#hugo's involvement in the june days of 1848

[cliozaur]

While the barricade is still holding on, Hugo decides that this is his last chance to write about other barricades which he ordered to be taken by siege in June 1848. To make sense of what is going on, I read a chapter about Hugo in Jonathan Beecher’s Writers and Revolution: Intellectuals and the French Revolution of 1848 (2021). “Victor Hugo never forgot what he saw and did between June 22–26. Unlike our other writers, he participated in the fighting, and he did so on the side of the government.” Sigh.

This is where his lengthy explanations about the differences between uprisings and insurrections from 4.10.2 become relevant. He genuinely believed that everything that was going on in February 1848, before the abdication of Louise Philippe was revolution (insurrection), and what followed in June was uprising against the Republic. It was “a revolt of the people against itself.”  

The problem was: people had legitimate causes to rebel. “Once settled in the Assembly, Hugo was immediately confronted by the question of the National Workshops. Like many on both the right and the left, he believed the Workshops were a disaster. They produced nothing and were “an enormous waste of resources”… he urged that they be closed… He apparently believed that by voting to dissolve the National Workshops, he was not voting to shelve the question of unemployment. He was wrong.” Moreover, when workers erected the barricades and the confrontation began, “Hugo seems to have convinced himself that the best way to limit bloodshed was to defeat the insurrection rapidly. For the next three days he became a tiger, “haranguing insurgents, storming barricades, taking prisoners, and somehow remaining alive.”

According to an account from a member of the National Guard, Hugo was acting suicidally: “This man... was M. Victor Hugo, a representative for Paris. He was unarmed and nonetheless he led us; and while we took cover behind houses, he alone kept to the middle of the street. Twice I tugged at his sleeve, telling him: “You’ll get yourself killed!” “That is why I am here.”” But this was because he believed that he was acting under divine protection.

During these days, Hugo was not able to contact his wife and his mistress. He heard rumours that his house was burnt down, but finally found out that it was not true: “When he finally got back to the Place des Vôsges, he found fourteen bullet holes around carriage entrance, but everything in the house was intact: rugs, furniture, silverware, wall hangings, ancient swords and muskets, and above all his manuscripts. A leader of the insurgents, a school teacher and a reader of Hugo, had even led tours of the house for other insurgents.” The last detail is heartbreaking.

In this chapter, Hugo conveys his point of view on the events of June 1848, infusing them with symbolic images of two barricades: both quite eerie and ominous. He is exploiting his talent of horror writer again: “The Saint-Antoine barricade was the tumult of thunders; the barricade of the Temple was silence. The difference between these two redoubts was the difference between the formidable and the sinister. One seemed a maw; the other a mask.”

The sad thing is that after this chapter with its context in Hugo’s biography, it is hard to read his depiction of other barricades from other time without thinking of him as a hypocrite. This is Hugo — an embodiment of controversy.

Siege of the barricade during the June days of 1848:

[pilferingapples]

Victor Hugo vs the workers’  barricades, 1848

@melle93  mentioned hoping someone would talk more about Hugo’s involvement in 1848?  I will try!

For people interested in this part of Hugo’s bio in particular, I rec Graham Robb’s “ Victor Hugo: A Biography” as the English-language bio that deals with this in the most depth. (Some, though not all , of the main chapter on it is here). Also just...read up on the June Days in particular. It’s a pretty important episode to understand , both for Hugo Studies and Western Political Developments in General and for why the barricades of 1848 aren’t a happily ever after ending, don’t do that in your les mis adaptation,oh, my god, do NOT. 

I feel I should note that there are a lot of wildly varying accounts about Hugo’s involvement in 1848, not least from Hugo himself-- if you go looking for primary sources, you’ll find conflicting claims about who did what when all over  the place.  So I’m definitely not trying to make this be a comprehensive account-- this is only about Hugo’s role, and it can’t even be comprehensive about that!   We Do Not Purport Here to Give a History of 1848, etc.  Still, it’s gonna be Long. So!  Under the cut:

 What really touched off the June Days of 1848 was the issue of the National Workshops, the Ateliers Nationaux.  Basically a stopgap measure from the new government (the new Republic that had just gotten started that spring!) , the Ateliers gave a (very very small but better than nothing) wage and “ work” to around 100,000 Parisians in June of 1848.  

