I would like man to be made according to Euclid, says Cimourdain, and Gauvain replies that he would like man to be made according to Homer. The whole novel suggests to us (in stylistic terms) that Hugo would have taken Homer’s part, which is why he fails to make us loathe his Homeric Vendée, but in ideological terms this Homer has tried to tell us that to build the future it is necessary to follow the straight line of the guillotine.
This is the story told in the novel, the story of Hugo’s stylistic choices, the story of one interpretation (my own—and others are possible). What can we say? That historians have identified many anachronisms and unacceptable liberties in this book? Does that matter? Hugo wasn’t interested in writing history; he wanted us to feel the panting breath, the often fetid roar of history. Did he want to deceive us, like Marx, who claimed that Hugo was more interested in the moral conflicts of individual people than in understanding the class struggle?6 If anything, it was the opposite, and he said so.
Hugo carves his psychological portraits with a hatchet to make us feel the forces in conflict—and if it wasn’t class conflict that he was thinking about, it was certainly (as Lukács recognized) the ideals of a “revolutionary democracy that point the way ahead”—though Lukács then tempered his judgment with the stern warning that “the real human and historical conflicts of the aristocrat and the priest who sided with the Revolution become, for each of them, artificial conflicts of duty in the context of this abstract humanism.”7 Heavens above, it has even been suggested that Hugo was not interested in class but in the People and in God. It was typical of Lukács’s mental rigidity that he failed to understand that Hugo could not be Lenin (if anything, Lenin was a Cimourdain who doesn’t kill himself) and that indeed the tragic and Romantic magic of Ninety-three lies in the interplay between the reasons of history and those of various moral individuals, measuring the constant divide between politics and utopia.
But I believe there is no better book for understanding the underlying motives of the Revolution and of its enemy, the Vendée, which is an ideological force even today for so many nostalgics of la France profonde. To tell the story of two excesses, Hugo (faithful to his poetics) could choose only the technique of excess, taken from excess. Only by accepting this convention is it possible to understand the Convention, becoming the Model Reader that Hugo had hoped to reach—made not with flimsy cardboard cutouts but with an opus incertum of rough-hewn boulders. If we enter into the spirit that animates this novel, we may come out dry-eyed but with our minds in tumult. Hélas!
[Previously unpublished in this form, this essay summarizes various articles and lectures.]
The end
