"Fellow-countrymen killing one another! Brothers, fathers, sons, face to face!"
All this is very sad, no doubt; and yet a nation has often been regenerated and acquired new vigour in intestine discords. None has ever perished by a civil war; many have disappeared in foreign wars. See what Italy was, at the time of her divisions, and see what she is now. It is a deplorable thing to be obliged to lay waste your neighbour's property, to see your own home blooded by that same neighbour; but, frankly, is it much more humane to slay a family of German peasants whom you do not know, who have never had a discussion with you of any kind, whom you rob, whom you kill without remorse, whose wives and children you dishonour with a safe conscience, because this is war? Whatever men may say, civil wars are less unjust, less revolting and more natural than foreign wars, except when the latter are undertaken to save the national independence. Civil wars are based at least upon individual outrages, upon admitted and recognised aversions; they are duels with seconds, in which the adversaries know why they are wielding their swords. If the passions do not justify the evil, they excuse it, they explain it, they give a reason for its existence. How is foreign war justified? Generally, nations cut each other's throats because a king is bored, because an ambitious man wishes to rise, because a minister seeks to supplant a rival. The time has come to do justice on those old common-places of sentimentalism, better suited to poets than historians: Thucydides, Cæsar, Livy are content to utter a word of sorrow and pass on.
Thoughts on Civil war.
Civil war, in spite of its calamities, has only one real danger: if the contending factions have recourse to the foreigner, or if the foreigner, profiting by the divisions of a people, attack it; such a position might result in conquest. Great Britain, the Iberian Peninsula, Constantinopolitan Greece, in our own days Poland offer examples which we must not forget. Nevertheless, during the League, the two parties calling Spaniards and English, Italians and Germans to their aid, the latter counter-balanced each other and did not disturb the equilibrium which the French in arms maintained among themselves.
Charles X. was wrong to employ bayonets in support of his Ordinances; his ministers have no justification to offer, whether they were acting in obedience or not, for having shed the blood of the people and the soldiers, whom no hatred divided, in the same way as the theoretical Terrorists would gladly reproduce the system of the Terror, when no Terror exists. But Charles X. was also wrong not to accept war when, after he had yielded on every point, it was brought to his door. He had no right, after placing the diadem on the brow of his grandson, to say to that new Joas:
"I have made you ascend the throne, to drag you into exile, so that, wretched and banished, you may bear the weight of my years, my proscription and my sceptre."
He was not right at the same moment to give Henry V. a crown and to rob him of France. When they made him King, they had condemned him to die on the soil in which lie mingled the dust of St. Louis and that of Henry IV.
For the rest, after this ebullition of my blood, I return to my reason, and I see in these things no more than the accomplishment of the destinies of humanity. The Court, had it triumphed by force of arms, would have destroyed the public liberties; they would none the less have crushed it one day; but it would have retarded the development of society for some years; all that had taken a wide view of the Monarchy would have been persecuted by the re-established Congregation. In the last result, events have followed the trend of civilization. God makes men powerful according to His secret designs: He gives them faults which undo them when they must be undone, because He does not wish that qualities ill-applied by a false intelligence should oppose themselves to the decrees of His Providence.
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