Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  What do they so urgently look for, the wearied devotions, the tired heroisms, the sated ambitions, the fortunes gained? They want a breathing-spell, and they have one. They take hold of peace tranquillity, and leisure, and are content. Yet certain facts emerge and call for notice by hammering on the door. They are facts born of revolution and war, living and breathing facts entitled to become part of the fabric of society, and which do so. But for the most part they are the under-officers and outriders whose business is to prepare lodgings for the commanders.

  It is now that the political philosophers appear on the scene, while the weary demand rest and new-found facts demand guarantees. Guarantees are to facts what rest is to men.

  That is what England demanded of the Stuarts after the Protector and what France demanded of the Bourbons after the Empire.

  These guarantees are a necessity of the time. They have to be conceded. The princes ‘offer’, but it is the force of events that gives. This is a profound truth, necessary to know, which the Stuarts did not appreciate in 1660 and of which the Bourbons had not an inkling in 1814.

  The predestined family which returned to France after the collapse of Napoleon was sufficiently naïve to believe that it was giving, and that what it had given it might take back; that the House of Bourbon possessed divine rights and that France possessed none; that the political concessions granted in the charter of Louis XVIII were no more than blossomings of the Divine Right, plucked by the House of Bourbon and graciously bestowed on the people until such time as it might please the king to reclaim them. But its very reluctance to concede them should have warned the House of Bourbon that the gift was not its own.

  The Royal House was acrimonious in the nineteenth century. It pulled a wry face at every advance of the nation. To use a trivial word – that is to say, a commonplace and true one – it jibbed. The people saw this.

  The Bourbons believed that they were strong because the Empire had been swept away before them like the changing of a stage-set. They did not perceive that they had been brought back in the same fashion. They did not see that they too were in the hands that had removed Napoleon.

  They believed they had roots because they represented the past. They were wrong. They were a part of the past, but the whole past was France. The roots of French society were not in the Bourbons but in the nation. Those deep and vigorous roots were not the rights of a single family but the history of a people. They were everywhere, except under the throne.

  The House of Bourbon was the illustrious and blood-stained core of France’s history, but it was no longer the principal element in her destiny or the essential basis of her policies. The Bourbons were dispensable, they had been dispensed with for twenty-two years, the continuity had been broken. These were things they did not realize. How could they be expected to realize them, maintaining as they did that the events of 9 Thermidor had occurred in the reign of Louis XVII, and Marengo in the reign of Louis XVIII? Never since the beginning of history have princes been so blind in the face of facts, so unaware of the portion of Divine Authority which those facts embraced and enacted. Never has the earthly pretension which is called the right of kings so flatly denied the Right which comes from above.

  It was a fatal blunder which prompted this family to lay hands on the guarantees ‘offered’ in 1814 – concessions, as they described them. A sad business. Those so-called concessions were our conquests, and what they called our encroachments were our rights.

  When it thought the time was ripe, the Restoration, believing itself victorious over Bonaparte and enrooted in the nation – that is to say, believing itself to be both strong and deep – abruptly showed its face and chanced its arm. On a July morning it confronted France and, raising its voice, revoked both collective and individual rights, the sovereignty of the nation and the liberty of the citizen. In other words it denied to the nation that which made the nation, and to the citizen that which made the citizen.

  This was the essence of those famous Acts which are called the Ordonnances de juillet.

  The Restoration fell.

  It was right that it should fall. Nevertheless it must be said that it had not been absolutely hostile to all forms of progress. Great things had been accomplished while the regime looked on.

  Under the Restoration the nation had grown accustomed to calm discussion, which had not happened under the Republic, and to greatness in peace, which had not happened under the Empire. A free and strong France had provided a heartening example for the peoples of Europe. Revolution had spoken under Robespierre, and guns had spoken under Bonaparte: it was under Louis XVIII and Charles X that intellect made itself heard. The winds died down and the torch was re-lighted. The pure light of the spirit could be seen trembling on the serene heights, a glowing spectacle of use and delight. During a period of fifteen years great principles, long-familiar to the philosopher but novel to the statesman, were seen to be at work in peace and in the light of day: equality before the law, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech and of the press, careers open to all talents. So it was until 1830. The Bourbons were an instrument of civilization which broke in the hands of Providence.

