Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 1971
of its miasmas, of its ignorances, of its darkness, that great
and despairing body, the rabble, protests against, and that
the populace wages battle against, the people.
Beggars attack the common right; the ochlocracy rises
against demos.
These are melancholy days; for there is always a certain
amount of night even in this madness, there is suicide in
this duel, and those words which are intended to be in-
sults— beggars, canaille, ochlocracy, populace—exhibit,
alas! rather the fault of those who reign than the fault of
those who suffer; rather the fault of the privileged than the
fault of the disinherited.
For our own part, we never pronounce those words with-
out pain and without respect, for when philosophy fathoms
the facts to which they correspond, it often finds many a
grandeur beside these miseries. Athens was an ochlocra-
cy; the beggars were the making of Holland; the populace
saved Rome more than once; and the rabble followed Jesus
Christ.
There is no thinker who has not at times contemplated
the magnificences of the lower classes.
It was of this rabble that Saint Jerome was thinking, no
doubt, and of all these poor people and all these vagabonds
and all these miserable people whence sprang the apostles
and the martyrs, when he uttered this mysterious saying:
‘Fex urbis, lex orbis,’— the dregs of the city, the law of the
earth.
The exasperations of this crowd which suffers and bleeds,
its violences contrary to all sense, directed against the prin-