Neither Tacitus nor Thucydides could give us a good description of the events of the Three Days; it would need Bossuet to explain to us the events in the order of Providence: a genius that saw all, but without overstepping the limits set to its reason and its splendour, like the sun which moves between two dazzling boundaries and which the Orientals call the "Slave of God." Let us not seek so near at hand the motive powers of a movement placed so far away; the mediocrity of mankind, mad terrors, inexplicable disagreements, hatreds, ambitions, the presumption of some, the prejudice of others, secret conspiracies, buying and selling, well or ill-advised measures, courage or the absence of courage: all these things are the accidents, not the causes, of the event. When people say that they no longer wanted the Bourbons, that these had become hateful because they were supposed to have been forced upon France by the foreigner, this lofty disgust explains nothing satisfactorily. The movement of July has not to do with politics properly so-called: it has to do with the social revolution which is never idle. By the concatenation of this general revolution, the 28th of July 1830 is only the inevitable sequel of the 21st of January 1793. The work of our first deliberative assemblies had been suspended; it had not been finished. In the course of twenty years, the French had accustomed themselves, like the English under Cromwell, to be governed by other masters than their old sovereigns. The fall of Charles X. is the consequence of the decapitation of Louis XVI., even as the dethronement of James II. is the consequence of the murder of Charles I. The Revolution seemed to die away in the glory of Bonaparte and in the liberties of Louis XVIII., but its germ was not destroyed: lodged at the bottom of our manners, it developed when the faults of the Restoration gave it fresh heat, and soon it burst forth.