The enduring relevance of Victor Hugo
ByMegan Behrent
TO UNDERSTAND the significance of Victor Hugo, one must begin at the end, with his death on May 22, 1885. His funeral attracted more than two million people, one of the largest mass mobilizations ever seen in Paris and more than the city’s total population at the time.
The French government was well aware that Hugo’s funeral would attract masses of people and feared an uprising. Only a few years earlier, half a million people had shown up to pay respects to him on his seventy-ninth birthday. In an attempt to capitalize on his death, the government co-opted the service, preparing a massive tribute to the writer despite his expressed wish for a simple funeral. The only request the government honored was that he be buried in a pauper’s casket. Despite all the pomp and circumstance, it was truly a festival of the oppressed, as workers, the poor, and the exploited arrived en masse to celebrate the life and work of a man who had given voice to the voiceless.
Graham Robb, the author of one of the best biographies of Hugo, describes the scene as a “fairground” where “drunken bodies littered the Champs-Élysées. Wine-shops stayed open, and as the night of the wake wore on, the singing became merrier and politically suspect.”1Brothels closed as prostitutes dressed in mourning to pay their respects. “Behind the bushes in the Avenue Victor Hugo,” writes Robb, using first-hand accounts, “‘abominable outrages’ were taking place ‘which the police [were] impotent to repress.’”2
Among those who came to pay their respects were delegations of “war veterans, civil servants, artists and writers, animal-lovers and school children.”3There were major debates about the order of the procession. For example, “The militant feminist journal,La Citoyenne, complained that the suffragettes were placed a long way behind the gymnasts and the department stores.”4According to urban legend, there was even a notable spike in the birth rate nine months later.
It is a testament to the enduring appeal of his work that 150 years after the publication of his masterpiece,LesMisérables, Hugo once again has crowds lining up to experience the epic story of Jean Valjean, a man imprisoned for nineteen years for stealing a loaf of bread. His significance as a writer—an extremely prolific writer—is incontestable. As the poet and critic Mallarmé argued, Hugo “divided all French literature into two epochs—before and after Hugo.”5
Hugo had a lasting impact on a wide range of writers, from his French contemporaries Zola and Flaubert to Dostoevsky and Camus. But, as his funeral made clear, it was as a hero of working people that Hugo gained his greatest notoriety—thisdespitehis politics more often than not. As a politician, he left much to be desired, but as a writer he captured the revolutionary spirit of his age and inspired generations to come. In particular,Les Misérablescaptured the struggles, heroism, and humanity of those who had been condemned to marginality.
Eugene Debs, who was given the middle name Victor in honor of Hugo, readLes Misérablesover and over throughout his life, both in French and English. The brutality of poverty—the theme of Hugo’s masterpiece—was something he never forgot. Louise Michel, the inspiring revolutionary female incendiary and leader of the Paris Commune, called herself Enjolras after the student leader of the revolution at the heart of Hugo’s novel. And 150 years later, in film and on stage,Les Misérablesinspires audiences around the world to sing of revolution, barricades, and a better world.
Hugo is nothing if not controversial and there is a long history of debate and disagreement among radicals about how to understand this man and his work. One of his more famous contemporary critics, Paul Lafargue, who was married to Marx’s daughter Laura, argues that it is ultimately as a writer and poet of the bourgeoisie that he distinguishes himself. In Hugo, Lafargue argues, the bourgeoisie sees “one of the most perfect and brilliant personifications of its instincts, passions and thoughts.”6That Hugo was bourgeois is undeniable. Hugo’s politics changed drastically throughout his life. At his best, he espoused a form of left-wing bourgeois republicanism—a hodgepodge of humanism and pacifism with a little socialist mysticism thrown in. At other times, he was a royalist, imperialist, and counterrevolutionary.
The popularity of Victor Hugo cannot be explained by his personal politics alone. Nor can his legacy be understood solely on literary or aesthetic grounds. Despite his early success as a writer, he rarely received critical acclaim and, in fact, often elicited the ire of critics. The French poet and politician, Alphonse de Lamartine, a contemporary of Hugo who was the head of the 1848 provisional revolutionary government, argued thatLes Misérablesprovides “an excessive, radical, and sometimes unjust critique of society, which might lead human beings to hate what saves them, which is social order, and to become delirious about what will cause their downfall: the antisocial dream of theundefined ideal.”7Reviewing the first English language edition of the novel,The New York Timespraised the novel, while deeming Hugo himself a “prosy madman.”8The New Englanderwent further, arguing: “The whole career of Jean Valjean presents a series of impossible cases, of strange incongruities, and stands in continuous antagonism with the principles of truth and honor which ought to be every honest man’s line of conduct.”9
These critiques are echoed 150 years later in a tirade dripping with condescension by David Denby forThe New Yorkertitled: “There’s Still Hope for People who Love ‘Les Mis.’” Denby describes Tom Hooper‘s movie based on the musical as “terrible; it’s dreadful. Overbearing, pretentious, madly repetitive.”10He is baffled by the emotion it elicits from its audience, arguing “the story doesn’t connect to our world (which may well be the reason for the show’s popularity)”11and deplores the sense of “victimization” that he argues is at the center of the story. It is Denby, however, not Hugo who is disconnected from the world today. For modern viewers, the “victims” of Hugo’s novel—the poor, oppressed and disenfranchised— are all too familiar. Furthermore, Hugo’s “victims” fight back. It is their heroism, despite adversity, that continues to inspire. It is as the “voice of the people,” as Hugo was often described, giving literary expression to the aspirations of the oppressed, that he became a hero to masses of working-class people.
