by David Bellos
The upper chamber was abolished along with the old parliament, so Hugo ceased to hold the rank of pair de France. In the April elections he won 60,000 votes, but not a seat. He stood again in a by-election on 4 June, garnered 89,695 votes and was elected to the constituent assembly as a representative of the people of Paris.37 He attended the first session on 10 June 1848 and took a seat on the right-hand side, signalling that he was not ‘on the left’. In his first speech on 20 June, he attacked the scandal of the jobs-for-all scheme that was ruining the nation and not doing anything to help the poor. Although he probably didn’t quite realize it at the time, his speech was the last drop that brought to overflowing the cup of fury among elected conservatives at the continuing chaos of republican and revolutionary France. Two days later, the provisional government, which was now more ‘right’ than ‘left’, abolished the ateliers nationaux, introduced compulsory conscription for able-bodied unemployed men under the age of twenty-five and banished all other jobless men to the provinces so as to get them off the city’s streets. That was more than a labour market reform. It was a purge, and it was taken by the poor as a declaration of war. Working-class areas of Paris erupted in protest, and rioters built barricades larger and more solid than any that had been seen before.
The first barricade went up as early as Friday 23 [June] in the morning and it was attacked the same day … When the assault force … came within range, a huge volley blasted out from the barricade, and the ground was strewn with National Guards. More irritated than intimidated, the soldiers stormed the barricade at a trot.
At this point a woman appeared on the crest of the barricade. She was young and beautiful with unkempt hair and a fearsome sight. The woman, who was a prostitute, raised her skirt to her waist and bawled at the guard, in that frightful bawdy-house slang that can only be given in translation, ‘Cowards, shoot if you dare at a woman’s belly!’
Here things turned horrific. The National Guard didn’t hesitate. Squad fire brought the woman down. She fell with a loud scream. Silence passed over the barricade and the attackers.
Suddenly a second woman emerged. She was even younger and even more beautiful – almost a child, seventeen at most. What profound misère! Another prostitute. She raised her skirt, showed her belly, and yelled, ‘Shoot, you villains!’ They shot her. Riddled with bullets, she fell on top of the first woman.
That is how this war began.38
In the draft novel he’d left at home on his work shelf, Hugo had only sketched out the start of a barricade scene. But even in the version he completed twelve years later there is nothing as sad and shocking as this.
On 26 June, a state of siege was declared. The constituent assembly ordered sixty of its members to go to different places around the city to inform rioters of that fact and to persuade them to leave their barricades. Nine representatives were shot dead before reaching their destinations. Hugo made his way to the entrance to the Faubourg du Temple, where he declared the state of siege to an armed and angry mob entrenched behind a huge barricade. He was a dutiful man.
He wasn’t wearing any uniform, as he had never been a soldier of any kind. Nonetheless, the bewildered troops facing the barricade took his order to open fire. Hugo seems to have suddenly become a different man. For the next thirty-six hours he stayed in command, shouting advice, giving orders and risking death many times under a hail of fire. (Some of the bullets might have come from the poet Charles Baudelaire, who was having the time of his life taking pot shots at anyone who might have been his hated father-in-law.) Such behaviour was completely unexpected from an exquisitely courteous literary celebrity and ladies’ man. At all events, it was an experience like no other Hugo had ever had, and not easy to square with his views, his feelings and his position. By dawn on the third day, the barricade fell. Hugo, exhausted but unharmed, had a lot of thinking to do.
