Jean Valjean cut the halter round Javert’s neck, then the ropes binding his wrists and ankles; then, standing upright, he said:
‘You’re free to go.’
Javert was not easily taken aback but, with all his self-discipline, he could not conceal his amazement. He stared open-mouthed.
‘I don’t suppose I shall leave here alive,’ Valjean went on. ‘But if I do, I am lodging at No. 7, Rue de l’Homme-Armé, under the name of Fauchelevent.’
A swift tigerish grimace curled the corner of Javert’s lip.
‘Take care!’ he said.
‘Now go,’ said Jean Valjean.
‘Fauchelevent, you said? In the Rue de l’Homme-Armé?’
‘Number seven.’
‘Number seven,’ repeated Javert.
He re-buttoned his greatcoat, straightened his shoulders, turned, and with folded arms, supporting his chin in one hand, he marched off in the direction of the market. Valjean stood watching him. After he had gone a few paces Javert turned and said:
‘I find this embarrassing. I’d rather you killed me.’
He did not notice that he had ceased to address Valjean disrespectfully as tu.
‘Clear out,’ said Valjean.
Javert walked on slowly and a moment later had turned into the Rue des Prêcheurs. When he had vanished from sight Valjean fired the pistol into the air.
Then he went back into the stronghold and said, ‘It’s done.’
In the meantime the following had occurred.
Marius, more concerned with what was happening outside the stronghold, had paid little attention to the spy tied up in the obscure downstairs room of the tavern; but when he saw him in full daylight climbing over the barricade to his death, he recognized him. He suddenly recalled the police inspector in the Rue de Pontoise who had given him the two pistols which he had only recently used. Not only did he recall his face but he remembered his name.
The recollection was, however, hazy and uncertain, as were all his thoughts at that time. He did not put it to himself in the form of a positive statement but rather as a question. ‘Is not that the police inspector who told me his name was Javert?’ Perhaps there was still time to intercede in his favour, but first he must make sure that he was right. He turned to Enjolras, who had come from the other end of the barricade.
‘What is the name of that man?’
‘Which man?’
‘The policeman. Do you know his name?’
‘Of course. He told us.’
‘Well, what is it?’
‘Javert.’
Marius started forward, but at this moment there was the sound of a pistol-shot and Jean Valjean returned saying, ‘It’s done.’
A chill pierced Marius to the heart.
XX
The dead are right, but the living are not wrong
The death-throes of the stronghold were about to begin.
All things combined to create the tragic majesty of that supreme moment, a thousand mysterious shudders in the air, the breath of armed bodies of men moving along streets where they were not yet visible, the occasional galloping of cavalry, the heavy rumble of artillery on the move, musketry and cannon fire clashing in the labyrinth of Paris, the smoke of battle rising golden above the roofs, occasional distant cries that were vaguely terrible, the lightnings of danger everywhere, the Saint-Merry tocsin that now had the sound of a sob, the mildness of the season, the splendour of a sky filled with sun and cloud, the beauty of the day and the dreadful silence of the houses.
For since the previous evening the two rows of houses in the Rue de la Chanvrerie had become fiercely defiant ramparts, with bolted doors, windows, and shutters.
In those days, so different from our present time, when the hour had struck when the people wanted to have done with a situation that had gone on too long, a charter offered to them, or a body of law; when universal anger was suspended in the air, when the town acquiesced in the uprooting of its pavements, when insurrection won a smile from the bourgeois by whispering orders in their ear; in such times the citizen, penetrated with rebellion, as one might say, was the ally of the combatant, the private house fraternized with the improvised fortress into which it had been turned. But when the time was not ripe, when the insurrection was decidedly not agreed to, when the majority repudiated the movement, then there was no hope for the combatant; the town became a desert surrounding the revolt, hearts were frozen, all ways of escape were closed and the streets lay open to the army in its assault upon the barricades.
