[In the following essay, Cismaru presents Victor Hugo as a writer preoccupied with the struggle for human liberty.]

The year 1985 marked the centenary of Victor Hugo's death. In France, and significantly, in many other parts of the world, including Soviet-bloc countries, states in the Middle East, and China, numerous official observances were held, within and outside university campuses. To be sure, Hugo's reputation as one of the dominant literary giants of the nineteenth century earned him lasting respect and the memory of contemporaries everywhere. But it is especially his highly developed spirit of tolerance, love of fellow human beings, and defense of humanitarian causes that liberals throughout the world seem to appreciate, even if they are not too familiar with his poetry, novels, or plays.

There is a label of internationalism which is generally applied to Victor Hugo, and even a quick glimpse into his biographies elucidates and enhances this well-deserved designation. As a young boy, for example, he had occasion to visit Italy and Spain, and even to be schooled in Madrid. While still in high school he began writing Bug-Jargal, narrating the true story of the revolt of the blacks in Santo Domingo. He even had the chief of the insurgents save the life of a white man whom he called his brother, and give up his own in exchange for that of ten black hostages who were subsequently freed. Bug-Jargal is the first example of Hugo's humanitarian concern and, as noted herein later, he will have occasion to return to the theme of the just rebellion of blacks.

The poet's penchant for ancient monuments and aversion to the so-called progress that ignores or destroys them can be seen in an early poem called “The Black Tape” which he published in 1824, when he was only twenty-two years old. A year later he recalled the problem in an essay entitled “On the Destruction of Monuments in France,” advocating laws for their preservation from demolition or abusive restoration.

In 1827, appalled by news of the treatment of prisoners in labor camps, he visited the prison at Bicêtre and took notes on the punishment and torture to which those jailed were subjected. He quoted his notes later when he wrote The Last Day of a Person Condemned to Death and Les Misérables. In 1830 he published a collection of poems, Alms, and he directed that all profits from its sale be sent to a fund designed to help the strikers in Normandy who had long fought to have their wages on a par with those doing similar work in the Paris area. In 1831, in fact, he used his famous novel, Nôtre-Dame de Paris, to focus again on the life of the poor and the disadvantaged, and to condemn once more capital punishment, and torture, which is considered an even worse calamity.

In the course of the following year the poet had occasion to return to the theme of the protection of monuments in “War on Demolishers,” verses which did not endear him to those for whom the attainment of an elusive future was worth the abolishment of a sure past. More than that, for Hugo (and the authorities knew it, of course), emphasis on the past pointed out the shortcomings of the present, a none-too-subtle way of attacking the government and the court of Louis-Philippe. This he did even more openly in 1834 in the tale Claude Gueux, a true story of a worker imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread who later killed the warden of the prison. Hugo, with bitter sarcasm, attacked poverty which leads to crime, and a penal system which, by its severity, fosters an all-too-easy graduation from petty infractions to extreme violence. Moreover, he took the occasion to promote the universal education of children, holding that ignorance is deliberately tolerated by governments, in an attempt, quite successful, as a matter of fact, to retain the advantages of the upper classes. Some of the language used by the author went beyond even that used by Karl Marx, for it is vigorous and violent in nature. In 1837, when he returned to his practice of earmarking profits for the poor, this time with verses under the heading of Charity and for the benefit of the beggars of the 10th arrondissement, his vocabulary was again vituperant and explosive. Begging, petty theft, and murder, he maintained, are almost unavoidable steps, and he cited prisons such as that of Toulon (which he visited two years later) as providing the required ambiance of hopelessness. All this he evoked, in part, in his acceptance speech of 1841, when he was accorded a seat among the forty immortals of the French Academy.

In 1846 and 1847, respectively, he visited the prison of the Conciergerie and that of Roquette. He was touched by the harsh treatment of prisoners, took notes, and wrote pamphlet after pamphlet urging a revision of the penal code. Always espousing new humanitarian and liberal causes, he spoke on the occasion of the 1848 revolution against the deportation of political detainees, against press censorship, and for the insertion in the preamble to the new constitution of a reference to the rights of man.

The fact that he was not immediately successful in these areas did not deter him at all. Lack of prompt accomplishment in the political and social arenas paralleled great success in literary endeavors; and he capitalized on his now international reputation engendered by the latter in order to try and beat the odds against him in the former efforts. In 1859, for example, he made a public appeal to the government in Washington, D.C. for the pardon of the abolitionist John Brown. A year later he intervened in the Haitian uprising and affirmed that there are no white or black men, that there are only souls, whose fraternity is preconceived and ordered by God Himself. The article in question, published by the newspaper Progrès, was much criticized in France because many of the elite French troops sent to Haiti to restore order lost their lives; and the victory was so costly as to be quite debatable. Yet, so great was Hugo's interest in the relationship between whites and blacks that he responded with a drawing (painting was an activity in which he engaged only rarely), much heralded by supporters, of John Brown being hanged by his executioners to the delight of drunken spectators.

