I was born while these facts were being accomplished[423]. Two new empires, Prussia[424] and Russia[425], preceded me by scarcely half a century on the earth; Corsica became French at the moment when I appeared[426]; I arrived in the world twenty days before Bonaparte[427]. He brought me with him. I was about to enter the navy, in 1783, when the fleet of Louis XVI. put in to Brest[428]: it carried the birth certificate of a nation[429] that had been hatched under the wings of France. My birth is connected with the birth of a man and a people, pale reflection that I was of an immense light.
If we fix our eyes on the actual world, we see it, following the movement communicated by a great revolution, shaken from the East to China, which seemed closed for ever: so that our past subversions would be nothing and the noise of Napoleon's fame be hardly audible in the general topsy-turviness of the nations, even as he, Napoleon, drowned all the noises of our ancient globe.
The Emperor left us in a condition of prophetic agitation. We, the ripest and most advanced State, display numerous symptoms of decadence. Just as a sick man in danger becomes preoccupied with what awaits him in his grave, a nation which feels itself decaying grows restless as to its future fate. Hence the political heresies which succeed one another. The old European order is expiring; our present contests will appear puerile struggles in the eyes of posterity. Nothing more exists; authority of experience and age, birth or genius, talent or virtue: all are denied; a few individuals clamber to the top of the ruins, proclaim themselves giants and roll down to the bottom as pygmies. With the exception of a score of men who will survive and who were destined to hold the torch across the murky steppes upon which we are entering, with the exception of those few men, a generation which bore within it an abundant intelligence, acquired knowledge, germs of success of all kinds has stifled these in a restlessness as unproductive as its arrogance is barren. Nameless multitudes are agitated without knowing why, like the popular associations of the middle-ages: famished flocks which recognise no shepherd, which rush from the plain to the mountain and from the mountain to the plain, disdaining the experience of the herdsmen hardened to the wind and sun. In the life of that city, all is transitory: religion and morals cease to be admitted, or else each interprets them after his own fashion. Among things of an inferior nature, even in power of conviction and existence, a man's renown throbs for barely an hour, a book grows old in a day, writers kill themselves to attract attention: one more vanity; no one hears even their last breath.
From this predisposition of men's minds it results that we imagine no other means of touching people than scenes of the scaffold and tainted manners: we forget that the real tears are those which flow at the bidding of a beautiful poem and with which as much admiration as sorrow is blended; but at present, when talents feed upon the Regency and the Terror, what need was there of subjects for our tongues destined so soon to die? No more will fall from man's genius some of those thoughts which become the patrimony of the universe.
That is what everybody says and what everybody deplores, and yet illusions superabound, and the nearer a man is to his end the longer he thinks that he will live. We see monarchs who imagine that they are monarchs, ministers who believe that they are ministers, deputies who take their speeches seriously, landlords who, possessing property to-day, are persuaded that they will possess it to-night. Private interests, personal ambitions hide the gravity of the moment from the vulgar: notwithstanding the oscillations of the affairs of the day, they are but a wrinkle on the surface of the deep; they do not decrease the depth of the waters. Beside the paltry contingent lotteries, the human race is playing the great game; the kings still hold the cards and hold them for the nations: will the latter do better than the monarchs? A side issue, which does not alter the principal fact. What importance have children's amusements, shades gliding over the whiteness of a shroud? The invasion of ideas has succeeded on the invasion of the Barbarians; our actual decomposing civilization is becoming lost in itself; the vessel that contains it has not poured the liquid over into another vessel: it is the vessel that has been shattered.
At what period will society disappear? What accidents will be able to suspend its movements? In Rome, the reign of man was substituted for the reign of law: they passed from the Republic to the Empire; our revolution is being accomplished in a contrary sense; we are inclined to pass from the Royalty to the Republic, or, not to specify any form, to Democracy: this will not be effected without difficulty.
Property.
To touch upon only one point in a thousand: will property, for instance, remain distributed as it is? The Royalty born at Rheims was able to keep that property going by tempering its severity by the diffusion of moral laws, even as it changed humanity into charity. Given a political state of things in which individuals have so many millions a year, while other individuals are dying of hunger: can that state of things subsist, when religion is no longer there with its hopes beyond this world to explain the sacrifice? There are children to whom their mothers give suck at their withered breasts for want of a mouthful of bread to feed their dying babes; there are families whose members are reduced to huddle together at night, for want of blankets to warm them. That man sees his many furrows ripen; this one will possess only the six feet of earth lent to his tomb by his native land. Now with how many ears of corn can six feet of earth supply a dead man?
As instruction comes down to those lower classes, the latter discover the secret sore which gnaws at the irreligious social order. The too great disproportion of conditions and fortunes was endurable so long as it remained concealed; but, so soon as this disproportion was generally perceived, it received its death-blow. Recompose the aristocratic fictions, if you can; try to persuade the poor man, when he shall have learnt to read correctly and ceased to believe, when he shall be as well-informed as yourself, try to persuade him that he must submit to every sort of privation, while his neighbour possesses superfluity a thousand times told: as a last resource, you will have to kill him.