#1.1.4

And the bishop continues to be hilarious

This chapter really gets to me. It reminds me again why I love this book and why I try to do the things that I do. It saddens me to think about the bishop and his works and to know what is still yet to come for the people of France in this story.

I feel so damn vindicated realizing that Bienvenu would frown upon people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos today and their performative charity. We know already the bishop disdained titles (and their accompanying entitlement) and the system of peerage, he only begrudgingly accepts the title Monseigneur.

His takes on the concept of sin are very...Christian for me honestly. It’s a peculiar paradox that allows the bishop to condemn the ills of society, “the guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness,” but also to follow typical Christian doctrine that sin is embodied in each of us. The idea of individuals as inherently sinful is irreconcilable with social systems that drive people to sinful acts. In the example of the counterfeiter condemned to death, how can we say his sin is greed when he has been systematically forced into poverty like so many of the “wrongdoers” in Les Mis? Most of these people turn to crime as a means of survival made necessary by class oppression and that simply doesn’t fit into the concept of ‘sin.’ If I am misrepresenting the concept here, do feel free to let me know, of course, this is simply my interpretation of what I see.

Hugo’s description of the guillotine is still as moving as ever. I want to talk now about the bishop, revolution, and death. We see a clear parallel (foreshadowing?) of Bienvenu in Valjean’s story in the story of the murderer sentenced to death. “Through these fatal breaches, [the murderer] was constantly looking beyond this world, and he could see nothing but darkness; the bishop showed him the light.” Sound familiar?

I am reaching, but I fall And the night is closing in And I stare into the void To the whirlpool of my sin

Going deeper, the bishops methods are a choice he has made in the face of the guillotine (the consequences of oppressive societal structures) and he chooses life, compassion, charity. But there is another choice: “But when we see one, the shock is violent, and we are compelled to decide and take part, for or against.” The person in this book who makes the choice opposite of the bishop’s is Enjolras.

In the Le Cabuc incident, Enjolras explicitly declares that he has chosen death as his tool, his weapon and has accepted the blight on his own soul, so that others may choose the route of Bienvenu. He recognizes the need for people like him and people like Bienvenu. Sometimes the necessary change is violent, quick, comprehensive. But there needs to be people there afterward as well. Enjolras doesn’t consider himself that person, he is a martyr that brings change in the wake of his demise. There is no place for him in the after.

Naturally, Bienvenu would contest that view but, in some ways, I wonder if Enjolras doesn’t have a better, or perhaps more realistic understanding of what ultimately brings about a better future. There is strength in the bishop’s pacifism, but for every person he helps, somewhere, someone else is still dying. Enjolras’s methods result in casualties in the short term, yes, but more so than Bienvenu’s in the long term? It’s hard to judge.

And so we hit our first really substantial chapter of the book. And what a chapter it is! Sarcasm, character moment, moral dilemmas, and soaring descriptions all in one. I feel like this is really the chapter that lets us know what we’re in for.

I’ll get into smaller details in a bit, but the real meat of this chapter is the execution, and the description of the guillotine. Hugo does that thing he’s really good at, where he really brings inanimate objects to life with his words, which is simultaneously gorgeous and impossible to translate. Donougher takes a stab at it, but she can’t match his original poetry. Say what you want about Hugo the person, or even Hugo the writer, but Hugo the craftsman undeniably knew his stuff.

I also wonder how much of it is Hugo straight drawing from personal experience. I know that he became an anti-death penalty advocate as he grew older, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had a similar moment, where he came face to face with an execution and found that he couldn’t remain neutral anymore. (I think there’s also a dig at the concept of neutrality in general there -- the only people who are neutral about the death penalty -- and by implication, about any social issue -- are those who’ve never actually seen it and experienced it. Which jives well with Hugo’s roles as activist and as Romantic leader. The Romantics... didn’t find much use for neutral anything, really.)

“The scaffold is a kind of monster put together by the judge and the carpenter, a spectre that seems to live by some dreadful life force created out of all the death it has inflicted."

I just wanted to pull out this sentence, because it’s a heck of a sentence. Evocative, poetic, viscerally horrifying, this is the Hugolian prose I love.

It’s interesting that Hugo notes that, with time, the Bishop’s initial horror probably faded away. I... don’t actually agree with that assessment. I think the immediacy of it probably dulled, but I do think the experience fundamentally changed him. Earlier in the chapter, when he’s preaching about the window tax, he says, “I’m not accusing the law, but I do thank God.” I think that, after having been so deeply marked by this particular example of the law and its power, he might, actually, start blaming the law for some things. The Bishop goes out of his way never to condemn, only to praise, and I think this is a moment that makes him reevaluate that ethos, just a little.