The Royalist revolt is sublime, as must be the picture of the Convention, the very essence of the Revolution. We reach the third book, titled “The Convention.” The first three chapters describe the hall, and already in these first seven pages the abundance of description leaves the reader dazed and deprived of all feeling of space. But it then continues—for another fifteen pages—with the list of the members of the Convention, more or less as follows:
On the right, the Gironde, a legion of thinkers; on the left the Mountain, a group of athletes. On one side, Buissot, who received the keys of the Bastille; Barbaroux, whom the Marseilles troops obeyed; Kervélegan, who had the battalion of Brest garrisoned in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau, under his hand; Gersonné, who established the supremacy of representatives over generals . . . Sillery, the humpback of the Right, as Couthon was the cripple of the Left. Lause-Duperret, who when called a “rascal” by a journalist, invited him to dine with him, saying: “I know that rascal means simply a man who does not think as we do”; Rabaut-Saint-Étienne, who commenced his Almanac of 1790 with these words: “The revolution is ended” . . . Vigée, who had the title of grenadier in the second battalion of Mayenne-et-Loire, who, when threatened by the public tribunes, cried out: “I ask that at the first murmur of the public tribunes, we withdraw and march to Versailles, sword in hand!”; Buzot, destined to die of hunger; Valazé, victim of his own dagger; Condorcet, who was to die at Bourg-la-Reine, changed to Bourg-Égalité, denounced by the Horace he carried in his pocket; Pétion, whose fate was to be worshiped by the multitude in 1792, and devoured by the wolves in 1793; twenty others beside, Pontécoulant, Marboz, Lidon, Saint-Martin, Dussaulx, the translator of Juvenal, who took part in the campaign of Hanover; Boilleau, Bertrand, Lesterp-Beauvais, Lesage, Gomaire, Gardien, Mainvielle, Duplantier, Lacaze, Antiboul, and at their head a Barnave called Vergniaud . . .
And so on, for fifteen pages, like the litany of a black mass, Antonie-Louis-Léon Florelle de Saint-Just, Merlin de Thionville, Merkin de Douai, Billaud-Varenne, Fabre d’Églantine, Fréron-Thersite, Osselin, Garan-Coulon, Javogues, Camboulas, Collot, d’Herbois, Goupilleau, Laurent Lecointre, Léonard Bourdoin, Bourbotte, Levasseur de la Sarthe, Reverchon, Bernard de Saintres, Charles Richard, Châteauneuf-Randon, Lavicomterie, Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, almost as if Hugo realized that anyone reading this mad catalog would have lost the identity of the actors in order to become aware of the titanic dimensions of the only actant he was interested in—the Revolution itself, with its glories and its miseries.
Yet it seems that Hugo (was it due to weakness, shyness, excessive excess?) is worried that the reader (even though he presumably skips ahead) will not fully grasp the dimensions of the monster he wishes to portray and so—using an entirely new technique in the history of the list, and in any case different from the description of the Vendée—the author’s moralizing voice continually intervenes at the beginning, at the end, in the list itself:
Here is the Convention.
The attention must be fixed on this summit.
Never did anything higher appear on man’s horizon.
There is Mt. Himalaya, and there is the Convention . . .
The Convention is the first avatar of the people . . .
The effect of all this was intense, savage, regular. Savage correctness; this is a suggestion of the whole Revolution . . .
Nothing was more deformed, nor more sublime. A pile of heroes, a herd of cowards. Wild beasts on a mountain, reptiles in a marsh . . . A gathering of Titans . . .
Tragedies knotted by giants and untied by dwarfs . . .
Minds, a prey to the wind. But this wind a miraculous wind . . .
Such was this boundless Convention; an entrenched camp of the human race attacked by all the powers of darkness at once, the night fires of a besieged army of ideas, the immense bivouac of minds on the edge of a precipice. Nothing in history can be compared to this gathering, both senate and populace, conclave and street crossing, areopagus and public square, tribunal and the accused.
The Convention always yielded to the wind; but the wind came from the mouth of the people and was the breath of God . . .
It is impossible not to give attention to this great procession of shades. (section 2, book 3, chapter 1)
Unbearable? Unbearable. Bombastic? Much worse. Sublime? Sublime. See how I am being swept away by my author and have even begun to speak like him: but when bombast bursts its banks, breaks down the wall of the sound of excessive excess, a hint of poetry begins to form. Hélas.
Authors (unless they are writing with no interest in money and no hope of immortality, for a readership of seamstresses, traveling salesmen, or lovers of pornography whose tastes at that specific time and in one given country are well-known) never write for their own specific kind of reader but try to construct a Model Reader—in other words, the kind of reader who, having accepted from the beginning the rules of the textual game on offer, will become the ideal reader of that book, even a thousand years later. What kind of Model Reader is Hugo thinking of? I think he had two kinds in mind. The first was someone reading in 1874, eighty years after the fateful year of 1793—someone who still knew many of the names of the Convention. It would be like someone in Italy today reading a book about the 1920s, who would not be taken completely by surprise at the sight of names like Mussolini, D’Annunzio, Marinetti, Facta, Corridoni, Matteotti, Papini, Boccioni, Carrà, Italo Balbo, or Turati. The second kind is the future reader (or perhaps even the foreign reader of Hugo’s time), who—with the exception of a few names like Robespierre, Danton, and Marat—would have been bewildered in the face of so many unfamiliar names; but at the same time, he would have the impression of listening to endless tittle-tattle about the village he is visiting for the first time and where he gradually learns to separate himself from the crowd of contradictory figures, to sniff the atmosphere, to become accustomed little by little to moving about in that crowded arena where he imagines that each unknown face is a mask hiding a story of bloodshed and is, ultimately, one of the many masks of history.