The Ateliers were supposed to help alleviate poverty (like many welfare programs, they helped but not enough), alleviate the Scourge of Unemployment (because Unemployed Poor People are the worst  poor people, don’tcha know /s) and just generally do the things social welfare programs are supposed to do. They weren’t particularly successful at any of these things--again, the government had been in place for less than a year and there were a lot  of Complicated Things to work out--and by June of 1848 people were talking about shutting down the National Workshops.

Hugo stood with the workshop-closing side; as an elected government official, on June 20, 1848, Hugo gave a typically Hugolian speech urging the closing of the workshops, calling them an insult to the people of Paris.  Hugo was of the majority opinion; the Ateliers were closed. 

This was A Problem.  The Ateliers Nationaux may not have been the most successful welfare program, but they’re been the only steady income for ~100,000 Parisians, who suddenly went from “ surviving”  to “ utterly destitute” . That’s pretty panic-inducing, and for a city of around  1,053,000 that’s a major chunk of suddenly desperate and angry people!

But it gets worse. To quote Graham Robb: 

Two days after (Hugo’s) speech, the Ateliers were closed. Workers under the age of twenty-five were to be conscripted; all others were ordered to go and work in the provinces (that is, they were going to be deported out of Paris--Pilf).  It was a political purge designed as a new employment policy. As expected, the poorer areas of Paris immediately reached boiling-point. 

which..They WOULD, right?  There was no replacement welfare program,no fallback. And now they were facing deportation and conscription.  

The inevitable barricades arose (and  some , including Hugo and Lamartine, began to suspect that the uprising was actually being allowed and encouraged to justify a more intense retaliation). Then (Robb,again):

Hugo and fifty-nine other representatives were chosen to go and inform the insurgents that a state of siege existed and that Cavaignac was in control. Their mission was ‘ to stop the spilling of blood’. Nine of the representatives would be shot dead before they had a chance to complete their mission.

...When the author of Les Miserables came face to face with the people in June 1848,he went far beyond his remit from the Assemblee Nationale.  The representatives had not been asked to lead a full-scale assault on the barricades, backed by cavalry and heavy artillery....

But that was exactly what Hugo did, with selfless heroism and/or Pontmercyish suicidal tendencies:  one witness reported 

Twice, I tugged at his sleeve, saying“ You’ll get yourself killed!”  to which Hugo answered “ That is why I am here”, and continued to shout “Forward! Forward!” With such a man to lead us, we reached the barricades and took them one after the other. 

and Hugo himself said of his combat, “ I offered myself, but God didn’t want me.” 

He was in the fight, intensely, noticeably , and seen as a leader, for three days, not sleeping and rarely so much as sitting down.

The end result of the June Days was intensely bad for the workers and insurgents (4,000 deported to Algeria; ~3,000-5,000 killed; thousands more injured and arrested) and Marked a Turning Point in the political discourse of the day, as history docs like to say. 

I’m not gonna pretend I don’t have an opinion about this; the whole thing was handled disastrously by pretty much everyone (except the people who WANTED to undermine the idea of the republic and potential for organized working class/left wing resistance, who got exactly what they wanted). Hugo was only one piece of a moving calamity. 

That he was involved at all was...weird. He hadn’t approved of the first 1848 Revolution, just like he hadn’t approved of any of the earlier republican insurrections. Even 1830 made him uncomfortable! And yeah, he was on the Right , in the political alliances of the day-- Hugo’s specific political opinions were constantly changing --but he was never really at ease with violence, either politically or personally.  His friends laughed at him when he talked about dueling or joining the army! He  laughed at himself about it! 

And then he just. Went and helped gun down a bunch of people fighting for their own immediate survival.  Who’s writing this mess? Where’s the character consistency?? 

That’s an understatement, Groban. 

But it gets weirder!

The June Days seem to have been THE point where Hugo’s politics finally, genuinely, started to swing around. Yeah, he endorsed Napoleon III --he thought the guy would be Socially Conscious! (and Hugo wasn’t gonna vote for Cavaignac, the general who’d helped orchestrate the massacre. That Hugo also helped run.)  And Hugo’s swing left can hardly be considered opportunistic , given how things went.

Anyway. All of that, plus nearly 14 years of political transformation, an exile, and endless discussion, are wrapped up in all Hugo’s commentary on 1848. I’ve got some more about it here, but honestly, this is one of those Get A Degree About It level topics, and there is, as The Kids Probably No Longer Say , A Lot To Unpack here.