitimate chronic revolt which at the decisive moment, on the day of salvation, and in the hour of the popular victory, espouses the throne, turns into chouannerie, and from an insurrection against the government becomes a riot for it? These are gloomy masterpieces of ignorance. The false salt-maker escapes from the royal gallows, and with the noose still round 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, the assassins 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 a grand Catholic riot The sound of right in motion can be recognized, and it does not always come from the trembling of the overthrown masses; there are mad furies and cracked bells, and all the tocsins do not give the sound of bronze. The commotion of passions and ignorances differs from the shock of progress. Rise, if you like, but only to grow, and show me in what direction you are going, for insurrection is only possible with a forward movement. Any other uprising is bad, every violent step backwards is riot, and recoiling is an assault upon the human race. Insurrection is the outburst of the fury of truth; the paving-stones which insurrection tears up emit the spark of right, and they only leave to riot their mud. Danton rising against Louis XVI. is insurrection; Hébert against Danton is riot.
Hence it comes that if insurrection in given cases may be, as Lafayette said, the most holy of duties, riot may be the most fatal of attacks. There is also some difference in the intensity of caloric; insurrection is 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 Camille Desmoulins is a government. At times insurrection is a resurrection. The solution of everything by universal suffrage being an absolutely modern fact, and all history anterior to that fact being for four thousand years filled with violated right and the suffering of the peoples, each epoch of history brings with it the protest which is possible to it. Under the Cæsars there was no insurrection, but there was Juvenal. The facit indignatio takes the place of the Gracchi. Under the Cæsars there is the Exile of Syene, and there is also the man 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 the ideal world, converts a vision into an enormous satire, and casts on Rome-Nineveh, Rome-Babylon, and Rome-Sodom the flashing reflection of the Apocalypse. John on his rock is the sphinx on its pedestal. We cannot understand him, for he is a Jew, and writes in Hebrew; but the man 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 painted in the same. Work produced by the graver alone would be pale, and so a concentrated biting prose must be poured into the lines. Despots are of some service to thinkers, for chained language is terrible language, and the writer doubles and triples his style when silence is imposed by a master on the people. There issues from this silence a certain mysterious fulness which filters and fixes itself in bronze in the thought. Compression in history produces conciseness in the historian, and the granitic solidity of certain celebrated prose is nothing but a pressure put on by the tyrant. Tyranny forces the writer into contraction of the diameter, which is increase of strength. The Ciceronian period, scarce sufficient for Verres, would be blunted upon a Caligula. Though there is less breadth in the sentence, there is more intensity in the blow, and Tacitus thinks with a drawn-back arm. The honesty of a great heart condensed in justice and truth is annihilating.
We must observe, by the way, that Tacitus is not historically superimposed on Cæsar, and the Tiberii are reserved for him. Cæsar and Tacitus are two successive phenomena, whose meeting seems to be mysteriously prevented by Him who regulates the entrances and exits on the stage of centuries. Cæsar is great, Tacitus is great, and God spares these two grandeurs by not bringing them into collision. The judge, in striking Cæsar, might strike too hard and be unjust, and God does not wish that. The great wars of Africa and Spain, the Cilician pirates destroyed, civilization introduced into Gaul, Britain, and Germany,—all this glory covers the Rubicon. There is in this a species of delicacy on the part of divine justice, hesitating to let loose on the illustrious usurper the formidable historian, saving Cæsar from the sentence of a Tacitus, and granting extenuating circumstances to genius. Assuredly despotism remains despotism, even under the despot of genius. There is corruption under illustrious tyrants, but the moral plague is more hideous still under infamous tyrants. In such reigns nothing veils the shame; and the producers of examples, Tacitus like Juvenal, buffet more usefully in the presence of this human race this ignominy, which has no reply to make. Rome smells worse under Vitellius than under Sylla; under Claudius and Domitian there is a deformity of baseness corresponding with the ugliness of the tyrant. The foulness of the slaves is the direct product of the despots; a miasma is extracted from these crouching consciences in which the master is reflected; the public power is unclean, heads are small, consciences flat, and souls vermin; this is the case under Caracalla, Commodus, and Heliogabalus, while from the Roman senate under Cæsar there only issues the smell of dung peculiar to eagles' nests. Hence the apparently tardy arrival of Juvenal and Tacitus, for the demonstrator steps in at the hour for the experiment to be performed.
