"A Dream of Stone": Fame, Vision, and the Monument in Nineteenth-Century French Literary Culture

Colosse de bronze ou d'albâtre,
Salué d'un peuple idolâtre,
Je surgirais sur la cité
Comme un géant en sentinelle,
Couvrant la ville de mon aile,
Dans une attitude éternelle
De génie et de majesté!

(Victor Hugo, Oeuvres Poétiques I: 734)

[Colossus of bronze or alabaster,
Hailed by an idolatrous populace,
I would loom over the city
Like a watchful giant
Covering the town with my wing,
In an eternal attitude
Of genius and majesty!]

In 1881, perhaps for fear the old man would not reach his eightieth birthday, the beginning of Hugo's eightieth year was declared a national celebration. On the avenue d'Eylau, where he lived, a temporary triumphal arch was erected and, on February 26, his seventy-ninth birthday, six hundred thousand admirers paraded beneath his window. In July, thestreet itself was renamed avenue Victor Hugo, an honor once reserved for kings, and now for dead luminaries (Bournon 1909, 183-84). This telling rededication assumed immortality in life--indeed, from this point on the great man's friends would address mail "A monsieur Victor Hugo, en son avenue": Victor Hugo in his avenue, like Mausoleus in his tomb.

The eightieth-year fanfare was like a dress rehearsal for Hugo's grand state funeral, four years later. On June 1, 1885, two million spectators, more than the population of Paris at the time, watched the funerary procession across Paris. In an elaborate, commemorative petrifaction, organized around two symbolically-charged monumental structures, Hugo lay in state beneath the Arc de Triomphe, then was enshrined in the Panthéon. Throughout much of his long career, Hugo had been considered France's greatest living writer, his literary accomplishments already seen in monumental terms. Now, the ever-closer identification of writer and monument, flesh and stone, that characterized nineteenth-century France's evolving vision of literary greatness, reached its apogee in this ceremony marking his passage from the animate, into the inanimate--with the great writer seeming to fuse with the monument, seeming literally to become what Pierre Nora (1997) has called a lieu de mémoire or realm of memory.

Hugo's spectacular state funeral was emblematic of the broader interrelations among literary fame, vision, and the monument in nineteenth-century France. Amid the profound societal changes in the wake of the Revolution, cultural permanence could best be imagined through monuments, commemorative sculptural or architectural works that helped a nation in flux define itself, its relation to the past, and anticipated survival into the future. Within this context, the literary field evolved an ideal of great writers and their work as immortal, envisioning literary glory through the metaphor of the monument. This belief in grandiose possibilities for writers and their work was "un rêve de pierre" or "dream of stone"--an oxymoron that Baudelaire used to evoke the nature of beauty (1975-76, 1. 21; 1991, 47), but that also captures the curious mix of material and ideal, concrete and imaginary, ephemeral and eternal, within the period's conception of literary greatness. ¹

The "dream of stone," while now largely forgotten, was a central, organizing force in nineteenth-century French literary culture. Cutting across genres, periods, and movements, it pervaded the world of letters, informing the lives, work, and reception of literary figures from obscure but ambitious scribblers to such touchstones of greatness as Honoré de Balzac, George Sand, or Victor Hugo; from popular hacks like Pierre Alexis, vicomte Ponson du Terrail to cerebral aesthetes like Stéphane Mallarmé; from dignified Germaine de Staël to outrageous Alfred Jarry; and, from François-René de Chateaubriand in the early years of the nineteenth century, to Marcel Proust at the beginning of the twentieth. In recent years, historical and art historical scholarship has dealt extensively with nineteenth-century France's monumental art and architecture, and especially its commemorative...