Ninety-Three (Quatrevingt-treize) is Hugo’s last novel and one of his best. It is an excellent introduction to his works: it presents—in story, style and spirit—the condensed essence of that which is uniquely “Hugo-esque.”
The novel’s background is the French Revolution—“Ninety-three” stands for 1793, the year of the terror, the Revolution’s climax. The events of the story take place during the civil war of the Vendée—an uprising of the royalist peasants of Brittany, led by aristocrats who returned from exile for a desperate attempt to restore the monarchy—a civil war characterized by savage ruthlessness on both sides.
A great many irrelevant things have been said and written about this novel. At the time of its publication, in 1874, it was not favorably received by Hugo’s enormous public or by the critics. The explanation usually given by literary historians is that the French public was not sympathetic to a novel that seemed to glorify the first Revolution, at a time when the recent blood and horror of the Paris Commune of 1871 were still fresh in the public’s memory. Two of Hugo’s modern biographers refer to the novel as follows: Matthew Josephson, in Victor Hugo, mentions it disapprovingly as a “historical romance” with “idealized characters”; André Maurois, in Olympio ou la Vie de Victor Hugo, lists a number of Hugo’s personal connections with the setting of the story (such as the fact that Hugo’s father fought in the Vendee, on the republican side), then remarks: “The dialogue [of the novel] is theatrical. But the French Revolution had been theatrical and dramatic. Its heroes had struck sublime poses and had held them to the death.” (Which is a purely Naturalistic approach or attempt at justification.)
The fact is that Ninety-Three is not a novel about the French Revolution.
To a Romanticist, a background is a background, not a theme. His vision is always focused on man—on the fundamentals of man’s nature, on those problems and those aspects of his character which apply to any age and any country. The theme of Ninety-Three—which is played in brilliantly unexpected variations in all the key incidents of the story, and which is the motive power of all the characters and events, integrating them into an inevitable progression toward a magnificent climax—is: man’s loyalty to values.
To dramatize that theme, to isolate that aspect of man’s soul and show it in its purest form, to put it to the test under the pressure of deadly conflicts, a revolution is an appropriate background to select. Hugo’s story is not devised as a means of presenting the French Revolution; the French Revolution is used as a means of presenting his story.
It is not any specific code of values that concerns him here, but the wider abstraction: man’s loyalty to values, whatever any man’s particular values might be. Although Hugo’s personal sympathy is obviously on the side of the republicans, he presents his characters with impersonal detachment, or rather, with an impartial admiration granted equally to both sides of the conflict. In spiritual grandeur, intransigent integrity, unflinching courage and ruthless dedication to his cause, the old Marquis de Lantenac, the leader of the royalists, is the equal of Cimourdain, the ex-priest who became the leader of the republicans. (And, perhaps, Lantenac is Cimourdain’s superior, as far as the color and power of his characterization are concerned.) Hugo’s sympathy for the gay, boisterous exuberance of the republican soldiers is matched by his sympathy for the grim, desperate stubbornness of the royalist peasants. The emphasis he projects is not: “What great values men are fighting for!” but: “What greatness men are capable of, when they fight for their values!”
Hugo’s inexhaustible imagination is at its virtuoso best in an extremely difficult aspect of a novelist’s task: the integration of an abstract theme to the plot of a story. While the events of Ninety-Three are a sweeping emotional torrent directed by the inexorable logic of a plot structure, every event features the theme, every event is an instance of man’s violent, tortured, agonized, yet triumphant dedication to his values. This is the invisible chain, the corollary of the plot-line, that unites such scenes as: the ragged, disheveled young mother, staggering blindly, with savage endurance, through flaming villages and devastated fields, searching desperately for the children she has lost in the chaos of the civil war—the beggar who acts as host to his former feudal master, in a cave under the roots of a tree—the humble sailor who has to make a choice, knowing that for a few brief hours, in a rowboat, in the darkness of night, he holds the fate of the monarchy in his hands—the tall, proud figure of a man with the clothes of a peasant and the bearing of an aristocrat, who looks up from the bottom of a ravine at the distant reflection of a fire and finds himself confronted by a terrible alternative—the young revolutionary, pacing back and forth in the darkness, in front of a breach in a crumbling tower, torn between treason to the cause he has served all his life and the voice of a higher loyalty—the white-faced figure of a man who rises to pronounce the verdict of a revolutionary tribunal, while the crowd waits in total stillness to hear whether he will spare or sentence to death the only man he had ever loved.
The greatest example of the power of dramatic integration is an unforgettable scene which only Hugo could have written, a scene in which the agonizing intensity and suspense of a complex development are resolved and surpassed by two simple lines of dialogue: “Je t’arrete.”—“Je t’approuve.” (“I arrest you.”—“You are right.”) The reader will have to reach these lines in their full context to discover who speaks them and what enormous psychological significance and grandeur the author makes them convey.
“Grandeur” is the one word that names the leitmotif of Ninety-Three and of all of Hugo’s novels—and of his sense of life. And perhaps the most tragic conflict is not in his novels, but in their author. With so magnificent a view of man and of existence, Hugo never discovered how to implement it in reality. He professed conscious beliefs which contradicted his subconscious ideal and made its application to reality impossible.
He never translated his sense of life into conceptual terms, he did not ask himself what ideas, premises or psychological conditions were necessary to enable men to achieve the spiritual stature of his heroes. His attitude toward the intellect was highly ambiguous. It is as if Hugo the artist had overwhelmed Hugo the thinker; as if a great mind had never drawn a distinction between the processes of artistic creation and of rational cognition (two different methods of using one’s consciousness, which need not clash, but are not the same); as if his thinking consisted of images, in his work and in his own life; as if he thought in metaphors, not in concepts, in metaphors that stood for enormous emotional complexities, as hurried symbols and mere approximations. It is as if the wide emotional abstractions he handled as an artist made him too impatient for the task of rigorous defining and of identifying that which he sensed rather than knew—and so he reached for any available theories that seemed to connote, rather than denote, his values.
Toward the close of Ninety-Three, Hugo the artist sets up two superlatively dramatic opportunities for his characters to express their ideas, to declare the intellectual grounds of their stand: one, a scene between Lantenac and Gauvain, in which the old royalist is supposed to defy the young revolutionary by an impassioned defense of the monarchy; the other, between Cimourdain and Gauvain, in which they are supposed to confront each other as the spokesmen for two different aspects of the revolutionary spirit. I say “supposed,” because Hugo the thinker was unable to do it: the characters’ speeches are not expressions of ideas, but only rhetoric, metaphors and generalities. His fire, his eloquence, his emotional power seemed to desert him when he had to deal with theoretical subjects.