Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  We need not speak of the exile in Patmos who mightily assailed the world as it was with a protest in the name of an ideal world, a huge, visionary satire, which cast upon Rome-that-was-Nineveh, Rome-that-was-Babylon, and Rome-that-was-Sodom the thunderous light of his Revelation. John on his rock is the Sphinx on its pedestal; he is beyond our understanding; he was a Jew and a Hebrew. But Tacitus, who wrote the Annals, was a Latin, and, better still, a Roman.

  Since the rule of a Nero is black, it must be blackly depicted. The work of the graving-tool alone would be too weak; the lines must be drawn with the acid of a prose that bites deep.

  Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant. The tyrant enforced upon the writer a condensation which is a gain in strength. The Ciceronian periods, scarcely adequate on the subject of Verres, would sound flowery applied to Caligula. Less roundness in the phrase produces more hitting power. Tacitus thinks with clenched fists. The honesty of a great spirit, fined down to justice and truth, is devastating.

  It may be remarked in passing that Tacitus was not the historical contemporary of Caesar. His field was the Tiberii. Caesar and Tacitus are successive phenomena whose clash seems to have been mysteriously prevented by the Dramatist who down the centuries decrees entrances and exits. Both were great, and God spared their greatness by not bringing them into collision.† The passer of judgement assailing Caesar might have hit too hard and dealt unjustly with him. God did not desire this. The great African and Spanish campaigns, the rooting out of the Silician pirates, the spread of civilization to Gaul, Britain, and Germany – those are the glories that crossed the Rubicon. There is a kind of delicacy in the divine justice, in its reluctance to let loose the redoubtable historian upon the illustrious usurper, preserving Caesar from Tacitus and allowing genius the benefit of extenuating circumstances.

  Certainly despotism is always despotism, even under a despot of genius. There is corruption under the most illustrious of tyrants, but moral depravity is even more abominable under an ignoble tyrant. In those reigns nothing masks the shame, and the pointers of morals, a Tacitus or a Juvenal, can more usefully castigate the vileness that is indefensible in the eyes of men.

  Rome had a fouler stench under Vitellius than under Sulla; under Claudius and Domitian there was a manner of baseness corresponding to the baseness of the tyrant. The institution of slavery is a direct product of despotism. A miasma arises from blunted consciences reflecting the mind of the master; public authorities are infamous, hearts shrunken, scruples dulled, souls like crawling slugs. So it was under Caracalla, under Commodus and Heliogabalus; but the Roman Senator under Caesar exhales only the rank odour proper to an eagle’s eyrie. Hence the seemingly late appearance of a Tacitus or a Juvenal: it is when the evil is manifest that its denouncer shows himself.

  But Juvenal and Tacitus, like Isaiah in the Old Testament and Dante in the Middle Ages, were individual men, whereas revolt and insurrection are the multitude, which is sometimes right and sometimes wrong.

  Most commonly revolt is born of material circumstances; but insurrection is always a moral phenomenon. Revolt is Masaniello, who led the Neapolitan insurgents in 1647; but insurrection is Spartacus. Insurrection is a thing of the spirit, revolt is a thing of the stomach. John Citizen grows angry, and not always without cause. Where it is a question of famine, the street uprising – that of Buzançais, for example, in 1847 – has a real and moving validity. Nevertheless, it remains no more than an uprising. Why? Because although it has good reason it is wrong in method. It is ill-directed although right, violent although morally powerful; it hits out at random, thunders on like a blinded elephant, crushing everything in its path and leaving behind it the bodies of old men, women, and children. It sheds the blood of innocents, without knowing why. The feeding of the people is a rightful objective, but their massacre is a wrongful means.

  All armed acts of protest, however warranted, even those of 10 August and 14 July, take the same course. First come the sound and fury, before the rightful cause emerges. Insurrection itself is no more than a street riot at the beginning, a stream that swells into a torrent. Ordinarily the stream flows into the ocean, which is revolution. But sometimes, pouring down from those mountain heights which dominate our moral horizon, justice, wisdom, reason, law, born of the pure source of idealism, after the long descent from rock to rock, after reflecting the heavens in the limpidity of its waters and being swollen by a hundred tributaries in its splendid show of triumph, the insurrection wastes itself eventually in some bourgeois quagmire, as if the river Rhine were to end in a marsh.

