ABSTRACT
Having pointed out several times the inevitable opposition which exists between the interest of idleness and that of work, we should explain the blindness which has led classes who are obviously always in open or hidden conflict to share the same political doctrines, how, for example, the idle bourgeoisie on the one hand and on the other the artists, scholars and industrialists (who live only from their work) have for fifteen years repeatedly extolled the sweetness of the constitutional regime, or at least the prospects it promised.2 If the constitutional system is of a sort to please a large class which lives without doing anything, which consumes a great deal and does not produce, which for its pleasures employs men to whom it gives nothing in return(2) as it produces nothing, which enjoys the creations of the fine arts, the discoveries of science and the riches of industry, but which creates nothing, discovers nothing and does nothing; if the constitutional system suits the fox-hunters, the dandies of the bois de Boulogne,3 the écarté players,4 the patrons of Lointier5 and the Rocher de Cancale,6 the men of fashion who frequent the theatres and in general the men who live on annuities, rent of houses and farm rents, this is surely no reason for it to be very favourable for those who pay these annuities, these rents of houses and farm rents by the sweat of their brow. It is not precisely this which made the idle bourgeoisie and the workers agree and led to the golden age of what Courrier7 called the recreational government. Their union is the result of the fact that neither of them wanted the institutions of the past: they had the same enemies, the nobility and the clergy, and they united in order to overthrow them. Once they had obtained victory, they thought that the principles which had served to destroy were excellent for building; they continued to deny when they needed to assert; and with distrust, competition, opposition and freedom, they thought they could bring back trust, harmony, order and authority. Political and commercial crises followed one after another with the greatest of ease; the fortune of kings was as swift and as risky as that of individuals: princes and ministers went bankrupt and failed like the bankers; revolutions and constitutions abounded on all sides. During this time, a strange phenomenon occurred. Napoleon, the parvenu soldier, copied Charlemagne; Charles X became a Jesuit; one wanted to restore the feudal system and the other the church; with one the Chaussée-d’Antin8 obtained a coat of arms, with the other the Faubourg Saint-
Germain9 became a hermit, with the result that the old quarrel of the Third Estate10 against the clergy and nobility continued, with the difference that the new feudalism had no roots in land and no past, and that the new clergy, who converted only the dying, contrite and repenting of their youthful errors, had no future. But now the July11 sun has come up and thrown new light on our position. Our feudality today is merely an idle bourgeoisie; as for Jesuitism, we do not even know where the Pope is now; why should we bother about his militia?
