, and of shedding its blood. In the eyes
of despotic governments, who are always interested in having liberty
calumniate itself, the Revolution of July committed the fault of being
formidable and of remaining gentle. Nothing, however, was attempted or
plotted against it. The most discontented, the most irritated, the most
trembling, saluted it; whatever our egotism and our rancor may be, a
mysterious respect springs from events in which we are sensible of the
collaboration of some one who is working above man.

The Revolution of July is the triumph of right overthrowing the fact. A
thing which is full of splendor.

Right overthrowing the fact. Hence the brilliancy of the Revolution of
1830, hence, also, its mildness. Right triumphant has no need of being
violent.

Right is the just and the true.

The property of right is to remain eternally beautiful and pure. The
fact, even when most necessary to all appearances, even when most
thoroughly accepted by contemporaries, if it exist only as a fact, and
if it contain only too little of right, or none at all, is infallibly
destined to become, in the course of time, deformed, impure, perhaps,
even monstrous. If one desires to learn at one blow, to what degree of
hideousness the fact can attain, viewed at the distance of centuries,
let him look at Machiavelli. Machiavelli is not an evil genius, nor a
demon, nor a miserable and cowardly writer; he is nothing but the fact.
And he is not only the Italian fact; he is the European fact, the
fact of the sixteenth century. He seems hideous, and so he is, in the
presence of the moral idea of the nineteenth.

This conflict of right and fact has been going on ever since the origin
of society. To terminate this duel, to amalgamate the pure idea with the
humane reality, to cause right to penetrate pacifically into the fact
and the fact into right, that is the task of sages.

CHAPTER II--BADLY SEWED

But the task of sages is one thing, the task of clever men is another.
The Revolution of 1830 came to a sudden halt.

As soon as a revolution has made the coast, the skilful make haste to
prepare the shipwreck.

The skilful in our century have conferred on themselves the title of
Statesmen; so that this word, statesmen, has ended by becoming somewhat
of a slang word. It must be borne in mind, in fact, that wherever
there is nothing but skill, there is necessarily pettiness. To say "the
skilful" amounts to saying "the mediocre."