It would be hard to guess from film and stage adaptations of Les Misérables that it was written not by a man who fought on a barricade but by the impromptu commander of a military unit that took one down. But it isn’t very hard to grasp the reality from the text of the novel itself. The ‘wrong-headed violence’ of a mob ‘against the principles that are its life’, he says in his essay on the meaning of 1848,
must be quelled. The man of probity dedicates himself to this, and out of his very love for the mob he fights against it … June 1848 … had to be combatted, as a matter of duty, for it attacked the Republic. (V.1.i, 1,052)
What ‘the man of probity’ considered his duty in June 1848 was at odds with his convictions, for Hugo certainly did not believe he had the right to kill. Yet the rioters were a threat to the republic and to civilization. As a citizen and representative, he had no choice but to put them down. The sight of the rioters’ huge and ugly barricade in Rue Saint-Denis was an affront in itself: ‘Nothing can be more chilling or more sombre than the hideous heroism of abjection, displaying all the strength of the weak; nothing more chilling than civilisation attacked by cynicism and defending itself like a barbarian.’39
Not many of us have to face brutality, or learn how brutal we could be. That was the real catastrophe for Victor Hugo. It’s hardly surprising he could not return to the draft of a novel suspended on a different barricade straight after those terrible days, or for a long while after that.
* * *
After the June days, Hugo put his energy into the work of the constituent assembly, labouring to produce a new constitution while the still provisional government moved steadily towards the right, in the name of law and order. There were many fundamental questions to be answered. Should there be two legislative chambers or one? Was universal suffrage such a good idea after all? Should members of former French dynasties be eligible for office? In fact, the nephew of Napoleon I, an unremarkable, rather hesitant man with a German accent, had returned to Paris already and had even started attending the Assembly. Many conservatives openly admitted to having royalist sympathies. Hugo sat through all-night sessions and stuck to the principles of universal male suffrage and eligibility for all. But as there was a continuing risk of civil disorder in his still volatile land, he was not averse to strong leadership. He actually met Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte at a dinner party in November 1848. The man seemed:
distinguished, cold, gentle, intelligent with a degree of politeness and dignity, a German look, black moustaches, looking nothing like the emperor. He ate little, said little, laughed little, though the dinner party was very jolly … [While others were talking politics] Louis Bonaparte fed fish fritters to Mme Barrot’s greyhound pup.40
His name alone made him a figure of authority, and Hugo thought he might be able to keep a new Assembly in check … When the constitution was passed and presidential elections were called for November 1848, the newspaper that Hugo’s sons ran under his guidance didn’t back the former left-wing president, Lamartine, who was wiped out, as was his successor, the repressive General Cavaignac. L’Évènement called on its readers to vote for Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who won with a massive majority and took the title of prince-président. The Second Republic was entering a new phase.
In May 1849, there were elections for the new legislature. Among a tidal wave of support for the ‘party of order’, a significant minority returned candidates from the socialist left. French politics was becoming ever more polarized. Hugo became the deputy for the Department of Seine (effectively, the city of Paris). But where did he stand?
The new Legislative Assembly proposed to install a commission to look into means of alleviating the mass poverty that many felt was the root cause of the turmoil of the previous year. The bill came up for debate on 9 July, and Hugo was the first to speak.41 He began badly, accusing unnamed deputies of thinking that the only way to deal with unruly mobs was to come down on them hard, that outside main force there was no solution to the problem of order and that everything else was just socialism in disguise. Hugo was heckled and challenged to name names. It took him some time to extricate hi
mself from the tangle of accusations and counter-claims, but he eventually got down to his prepared oration in which he declared that the duty of the nation was nothing less than to ‘destroy poverty’. The actions and the talk of the last eighteen months, he said, had produced nothing. It was now time to move towards reconciliation. Socialism (by which he meant the jobs-for-all scheme) had failed but it expressed a hidden truth – man’s aspiration to better his lot. If the plight of the poor could be made less dire, then all that was frightening and bad in the socialist project would vanish. Just as leprosy was a disease of the body, poverty, he went on, was a social disease, and like leprosy it could be made to disappear. Hugo gave shocking examples of abjection – people living in rags, scraping morsels of food from rubbish dumps, dying of hunger on the streets. The government had succeeded in re-establishing order, but in truth it had done nothing.
