ra, to denounce and retrench the harshness of enthusiasm, to cut all angles and nails, to wad triumph, to muffle up right, to envelop the giant-people in flannel, and to put it to bed very speedily, to impose a diet on that excess of health, to put Hercules on the treatment of a convalescent, to dilute the event with the expedient, to offer to spirits thirsting for the ideal that nectar thinned out with a potion, to take one''s precautions against too much success, to garnish the revolution with a shade.
1830 practised this theory, already applied to England by 1688.
1830 is a revolution arrested midway.
Half of progress, quasi-right. Now, logic knows not the "almost," absolutely as the sun knows not the candle.
Who arrests revolutions half-way? The bourgeoisie?
Why?
Because the bourgeoisie is interest which has reached satisfaction. Yesterday it was appetite, to-day it is plenitude, to-morrow it will be satiety.
The phenomenon of 1814 after Napoleon was reproduced in 1830 after Charles X.
The attempt has been made, and wrongly, to make a class of the bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie is simply the contented portion of the people.
The bourgeois is the man who now has time to sit down. A chair is not a caste.
But through a desire to sit down too soon, one may arrest the very march of the human race.
This has often been the fault of the bourgeoisie.