Friday
A Washington Post column yesterday reminded me of a post I wrote a year ago and which I am reconfiguring for today. Seeking to balance the inspiring leadership of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky with the grim reality of the war, David Ignatius wrote,
Zelensky has taken the West with him, emotionally, to the barricades of Kyiv. He evokes the idealism of the popular uprisings that swept Europe in the 19th century and inspired Victor Hugo’s classic novel, “Les Miserables.” We know the rousing chorus of the musical version: “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!”
But this isn’t a musical. And it would be a mistake not to cast a cold, unsentimental eye at the Ukraine crisis before it damages the world irreparably. Even as we try to support Zelensky and his noble fight against Russian President Vladimir Putin, we should understand the dangers ahead.
The song in the musical rises out of an inspiring speech given by character Enjolras, who Hugo shows leading an aborted 1832 Paris insurrection that ends with the deaths of most of the insurgents. A year ago, I applied the speech to those Myanmar, Belorussian, and Hong Kong citizens fighting against oppression. Today, it’s easy to imagine Zelensky delivering Enjolras’s words.
In the novel, Hugo observes Enjolras’s vision has grown in the course of the insurrection, and we could say the same of Zelensky’s vision. When the former actor and comedian speaks now, like Enjolras he speaks for democracies everywhere:
[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…. 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, like Zelensky, 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. Think of such education as a guard against the constant mendacity and brainwashing that authoritarians and their minions engage 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!
To our sorrow, we know Enjorlas’s 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, from World War II up until now, the European Union and NATO have accomplished some of what he envisions:
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.
Sadly, when I wrote my earlier version of this post a year ago, I didn’t have to put in the qualifier “up until now.” In fact, with the exception of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, it appeared that the new post World War II order had brought an end to the wars that have ravaged Europe ever since, well, the Pax Romana. Unfortunately, it appears we made the mistake of complacency. We forgot about how precious, and how fragile, democracy can be. Putin has reminded us.
Enjorlas’s address concludes with assurances that the Ukrainians, and all of us, need to hear. The forthcoming sacrifices, 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.
Ukraine is fighting that we may all be free, whether of Russian imperialism or of creeping authoritarianism. Thanks to actual dictator Putin and wannabe dictator Trump, Enjorlas’s speech seems as urgent now as it was in 1832, when Hugo set his book, and in 1862, when he wrote it.