by David Bellos
In the early stages Hugo referred to his work in progress simply as the novel he was writing. In 1846, he started calling it Jean Tréjean, by the name of the ex-convict who had not yet become Jean Valjean. By 1847, punning on the title of Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris, he was calling it Les Misères. That is the name the first draft had from then on, and still does now. It is no easier to translate than Les Misérables.
* * *
Victor Hugo was obliged to put his novel to one side in February 1848, when street protests in Paris turned into a violent revolution followed by months of chaos and change.
The later parts of Les Misérables also hinge on a moment of revolution in Paris, but it is not this one. Yet the two – the historical event, and a fiction that partly resembles it – are intertwined in compelling and complicated ways. Whether you want to understand how Hugo’s novel was written or what it has to say, revolution is an unavoidable theme.
‘Revolution’ means a turn of 360 degrees – in car engines, for example, where a revolution is a full cycle, or in astronomy, where a revolution of a planet around its sun brings it back to where it was a year before. In politics, too, ‘revolution’ used to mean an event that put things back where they had been before: the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, for example, ensured that the English throne would not pass to a Catholic line of descent. In the eighteenth century, however, the word started to be used for something rather less (or more) than the restoration of an original state by a full turn of a wheel. In its new meaning, a ‘revolution’ became a turn of 180 degrees, putting things not where they had been but in an opposite state. However, not all processes of change in the political sphere are considered revolutionary. The word acquired its modern senses largely because of the particular history of France.
Hugo was born too late to experience the great upheaval of 1789 that swept away the French monarchy, introduced the Rights of Man, descended into the Great Terror and ended up empowering Napoleon Bonaparte to liberate most of continental Europe from the feudal monarchies that ruled it. As that founding event was dubbed ‘the Revolution’, the word ‘revolution’ acquired senses that derive directly from specific aspects of the popular uprising of 1789 and its dramatic sequels. The French Revolution of 1789 is not the subject of Les Misérables, but one of the novel’s larger purposes is to make it the well-spring of nineteenth-century civilization and so to heal the bleeding wounds that it bequeathed to subsequent generations of French men and women.
Hugo was an adolescent when Napoleon fell and the monarchy was restored in 1815. When the new (but fairly old) king, Louis XVIII, died in 1824, the throne passed to his younger brother, Charles X, a stern and religious man, whose rule became ever more backward-looking. Hugo, who had adopted his mother’s royalist views in his teens, composed verses for Charles’s faux-medieval coronation at Rheims in 1825. Meanwhile, pressure from the middle classes for a more liberal regime led the king to take increasingly repressive measures. When he reimposed censorship of the press and restricted the electorate by decree in July 1830, protesters came out on the streets, led by print-workers, who saw a threat to their livelihoods in the new censorship rules. Attempts by troops to restore order were bungled. Some detachments got lost in the labyrinth of streets around Les Halles, and the king fled to his palace in Saint-Cloud, outside Paris. The long-serving Marquis de Lafayette – the French hero of the American War of Independence – appeared on the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville, the Paris town hall, and for a moment it seemed as if a new Republic were about to be declared. However, a group of notables, among them the banker Jacques Laffitte, moved quickly behind the scenes to bring back to France the exiled head of the junior branch of the French royal family. Louis-Philippe d’Orléans accepted their invitation to become the constitutional monarch of a more liberal France.
This revolution, known as the July Revolution or the ‘Three Glorious Days’ of 27, 28 and 29 July 1830, celebrated in Delacroix’s huge painting of Liberty Guiding the People, is the first that Hugo experienced for himself. But it is also not the subject of Les Misérables.
