more a criminal than a Vendean is a
ruffian. Let us, then, impute to the fatality of things alone these
formidable collisions. Whatever the nature of these tempests may be,
human irresponsibility is mingled with them.

Let us complete this exposition.

The government of 1830 led a hard life immediately. Born yesterday, it
was obliged to fight to-day.

Hardly installed, it was already everywhere conscious of vague movements
of traction on the apparatus of July so recently laid, and so lacking in
solidity.

Resistance was born on the morrow; perhaps even, it was born on the
preceding evening. From month to month the hostility increased, and from
being concealed it became patent.

The Revolution of July, which gained but little acceptance outside of
France by kings, had been diversely interpreted in France, as we have
said.

God delivers over to men his visible will in events, an obscure text
written in a mysterious tongue. Men immediately make translations of it;
translations hasty, incorrect, full of errors, of gaps, and of nonsense.
Very few minds comprehend the divine language. The most sagacious, the
calmest, the most profound, decipher slowly, and when they arrive with
their text, the task has long been completed; there are already twenty
translations on the public place. From each remaining springs a party,
and from each misinterpretation a faction; and each party thinks that it
alone has the true text, and each faction thinks that it possesses the
light.

Power itself is often a faction.

There are, in revolutions, swimmers who go against the current; they are
the old parties.

For the old parties who clung to heredity by the grace of God, think
that revolutions, having sprung from the right to revolt, one has the
right to revolt against them. Error. For in these revolutions, the one
who revolts is not the people; it is the king. Revolution is precisely
the contrary of revolt. Every revolution, being a normal outcome,
contains within itself its legitimacy, which false revolutionists
sometimes dishonor, but which remains even when soiled, which survives
even when stained with blood.

Revolutions spring not from an accident, but from necessity. A
revolution is a return from the fictitious to the real. It is because it
must be that it is.

None the less did the old legitimist parties assail the Revolution of
1830 with all the vehemence which arises from false reasoning. Errors
make excellent projectile