  All that belongs to the past; the future is another matter. It is the particular virtue of universal suffrage that it cuts the ground from under the feet of violent revolt and, by giving insurrection the vote, disarms it. The elimination of war – warfare in the streets or warfare across frontiers – is the fruit of progress. Whatever may be happening today, peace is the meaning of tomorrow.

  For the rest, whatever the difference may be between insurrection and revolt, the bourgeoisie are little aware of the distinction. For the bourgeois, both are sedition, rebellion pure and simple, a rebellion of the dog against its master which has to be restrained with chain and collar – until such time as the dog’s head, vaguely discernible in the shadows, is found to have grown into the head of a lion. Whereupon the bourgeois cries, ‘Long live the people!’

  Having thus defined our terms we must ask, how will history assess the events of June 1832? Were they a revolt or an insurrection?

  They were an insurrection.

  It may happen, in the course of our account of that formidable convulsion, that we shall use words such as ‘riot’ and ‘revolt’, but this is to describe the facts on the surface, without losing sight of the distinction between revolt in appearance and insurrection in principle.

  In its rapid explosion and melancholy suppression, the outburst of 1832 was possessed of such nobility that even those who regard it as no more than a riot cannot talk of it without respect. To them it is like a last echo of 1830. Over-heated imaginations, they maintain, do not cool in a day. Revolution does not come abruptly to an end. There must be a gradual aftermath, further rises and falls, before it settles down into a state of stability, like the lower slopes of a mountain merging into the plain. There are no Alps without their Jura, no Pyrenees without their Asturias.

  That pathetic crisis in contemporary history which is known to latter-day Paris as ‘the time of riots’ was undoubtedly characteristic of the tempestuous occasions in the tale of the present century. We must add a last word before beginning our account of it.

  The events to be related belong to that order of vivid and dramatic happenings which historians sometimes pass over for lack of time and space. But it is here, we must insist, that the reality of life is to be found, the stir and tremor of human beings. Small details are as it were the separate foliage of great events, lost to sight in the distant perspective of history. The so-called time of riots abounds in details such as these. And for reasons differing from those of history, the subsequent judicial investigations do not disclose everything, nor, perhaps, have they got to the bottom of everything. We propose to bring to light, amid the known and published details, things hitherto unknown, facts scattered by the forgetful-ness of some men and the death of others. Most of the actors in that great drama have vanished; they fell silent upon the morrow; but we can truly say of what we have to relate, ‘These are things which we saw.’ We shall change certain names, for it is the function of history to chronicle, not to denounce; but we shall depict the truth. Confined within the bounds of the book we are writing, w
e shall deal with only one aspect and one incident, certainly the least known, of the events of 5 and 6 June 1832; but we shall do it in such a manner as to enable the reader to catch a glimpse, behind the dark curtain that we shall raise, of the true face of that terrible occurrence.

  III

  A burial and a rebirth

  By the spring of 1832, although for three months cholera had chilled men’s spirits and in some sort damped their state of unrest, Paris was more than ripe for an upheaval. The town was like a loaded gun, needing only a spark to set it off. The spark, in June 1832, was the death of General Lamarque.

  Lamarque was a man of action and of high repute. Under the Empire and the Restoration he had possessed the two forms of courage required by those two epochs – courage on the battlefield and courage in the debating chamber. He was as eloquent as he had been brave: one sensed the swordthrust in his words. Like Foy, his predecessor, having staunchly borne the command he staunchly upheld the cause of liberty. He took his stand midway between the extremes of left and right, was esteemed by the people as a whole because he faced the hazards of the future, and by the crowd because he had loyally served the Emperor. With Counts Gérard and Brouet, he had been one of Napoleon’s marshals in petto – that is to say, his possible successor in the military command. The treaties of 1815 had outraged him like a personal affront. He detested Wellington with a forthright hatred that pleased the masses; and for seventeen years, taking little note of subsequent events, Lamarque had mourned the tragedy of Waterloo. On his deathbed he had pressed to his heart the sword bestowed on him by his fellow officers of the Hundred Days, and he had died with the word patrie on his lips, as Napoleon had died with the word armée.

