John on his rock is the sphinx on its pedestal; we may understand him, he is a Jew, and it is Hebrew; but the man who writes the Annales is of the Latin race, let us rather say he is a Roman.
As the Neros reign in a black way, they should be painted to match.
The work of the graving-tool alone would be too pale; there must be poured into the channel a concentrated prose which bites.
Despots count for something in the question of philosophers.
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 certain mysterious plenitude which filters into thought and there congeals into bronze.
The compression of history produces conciseness in the historian.
The granite solidity of such and such a celebrated prose is nothing but the accumulation effected by the tyrant.
Tyranny constrains the writer to conditions of diameter which are augmentations of force.
The Ciceronian period, which hardly sufficed for Verres, would be blunted on Caligula.
The less spread of sail in the phrase, the more intensity in the blow.
Tacitus thinks with all his might.
The honesty of a great heart, condensed in justice and truth, overwhelms as with lightning.
Be it remarked, in passing, that Tacitus is not historically superposed upon C?sar.
The Tiberii were reserved for him.
C?sar and Tacitus are two successive phenomena, a meeting between whom seems to be mysteriously avoided, by the One who, when He sets the centuries on the stage, regulates the entrances and the exits.
C?sar is great, Tacitus is great; God spares these two greatnesses by not allowing them to clash with one another.
The guardian of justice, in striking C?sar, might strike too hard and be unjust.
God does not will it.
The great wars of Africa and Spain, the pirates of Sicily destroyed, civilization introduced into Gaul, into Britanny, into Germany,—all this glory covers the Rubicon.
There is here a sort of delicacy of the divine justice, hesitating to let loose upon the illustrious usurper the formidable historian, sparing C?sar Tacitus, and according extenuating circumstances to genius.
Certainly, despotism remains despotism, even under the despot of genius.
There is corruption under all illustrious tyrants, but the moral pest is still more hideous under infamous tyrants.
In such reigns, nothing veils the shame; and those who make examples, Tacitus as well as Juvenal, slap this ignominy which cannot reply, in the face, more usefully in the presence of all humanity.
Rome smells worse under Vitellius than under Sylla.
Under Claudius and under Domitian, there is a deformity of baseness corresponding to the repulsiveness of the tyrant.
The villainy of slaves is a direct product of the despot; a miasma exhales from these cowering consciences wherein the master is reflected; public powers are unclean; hearts are small; consciences are dull, souls are like vermin; thus it is under Caracalla, thus it is under Commodus, thus it is under Heliogabalus, while, from the Roman Senate, under C?sar, there comes nothing but the odor of the dung which is peculiar to the eyries of the eagles.
Hence the advent, apparently tardy, of the Tacituses and the Juvenals; it is in the hour for evidence, that the demonstrator makes his appearance.
But Juvenal and Tacitus, like Isaiah in Biblical times, like Dante in the Middle Ages, 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.
Riot is Masaniello; insurrection, Spartacus.
Insurrection borders on mind, riot on the stomach; Gaster grows irritated; but Gaster, assuredly, is not always in the wrong.
In questions of famine, riot, Buzancais, for example, holds a true, pathetic, and just point of departure.
Nevertheless, it remains a riot.
Why?
It is because, right at bottom, it was wrong in form.
Shy although in the right, violent although strong, it struck at random; it walked like a blind elephant; it left behind it the corpses of old men, of women, and of children; it wished the blood of inoffensive and innocent persons without knowing why.
The nourishment of the people is a good object; to massacre them is a bad means.
All armed protests, even the most legitimate, even that of the 10th of August, even that of July 14th, 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, however, coming from those lofty mountains which dominate the moral horizon, justice, wisdom, reason, right, formed of the pure snow of the ideal, after a long fall from rock to rock, after having reflected the sky in its transparency and increased by a hundred affluents in the majestic mien of triumph, insurrection is suddenly lost in some quagmire, as the Rhine is in a swamp.
All this is of the past, the future is another thing.
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.
The disappearance of wars, of street wars as well as of wars on the frontiers, such is the inevitable progression.
Whatever To-day may be, To-morrow will be peace.
However, insurrection, riot, and points of difference between the former and the latter,—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 whom must be punished by the chain and the kennel, barking, snapping, until such day as the head of the dog, suddenly enlarged, is outlined vaguely in the gloom face to face with the lion.