So as not to allow our author to take over, let us move on finally to the end. After a truly epic battle (what a great screenwriter Hugo would have made!), Gauvain finally captures Lantenac. The duel is over. Cimourdain has no hesitation and—even before the trial—gives orders for the guillotine to be set up. Killing Lantenac would mean killing the Vendée, and killing the Vendée would mean saving France.
But Lantenac, as I revealed at the beginning, has voluntarily given himself up to save the three children who were in danger of being burned to death in the library to which he alone had the key. In the face of this gesture of generosity, Gauvain does not have the heart to send the man to his death, and saves him. Hugo uses other rhetorical devices to compare two worlds, first in the dialogue between Lantenac and Gauvain, and then in the dialogue between Cimourdain and Gauvain, who at that point awaits his death. In Lantenac’s first invective against Gauvain (before realizing he was going to save him), he expresses all the arrogance of the ci-devant before the representative of those who have guillotined the king. In the confrontation between Cimourdain and Gauvain a deep gulf appears between the high priest of vengeance and the apostle of hope. I would like man to be made according to Euclid, says Cimourdain, and Gauvain replies that he would like man to be made according to Homer. The whole novel suggests to us (in stylistic terms) that Hugo would have taken Homer’s part, which is why he fails to make us loathe his Homeric Vendée, but in ideological terms this Homer has tried to tell us that to build the future it is necessary to follow the straight line of the guillotine.
This is the story told in the novel, the story of Hugo’s stylistic choices, the story of one interpretation (my own—and others are possible). What can we say? That historians have identified many anachronisms and unacceptable liberties in this book? Does that matter? Hugo wasn’t interested in writing history; he wanted us to feel the panting breath, the often fetid roar of history. Did he want to deceive us, like Marx, who claimed that Hugo was more interested in the moral conflicts of individual people than in understanding the class struggle?6 If anything, it was the opposite, and he said so. Hugo carves his psychological portraits with a hatchet to make us feel the forces in conflict—and if it wasn’t class conflict that he was thinking about, it was certainly (as Lukács recognized) the ideals of a “revolutionary democracy that point the way ahead”—though Lukács then tempered his judgment with the stern warning that “the real human and historical conflicts of the aristocrat and the priest who sided with the Revolution become, for each of them, artificial conflicts of duty in the context of this abstract humanism.”7 Heavens above, it has even been suggested that Hugo was not interested in class but in the People and in God. It was typical of Lukács’s mental rigidity that he failed to understand that Hugo could not be Lenin (if anything, Lenin was a Cimourdain who doesn’t kill himself) and that indeed the tragic and Romantic magic of Ninety-three lies in the interplay between the reasons of history and those of various moral individuals, measuring the constant divide between politics and utopia.
But I believe there is no better book for understanding the underlying motives of the Revolution and of its enemy, the Vendée, which is an ideological force even today for so many nostalgics of la France profonde. To tell the story of two excesses, Hugo (faithful to his poetics) could choose only the technique of excess, taken from excess. Only by accepting this convention is it possible to understand the Convention, becoming the Model Reader that Hugo had hoped to reach—made not with flimsy cardboard cutouts but with an opus incertum of rough-hewn boulders. If we enter into the spirit that animates this novel, we may come out dry-eyed but with our minds in tumult. Hélas!
[Previously unpublished in this form, this essay summarizes various articles and lectures.]
Censorship and Silence
THOSE OF YOU who are younger may think that veline are pretty girls who dance about on television shows, and that a casino is a chaotic mess.1 Anyone of my generation knows that the word casino used to mean “brothel” and only later, by connotation, did it come to mean “somewhere chaotic,” so that it lost its initial meaning, and today anyone, perhaps even a bishop, uses it to indicate disorder. Likewise, once upon a time a bordello was a brothel, but my grandmother, a woman of the most upright morals, used to say, “Don’t make a bordello,” meaning “Don’t make too much racket”; the word had completely lost its original meaning. The younger ones among you may not know that, during the Fascist regime, veline were sheets of paper that the government department responsible for controlling culture (called the Ministry of Popular Culture, shortened to MinCulPop—they didn’t have sufficient sense of humor to avoid such an ambiguous-sounding name) sent to the newspapers. These sheets of thin copy paper told the newspapers what they had to keep quiet about and what they had to print. The velina, in journalistic jargon, therefore came to symbolize censorship, the inducement to conceal, to make information disappear.2
The veline that we know today—the television showgirls—are, however, the exact opposite: they are, as we all know, the celebration of outward appearance, visibility, indeed of fame achieved through pure visibility, where appearance signifies excellence—even that kind of appearance that would once have been considered unseemly.
We find ourselves with two forms of velina, which I would like to compare with two forms of censorship. The first is censorship through silence; the second is censorship through noise; I use the word velina, therefore, as a symbol of the television event, the show, entertainment, news coverage, and so on.
Fascism had understood (as dictators generally do) that deviant behavior is encouraged by the fact that the media give it coverage. For example, the veline used to say “Don’t write about suicide” because the mere mention of suicide might inspire someone to commit suicide a few days later. This is absolutely correct—we shouldn’t assume all that went through the minds of the Fascist hierarchy was wrong—and it is quite true that we know about events of national significance that have occurred only because the media have talked about them. For example, the student protests of 1977 and 1989: they were short-lived events that sought to repeat the protests of 1968 only because the newspapers had begun saying “1968 is about to return.” Anyone involved in those events knows perfectly well that they were created by the press, in the same way that the press generates revenge attacks, suicides, classroom shootings—news about one school shooting provokes other school shootings, and a great many Romanians have probably been encouraged to rape old ladies because the newspapers told them it is the exclusive speciality of immigrants and is extremely easy to commit: all you have to do is loiter in any pedestrian passage, near a railway station, and so forth.