  The fall of the Bourbons was clothed with greatness, not on their side but on the side of the nation. They abandoned the throne solemnly but without authority. This descent into oblivion was not one of those grave occasions which linger as a sombre passage of history; it was enriched neither with the spectral calm of Charles I nor with the eagle-cry of Napoleon. They went away, and that was all. In putting off the crown they retained no lustre. They were dignified but not august, and in some degree they lacked the majesty of their misfortune. Charles X, causing a round table to be sawn square during the voyage from Cherbourg, seemed more concerned with the affront to etiquette than with the crumbling of the monarchy. This narrowness was saddening to the devoted men who loved their persons and the serious men who honoured their race. The people, on the other hand, were admirable. The nation, assailed with armed force by a sort of royal insurrection, was so conscious of its strength that it felt no anger. It defended its rights and, acting with restraint, put things in their proper place (the government within the law, the Bourbons, alas, in exile) and there it stopped. It removed the elderly king, Charles X, from under the canopy which had sheltered Louis XIV, and set him gently upon earth. It laid no hand on the royal persons except with sorrow and precaution. This was not the work of one man or of several men; it was the work of France, the whole of France; victorious France flushed with her victory who yet seemed to recall the words spoken by William of Vair after the Day of the Barricades in 1588: ‘It is easy for those accustomed to hang upon the favours of the great, hopping, like birds on a tree, from evil to good fortune, to be bold in defying their prince in his adversity; but for myself, the fortunes of my kings will always be deserving of reverence, and especially in their affliction.’

  The Bourbons took with them respect but not regret. As we have said, their misfortune was greater than themselves. They vanished from the scene.

  The July Revolution at once found friends and enemies throughout the world. The former greeted it with enthusiasm and rejoicing, the latter averted their gaze, each according to his nature. The princes of Europe, like owls in the dawn, at first shut their eyes in wounded amazement, and opened them only to utter threats. Their fear was understandable, their wrath excusable. That strange revolution had been scarcely a conflict; it had not even done royalty the honour of treating it as an enemy and shedding its blood. In the eyes of despotism, always anxious for liberty to defame itself by its own acts, the grave defect of the July Revolution was that it was both formidable and gentle. And so nothing could be attempted or plotted against it. Even those who were most outraged, most wrathful, and most apprehensive, were obliged to salute it. However great our egotism and our anger, a mysterious respect is engendered by events in which we feel the working of a power higher than man.

  The July Revolution was the triumph of Right over Fact, a th
ing of splendour. Right overthrowing the accepted Fact. Hence the brilliance of the July Revolution, and its clemency. Right triumphant has no need of violence. Right is justice and truth.

  It is the quality of Right that it remains eternally beautiful and unsullied. However necessary Fact may appear to be, however acquiesced in at a given time, if it exists as Fact alone, embodying too little Right or none at all, it must inevitably, with the passing of time, become distorted and unnatural, even monstrous. If we wish to measure the degree of ugliness by which Fact can be overtaken, seen in the perspective of centuries, we have only to consider Machiavelli. Machiavelli was not an evil genius, a demon, or a wretched and cowardly writer; he was simply Fact. And not merely Italian Fact but European Fact, sixteenth-century Fact. Nevertheless he appears hideous, and is so, in the light of nineteenth-century morality.

  The conflict between Right and Fact goes back to the dawn of human society. To bring it to an end, uniting the pure thought with human reality, peacefully causing Right to pervade Fact and Fact to be embedded in Right, this is the task of wise men.

  II

  Badly stitched

  But the work of the wise is one thing and the work of the merely clever is another.

  The revolution of 1830 soon came to a stop.

  Directly a revolution has run aground the clever tear its wreckage apart.

  The clever, in our century, have chosen to designate themselves statesmen, so much so that the word has come into common use. But we have to remember that where there is only cleverness there is necessarily narrowness. To say, ‘the clever ones’ is to say, ‘the mediocrities’; and in the same way to talk of ‘statesmen’ is sometimes to talk of betrayers.

  If we are to believe the clever ones, revolutions such as the July Revolution are like severed arteries requiring instant ligature. Rights too loudly proclaimed become unsettling; and so, once righteousness has prevailed, the State must be strengthened. Liberty being safeguarded, power must be consolidated. Thus far the Wise do not quarrel with the Clever, but they begin to have misgivings. Two questions arise. In the first place, what is power? And secondly, where does it come from? The clever ones do not seem to hear these murmurs and continue their operations.

  According to these politicians, who are apt at dissembling convenient myths under the guise of necessity, the first thing a nation needs after a revolution, if that nation forms part of a monarchic continent, is a ruling dynasty. Only then, they maintain, can peace be restored after a revolution – that is to say, time for the wounds to heal and the house to be repaired. The dynasty hides the scaffolding and affords cover for the ambulance.

