Page 1397 - les-miserables

This, then, is what appears to philosophical
politicians:—
At the same time that weary men demand repose, ac-
complished facts demand guarantees. Guarantees are the
same to facts that repose is to men.
This is what England demanded of the Stuarts after the
Protector; this is what France demanded of the Bourbons
after the Empire.
These guarantees are a necessity of the times. They must
be accorded. Princes ‘grant’ them, but in reality, it is the
force of things which gives them. A profound truth, and
one useful to know, which the Stuarts did not suspect in
1662 and which the Bourbons did not even obtain a glimpse
of in 1814.
The predestined family, which returned to France when
Napoleon fell, had the fatal simplicity to believe that it was
itself which bestowed, and that what it had bestowed it
could take back again; that the House of Bourbon possessed
the right divine, that France possessed nothing, and that
the political right conceded in the charter of Louis XVIII.
was merely a branch of the right divine, was detached by the
House of Bourbon and graciously given to the people until
such day as it should please the King to reassume it. Still,
the House of Bourbon should have felt, from the displeasure
created by the gift, that it did not come from it.
This house was churlish to the nineteenth century. It put
on an ill-tempered look at every development of the nation.
To make use of a trivial word, that is to say, of a popular and
a true word, it looked glum. The people saw this.

1397