1406 Les Miserables
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.
One is not a class because one has committed a fault.
Selfishness is not one of the divisions of the social order.
Moreover, we must be just to selfishness. The state to
which that part of the nation which is called the bourgeoi-
sie aspired after the shock of 1830 was not the inertia which
is complicated with indifference and laziness, and which
contains a little shame; it was not the slumber which pre-
supposes a momentary forgetfulness accessible to dreams;
it was the halt.
The halt is a word formed of a singular double and al-
most contradictory sense: a troop on the march, that is to
say, movement; a stand, that is to say, repose.
The halt is the restoration of forces; it is repose armed