n questions of famine, riot, Buzancais, for example, holds a
true, pathetic, and just point of departure. Nevertheless, it remains
a riot. Why? It is because, right at bottom, it was wrong in form. Shy
although in the right, violent although strong, it struck at random; it
walked like a blind elephant; it left behind it the corpses of old
men, of women, and of children; it wished the blood of inoffensive and
innocent persons without knowing why. The nourishment of the people is a
good object; to massacre them is a bad means.

All armed protests, even the most legitimate, even that of the 10th of
August, even that of July 14th, begin with the same troubles. Before
the right gets set free, there is foam and tumult. In the beginning, the
insurrection is a riot, just as a river is a torrent. Ordinarily it ends
in that ocean: revolution. Sometimes, however, coming from those lofty
mountains which dominate the moral horizon, justice, wisdom, reason,
right, formed of the pure snow of the ideal, after a long fall from
rock to rock, after having reflected the sky in its transparency and
increased by a hundred affluents in the majestic mien of triumph,
insurrection is suddenly lost in some quagmire, as the Rhine is in a
swamp.

All this is of the past, the future is another thing. Universal suffrage
has this admirable property, that it dissolves riot in its inception,
and, by giving the vote to insurrection, it deprives it of its arms.
The disappearance of wars, of street wars as well as of wars on the
frontiers, such is the inevitable progression. Whatever To-day may be,
To-morrow will be peace.

However, insurrection, riot, and points of difference between the former
and the latter,--the bourgeois, properly speaking, knows nothing of such
shades. In his mind, all is sedition, rebellion pure and simple, the
revolt of the dog against his master, an attempt to bite whom must be
punished by the chain and the kennel, barking, snapping, until such day
as the head of the dog, suddenly enlarged, is outlined vaguely in the
gloom face to face with the lion.

Then the bourgeois shouts: "Long live the people!"

This explanation given, what does the movement of June, 1832, signify,
so far as history is concerned? Is it a revolt? Is it an insurrection?

It may happen to us, in placing this formidable event on the stage, to
say revolt now and then, but merely to distinguish superficial facts,
and always preserving the distinction betwee