One cannot goad people into moving faster than they are prepared to go. Woe to him who tries to force their hands. A whole people does not let itself be driven. It leaves the insurrection to its own devices. The insurgent becomes a pestilence. The house is an escarpment, its door a refusal, its façade a closed wall. A wall that sees and hears and will have none of it. It might open its doors and save you, but it does not do so. The wall is a judge. It looks at you and passes sentence. How sombre are those barred houses! They seem dead, but are alive. Life in them, though it seems suspended, still persists. No one has emerged from them in twenty-four hours, but no one is missing. Within that rock people come and go, retire to bed and rise; they are a family, they eat and drink, and they are frightened, a terrible thing. Fear excuses that formidable inhospitableness, and it brings with it the extenuating circumstances of panic. Sometimes indeed, and this has been known, fear becomes passion, panic can turn into fury as prudence can turn into rage. Hence that profound expression, ‘The fury of the moderates’. There can be a flare-up of terror from which, like a sinister smoke, anger arises … ‘What do those people want? They’re never satisfied. They compromise peaceful men. As if we had not had enough of this sort of disorder! Why did they choose to come here? Well, they must get out of it as best they can, and so much the worse for them. It’s their own doing, they’ll only get what they deserve. It’s no affair of ours. Look at our poor street, pocked with bullet-holes. They’re a gang of ruffians. Mind you keep that door shut!’ … And the house acquires the semblance of a tomb. The insurgent crouches in deadly peril outside that door, seeing the guns and naked sabres. If he calls for help he knows that he is heard but that no one will answer; there are walls that might protect him, men who might save him – the walls have living ears, but the men have bowels of stone.
Whom shall we blame?
Nobody, and everybody.
The incomplete times in which we live.
It is always at its risk and peril that Utopia takes the form of Insurrection, substituting armed for reasoned protest, transforming Minerva into Pallas. The Utopia which grows impatient and becomes an uprising knows what awaits it; it nearly always happens too soon. So then it resigns itself, stoically accepting disaster in place of triumph. Without complaint it serves those who have disavowed it, even acquitting them, and its magnanimity lies in acceptance of desertion. It is indomitable in the face of obstacles and mild in the face of ingratitude.
In any case, is it ingratitude? Yes, in terms of the human species. No, in terms of the individual.
Progress in the life-style of man. The general life of the human race is called Progress, and so is its collective march. Progress advances, it makes the great human and earthly journey towards what is heavenly and divine; it has its pauses, when it rallies the stragglers, its stopping places when it meditates, contemplating some new and splendid promised land that has suddenly appeared on its horizon. It has its nights of slumber; and it is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker to see the human spirit lost in shadow, and to grope in the darkness without being able to awake sleeping progress.
‘Perhaps God is dead,’ Gérard de Nerval once said to the writer of these lines, confusing progress with God and mistaking the pause in its movement for the death of the Supreme Being.
It is wrong to despair. Progress invariably reawakens, and indeed it may be said that she walks in her sleep, for she has grown. Seeing her again on her feet, we find that she i
s taller. To be always peaceful is no more a part of progress than it is of a river, which piles up rocks and creates barriers as it flows; these obstacles cause the water to froth and humanity to seethe. This leads to disturbance; but when the disturbance is over we realize that something has been gained. Until order, which is nothing less than universal peace, has been established, until harmony and unity prevail, the stages of progress will be marked by revolutions.
What, then, is Progress? We have just said it. It is the permanent life of all people. But it sometimes happens that the momentary life of individuals is opposed to the eternal life of the human race.
Let us admit the fact without bitterness: the individual has his separate interests and may legitimately seek to further and defend them; the present has its excusable quantity of egotisms; the life of the moment has its own rights and is not obliged to sacrifice itself incessantly for the future. The generation which now has its time upon earth is not obliged to shorten this time for the sake of generations – its equals, after all – which will later have their turn. ‘I exist,’ murmurs someone whose name is Everyone. ‘I’m young and in love; I am old and I want rest; I work, I prosper, I do good business, I have houses to rent, money in State Securities; I am happy, I have a wife and children; I like all these things and I want to go on living, so leave me alone.’ … There are moments when all this casts a deep chill on the large-minded pioneers of the human race.
