All that was foreseen. ...  Yes, certainly, I had foreseen it as well as anyone!  I saw the storm rising.  I was aware, like all those who do not live without thinking, of the evident approach of the cataclysm.  When one sees the patient writhing in agony is there any consolation in understanding his illness thoroughly?  When lightning strikes, are we calm because we have heard the thunder rumble a long time before?

No, no, people do not isolate themselves, the ties of blood are not broken, people do not curse or scorn their kind.  Humanity is not a vain word.  Our life is composed of love, and not to love is to cease to live.

The people, you say!  The people is yourself and myself.  It would be useless to deny it.  There are not two races, the distinction of classes only establishes relative and for the most part illusory inequalities.  I do not know if your ancestors were high up in the bourgeoisie; for my part, on my mother’s side my roots spring directly from the people, and I feel them continually alive in the depth of my being.  We all have them, even if the origin is more or less effaced; the first men were hunters and shepherds, then farmers and soldiers.  Brigandage crowned with success gave birth to the first social distinctions.  There is perhaps not a title that was not acquired through the blood of men.  We certainly have to endure our ancestors when we have any, but these first trophies of hatred and of violence, are they a glory in which a mind ever so little inclined to be philosophical, finds grounds for pride?  The people always ferocious, you say?  As for me, I say, the nobility always savage!

And certainly, together with the peasants, the nobility is the class most hostile to progress, the least civilized in consequence.  Thinkers should congratulate themselves on not being of it, but if we are bourgeois, if we have come from the serf, and from the class liable to forced labor, can we bend with love and respect before the sons of the oppressors of our fathers?  Whoever denies the people cheapens himself, and gives to the world the shameful spectacle of apostasy.  Bourgeoisie, if we want to raise ourselves again and become once more a class, we have only one thing to do, and that is to proclaim ourselves the people, and to fight to the death against those who claim to be our superiors by divine right.  On account of having failed in the dignity of our revolutionary mandate, of having aped the nobility, of having usurped its insignia, of having taken possession of its playthings, of having been shamefully ridiculous and cowardly, we count for nothing; we are nothing any more:  the people, which ought to unite with us, denies us, abandons us and seeks to oppress us.