As I have said, Hugo is not interested in the psychology of his wooden or marmoreal characters. He is interested in the antonomasia to which they relate or, if you like, their symbolic value. The same applies for things: for the forests of the Vendée, or for La Tourgue, the immense Tour Gauvain in which Lantenac is besieged by Gauvain, both men attached to the ancestral fortress that both will try to destroy, one laying siege from outside and the other besieged within, each threatening a final holocaust. Much has been written about the symbolic value of this tower, not least because another innocent symbolic gesture takes place in it—the destruction of a book by the three children.
The children are hostages of Lantenac, who threatens to blow them up if the republicans try to set them free. They are locked in the library of the besieged tower and have nothing better to do than destroy, transforming a magnificent book about Saint Bartholomew into a pile of paper fragments—and there are those who see in their gesture the reenactment, in reverse, of the night of Saint Bartholomew, carried out to the shame of the monarchy of the time, and therefore perhaps a revenge of history, a childish antistrophe of that work of annihilating the past that is being carried out elsewhere by the guillotine. What is more, the title of the chapter that narrates this story is “The Massacre of Saint Bartholomew”—Hugo was always worried his readers weren’t quaking quite enough.
But this gesture, due to its excess, can also be seen as symbolic. The children’s games are described in every detail for fifteen pages, and it is thanks to this excess that Hugo warns us that we are not dealing even here with an individual story but with the tragedy of an actant—Innocence—which is at least benevolent if not redemptive. He could obviously have resolved everything in a sudden epiphany. That he was capable of doing so can be seen in the last lines of book 3, chapter 6—little Georgette picks up handfuls of the book assigned to that sacred sparagmos, throws them from the window, sees them being scattere
d in the breeze, and says, “Papillons”—and the ingenuous massacre ends with these butterflies disappearing into thin air. But Hugo could not weave this very brief epiphany into the plot of so many other excesses at the risk of it going unnoticed. If excess is to exist, even the most dazzling numinous apparitions (contrary to every mystical tradition) have to last for a very long time. In Ninety-three, even charm must appear murky, like a froth of white-hot lava, waters spilling forth, inundations of affections and of effects. It is pointless asking Wagner to reduce his entire Ring to the size of a Chopin scherzo.
So as not to allow our author to take over, let us move on finally to the end. After a truly epic battle (what a great screenwriter Hugo would have made!), Gauvain finally captures Lantenac. The duel is over. Cimourdain has no hesitation and—even before the trial—gives orders for the guillotine to be set up. Killing Lantenac would mean killing the Vendée, and killing the Vendée would mean saving France.
But Lantenac, as I revealed at the beginning, has voluntarily given himself up to save the three children who were in danger of being burned to death in the library to which he alone had the key. In the face of this gesture of generosity, Gauvain does not have the heart to send the man to his death, and saves him. Hugo uses other rhetorical devices to compare two worlds, first in the dialogue between Lantenac and Gauvain, and then in the dialogue between Cimourdain and Gauvain, who at that point awaits his death. In Lantenac’s first invective against Gauvain (before realizing he was going to save him), he expresses all the arrogance of the ci-devant before the representative of those who have guillotined the king. In the confrontation between Cimourdain and Gauvain a deep gulf appears between the high priest of vengeance and the apostle of hope. I would like man to be made according to Euclid, says Cimourdain, and Gauvain replies that he would like man to be made according to Homer. The whole novel suggests to us (in stylistic terms) that Hugo would have taken Homer’s part, which is why he fails to make us loathe his Homeric Vendée, but in ideological terms this Homer has tried to tell us that to build the future it is necessary to follow the straight line of the guillotine.
This is the story told in the novel, the story of Hugo’s stylistic choices, the story of one interpretation (my own—and others are possible). What can we say? That historians have identified many anachronisms and unacceptable liberties in this book? Does that matter? Hugo wasn’t interested in writing history; he wanted us to feel the panting breath, the often fetid roar of history. Did he want to deceive us, like Marx, who claimed that Hugo was more interested in the moral conflicts of individual people than in understanding the class struggle?6 If anything, it was the opposite, and he said so. Hugo carves his psychological portraits with a hatchet to make us feel the forces in conflict—and if it wasn’t class conflict that he was thinking about, it was certainly (as Lukács recognized) the ideals of a “revolutionary democracy that point the way ahead”—though Lukács then tempered his judgment with the stern warning that “the real human and historical conflicts of the aristocrat and the priest who sided with the Revolution become, for each of them, artificial conflicts of duty in the context of this abstract humanism.”7 Heavens above, it has even been suggested that Hugo was not interested in class but in the People and in God. It was typical of Lukács’s mental rigidity that he failed to understand that Hugo could not be Lenin (if anything, Lenin was a Cimourdain who doesn’t kill himself) and that indeed the tragic and Romantic magic of Ninety-three lies in the interplay between the reasons of history and those of various moral individuals, measuring the constant divide between politics and utopia.
