The problem confronted Victor Hugo, and generations after him till this day, was “when is it legitimate to use violence in an ‘insurrection’ that was not merely a destructive ‘riot’?” How could revolution be made to serve Civilization rather than Barbarism? When would ‘the people’ be its noble, patriotic self, rather than a debased and destructive ‘mob’ which is ‘traitor to the people’?
For Hugo, with his genuine compassion for the downtrodden, sweeping dismissals of the masses were unacceptable. Yet, in his mind, there seemed to be no clear divide between ‘people’ and ‘mob’ but a mere linguistic distinction: ‘Clear-sighted today, the instinct of the masses may be blurred tomorrow’
Hugo’s answer to this relates not to sociology or ideology but to morality. When inspired and educated to do good, they were ‘the people’; when debased and corrupted, they were ‘the mob’. But the obvious difficulty for any moral argument that involves the use of “good” is its circularity: “good” according to whom? Who has the moral authority on reality rather than mere appearance?
Without a clear moral ground, however, his political Romanticism becomes dangerously vacuous. He was aware of the horrors of civil war, and of the dangers of popular violence. Yet all this is wiped away by insisting on the long-term beneficence of Revolution, Progress and Providence: ‘Revolutions have a strong arm and a good hand, they strike hard and have the luck of the draw.’
Arguably, the catastrophe of 1871 (the semaine sanglante, or the bloody week that crushed the Paris Commune) removed the romance of the barricades from politics and confined it to fantasy: ‘the last great uprising … the one which created the most fear and shed the most blood … formed the ultimate exorcism of a violence which had been an inseparable part of French public life since the eighteenth century … In this Paris in flames, the French Revolution bade farewell to history.’ The reign of the orators ended. So Hugo thought.
Yet the myth of insurrection, the intoxication of courageous revolt against the odds, aiming to sweep away injustice in a day, still retains its magnetism till our day, whether as escapism in popular culture or in reality, as in the ‘Arab Spring’, as in the Hong Kong Protest of 2019, as in the storming of the US Capitol, or, if I may add, as in the quixotic GameStop saga.
*This is a combination of an excerpt of R. Tombs’s introduction to Les Misérables and my own comments.
