are compelled by the situation to uphold abroad the hostile monarchic
houses, whose adherents they are, while in France they support the
republic that they hate; an Executive power that finds its strength in
its very weakness, and its dignity in the contempt that it inspires;
a republic, that is nothing else than the combined infamy of two
monarchies--the Restoration and the July Monarchy--with an imperial
label; unions, whose first clause is disunion; struggles, whose first
law is in-decision; in the name of peace, barren and hollow agitation;
in the name of the revolution, solemn sermonizings on peace; passions
without truth; truths without passion; heroes without heroism; history
without events; development, whose only moving force seems to be the
calendar, and tiresome by the constant reiteration of the same tensions
and relaxes; contrasts, that seem to intensify themselves periodically,
only in order to wear themselves off and collapse without a solution;
pretentious efforts made for show, and bourgeois frights at the danger
of the destruction of the world, simultaneous with the carrying on of
the pettiest intrigues and the performance of court comedies by the
world's saviours, who, in their "laisser aller," recall the Day of
Judgment not so much as the days of the Fronde; the official collective
genius of France brought to shame by the artful stupidity of a single
individual; the collective will of the nation, as often as it speaks
through the general suffrage, seeking its true expression in the
prescriptive enemies of the public interests until it finally finds it
in the arbitrary will of a filibuster. If ever a slice from history is
drawn black upon black, it is this. Men and events appear as reversed
"Schlemihls," [#1 The hero In Chamisso's "Peter Schiemihi," who loses
his own shadow.] as shadows, the bodies of which have been lost. The
revolution itself paralyzes its own apostles, and equips only its
adversaries with passionate violence. When the "Red Spectre," constantly
conjured up and exorcised by the counter-revolutionists finally does