By 1830, Hugo’s political views had shifted towards the liberal cause, and he wrote stirring verses in retrospective support of the coming of a new and freer regime. All the same, he had many good reasons for not centring Les Misérables on the events that brought Louis-Philippe to power. First, he had taken no part in the uprising and hardly saw any of it with his own eyes. That was because his wife Adèle was about to give birth to their fourth child, and Hugo’s main concern when the first shots could be heard was to get his family out of town as fast as he could. His daughter, also called Adèle, was born at Montfort l’Amaury on 29 July 1830. Hugo had another important reason beside parenthood to be absent from the turmoil of the world: he was behind schedule on a book that he owed to a publisher who had paid him an advance. A week before the July Revolution erupted he had locked away his going-out clothes and donned a woollen body-stocking so as to settle down to an intense period of literary work at home. He was determined to stay at his writing shelf until Notre-Dame de Paris was done.
Beyond these personal and practical reasons for avoiding 1830 in real life, there were also commonsensical reasons why Hugo did not place the barricade scene of Les Misérables in 1830. The three-day overturning of the Bourbon monarchy was a remarkably brief and relatively bloodless civic rampage that quite surprisingly allowed the country to switch to a regime under which Hugo prospered and rose to high rank. He wasn’t the only one of his generation to do well out of the ‘Three Glorious Days’. Among those who benefited were the historian Jules Michelet, made head of the National Archives by the new king; the short-story-writer Prosper Mérimée (the author of the original Carmen that Bizet later turned into an opera), who was parachuted into a new and equally important position as inspector of national antiquities; the liberal bookseller Louis Hachette, who won the contract to supply all the new primary schools that were founded in 1833 with slates and chalk; even the unclubbable Stendhal landed a job that he wanted, as French consul in Civitavecchia, in Italy. A whole generation of talented and ambitious young men found their places under the rule of King Louis-Philippe, who led a far less pompous and cloistered life than his predecessors on the throne of France. Had Hugo decided to focus his novel on the barricades of 1830, he would have been stepping into a moral minefield, for the regime they brought about was still in power in 1845. A retrospective apologia for how the status quo had come to be was not what he had in mind.
The July Monarchy, as Louis-Philippe’s eighteen-year reign is called, was more favourable to commerce and to the professional middle classes than its predecessors had been, but the slowly rising wealth of the nation was not equally distributed. In addition, many rival factions contested the policies and even the legitimacy of the regime. Civil disorder was frequent, some of it fomented by those who remained faithful to the Bourbon line of descent represented by Charles X (living in exile in Edinburgh, which is how Royal Terrace got its name), some from Bonapartists plotting to restore an authoritarian and modernizing regime, and some from a scattering of groups with still-vague socialist and utopian ideals; but most of all from the often desperate, disgruntled and volatile poor. The painter and cartoonist Honoré Daumier made some memorable images of the ugly slaughter that followed one such riot, the ‘Massacre in Rue Transnonain’, in 1834. For Les Misérables, Hugo chose an equally doomed moment of civil strife in the early part of the reign of Louis-Philippe: the riots of 5 and 6 June 1832. It’s an episode that would now only be recalled by specialist historians of nineteenth-century France if Hugo had not made it the centrepiece of Les Misérables. It had no identifiable consequences and no measurable effect on the real world, but Hugo wanted to believe that it was not a meaningless event. Unburdened by any impact on the course of events, the micro-revolution of June 1832 was a better vehicle for explanations in principle than any more historically significant moment of change.
Hugo drew on authentic historica
l documentation and on the accounts of contemporaries for his reconstruction of the events of 5–6 June 1832, but he also made many changes to the facts. Not out of sloppiness or disrespect, but because fiction is the vehicle of truth. Derealizing the actually rather sad and sordid events of that night allowed him to bring out the higher and more important meanings of ‘revolution’ for the past and future history of France.