You have done nothing as long as able-bodied workers are without bread! As long as seniors who have worked all their lives are without homes!… As long as you have no fraternal, evangelical laws that give assistance of all kinds to poor and honest families, good peasants, good workers, those of good heart! [He got applauded for that.] You have done nothing, nothing at all, as long as in the persisting subterranean project of darkness and destruction the wretched stand shoulder to shoulder with the evil!
In his rousing conclusion he declared that a body that could pass laws against anarchy must now pass laws against poverty.
Hugo’s heart was with the poor and he insisted that something had to be done for them, though he was unable to say what. At the same time his head was with order. He had seen civil war close up, and it was not good. He would not budge on the sovereignty of the people and accepted that the results of elections by universal (male) suffrage had to be respected, whatever they were. But he also defended civil liberties, particularly freedom of expression, and became wary of the creeping authoritarianism of the state under its new and still sphinx-like prince-président.
Disturbances in June 1849 prompted the expulsion of some left-wing deputies from the assembly. Yet another state of siege gave the government powers to ban public and private meetings of political clubs. In July, a press law made offending the president a punishable offence. In the autumn, the church was given back some of its former role in schools and higher education. Hugo was opposed to most of these changes. When the president summarily dismissed a government approved by the assembly and appointed ministers more amenable to his own views, democracy seemed to be slipping away. In by-elections in March 1850, the country swung firmly behind the ‘party of order’, but Paris returned a trio of left-wing candidates. That alone persuaded the conservatives in charge that the rabble hadn’t yet been ‘compressed’ enough. In June, a law was passed to restrict the right to vote to men who paid tax, cutting the electorate by about 30 per cent. However, although he had won by a landslide in November 1848, Louis-Napoléon, who was from one point of view no more than the tight-lipped beneficiary of an illustrious uncle, would be obliged to step down at the end of his four-year presidential term. Starting in 1850, the prince-président launched a campaign for a constitutional revision to allow him to extend his rule. Victor Hugo, now thoroughly disenchanted with the presidential regime, thundered against the idea of imperial restoration in debates in the Assembly on the proposed constitutional change. ‘Just because we had Augustus,’ he asked, in a typical repurposing of Roman history, ‘do we have to have Augustulus? Because we had Napoléon le Grand, do we have to have Napoléon le Petit?’42 The quip provoked ‘an inexpressible tumult’ of cheers and catcalls. ‘Little Napoleon’ turned out to be Hugo’s best-known political barb, and a nail in his coffin. Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte never forgave Hugo for an insult that hit home. From then on, it was war between the two men.
The first sally targeted Hugo’s son Charles in his role as editor of L’Évènement, a newspaper written exclusively by Hugo’s relatives and close friends. For criticizing the way the death penalty had been carried out in a recent case, Charles Hugo was found guilty of ‘contempt’ and sentenced to six months in the Conciergerie. Then his brother François-Victor and Paul Meurice, a close friend of the family, were given nine months in jail for having invited the government to give political asylum to foreigners (implicitly, to the leaders of national uprisings that had now been suppressed in the Austrian Empire and in Italy). These warning shots were loud and clear. Hugo was in the president’s black book.
Louis-Napoléon lost the vote in the Assembly over the constitutional amendment that would have allowed him to stand for president a second time. His riposte was a proposal to restore universal suffrage, since he knew he could rely on a personal majority among the rural masses. He lost that vote in the Assembly too – but this second defeat at the hands of ‘mere politicians’ was what he needed to justify the action he’d been planning all along.
At dawn on 2 December 1851 – the anniversary of Napoleon I’s coronation at Notre-Dame in 1804 and of his victory at the Battle of Austerlitz the following year – placards were posted throughout Paris, under armed guard, announcing the dissolution of the Legislative Assembly and the drafting of a new constitution that would be submitted to a plebiscite with all (men) entitled to vote. During the night a police dragnet had already put eighty democratic militants behind bars along with twenty elected deputies, including all military officers in the Assembly. Troops moved into the parliament building to prevent the remaining deputies from assembling, but some of them – republicans and democrats in the main – managed to get together in the town hall of the tenth arrondissement. They voted to unseat the president for having infringed the constitution and ordered prison governors to release all those arrested in the night. They were arrested in their turn and led to prison by soldiers obeying the orders of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte.
