État présent: Victor Hugo

Referring back to Jean Cocteau’s famous description of Hugo as ‘un fou qui se croyait Victor Hugo’,¹ the art critic Robert Hughes claimed that ‘so might a Chihuahua fix its tiny fangs in the ankle of a bull elephant’.² Hughes’s point is that various generations of artists have sunk their teeth into Hugo in the hope of delivering something of a death blow to his legend, but that such aggression has done little to slow down this cultural beast. The mammoth proportions of Hugo’s renown may have provoked apprehension, but neither death nor would-be successors have been able to deny him the prominence that he so blatantly desired in his quest to become ‘Chateaubriand ou rien’.³ In France, Hugo is the superstar of Republicanism, who championed egalitarian rights and the abolition of the death penalty. The anecdote that God Himself was evicted from the Panthé on in 1885 so that Hugo could be interred there still meets with warm affection. Internationally, the twentieth-century globalization of the media age has only solidified Hugo’s celebrity. Nearly 80 of the some 140 film and television adaptations of his work have been in a language other than French, while Les Misérables became the world’s longest running musical in 2006, as well as achieving the distinction in 2002 of being the first Broadway production to be staged in mainland China.

Navigating the sheer magnitude of a phenomenon whose name adorns a street in every corner of France is a daunting prospect for any scholar. Two key problems are discernible within the enormous shadow that Hugo casts, and which Gustave Flaubert once fittingly described as ‘désespérant’.⁴ Firstly, the often passionate cultural responses to Hugo make any impartial analysis an especially difficult enterprise. His undeniable bravado and lack of measure cause as much admiration as exasperation, both of which inform receptions of his work as readily today as they did in Hugo’s own time. What Stéphane Mallarmé saw as the ‘infamies immortelles’ of Hugo’s socially-minded aesthetics,⁵ George Sand described as ‘la couleur des qualités’;⁶ what historian Alistair Horne believes to be ‘bombastic silliness’,⁷ the novelist Mario Vargas-Llosa hails as ‘lyrical intellectual fiction’.⁸ In particular, Hugo’s indomitable self-confidence has underpinned his stereotypical image as the white-bearded grand homme, complete with the authority and immovability that so easily come with such a supremely patriarchal icon. The 1985 centenary of his death and 2002 bicentenary of his birth only reinforced this stereotype with their distinctly political agendas. During the latter, Claude Millet articulated widely held concerns that Hugo’s name had been repeatedly exploited at both ends of the political spectrum. Neither the anniversary of Émile Zola’s death nor the transfer of Alexandre Dumas’s remains to the Panthéon could eclipse yet another moment of Hugo commemoration. Millet argued that Hugo’s own oscillations back and forth between conservatism and liberalism had woven him into the very fabric of modern France’s unstable political evolution: ‘Hugo parle de tout à tous.’⁹ Crucial to this widespread political appeal were the presidential elections in that year. Lionel Jospin’s failure to advance, combined with Jean-Marie Le Pen’s progression in the race, accelerated a scramble on both Left and Right to try and make sense of how the Republic had arrived at this astonishing point. Hugo’s moral resilience quickly became an emblem of a lost political integrity. The Left could cite his near twenty-year defiance in exile of the Second Empire, while the Right found comfort in his condemnation and abandonment of the Commune. Hugo’s grandeur was simultaneously seen to mirror the gloire of the whole of France, and demand for celebratory events in his honour soared. The Comédie Française was obliged to extend an already lengthy run of Ruy Blas well into the autumn, often with ninety-five per cent of tickets being sold. On both Left and Right, Hugo could serve as a figure of reassurance, compensating for the perceived erosion of Republican values. At...