That the whites take advantage of and suppress persons of another color is a truism in which Hugh believed for the rest of his life. In 1861, for example, after the sacking of Peking's Summer Palace by French and British armies, he wrote a moving letter to a Captain Butler in which he condemned both countries for what he considered to be a decivilizing and barbaric act. In his eyes the French and the British were not only guilty of the sin of colonizing, but also of the greater sin of not appreciating the art of another culture, of pillaging and burning it as if it were a menace to that of the Western world. On the contrary, he concluded, just as souls of different races complement and enrich each other, so too the art of different peoples enhances and heightens that of each nation. That neither Queen Victoria nor Emperor Louis Napoleon realized any of this is less the fault of blind individual leaders than it is a horrid manifestation of man's basic greed and need to conquer; or to destroy that which he cannot have; or that which, being too beautiful to have been made by someone else, must cease to exist. And as if to compensate in some small measure for the loss, Hugo decided to order the building of a sumptuous Chinese dining room for Hauteville Ferry, the house of Juliette Drouet (his lifelong mistress) at Guernesey, where he had exiled himself while waiting for the dissolution of the Second Empire. The wood panels in the room were polygraphed and painted by Hugo himself. While it may be argued that all this constituted an insignificant gesture on the part of Hugo, the fact is that he spent many long weeks doing part of the work himself and a great deal of money contracting for the rest. The entire room was later transported and recreated as a huge living room in the house that the poet had occupied from 1832 to 1848 on Place des Vosges in Paris, a house which, since 1903, has become a museum evoking the life and work of Hugo.

In 1862 the novelist returned to concerns closer to home. This was, of course, the date of the publication of Les Misérables, on which he had been working for many years. Jean Valjean, Cosette, Gavroche, and others are representatives of the lower classes pushed to petty and not-so-petty crimes; of the persecuted; of the victims whose only ultimate solution is the victimization of others, in a never-ending cycle of inhumanity practices with the acumen of habit and the zeal of fanatics. Quantitatively, if not qualitatively, nowhere is Hugo's pressure for change more urgent, nor more provingly stated. In less than two years the book transcended French frontiers and became a source of inspiration for Europeans and non-Europeans who saw in it the possibility of a glimmer of hope: perhaps the ills now so vividly portrayed would no longer be ignored; perhaps the light cast by a universally known visionary would lift the fog blurring the eyes of rulers. And so it was that, in a gesture of hope and enthusiasm, journalists from all over Europe gathered in Brussels and organized an impromptu banquet honoring the book and its author. Hugo attended, fully conscious of his glory, of which he took advantage the very next day by addressing another of his old peeves, capital punishment: he wrote an open letter to the people of Geneva, urging them to reject a constitution including the death penalty. This they did, the proponents of the constitution saying that the vote was prompted more by respect for “The Great Man of the Century” than by deep popular convictions one way or the other.

No matter, Hugo was encouraged, and the following year he intervened on the side of the Poles whose insurrection was crushed by Russia, and on the side of the Mexican forces which, at Puebla, resisted the onslaught of the French troops. A bilingual daily in the besieged town boasted: “You have Napoleon's troops on your side, but on ours is Victor Hugo himself.” Hugo responded in a widely-circulated text, The War in Mexico, and public opinion switched more and more to the side of the Mexicans.

Spurred on by such success, he continued to pursue his interventions beyond the frontiers of France. In 1866, for example, he gave his support to the people of Crete who revolted against Turkish occupation. In the following year he wrote to the Prime Minister of England, urging that Ireland be given independence; to the President of the new Mexican Republic, asking that Emperor Maximilian be pardoned so that mercy may be shown even to those who do not deserve it; to the Portuguese Congress, congratulating it on its abolition of capital punishment, an action taken specifically at the request of the French writer; and to the Puerto Rican Patriots for Independence, saying that “The liberty of the world is made up of the freedom of each nation, no matter how small.” Following a French tradition dating back to Voltaire, and perhaps even before him, which holds that true leaders are not politicians but poets, because they dwell on loftier grounds and are prophets by definition, Hugo continued his Continent-wide and overseas interventions in the late 1860's. A letter of his was even published in Washington by the newspaper Public Opinion. It addressed the International League of Peace, praised its efforts, and anticipated the creation of a United Nations where, he hoped, all disputes would be solved by arbitration. In fact, in 1869 he was invited to preside at the League's meeting in Geneva, and there he exhorted the United States to side with the people of Crete in their struggle to shake off Turkish occupation. He even corresponded with the American philanthropist George Peabody, urging that fortunes, even if acquired by questionable means, be used to alleviate human suffering.