Moreover Utopia, let us agree, emerges from its starry-eyed state when it goes to war. Being tomorrow’s truth she borrows her method, which is war, from yesterday’s lies. She is the future, but she acts like the past; she is the ideal, but she becomes the actuality, sullying her heroism with a violence for which it is right that she should be held responsible – tactical and expedient violence, against all principle, and for which she is inevitably punished. Utopia in rebellion defies the established military code: she shoots spies, executes traitors, destroys living beings and casts them into unknown shadow. She makes use of death, which is a grave matter. It seems that Utopia no longer believes in its own ideal, that irresistible and incorruptible force. She wields the sword. But no sword is simple; all are two-edged, and he who inflicts wounds with the one edge wounds himself with the other.
But subject to that reservation, made in all severity, it is impossible for us not to admire the glorious warriors of the future, the prophets of Utopia, whether they are successful or not. Even when they fail they are deserving of reverence, and perhaps it is in failure that they appear most noble. Victory, if it is in accord with progress, deserves the applause of mankind; but an heroic defeat deserves one’s heartfelt sympathy. The one is magnificent, the other sublime. For ourselves, since we prefer martyrdom to success, John Brown is greater than Washington, Pisacane greater than Garibaldi.
It is necessary that someone should be on the side of the defeated. We are unjust to those great fighters for the future when they fail. We accuse revolutionaries of spreading terror. Every barricade seems to be an act of aggression. We stigmatize their theories, suspect their aims, mistrust their afterthoughts, and denounce their scruples. We reproach them with piling up a structure of misery and suffering, iniquities, grievances and despairs against the existing social order, and with dredging up shadows from the lowest depths as a pretext for conflict. We say to them: ‘You are robbing Hell of its pavements!’ To which they might reply: ‘That is why our barricade is built of good intentions.’
Certainly the best solution is the one peacefully arrived at. We may agree, in short, that at the sight of paving-stones we think of the monster, and his good intentions are disquieting to society. But it is for society to save itself, and it is to its own good intentions that we appeal. No violent remedy is called for. To examine the evil with good-will, define it and then cure it – that is what we urge society to do.
However this may be, those men in all parts of the world who, with their eyes fixed upon France, struggle in the great cause with the inflexible logic of idealism, are deserving of honour. They offer their lives as a gift to Progress, they fulfil the will of Providence, they perform a religious rite. When the time comes, with as much indifference as an actor taking his cue in accordance with the divine scenario, they pass on into the tomb. They accept the hopeless battle and their own stoical disappearance, for the sake of the splendid and supreme universal outcome of the magnificent human movement which began with irresistible force on 14 July 1789. Those soldiers are priests. The French Revolution is a gesture of God.
For the rest, there are – and we must add this distinction to those already made in an earlier chapter – there are accepted insurrections which we call revolutions, and there are rejected revolutions which we call uprisings. An insurrection when it breaks out is an idea which submits itself to trial by the people. If the people turn down their thumbs then the idea is dead fruit, the insurrection has failed.
To go into battle on every pretext, and whenever Utopia desires it, is not the will of the people. Nations are not always and at every moment endowed with the temperament of heroes and martyrs. They are positive. In principle they find insurrection repugnant, first because it often leads to disaster, and secondly because its starting-point is always an abstract idea.
It is always for the ideal, the ideal alone – and this is splendid – that its devotees are prepared to sacrifice themselves. An insurrection is an outburst of enthusiasm. This enthusiasm may turn to rage, hence the recourse to arms. But every insurrection levelled at a government or a regime is aiming higher than this. We must insist, for example, that the leader of this insurrection of 1832, and most especially the youthful enthusiasts in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, were not precisely doing battle with Louis-Philippe. Most of them, in their conversation, did justice to the qualities of that king who was midway between monarchy and revolution; none hated him. But they were attacking in Louis-Philippe the younger branch of the divine right, precisely as they had attacked the older branch in Charles X; and, as we have said, what they were seeking to overthrow, in overthrowing monarchy in France, was the usurpation of man over man and of privilege over law throughout the world. Paris without a king signified a world without despots. That was how they reasoned. Their objective was a remote one, no doubt, perhaps vague, and one which receded as they strove to draw near it; but it was great.
