Intellectual and moral growth is no less essential than material betterment. Knowledge is a viaticum; thought is a primary necessity; truth is as much a source of nourishment as corn. Argument lacking knowledge and wisdom grows thin. We must pity minds, no less than stomachs, that go unfilled. If there is anything more poignant than a body dying for lack of food it is a mind dying for lack of light.
All progress points in this direction, and the day is coming when we shall be amazed. As the state of the human race improves, its lowest layers will rise quite naturally above the zone of distress. The abolition of poverty will be achieved by a simple raising of the level. This is a blessed solution, and we shall be wrong to doubt it.
Certainly the influence of the past is very strong at the present time; it is reviving, and this rejuvenation of a corpse is surprising. It is on the march, and it seems to be winning – a dead thing yet a conqueror! It comes with its army of superstitions, its sword, which is despotism, its banner, which is ignorance, and in recent years it has won ten battles. It advances, laughs, and threatens; it is at our door. But we do not despair. Let us sell the field on which Hannibal is encamped. We who believe, what have we to fear? Ideas can no more flow backwards than can a river.
But those who do not welcome the future should consider this: in denying progress it is not the future that they condemn, but themselves. They are inoculating themselves with a fatal disease, the past. There is only one way of denying tomorrow, and that is to die.
The riddle will disclose its answer, the Sphinx will speak, the problem will be solved. The People, having burst their bonds in the eighteenth century, will complete their triumph in the nineteenth. Only a fool can doubt it. The coming achievement, the imminent achievement of universal well-being, is a phenomenon divinely preordained.
The immense pressure of events indicates that within a given time human society will be brought to its logical condition, that is to say, into equilibrium, which is the same as equity. A power comprising earth and Heaven emanates from humanity and directs it; it is a power that can work miracles, to which miraculous accomplishments are no more difficult than extraordinary deviations. Aided by the knowledge which comes from man, and the event which comes from another source, this power is undismayed by contradictions arising out of the problem it poses, which to the common mind seem impossibilities. It is no less adroit in producing solutions out of the conjunction of ideas than it is in producing lessons out of the juxtaposition of facts. One may expect anything of this mysterious power of progress which on one occasion caused East and West to meet in a sepulchre, and the Imams to treat with Bonaparte in the interior of the Great Pyramid.
Meanwhile there must be no pause, no hesitation, in the forward march of minds. Social philosophy is essentially the science of peace. Its purpose is, and its outcome should be, to dissipate anger by studying the reasons for antagonism. It scrutinizes and analyses, then reshapes. It proceeds by a process of reduction, eliminating the element of hatred.
That a society should be destroyed by the winds that assail human affairs is by no means unknown; history is filled with the shipwreck of nations and empires. The day comes when the hurricane, that unknown factor, bears custom, law, religion, everything away. One after another, the civilizations of India, the Chaldees, Persia, Assyria, and Egypt have perished, and we do not know why. We do not know the cause of these disasters. Could those societies have been saved? Were they at fault? Did they persist in some fatal vice which destroyed them? How great is the element of suicide in the death of a nation or a race? They are questions without answer. The condemned civilizations are lost in darkness. They were not seaworthy and so they sank and there is nothing more to be said. It is with a sort of horror that we peer into the depths of that sea which is the past, through the great waves of the centuries, at the huge wrecks which are Babylon, Nineveh, Tarsus, Thebes, and Rome. But if they are buried, we exist in the light of day. We are ignorant of the sickness of ancient civilizations, but we know the infirmities of our own. We are able everywhere to throw light upon it, to admire its beauties and lay bare its deformities. We probe it to see where it hurts, and when we have found the pain-centre our examination of the cause leads to the discovery of the remedy, Our civilization, the work of twenty centuries, is at once their monster and their prodigy; it is worth saving. And it will be saved. To doctor it is to do a great deal; to enlighten it is to do still more. All the work of modern social philosophy should bear this end in mind. To auscultate civilization is the supreme duty of the thinker of today.
Let us repeat it, this auscultation is encouraging; and it is with emphasis on the note of encouragement that we wish to end these few pages of austere digression from our sombre narrative. Beneath social mortality we are conscious of human imperishability. The earth does not the because there are lesions on its body, craters and volcanoes out of which it pours its pus. The sickness of a nation does not kill Man.
Nevertheless, those who study the health of society must now and then shake their heads. Even the strongest-minded and most clear-thinking must have their moments of misgiving. Will the future ever arrive? The question seems almost justified when one considers the shadows looming ahead, the sombre confrontation of egoists and outcasts. On the side of the egoists, prejudice – that darkness of a rich education – appetite that grows with intoxication, the bemusement of prosperity which blunts the sense, the fear of suffering which in some cases goes so far as to hate all sufferers, and un-shakeable complacency, the ego so inflated that it stifles the soul; and on the side of the outcasts, greed and envy, resentment at the happiness of others, the turmoil of the human animal in search of personal fulfilment, hearts filled with fog, misery, needs, and fatalism, and simple, impure ignorance.
Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold, lost as it is in the depths, small, isolated, a pin-point, brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it: nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds.
Book One: An Upright man
* A real person. He was one of the compilers of the Code Civil and Ministre de Cultes (religious affairs) under the Empire.
