Sons of the Soil. Honore de Balzac

      DEDICATION

       Table of Contents

      To Monsieur P.S. B. Gavault.

       Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote these words at the beginning of his

       Nouvelle Heloise: “I have seen the morals of my time and I publish

       these letters.” May I not say to you, in imitation of that great

       writer, “I have studied the march of my epoch and I publish this

       work”?

       The object of this particular study—startling in its truth so

       long as society makes philanthropy a principle instead of

       regarding it as an accident—is to bring to sight the leading

       characters of a class too long unheeded by the pens of writers who

       seek novelty as their chief object. Perhaps this forgetfulness is

       only prudence in these days when the people are heirs of all the

       sycophants of royalty. We make criminals poetic, we commiserate

       the hangman, we have all but deified the proletary. Sects have

       risen, and cried by every pen, “Arise, working-men!” just as

       formerly they cried, “Arise!” to the “tiers etat.” None of these

       Erostrates, however, have dared to face the country solitudes and

       study the unceasing conspiracy of those whom we term weak against

       those others who fancy themselves strong—that of the peasant

       against the proprietor. It is necessary to enlighten not only the

       legislator of to-day but him of to-morrow. In the midst of the

       present democratic ferment, into which so many of our writers

       blindly rush, it becomes an urgent duty to exhibit the peasant who

       renders Law inapplicable, and who has made the ownership of land

       to be a thing that is, and that is not.

       You are now to behold that indefatigable mole, that rodent which

       undermines and disintegrates the soil, parcels it out and divides

       an acre into a hundred fragments—ever spurred on to his banquet

       by the lower middle classes who make him at once their auxiliary

       and their prey. This essentially unsocial element, created by the

       Revolution, will some day absorb the middle classes, just as the

       middle classes have destroyed