oppressor, but the revolt of
discomfort against comfort. Then everything crumbles.

Jacqueries are earthquakes of the people.

It is this peril, possibly imminent towards the close of the eighteenth
century, which the French Revolution, that immense act of probity, cut
short.

The French Revolution, which is nothing else than the idea armed with
the sword, rose erect, and, with the same abrupt movement, closed the
door of ill and opened the door of good.

It put a stop to torture, promulgated the truth, expelled miasma,
rendered the century healthy, crowned the populace.

It may be said of it that it created man a second time, by giving him a
second soul, the right.

The nineteenth century has inherited and profited by its work, and
to-day, the social catastrophe to which we lately alluded is simply
impossible. Blind is he who announces it! Foolish is he who fears it!
Revolution is the vaccine of Jacquerie.

Thanks to the Revolution, social conditions have changed. Feudal and
monarchical maladies no longer run in our blood. There is no more of
the Middle Ages in our constitution. We no longer live in the days when
terrible swarms within made irruptions, when one heard beneath his feet
the obscure course of a dull rumble, when indescribable elevations from
mole-like tunnels appeared on the surface of civilization, where the
soil cracked open, where the roofs of caverns yawned, and where one
suddenly beheld monstrous heads emerging from the earth.

The revolutionary sense is a moral sense. The sentiment of right, once
developed, develops the sentiment of duty. The law of all is
liberty, which ends where the liberty of others begins, according to
Robespierre's admirable definition. Since '89, the whole people has
been dilating into a sublime individual; there is not a poor man, who,
possessing his right, has not his ray of sun; the die-of-hunger feels
within him the honesty of France; the dignity of the citizen is an
internal armor; he who is free is scrupulous; he who votes reigns. Hence
incorruptibility; hence the miscarriage of unhealthy lusts; hence eyes
heroically lowered before temptations. The revolutionary wholesomeness
is such, that on a day of deliverance, a 14th of July, a 10th of August,
there is no longer any populace. The first cry of the enlightened and
increasing throngs is: death to thieves! Progress is an honest man; the
ideal and the absolute do not filch pocket-handkerchiefs. By whom were
the