At that epoch, which was, to all appearances indifferent, a certain revolutionary quiver was vaguely current. Breaths which had started forth from the depths of ’89 and ’93 were in the air. Youth was on the point, may the reader pardon us the word, of moulting.
People were undergoing a transformation, almost without being conscious of it, through the movement of the age. The needle which moves round the compass also moves in souls. Each person was taking that step in advance which he was bound to take.
The Royalists were becoming liberals, liberals were turning democrats. It was a flood tide complicated with a thousand ebb movements; the peculiarity of ebbs is to create intermixtures; hence the combination of very singular ideas; people adored both Napoleon and liberty. We are making history here.
These were the mirages of that period. Opinions traverse phases. Voltairian royalism, a quaint variety, had a no less singular sequel, Bonapartist liberalism. Other groups of minds were more serious. In that direction, they sounded principles, they attached themselves to the right.
They grew enthusiastic for the absolute, they caught glimpses of infinite realizations; the absolute, by its very rigidity, urges spirits towards the sky and causes them to float in illimitable space. There is nothing like dogma for bringing forth dreams. And there is nothing like dreams for engendering the future.
Utopia to-day, flesh and blood to-morrow. These advanced opinions had a double foundation. A beginning of mystery menaced 'the established order of things,' which was suspicious and underhand. A sign which was revolutionary to the highest degree.
The second thoughts of power meet the second thoughts of the populace in the mine. The incubation of insurrections gives the retort to the premeditation of coups d’état. There did not, as yet, exist in France any