But Juvenal or Tacitus, like Isaiah in biblical times and Dante in the Middle Ages, is the man; riot, and insurrection are the multitude, which is sometimes wrong, sometimes right. In the most general cases riot issues from a material fact, but insurrection is always a moral phenomenon. Riot is Masaniello; insurrection is Spartacus. Insurrection is related to the mind, riot to the stomach; Gaster is irritated, but Gaster is certainly not always in the wrong. In questions of famine, riot, the Buzançais one, for instance, has a true, pathetic, and just starting point, and yet it remains a riot. Why? Because, though right in the abstract, it is wrong in form. Ferocious though legitimate, violent though strong, it has marched haphazard, crushing things in its passage like a blind elephant; it has left behind it the corpses of old men, women, and children, and has shed, without knowing why, the blood of 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 July 14, set out with the same trouble, and before right is disengaged there are tumult and foam. At the outset an insurrection is a riot, in the same way as the river is a torrent, and generally pours itself into that ocean, Revolution. Sometimes, however, insurrection, which has come from those lofty mountains which command the moral horizon, justice, wisdom, reason, and right, and is composed of the purest snow of the ideal, after a long fall from rock to rock, after reflecting the sky in its transparency, and being swollen by a hundred confluents in its majestic course, suddenly loses itself in some bourgeois bog, as the Rhine does in the marshes. All this belongs to the past, and the future will be different; for universal suffrage has this admirable thing about it, that it dissolves riot in its origin, and, by giving insurrection a vote, deprives it of the weapon. The disappearance of war, street wars as well as frontier wars,—such is the inevitable progress. Whatever To-day may be, peace is To-morrow. However, the bourgeois, properly so called, makes but a slight distinction between insurrection and riot. To him everything is sedition, pure and simple rebellion, the revolt of the dog against the master, an attempt to bite, which must be punished with the chain and the kennel, a barking, until the day when the dog's head, suddenly enlarged, stands out vaguely 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 to history? Is it a riot or an insurrection? It is an insurrection. It may happen that in the course of our narrative of a formidable event we may use the word "riot," but only to qualify surface facts, and while still maintaining the distinction between the form riot and the basis insurrection. The movement of 1832 had in its rapid explosion and mournful extinction so much grandeur that even those who only see a riot in it speak of it respectfully. To them it is like a remnant of 1830; for, as they say, excited imaginations cannot be calmed in a day, and a revolution does not stop short with a precipice, but has necessarily a few undulations before it returns to a state of peace, like a mountain in redescending to the plain. There are no Alps without Jura, nor Pyrenees without Asturia. This pathetic crisis of contemporary history, which the memory of the Parisians calls the "time of the riots," is assuredly a characteristic hour among the stormy hours of this age. One last word before we return to our story.
The facts which we are going to record belong to that dramatic and living reality which the historian sometimes neglects through want of time 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 to speak, the foliage of great events, and are lost in the distance of history. The period called the riots abounds in details of this nature, and the judicial inquiries, through other than historic reasons, have not 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 of some and the death of others have passed. Most of the actors in these gigantic scenes have disappeared. On the next day they held their tongues, but we may say that we saw what we are about to narrate. We will change a few names, for history recounts and does not denounce, but we will depict true things. The nature of our book will only allow us to display one side and one episode, assuredly the least known, of the days of June 5 and 6, 1832; but we will do so in such a way that the reader will be enabled to catch a glimpse of the real face of this frightful public adventure behind the dark veil which we are about to lift.