1831 and 1832, the two years immediately connected with the Revolution of July, form one of the most peculiar and striking moments of history. These two years rise like two mountains midway between those which precede and those which follow them. They have a revolutionary grandeur. Precipices are to be distinguished there. The social masses appear and disappear in them every instant, athwart the storm clouds of systems, of passions, and of theories. These appearances and disappearances have been designated as movement and resistance. At intervals, truth, that daylight of the human soul, can be descried shining there. This remarkable epoch is beginning to be sufficiently distant for us to grasp the principal lines. We shall make the attempt. The Restoration had been one of those intermediate phases, hard to define, in which there is fatigue, buzzing, murmurs, sleep, tumult, and which are nothing else than the arrival of a great nation at a halting-place. These epochs mislead the politicians who desire to convert them to profit. In the beginning, the nation asks nothing but repose. It thirsts for but one thing, peace. It has but one ambition, to be small. Which is the translation of remaining tranquil. Of great events, great hazards, great adventures, great men, thank God, we have seen enough. We have them heaped higher than our heads. We would exchange Caesar for a little king. We have marched since daybreak. We have reached the evening of a long and toilsome day. We have made our first change with Mirabeau, the second with Robespierre, the third with Bonaparte. We are worn out. Each one demands a bed. Devotion which is weary, heroism which has grown old, ambitions which are sated, fortunes which are made, seek a shelter. They have it. They take possession of peace, of tranquillity, of leisure. Behold, they are content. But at the same time certain facts arise, compel recognition, and knock at the door in their turn. These facts are the products of revolutions and wars. They have the right to install themselves in society. Most of the time, facts are the stewards of the household who do nothing but prepare lodgings for principles. At the same time that weary men demand repose, accomplished facts demand guarantees. Guarantees are the same to facts that repose is to men. This is what England demanded of the Stuarts after the Protector. This is what France demanded of the Bourbons after the Empire. Princes grant them, but in reality it is the force of things which gives them. A profound truth, which the Stuarts did not suspect and which the Bourbons did not even obtain a glimpse of.
The predestined family, which returned to France when Napoleon fell, had the fatal simplicity to believe that it was itself which bestowed, and that what it had bestowed it could take back again. The House of Bourbon possessed the right divine. France possessed nothing. The political right in the charter was merely a branch graciously given until such day as it should please the King to reassume it. Still, the house should have felt, from the displeasure created by the gift, that it did not come from it. This house was churlish to the nineteenth century. It put on an ill-tempered look at every development of the nation. It looked glum. The people saw this. It thought it possessed strength because the Empire had been carried away before it like a theatrical stage-setting. It did not perceive that it had itself been brought in in the same fashion. It thought that it had roots, because it was the past. It was mistaken. It formed a part of the past, but the whole past was France. The roots of French society were not fixed in the Bourbons, but in the nations. These obscure and lively roots constituted, not the right of a family, but the history of a people. They were everywhere, except under the throne. The House of Bourbon was the illustrious and bleeding knot in her history, but was no longer the principal element of her destiny. She could get along without the Bourbons. She had done without them for two and twenty years. There had been a break of continuity. They did not suspect the fact. A capital error led this family to lay its hand once more on the guarantees granted in 1814, on the concessions, as it termed them. What it termed its concessions were our conquests. What it termed our encroachments were our rights. When the hour seemed to it to have come, the Restoration drew itself up before the face of France and contested the collective title and the individual right of the nation to sovereignty, of the citizen to liberty. This is the foundation of those famous acts which are called the ordinances of July. The Restoration fell. It fell justly.
But it had not been absolutely hostile to all forms of progress. Under the Restoration the nation had grown accustomed to calm discussion, which had been lacking under the Republic, and to grandeur in peace, which had been wanting under the Empire. For a space of fifteen years, equality before the law, liberty of conscience, liberty of speech, liberty of the press, could be seen at work in perfect peace. Thus it proceeded until 1830. The Bourbons were an instrument of civilization which broke in the hands of Providence. The fall of the Bourbons was full of grandeur, not on their side, but on the side of the nation. They quitted the throne with gravity, but without authority. They departed, that is all. They laid down the crown, and retained no aureole. They were worthy, but they were not august. They lacked, in a certain measure, the majesty of their misfortune. During the voyage from Cherbourg, the last of them, causing a round table to be cut over into a square table, appeared to be more anxious about imperilled etiquette than about the crumbling monarchy. The populace was admirable. The nation, attacked one morning with weapons, felt itself in the possession of so much force that it did not go into a rage. It defended itself, restrained itself, restored things to their places, and then halted. It touched the royal personages only with sadness and precaution. The Bourbons carried away with them respect, but not regret. Their misfortune was greater than they were. They faded out in the horizon. The Revolution of July is the triumph of right overthrowing the fact. Right triumphant has no need of being violent. The property of right is to remain eternally beautiful and pure. The fact, even when most necessary, if it contain only too little of right, is infallibly destined to become, in the course of time, deformed, perhaps even monstrous. This conflict of right and fact has been going on ever since the origin of society. To terminate this duel, to amalgamate the pure idea with the humane reality, to cause right to penetrate pacifically into the fact and the fact into right, that is the task of sages.
