Creators by Paul M. Johnson

Author:Paul M. Johnson [Paul Johnson]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780061740954
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2006-06-15T16:00:00+00:00

Gloire à notre France éternelle!

Gloire à ceux qui sont mort pour elle!

And much else in the same vein.

Two years later Hugo published his travel book Le Rhin, whose theme was: “Give back to France what God gave her”—the Rhine frontier. The book presents France and Germany as the essence of Europe: “Germany is the heart, France the head.” If the two powers act together, with France doing the directing, they can beat Britain and Russia out of Europe. But the “Rhine frontier” was the essential preliminary to this alliance of head and heart. Hugo said it would be democratic, too: the Rhinelanders, although German-speaking, wanted to live under “the finest, the most noble, the most popular flag in the world, the Tricouleur.” They would soon adopt French, the true language of culture, the speaking mind—a theme he reiterated throughout his career. Thus: “How does one recognize intelligence in a nation? By its ability to speak French.”5 Hugo always, and often, presented France as a nation that had the destiny of ruling others. It was une nation conquérante.6 In a poem written in 1830 he presents Paris as the “mother city of Europe,” a “spider in whose huge web entire nations are caught.”7 He presented French nationalism, of the strident kind Napoleon Bonaparte had personified, as an unmixed boon to the world.8 What he did not see was that nationalism inevitably spread to other countries, such as Italy and Germany, and as such worked to France’s disadvantage. In the nineteenth century, the populations of both a united Germany and a united Italy each grew by 250 percent, whereas France grew by a mere 45 percent. But even in 1871, when the disastrous consequences of France’s ignition of the nationalist bonfire were apparent, and France’s own relative weakness was fully revealed, Hugo continued to pour forth nationalist froth. He told the National Assembly, of which he was a member, when it debated the peace terms laid down by the victorious Bismarck, that the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine would “soon be recaptured,” adding, in a loud voice: “Is that all? No. France will again seize Trèves, Mainz, Coblenz, Cologne—the entire left bank of the Rhine!” This empty bombast was received in embarrassed silence.9 Hugo’s views on politics and international affairs appear here and there in his writings, often at considerable length. But it is impossible to point to any passages that show unusual knowledge, genuine insight, or even routine intelligence. All are vacuous expressions of popular platitudes—the republic, the people, France, destiny, and so forth. There is no evidence that Hugo ever thought deeply about these issues.

Indeed, had he thought deeply, he would have become uncomfortably aware of the logical insecurity of his own position. He was both the beneficiary and the victim of his own double standard. In youth a legitimist, he became a republican in 1830, briefly, then an Orléanist; but when Napoleon’s ashes were returned to France, all the veterans of the wars turned out in the streets

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