That is how it is. And men sacrifice themselves for visions which for the sacrificed are nearly always illusions, but illusions, after all, in which all human certainties are mingled. The insurgent poeticizes and gilds the insurrection. He flings himself into the tragedy intoxicated with the thought of what he will achieve. And who can be sure that he will not succeed? We are small in numbers, with a whole army arrayed against us; but we are defenders of the right, of the natural law, the sovereignty of each man over himself which cannot possibly be renounced, of justice and truth, and if need be we will die like the Spartan three hundred. We do not think of Don Quixote but of Leonidas. We go forward and, being engaged in battle, do not retreat; we charge with our heads down, impelled by the hope of unimaginable victory, the revolution successful, progress set free, the human race made great, universal deliverance; or, at the worst, another Thermopylae.
These resorts to arms in the name of progress frequently fail, and we have said why. The crowd mistrusts the allurement of paladins. The masses, ponderous bodies that they are, and fragile on account of their very heaviness, fear adventure; and there is adventure in the ideal
Moreover we must not forget that there are interests which have little sympathy with the ideal and the sentimental. Sometimes the stomach paralyses the heart.
It is the grandeur and the beauty of France that she is less concerned with the belly than other peoples; she slips readily into harness. She is the first to awaken, the last to fall asleep. She presses forward. She is a searcher.
All this depends on the fact that she is an artist. The ideal is nothing but the culmination of logic, just as beauty is the apex of truth.
Artistic peoples are logical peoples. To love beauty is to seek for light. That is why the torch of Europe, which is civilization, was carried first by Greece, which passed it to Italy, which has passed it to France. Divine pioneering peoples – Vitai lampada tradunt.
What is admirable is that the poetry of a people is at the head of its progress. The quantity of civilization is measured by the quality of imagination. But a civilizing race must be a masculine race; it must be Corinth, not Sybaris. Those who become effeminate bastardize themselves. It is necessary to be neither a dilettante nor a virtuoso; but it is necessary to be an artist. In the matter of civilization one must not refine but sublimate. Subject to this condition, we endow mankind with the mastery of the ideal.
The modern ideal finds its prototype in art and its method in science. It is through science that we shall realize that sublime vision of poets: social beauty. We shall rebuild Eden in terms of A + B. At the stage which civilization has reached, the exact is a necessary element in what is splendid, and artistic feeling is not only served but completed by the scientific approach; the dream must know how to calculate. Art, which is the conqueror, must have as its point of stress science, which is the prime mover. The solidity of the mount is important. The modern spirit is composed of the genius of Greece mounted on the genius of India – Alexander on the elephant.
Races petrified in dogma or demoralized by wealth are unfitted for the conduct of civilization. Genuflexion before the idol or the golden crown weakens the muscles which march and the will-power which impels. Hieratic or mercantile preoccupations decrease the luminous quality of a people, narrow its horizon by lowering its level, and withhold from it that instinct, at once human and divine, which makes missionary nations. Babylon had no ideal, nor did Carthage. Athens and Rome had, and still, through all the darkness of centuries, they retain the glow of civilization.
France is a people of the same quality as Greece and Italy. She is Athenian in beauty and Roman in grandeur. Moreover, she is generous. She gives herself. More often than other peoples, she knows the mood of devotion and sacrifice. But it is a mood that comes and goes; and this is the great danger for those who seek to run when she is content to walk, and to walk when she wishes to stay still. France has her relapses into materialism, and at certain moments the ideas which obstruct the working of her splendid mind contain nothing that recalls her greatness but are rather of the dimensions of Missouri or some other southern state. What can be done about it? The giantess plays the dwarf; great France has her fantasies of smallness. That is all.
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