However artificial they may be, anniversaries have their uses. The bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens has probably encouraged a number of readers to re-examine a writer who (like Shakespeare) is accessible at many levels and as a major artist transcends any simple notions of “self-expression”. In a way that is hard for us to understand, Dickens occupied a special place in the culture of Victorian Britain, and perhaps as a result was the victim of a certain condescension on the part of eminent intellectuals of the time (like John Stewart Mill) whose education predisposed them to the view that popularity and profundity were incompatible.
Of all the writers of the nineteenth century in France, the one who most corresponds to this notion of the artist is Victor Hugo. The sheer scale of his achievement is daunting: his collected works comprise 15 volumes, each consisting of well over one thousand closely-printed pages – and this does not include his voluminous correspondence. He was a prolific poet, but also a novelist and dramatist. He was politically committed, and went into exile after the coup d’état that established the second empire, whose “Napoléon le Petit” as he dubbed him, was the butt of Hugo’s scornful satire.
He was also a committed and eloquent opponent of the death penalty (a short fictional piece of his on the subject, The Last Day of a Condemned Man, was greatly admired by Dostoyevsky, who often quoted it. At his death in 1885 some two million mourners joined the funeral procession. Like Dickens, however, his popularity brought disapproval from the literary establishment: when asked to name the greatest French poet, André Gide replied “Victor Hugo, hélas”.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Les Misérables, the best-known of Hugo’s novels, and this could encourage English readers to re-examine the novel (familiar because of film and musical adaptations) especially as there is now a fluent and above all complete translation, which I can thoroughly recommend (Les Misérables, translated by Julie Rose, Vintage Books, 2008).
Previous versions have excised large sections, on the grounds that they were not essential to the plot. However, to reduce Les Misérables to its plot is to misunderstand it. From that point of view the first 50 pages (concerning the Bishop of Digne, who helps the central character Jean Valjean) is a digression, but in fact that opening is crucial, as are other so-called digressions, such as the long account of the Battle of Waterloo, or the descriptions of the Paris sewers. In fact Les Misérables is perhaps best approached as a metaphysical novel, which examines the nature of fate and the limitations of human freedom by focusing attention on the hidden forces that drive human action. That is why the centre of interest is the “hell at the heart of civilization”, and its victims – principally the “misérables” of the title. At 1200 pages it requires some stamina to read it, but no more than War and Peace and much less than A la recherche du temps perdu ‒ and it is never boring.
To link all this with Paris I would like to recommend a visit to Victor Hugo’s house which is in the splendid Place des Vosges in the Marais district.
