Lettres (review)

Hugo, Victor et Victor Schoelcher. Lettres. Texte établi, présenté et annoté par Jean et Sheila Gaudon. Paris: Flohic Editions, 1998. Pp. 267. ISBN 2-84234-050-7

This edition was produced to mark the one hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the abolition of slavery, decreed by the provisional government of 1848. Scholars familiar with the impeccable editing skills of Jean and Sheila Gaudon will not be disappointed by this book, a model of editorial methodology. In fact, this volume causes one to lament again the interruption of the publication of the remarkable edition of the personal correspondence of Victor Hugo of which the first volumes appeared in 1988 and 1991 under the direction of Jean and Sheila Gaudon (in the "Bouquins" series of Robert Laffont).

This is a beautifully printed collection of 95 letters, written between 1843 and 1882, but the majority of them are from 1852 to 1860, giving insights into the political world of the proscrits, particularly in London, under Napoléon III. (Both Hugo and Schoelcher refused the amnesty offered by the French government in 1859.) Hugo's letters to Schoelcher were first reproduced in a 1963 article (see p. 23), but the entire collection is worth reading. Jean Gaudon's preface, and the index, which is almost a historical dictionary, give quite a full picture of the political and journalistic world until the creation of the Third Republic.

Hugo and Schoelcher provide a remarkable contrast, that of the larger-than-life, mythic poet and would-be politician and a "lesser" journalist-politician, something of an eccentric, who succeeded in achieving his goal of the abolition of slavery in the French colonies and worked as well to end capital punishment.

In the preface, Jean Gaudon quotes Schoelcher's self-portrait:

Je n'ai jamais été autre chose qu'un caractère. Je ne suis
pas un grand esprit. Je ne suis qu'une intelligence de
cinquième ordre. Je serais heureux si ma vie servait à
prouver qu'un homme peut être quelqu'un sans posséder une
intelligence au-dessus de la moyenne, par la simple intégrité
de sa manière d'être, par la dignité de sa vie qui force le
respect de ses citoyens. (10)

The inheritor of his father's fortune, Schoelcher became an opponent of slavery after an 1829 trip to Mexico, Cuba, French Guyana, and Louisiana. With Ledru-Rollin he founded La Réforme in 1843, and served as under secretary of state for the colonies in 1848, overseeing the decree to abolish slavery and its implementation. His fate was linked to that of Hugo when they met on the barricades and then in exile. He was to remain a habitué of Hugo's household after the latter's return to Paris. Although Schoelcher played an active role in the politics of the early 1870s, none of this comes to the fore in the letters of this collection.

Rather, it is the decade of the 1850s which is the focus of the correspondence, providing glimpses of the political issues which united and divided the exiles, as in the case of Ledru-Rollin. Schoelcher was in Brussels, Jersey, and England. In 1853, Hugo could say to the former that "notre marche en commun et toujours parallèle est une de mes idées les plus douces" (77). Both were engaged in political defiance through their writings. While Hugo was turning our Napoléon le Petit and Châtiments, Schoelcher was producing Le Gouvernement du deux-décembre, Histoire des crimes du deux-décembre and Dangers to England of the Alliance with the men of the coup d'état.

It is easy to forget the intensity of the political debate in Europe over the government of Louis Bonaparte and American slavery and the issues of compromise and resistance that characterized this discussion. These letters remind us of old issues that reappear today in variant guises. And of the lesser figures on the political stage who sometimes overshadow by a single...