Page 1402 - les-miserables

whatever our egotism and our rancor may be, a mysterious
respect springs from events in which we are sensible of the
collaboration of some one who is working above man.
The Revolution of July is the triumph of right overthrow-
ing the fact. A thing which is full of splendor.
Right overthrowing the fact. Hence the brilliancy of the
Revolution of 1830, hence, also, its mildness. Right trium-
phant has no need of being violent.
Right is the just and the true.
The property of right is to remain eternally beautiful and
pure. The fact, even when most necessary to all appearances,
even when most thoroughly accepted by contemporaries, if
it exist only as a fact, and if it contain only too little of right,
or none at all, is infallibly destined to become, in the course
of time, deformed, impure, perhaps, even monstrous. If one
desires to learn at one blow, to what degree of hideousness
the fact can attain, viewed at the distance of centuries, let
him look at Machiavelli. Machiavelli is not an evil genius,
nor a demon, nor a miserable and cowardly writer; he is
nothing but the fact. And he is not only the Italian fact; he
is the European fact, the fact of the sixteenth century. He
seems hideous, and so he is, in the presence of the moral
idea of the nineteenth.
This conflict of right and fact has been going on ever
since the origin of society. To terminate this duel, to amal-
gamate the pure idea with the humane reality, to cause right
to penetrate pacifically into the fact and the fact into right,
that is the task of sages.

1402 Les Miserables