Ultimately, it is as a product of his period, as a writer of an era of revolution, that Hugo gains his greatest power. As one British obituary put it, “To understand Victor Hugo’s life is to understand the nineteenth century.”12In this regardLes Misérables, a novel forged in revolution, is his crowning achievement. It is only by understanding the revolutionary period from which the novel was born that we can understand why it continues to speak to and inspire radicals and revolutionaries all over the world.
Victor Hugo’s life and politics
InLiterature and Revolution, Trotsky argues that “a work of art should, in the first place, be judged by its own law, that is by the law of art. But Marxism alone can explain why and how a given tendency in art has originated in a given period of history; in other words, who it was who made a demand for such an artistic form and not for another, and why.”13Despite the weaknesses and betrayals of Hugo the politician, and despite the formal limitations of his literary work,Les Misérablescaptured the imagination of a generation of workers because it was the political, aesthetic, and literary manifestation of a century of revolution and, most importantly, the revolution of 1848.
Victor Hugo was born into a world that had been upended by the French Revolution of 1789. Indeed, his family was a product of the revolutionary turmoil. His father was an atheist and an ardent supporter of the republic created following the abolition of the monarchy in 1792. His mother was a devout Catholic who remained loyal to the deposed dynasty. Hugo claimed that his parents met when his father was serving in the republican army dispatched to suppress the royalist rebellion in Western France.14Hugo was born in 1802, three years after Bonaparte had seized power, declaring “the revolution is over,” and two years before the same general declared France an “empire” and crowned himself Napoleon I. Hugo’s early years were spent traveling around the war-torn empire with his father, who became a general in Napoleon’s army.15From his early childhood, he was thus enmeshed in the political debates opened by the 1789 revolution.
Coming of age after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, in the period known as the Bourbon Restoration when the monarchy was returned to power, Hugo began his life as a poet and writer of royalist sympathies and a key figure in the development of French Romanticism.16
Nonetheless, even his early writing shows an inchoate commitment to raising social justice issues and giving voice to the oppressed. In particular, he was a lifelong opponent of the death penalty—the horrors of which he had witnessed firsthand in both Spain and Paris. One of his earliest novels,Le dernier jour d’un condamné(The Last Day of a Condemned Man), gives expression to the inner thoughts of a man condemned to die for an unspecified crime. This work would have a lasting impact on such writers as Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Albert Camus, who cites it as a direct influence on his novel,L’Étranger(The Stranger).17
Over the next few decades, Hugo’s politics shifted, and his ideas changed as a result of the revolutionary upheavals he witnessed. Unfortunately, this at first led him to a fascination with Napoleon I.
In 1830, Hugo witnessed the first revolution of his life: the July Revolution. He participated in the “three glorious days,” as they are known, which overthrew Charles X and established a constitutional monarchy under Louis Philippe. Still, while Hugo saluted the noble students who had helped to restore freedom, he continued to think of Napoleon as a child of the revolution.18
By the 1840s, Hugo had already achieved the pinnacle of French literary success, elected to the AcadémieFrançaise in 1841 and honored by Louis Philippe, developments that were considered a betrayal by many of his fans.
Two events in this time period were to have major impacts on him. On June 5, 1832, the death of General Lamarque sparked a rebellion against the monarchy of Louis Philippe which was quickly and brutally repressed. This would provide the inspiration for the student revolt at the center ofLes Misérables. At the time, in words that he would later deride, Hugo described the insurrection in his diary as “follies drowned in blood.” “We shall have a republic one day,” he argued, “and when it comes of its own free will, it will be good. But, let us not harvest in May fruit which will not be ripe until July; let us learn to wait. . .. We cannot suffer boors to bespatter our flag with red.”19
The year 1848 would prove to be a major turning point for Hugo, France, and Europe. A combination of bad harvests, unemployment, skyrocketing food prices, and a major recession led to a level of misery unseen since the revolution. At the same time, France’s rising middle classes, feeling excluded from power by the regime’s restricted suffrage (based on an onerous poll tax), organized a series of banquets across the country to press for broader voting rights. When the government banned a banquet from being held in Paris in February 1848, France found itself in a perfect revolutionary storm. On February 23, the National Guard sided with the people and Louis Philippe fled the country.
