Wednesday
This past year I have watched with awe as protesters around the world have put their liberty and lives on the line for principles that Americans—at least until Donald Trump’s presidency—have taken for granted. Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables is helping me get a better sense of those Myanmar citizens—and Russian, Belorussian, and Hong Kong citizens—who are risking everything for freedom and liberty.
Hugo writes about an aborted 1832 Paris insurrection that ends with the deaths of most of the insurgents. Their leader, Enjolras, draws on the ideals of the French Revolution to deliver an inspiring speech on a Paris barricade. Hugo observes Enjolras’s vision has grown in the course of the insurrection:
[F]or some time past, he 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…. Enjolras was standing erect on the staircase of paving-stones, one elbow resting on the stock of his gun. He was engaged in thought; he quivered, as at the passage of prophetic breaths….A sort of stifled fire darted from his eyes, which were filled with an inward look. All at once he threw back his head, his blond locks fell back like those of an angel on the somber quadriga [chariot] made of stars, they were like the mane of a startled lion in the flaming of a halo, and Enjolras cried:
“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!
Enjolras declares that the meaning of the struggle is self-determination:
Citizens, whatever happens to-day, through our defeat as well as through our victory, it is a revolution that we are about to create. As conflagrations light up a whole city, so revolutions illuminate the whole human race. And what is the revolution that we shall cause? I have just told you, the Revolution of the True. 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:
[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.
To our sorrow, we know his next prediction will not occur. The 20th century, rather than being happy, will be one of the bloodiest in history. Nevertheless, the ideal is one worth striving for. And to give Enjorlas credit, the European Union has accomplished some of what he envisions, ending the wars that have ravaged Europe since, well, the Pax Romana:
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.
The leader’s address concludes with assurances that the forthcoming sacrifice will not be in vain:
Friends, the present hour in which I am addressing you, is a gloomy hour; but these are terrible purchases of the future. A revolution is a toll. Oh! the human race will be delivered, raised up, consoled! We affirm it on this barrier. Whence should proceed that cry of love, if not from the heights of sacrifice? Oh my brothers, this is the point of junction, of those who think and of those who suffer; this barricade is not made of paving-stones, nor of joists, nor of bits of iron; it is made of two heaps, a heap of ideas, and a heap of woes. Here misery meets the ideal. The day embraces the night, and says to it: ‘I am about to die, and thou shalt be born again with me.’ From the embrace of all desolations faith leaps forth. Sufferings bring hither their agony and ideas their immortality. This agony and this immortality are about to join and constitute our death. Brothers, he who dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded with the dawn.”
I myself have difficulty surrendering to Enjorlas’s idealism, but it does take me back to when I was 18 and protesting the Vietnam War. Once, along with 80 other students and faculty from Carleton College and St. Olaf, were arrested for blocking the doors of the Hennepit County Induction Center following the Kent State shootings. I remember an electric shock going through us when we learned that the federal government was prepared to gun down middle class white kids and feeling that drastic measures were called for.
Now, I was never capable of violence and, to participate in our sit-in, people had to promise not to resist the arresting authorities. We knew we wouldn’t be facing the kind of risks that Enjorlas and the Myanmar protesters must confront. Still, Hugo provides glimpses of the higher vision that can supersede even care for one’s life.