If we listen to this school we hear: "The riots which complicated the
deed of 1830 deprived that grand event of a portion of its purity.
The revolution of July was a fine blast of the popular wind, suddenly
followed by a blue sky, and the riot caused a cloudy sky to reappear,
and compelled the revolution, originally so remarkable through
unanimity, to degenerate into a quarrel. In the revolution of July, as
in every progress produced by a jerk, there were secret fractures; the
riot rendered them perceptible. After the revolution of July only the
deliverance was felt, but after the riots the catastrophe was felt.
Every riot closes shops, depresses the funs, consternates the Stock
Exchange, suspends trade, checks business, and entails bankruptcies;
there is no money, trade is disconcerted, capital is withdrawn, labor
is at a discount, there is fear everywhere, and counter-strokes take
place in every city, whence come gulfs. It is calculated that the
first day of riot costs France twenty millions of francs, the second
forty, and the third sixty. Hence a riot of three days costs one
hundred and twenty millions; that is to say, if we only regard the
financial result, is equivalent to a disaster, shipwreck, or lost
action, which might annihilate a fleet of sixty vessels of the line.
Indubitably, riots, historically regarded, had their beauty; the war
of the paving-stones is no less grand or pathetic than the war of
thickets; in the one there is the soul of forests, in the other the
heart of cities; one has Jean Chouan, the other has Jeanne. Riots
lit up luridly but splendidly all the most original features of the
Parisian character,--generosity, devotion, stormy gayety, students
proving that bravery forms a part of intellect, the National Guard
unswerving, bivouacs formed by shop-keepers, fortresses held by gamins,
and contempt of death in the passers-by. Schools and legions came
into collision, but, after all, there was only the difference of age
between the combatants, and they are the same race; the same stoical
men who die at the age of twenty for their ideas, and at forty for
their families; the army, ever sad in civil wars, opposed prudence to
audacity; and the riots, while manifesting the popular intrepidity,
were the education of the bourgeois courage. That is all very well,
but is all this worth the blood shed? And then add to the bloodshed
the future darkened, progress compromised, anxiety among the better
classes, honest liberals despairing, foreign absolutism delighted
at these wounds dealt to revolution by itself, and the conquered of
1830 triumphing and shouting, 'Did we not say so?' Add Paris possibly
aggrandized, France assuredly diminished. Add--for we must tell the
whole truth--the massacres which too often dishonored the victory of
order, which became ferocious, over liberty which went mad, and we must
arrive at the conclusion that riots have been fatal."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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