In February 1848, Hugo’s story was near to its dramatic climax. Marius, despairing of ever marrying his beloved Cosette, has joined his student friends at the barricade in Rue de la Chanvrerie, a small street in a working-class area of central Paris (a street that had long ceased to exist). Shots have been fired, there are dead and injured already, but as night falls on 5 June most of the militants behind the barricade are still alive. Should they fight on? What will dawn bring? That’s where Hugo’s first draft stops because, at that precise time in the writing of Les Misérables, an entirely non-fictional riot erupted in the streets outside. In the space of forty-eight hours the government collapsed, barricades went up, and the king threw in the towel. Victor Hugo, a peer of the realm, could not simply stand aside. He put away his pen and turned to finding out what his duty was. He had no plan of his own to change the world and no clue what the chaos would lead to, but he had to be part of the fight. It was a new moment and called for new kinds of action on his part. Nothing affected Hugo’s life and mind – or the composition, structure and sense of Les Misérables – more profoundly than what happened next. The narrative of the novel may be focused on 1832, but what it has to say cannot be properly understood outside Hugo’s experience of the revolution of 1848.
It was a year of revolutions throughout Europe. ‘The Spring of Nations’, as 1848 is called, brought major political changes in Denmark, Holland, Austria, Hungary, Germany, Poland and Italy. These uncoordinated uprisings had local and particular causes, but all were inspired and encouraged by what happened first in Paris. In that year, the city of light truly filled its legendary role as the political and intellectual centre of the world.
The events in Paris had two converging causes: the general desperation of the poor, and a particular political mess. In the 1840s, Louis-Philippe felt obliged to take repressive measures against republican and other opponents of his reign. Unorthodox opinions about the way France should be governed were expressed by a small handful of elected representatives and through newspapers aligned with them, but their freedom was increasingly curtailed. Prominent republican figures were jailed and all political parties were banned. Some of them survived as clandestine clubs, but they were not all of like mind. Some were still calling for the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy; some were socialists; and the long-established Bonapartist underground had its secret network too. What was obvious to them all was that no change could be achieved by parliamentary means without giving the vote to a wider circle of electors. By the mid-1840s, extension of suffrage had become the focus of otherwise incompatible forces seeking the end of the reign of Louis-Philippe d’Orléans.
A way round the ban on political associations was found in ‘banquets’, where prohibited political views could be expressed in coded terms in pseudo-ceremonial toasts. A large one was planned for 14 January 1848 to promote the cause of electoral reform. The prime minister, Guizot, banned it. The organizers put it off until 22 February. The plan was to have ‘diners’ accompanied to the hall by ‘companions’, a subterfuge that would create a public demonstration flouting the spirit but not the letter of the law. On 21 February, Guizot repeated the order banning the banquet, but it was too late. A crowd of people who had been planning to accompany the diners came out on the streets and assembled in Place de la Concorde. Guizot called out the National Guard, a civilian reserve force drawn mostly from the middle classes. Unhappily for him, most of its members were sympathetic to electoral reform, and they took no action against the crowd. Guizot saw that he had failed, and so he resigned. The crowd held a noisy celebration outside his home, scaring Guizot’s personal guards. Desperate to disperse them, the guards opened fire and killed several men. The bodies were paraded on carts through the streets of Paris, arousing the anger of the masses. Barricades went up, and by dawn on 24 February an uprising was in full swing. Louis-Philippe tried to form a new government, but each of the men he asked to lead the country in its time of need backed out within hours. France had no government, and the people knew it. Rioters moved ever nearer the Tuileries Palace, where the king lived. Louis-Philippe did not want to end up on the guillotine like Louis XVI, or at war with his own people like Charles X. He stepped down and passed the crown to his grandson, who was only nine years old.
Victor Hugo did not try to escape involvement in the crisis. On 22 and 23 February he strode back and forth between his home in the Marais quarter and the Luxembourg Palace, where the peers were meeting in almost permanent session. In the afternoon of 24 February, Odilon Barrot – prime minister for just a few hours – told him to announce to the people in his area that power had been transferred to the queen, as regent of the new child-king. Hugo spoke to the crowd from the balcony of the local town hall in Place Royale and then went on to Place de la Bastille, where there was a larger, angrier and now armed mob. To be seen he had to stand on the plinth of the monument to the July Revolution (the Column of Liberty, which is still there today), to be heard he had to shout at the top of his voice, and everything he said was cheered, booed, contested or drowned out.
