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As the reader perceives, slang in its entirety, slang of four hundred years ago, like

the slang of to-day, is permeated with that sombre, symbolical spirit which gives to all

words a mien which is now mournful, now menacing. One feels in it the wild and ancient

sadness of those vagrants of the Court of Miracles who played at cards with packs of their

own, some of which have come down to us. The eight of clubs, for instance, represented a

huge tree bearing eight enormous trefoil leaves, a sort of fantastic personification of

the forest. At the foot of this tree a fire was burning, over which three hares were

roasting a huntsman on a spit, and behind him, on another fire, hung a steaming pot,

whence emerged the head of a dog. Nothing can be more melancholy than these reprisals in

painting, by a pack of cards, in the presence of stakes for the roasting of smugglers and

of the cauldron for the boiling of counterfeiters. The diverse forms assumed by thought in

the realm of slang, even song, even raillery, even menace, all partook of this powerless

and dejected character. All the songs, the melodies of some of which have been collected,

were humble and lamentable to the point of evoking tears. The pegre is always the poor

pegre, and he is always the hare in hiding, the fugitive mouse, the flying bird. He hardly

complains, he contents himself with sighing; one of his moans has come down to us: "I

do not understand how God, the father of men, can torture his children and his

grandchildren and hear them cry, without himself suffering torture."[43] The wretch,

whenever he has time to think, makes himself small before the low, and frail in the

presence of society; he lies down flat on his face, he entreats, he appeals to the side of

compassion; we feel that he is conscious of his guilt. .

[43] Je n'entrave que le dail comment meck, le daron des orgues, peut atiger ses momes

et ses momignards et les locher criblant sans etre agite lui-meme. .

Towards the middle of the last century a change took place, prison songs and thieves'

ritournelles assumed, so to speak, an insolent and jovial mien. The plaintive malure was

replaced by the larifla. We find in the eighteenth century, in nearly all the songs of the

galleys and prisons, a diabolical and enigmatical gayety. We hear this strident and

lilting refrain which we should say had been lighted up by a phosphorescent gleam, and

which seems to have been flung into the forest by a will-o'-the-wisp playing the fife:-- .

Miralabi suslababo Mirliton ribonribette Surlababi mirlababo Mirliton ribonribo. .

This was sung in a cellar or in a nook of the forest while cutting a man's throat. .

A serious symptom. In the eighteenth century, the ancient melancholy of the dejected

classes vanishes. They began to laugh. They rally the grand meg and the grand dab. Given

Louis XV. they call the King of France "le Marquis de Pantin." And behold, they

are almost gay. A sort of gleam proceeds from these miserable wretches, as though their

consciences were not heavy within them any more. These lamentable tribes of darkness have

no longer merely the desperate audacity of actions, they possess the heedless audacity of

mind. A sign that they are losing the sense of their criminality, and that they feel, even

among thinkers and dreamers, some indefinable support which the latter themselves know not

of. A sign that theft and pillage are beginning to filter into doctrines and sophisms, in

such a way as to lose somewhat of their ugliness, while communicating much of it to

sophisms and doctrines. A sign, in short, of some outbreak which is prodigious and near

unless some diversion shall arise. .

Let us pause a moment. Whom are we accusing here? Is it the eighteenth century? Is it

philosophy? Certainly not. The work of the eighteenth century is healthy and good and

wholesome. The encyclopedists, Diderot at their head; the physiocrates, Turgot at their

head; the philosophers, Voltaire at their head; the Utopians, Rousseau at their

head,--these are four sacred legions. Humanity's immense advance towards the light is due

to them. They are the four vanguards of the human race, marching towards the four cardinal

points of progress. Diderot towards the beautiful, Turgot towards the useful, Voltaire

towards the true, Rousseau towards the just. But by the side of and above the

philosophers, there were the sophists, a venomous vegetation mingled with a healthy

growth, hemlock in the virgin forest. While the executioner was burning the great books of

the liberators of the century on the grand staircase of the court-house, writers now

forgotten were publishing, with the King's sanction, no one knows what strangely

disorganizing writings, which were eagerly read by the unfortunate. Some of these

publications, odd to say, which were patronized by a prince, are to be found in the Secret

Library. These facts, significant but unknown, were imperceptible on the surface.

Sometimes, in the very obscurity of a fact lurks its danger. It is obscure because it is

underhand. Of all these writers, the one who probably then excavated in the masses the

most unhealthy gallery was Restif de La Bretonne. .

This work, peculiar to the whole of Europe, effected more ravages in Germany than

anywhere else. In Germany, during a given period, summed up by Schiller in his famous

drama The Robbers, theft and pillage rose up in protest against property and labor,

assimilated certain specious and false elementary ideas, which, though just in appearance,

were absurd in reality, enveloped themselves in these ideas, disappeared within them,

after a fashion, assumed an abstract name, passed into the state of theory, and in that

shape circulated among the laborious, suffering, and honest masses, unknown even to the

imprudent chemists who had prepared the mixture, unknown even to the masses who accepted

it. Whenever a fact of this sort presents itself, the case is grave. Suffering engenders

wrath; and while the prosperous classes blind themselves or fall asleep, which is the same

thing as shutting one's eyes, the hatred of the unfortunate classes lights its torch at

some aggrieved or ill-made spirit which dreams in a corner, and sets itself to the

scrutiny of society. The scrutiny of hatred is a terrible thing. .

Hence, if the ill-fortune of the times so wills it, those fearful commotions which were

formerly called jacqueries, beside which purely political agitations are the merest

child's play, which are no longer the conflict of the oppressed and the 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 left. .

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 left, 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 left, 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 wagons containing the wealth of the Tuileries

escorted in 1848? By the rag-pickers of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.Rags mounted guard over

the treasure. Virtue rendered these tatterdemalions resplendent. In those wagons in

chests, hardly closed, and some, even, half-open, amid a hundred dazzling caskets, was

that ancient crown of France, studded with diamonds, surmounted by the carbuncle of

royalty, by the Regent diamond, which was worth thirty millions. Barefooted, they guarded

that crown. .

Hence, no more Jacquerie. I regret it for the sake of the skilful. The old fear has

produced its last effects in that quarter; and henceforth it can no longer be employed in

politics. The principal spring of the red spectre is broken. Every one knows it now. The

scare-crow scares no longer. The birds take liberties with the mannikin, foul creatures

alight upon it, the bourgeois laugh at it. .

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