ious militarism, this state which completed the revolution in the
act which denied it, could not dispense with its scripture, and it found
it in the Civil Code, which is the golden book for a society which
produces and sells commodities. It is not in vain that generalized
jurisprudence had preserved and annotated for centuries, in the form of
a scientific discipline, this Roman law, which was, which is and ever
shall be, the typical and classical form of the law of every shopkeeping
society, until communism puts an end to the possibility of buying and
selling.

The bourgeoisie, which, by the concurrence of so many singular
circumstances effected the revolution with the concurrence of so many
other classes and semi-classes which after a short lapse of time almost
all disappeared from the political stage, seemed, in the moments of the
most violent shocks, as if moved by motives inspired by an ideology,
which would have absolutely no relation with the effects which actually
supervene and perpetuated themselves. The meaning of that is that in the
heat of struggle the bewildering change of the economic substructure
appeared, as if it were, disguised by ideals and obscure by the
interlacings of so many intentions and designs, whence sprung so many
acts of cruelty and of unparalleled heroism, so many currents of
illusion and hard facts of disenchantment. Never had so powerful a faith
in the ideal of progress sprung from human breasts. To deliver the human
race from superstition, and even from religion, to make of each
individual a citizen, or of every private man a public man; those are
its beginnings:--and then on the line of this programme to sum up, in
the short activity of a few years, an evolution which appears to the
most idealistic of to-day as the work of several centuries to come--that
is the idealism of that time! And why should it revolt at the pedagogy
of the guillotine?

That poetry, grand certainly, if not joyous, left behind it a prose that
was severe enough. And it was the prose of the proprietors who owned
their property to chance, it was that of the high finance and the newly
rich purveyors, marshals, prefects, journalists and mercenary men of
letters; it was the prose of the court of that strange man to whom the
qualities of military genius grafted upon the soul of a brigand, had,
without any doubt, conferred the right of treating as an ideologist
whoever did not admire the bare fact which, in life, as it w