In the 1870's, although a septuagenarian, he continued like activities at an increased pace. In Parliament he made his famous “For Cuba” speech, advocating the Island's independence, and for the first time, too, he pleaded that women everywhere be given the right to vote. In 1871, the year of the Commune insurrection, he sided with it. He offered asylum to some of its leaders, his house was searched, and he was exiled to Belgium. From there he pursued his fight for the voting rights of women by contributing to the Parisian publication L'Avenir des Femmes, linking the very future of Europe to universal suffrage. Anticipating concerns that emerged in France much later, he noted women's lack of education, on-the-job discrimination, and the generally abusive treatment to which they are subjected by fathers, husbands, employers and governments. In a letter to the Society for the Amelioration of Women's Status he made the startling (for a Frenchman, at the time) statement: “Half of the human species does not enjoy equality; it is time that it does.”

When he was elected Senator in 1876, he used his platform for national and international political interests. He fought for amnesty for the Communards, he made fiery speeches against the Turks who persecuted and massacred Bulgarians, and he tried to increase France's participation in the International League of Peace. Conservatives rebuked him on all fronts in the beginning, but on a domestic level he was successful in pushing through first a partial, and then a total amnesty for the Communards. At this point he began to think it really in his power to make substantial changes, yet he was painfully aware that age and disease would keep him from attaining any major goals. He approached the 1880's, then, both with enthusiasm and with humility. He called for the abolition of slavery everywhere, a very touching issue because it was so rooted in economics. Education, much of it in the hands of various churches, is narrow, parochial and unscientific, he held, and he asked enlightened governments all over the planet to strip prelates from the propaganda platform that schools provide for them. This advice, he knew, since it related to an issue in which emotion enters, could not be followed easily. But he knew also that not speaking out is the attitude of the coward, or worse even, that of the accomplice. And so he went on, aware of the limitations imposed by time, and of the constrictions and restrictions of diminishing physical abilities. He continued to prefer to put a dent into a wrong, rather than to let it survive unhindered and metastasize.

Moreover, he was encouraged by the fact that his eightieth birthday was the occasion for an enormous popular demonstration, tens of thousands of Frenchmen passing under his windows and shouting their salutations and their wishes. In Le Rappel he published a stinging attack against the Russians for their persecutions of the Jews, and recalling the famous J'accuse in the Dreyfus Affair, he returned to the issue of the wrongs done to the Chosen People by Christians whose level of tolerance denied the very religion they professed. But if saddened by the progroms in Russia, he was extremely excited by the abolition of slavery in Brazil, which he saluted with a long speech in Parliament; and on a personal level, by the success of Saint-Saëns' Hymn to Victor Hugo which was played by orchestras throughout France. Shortly before his death, though ill and not moving with ease anymore, he insisted on visiting Bartholdi's atelier in order to see the Statue of Liberty before it was shipped to New York. The fact that a statue had been built to liberty was significant in and of itself, but he was especially pleased that the promised land of America would be its home. There, he thought, it would ultimately shame the New World into granting full rights to negroes and to women.

Eight months after expressing such hopes Victor Hugo died. There is little wonder that he was given a State funeral and that twenty-six foreign countries sent representatives who followed the procession from the Arc de Triomphe, where he lay in state, to the Panthéon, where he was buried. He would have been pleased to know that on his centenary unesco ordered the minting of a medal in gold, silver and bronze, bearing on one side the poet's head at age fifty, with the inscription: “Victor Hugo 1802-1885 unesco 1985”; and on the other, a tree shaking in the tempest, under which are inscribed the words: “It is through fraternity that the world will be saved,” words pronounced by the poet when he had returned to France from his Guernesey exile. The work was done by the renowned French artist Louisette-Jeanne Courroy. The Philatelic and Numismatic Bureau of unesco announced within two weeks after completion that the sale of all minted medals had been concluded and that it regretted that others would not be available for some time to come.

While not really needed for additional corroboration, the official recognition of Victor Hugo by an international body such as unesco is significant. Many inventors and pioneers in all areas of human endeavor are ignored during their lifetime, or soon forgotten after their death. Hugo, having had some success while alive, has the distinction of being remembered a hundred years later for his efforts on behalf of what today are called liberal causes; though, for him, these causes were simply human and humane, and of import to the entire family of man.