His reference to de Maistre appears in book 1, chapter 4, of Les misérables, in that scene where Monsignor Myriel contemplates the guillotine:
He who sees it shivers with the most mysterious of shivers . . . The scaffold is a vision . . . It seems as though it were a being, possessed of I know not what sombre initiative; one would say that this piece of carpenter’s work saw, that this machine heard, that this mechanism understood, that this wood, this iron, and these cords were possessed of will . . . The scaffold is the accomplice of the executioner; it devours, it eats flesh, it drinks blood . . . a spectre which seems to live with a horrible vitality composed of all the death which it has inflicted. (translated by Isabel F. Hapgood)
But in Ninety-three the guillotine, even though it will kill the Revolution’s purest hero, passes from the side of death to that of life and, in any event, stands as a symbol for the future against the darkest symbols of the past. It is now erected in front of La Tourgue, the stronghold where Lantenac is besieged. Fifteen hundred years of feudal sin are condensed in it—a hard knot to untie. The guillotine stands before it with the purity of a blade that will slice through that knot—it was not created out of nothing, it has been drenched by the blood spilled over fifteen centuries on that same land, and it rises up from the ground, an unknown vindicator, and says to the tower, “I am thy daughter.” And the tower realizes that its end is near. This exchange is not new for Hugo: it is reminiscent of Frollo in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, when he compares the printed book to the towers and gargoyles of the cathedral: “Ceci tuera cela.” Though the guillotine is still a monster, in Ninety-three it takes the side of the future.
What is a ferocious, death-giving monster that promises a better life? An oxymoron. Victor Brombert has observed how many oxymorons populate this novel: rapacious angel, intimate discord, colossal sweetness, odiously obliging and terrible serenity, venerable innocents, frightening wretches, hell in the midst of dawn, and Lantenac himself, who at one point shifts from being an infernal Satan to a celestial Lucifer.5 The oxymoron is “a rhetorical microcosm that affirms the substantially antithetical nature of the world,” though Brombert emphasizes that the antitheses are ultimately resolved into a higher order. Ninety-three tells the story of a virtuous crime, a healing act of violence whose deep purposes must be understood for its events to be justified. Ninety-three is not the story of what a few men did, but the story of what history forced those men to do, irrespective of their wishes, often undermined by contradictions. And the idea of a purpose to the story justifies even that force—the Vendée—which ostensibly seeks to move against it.
This takes us back to defining the relationship between the novel’s minor actors and the actants. Each individual and each object, from Marat to the guillotine, represent not themselves but the great forces that are the actual protagonists of the novel. Hugo presents himself here as the authorized interpreter of divine will, and seeks to justify each story he tells from the point of view of God.
Whatever Hugo’s God might be, he is always present in his narrative to explain the bloody enigmas of history. Perhaps Hugo would never have written that everything real is rational, but he would have agreed that everything ideal is rational. In any event, there is always a Hegelian tone in acknowledging that history marches toward its own ends, over the heads of the actors condemned to embody its purposes. Just think of the Beethovenian description of the Battle of Waterloo in Les misérables. Unlike Stendhal, who describes the battle through the eyes of Fabrizio, who is in the midst of it and doesn’t understand what is going on, Hugo describes the battle through the eyes of God—he watches it from above.
He knows that if Napoleon had known there was a cliff beyond the crest of the Mont-Saint-Jean plateau (but his guide had failed to tell him about it), Milhaud’s cuirassiers would not have been destroyed by the English army; that if the shepherd boy who was Bülow’s guide had suggested a different route, the Prussian army would not have arrived in time to decide the fate of the battle. But what does it matter, and what is the importance of the miscalculations of Napoleon (actor), the folly of Grouchy (actor)—who could have returned but didn’t—or the ruses, if such they were, of the actor Wellington, seeing that Hugo describes Waterloo as a first-rate victory by a second-rate leader?
This vertigo, this terror, this downfall into ruin of the loftiest bravery which ever astounded history,—is that causeless? No. The shadow of an enormous right hand is projected athwart Waterloo . . . The disappearance of the great man was necessary to the advent of the great century. Someone, a person to whom one replies not, took the responsibility on himself. The panic of heroes can be explained. In the battle of Waterloo there is something more than a cloud, there is something of the meteor. God has passed by. (volume 2, book 1, chapter 13)
And God also passes through the Vendée and the Convention, gradually putting on the actorial guise of wild, ferocious peasants, of aristocrats converted to égalité, of heroes gloomy and nocturnal like Cimourdain, or radiant like Gauvain. Hugo sees the Vendée rationally, as a mistake. But since this mistake was deliberate and kept under control by a providential (or fatal) plan, he is fascinated by the Vendée, and turns it into an epic. He is skeptical, sarcastic, petty in describing the men who populate the Convention, but he sees them as giants, or rather, he gives us a gigantic picture of the Convention.
This is why he isn’t worried that his actors are psychologically rigid and bound up in their destiny. He isn’t worried that the cold frenzies of Lantenac, the harshness of Cimourdain, or the hot passionate sweetness of his Homeric Gauvain (Achilles? Hector?) are improbable. Hugo wants us to feel through them the Great Forces at play.
He wants to tell us a story about excess, and about excess that is so inexplicable that it can only be described through oxymorons. What style do you use to talk about one excess, about many excesses? An excessive style. That is exactly the style that Hugo adopts.
We have seen in The Man Who Laughs that one of the manifestations of excess is the vertiginous reversal in events and points of view. It is difficult to explain this technique, of which Hugo is the master. He knows that the rules of tragedy require what the French call a coup de théâtre. In classical tragedy, one is generally more than enough: Oedipus discovers he has killed his father and slept with his mother—what more do you want? End of the tragic action, and catharsis—if you’re able to swallow it.
But for Hugo this is not enough (doesn’t he believe he is Victor Hugo, after all?). Let us see what happens in Ninety-three. The corvette Claymore is trying to break through the republican naval blockade along the Brittany coast to bring ashore Lantenac, the future head of the Vendée revolt. It looks like a freighter from the outside but is armed with thirty guns. And the drama begins—Hugo, lest we fail to realize its magnitude, announces that “nothing more terrible could have happened.” A twenty-four-pounder cannon breaks loose. In a ship that plunges and pitches at the mercy of a rough sea, a cannon rolling from port to starboard is worse than enemy fire.
It hurtles about, like one of its cannonballs, crashing into the walls, opening up leaks. No one can stop it. And the ship is destined to sink. It is a supernatural beast, Hugo warns us, fearing that we haven’t yet understood, and to avoid any misunderstanding, he describes the catastrophic event for five pages. Until one brave gunner, playing with the iron beast like a matador with a bull, takes up the challenge, throws himself before it, risking his life, dodges it, provokes it, attacks it once again, and is about to be crushed by it when Lantenac throws a bale of counterfeit banknotes between its wheels, stopping it for a moment, allowing the sailor to plunge an iron bar between the spokes of its hind wheels, to lift up the monster, turn it over, and restore it to its mineral immobility. The crew rejoices. The sailor thanks Lantenac for having saved his life. Shortly afterward,