* Hugo’s claim to be descended from the Bishop, who was in fact a bishop in partibus, appears to be unfounded, cf. E. Biré, Victor Hugo avant 1830.
Book Three: In the Year 1817
* Hugo himself competed for this award, receiving an honourable mention.
* Even when Loyson soars one feels that his feet are on earth.’ The line is a parody, presumably by Hugo, of a line written by Antoine-Marin Lemierre before Loyson was born–’ Même quand l’oiseau marche on sent qu’il a des ailes.’ Charles Loyson, a young poet of great promise, died in 1820.
* ‘I come from Badajoz. Love calls to me. All my soul is in my eyes because you ate showing your legs.’
Book Five: Degradation
* The ex-criminal who became chief of police and on whose Memoirs, published in 1828, Balzac based the character of Vautrin.
Book Seven: The Champmathieu Affair
* This seems to be an invention of Hugo’s. There is no mention of a St Simplice, or Simplicitas, in the Acta Sanctorum.
Book One: Waterloo
* This has been questioned. It seems that Grouchy may have misread Napoleon’s dispatch.
* These words have been authenticated. Ney was executed on 7 October 1815, having been condemned to death by the French Chamber.
* Taken from the tenth Satire of Juvenal, referring specifically to Hannibal. Lit. ‘How much does the General weigh?’
* Sic vos non vobis mellificatis apes – thus do you make honey, but not for yourselves, O bees.
* Voltaire (in Le Pauvre Diable) is saying that he has more respect for the boys from Savoie ‘whose hands skilfully clear those long channels blocked by soot’ than for the so-called ‘enlightened spirits’ of the age.
&nb
sp; * Oudinot said: ‘The thing that angers and perturbs me about this business is that those people think they’ve been fighting a war.’
Book Five: Hunt in Darkness
* An imaginary quarter broadly based by Hugo on the Quartier Saint-Victor.
Book Six: Le Petit-Picpus
* The Order is a fictitious one, based on the Benedictine convent of the Perpetual Adoration of the Holy Sacrament in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève (in what is now the 5th Arrondissement) and the Couvent Saint-Michel. There was also a Couvent des Dames du Sacré-Cœur et de l’Adoration Perpétuelle in the Saint-Antoine quarter. Hugo derived the exhaustive details which follow from ladies who had been inmates of these establishments.
Book One: Paris in Microcosm
* Pierre-François Lacenaire (1800-1835), poet, thief, and murderer, made the subject of a play by Théophile Gautier. Dautun was executed for the murder of his brother in 1814.
†Roughly: ‘Ahoy, Titi, ahoy, ahoy, the coppers are coming, the law’s on its way, pick up your duds and bolt through the sewers’
Book Three: Grandfather and Grandson
* Roughly – ‘Tuck the bottom of your shirt into your breeches. Never let it be said that patriots showed the white flag.’
* The first of these dates, 5 September 1816, is that of the dissolution of the first Restoration parliament, the ‘Chambre introuvaile’. The second is that of the second return of Louis XVIII in 1815.
Book Five: The Virtues of Misfortune
* By Victor Hugo. Trs
Book One: A Few Pages of History
* ‘His pardon is granted, it only remains for me to secure it.’ The words may have been written to Hugo himself, who had sent the king a short poem pleading for Barbès. It is worth recalling that Hugo was living in exile when, long afterwards, he wrote this book.
Book Six: The Boy Gavroche
* Hugo himself added footnotes with translations in conventional French of these passages of argot, which are here reproduced as a sample of the cant. In the subsequent dialogue only his translations have been rendered into English. Trs
Book Eight: Enchantment and Despair
*How sadly I miss
My smooth, round arm,
My well-turned leg
And the time that is gone.
Book Ten: 5 June 1832
* Both were Finance Ministers – Terray from 1769 to 1774, Turgot from 1774 to 1776.
*‘Where talent is lacking, anger writes poetry’
†Professor Guyard remarks that Hugo was here thinking of the first Napoleon (Caesar) and himself. He was the Tacitus of Napoleon III, that modern Tiberius.
*Author of Thé Mysteries of Udolpho. Trs.
Book Fourteen: The Greatness of Despair
* The Gallic cock was the emblem of the July Monarchy.
Book One: War Within Four Walls
* A German visionary and follower of Hébert who went to the guillotine in 1794.
* This episode, described in Choses vues as having happened to Hugo himself in 1834, is here attributed to another person. The poet, Paul-Aimé Garnier, died in 1846.
* The Palais du Luxembourg, at that time, was the hall of assembly of the French Senate or House of Peers.
Book Nine: Supreme Shadow, Supreme Dawn
* Baron Thénard, a chemist, had been a member of the Académie des Sciences.
*The encounter between Gavroche and Montparnasse, Book Six, Chapter 2. Trs.
Appendix A Part two: Book seven: A Parenthesis
* Professor Guyard comments on this that Thales, the Ionic philosopher (636–546 BC), did at least live in solitude for four years. Trs.
Appendix B Part four: Book seven: Argot
* It should be noted, however, that ‘mac’ in Celtic means ‘son’. (Note by Victor Hugo.)
* La Sorbonne – the university of Paris. Tronche – commonplace slang, as it might be, ‘nut’. Trs.
* This is the theatre of the little archer.
Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774) Page 147