A man in a worker’s shirt shouted out, ‘Shut up the pair de France! Down with the pair de France!’ And he trained his rifle on me. I stared at him hard and raised my voice to such a pitch that everyone else fell silent. ‘Yes, I am a pair de France and I speak to you as a pair de France. I took an oath to serve not a royal person but a constitutional monarchy. Until such time as another government is established it is my duty to serve it. And I always believed that the people don’t approve of breaking promises, whatever they are.’32
The crowd didn’t want a regent, or any kind of king. ‘No regency? But what then? Nothing’s ready, absolutely nothing! It would be a complete collapse, ruination, poverty, maybe civil war; at any rate, it would be a leap into the unknown.’33
Hugo did not know at that moment that Alphonse de Lamartine, whose politics had turned towards the left more sharply and much earlier than his own, had already set up a provisional government at the town hall, the traditional seat of people’s power since the days of the first revolution in 1789. The next day, after tramping through dangerously chaotic streets from the Marais to the Luxembourg Palace in the Latin Quarter and back again, he dropped in at the town hall.
Lamartine stood up as I entered …
‘Ah! You are joining us, Victor Hugo! A fine recruit to the Republic!’
‘Hang on, my friend!’ I said with a laugh. ‘I’m just coming to see my old friend Lamartine. Perhaps you don’t know that yesterday, when you were bringing down the Regency at the Chambre des pairs, I was defending it at the Bastille.’
‘Yesterday, sure. But today? Today there’s no regency or royalty left. It is not possible that in his heart of hearts Victor Hugo is not a republican man.’
‘In principle, yes, I am for the republic. In my opinion a republic is the only rational form of government, the only one worthy of nations. A universal republic will be the last stage of progress. But has its time come in France? It’s because I want there to be a Republic that I want it to be a viable one, I want it to be definitive. You’re going to consult the country, aren’t you? The whole country?’34
The royal family went into exile and settled in Twickenham, while the exiled relatives of Napoleon Bonaparte were allowed to return. A provisional government was declared, and it declared itself to be a republican one. It quickly brought in reforms implementing several of Hugo’s more or less recently acquired principles: universal male suffrage, abolition of the death penalty (but only for political crimes) and of slavery in the French colonies. Hugo wasn’t so naive as to thin
k that the last would bring racial discrimination to an end by itself:35
When the governor [of Guadeloupe, a French colony in the Caribbean] proclaimed the equality of the whites, mulattoes and blacks, there were three men on the podium, representing as it were the three races: a white man, the governor; a mulatto, holding his parasol; and a black man carrying his hat.36
The problem of mass poverty was addressed by a jobs-for-all scheme paid for from national coffers. However, the economic slump that had brought discontent to boiling point and was now exacerbated by political instability meant that the ateliers nationaux or ‘national workshops’ didn’t have any work to hand out. The idea of setting the men to building railways ran into objections about interference in private enterprise, so the newly employed unemployables hung about on the streets playing quoits. Political restraints on clubs and associations were lifted, and at times it seemed as if the city was engaged in a permanent political talk-in. Even so, order had to be kept. The provisional government established a new National Guard, which ceased to be organized on a local basis and manned by middle-class volunteers. It was now a professional paramilitary force that could move to any part of the city as needed. Elections by universal male suffrage for a constituent assembly of 900 delegates, whose job would be to write a new constitution, were set for April. The result was not a landslide for socialists and republicans, despite their apparent victory on the streets. The newly enfranchised countryside, where the mass of the French population still lived, chose local notables to represent them, often the same ones who had served in the national assembly under the previous restricted electoral regime.