The party of Order draws in its shoulders, lets the bourgeois
republicans tumble down heels over head, and throws itself upon the
shoulders of the armed power. Finally, still of the mind that it is
sustained by the shoulders of the armed power, the party of Order
notices one fine morning that these shoulders have turned into bayonets.
Each party kicks backward at those that are pushing forward, and leans
forward upon those that are crowding backward; no wonder that, in this
ludicrous posture, each loses its balance, and, after having cut
the unavoidable grimaces, breaks down amid singular somersaults.
Accordingly, the revolution moves along a downward line. It finds itself
in this retreating motion before the last February-barricade is cleared
away, and the first governmental authority of the revolution has been
constituted.
The period we now have before us embraces the motliest jumble of crying
contradictions: constitutionalists, who openly conspire against the
Constitution; revolutionists, who admittedly are constitutional;
a National Assembly that wishes to be omnipotent yet remains
parliamentary; a Mountain, that finds its occupation in submission,
that parries its present defeats with prophecies of future victories;
royalists, who constitute the "patres conscripti" of the republic, and
are compelled by the situation to uphold abroad the hostile monarchic
houses, whose adherents they are, while in France they support the
republic that they hate; an Executive power that finds its strength in
its very weakness, and its dignity in the contempt that it inspires;
a republic, that is nothing else than the combined infamy of two
monarchies--the Restoration and the July Monarchy--with an imperial
label; unions, whose first clause is disunion; struggles, whose first
law is in-decision; in the name of peace, barren and hollow agitation;
in the name of the revolution, solemn sermonizings on peace; passions
without truth; truths without passion; heroes without heroism; history
without events; development, whose only moving force seems to be the
calendar, and tiresome by the constant reiteration of the same tensions
and relaxes; contrasts, that seem to intensify themselves periodically,
only in order to wear themselves off and collapse without a solution;
pretentious efforts made for show, and bourgeois frights at the danger
of the destruction of the world, simultaneous with the carrying on of
the pettiest intrigues and the performance of court comedies by the
world's saviours, who, in their "laisser aller," recall the Day of
Judgment not so much as the days of the Fronde; the official collective
genius of France brought to shame by the artful stupidity of a single
individual; the collective will of the nation, as often as it speaks
through the general suffrage, seeking its true expression in the
prescriptive enemies of the public interests until it finally finds it
in the arbitrary will of a filibuster.
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