The Novel of the Century

by David Bellos

  He was exiled to the island of Elba, in the Mediterranean, under British control at that time. Amazingly, incomprehensibly, he slipped his guards on the night of 26 February and landed on the south coast of France on 1 March 1815. At the head of a constantly growing band of enthusiasts, he marched north by way of Digne1 to Lyon, where army units abandoned the hastily restored monarchy they had only just agreed to serve. Napoleon’s aim was to use attack as defence, to strike the Seventh Coalition of Russia, Prussia, Holland, Austria and Britain before it could assemble in full, and by winning a military victory, extract a peace that would leave him on the throne of France. By the time he reached Belgium in early June he had almost as many men, horses and cannon at his disposal as his enemies did. The showdown came at a place he had chosen, on undulating farmland south of Brussels. Another 25,000 French soldiers were killed or maimed in the battle that took place there on 18–19 June 1815.

  Jean Valjean was not among them, because he was still in jail. Indeed, he had spent the preceding nineteen years in just about the only place in France that could have been called safe for a man of his class and physical build. His sentence may be an example of the injustice of the law, and his punishment may be seen as barbaric and cruel, but they saved his life and left Hugo with a story to tell. In fact, Valjean must have spent more than nineteen years in jail, since he emerges in the summer of 1815, a few weeks after the fall of France. Had he been released on the anniversary of his chaining, on 22 April, he would most likely have been press-ganged into military service for the last of Napoleon’s battles.

  One of Hugo’s most hostile and conservative critics, Armand de Pontmartin, inadvertently confirmed the structural role of Valjean’s imprisonment until 1815. He fished up hearsay evidence that the character of Jean Valjean was based on the real life of an ex-convict named Pierre Maurin (or Morin) who had been sentenced to five years’ hard labour for stealing bread and was treated kindly by the real Bishop Miollis in Digne. Maurin was released in 1806 – and then joined the army, as he had to. He died at the Battle of Waterloo, and his bones were most likely part of the huge pile that an entrepreneur ground up to make fertilizer for Yorkshire farms.2 This probably made-up story confirms the logic of Hugo’s construction of the pre-history of the hero of Les Misérables. Valjean stays in jail until the nineteenth century can begin.

  Twice over Hugo dated the start of his tale to that point – in Les Misères, which begins ‘Early in the month of October 1815’ (now the start of Book 2), and again at the start of the first book inserted at the head of Les Misérables, which begins ‘In 1815…’ This repetition serves to remind us how special the hero of the story is. Unlike almost all of his contemporaries, Valjean is neither dead nor a war hero, nor is he a returning émigré or a traitor or a dodgy camp-follower like Thénardier. Physically intact save for a limp in his left leg from having a heavy chain attached to it all those years, he is a historical anomaly, as unburdened as a new-born by the terrible and glorious history of his land.

  Another popular novel of the period begins in the same key year. Its hero, Edmond Dantès, is incarcerated in the Château d’If in 1815, just when Valjean is released from Toulon. After extraordinary adventures in an island prison and around the Mediterranean Sea, Dantès comes to Paris as the Count of Monte Cristo in the 1830s, just after the death of Valjean. The action of Les Misérables, from 1815 to 1835, fills the time that Monte Cristo spends in prison and on the high seas and stops at the point where the Parisian adventures of Dumas’s hero begin. Valjean and Dantès book-end each other, so to speak – and for good reason. The Count of Monte Cristo is a story of extravagant and spectacular revenge, but Les Misérables asks us to be kind. Dumas’s saga of daring and survival fulfils a fantasy of avenging political and financial crimes. Hugo’s much more tightly wound plot is designed to promote and make manifest the possibility of reconciliation. Though the two authors were good friends and comrades in arms in the fight against the Second Empire, their most famous works of fiction express different moral perspectives and different kinds of hopes for the future of France.

