"Deeds and Words" ("Actes et Paroles"), which is dated June,
1875, is the record of Victor Hugo's public life, speeches and
letters, down to the year of his death, which occurred on May
32, 1885; but it is most important as a defence of his
political career from 1848 onwards. It does not, however, tell
us how changeable his opinions had actually been. His
inconstant attachments are thus summed up by Dr. Brandes: "He
warmly supports the candidacy of Louis Napoleon for the post
of President of the Republic ... lends him his support when he
occupies that post, and is even favourable to the idea of an
empire, until the feeling that he is despised as a politician
estranges him from the Prince-President, and resentment at the
coup d'etat drives him into the camp of the extreme
Republicans. His life may be said to mirror the political
movements of France during the first half of the century."
(See FICTION.)
_I.--Right and Law_
All human eloquence, among all peoples and in all times, may be summed
up as the quarrel of Right against Law.
But this quarrel tends ever to decrease, and therein lies the whole of
progress. On the day when it has disappeared, civilisation will have
attained its highest point; that which ought to be will have become one
with that which is; there will be an end of catastrophes, and even, so
to speak, of events; and society will develop majestically according to
nature. There will be no more disputes nor factions; no longer will laws
be made, they will only be discovered. Education will have taken the
place of war, and by means of universal suffrage there will be chosen a
parliament of intellect.
In that serene and glorious age there will be no more warriors, but
workers only; creators in the place of exterminators. The civilisation
of action will have passed away, and that of thought will have
succeeded. The masterpieces of art and of literature will be the great
events.
Frontiers will disappear; and France, which is destined to die as the
gods die, by transfiguration, will become Europe. For the Revolution of
France will be known as the evolution of the peoples. France has
laboured not for herself alone, but has aroused world-wide hopes, and is
herself the representative of all human good-will.
Right and Law are the two great forces whose harmony gives birth to
order, but their antagonism is the source of all catastrophe. Right is
the divine truth, and Law is the earthly reality; liberty is Right and
society is Law. Wherefore there are two tribunes, one of the men of
ideas, the other of the men of facts; and between these two the
consciences of most still vacillate. Not yet is there harmony between
the immutable and the variable power; Right and Law are in ceaseless
conflict.
To Right belong the inviolability of human life, liberty, peace; and
nothing that is indissoluble, irrevocable, or irreparable. To Law belong
the scaffold, sword, and sceptre; war itself; and every kind of yoke,
from divorceless marriage in the family to the state of siege in the
city. Right is to come and go, buy, sell, exchange; Law has its
frontiers and its custom-houses. Right would have free and compulsory
education, without encroaching on young consciences; that is to say, lay
instruction; Law would have the teaching of ignorant friars. Right
demands liberty of belief, but Law establishes the state religions.
Universal suffrage and universal jury belong to Right, but restricted
franchise and packed juries are creatures of the Law.
What a difference there is! And let it be understood that all social
agitation arises from the persistence of Right against the obstinacy of
Law. The keynote of the present writer's public life has been "_Pro jure
contra legem"_--for the Right which makes men, against the Law which men
have made. He believes that liberty is the highest expression of Right,
and that the republican formula, "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,"
leaves nothing to be added or to be taken away. For Liberty is Right,
Equality is Fact, and Fraternity is Duty. The whole of man is there. We
are brothers in our life, equal in birth and death, free in soul.
_II.--Days of Childhood_
At the beginning of this nineteenth century there was a child who lived
in a great house, surrounded by a large garden, in the most deserted
part of Paris. He lived with his mother, two brothers, and a venerable
and worthy priest, who was his only tutor, and taught him much Latin, a
little Greek, and no history at all. Here, at the time of the First
Empire, the three boys played and worked, watched the clouds and trees
and listened to the birds, under the sweet influence of their mother's
smile.
It was the child's misfortune, though no one's fault, that he was taught
by a priest. What can be more terrible than a system of untruth,
sincerely believed? For a priest teaches falsehoods, ignorant of the
truth, and thinks he does well; everything he does for the child is done
against the child, making crooked that which nature has made straight;
his teaching poisons the young mind with aged prejudices, drawing
evening twilight, like a curtain, over the dawn.
That ancient, solitary house and garden, formerly a convent and then the
home of his childhood, is still in his old age a dear and religious
memory, though its site is now profaned by a modern street He sees it in
a romantic atmosphere, in which, amid sunbeams and roses, his spirit
opened into flower. What a stillness was in its vast rooms and
cloisters. Only at long intervals was the silence broken by the return
of a plumed and sabred general, his father, from the wars. That child,
already thoughtful, was myself.