  But it is not always easy to create a dynasty. At a pinch any man of genius or even any soldier of fortune may be made into a king. Bonaparte is an instance of the first, and an instance of the second is Iturbide, the Mexican general who was proclaimed emperor in 1821, deposed in 1823, and shot the following year. But not any family can be established as a dynasty. For this some depth of ancestry is needed: the wrinkles of centuries cannot be improvised.

  If we consider the matter from the point of view of a ‘statesman’ (making, of course, all due reservations), what are the characteristics of the king who is thrown up by a revolution? He may be, and it is desirable that he should be, himself a revolutionary – that is to say, a man who has played a part in the revolution and in so doing has committed or distinguished himself; a man who has himself wielded the axe or the sword.

  But what are the characteristics needful for a dynasty? It must represent the nation in the sense that it is revolutionary at one remove, not from having committed any positive act, but from its acceptance of the idea. It must be informed with the past and thus historic, and also with the future and thus sympathetic.

  This explains why the first revolutions were content to find a man, a Cromwell or a Napoleon, and why succeeding revolutions were obliged to find a family, a House of Brunswick or a House of Orléans. Royal houses are something like those Indian fig-trees whose branches droop down to the earth, take root and themselves become fig-trees: every branch may grow into a dynasty – provided always that it reaches down to the people.

  Such is the theory of the clever ones.

  So the great art is this: to endow success with something of the aspect of disaster, so that those who profit by it are also alarmed by it; to season advance with misgivings, widen the curve of transition to the point of slowing down progress, denounce and decry extremism, cut corners and finger-nails, cushion the triumph, damp down the assertion of rights, swaddle the giant mass of the people in blankets and put it hastily to bed, subject the superabundance of health to a restricted diet, treat Hercules like a convalescent, fetter principle with expediency, slake the thirst for the ideal with a soothing tisane and, in a word, put a screen round revolution to ensure that it does not succeed too well.

  This was the theory applied in France in 1830, having been applied in England in 1688.

  1830 was a revolution arrested in mid-course, halfway to achieving real progress, a mock-assertion of rights. But logic ignores the more-or-less as absolutely as the sun ignores candlelight.

  And who is it who checks revolutions in mid-course? It is the bourgeoisie.

  Why? Because the bourgeoisie represent satisfied demands. Yesterday there was appetite; today there is abundance; tomorrow there will be surfeit. The phenomenon of 1814 after Napoleon was repeated in 1830 after Charles X.

  The attempt has been made, mistakenly, to treat the bourgeoisie as though they were a class. They are simply the satisfied section of the populace. The bourgeois is the man who now has leisure to take his ease; but an armchair is not a caste. By being in too much of a hurry to sit back, one may hinder the progress of the whole human race. This has often been the failing of the bourgeoisie. But they cannot be regarded as a class because of this failing. Self-interest is not confined to any one division of the social order.

  To be just even to self-interest, the state of affairs aspired to after the shock of 1830 by that part of the nation known as the bourgeoisie was not one of total inertia, which is composed of indifference and indolence and contains an element of shame; it was not a state of slumber, presupposing forgetfulness, a world lost in dreams; it was simply a halt.

  The word ‘halt’ has a twofold, almost contradictory meaning. An army on the march, that is to say, in movement, is ordered to halt, that is to say, to rest. The halt is to enable it to recover its energies. It is a state of armed, open-eyed rest, guarded by sentinels, a pause between the battle of yesterday and the battle of tomorrow. It is an in-between time, such as the period between 1830 and 1848, and for the word ‘battle’ we may substitute the word ‘progress’.

  So the bourgeoisie, like the statesmen, had need of a man who embodied the word ‘halt’. A combination of ‘although’ and ‘because’. A composite individual signifying both revolution and stability – in other words, affirming the present by formally reconciling the past with the future. And the man was there. He was Louis-Philippe of Orléans.

  The vote of 221 deputies made Louis-Philippe king. Lafayette presided, extolling ‘the best of republics’. The Paris Hôtel de Ville replaced Rheims Cathedral. This substitution of a half-throne for an entire throne was ‘the achievement of 1830’.

  When the clever ones had finished their work, the huge weakness of their solution became apparent. It had all been done without regard to the basic rights of the people. Absolute right cried out in protest; but then, an ominous thing, it withdrew into the shadows.

