17 74 Les Miserables
hind it the corpses of old men, of women, and of children; it
wished the blood of inoffensive and innocent persons with-
out knowing why. The nourishment of the people is a good
object; to massacre them is a bad means.
All armed protests, even the most legitimate, even that
of the 10th of August, even that of July 14th, begin with the
same troubles. Before the right gets set free, there is foam
and tumult. In the beginning, the insurrection is a riot,
just as a river is a torrent. Ordinarily it ends in that ocean:
revolution. Sometimes, however, coming from those lofty
mountains which dominate the moral horizon, justice, wis-
dom, reason, right, formed of the pure snow of the ideal,
after a long fall from rock to rock, after having reflected the
sky in its transparency and increased by a hundred affluents
in the majestic mien of triumph, insurrection is suddenly
lost in some quagmire, as the Rhine is in a swamp.
All this is of the past, the future is another thing. Uni-
versal suffrage has this admirable property, that it dissolves
riot in its inception, and, by giving the vote to insurrection,
it deprives it of its arms. The disappearance of wars, of street
wars as well as of wars on the frontiers, such is the inevitable
progression. Whatever To-day may be, To-morrow will be
peace.
However, insurrection, riot, and points of difference be-
tween the former and the latter,—the bourgeois, properly
speaking, knows nothing of such shades. In his mind, all
is sedition, rebellion pure and simple, the revolt of the dog
against his master, an attempt to bite whom must be pun-
ished by the chain and the kennel, barking, snapping, until