One night--it was some great festival of the empire, and all Paris was
illumined--my mother was walking in the garden with three of my father's
comrades, and I was following them, when we saw a tall figure in the
gloom of the trees. It was the proscribed Victor du Lahorie, my
godfather. He was even then conspiring against Bonaparte in the cause of
liberty, and was shortly after executed. I remember his saying, "If Rome
had kept her kings, she had not been Rome," and then, looking on me,
"Child, put liberty first of all!" That one word outweighed my whole
education.
_III.--Before the Exile_
It was not until the writer saw, in 1848, the triumph of all the enemies
of progress that he knew in the depths of his heart that he belonged,
not to the conquerors, but to the vanquished. The Republic lay
inanimate; but, gazing on her form, he saw that she was liberty, and not
even the sure fore-knowledge of the ruin and exile that must follow
could prevent his espousal with the dead. On June 15 he made his protest
from the tribune, and from that day he fought relentless battle for
liberty and the republic. And on December 2, 1851, he received what he
had expected--twenty years of exile. That is the history of what has
been called his apostasy.
Throughout that strange period before his exile, the frightful phantom
of the past was all-powerful with men. Every kind of question was
debated--national independence, individual liberty, liberty of
conscience, of thought, of speech, and of the Press; questions of
marriage, of education, of the right to work, of the right to one's
fatherland as against exile, of the right to life as against penal law,
of the separation of Church and state, of the federation of Europe, of
frontiers to be wiped out, and of custom-houses to be done away--all
these questions were proposed, debated, and sometimes settled.
In these debates the author of this memoir took his part and did his
duty, and was repaid with insults. He remembers interjecting, when they
were insisting on parental rights, that the children had rights, too. He
astounded the assembly by asserting that it was possible to do away with
misery. On July 17, 1851, he denounced the conspiracy of Louis
Bonaparte, unveiling the project of the president to become emperor. On
another day he pronounced from the tribune a phrase which had never yet
been uttered--"The United States of Europe." Contempt and calumny were
poured upon him, but what of that? They called George Washington a
pickpocket.
These men of the old majority, who were doing all the evil that they
could--did they mean to do evil? Not a bit of it. They deceived
themselves, thinking that they had the truth, and they lied in the
service of the truth. Their pity for society was pitiless for the
people, whence arose so many laws, so many actions, that were blindly
ferocious. They were rather a mob than a senate, and were led by the
worst of their number. Let us be indulgent, and let night hide the men
of night.
What do our labours and our troubles and our exiles matter if they have
been for the general good; if the human race be indeed passing from
December to its April; if the winter of tyrannies and of wars indeed be
finished; if superstitions and prejudices no longer fall on our heads
like snow; and if, after so many clouds of empire and of carnage have
rolled away, we at last descry upon the horizon the rosy dawn of
universal peace?
O my brothers, let us be reconciled! Let us set out on the immense
highway of peace. Surely there has been enough of hatred. When will you
understand that we are all together on the same ship, and that the
immense menace of the sea is for all of us together? Our solidarity is
terrible, but brotherhood is sweet.
_IV.--Republican Principles_
The sovereignty of the people, universal suffrage, and the liberty of
the Press are all the same thing under three different names. The three
together constitute the whole of our public right; the first is its
principle, the second its manner, and the third its expression. The
three principles are indissoluble from one another. The sovereignty of
the people is the life-giving soul of the nation, universal suffrage its
government, the Press its illumination; but they are all really one, and
that unity is the republic. It is curious to notice how these principles
appear again in the watchword of the republic; for the sovereignty of
the people creates liberty, universal suffrage creates equality, and the
Press, which enlightens the general mind, creates fraternity.
Wherever these three great principles exist in their powers and
plenitude there is the republic, even though it be known as monarchy.
Wherever, on the other hand, they are betrayed, hindered, or oppressed,
the actual state is a monarchy or an oligarchy, even though it goes
under the name of a republic. In the latter case we see the monstrous
phenomenon of a government betrayed by its proper guardians, and it is
this phenomenon that makes the stoutest hearts begin to be doubtful of
revolutions. For revolutions are vast, ill-guided movements, which bring
forth out of the darkness at one and the same time the greatest of ideas
and the smallest of men; they are movements which we welcome as salutary
when we look at their principles, but which we can only call
catastrophes when he consider the character of their leaders.
