I have described the Three Days as they unfolded before me: a certain contemporary colouring, true at the moment when it occurs, false when the moment has gone, thus extends across the picture. There is no revolution so prodigious that, if described from minute to minute, is not reduced to smaller proportions. Events emerge from the womb of things, like men from their mothers’ wombs, accompanied by the failings of nature. Misery and grandeur are twin sisters, they are born together; but if the birth-pangs are vigorous, the pains die-away after a time, and only the grandeur remains. To judge the reality that remains impartially, one must adopt the point of view from which posterity will consider the completed event.

Detaching myself from the meanness of character and action of which I had been the witness, considering the July Days only in terms of what will remain, I spoke rightly in my speech to the Chamber of Peers: ‘the people armed themselves with intelligence and courage; shopkeepers proved able to breathe powder-fumes as easily as others, and a corporal and four soldiers were needed to overcome them. A century could not have better nurtured the fate of a nation than the three suns which have just shone on France.’

Indeed, the people, strictly speaking, had been brave and generous during the day of the 28th. The Guard had lost more than three hundred men, dead or wounded; it rendered full justice to the lower classes, who alone fought on that day, and among whom were included some tainted individuals, who nevertheless brought them no dishonour. The students from the École Polytechnique, emerging from their college too late to take part in events, were made leaders of the people on the 29th, with an admirable simplicity and naivety.

Champions absent from the people’s struggle came to join its ranks on the 29th, when the greatest danger was past; others, equally victorious, did not participate in victory until the 30th and 31st.

On the troops side, almost the same thing happened, the soldiers and officers were barely engaged; the staff, who had previously deserted Bonaparte at Fontainebleau, stood on the heights of Saint-Cloud, looking to see which way the wind would blow the powder-fumes. They formed a queue at Charles X’s accession; at his abdication no one was to be found.

The moderation of the common people matched their courage; order came swiftly out of confusion. One must have seen the half-naked workers, on guard at the gates of the public gardens, to prevent according to instructions other ragged workers from entering, to gain an idea of that power of duty which gripped the servants become masters. They could have taken the price of their blood, and let themselves be tempted by their poverty. There was no sight, as on the 10th of August 1792, of the Swiss being massacred as they fled. All views were respected; never, with a few exceptions, has victory been less abused. The victors, carrying wounded guardsmen through the crowd shouted: ‘Respect the brave!’ When a soldier died, they said: ‘Peace to the dead! The fifteen years of the Restoration, under a constitutional regime, had given birth among us to that spirit of humanity, legality and justice which twenty-five years of revolutionary and military spirit could not have produced. The right to force introduced into our conduct seemed to have become a common right.

The consequences of the July Revolution will be felt. That revolution has announced the end of all monarchies; kings cannot reign today except by strength of arms; a viable method for the moment, but who knows for how long: the age of repeated Jannissaries is over.

Thucydides and Tacitus are of little assistance to us with regard to the Three Days; we need Bossuet to explain events produced by Providence; a genius who sees all, but without transgressing the limits set by his reason and his splendour, like the sun which moves between two brilliant horizons, and which Orientals call the slave of God.

Do not seek too near to us the source of a motion placed far off: the mediocrity of men, inexplicable dissent, hatred, ambition, the presumption of some, the prejudices of others, secret conspiracies, radical factions, well or badly taken measures, courage or lack of courage; all these things are accidents, not causes of the event. When they said they no longer wanted the Bourbons, who had become odious because they were considered to have been imposed on France by foreign powers, that proud disdain explains nothing adequately.

The July actions do not belong properly to politics; they belong to the social revolution which acts ceaselessly. Linked to the general revolution, the 28th of July 1830 is merely the inevitable successor to the 21st of January 1793. The work of our upper debating chambers had been suspended, it had not been ended. During the course of twenty years, the French became accustomed, as the English did under Cromwell, to being governed by other masters than their former kings. The fall of Charles X was a consequence of the decapitation of Louis XVI, as the dethronement of James II was a consequence of the execution of Charles I. The Revolution seemed extinguished by Bonaparte’s glory, and Louis XVIII’s freedoms, but its seed was not destroyed: lurking in the depths of our society it developed as the Restoration’s mistakes grew, and soon erupted.

