by Victor Hugo
CHAPTER XX.
THE DEAD ARE RIGHT AND THE LIVING ARE NOT WRONG.
The death-struggles of the barricade were about to begin, andeverything added to the tragical majesty of this supreme moment,--athousand mysterious sounds in the air, the breathing of armed massesset in motion in streets which could not be seen, the intermittentgallop of cavalry, the heavy rumor of artillery, the platoon firing andthe cannonade crossing each other in the labyrinth of Paris, the smokeof the battle rising all golden above the roofs, distant and vaguelyterrible cries, flashes of menace everywhere, the tocsin of St. Merry,which now had the sound of a sob, the mildness of the season, thesplendor of the sky full of sunshine and clouds, the beauty of the day,and the fearful silence of the houses. For since the previous eveningthe two rows of houses in the Rue de la Chanvrerie had become twowalls,--ferocious walls with closed doors, closed windows, and closedshutters.
At that day, so different from the present time, when the hour arrivedin which the people wished to be done with a situation which had lastedtoo long, with a conceded charter or a restricted suffrage, whenthe universal wrath was diffused in the atmosphere, when the cityconsented to an upheaving of paving-stones, when the insurrection madethe bourgeoisie smile by whispering its watchword in their ear, thenthe inhabitant, impregnated with riot, so to speak, was the auxiliaryof the combatant, and the house fraternized with the improvisedfortress which it supported. When the situation was not ripe, when theinsurrection was not decidedly accepted, when the masses disavowed themovement, it was all over with the combatants, the town was changedinto a desert round the revolt, minds were chilled, the asylums werewalled up, and the street became converted into a defile to helpthe army in taking the barricade. A people cannot be forced to movefaster than it wishes by a surprise, and woe to the man who tries tocompel it; a people will not put up with it, and then it abandons theinsurrection to itself. The insurgents become lepers; a house is anescarpment, a door is a refusal, and a façade is a wall. This wallsees, hears, and will not; it might open and save you, but no, the wallis a judge, and it looks at you and condemns you. What gloomy thingsare these closed houses! They seem dead though they are alive, andlife, which is, as it were, suspended, clings to them. No one has comeout for the last four-and-twenty hours, but no one is absent. In theinterior of this rock people come and go, retire to bed and rise again;they are in the bosom of their family, they eat and drink, and areafraid, terrible to say. Fear excuses this formidable inhospitality,and the alarm offers extenuating circumstanced. At times even, and thishas been witnessed, the fear becomes a passion, and terror may bechanged into fury, and prudence into rage; hence the profound remark,"The enraged moderates." There are flashes of supreme terror, fromwhich passion issues like a mournful smoke. "What do these people want?They are never satisfied; they compromise peaceable men. As if we hadnot had revolutions of that nature! What have they come to do here? Letthem get out of it as they can. All the worse for them, it is theirfault, and they have only what they deserve. That does not concernus. Look at our poor street torn to pieces by cannon: they are a heapof scamps; above all do not open the door." And the house assumes theaspect of a tomb: the insurgent dies a lingering death before theirdoor; he sees the grape-shot and naked sabres arrive; if he cries out,he knows there are people who hear him but will not help him; there arewalls which might protect him, and men who might save him, and thesewalls have ears of flesh, and these men have entrails of stone.
Whom should we accuse? Nobody and everybody,--the imperfect times inwhich we live. It is always at its own risk and peril that the Utopiaconverts itself into an insurrection, and becomes an armed protestinstead of a philosophic protest,--a Pallas and no longer a Minerva.The Utopia which grows impatient and becomes a riot knows what awaitsit, and it nearly always arrives too soon. In that case it resignsitself, and stoically accepts the catastrophe in lieu of a triumph.It serves, without complaining, and almost exculpating them, thosewho deny it, and its magnanimity is to consent to abandonment. It isindomitable against obstacles, and gentle toward ingratitude. Is itingratitude after all? Yes, from the human point of view; no, from theindividual point of view. Progress is the fashion of man; the generallife of the human race is called progress; and the collective step ofthe human race is also called progress. Progress marches; it makes thegreat human and earthly journey toward the celestial and divine; ithas its halts where it rallies the straying flock; it has its stationswhere it meditates, in the presence of some splendid Canaan suddenlyunveiling its horizon; it has its nights when it sleeps; and it is oneof the poignant anxieties of the thinker to see the shadow on the humansoul, and to feel in the darkness sleeping progress, without being ableto awaken it.
