The Horizon Which One Beholds from the Summit of a Barricade — Les Misérables

The situation of all in that fatal hour and that pitiless place had as result and culminating point Enjolras's supreme melancholy. He bore within him the plenitude of the revolution. He was incomplete, however, so far as the absolute can be so: he had too much of Saint-Just about him, and not enough of Anacharsis Cloots. Still, in the society of the Friends of the ABC, his mind had undergone a certain polarization from Combeferre's ideas. He had come to accept, as a definitive and magnificent evolution, the transformation of the great French Republic into the immense human republic. As far as the immediate means were concerned, a violent situation being given, he wished to be violent. On that point he never varied. He remained of that epic and redoubtable school which is summed up in the words: Eighty-three. Enjolras was standing erect on the staircase of paving-stones, one elbow resting on the stock of his gun. He was engaged in thought. Places where death is have these effects of tripods. All at once he threw back his head, his blond locks fell back like those of an angel, they were like the mane of a startled lion, and Enjolras cried: Citizens, do you picture the future to yourselves?

He named streets inundated with light, nations sisters, work for all, peace over all, happy mothers. To conquer matter is the first step; to realize the ideal is the second. The hydra is already the locomotive. The griffin is already the balloon. We are advancing to the union of peoples; we are advancing to the unity of man. He turned to Feuilly, valiant artisan, man of the people, who had neither father nor mother and who had adopted humanity for his mother and right for his father. You are about to die, that is to say to triumph, here. Citizens, whatever happens today, through our defeat as well as through our victory, it is a revolution that we are about to create. The Revolution of the True. From a political point of view there is but a single principle: the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty is called Liberty. Where two or three of these sovereignties are combined, the state begins. That identity of concession is called Equality. This protection of all over each is called Fraternity. Equality has an organ: gratuitous and obligatory instruction. The right to the alphabet, that is where the beginning must be made.

The nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century will be happy. Then there will be nothing more like the history of old. One might almost say: There will be no more events. Friends, the present hour in which I am addressing you is a gloomy hour; but these are terrible purchases of the future. A revolution is a toll. Whence should proceed that cry of love, if not from the heights of sacrifice? This barricade is not made of paving-stones, nor of joists, nor of bits of iron; it is made of two heaps, a heap of ideas, and a heap of woes. Here misery meets the ideal. The day embraces the night, and says to it: I am about to die, and thou shalt be born again with me. Brothers, he who dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded with the dawn. Enjolras paused rather than became silent. His lips continued to move silently, as though he were talking to himself. There was no applause; but they whispered together for a long time. Speech being a breath, the rustling of intelligences resembles the rustling of leaves.