Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo

By Graham Robb

Picador, 1998 — 682 pp., $19.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/19947

Scotland Yard regarded him as "the most obnoxious" of the French exiles, but his picture was a common sight in the homes of French workers. His masterpiece Les Misérables was added to the Index of Prohibited Books by the pope, but Paris factory workers held whip-arounds to buy and share a copy. If judged by these supporters and opponents, Victor Hugo qualifies well as "the French Dickens".

Graham Robb's biography follows the life of this writer who rode the seas of revolution and reaction in 19th century France. Born in 1802, Hugo was by turns Bonapartist, royalist and quasi-socialist, a popular politician repeatedly elected by the workers of Paris, as well as an idolised writer.

The young Hugo was inspired by his father, General "Brutus" Hugo in Napoleon I's army, who spread empire, republicanism and atheism in Europe. With Napoleon's defeat and abdication in 1814, the emperor's standing plummeted in Hugo's eyes, and the 13-year-old became an ardent monarchist. Despite Hugo's position as official poet for the coronation of Charles X in 1826, however, he tilted ever more leftwards, if timorously, towards the liberalism of the still-revolutionary bourgeoisie.

Hugo's play Hernani, in which a 16th century Spanish bandit hero treats the king of France as just another brigand, was played to booing and cheering, fights and arrests amongst its audience, who spilled out from the theatre to the barricades of the 1830 revolution.

Hugo offered his qualified support to the insurgents of 1830. He was defiant on civil liberties ("when my freedom as a poet is today taken by a censor, tomorrow my freedom as a citizen will be taken by a policeman"), but fretted over the sanctity of property — an over-cautious attitude that he was later to deride in Les Misérables.

Still not fully committed to republicanism and radical democracy, Hugo, backed by right-wing moderates, was elected to the National Assembly during the revolutionary upheaval of 1848. As Hugo voted for a temporary military dictatorship to quell the revolutionary swell of June, and personally "harangued insurgents, stormed barricades, took prisoners, directed troops and cannon", the sceptics nodded sadly, claiming that Hugo's "so-called republicanism went all the way back to last Thursday".

Hugo saw his mandate as "order, peace and reconciliation", the flaccid dream of the liberal who, blind to the realities of class power, winds up supporting in practice the status quo and thwarting his own reform agenda.

It took the advent to power of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in 1849 to cut the knot of Hugo's political contradictions. Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon I, was regarded as a clown for his comic-opera attempts at coups d'état, which earned him a spell of exile in England, where he practised his skills in class warfare by volunteering as a special constable to truncheon bothersome Chartists.

With a working class cowed by repression and beguiled by Bonaparte's left-humanitarian rhetoric, Bonaparte was voted into office after martial law was lifted. Hugo, also elected in 1849, became distressed by Bonaparte's repressive measures. Fearing for his life and liberty after Bonaparte staged a successful coup in 1851 to become dictator, Hugo fled into exile.

His 1852 pamphlet Napoleon the Little, smuggled into France, was a lively and savage exposure of Bonaparte's police state, although, as Marx wrote, it gave to Bonaparte an individual prominence that underplayed the social base of his political reign (the capitalist and middle classes, who feared revolution by a proletariat repeatedly betrayed by its bourgeois allies in past revolutions).

Hugo's polemical salvos echoed in France, a volley of satirical poems finding a receptive audience amongst the young: "We felt that simply by reading Hugo's works, we were contributing to some silent victory over tyranny", said schoolboy Emile Zola.

Hugo rejected Bonaparte's sham offer of amnesty (in which "the murderer forgave his victims", he wrote scornfully, vowing that "when freedom returns to France, so shall I"). Ever more radical, his renewed artistic flurry culminated in Les Misérables, published in 1862.

The novel is a magnificent marathon about the 1832 revolution, with its cry against injustice, poverty and repression and its display of monumental characters (Jean Valjean, the ex-convict turned humanitarian factory owner, hunted by Javert, the maniacally dedicated police inspector; Cosette, the orphan rescued by Valjean from the infernal Thenardier family; Marius, republican revolutionary and Hugo's alter ego).

Les Misérables provoked fury among reactionaries; Hugo counted 740 attacks on the novel in the Catholic press alone. It confirmed Hugo's status as a symbol of resistance to autocracy.

But the man was not universally trusted by the poor. Tainted by his past, his moderate politics were seen clearly enough by socialists like Paul Lafargue, Marx's son-in-law, who said Hugo "had been an upholder of bourgeois values and interests all along". Nevertheless, no criticism could dim Hugo's symbolic glow.

War with Prussia in 1870 ended Bonaparte's reign, and Hugo returned to a Paris under siege from the Prussians. He remained during the Paris Commune, the independent, democratic working-class government of Paris, which was established in March 1871 by a workers' insurrection against the moderate republicans.

The Paris Commune scared the wits out of the anti-socialist national government of France, which crushed it after two months. The reprisals in May reached historic heights of blood-letting: 40,000 killed, 43,000 arrested and 5000 sent to penal exile in New Caledonia. Hugo courageously defended the imprisoned and exiled communards.

With the prospect of socialist revolution again drowned for the moment in proletarian blood, the capitalist ruling class were able to relax their repressive methods and turn to other strategies of control, including nationalism. They attempted to turn the workers' hero, Victor Hugo (whose reputation had kept him precariously safe during the slaughter), into a de-radicalised emblem of French nationalism.

Hugo's birthday celebration in 1881 was a state affair with a six-hour procession of more than half a million people who turned out to honour their champion, but the suffragettes were relegated to the rear of the parade. After Hugo's death in 1885, his state funeral was also a gigantic populist spectacle, but the socialist clubs had their banners confiscated.

Thus Hugo went to his grave as he had lived his life, his formal ideology in parallel with the bourgeoisie but his art defiantly on the side of the poor and the wretched, the rejected and the rebels. Though more a reformist liberal than a socialist, Hugo went from this world condemning the evils of capitalism — "war, the scaffold, hate, royalty, frontiers and dogmas".

Although Robb seems to be more concerned with the arrival time of trains, the size of Hugo's sexual appetite and a cacophony of other biographical white noise, Victor Hugo's artistic greatness and humanitarianism manage to shine through, a still-flaming torch to today's radicals and fighters against oppression.