"God is perhaps dead," Gérard de Nerval said one day to the writer ofthese lines, confounding progress with God, and taking the interruptionof the movement for the death of the Being. The man who despairs iswrong: progress infallibly reawakens, and we might say that it moveseven when sleeping, for it has grown. When we see it upright againwe find that it is taller. To be ever peaceful depends no more onprogress than on the river; do not raise a bar, or throw in a rock,for the obstacle makes the water foam, and humanity boil. Hence cometroubles; but after these troubles we notice that way has been made.Until order, which is nought else than universal peace, is established,until harmony and unity reign, progress will have revolutions forits halting-places. What, then, is progress? We have just said, thepermanent life of the peoples. Now, it happens at times that themomentary life of individuals offers a resistance to the eternal lifeof the human race.
Let us avow without bitterness that the individual has his distinctinterest, and can without felony stipulate for that interest and defendit; the present has its excusable amount of egotism, momentary righthas its claims, and cannot be expected to sacrifice itself incessantlyto the future. The generation which at the present moment is passingover the earth is not forced to abridge it for the generations, itsequals, after all, whose turn will come at a later date. "I exist,"murmurs that some one, who is everybody. "I am young and in love, I amold and wish to rest, I am father of a family, I work, I prosper, I doa good business, I have houses to let, I have money in the funds, Iam happy, I have wife and children, I like all that, I wish to live,and so leave us at peace." Hence at certain hours a profound coldnessfalls on the magnanimous vanguard of the human race. Utopia, moreover,we confess it, emerges from its radiant sphere in waging war. It, thetruth of to-morrow, borrows its process, battle, from the falsehoodof yesterday. It, the future, acts like the past; it, the pure idea,becomes an assault. It complicates its heroism with a violence forwhich it is but fair that it should answer,--a violence of opportunityand expediency, contrary to principles, and for which it is fatallypunished. The Utopia, when in a state of insurrection, combats withthe old military code in its hand; it shoots spies, executes traitors,suppresses living beings and hurls them into unknown darkness. It makesuse of death, a serious thing. It seems that the Utopia no longer patsfaith in the radiance, which is its irresistible and incorruptiblestrength. It strikes with the sword, but no sword is simple; everysword has two edges, and the man who wounds with one wounds himselfwith the other.
This reservation made, and made with all severity, it is impossible forus not to admire, whether they succeed or no, the glorious combatantsof the future, the confessors of the Utopia. Even when they fail theyare venerable, and it is perhaps in ill-success that they possessmost majesty. Victory, when in accordance with progress, deserves theapplause of the peoples, but an heroic defeat merits their tenderness.The one is magnificent, the other sublime. With us who prefer martyrdomto success, John Brown is greater than Washington, and Pisacane greaterthan Garibaldi. There should be somebody to take the part of theconquered, and people are unjust to these great assayers of the futurewhen they foil. Revolutionists are accused of sowing terror, and everybarricade appears an attack. Their theory is incriminated, their objectis suspected, their after-thought is apprehended, and their conscien
ceis denounced. They are reproached with elevating and erecting againstthe reigning social fact a pile of miseries, griefs, iniquities, anddespair, and with pulling down in order to barricade themselves behindthe ruins and combat. People shout to them, "You are unpaving hell!"And they might answer, "That is the reason why our barricade is madeof good intentions." The best thing is certainly the pacific solution;after all, let us allow, when people see the pavement, they think ofthe bear, and it is a good will by which society is alarmed. But itdepends on society to save itself, and we appeal to its own good-will.No violent remedy is necessary: study the evil amicably, and then cureit,--that is all we desire.