Let us never forget that our three first principles live with a common
life, and mutually defend one another. If the Liberty of the Press is in
danger, the suffrages of the people arise and protect it; and, again, if
the franchise is threatened, it is safeguarded by the freedom of the
Press. Any attempt against either of them is a treachery to the
sovereignty of the people.
The movement of this great nineteenth century is the movement not of one
people only, but of all. France leads, and the nations follow. We are
passing from the old world to the new, and our governors attempt in vain
to arrest ideas by laws. There is in France and in Europe a party
inspired by fear, which is not to be accounted the party of order; and
its incessant question is: Who is to blame?
In the crisis through which we are passing, though it is a salutary
crisis which will lead only to good, everyone exclaims at the dreadful
moral disorder and the imminent social danger. Who, then, is guilty of
these ravages? Whom shall we punish? Throughout Europe, the party of
fear answers "France." Throughout France, it answers "Paris." In Paris,
it blames the Press. But every thoughtful man must see that it is none
of these, but is the human spirit.
It is the human spirit that has made the nations what they are. From the
beginning, through infinite debate and contradiction, it has sought,
unresting, to solve the problem eternally placed before the creature by
his Creator. It is the human spirit which takes from age to age the form
of the great revolts of history; it has been in turn, and sometimes
altogether, error, illusion, heresy, schism, protest, and the truth. The
human spirit is ever the great shepherd of the generations, proceeding
always towards the just, the beautiful, and the true, enlightening the
multitude, ennobling souls, directing the mind of man towards God.
Let the party of fear throughout Europe consider the magnitude of the
task which they have undertaken. When they have destroyed the Press,
they have yet to destroy Paris. When Paris is fallen, there remains
France. Let France be annihilated, there still remains the human
spirit--a thing intangible as the light, inaccessible as the sun.
_V.--In Exile_
Nothing is more terrible than exile. I do not say for him who suffers,
but for the tyrant who inflicts it. A solitary figure paces a distant
shore, or rises in the morning to his philosophic labours, or calls on
God among the rocks and trees; his hairs become grey, and then white, in
the slow passing of the years and in his longing for home; his lot is a
sorrowful one; but his innocence is terrible to the crowned miscreant
who sent him there. From 1852 to 1870 I was in exile.
How pleasant are those islands of the Channel, and how like France!
Jersey, perhaps, more charming than Guernsey, prettier if less imposing;
in Jersey the forest has become a garden; the island is like a bouquet
of flowers, of the size of London, a smiling land, an idyll set in the
midst of the sea.
The exile soon learns that, though the tyrant has placed him afar, he
does not release his hold. Many and ingenious are the snares laid for
the banished. A prince calls on you, but though he is of royal blood, he
is also a detective of police. A grave professor stays at your house,
and you surprise him searching your papers. Everything is permitted
against you; you are outside the law, outside of common justice, outside
of respect. They will say that they have your authority to publish your
conversations, and will attribute to you words that you have never
spoken and actions that you have never done. Never write to your
friends--your letters are opened on the way. Beware of all who are
kindly to you in exile; they are ruining you in Paris. You are isolated
as a leper. A mysterious stranger whispers in your ear that he can
procure the assassination of Bonaparte; it is Bonaparte offering to kill
himself. Every day of your life is a new outrage. Only one thing is open
to the exile; it is to turn his thought to other subjects.
He is at least beside the sea; let its infinity bring him wisdom. The
eternal rioting of the surges against the rocks is as the agitation of
impostures against the truth. It is a vain convulsion; the foam gains
nothing by it, the granite loses nothing, and only sparkles the more
bravely in the sun.
But exile has this great advantage--one is free to contemplate, to
think, to suffer. To be alone, and yet to feel that one is with all
humanity; to consolidate oneself as a citizen, and to purify oneself as
a philosopher; to be poor, and begin again to work for one's living, to
meditate on what is good and to contrive for what is better; to be angry
in the public cause, but to crush all personal enmity; to breathe the
vast, living winds of the solitudes; to compose a deeper indignation
with a profounder peace--these are the opportunities of exile. I
accustomed myself to say, "If, after a revolution, Bonaparte should
knock at my door and ask shelter, let never a hair of his head be
injured."
Yes, an exile becomes a well-wisher. He loves the roses, and the birds'
nests, and the flitting hither and thither of the butterflies. He
mingles with the sweet joys of the creatures, and learns a changeless
faith in some secret and infinite goodness. The green glades are his
chosen dwelling and his life is April; he reclines amazed at the
mysteries of a tuft of grass; he studies the ant-hills of tiny
republicans; he learns to know the birds by their songs; he watches the
children playing barefoot in the edge of the sea.