As a public figure, Hugo was politically influential. Following Louis Philippe’s abdication, a new republic known as the Second Republic was declared, and the provisional government was announced from Hugo’s balcony. It was hardly revolutionary. He proposed a “Regency” headed by the Duchesse d’Orléans. The people of France were unimpressed. With a gun pointed at Hugo’s head, one man yelled, “Down with thepair de France!’”20Thepair de France(peer of France) was a designation of high distinction applied to a small number of the French nobility.
Despite disillusionment with Hugo, he shot to political fame after the February revolution and was ultimately elected as a representative of Paris. But 1848 would be a crucial political test.21
Much to the disappointment of his supporters, in his first speech in the national assembly he went after theateliersor national workshops, which had been a major demand of the workers. Two days later the workshops were closed, workers under twenty-five were conscripted and the rest sent to the countryside. It was a “political purge” and a declaration of war on the Parisian working class that set into motion the June Days, or the second revolution of 1848—an uprising lauded by Marx as one of the first workers’ revolutions. As the barricades went up in Paris, Hugo was tragically on the wrong side. On June 24 the national assembly declared a state of siege with Hugo’s support.22
Hugo would then sink to a new political low. He was chosen as one of sixty representatives “to go and inform the insurgents that a state of siege existed and that Cavaignac [the officer who had led the suppression of the June revolt] was in control.” With an express mission “to stop the spilling of blood,” Hugo took up arms against the workers of Paris. Thus, Hugo, voice of the voiceless and hero of workers, helped to violently suppress a rebellion led by people whom he in many ways supported—and many of whom supported him.23With twisted logic and an even more twisted conscience, Hugo fought and risked his life to crush the June insurrection.
After the assault, a heartbroken Hugo described the scene as follows:
Leaving a barricade, one no longer knows what one has seen. One has been ferocious, yet one has no recollection of it. Swept up in a battle of ideas endowed with human faces, one’s head has been in the light of the future. There were corpses lying down and phantoms standing up. The hours were colossal—hours of eternity. One has been living in Death. Shadows have passed. What were they? Hands with blood on them. A short deafening din. An atrocious silence. Open mouths shouting; other mouths, also open, but soundless. . . One seems to have touched the sinister perspiration of unknown depths. There is something red under one’s fingernails. One remembers nothing.24
In the wake of the revolution, Hugo tried to make sense of the events of 1848. He tried to straddle the growing polarization between, on the one hand, “the party of order,” which coalesced around Napoleon’s nephew Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who in December 1848 had been elected France’s president under a new constitution, and the “party of movement” (or radical Left) that, in the aftermath of 1848, had made considerable advances. In this climate, as Hugo increasingly spoke out, and faced opposition and repression himself, he was radicalized and turned to the Left for support against the tyranny and “barbarism” he saw in the government of Louis Napoleon.25
The “point of no return” came in 1849. Hugo became one of the loudest and most prominent voices of opposition to Louis Napoleon. In his final and most famous insult to Napoleon, he asked: “Just because we had Napoleon le Grand [Napoleon the Great], do we have to have Napoleon le petit [Napoleon the small]?”26Immune from punishment because of his role in the government, Bonaparte retaliated by shutting down Hugo’s newspaper and arresting both his sons.
On December 2, 1851, Louis Napoleon launched his coup, suspending the republic’s constitution he had sworn to uphold. The National Assembly was occupied by troops. Hugo responded by trying to rally people to the barricades to defend Paris against Napoleon’s seizure of power. Protesters were met with brutal repression. On December 4, the army fired indiscriminately on protesters, shooting children and stabbing people who tried to run indoors or help the wounded. Hundreds died in this massacre. Under increasing threat to his own life, with both of his sons in jail and his death falsely announced, Hugo finally left Paris.27He ultimately ended up on the island of Guernsey where he spent much of the next eighteen years and where he would write the bulk ofLes Misérables.28It was from here that his most radical and political work was smuggled into France.
In 1852, President Bonaparte replaced the Second Republic with the Second Empire and crowned himself Napoleon III. Hugo’s workNapoleon le petit, a scathing indictment of the “emperor, was smuggled into France in boxes of tobacco, tins of sardines, prayer books, and even plaster busts of Napoleon III.”29This was followed byLes châtiments(Castigations), one of his most important political collections of poetry, which likewise found a huge audience in France.
Despite being granted amnesty by Napoleon III in 1859, Hugo chose to remain in exile, writing: “Faithful to the undertaking I have given my conscience, I shall share the exile of freedom to the end. When freedom returns, so shall I.”30