  III

  Louis-Philippe

  Revolutions have vigorous arms and shrewd hands; they deal heavy blows but choose well. Even when unfinished, bastardized and doctored, reduced to the state of minor revolutions, like that of 1830, they still nearly always retain sufficient redeeming sanity not to come wholly to grief. A revolution is never an abdication.

  But we must not overdo our praises; revolutions can go wrong, and grave mistakes have been made.


  To return to 1830, it started on the right lines. In the establishment which restored order after the truncated revolution, the king himself was worth more than the institution of royalty. Louis-Philippe was an exceptional man.

  The son of a father for whom history will surely find excuses, he was as deserving of esteem as his father was of blame. He was endowed with all the private and many of the public virtues. He was careful of his health, his fortune, his person and his personal affairs, conscious of the cost of a minute but not always of the price of a year. He was sober, steadfast, peaceable and patient, a friendly man and a good prince who slept only with his wife and kept lackeys in his palace whose business it was to display the conjugal bed to visitors, a necessary precaution in view of the flagrant illegitimacies that had occurred in the senior branch of the family. He knew every European language and also, which is less common, the language of every sectional interest, and spoke them all. An admirable representative of the ‘middle class’, he nevertheless rose above it and was in all respects superior to it, having the good sense, while very conscious of the royal blood in his veins, to value himself at his true worth, and very particular in the matter of his descent, declaring himself to be an Orléans and not a Bourbon. He was the loftiest of princes in the days when he was no more than a Serene Highness but became a franc bourgeois on the day he assumed the title of Majesty. Flowery of speech in public but concise in private; reportedly parsimonious, but this was not proved, and in fact he was one of those prudent persons who easily grow lavish where fancy or duty is involved; well-read but not very appreciative of literature; a gentleman but not a cavalier, simple, calm and strong-minded, adored by his family and his household; a fascinating talker; a statesman without illusions, inwardly cold, dominated by immediate necessity and always ruling by expediency, incapable of rancour or of gratitude, ruthless in exercising superiority over mediocrity, clever at frustrating by parliamentary majorities those mysterious undercurrents of opinion that threaten thrones. He was expansive and sometimes rash in his expansiveness, but remarkably adroit in his rashness; fertile in expedients, in postures and disguises, causing France to go in awe of Europe and Europe to go in awe of France. He undoubtedly loved his country but still preferred his family. He prized rulership more than authority, and authority more than dignity: an attitude having the serious drawback, being intent upon success, that it admits of deception and does not absolutely exclude baseness, but which has the advantage of preserving politics from violent reversals, the State from disruption and society from disaster. He was meticulous, correct, watchful, shrewd and indefatigable, sometimes contradicting and capable of repudiating himself. He dealt boldly with Austria at Ancona and stubbornly with England in Spain, bombarded Antwerp and compensated Pritchard. He sang the ‘Marseillaise’ with conviction. He was impervious to depression or lassitude, had no taste for beauty or idealism, no tendency to reckless generosity, utopianism, daydreaming, anger, personal vanity or fear. Indeed, he displayed every form of personal courage, as a general at Valmy and a common soldier at Jemmapes; he emerged smiling from eight attempts at regicide, had the fortitude of a grenadier and the moral courage of a philosopher. Nothing dismayed him except the possibility of a European collapse, and he had no fondness for major political adventures, being always ready to risk his life but never his work. He concealed his aims with the use of persuasion, seeking to be obeyed as a man of reason rather than as a king. He was observant but without intuition, little concerned with sensibilities but having a knowledge of men - that is to say, needing to see for himself in order to judge. He possessed a ready and penetrating good sense, practical wisdom, fluency of speech and a prodigious memory, upon which he constantly drew, in this respect resembling Caesar, Alexander, and Napoleon. He knew facts, details, dates and proper names, but ignored tendencies, passions, the diverse genius of the masses, the buried aspirations and hidden turbulence of souls – in a word, everything that may be termed the sub-conscious. He was accepted on the surface, but had little contact with the depths of France, maintaining his position by adroitness, governing too much and ruling too little, always his own prime-minister, excelling in the use of trivialities as an obstruction to the growth of great ideas. Mingled with his genuinely creative talent for civilization, order, and organization there was the spirit of pettifogging chicanery. The founder and advocate of a dynasty, he had in him something of a Charlemagne and something of an attorney. In short, as a lofty and original figure, a prince able to assert himself despite the misgivings of France, and to achieve power despite the jealousy of Europe, Louis-Philippe might be classed among the great men of his century and take his place among the great rulers of history if he had cared a little more for glory and had possessed as much feeling for grandeur as he had for expediency.