  His death, which was not unexpected, had been feared by the people as a loss, and by the Government as a pretext. It was a day of national mourning, and, like all other bitterness, mourning may be transformed into revolt. That is what happened.

  On the eve of 5 June, the day fixed for Lamarque’s funeral, and on the morning of that day, the Faubourg Saint-Aintoine, through which the funeral procession was to pass, assumed a formidable aspect. The crowded network of streets became a hive of activity. Men were arming themselves with whatever they could lay hands on. There were joiners who snatched up the tools of their trade to ‘break down doors’, or converted them into daggers. One man in a state of bellicose fever had slept in his clothes for three nights. A carpenter named Lombier was accosted by a friend in the street who asked him where he was going. ‘I haven’t got a weapon,’ said Lombier… ‘So?’ … ‘I’m going to fetch a pair of dividers from my workshop’ … ‘What will you do with them?’ … ‘Blessed if I know’ … A man named Jacqueline, a carrier, accosted passing workmen with offers of a drink. Having stood them a glass of wine he asked, ‘Have you got a job?’ … ‘No’ … ‘Well, go to Filspierre, between the Montreuil and the Charonne barriers. There’s a job for you there.’ There were weapons and ammunition at Filspierre’s establishment. Certain recognized leaders ‘did the roundup’ – went from door to door collecting their followers. In cafés such as Barthélemy, near the Barrière du Trône, Capel, and the Petit-Chapeau, the drinkers inquired of one another, ‘Where are you hiding your pistol?’ … ‘Under my jacket’ … ‘And you?’ … ‘Under my shirt’ … There were whispering groups outside workshops in the Rue Traversière and in the courtyard of the Maison-Brûlée. Among the most ardent of the agitators was a certain Mavot, who never stayed more than a week in any one job, being dismissed because the masters found ‘one had to be constantly arguing with him’. He was killed the day after the funeral at the barricade in the Rue Ménilmontant. Pretot, who also died in the fighting, was his second-in-command; when asked what his aim was, he answered, ‘Insurrection.’ A group of workers gathered at the corner of the Rue de Bercy to await a man named Lemarin, the revolutionary agent for the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. Orders were issued almost publicly.

  So on 5 June, on a day of alternating rain and sunshine, General Lamarque’s funeral procession crossed Paris with full military ceremonial, somewhat swollen by special safety precautions. The escort consisted of two battalions of infantry with draped drums and reversed arms; ten thousand National Guards armed with sabres, and the National Guard batteries of artillery. The hearse was drawn by a team of young men. Invalided officers followed immediately behind it carrying branches of laurel Then came a motley, excited, numerous crowd, representatives of the Amis du Peuple, the Schools of Law and Medicine, refugees from all nations bearing Spanish, Italian, German and Polish flags and banners of all kinds, children waving bunches of greenery, stonemasons and carpenters who were at that moment on strike, printers, recognizable by their paper caps – marching in pairs and in threes, shouting, nearly all carrying cudgels and a few armed with sabres, disorderly yet infused with a single spirit, both a mob and an organized body. The different groups had their own leaders. A man armed with a pair of pistols which he made no effort to conceal seemed to be inspecting them, and the files parted to make room for him. The streets leading to the boulevards, trees, balconies, and windows, all were packed with men, women and children anxiously watching. An armed crowd was on the march while an apprehensive crowd looked on.

  Authority was also on the alert, with a hand on its sword-hilt. In the Place Louis XV were four mounted squadrons of carabineers, with muskets and musketoons loaded and full ammunition pouches, ready to go into action with trumpeters at their head; detachments of the Garde Municipale were drawn up in the streets of the Latin Quarter and in the Jardin des Plantes; there was a squadron of Dragoons in the Halle-aux-Vins; the 12th Light Infantry was divided between the Grève and the Bastille; the 6th Dragoons were on the Quai des Célestins and the courtyard of the Louvre was packed with artillery. The rest of the troops were held in reserve in barracks, to say nothing of the regiments on the outskirts of Paris. A disquieted government confronted the threatening multitude with 24,000 soldiers in the town itself and another 30,000 in the environs.