Against this dangerous man governments are taking the most strenuous
precautions. Victoria offers to hand over the exiles to Napoleon, and
messages of compliment are passed from one throne to the other. But that
gift did not take place. The English royalist Press applauded, but the
people of London would have none of it. The great city muttered thunder.
Majesty clothed in probity--that is the character of the English nation.
That good and proud people showed their indignation, and Palmerston and
Bonaparte had to be content with the expulsion of the exiles.
During the whole long night of my exile I never lost Paris from my view.
When Europe and even France were in darkness, Paris was never hidden.
That is because Paris is the frontier of the future, the visible
frontier of the unknown. All of to-morrow that can be seen to-day is in
Paris. The eyes that are searching for progress come to rest on Paris,
for Paris is the city of light.
_VI.--After the Exile_
This triology, "Before, During, and After the Exile," is no work of
mine, it is the doing of Napoleon III. He it is who has divided my life
in this way, observing, as one might say, the rules of art. Returning to
my country on September 5, 1870, I found the sky more gloomy and my duty
more clamant than ever.
Though it is sad to leave the fatherland, to return to it is sometimes
sadder still; and there is no Frenchman who would not have preferred a
life-long banishment, to seeing France ground beneath the Prussian heel,
and the loss of Metz and Strasburg. This was an invasion of barbarians;
but there is another menace that is not less formidable. I mean the
invasion of our land by darkness, an invasion of the nineteenth century
by the middle ages. After the emperor, the pope; after Berlin, Rome;
after the triumph of the sword, the triumph of night. For the light of
civilisation may be extinguished in either of two ways, by a military or
by a clerical invasion. The former threatens our mother, France; the
latter our child, the future.
A double inviolability is the most precious possession of a civilised
people--the inviolability of territory and the inviolability of
conscience; and as the soldier violates the first, so does the priest
violate the other. Yet the soldier does but obey his orders and the
priest his dogmas, so that there are only two who are ultimately
culpable--Caesar, who slays, and Peter, who lies. There is no religion
which has not as its aim to seize forcibly the human soul, and it is to
attempts of this kind that France is given up to-day.
One may say, indeed, that in our age there are two schools, and that
these two schools sum up in themselves the two opposed currents which
draw civilisation, the one towards the future and the other towards the
past. One of these schools is called Paris and the other Rome. Each of
them has its book; the one has the "Declaration of the Rights of Man,"
the other has the "Syllabus"; and the first of these books says "Yes" to
progress, but the second of them says "No." Yet progress is the footstep
of God.
Paris means Montaigne, Rabelais, Pascal, Corneille, Molière,
Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire, Mirabeau, Danton. Rome, on the
other hand, means Innocent III., Pius V., Alexander VI., Urban VIII.,
Arbuez, Cisneros, Lainez, Guillandus, Ignatius.
To educate is nothing less than to govern; and clerical education means
a clerical government, with a despotism as its summit and ignorance as
its foundation.
Rome already holds Belgium, and would now seize Paris. We are witnesses
of a struggle to the death. Against us is all that manifold power which
emerges from the past, the spirit of monarchy, of superstition, of the
barrack and of the convent; we have against us temerity, effrontery,
audacity, and fear. On our side there is nothing but the light. That is
why the victory will be with us. For to enlighten is to deliver. Every
increase in liberty involves increased responsibility. Nothing is graver
than freedom; liberty has burdens of her own, and lays on the conscience
all the chains which she unshackles from the limbs. We find rights
transforming themselves into duties. Let us therefore take heed to what
we are doing; we live in a difficult time and are answerable at once to
the past and to the future. The time has come, in this year 1876, to
replace commotions by concessions. That is how civilisation advances.
For progress is nothing other than revolution effected amicably.
Therefore, legislators and citizens, let us redouble our good-will. Let
all wounds be healed, all animosities extinguished; by overcoming hatred
we shall overcome war; let no disturbance that may come be due to our
fault. Our task of entering into the unknown is difficult enough without
angers and bitterness. I am one of those who hope from that unknown
future, but only on condition that we make use from the first of every
means of pacification that is in our power. Let us act with the virile
kindness of the strong.
Let us then calm the nations by peace, and the hearts of men by
brotherhood, and let us never forget that we are ourselves responsible
for this last half of the nineteenth century, and that we are placed
between a great past, the Revolution of France, and a great future, the
Revolution of Europe.
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