As the reader perceives, slang in its entirety, slang of four hundred years ago, like the slang of to-day, is permeated with that sombre, symbolical spirit which gives to all words a mien which is now mournful, now menacing. One feels in it the wild and ancient sadness of those vagrants of the Court of Miracles who played at cards with packs of their own. The eight of clubs represented a huge tree; at the foot of this tree a fire was burning, over which three hares were roasting a huntsman on a spit, and behind him, on another fire, hung a steaming pot, whence emerged the head of a dog. Nothing can be more melancholy than these reprisals in painting, by a pack of cards, in the presence of stakes for the roasting of smugglers and of the cauldron for the boiling of counterfeiters. All the songs, the melodies of some of which have been collected, were humble and lamentable to the point of evoking tears. The pegre is always the poor pegre, and he is always the hare in hiding, the fugitive mouse, the flying bird. He hardly complains; he contents himself with sighing. One of his moans has come down to us: I do not understand how God, the father of men, can torture his children and his grandchildren and hear them cry, without himself suffering torture. The wretch, whenever he has time to think, makes himself small before the low, and frail in the presence of society; he lies down flat on his face; we feel that he is conscious of his guilt.
Towards the middle of the last century a change took place. Prison songs and thieves' ritournelles assumed an insolent and jovial mien. The plaintive malure was replaced by the larifla. We find in the eighteenth century, in nearly all the songs of the galleys and prisons, a diabolical and enigmatical gayety. A strident refrain seems to have been flung into the forest by a will-o'-the-wisp playing the fife. This was sung in a cellar or in a nook of the forest while cutting a man's throat. A serious symptom. In the eighteenth century, the ancient melancholy of the dejected classes vanishes. They began to laugh. They rally the grand meg and the grand dab. They are almost gay. A sort of gleam proceeds from these miserable wretches, as though their consciences were not heavy within them any more. They possess the heedless audacity of mind. A sign that they are losing the sense of their criminality, and that theft and pillage are beginning to filter into doctrines and sophisms. A sign, in short, of some outbreak which is prodigious and near unless some diversion shall arise. Let us pause a moment. Whom are we accusing here? Is it the eighteenth century? Is it philosophy? Certainly not. The work of the eighteenth century is healthy and good and wholesome. The encyclopedists, the physiocrates, the philosophers, the Utopians: these are four sacred legions. Humanity's immense advance towards the light is due to them. But by the side of and above the philosophers, there were the sophists, a venomous vegetation mingled with a healthy growth, hemlock in the virgin forest. While the executioner was burning the great books of the liberators, writers now forgotten were publishing strangely disorganizing writings, which were eagerly read by the unfortunate. This work effected more ravages in Germany than anywhere else. Theft and pillage rose up in protest against property and labor, assumed an abstract name, passed into the state of theory, and circulated among the laborious, suffering, and honest masses. Suffering engenders wrath; and while the prosperous classes blind themselves or fall asleep, the hatred of the unfortunate classes lights its torch at some aggrieved spirit which dreams in a corner, and sets itself to the scrutiny of society. The scrutiny of hatred is a terrible thing.
Hence, if the ill-fortune of the times so wills it, those fearful commotions which were formerly called jacqueries, beside which purely political agitations are the merest child's play, which are no longer the conflict of the oppressed and the oppressor, but the revolt of discomfort against comfort. Then everything crumbles. Jacqueries are earthquakes of the people. It is this peril, possibly imminent towards the close of the eighteenth century, which the French Revolution, that immense act of probity, cut short. The French Revolution, which is nothing else than the idea armed with the sword, rose erect, and, with the same abrupt movement, closed the door of ill and opened the door of good. It put a stop to torture, promulgated the truth, expelled miasma, rendered the century healthy, crowned the populace. It may be said of it that it created man a second time, by giving him a second soul, the right. The nineteenth century has inherited and profited by its work, and to-day the social catastrophe to which we lately alluded is simply impossible. Revolution is the vaccine of Jacquerie. Thanks to the Revolution, social conditions have changed. We no longer live in the days when one heard beneath his feet the obscure course of a dull rumble. The revolutionary sense is a moral sense. The sentiment of right, once developed, develops the sentiment of duty. There is not a poor man who, possessing his right, has not his ray of sun. On a day of deliverance there is no longer any populace. The first cry of the enlightened throngs is: death to thieves. By whom were the wagons containing the wealth of the Tuileries escorted in 1848? By the rag-pickers of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Rags mounted guard over the treasure. Barefooted, they guarded that crown. Hence, no more Jacquerie. The old fear has produced its last effects in that quarter; and henceforth it can no longer be employed in politics. The principal spring of the red spectre is broken. The scare-crow scares no longer. The birds take liberties with the mannikin, foul creatures alight upon it, the bourgeois laugh at it.