However this may be, those men, even when they have fallen, andespecially then, are august, who at all points of the universe, withtheir eyes fixed on France, are struggling for the great work with theinflexible logic of the ideal; they give their life as a pure giftfor progress, they accomplish the will of Providence, and perform areligious act. At the appointed hour, with as much disinterestedness asan actor who takes up his cue, they enter the tomb in obedience to thedivine scenario, and they accept this hopeless combat and this stoicaldisappearance in order to lead to its splendid and superior universalconsequences. The magnificent human movement irresistibly began on July14. These soldiers are priests, and the French revolution is a gestureof God. Moreover, there are--and it is proper to add this distinctionto the distinctions already indicated in another chapter,--there areaccepted insurrections which are called revolutions; and there arerejected revolutions which are called riots. An insurrection whichbreaks out is an idea which passes its examination in the presence ofthe people. If the people drops its blackball, the idea is dry fruit,and the insurrection is a street-riot. Waging war at every appeal andeach time that the Utopia desires it is not the fact of the peoples;for nations have not always, and at all hours, the temperament ofheroes and martyrs. They are positive; _a priori_ insurrection isrepulsive to them, in the first place, because it frequently hasa catastrophe for result, and, secondly, because it always has anabstraction as its starting-point.
For, and this is a grand fact, those who devote themselves do so forthe ideal, and the ideal alone. An insurrection is an enthusiasm, andenthusiasm may become a fury, whence comes an upraising of muskets. Butevery insurrection which aims at a government or a regime aims higher.Hence, for instance, we will dwell on the fact that what the chiefs ofthe insurrection of 1832, and especially the young enthusiasts of theRue de la Chanvrerie, combated was not precisely Louis Philippe. Themajority, speaking candidly, did justice to the qualities of this kingwho stood between monarchy and revolution, and not one of them hatedhim. But they attacked the younger branch of the right divine in LouisPhilippe, as they had attacked the elder branch in Charles X., and whatthey wished to overthrow in overthrowing the Monarchy in France was, aswe have explained, the usurpation of man over man, and the privilegeopposing right throughout the universe. Paris without a king has as itscounterstroke the world without despots. They reasoned in this way.Their object was far off without doubt, vague perhaps, and retreatingbefore the effort, but grand.
So it is. And men sacrifice themselves for these visions, which arefor the sacrificed nearly always illusions, but illusions with whichthe whole of human certainty is mingled. The insurgent poetizes andgilds the insurrection, and men hurl themselves into these tragicalthings, intoxicating themselves upon what they are about to do. Whoknows? Perhaps they will succeed; they are the minority; they haveagainst them an entire army; but they are defending the right, naturallaw, the sovereignty of each over himself, which allows of no possibleabdication, justice, and truth, and, if necessary, they die likethe three hundred Spartans. They do not think of Don Quixote, butof Leonidas, and they go onward, and once the battle has begun theydo not recoil, but dash forward head down-wards, having for hope anextraordinary victory, the revolution completed, progress restored toliberty, the aggrandizement of the human race, universal deliverance,and at the worst a Thermopylæ. These combats for progress frequentlyfail, and we have explained the cause. The mob is restive against theimpulse of the Paladins; the heavy masses, the multitudes, fragileon account of their very heaviness, fear adventures, and there isadventure in the ideal. Moreover, it must not be forgotten thatthese are interests which are no great friends of the ideal and thesentimental. Sometimes the stomach paralyzes the heart. The greatnessand beauty of France are, that she does not grow so stout as othernations, and knots the rope round her hips with greater facility. Sheis the first to wake and the last to fall asleep; she goes onward. Sheis seeking.