Hugo was tipped off when he was still in bed. He dressed, rushed out and started haranguing workers to take up arms against the coup d’état. He had proclamations printed and bills posted. On 4 December, protesters were massacred in the streets, with troops shooting civilians almost randomly. Hugo was a prime target, and he went into hiding. Friends and associates started to slip away over the border. Hugo did not want to leave. Both his sons were in jail, and he still hoped that France would rid itself of the monster who had violated its trust. He was given shelter by friends, but his best ‘minder’ by far was his lover Juliette. She kept her eyes and her ears open, warned him of risks, led him away from potential traps. He almost certainly owed his life to her. Hugo went unshaven, he didn’t change his clothes, he hardly slept. But by the end of the first week, it was clear there was no point in further resistance. Paris was in the firm hands of the army and of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. On 10 December, Juliette borrowed a passport from a print-worker she knew. Next day, a man in a top hat and false beard with identity papers in the name of Jacques Lanvin sat at Gare du Nord, waiting for the night train to Brussels. Checks by police at stops in Amiens and Arras went by without incident. By dawn Victor Hugo was in Belgium. He hadn’t waited to be thrown out, but only a few days later the prince-président declared him a proscrit, along with thousands of other republicans, democrats and citizens simply outraged by the coup. They were all banished men now. They would never be allowed back into France.
Interlude: Invisible History
Les Misérables was already a ‘historical’ novel when it first appeared because its story is set in the past. It begins in 1815, thirty years before the first line of it was written, and ends after Valjean’s death in 1835, twenty-five years before the last page was composed. The gap of a human lifespan between the story and its publication allowed it to be read as an exercise in nostalgia for a vanished world. Much more of it has vanished now, of course, in ways that Hugo could not have foreseen. As a result, Les Misérables has become ‘historical’ in another sense besides, as an unintended guide to the way things used to be.
Reading novels as historical resources is not a way
of paying attention to what the author meant to say, but a matter of identifying what was once so obvious that it didn’t need to be said. For example, Jules Maigret, the recurrent hero of Georges Simenon’s series of detective novelettes from the 1930s, often has to buy a token at the bar of a café so as to use the telephone at the back, telling us now that there was a time not so long ago when there were no public telephones in the street, let alone mobile ones. As there is no way of knowing which details of everyday life will be overtaken by change, the truly historical dimension of a novel like Les Misérables is to be found in details so ordinary that Victor Hugo didn’t even think they needed explaining. Without an explanation, however, later readers can easily miss the point of what Hugo’s characters do, think and say. About colours, for example, or about coins, or carriages on the streets.
Hugo had no reason to know that the publication of Les Misérables coincided with an advance in chemistry that would rapidly change the very meaning of colour. A young English student, William Henry Perkin, accidentally discovered in his home laboratory in Cable Street that aniline (extracted from coal) could be used to produce a substance with an intense purple colour. Further tests showed that the new compound, called mauveine, could be used to dye fabrics, including silk. Other colours followed in quick succession, and the modern world of cheap and varied colours was born. As we have become entirely accustomed to it, the far drabber colour-world of Les Misérables has become hard to understand.
Before synthetic dyes, colours in fabrics and paints were limited to hues that could be extracted from vegetable, animal or mineral sources, some plentiful and others rare. Colour choice in 1862 was not a statement of taste, because the (rather few) hues available for clothes and flags had symbolic meanings related to their cost. Naturally enough, Hugo takes it for granted that you know what the colour codes were – except that few people do any more. Here’s a basic guide I’ve put together to help with the reading of all fiction written in France before around 1865.