III.
If we have succeeded in demonstrating this truth, it will not be difficult to decide upon the duties it imposes upon us, and the means we must employ to incline in the way of salvation the undecided balance of the destinies of France.
Since the proclamation of the revolutionary principle in the last century was the commencement of our ruin, we can only save ourselves by denying it with all possible solemnity, and in placing the contrary principle as the basis of the future constitution of our country. We must, in fine, leave the ways which have misled and lost all the powers that during fifty years have assumed in France the mission of restoring public order. Undoubtedly, none of them accepted the revolutionary theory to its full extent; they even by more than one act implied its negation. But these isolated efforts, extorted from them by the instinct of preservation, did not prevent them from habitually submitting to the influences of the Revolution, and even often rendering homage to its principles.
Sprung from its bosom, they dared not deny their origin, and they did not understand that, while shrinking from this disavowal, they condemned themselves to be overthrown by the blind force which had lifted them on its shield. One after the other they deceived themselves, and France with them, by taking “the great principles of ‘89” as the palladium of their thrones and their dynasties. It was asking a guarantee of duration from the most energetic dissolvent, and giving a solemn falsehood to France as a political creed. We have shown elsewhere that, under ambiguous formulas intended to deceive thoughtless good faith, the declaration of 1789 contains, in seventeen articles, the pure theory of the Revolution. We willingly admit that this hypocrisy of language might, at the first moment, put on the wrong scent a generation intoxicated with the desire of reform; but to be still seduced by it, after so many bloody revolutions have too clearly commented this ambiguous text, would be intolerable.
If we push blindness to this excess, will we deserve to be called the most intellectual people in the world? We have been duped by a comedy of fifteen years; will it be so with a comedy of a hundred? It is thus that posterity will name the century in which the principles of ‘89 were the theme of the most gigantic mystification found in history. All the civilized nations have been more or less cheated by this jugglery of the most precious liberties, in the name of liberalism; but France has played a separate part. It is she who, after being herself deceived, endeavored to make the entire universe share in her deception, and thus took upon herself both the shame of the fraud, and the responsibility of the imposture.
Let us be done with this odious falsehood, and return to reality. Let us seek true liberties in the proclamation of true principles, and ensure respect for the rights of man by the restoration of the authority of God.
This is the first duty that the vital interest of France imposes on all men called to take any part whatever in the re-establishment of power.
But henceforward we have another obligation to fulfil. Honest men of all parties must unite in the proclamation of the Christian principle, and renounce any alliance with the defenders of the Revolution. Former parties must disappear, and only leave in the field the great armies of order and disorder. This division alone has a reason for existing in the present state of society. Old parties, on the contrary, can only be divided by personal questions, to which it would be shameful to attach any importance in presence of the dangers that menace society. All parties, even those that seem to yield the most thorough allegiance to the Revolution, contain a greater or less number of friends of order whose equivocal connections do not prevent their disowning, in the bottom of their hearts, the revolutionary principle.
The moment has come to separate these contrary elements united by purely accidental affinities. We are approaching one of those fatal dates that betokens the end of one world, and the commencement of another; one of those partial judgments of Providence that prelude the general one by which divine justice will close the era of time, to open that of eternity. Now, as then, the terrible blows of the Almighty dissipate illusions, crush adverse interests, and bring to light the two contrary tendencies which have been hidden in the depths of hearts; the two opposite loves that, since the beginning of the world, have divided humanity into two hostile cities.
It is, then, indispensable to take a side; the time of tergiversation and compromise is past; we must be for truth or falsehood, for order or the Revolution, for Jesus Christ or the infernal chief of all rebels. And it does not suffice to carry the truth in the heart: it must be professed openly and courageously. The more evident is the necessity of adhering to the Christian principle, the more manifest is the double obligation that flows from it for honest men of all parties to form a compact league, whatever may have previously been their mutual estrangement, and to separate themselves from the revolutionists, with whom circumstances may have connected them.
We will go on no further, for we have resolved not to leave the region of principles; but the men to whom Providence has given the mission and power to save us cannot stop there. They must bring down the saving principle from the region of abstractions to that of facts, give it a concrete existence, a determined form, a durable organization, a strength sufficient to maintain itself, and to raise us up. It is not our province to guide them in the accomplishment of this task; may God give them, with the light which will show them the path of salvation, strength to follow it, and draw France after them! They are called to be nothing less than the saviours of their country and of Christendom; for it is not only the destinies of France which they hold in their hands, but those of Christian civilization, incapable, if France yields, of escaping from the invasion of the double revolution of Cæsarism and demagogism. May they feel the gravity of the situation, and understand that such great peril demands heroic resolutions!
To worthily fulfil this mission, the most important, perhaps, ever confided to a deliberative assembly, they must rise above all consideration of persons, all interests of parties, and they must choose, in the sincerity of their conscience, the man and the form of government that will most surely guarantee the restoration of the Christian principle, and the repudiation of the revolutionary, the destruction of anarchy and Cæsarism, the protection of every right, and the re-establishment of true liberty. This choice, which alone can save us, will not be difficult from the moment that they agree on the principle from which it must proceed, and the end which must be attained; and once the choice made under the eye of God, it will be still less difficult, with his help, to make it acceptable to France.
The Comte de Breda recently recalled to us, as appropriate to the time, the consoling and prophetic words written by Joseph de Maistre in 1797, at an epoch when the restoration of order appeared still more difficult than at the present time: “Can we believe that the political world moves by chance, and that it is not organized, directed, animated, by the same wisdom which shines in the physical? The great criminals who overthrow a state necessarily produce heart-rending wounds; but, when man works to re-establish order, he associates himself with the Author of order, he is favored by nature—that is to say, by the harmony of secondary causes, which are the ministers of divine power. His action has something in it of divine; it is at the same time gentle and imperious; he forces nothing, and nothing resists him.”
[GRAPES AND THORNS.]
BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE.”