There is such a thing as an uprising, and there is such a thing as insurrection. These are two separate phases of wrath. One is in the wrong, the other is in the right. In democratic states it sometimes happens that the fraction usurps; then the whole rises and the necessary claim of its rights may proceed as far as resort to arms. The war of the whole against the fraction is insurrection. The attack of the fraction against the whole is revolt. The same cannon, pointed against the populace, is wrong on one morning and right on another. Alike in appearance, fundamentally different in reality. Paris against the Bastille is insurrection. The destruction of machines, the pillage of warehouses, the false routes of multitudes: that is revolt. Sometimes the masses are traitors to the people. Rise, if you will, but let it be that you may grow great. There is no insurrection except in a forward direction. Every violent step towards the rear is a revolt. To retreat is to commit a deed of violence against the human race. Insurrection is a fit of rage on the part of truth. The pavements which the uprising disturbs give forth the spark of right. These pavements bequeath to the uprising only their mud. Hence if insurrection in given cases may be the most holy of duties, an uprising may be the most fatal of crimes. There is also a difference in the intensity of heat. Insurrection is often a volcano. Revolt is often only a fire of straw. Insurrection is sometimes resurrection.
The solution of everything by universal suffrage is an absolutely modern fact. All history anterior to this fact is filled with violated right and the suffering of peoples. Each epoch brings with it that protest of which it is capable. Under the Caesars there was no insurrection, but there was Juvenal. A word that is chained is a terrible word. The writer doubles and trebles his style when silence is imposed on a nation by its master. From this silence there arises a mysterious plenitude which filters into thought and there congeals into bronze. Tyranny constrains the writer to conditions of diameter which are augmentations of force. The less spread of sail in the phrase, the more intensity in the blow. Tacitus thinks with all his might. But Juvenal and Tacitus is man. Riot and insurrection are the multitude, which is sometimes right and sometimes wrong. In the majority of cases, riot proceeds from a material fact. Insurrection is always a moral phenomenon. The nourishment of the people is a good object; to massacre them is a bad means. All armed protests, even the most legitimate, begin with the same troubles. Before the right gets set free, there is foam and tumult. In the beginning, the insurrection is a riot, just as a river is a torrent. Ordinarily it ends in that ocean: revolution. Sometimes, after a long fall from the mountains of the ideal, it is suddenly lost in a quagmire. Universal suffrage has this admirable property, that it dissolves riot in its inception, and by giving the vote to insurrection, it deprives it of its arms. Whatever Today may be, Tomorrow will be peace.
However, the bourgeois, properly speaking, knows nothing of such shades. In his mind, all is sedition, rebellion pure and simple, the revolt of the dog against his master, an attempt to bite which must be punished by the chain and the kennel, until such day as the head of the dog, suddenly enlarged, is outlined vaguely in the gloom face to face with the lion. Then the bourgeois shouts: Long live the people. This explanation given, what does the movement of June 1832 signify, so far as history is concerned? Is it a revolt? Is it an insurrection? It may happen to us, in placing this formidable event on the stage, to say revolt now and then, but merely to distinguish superficial facts, and always preserving the distinction between revolt, the form, and insurrection, the foundation. This movement had, in its rapid outbreak and in its melancholy extinction, so much grandeur that even those who see in it only an uprising never refer to it otherwise than with respect. A last word, before we enter on the recital. The facts which we are about to relate belong to that dramatic and living reality which the historian sometimes neglects for lack of time and space. Petty details are, so to speak, the foliage of great events, and are lost in the distance of history. The majority of the actors in these gigantic scenes have disappeared. Beginning with the very next day they held their peace. But of what we shall relate, we shall be able to say: We have seen this. We alter a few names, for history relates and does not inform against, but the deed which we shall paint will be genuine. In accordance with the conditions of the book, we shall show only one side and one episode, and certainly the least known, of the two days, the 5th and the 6th of June. We shall do it in such wise that the reader may catch a glimpse, beneath the gloomy veil which we are about to lift, of the real form of this frightful public adventure.
