In Germany, during a given period, summed up by Schiller in his famous drama The Robbers, theft and pillage rose up in protest against property and labor, assimilated certain specious and false elementary ideas, which, though just in appearance, were absurd in reality, enveloped themselves in these ideas, disappeared within them, after a fashion, assumed an abstract name, passed into the state of theory, and in that shape circulated among the laborious, suffering, and honest masses, unknown even to the imprudent chemists who had prepared the mixture, unknown even to the masses who accepted it.
Whenever a fact of this sort presents itself, the case is grave.
Suffering engenders wrath; and while the prosperous classes blind themselves or fall asleep, which is the same thing as shutting one’s eyes, the hatred of the unfortunate classes lights its torch at some aggrieved or ill-made 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.
Blind is he who announces it!
Foolish is he who fears it!
Revolution is the vaccine of Jacquerie.
Thanks to the Revolution, social conditions have changed.
Feudal and monarchical maladies no longer run in our blood.
There is no more of the Middle Ages in our constitution.
We no longer live in the days when terrible swarms within made irruptions, when one heard beneath his feet the obscure course of a dull rumble, when indescribable elevations from mole-like tunnels appeared on the surface of civilization, where the soil cracked open, where the roofs of caverns yawned, and where one suddenly beheld monstrous heads emerging from the earth.
The revolutionary sense is a moral sense.
The sentiment of right, once developed, develops the sentiment of duty.
The law of all is liberty, which ends where the liberty of others begins, according to Robespierre’s admirable definition.
Since ‘89, the whole people has been dilating into a sublime individual; there is not a poor man, who, possessing his right, has not his ray of sun; the die-of-hunger feels within him the honesty of France; the dignity of the citizen is an internal armor; he who is free is scrupulous; he who votes reigns.
Hence incorruptibility; hence the miscarriage of unhealthy lusts; hence eyes heroically lowered before temptations.
The revolutionary wholesomeness is such, that on a day of deliverance, a 14th of July, a 10th of August, there is no longer any populace.
The first cry of the enlightened and increasing throngs is: death to thieves!
Progress is an honest man; the ideal and the absolute do not filch pocket-handkerchiefs.
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.
Virtue rendered these tatterdemalions resplendent.
In those wagons in chests, hardly closed, and some, even, half-open, amid a hundred dazzling caskets, was that ancient crown of France, studded with diamonds, surmounted by the carbuncle of royalty, by the Regent diamond, which was worth thirty millions.
Barefooted, they guarded that crown.
Hence, no more Jacquerie.
I regret it for the sake of the skilful.
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.
Every one knows it now.
The scare-crow scares no longer.
The birds take liberties with the mannikin, foul creatures alight upon it, the bourgeois laugh at it.
CHAPTER IV—THE TWO DUTIES: TO WATCH AND TO HOPE
This being the case, is all social danger dispelled?
Certainly not.
There is no Jacquerie; society may rest assured on that point; blood will no longer rush to its head. But let society take heed to the manner in which it breathes.
Apoplexy is no longer to be feared, but phthisis is there.
Social phthisis is called misery.
One can perish from being undermined as well as from being struck by lightning.
Let us not weary of repeating, and sympathetic souls must not forget that this is the first of fraternal obligations, and selfish hearts must understand that the first of political necessities consists in thinking first of all of the disinherited and sorrowing throngs, in solacing, airing, enlightening, loving them, in enlarging their horizon to a magnificent extent, in lavishing upon them education in every form, in offering them the example of labor, never the example of idleness, in diminishing the individual burden by enlarging the notion of the universal aim, in setting a limit to poverty without setting a limit to wealth, in creating vast fields of public and popular activity, in having, like Briareus, a hundred hands to extend in all directions to the oppressed and the feeble, in employing the collective power for that grand duty of opening workshops for all arms, schools for all aptitudes, and laboratories for all degrees of intelligence, in augmenting salaries, diminishing trouble, balancing what should be and what is, that is to say, in proportioning enjoyment to effort and a glut to need; in a word, in evolving from the social apparatus more light and more comfort for the benefit of those who suffer and those who are ignorant.
And, let us say it, all this is but the beginning.
The true question is this: labor cannot be a law without being a right.