#4.1.2

But I have not yet done that, so we'll have to make do without. Here we continue the theme of the nation being Tired. Hugo is more cynical about it in this chapter than he was in the last, which is an interesting shift. It feels like 4.1 is a conversation he's having with himself, as he tries to figure out what the right answer is. On the one hand, we have 4.1.1, where he tries really hard to make a case for the Restoration being a good idea but marred by having the wrong people in charge. Here, he rejects that notion by pointing out that this desire for peace and stability stems from people who already have it made just wanting to keep what they have, regardless of how many others don't have that comfort yet. He gets it, but he doesn't approve of it. And he really doesn't approve of people manipulating that desire to get power for themselves. I'm reminded of way back in 1.1, when he had Things To Say about people with ambition and skill. Hugo's definitely very wary of a certain kind of ambition, and I haven't yet pinned down what, precisely, he's objecting to. On a broad level, of course he objects to people who take advantage of misfortune and crisis to improve themselves. "As soon as a revolution has made the coast, the skilful make haste to prepare the shipwreck" is definitely a condemnation of people taking advantage of and manipulating turmoil in order to emerge more powerful and influential than they otherwise would have been. And I think, in general, he's very wary of people who want to be in charge. He seems very uncomfortable with people who willingly seek out authority and power over others. All his good leader characters either sort of stumble into it accidentally, and are more or less uncomfortable with that responsibility (Myriel, Valjean) or accept it as a necessary burden in the fight for the greater good (Enjolras).

This chapter, meanwhile, is about people who deliberately seek out leadership, and Hugo is bitingly sarcastic about all of them. Essentially he seems to be saying that people seek out power because they're not good enough at anything to have it given to them. It's... a take, all right, and not even a terrible one at that.

And then we move into Hugo's opinion about the bourgeoisie, in an interesting precursor to today's concept of privilege. It's not a one to one, obviously, and I'm not trying to bring modern opinions/worldviews into a venue where they don't really belong, but I still see a parallel there. Because basically Hugo is saying that the people who support the status quo and who want to be done with all this revolution stuff already are the people who have already profited. They've made it. They fought and they won and they're ready to just be done. They're not malicious, like the power seekers, but they are selfish. They're Tired and they don't see why they should have to keep fighting for the sake of others when they've already fought so long and so hard for their own sakes. It's an interesting twist on the concept of class solidarity and struggle.

Honestly, Hugo's ideas about class in general are interesting. This isn't really the time to get into them, but if someone's written that thesis I'd love to read it.

All of this takes us to the reason why Hugo’s breakdown of the July Revolution is so inconsistent. He incorrectly does not consider the actions of the monarchy and bourgeoisie to be a form of violence on par with the actions of the revolutionaries. He says the Bourbons were neatly cut out of place and retreated with respect, that the civility of the restoration is to be admired. Yet the legacy of their dynasty is what enables the bourgeoisie to undermine the revolution. The bourgeoisie are not staunching the wound of the revolution or even halting it as Hugo claims; they are violently attacking its ideals. This may sound dramatic but I don’t think it’s an exaggeration.

Hugo actually addresses a lot of my critiques from 4.1.1 very well in this chapter, making a point of directly calling out the bourgeoisie as culprits. Where he falls into a hole is that he too still considers the ‘fact’ as a default state, whether he realizes it or not. The fact that he characterizes the July Monarchy as a halt is very telling, saying, “Halt is the regaining of strength, it is armed and watchful repose.” The fact is always inherently in existence while the right needs to be asserted. Therefore, to Hugo, the work of the able is a sort of maintenance of the fact rather than a form of active violence done by the bourgeoisie. Which I will pretty confidently say it is.

This results in a shaky ideological foundation for Hugo to balance. He still wants to believe that “the right, when it triumphs, has no need to be violent” because he doesn’t see the state as perpetrating violence against the lower classes. He can’t bring himself to understand the struggle of the revolution as a matched response to an inherently violent status quo.  He wants the July Revolution to be a mild triumph against a worthy, if misguided, dynasty, rather than a violent overthrow of oppressors that was, in turn, overthrown violently by the bourgeoisie. He’s not sympathetic to the state in any sense—“when the able had finished their work, the immense viciousness of their solution became apparent”—but he wrongly links civility and nonviolence.