  On a political level, Hugo sought reconciliation between the three ‘grand plans’ for ruling the nation: monarchism, in the form of loyalty to either the Bourbons or the house of Orléans; the revolutionary and republican inheritance of 1789; and the modernizing authoritarianism of Napoleon Bonaparte. These were inherently incompatible models of government, and much blood had been spilled over the preceding half-century to make one or the other prevail. But for Hugo as for most people of his generation, the key event that allowed even a glimmer of hope to arise was what happened in June 1815 at Waterloo. A novel of the nineteenth century could not but take it within its view.

  However, Hugo did not even think about writing a chapter on the battle when he drafted Les Misères in 1845–8. It does not seem to have occurred to him in 1860 either, since there’s no mention of it on the ‘to-do’ list he made after rereading Les Misères from end to end. He certainly did not draft it in the extraordinarily fertile winter months of 1860–61, and he didn’t write a word on the battle even when he was staying at the Hôtel des Colonnes with a grand view of the battle site itself. On the other hand, we have to presume that he chose to complete Les Misérables at that special place because he had Waterloo in his mind. He certainly told Lacroix that there would be such a chapter when he signed the contract in October 1861, and by December, when Lacroix collected Part I ‘Fantine’ to set in type, it was clearly understood that the next section of fair copy would begin with a chapter on Waterloo. Except that it wasn’t written yet. The great essay on the battle that launched the great peace of the nineteenth century turns out to have been the last piece of Les Misérables that Hugo wrote – and only just in time. Even essay-writers know that introductions are best written at the end.

  Waterloo matters first of all because it was a national humiliation. It brought to a stop the great project of bringing the surviving values of the French Revolution to all of Europe (an end to the privileges of the aristocracy, social promotion given to merit rather than birth, the rational organization of laws and institutions, and submission of the church to the power of the state). It also matters because from then on France was under the tutelage of foreign powers – it was occupied by British, German and Russian troops, and had a constitution based on the British model imposed on it. But it also matters in a different way. The Peace that settled the outcome ushered in a ‘concert of nations’ based on a balance of powers that protected Europe from major continental wars for ninety-nine years. Waterloo was the inglorious end of a glorious adventure, but also the start of a less bloody and vastly more prosperous age.

  Making sense of Waterloo was therefore in Hugo’s mind the only way to make sense of the century his novel aimed to portray and understand, and the only way to explain why despite its defeat France remained the moral and intellectual centre of the world. At a more visceral level, Waterloo had to be chewed over so as to settle Hugo’s account with his father, General Léopold-Sigisbert, a blindly obedient hero whose rise and fall were by-products of Napoleon’s reign.

  However, it isn’t easy to say what really happened at Waterloo, even today. As soon as the smoke cleared on 19 June 1815, historians, military analysts and political commentators started disagreeing about the event and its significance, and have gone on arguing ever since. By 1861, books about Waterloo in French and English already filled many library shelves, and that is no doubt why Hugo declares, in the plural of majesty he uses from time to time, ‘We have no intention of writing the history of Waterloo’ (II.1.iii, 285). Perhaps not; but ‘we’ certainly aimed to rewrite it, and to work out what it meant.

  For the facts and for analysis Hugo used four main resources: Napoleon’s own account of how and why he lost, dictated to his scribe Las Cases and published as Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène (the favourite reading of Julien Sorel, in Stendhal’s Red and Black); a respected historical work, Histoire de la Campagne de 1815, by
Jean-Baptiste Charras, a retired military officer with republican views; Hugo’s own inspection of the battle site in May and June 1861; and his imaginative reconstruction of the way it had been in June 1815. His aim was to bring the argument about what really happened to a definitive end.3

  The section Hugo wrote between December 1861 and mid-January 1862 consists of both a dramatic recitation of stirring events full of noise and bravery beyond belief and a reflective essay designed to answer questions that mattered deeply to French readers. But it also does much more than that. Waterloo is where Thénardier first appears in chronological sequence and encounters the father of Marius, which ties a major thread of Part I to characters and events that will come together much later on in the book. Even more: it brings to the fore the theme of excrement that Hugo had already elaborated in the chapters written the previous spring but which aren’t broached in the novel until several hundred pages further on. To call these battle chapters a digression – or, even worse, to cut them out or to place them in an appendix, as some old British editions do – is not only to miss the personal, historical and political points Hugo wanted to make, but to ignore the full integration of the Waterloo episode in the finely wrought narrative of Les Misérables.

