139 8 Les Miserables
It thought it possessed strength because the Empire had
been carried away before it like a theatrical stage-setting.
It did not perceive that it had, itself, been brought in in the
same fashion. It did not perceive that it also lay in that hand
which had removed Napoleon.
It thought that it had roots, because it was the past. It was
mistaken; it formed a part of the past, but the whole past
was France. The roots of French society were not fixed in
the Bourbons, but in the nations. These obscure and lively
roots constituted, not the right of a family, but the history of
a people. They were everywhere, except under the throne.
The House of Bourbon was to France the illustrious and
bleeding knot in her history, but was no longer the princi-
pal element of her destiny, and the necessary base of her
politics. She could get along without the Bourbons; she had
done without them for two and twenty years; there had
been a break of continuity; they did not suspect the fact.
And how should they have suspected it, they who fancied
that Louis XVII. reigned on the 9th of Thermidor, and that
Louis XVIII. was reigning at the battle of Marengo? Never,
since the origin of history, had princes been so blind in the
presence of facts and the portion of divine authority which
facts contain and promulgate. Never had that pretension
here below which is called the right of kings denied to such
a point the right from on high.
A capital error which led this family to lay its hand once
more on the guarantees ‘granted’ in 1814, on the conces-
sions, as it termed them. Sad. A sad thing! What it termed
its concessions were our conquests; what it termed our en-