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Thursday
Kudos to Reuters News Service for its strategic juxtaposition, delivered deadpan, in an article on Trump’s plan to attend Les Misérables last night:
Trump’s appearance at Les Misérables, a show about citizens rising up against their government, comes just days after he sent U.S. Marines and the National Guard to quell protests against his administration’s immigration raids in Los Angeles. First lady Melania Trump and Vice President JD Vance will also attend.
Will the president connect “the songs of angry men” who vow to “not be slaves again” with the thousands of protesters who are expected to participate in the “No Kings” demonstrations this Saturday? Even in our rural and very red Tennessee county we will be assembling. In April we drew between 200-300 in our “Hands Off” protest (as in “Hands off our Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid”) as we assembled across from the federal office building in Winchester, Tennessee, and I can imagine similar numbers this time around. I’ll report back on Monday.
“No Kings Day” organizers are very clear that the protests, in the spirit of Martin Luther King, must be peaceful—Trump is salivating over the prospect of military confrontation—so the passages from Victor Hugo’s novel don’t entirely fit. The Paris Revolution of 1832, which Hugo witnessed directly, was violent and was violently put down, with revolutionaries lined up and summarily shot when captured (as occurs in the novel). Still, the vision of insurrection leader Enjolras is one that Saturday’s protesters will be embracing as he speaks for democracies everywhere.
I’ve applied these passages in the past to the Ukrainians resisting Vladimir Putin and to freedom movements in Hong Kong, Myanmar, and elsewhere. (I’ve repurposed those posts here.) Little did I know that I would one day be applying them to an attempted fascist takeover in my own country. Here’s Enjolras:
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 or “sovereignty of myself over myself”:
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. Think of such education as a guard against the mendacity and brainwashing that the Trump White House and Fox News engage in daily:
[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!
To our sorrow, we know Enjolras’s next prediction will not occur. The 20th century, rather than being happy, will be one of the bloodiest in history. Nevertheless, the ideal he voices is one that activists have never ceased striving for. And to give Enjolras credit, from World War II up until now, the European Union and NATO have accomplished some of what he envisions while various minority rights movements have changed the landscape of civilized society (which of course is what so infuriates Trump and his supporters). Here’s Enjolras:
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.
Another thing that Enjolras couldn’t foresee is that some people would become bored with freedom, choosing a leader who delights in taking it away once fears of invasion and famine had abated. Complacency set in as we forgot how precious and how fragile, democracy can be.
Enjolras’s address concludes with assurances that we need to hear. Whatever we sacrifice to protect freedom, he tells us, 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.
Americans have it lucky: on Saturday, people will not need to die to affirm our belief in our constitutional republic. The more of us who turn out, the more chance we have of saving the one we’ve got.
