Every blade has two edges; he who wounds with the one is wounded with the other.
Having made this reservation, and made it with all severity, it is impossible for us not to admire, whether they succeed or not, those the glorious combatants of the future, the confessors of Utopia.
Even when they miscarry, they are worthy of veneration; and it is, perhaps, in failure, that they possess the most majesty.
Victory, when it is in accord with progress, merits the applause of the people; but a heroic defeat merits their tender compassion.
The one is magnificent, the other sublime.
For our own part, we prefer martyrdom to success. John Brown is greater than Washington, and Pisacane is greater than Garibaldi.
It certainly is necessary that some one should take the part of the vanquished.
We are unjust towards these great men who attempt the future, when they fail.
Revolutionists are accused of sowing fear abroad.
Every barricade seems a crime.
Their theories are incriminated, their aim suspected, their ulterior motive is feared, their conscience denounced.
They are reproached with raising, erecting, and heaping up, against the reigning social state, a mass of miseries, of griefs, of iniquities, of wrongs, of despairs, and of tearing from the lowest depths blocks of shadow in order therein to embattle themselves and to combat.
People shout to them:
“You are tearing up the pavements of hell!”
They might reply:
“That is because our barricade is made of good intentions.”
The best thing, assuredly, is the pacific solution.
In short, let us agree that when we behold the pavement, we think of the bear, and it is a good will which renders society uneasy.
But it depends on society to save itself, it is to its own good will that we make our appeal.
No violent remedy is necessary.
To study evil amiably, to prove its existence, then to cure it.
It is to this that we invite it.
However that may be, even when fallen, above all when fallen, these men, who at every point of the universe, with their eyes fixed on France, are striving for the grand work with the inflexible logic of the ideal, are august; they give their life a free offering to progress; they accomplish the will of Providence; they perform a religious act.
At the appointed hour, with as much disinterestedness as an actor who answers to his cue, in obedience to the divine stage-manager, they enter the tomb.
And this hopeless combat, this stoical disappearance they accept in order to bring about the supreme and universal consequences, the magnificent and irresistibly human movement begun on the 14th of July, 1789; these soldiers are priests.
The French revolution is an act of God.
Moreover, there are, and it is proper to add this distinction to the distinctions already pointed out in another chapter,—there are accepted revolutions, revolutions which are called revolutions; there are refused revolutions, which are called riots.
An insurrection which breaks out, is an idea which is passing its examination before the people.
If the people lets fall a black ball, the idea is dried fruit; the insurrection is a mere skirmish.
Waging war at every summons and every time that Utopia desires it, is not the thing for the peoples.
Nations have not always and at every hour the temperament of heroes and martyrs.
They are positive.
A priori, insurrection is repugnant to them, in the first place, because it often results in a catastrophe, in the second place, because it always has an abstraction as its point of departure.
Because, and this is a noble thing, it is always for the ideal, and for the ideal alone, that those who sacrifice themselves do thus sacrifice themselves.
An insurrection is an enthusiasm.
Enthusiasm may wax wroth; hence the appeal to arms.
But every insurrection, which aims at a government or a regime, aims higher.
Thus, for instance, and we insist upon it, what the chiefs of the insurrection of 1832, and, in particular, the young enthusiasts of the Rue de la Chanvrerie were combating, was not precisely Louis Philippe.
The majority of them, when talking freely, did justice to this king who stood midway between monarchy and revolution; no one hated him.
But they attacked the younger branch of the divine right in Louis Philippe as they had attacked its elder branch in Charles X.; and that which they wished to overturn in overturning royalty in France, was, as we have explained, the usurpation of man over man, and of privilege over right in the entire universe.
Paris without a king has as result the world without despots.
This is the manner in which they reasoned.
Their aim was distant no doubt, vague perhaps, and it retreated in the face of their efforts; but it was great.
Thus it is.
And we sacrifice ourselves for these visions, which are almost always illusions for the sacrificed, but illusions with which, after all, the whole of human certainty is mingled. We throw ourselves into these tragic affairs and become intoxicated with that which we are about to do.
Who knows?
We may succeed.
We are few in number, we have a whole army arrayed against us; but we are defending right, the natural law, the sovereignty of each one over himself from which no abdication is possible, justice and truth, and in case of need, we die like the three hundred Spartans.
We do not think of Don Quixote but of Leonidas.
And we march straight before us, and once pledged, we do not draw back, and we rush onwards with head held low, cherishing as our hope an unprecedented victory, revolution completed, progress set free again, the aggrandizement of the human race, universal deliverance; and in the event of the worst, Thermopyl?.