Faith & Spirit Quote by Honore de Balzac

Balzac is sketching a post-revolutionary domino effect with the calm menace of someone who’s watched the crowd change targets. “Religion and Royalty” aren’t just institutions here; they’re social shock absorbers, the sacred story and the sovereign body that tell people where to lodge awe, fear, and blame. Once those are “swept away,” politics doesn’t become serene or rational. It becomes unmoored. Energy that used to be managed by ritual and hierarchy floods the street looking for a new object.

The phrasing is surgical: not “challenge” but “attack,” not “reform” but “fall upon.” Balzac’s intent isn’t to praise the people or scold them in simple class-snob terms; it’s to warn that revolution doesn’t end at the palace gates. It metastasizes into a hunt for visible power. “The great” signals status and influence (the aristocratic residue: titles, reputations, cultural authority). “After the great” comes the more fungible category: “the rich,” a class defined by assets rather than pedigree, and therefore endlessly expandable. That’s the subtextual threat: once legitimacy is gone, resentment needs only inequality, not a king, to justify itself.

Context matters. Balzac writes in the long hangover of 1789: regicide, Terror, Restoration, then another revolution in 1830. France kept testing new regimes like ill-fitting coats, and Balzac’s novels anatomize how money quietly replaces birth as the real sovereign. The line is prophetic and self-interested: it anticipates class conflict as the next act, and it also defends the emergent bourgeois order by casting popular justice as a force that, once unleashed, won’t politely stop where the pamphlets said it would.