  The ‘national’ question that Waterloo raised was this: could France have won the battle? Like Napoleon himself and his still numerous fans in nineteenth-century France, Hugo liked to believe that it could, and had been thwarted by mere chance. He therefore explains that overnight rain on 17 June bogged down French artillery and prevented it from being moved into position for several hours. Had the shelling started as planned at dawn, he surmises, then the outcome would have been very different. The second random blow of fate was that local guides gave misleading information to French troops, but accurate tips to the Prussian avant-garde. Wellington did not win the battle, Hugo argues, but chance lost it for France. This is now a familiar argument about military conflicts of all kinds: the ‘fog of war’ makes the outcome of conflict unpredictable, and momentous events may hang on trivially small causes. Hugo sums it up by saying that any battle is ‘un quine’ – a lottery, a throw of the dice (II.1.xvi, 315). This echoes the point made by Stendhal in his portrait of the Battle of Waterloo at the start of La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma), where the confusion of mud and smoke is so great that no general was really in charge or in a position to determine the outcome. Tolstoy, who read Stendhal and Hugo with care, gives an even grander portrayal of random chaos in his chapters on the Battle of Borodino in War and Peace. This element in Hugo’s analysis also provides a pragmatic basis for his pacifist convictions. If the outcome of mass violence is entirely unpredictable, then military action has no point.

  So should France have won? Hugo maintains that Napoleon had sufficient cannon, horses, men and morale to beat Wellington, especially since the Iron Duke’s strategy was unimaginative and old-fashioned. Without the rain, the delay and the misinformation, France ought to have won.

  Then why did it lose? An altogether different type of argument comes in at this point. France lost because it had to, because the time had come, because it was written in the stars. In a nutshell: ‘God intervened’ (II.1.xiii, 310).

  This looks like a retrospective illusion, but it’s not entirely silly. What would have happened if the French had scored a technical victory at Waterloo? Would the assembled armies of Britain, Austria, Prussia, Holland and Russia have said, OK, you win, we’ll go home? Surely not. They would have regrouped and then hammered the depleted armies of an outlaw nation with little money left and a diminished commander-in-chief who couldn’t sit in a saddle for more than a few minutes at a time. Napoleon’s hope that the Coalition would allow him to remain on the throne if he gave them just one more bloody nose wasn’t rational. It was madness.

  Hugo does not resolve history’s mysterious equation of chance and necessity. He leaves it open. His chapters give equal support to the view that it might have turned out differently and to the view that it had to turn out the way it did.

  But to do this, he has to say why the invincible French cavalry made no impact on Wellington’s line. Chance or necessity? This is where Hugo slightly alters the weight of the dice. He inserts a hidden ravine into the landscape, the ‘hollow road’ of Ohain. Wider and deeper in Hugo’s dramatic reconstruction of the past than it seems to have been in reality, the pit was invisible to advancing horsemen and so became their grave. That’s why Napoleon did not really lose the Battle of Waterloo and why Wellington certainly did not win it. This was the view of the ex-emperor himself, of course – but even he stopped short of inventing obstacles that weren’t there. Hugo’s reimagination of the battlefield may owe something to literary models such as the Song of Roland, in which Charlemagne’s rearguard was slaughtered in a similarly steep-sided cleft at Roncevaux, or a famous battle story by Balzac, Le Colonel Chabert, where the hero is buried alive beneath a huge pile of other corpses. Prior to mechanized warfare of the modern age, all battle writing seems to offer permutations of a limited number of themes. There are ravines at Thermopylae and Killiecrankie; pits full of corpses are as old as the stories of Tamerlane and Genghis Khan.