The workings of Providence are revealed in the anti-monarchic change operating. Superficial minds may see nothing more in the three day revolution than a skirmish, and everything seems simple; but those who reflect know that an enormous stride was taken: the principle of the sovereignty of the people has been substituted for the principle of royal sovereignty; hereditary monarchy has altered to elective monarchy. The 21st of January had taught that one could do away with a king’s head; the 29th of July showed that one could do away with the Crown. Now every reality good or bad that manifests itself is acquired from the crowd. Change ceases to be extraordinary; it no longer presents itself to the mind and conscience as impious, when it results from a popular idea. The Franks exercised sovereignty collectively, then they delegated it to several leaders; then those leaders conferred it on a single person; then that lone leader usurped it to the benefit of his family. Now we regress from hereditary monarchy to elective monarchy, from elective monarchy we will slide into a Republic. Such is the history of society; that is how by degrees government emerges from the people and returns to it.

Let us not think of the work of July, then, as a superfluity of a day or two; let us not imagine that the Legitimacy is immediately going to re-establish the succession, by right of primogeniture: let us no longer persuade ourselves that July will suddenly die a fine death. Without doubt the Orléans line will not take root; it will not be for such an outcome that so much trouble, blood and genius has been expended for half a century! But July, if it does not lead to the final destruction of France with the annihilation of all freedom, July will bear natural fruit: that fruit is democracy. That fruit will be bitter and blood-stained maybe; but monarchy is a foreign graft which will not take on a republican stem.

So, let us not confuse an improvised king with the revolution which chanced to give birth to him: the latter, such as we see it being enacted, is in contradiction to his principles; it does not seem viable since it is burdened with a throne; but let it only carry on for a few years, this revolution, and what will arise, what will have happened, will change the facts in ways yet to be known. Men have destroyed or no longer see things as they once saw them; adolescents are attaining the age of reason; fresh generations are replacing the corrupt generations; cloths drenched by a hospital’s wounds, washed by a great river, only soil the wave which passes beneath those corruptions: upstream and downstream the current maintains or regains its clarity.

July, free at its source, has produced only an enchained monarchy; but the time will come when, rid of the crown, it will undergo those transformations which are the law of beings; then, it will live in an atmosphere appropriate to its nature.

The Republican Party error, the Legitimist illusion are both deplorable, and exceed the limits of democracy and royalty: the first things that violence is the only route to success; the second thinks that the past is the only gate to salvation. Now, there is a moral law which controls society, a general legitimacy which rules the specific legitimacy. This great law and this great legitimacy are the exercise of man’s natural rights, ruled by duty; since it is duty which creates rights, and not rights which create duty; passions and vices relegate you to the class of slaves. The general legitimacy would have had no obstacles to overcome if it had protected, as deriving from the same principle, the specific legitimacy.

Moreover, an observation will suffice to help us understand the prodigious and majestic power of our ancient sovereigns: I have already said, and cannot too often repeat, that all monarchies will die with the French monarchy.

Indeed, the idea of monarchy is found wanting at the very moment when the monarch is found wanting; only the idea of democracy envelops him now. My young King will carry away in his arms the monarchy of the world. It is all done with.

While I was writing all this, about what the revolution of 1830 might become in the future, I was hard put to defend myself from a feeling that spoke to me in contradiction to reason. I took that feeling to be my pang of displeasure at the troubles of 1830; was I defying my own inner self, and perhaps, in my over-faithful impartiality, exaggerating the future consequences of the Three Days. Now, ten years have passed since Charles X’s fall: was July solid? We are now at the beginning of 1840, and what abasement France has descended into! If I could take any pleasure in the humiliation of a government originating in France, I might experience a sort of pride in re-reading, in Le Congrès de Vérone, my correspondence with Mr Canning: certainly, it is not like that which they have just made known to the Chamber of Deputies. Whose fault is it? Is it the Prince Elect’s? Is it due to ministerial incompetence? Is it the nation’s, whose character and genius seem depleted? Our ideas are progressive, but does our way of life support them? It would not be astonishing if a nation fourteen centuries old, which has terminated its lengthy course with marvellous explosions, had reached its end. If you turn to the end of these Memoirs, you will see that in rendering justice to all that has seemed fine to me in the various epochs of our history I consider that in the last analysis the society of old is finished.

(Note: Paris, the 3rd of December 1840)