  Rumours ran up and down the procession. There was talk of a legitimist conspiracy and of the Duc de Reichstadt, whom God had marked for death at the moment when the crowd was electing him to Empire (he died a few weeks later). Some person who has never been identified announced that when the time came two suborned works foremen would open the doors of an arms factory to admit the mob. The prevailing expression among the majority of the bareheaded spectators was one of mingled ardour and bewilderment, but here and there, amid that multitude so seized with violent but not ignoble emotion, the faces were to be seen of authentic evildoers, base mouths that talked of loot. There are certain kinds of civil disturbances that stir up the mud at the bottom of the pond, and any experienced police force is aware of the fact.

  The procession moved slowly but feverishly along the boulevard from the mortuary chapel to the Bastille. The occasional showers of rain did nothing to deter the crowd. There were a number of incidents. While the coffin was borne round the Vendôme column stones were thrown at the Duc de Fitz-James, who was seen on a balcony with his hat on his head: the Gallic cock, emblem of the July Monarchy, was torn off a standard and trampled in the mud; a police sergeant was wounded with a swordthrust at the Porte Saint-Martin; a party from the École Polytechnique, the students of which had been confined to the school premises, broke out and joined the procession, to be greeted with cries of, ‘Long live the École Polytechnique, long live the Republic!’ At the Place de la Bastille long and impressive columns of interested spectators from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine added themselves to the procession, and signs of commotion became apparent. A man was heard to say to his neighbour, ‘You see that fellow with the red beard? He’s the one who’ll give the order to shoot.’ It seems that this red-bearded man, whose name was Quénisset, was some years later to be involved in another affair, the attempted assassination of the Dukes of Orléans and Aumale.

  The hearse passed the Bastille, and, following the canal, crossed the small bridge and came to the e
splanade of the Pont d’Austerlitz. Here it paused. A bird’s-eye view of the procession at this moment would have displayed a comet with its head at the esplanade and its tail extending over the Quai Bourdon and along the boulevard, across the Place de la Bastille and on to the Porte Saint-Martin. A circle formed round the hearse, and the vast crowd fell silent Lafayette delivered a farewell address to Lamarque. It was a moving and uplifting moment, with all heads bared and all hearts beating in sympathy. But suddenly a rider on horseback clad in black and carrying a red flag (some say that it was a pike surmounted by a red bonnet) appeared within the circle. Lafayette looked away, and General Exelmans left the procession.

  The red flag unloosed a tempest and vanished in it. From the Boulevard Bourdon to the Pont d’Austerlitz a clamour arose from the multitude that was like the rising of a tide. Two tremendous cries were raised – ‘Lamarque to the Panthéon!’ and ‘Lafayette to the Hôtel de Ville!’ Two parties of young men, amid the applause of the crowd, harnessed themselves and began to drag Lamarque in his hearse across the Pont d’Austerlitz and Lafayette in a fiacre along the Quai Morland.

  Meanwhile a detachment of the Cavalerie Municipale had appeared on the left bank and were barring the exit from the bridge, while on the right bank a detachment of dragoons moved along the Quai Morland. The young men dragging Lafayette’s fiacre saw these as they debouched on to the quai and cried, ‘Watch out! Dragoons!’ The dragoons advanced grimly and purposefully at a walking pace and in silence, sabres sheathed, pistols in their holsters, musketoons in their rests.

  Two hundred paces from the little bridge they halted. Lafayette’s fiacre was moving towards them. They parted their ranks to let him through and then closed up behind him. At that moment the dragoons and the crowd were in direct contact. The women ran away in terror.

  What happened in that fateful minute? No one will ever know. It was the dark moment when two clouds converge. Some people say that a bugle-call sounding the charge was heard from the direction of the Arsenal, others that a youth attacked one of the dragoons with a dagger. What is certain is that suddenly three shots were fired. The first killed the squadron commander, Cholet; the second killed a deaf old woman in the act of shutting her window in the Rue Coutrescarpe and the third singed an officer’s epaulette. A woman cried, ‘They’re starting too soon!’, and suddenly there appeared at the other end of the Quai Morland another squadron of dragoons which had been held in reserve. They galloped with bared sabres down the Rue Bassompierre and the Boulevard Bourdon, clearing a path in front of them.