  Who, then, did win the battle? Hugo gives two answers, one strategic and the other ideological. At Waterloo, the ‘old monarchies’ of Europe defeated the heir of the French Revolution, and in so doing turned back the clock. They condemned British, Russian, Austrian and Prussian citizens to the straitjacket of feudal rule, which means that the notional victors were the real losers of the fight. (By that argument, the French were losers too, since they had a restored monarchy imposed on them.)

  But the law of unintended consequences produced the opposite result as well. The tens of thousands of Russian, German, Austrian and Dutch soldiers who poured into France after Waterloo came into prolonged contact with the most advanced civilization in the world. (The last detachment of Cossacks didn’t evacuate France until 1821.) By osmosis, those foreign soldiers absorbed ideas of progress, human rights and democracy that were native to France and took the seeds of these delicate plants back home. In 1825, they first sprouted in Russia with the Decembrist uprising. In 1830, when France swept away the Bourbons, the Belgians also revolted and established their own free state. And so on … Austrians and Hungarians in 1848, then Italians in the 1850s, all bore forward ideals first forged in France, on the long march towards a universal republic that could not have begun without Waterloo. It’s a national-subjective view of history that allows Hugo to believe that, despite its short-term reactionary effect, the humiliation of Waterloo was a chapter in the longer-term narrative of progress.

  The more ideological answer that Hugo gives to the question of who really won in 1815 is that nobody did – at least no emperor, duke or nation. The only victor that day was a French officer who blurted out a rude word. General Cambronne, commanding the last surviving squad of Napoleon’s Old Guard, was surrounded by British troops and ordered to surrender or be killed on the spot. Instead of laying down his arms he bawled ‘Merde!’ at the top of his voice. The valiant vulgarity of the old soldier isn’t a product of Hugo’s fertile imagination. It was an urban legend already.

  The real Cambronne survived the barrage of fire that killed all but a few of his comrades in arms. He was wounded, taken prisoner and moved to England, where he was cared for by a Scottish nurse who became his wife. During his convalescence in London in 1816, Cambronne wrote a letter to The Times about the reports it had published on two declarations he was said to have made at Waterloo: ‘La garde meurt et ne se rend pas!’ (‘The Guard dies and does not surrender!’) and ‘Merde!’ He wished to assure readers he had never said either of these things. The stories were calumnies and lies.

  Where did they come from? Why did Cambronne need to deny them? I don’t know. But thanks to the letter to The Times, they became known to all and part of the folk history of the Battle of Waterloo until Hugo picked up one of them and turned it into a nutshell expression of th
e linguistic, historical and human message of Les Misérables.

  Hugo had always been keen to loosen the rules on what kinds of words could be spoken on stage or put into print. When he congratulated himself in a poem published in 1856 for having ‘put a red cap on the dictionary’, he was claiming retrospectively that he’d revolutionized the lexicon of drama and verse.4 The culmination of his essay on Waterloo in Les Misérables takes his ‘ordinary language’ campaign several steps further on. Merde belongs not to the register of familiar or even vulgar French, but to the set of words that are counted as taboo. It had certainly never been seen in print in a literary work before Hugo put it into Les Misérables.

  The historical sense of ‘Cambronne’s word’ is to bring great events down to the actions of individuals. Cambronne faces an abstract choice between the force of history, backed by overwhelming might, and fidelity to his oath of allegiance. The choice manifests itself on the ground in directly personal terms: surrender or death. It’s the choices of individual men and women that make history, and the stand of Cambronne at the Battle of Waterloo is just one illustration that, in the end, it’s people, not abstractions, that count.