THE OLD COMMUNARD
Victor Hugo was born in 1802, three years later than Balzac. He grew up
in the same world, but was not satisfied to contemplate its diseases; he
sought remedies, and became a convert to revolutionary ideals, and so
all critics agree that his work is marred by propaganda. He lived to be
eighty-three years old, and went on writing and working to the very end,
so that the story of his life carries us through practically the whole
of the nineteenth century. We shall follow it, and then come back and
retrace parts of the same story in the lives of other artists, French,
German, British and American.
Hugo’s father was a revolutionary soldier who rose to be a general in
Napoleon’s army. As a little boy the poet followed the armies from place
to place in Switzerland, Italy and Spain. His mother was a Royalist, and
the boy had an old Catholic priest for a tutor, and was taught the old
dogmas, literary as well as religious and political. His conversion into
a revolutionist was not completed until the age of forty-six. Having
been brought about by contact with daily events, this conversion was of
tremendous influence upon the thought of Europe.
He was a child of genius, and his prodigious activity began early. We
find him composing a tragedy at the age of fourteen, and at the age of
seventeen publishing a journal with the title of the “Literary
Conservator.” He gets married upon a pension of a thousand francs,
conferred upon him by King Louis XVIII, who has been put upon the throne
to preserve Catholic reaction. Then comes King Charles X, who makes him
a knight of the Legion of Honor at the age of twenty-three. But
gradually the young poet’s “throne and altar stuff” begins to shown
signs of independent thought; he composes a play in which Richelieu is
portrayed as master of his king, and this is considered unsuitable for
such ticklish times; the censor bars it, and the young poet’s personal
intercession with the king does not avail.
All this time, you understand, French art is still under the sway of the
so-called “classical” ideals of Voltaire and Racine; tragic dramatists
have to obey the “three unities,” or they cannot get produced. But by
1830 the French people are sick of reaction, and ready to make their
revolution again. As part of the change comes a surge of “romanticism”
in the arts. Shakespeare is played in Paris for the first time; and
Victor Hugo publishes a drama on the theme of Cromwell, with a preface
in which he commits the blasphemy of declaring that Racine is “not a
dramatist”! In the midst of the new revolution he produces a romantic
play, “Hernani,” dealing with a revolutionary Spaniard of the Byronic
type, who declaims all over the stage and dies sublimely.
The production of this play resulted in one continuous riot for
forty-five nights. The leading lady protested, the hired claque
revolted; so Victor Hugo called for help to the young artists of the
studios, and they poured out of Montmartre and took possession of the
theater. In those days the first purpose of romantic youth was to “shock
the bourgeois” by strange costumes. Here was Théophile Gautier, nineteen
years old, with long locks hanging over his shoulders, a scarlet satin
waistcoat, pale sea-green trousers seamed with black, and a gray
overcoat lined with green satin. Night after night the rival factions
shouted and raged as long as the play lasted. All this in order to gain
for dramatists the right to show more than one scene in a play, and more
than twenty-four hours of their hero’s life!
Victor Hugo also wrote fiction and prose, and in every field he became
the new sun of France. But he was not content with literary laurels; he
went on seeking a remedy for the bourgeois disease. He espoused the
cause of a poor workingman, who, having been tortured in prison, had
killed the governor of the prison. The young poet came upon a novel
remedy--to sow the Bible all over France. “Let there be a Bible in every
peasant’s hut.” Here in America the Gideonites have tried out the idea,
sowing a Bible in every hotel room--but for some reason there are more
crimes of violence in the United States than ever before in any
civilized country!
The revolution of 1830 brought in a new king, Louis-Philippe, the ideal
bourgeois monarch, an amiable gentleman who stayed at home with his wife
and let the bankers and business men run the country. This king made
Victor Hugo into a peer of France. But there was a new revolutionary
outburst preparing, and in 1848 the bourgeois king was dethroned, and
Victor Hugo was elected deputy to the new parliament, styling himself a
“moderate Republican.” The French people at this time were in the same
position as the American people at present; that is, they believed what
they were told, and were ready to accept any tinseled circus-performer
as a statesman. They chose for their president a wretched creature who
happened to be a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, and promised a return of
all the old glories of France.
It took only a year of his government for Victor Hugo to realize that
the one hope for progress lay in the program of the radicals. His two
grown sons were thrown into jail for editing a paper attacking the
policies of Louis Napoleon; and the father espoused the ideas of the old
revolution, “the rights of man.” Egged on by the terrified financiers,
Louis Napoleon overthrew the parliament and had himself made emperor.
Victor Hugo sought to rouse the people, barricades were raised in the
streets, and hundreds were shot down with cannon. The poet with great
difficulty made his escape to Brussels, from which city he denounced the
usurper--“Napoleon the Little” as he called him--with the result that
the Catholic government of Belgium passed a law expelling him.
He fled to the channel island of Jersey, where he wrote a book of poems
called “The Chastisements,” one of the most terrific pieces of
denunciation in all the world’s literature. Shortly after this the
bourgeois government of England combined with the bourgeois government
of France to drive Russia out of the Crimea; there was a great war, and
the people of Jersey objected to the poet’s attacks on the French
emperor; they mobbed his home, and he had to flee to the neighboring
island of Guernsey, where he settled down to the true task of a great
artist, to reform the world by changing the ideals of the coming
generations. For nineteen years he stayed in exile, until “Napoleon the
Little” brought himself to ruin, and his country along with him. In the
meantime Victor Hugo had published several volumes of marvelous poetry,
and finally, after ten years’ labor, his masterpiece of fiction, “Les
Misérables,” which appeared simultaneously in eight capitals of the
world, and brought its author the sum of four hundred thousand francs.
Into this novel Hugo poured all his passionate devotion to liberty,
equality and fraternity; likewise his blazing hatred of cruelty and
tyranny. He tells the story of an escaped convict who reforms and makes
a success of his life, but is pursued by the police and dragged back to
prison. Incidentally the poet gives us a vast picture of the France of
his own time, and the lives and struggles of the proletariat. The figure
of Jean Valjean is one of the great achievements of the human
imagination, and his story is a treasure of the revolutionary movement
in every modern land.
“Napoleon the Little” led his country to war with Germany and was
overwhelmingly crushed. Hugo came home in this crisis, and took part in
the defense of Paris. Then came the terrible uprising of the starved and
tortured masses, the Paris Commune. By this time the bourgeois savages
had machine-guns, so that they could wipe out wholesale the idealism and
faith of the people; they stood some fifty thousand workers, men, women
and children, against the walls of Paris and shot them down in cold
blood. Victor Hugo defended these Communards, and once more had to flee
for his life.
After the peace with Germany, France was left a republic, and her great
poet returned to live with his grandchildren, to labor for the working
classes, and to pour out floods of eloquence in behalf of his social
ideals. New movements arose, and the old man heard that he was
theatrical, bombastic, unreal. All that is true to a considerable
extent; for Hugo is like Shelley, having the defects of his great
qualities. When the inspiration does not come to him, he learns to
imitate it; he acquires mannerisms, he adopts poses. Following Milton’s
suggestion of making an art work of his life, he sets his personality up
as an embodiment of revolutionary idealism, he makes himself into a
legend, a living monument, a literary shrine, one might say a literary
cathedral. It is only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous, and we
often take that step with Victor Hugo. But the masses of the people knew
that the core of his being was a passionate devotion to liberty and
justice; therefore they took him to their hearts, and his life is so
blended with theirs that Victor Hugo and revolutionary France are two
phrases with one meaning.