The consequences of the Revolution of July will be memorable. This Revolution has pronounced a decree against all thrones: to-day, kings will be able to reign only by force of arms; a sure means for a moment, but incapable of enduring: the time of successive janissaries is ended.
Thoughts on the Three Days.
Neither Tacitus nor Thucydides could give us a good description of the events of the Three Days; it would need Bossuet to explain to us the events in the order of Providence: a genius that saw all, but without overstepping the limits set to its reason and its splendour, like the sun which moves between two dazzling boundaries and which the Orientals call the "Slave of God."
Let us not seek so near at hand the motive powers of a movement placed so far away; the mediocrity of mankind, mad terrors, inexplicable disagreements, hatreds, ambitions, the presumption of some, the prejudice of others, secret conspiracies, buying and selling, well or ill-advised measures, courage or the absence of courage: all these things are the accidents, not the causes, of the event. When people say that they no longer wanted the Bourbons, that these had become hateful because they were supposed to have been forced upon France by the foreigner, this lofty disgust explains nothing satisfactorily.
The movement of July has not to do with politics properly so-called: it has to do with the social revolution which is never idle. By the concatenation of this general revolution, the 28th of July 1830 is only the inevitable sequel of the 21st of January 1793. The work of our first deliberative assemblies had been suspended; it had not been finished. In the course of twenty years, the French had accustomed themselves, like the English under Cromwell, to be governed by other masters than their old sovereigns. The fall of Charles X. is the consequence of the decapitation of Louis XVI., even as the dethronement of James II. is the consequence of the murder of Charles I. The Revolution seemed to die away in the glory of Bonaparte and in the liberties of Louis XVIII., but its germ was not destroyed: lodged at the bottom of our manners, it developed when the faults of the Restoration gave it fresh heat, and soon it burst forth.
The counsels of Providence are revealed in the anti-monarchical changes that are taking place. That superficial minds should see merely a scuffle in the Revolution of the Three Days is quite simple; but reflective men know that an enormous step forward has been taken: the principle of the sovereignty of the people has been substituted for the principle of the royal sovereignty, the hereditary monarchy changed into an elective monarchy. The 21st of January taught that one could dispose of a king's head; the 29th of July has shown that one can dispose of a crown. Now, any truth, good or bad, which manifests itself, remains the acquisition of the crowd. A change ceases to be unheard of, or extraordinary; it no longer presents itself to the mind or the conscience as impious, when it results from an idea that has become popular. The Franks used to exercise the sovereignty collectively; next they delegated it to a few chiefs; then those chiefs confided it to one alone; then this sole chief usurped it for the benefit of his family. Now men are going back from the hereditary royalty to the elective royalty, and from the elective royalty they will glide into the republic. That is the history of society; these are the stages by which the government comes from the people and returns to it.
Let us, then, not believe that the work of July is a superfetation of a day; let us not imagine that Legitimacy is going to come incontinently to re-establish succession by right of primogeniture: let us neither try to persuade ourselves that July will suddenly die a natural death. No doubt, the Orleans Branch will not take root: it is not to produce that result that so much blood, calamity and genius has been expended during the last half-century! But July, if it do not bring about the final destruction of France with the ruin of all her liberties, will bear its natural fruit: that fruit is democracy. The fruit will perhaps be bitter and blood-red; but the Monarchy is an outlandish graft, which will not take on a republican stem.
And so let us not confound the improvised King with the Revolution from which he sprang by chance: the latter, such as we see it, is acting in contradiction with its principles; it seems to have been born without the power to live, because it is punished with a throne: but let it only drag on a few years, this Revolution, and what will have come and gone will change the data that remain to be known. Grown-up men die, or no longer see things as they used to see them; adolescents attain the age of reason; new generations recruit corrupt generations; the linen soaked in the sores of a hospital, when met by a great stream, soils only the water that flows below those corruptions: down stream and up stream, the current keeps or resumes its limpidity.
The monarchy of July.
July, free in its origin, produced only a fettered monarchy; but the time will come when, rid of its crown, it will undergo the transformations which are the law of existences; then it will live in an atmosphere befitting its nature.