But I believe there is no better book for understanding the underlying motives of the Revolution and of its enemy, the Vendée, which is an ideological force even today for so many nostalgics of la France profonde. To tell the story of two excesses, Hugo (faithful to his poetics) could choose only the technique of excess, taken from excess. Only by accepting this convention is it possible to understand the Convention, becoming the Model Reader that Hugo had hoped to reach—made not with flimsy cardboard cutouts but with an opus incertum of rough-hewn boulders. If we enter into the spirit that animates this novel, we may come out dry-eyed but with our minds in tumult. Hélas!
[Previously unpublished in this form, this essay summarizes various articles and lectures.]
Censorship and Silence
THOSE OF YOU who are younger may think that veline are pretty girls who dance about on television shows, and that a casino is a chaotic mess.1 Anyone of my generation knows that the word casino used to mean “brothel” and only later, by connotation, did it come to mean “somewhere chaotic,” so that it lost its initial meaning, and today anyone, perhaps even a bishop, uses it to indicate disorder. Likewise, once upon a time a bordello was a brothel, but my grandmother, a woman of the most upright morals, used to say, “Don’t make a bordello,” meaning “Don’t make too much racket”; the word had completely lost its original meaning. The younger ones among you may not know that, during the Fascist regime, veline were sheets of paper that the government department responsible for controlling culture (called the Ministry of Popular Culture, shortened to MinCulPop—they didn’t have sufficient sense of humor to avoid such an ambiguous-sounding name) sent to the newspapers. These sheets of thin copy paper told the newspapers what they had to keep quiet about and what they had to print. The velina, in journalistic jargon, therefore came to symbolize censorship, the inducement to conceal, to make information disappear.2
The veline that we know today—the television showgirls—are, however, the exact opposite: they are, as we all know, the celebration of outward appearance, visibility, indeed of fame achieved through pure visibility, where appearance signifies excellence—even that kind of appearance that would once have been considered unseemly.
We find ourselves with two forms of velina, which I would like to compare with two forms of censorship. The first is censorship through silence; the second is censorship through noise; I use the word velina, therefore, as a symbol of the television event, the show, entertainment, news coverage, and so on.
Fascism had understood (as dictators generally do) that deviant behavior is encouraged by the fact that the media give it coverage. For example, the veline used to say “Don’t write about suicide” because the mere mention of suicide might inspire someone to commit suicide a few days later. This is absolutely correct—we shouldn’t assume all that went through the minds of the Fascist hierarchy was wrong—and it is quite true that we know about events of national significance that have occurred only because the media have talked about them. For example, the student protests of 1977 and 1989: they were short-lived events that sought to repeat the protests of 1968 only because the newspapers had begun saying “1968 is about to return.” Anyone involved in those events knows perfectly well that they were created by the press, in the same way that the press generates revenge attacks, suicides, classroom shootings—news about one school shooting provokes other school shootings, and a great many Romanians have probably been encouraged to rape old ladies because the newspapers told them it is the exclusive speciality of immigrants and is extremely easy to commit: all you have to do is loiter in any pedestrian passage, near a railway station, and so forth.
If the old-style velina used to say, “To avoid causing behavior considered to be deviant, don’t talk about it,” the velina culture of today says, “To avoid talking about deviant behavior, talk a great deal about other things.” I have always taken the view that if, by some chance, I discovered that tomorrow’s newspapers were going to take up some wrong I had committed that would cause me serious harm, the first thing I’d do would be plant a bomb outside the local police headquarters or railway station. The next day the newspaper front pages would be full of it and my personal misdemeanor would end up as a small inside story. And who knows how many real bombs have been planted to make other front-page stories disappear. The example of the bomb is sonically appropriate, as it is an example of a great noise th
at silences everything else.
Noise becomes a cover. I would say that the ideology of this censorship through noise can be expressed, with apologies to Wittgenstein, by saying, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must talk a great deal.” The flagship TG1 news program on Italian state television, for example, is a master of this technique, full of news items about calves born with two heads and bags snatched by petty thieves—in other words, the sort of minor stories papers used to put low on an inside page—which now serve to fill up three-quarters of an hour of information, to ensure we don’t notice other news stories they ought to have covered have not been covered. Several months ago, the press controlled by Berlusconi, in order to undermine the authority of a magistrate who criticized the premier, followed him for days, reporting that he sat smoking on a bench, went to the barber, and wore turquoise socks. To make a noise, you don’t have to invent stories. All you have to do is report a story that is real but irrelevant, yet creates a hint of suspicion by the simple fact that it has been reported. It is true and irrelevant that the magistrate wears turquoise socks, but the fact it has been reported creates a suggestion of something not quite confessed, leaving a mark, an impression. Nothing is more difficult to dispose of than an irrelevant but true story.