This is not an opinion, an argument, or a conjecture, but a statement of facts.
Now what is the import and tendency of these facts? Shall we find in them the ancient classifications of society? Will the ancient political denominations apply to them? Do they exhibit an aristocracy opposed to a democracy; or a nobility, a bourgeoisie, and a so-called people? Would these diversities and inequalities of social and political position form, or tend to form, a hierarchy of classes analogous to those which formerly existed in French society?
No, certainly!—the words aristocracy, democracy, nobility, bourgeoisie, or hierarchy, do not correspond to the constituent elements of modern French society, or express them with any truth or accuracy.
Does then this society consist solely of citizens equal among each other? Are there no different classes, and only individual diversities and inequalities, devoid of all political importance? Is there nothing but a great and uniform democracy, which seeks satisfaction in a republic at the risk of finding repose in a despotism?
Neither is this the fact; either of these descriptions would equally misrepresent the true state of our society. We must emancipate ourselves from the tyranny of words, and see things as they really are. France is extremely new, and yet full of the past; whilst the principles of unity and equality have determined her organization, she still contains social conditions and political situations profoundly different and unequal. There is no hierarchical classification, but there are different classes; there is no aristocracy, properly so called, but there is something which is not democracy. The real, essential, and distinct elements of French society, which I have just described, may enfeeble each other by perpetual conflicts, but neither can destroy or obliterate the other. They survive all the struggles in which they engage, and all the calamities which they inflict on each other. Their co-existence is a fact which it is not in their power to abolish. Let them then fully acquiesce in it; let them live together, and in peace. Neither the liberty nor the repose, the dignity nor the prosperity, the greatness nor the security of France, are to be had on any other terms.
On what conditions can this peace be established?
CHAPTER VI.
POLITICAL CONDITIONS OF SOCIAL PEACE IN FRANCE.
Whenever it shall have been distinctly perceived and fully admitted that the different classes which exist among us, and the political parties which correspond to those classes, are natural and deeply-rooted elements of French society, a great step will have been made towards social peace.
This peace is impossible so long as each of the different classes and the great political parties into which our society is divided cherishes the hope of annihilating the others, and of reigning alone. That is the evil which, ever since 1789, has periodically agitated and convulsed France. Sometimes the democratic element has aimed at the extinction of the aristocratic; at other times the aristocratic element has tried to crush the democratic, and to regain its former predominance. Constitutions, laws, and the administration of the government have been by turns directed, like engines of war, to one or the other of these ends—a war to the death, in which neither combatant believed his life compatible with that of his rival.