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Wednesday
Living under the shadow of a fascist takeover, sometimes one takes special pleasure in small acts of rebellion. My recent favorite has been when the Marine chorus entertained a White House function singing the well-known lyrics from Les Misérables: “Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men? It is the music of a people who will not be slaves again!” I don’t know whether or not a message was being sent but it brought a smile to my face.
Twice over the past four years I’ve turned to Hugo’s 1862 classic to characterize people’s hunger for freedom. The first time occurred in March 2021 when the world was witnessing Russian, Belorussian, and Hong Kong protesters courageously confronting tyrannical authorities. The second time was after Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky had delivered an inspiring New Year address to welcome in 2023. In each instance I compared those resisting tyranny to Enjolras, the idealistic activist who leads a rebellion against monarch Louis Philippe and is then, along with his comrades, gunned down by the French military.
I never thought that I would be repurposing those posts for our own sake, here in America. But here we are.
In the novel, Hugo observes that Enjolras’s vision grows as the rebellion unfolds in ways with which we can identify. After all, many of us took democracy for granted prior to Donald Trump. Here’s Hugo:
[F]or some time past, he [Enjolras] had been gradually emerging from the narrow form of dogma, and had allowed himself to incline to the broadening influence of progress, and he had come to accept, as a definitive and magnificent evolution, the transformation of the great French Republic, into the immense human republic….
Addressing his fellow revolutionaries, Enjolras imagines a society that honors all humanity:
Citizens, do you picture the future to yourselves? The streets of cities inundated with light, green branches on the thresholds, nations sisters, men just, old men blessing children, the past loving the present, thinkers entirely at liberty, believers on terms of full equality, for religion heaven, God the direct priest, human conscience become an altar, no more hatreds, the fraternity of the workshop and the school, for sole penalty and recompense fame, work for all, right for all, peace over all, no more bloodshed, no more wars, happy mothers!
Then comes the declaration that should have us all applauding:
From a political point of view, there is but a single principle; the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty.
Following a mini lecture on the social contract, Enjolras sets forth a Jeffersonian vision of the importance of education. Think of such education as a guard against the constant mendacity and brainwashing that Trump and his minions are engaging in:
[L]egally speaking, [equality] is all aptitudes possessed of the same opportunity; politically, it is all votes possessed of the same weight; religiously, it is all consciences possessed of the same right. Equality has an organ: gratuitous and obligatory instruction. The right to the alphabet, that is where the beginning must be made. The primary school imposed on all, the secondary school offered to all, that is the law. From an identical school, an identical society will spring. Yes, instruction! light! light! everything comes from light, and to it everything returns.
Yes, light! light! everything comes from light!
Enjolras’s high hopes for the 20th century will, amazingly enough, come to pass, although not until the second half and with some notable exceptions (Serbia’s Milosevic, Russia’s Putin). Thanks to the European Union and NATO, Europe has experienced the longest period of peace since the Roman Empire:
Citizens, the nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century will be happy. Then, there will be nothing more like the history of old, we shall no longer, as today, have to fear a conquest, an invasion, a usurpation, a rivalry of nations, arms in hand, an interruption of civilization depending on a marriage of kings, on a birth in hereditary tyrannies, a partition of peoples by a congress, a dismemberment because of the failure of a dynasty, a combat of two religions meeting face to face, like two bucks in the dark, on the bridge of the infinite; we shall no longer have to fear famine, farming out, prostitution arising from distress, misery from the failure of work and the scaffold and the sword, and battles and the ruffianism of chance in the forest of events. One might almost say: There will be no more events. We shall be happy. The human race will accomplish its law, as the terrestrial globe accomplishes its law; harmony will be re-established between the soul and the star; the soul will gravitate around the truth, as the planet around the light.
And now Trump wants to throw it all away. Enjolras might have had difficulty imagining how once, after achieving something approaching his vision, Europe and America would be so ready to backtrack. Why have democracy when you could return to a king?
People like Enjolras gave their lives so that we could have freedom. We spit on their sacrifice when we fail to protect it.