The reason of this is because she is artistic. The ideal is nought elsethan the culminating point of logic, in the same way as the beautifulis only the summit of the true. Artistic peoples are also consistentpeoples; loving beauty is to see light. The result of this is, thatthe torch of Europe, that is to say of civilization, was first borneby Greece, who passed it to Italy, who passed it to France. Divineenlightening nations! _Vita lampada tradunt._ It is an admirable thingthat the poetry of a people is the element of its progress, and theamount of civilization is measured by the amount of imagination. Still,a civilizing people must remain masculine; Corinth yes, but Sybarisno, for the man who grows effeminate is bastardized. A man must beneither dilettante nor virtuoso, but he should be artistic. In thematter of civilization, there must not be refinement, but sublimation,and on that condition the pattern of the ideal is given to the humanrace. The modern ideal has its type in art and its means in science. Itis by science that the august vision of the poet, the social beauty,will be realized, and Eden will be remade by A + B. At the point whichcivilization has reached exactitude is a necessary element of thesplendid, and the artistic feeling is not only served but completedby the scientific organ; the dream must calculate. Art, which is theconqueror, ought to have science, which is the mover, as its base. Thestrength of the steed is an imported factor, and the modern mind is thegenius of Greece, having for vehicle the genius of India,--Alexandermounted on an elephant. Races petrified in dogma or demoralized by timeare unsuited to act as guides to civilization. Genuflection beforethe idol or the crown-piece ruins the muscle which moves and the willthat goes. Hieratic or mercantile absorption reduces the radiance of apeople, lowers its horizon by lowering its level, and withdraws from itthat both human and divine intelligence of the universal object whichrenders nations missionaries. Babylon has no ideal, nor has Carthagewhile Athens and Rome have, and retain, even through all the nocturnaldensity of ages, a halo of civilization.
France is of the same quality, as a people, as Greece and Rome; sheis Athenian through the beautiful, and Roman through her grandeur.Besides, she is good, and is more often than other nations in thehumor for devotion and sacrifice. Still, this humor takes her andleaves her; and this is the great danger for those who run when shemerely wishes to walk, or who walk when she wishes to halt. Francehas her relapses into materialism, and at seasons the ideas whichobstruct this sublime brain have nothing that recalls French grandeur,and are of the dimensions of a Missouri or a South Carolina. What isto be done? The giantess plays the dwarf, and immense France feels afancy for littleness. That is all. To this nothing can be said, forpeoples like planets have the right to be eclipsed. And that is well,provided that light return and the eclipse does not degenerate intonight. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous, and the reappearanceof light is synonymous with the existence of the Ego. Let us statethese facts calmly. Death on a barricade, or a tomb in exile, is anacceptable occasion for devotion, for the real name of devotion isdisinterestedness. Let the abandoned be abandoned, let the exiles beexiled, and let us confine ourselves to imploring great nations notto recoil too far when they do recoil. Under the pretext of returningto reason, it is not necessary to go too far down the incline. Matterexists, the moment exists, interests exist, the stomach exists, but thestomach must not to the sole wisdom. Momentary life has its rights, weadmit, but permanent life has them also. Alas! To have mounted does notprevent falling, and we see this in hist
ory more frequently than wewish; a nation is illustrious, it tastes of the ideal, then it bitesinto the mud and finds it good, and when we ask it why it abandonsSocrates for Falstaff, it replies, "Because I like statesmen."
One word before returning to the barricade. A battle like the one whichwe are describing at this moment is only a convulsion toward the ideal.Impeded progress is sickly, and has such tragic attacks of epilepsy.This malady of progress, civil war, we have met as we passed along, andit is one of the social phases, at once an act and an interlude of thatdrama whose pivot is a social condemnation, and whose veritable titleis "Progress." Progress! This cry, which we raise so frequently, is ourentire thought, and at the point of our drama which we We reached, asthe idea which it contains has still more than one trial to undergo,we may be permitted, even if we do not raise the veil, to let itsgleams pierce through clearly. The book which the reader has before himat this moment is, from one end to the other, in its entirety and itsdetails, whatever the intermittences, exceptions, and short-comings maybe, the progress from evil to good, from injustice to justice, fromfalsehood to truth, from night to day, from appetite to conscience,from corruption to life, from bestiality to duty, from hell to heaven,and from nothingness to God. The starting-point is matter, the terminusthe soul; the hydra at the commencement, the angel at the end.