At the moment when the drama is on the point of penetrating into the depths of one of the tragic clouds which envelop the beginning of this reign, the book has to say who this king thought he was. Louis Philippe had entered into possession without violence and without any direct action on his part. He had been born a Prince, and he believed himself to have been elected King. The mandate had been offered, and he had accepted it, convinced that the offer was in accordance with right and the acceptance with duty. Hence his possession was in good faith. The democracy was in good faith in its attack. A clash of principles resembles a clash of elements. The King defends Royalty, the democracy defends the people, and society bleeds in the conflict. Those who combat are not to be blamed. One of the two parties is mistaken, but those who are in error are so sincerely. A blind man is no more a criminal than a Vendean is a ruffian. Let the collisions be imputed to the fatality of things. The government of 1840 led a hard life immediately. Born yesterday, it was obliged to fight to-day. Hardly installed, it was already conscious of vague movements of traction on the apparatus of July, so recently laid and so lacking in solidity. Resistance was born on the morrow, perhaps even on the preceding evening. The Revolution of July had been diversely interpreted. God delivers his visible will in events, an obscure text written in a mysterious tongue. Men make hasty translations, full of errors, of gaps, and of nonsense. When the sagacious arrive with their text, the task has long been completed. There are already twenty translations on the public place. From each remaining springs a party, and from each misinterpretation a faction, and each thinks that it alone has the true text. Power itself is often a faction.
The old parties who clung to heredity by the grace of God thought that revolutions, having sprung from the right to revolt, could themselves be revolted against. Error. In these revolutions it is the king who revolts. Revolution is precisely the contrary of revolt: a return from the fictitious to the real. Nonetheless the old parties assailed 1830 in its vulnerable spot, its royalty. They shouted: Revolution, why this king? Factions are blind men who aim correctly. The republicans uttered the same cry, and coming from them it was logical. 1830 had bankrupted the people. Between the attack of the past and the attack of the future, the establishment of July struggled. It represented the minute at loggerheads with the monarchical centuries and with eternal right. And because it was no longer revolution and had become a monarchy, it was obliged to take precedence of Europe. To keep the peace was an increase of complication. From that secret conflict, always muzzled, but always growling, was born armed peace. Meanwhile, within, pauperism, salary, education, the rights of capital and of labour, all these questions were multiplied above society, a terrible slope. Outside the parties, another movement became manifest. Thinkers meditated while the soil trembled under them. Impassive miners, they pushed their galleries into the depths of a volcano, hardly disturbed by the furnaces of which they caught glimpses. They left to political parties the question of rights; they occupied themselves with the question of happiness. These men, who may all be designated socialists, endeavoured to pierce the hard rock of combined interests and cause it to spout forth the living waters of human felicity. All the problems they proposed, cosmogonic visions being cast aside, reduce to two. First: to produce wealth. Second: to share it. England solves the first and divides badly: monstrous opulence, monstrous wretchedness. Communism thinks it solves the second and kills production. Equal partition abolishes emulation, and consequently labour. The two problems require to be solved together, to be well solved.
Solve both, encourage the wealthy and protect the poor, adjust salary to labour, make of science the base of manliness, render property democratic not by abolishing it but by making it universal, and you will have at once moral and material greatness, and you will be worthy to call yourself France. This is what socialism said outside and above a few sects which have gone astray. These doctrines, the unforeseen necessity for the statesman to take philosophers into account, a new system of politics to be created, the intuition of progress transparent beneath the revolt, his faith in the Revolution, his domestic spirit, his sincere respect for the people, his own honesty, preoccupied Louis Philippe almost painfully. There were moments when, strong and courageous as he was, he was overwhelmed by the difficulties of being a king. He felt under his feet a formidable disaggregation, which was not, nevertheless, a reduction to dust, France being more France than ever. Piles of shadows covered the horizon. A strange shade, gradually drawing nearer, extended little by little over men, over things, over ideas; a shade which came from wraths and systems. Everything which had been hastily stifled was moving and fermenting. Spirits trembled in the social anxiety like leaves at the approach of a storm. Twenty months had barely elapsed since the Revolution of July. The year 1832 had opened with an aspect of something impending and threatening. The distress of the people, a hammer nailing up Poland, England a suspected ally, the two capitals sick at once, civil war at Paris and servile war at Lyons, cholera, added the sombre roar of tumult of events to the sombre roar of ideas.
