1830 had bankrupted the people.
The enraged democracy reproached it with this.
Between the attack of the past and the attack of the future, the establishment of July struggled.
It represented the minute at loggerheads on the one hand with the monarchical centuries, on the other hand with eternal right.
In addition, and beside all this, as it was no longer revolution and had become a monarchy, 1830 was obliged to take precedence of all Europe.
To keep the peace, was an increase of complication.
A harmony established contrary to sense is often more onerous than a war.
From this secret conflict, always muzzled, but always growling, was born armed peace, that ruinous expedient of civilization which in the harness of the European cabinets is suspicious in itself.
The Royalty of July reared up, in spite of the fact that it caught it in the harness of European cabinets.
Metternich would gladly have put it in kicking-straps.
Pushed on in France by progress, it pushed on the monarchies, those loiterers in Europe.
After having been towed, it undertook to tow.
Meanwhile, within her, pauperism, the proletariat, salary, education, penal servitude, prostitution, the fate of the woman, wealth, misery, production, consumption, division, exchange, coin, credit, the rights of capital, the rights of labor,—all these questions were multiplied above society, a terrible slope.
Outside of political parties properly so called, another movement became manifest.
Philosophical fermentation replied to democratic fermentation.
The elect felt troubled as well as the masses; in another manner, but quite as much.
Thinkers meditated, while the soil, that is to say, the people, traversed by revolutionary currents, trembled under them with indescribably vague epileptic shocks.
These dreamers, some isolated, others united in families and almost in communion, turned over social questions in a pacific but profound manner; impassive miners, who tranquilly pushed their galleries into the depths of a volcano, hardly disturbed by the dull commotion and the furnaces of which they caught glimpses.
This tranquillity was not the least beautiful spectacle of this agitated epoch.
These men left to political parties the question of rights, they occupied themselves with the question of happiness.
The well-being of man, that was what they wanted to extract from society.
They raised material questions, questions of agriculture, of industry, of commerce, almost to the dignity of a religion.
In civilization, such as it has formed itself, a little by the command of God, a great deal by the agency of man, interests combine, unite, and amalgamate in a manner to form a veritable hard rock, in accordance with a dynamic law, patiently studied by economists, those geologists of politics.
These men who grouped themselves under different appellations, but who may all be designated by the generic title of socialists, endeavored to pierce that rock and to cause it to spout forth the living waters of human felicity.
From the question of the scaffold to the question of war, their works embraced everything.
To the rights of man, as proclaimed by the French Revolution, they added the rights of woman and the rights of the child.
The reader will not be surprised if, for various reasons, we do not here treat in a thorough manner, from the theoretical point of view, the questions raised by socialism.
We confine ourselves to indicating them.
All the problems that the socialists proposed to themselves, cosmogonic visions, reverie and mysticism being cast aside, can be reduced to two principal problems.
First problem: To produce wealth.
Second problem: To share it.
The first problem contains the question of work.
The second contains the question of salary.
In the first problem the employment of forces is in question.
In the second, the distribution of enjoyment.
From the proper employment of forces results public power.
From a good distribution of enjoyments results individual happiness.
By a good distribution, not an equal but an equitable distribution must be understood. From these two things combined, the public power without, individual happiness within, results social prosperity.
Social prosperity means the man happy, the citizen free, the nation great.
England solves the first of these two problems.
She creates wealth admirably, she divides it badly.
This solution which is complete on one side only leads her fatally to two extremes: monstrous opulence, monstrous wretchedness.
All enjoyments for some, all privations for the rest, that is to say, for the people; privilege, exception, monopoly, feudalism, born from toil itself. A false and dangerous situation, which sates public power or private misery, which sets the roots of the State in the sufferings of the individual.
A badly constituted grandeur in which are combined all the material elements and into which no moral element enters.
Communism and agrarian law think that they solve the second problem.
They are mistaken.
Their division kills production.
Equal partition abolishes emulation; and consequently labor.
It is a partition made by the butcher, which kills that which it divides.
It is therefore impossible to pause over these pretended solutions.