14 - 20 March 2002
Issue No.577
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 14 - 20 March 2002 Issue No.577 |
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Limelight
Paris when it sizzles!
He breathed in the mild air, impregnated with sweet odours of the flowers and trees of the wide open boulevards. Then a tear or two would well up in the corner of his eye, as he crossed the many cobblestone alleys, swarming with creatures of misery and misfortune. He found the social injustices of his beloved land, unbearable. His poetic soul needed to suffer the pains of others, so he can in turn echo their pain in his words. From an early age he knew that he wanted to write. He preferred to write in verse, but he would write in any and every form. His voluminous works made him one of his country's greatest poets, considered by many the most important of the French Romantic writers.
If you should find yourself in Paris today, you will undoubtedly catch some of the "Hugomania" infiltrating the city. This year, 2002, marking the 200th anniversary of his birth in Belançon, in 1802, has been declared the "year of Hugo". Sixty new publications of a number of his works are on display in every bookshop. A new biography in two large volumes has sold close to 200,000 copies. Every aspect of the man has been explored, displayed and enacted on the stage, on television, in art galleries and museums. Volumes and volumes of books by him and about him, are flying off the shelves, surpassing all publishers' expectations.
The commercial hounds are also making bundles of euros for every kind of memorabilia imaginable -- key chains, rings, watches, bracelets, cards. Designer tea mugs and coffee cups in fine porcelain have become a collectors' item. For your table you may purchase an embroidered "Hugo" setting and for your desk a set of "Hugo" stationary with pens, notebooks, diaries, inkwells and calendars spelling "Hugo". Museums all over Paris, indeed all over France display Hugo's works, pictures, documents, caricatures and personal belongings. In every French town you will find a Victor Hugo street. There is no avoiding the sweet "Victor Hugo" air that pervades the city arcades, embankments and promenades -- but then why would you want to?
After his long walks, Hugo would wipe the sweat off his pure and noble brow and return to his large drawing room in Paris where the family had settled since he was two. His eyes brilliant, as drops of dew, filled with tears unshed at the suffering of the hapless and downtrodden. He would rest his head on one hand and with the other his pen would feverishly write on and on as one possessed.
In 1817 the Academie Francaise honoured him for one of his poems. He was only 15. Encouraged by his mother, young Hugo continued to write a variety of literary works, plays, novels, poems in which he expressed his own particular vein of fantasy with force and originality.
A great admirer of Shakespeare and the Romantic Movement in England, Hugo found himself in conflict with the ideas of classicism. In 1827 his verse drama Cromwell, included a preface that became even more famous than the play. He demanded a verse drama in which contradictions of human existence, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, tears and laughter would be resolved by the inclusion of both tragic and comic elements in a single play. This preface became the principle declaration of French romanticism.
Victor Hugo (1802 --1885
Once a political conservative and a staunch royalist, Hugo became increasingly liberal. When Charles X restricted the freedom of the press, and censors prohibited the stage performance of his play Marion de Lorme (1829), Hugo retorted by writing Hernani (1830), depicting a noble outlaw at war with society. The play later became the basis of Verdi's opera Ernani, and is considered by many scholars the beginning of the French romantic movement in literature. Another play, Le Roi s'amuse (1832) also became Verdi's masterpiece Rigoletto.
His first international endeavour was Notre-Dame de Paris. (1831), (English translation: "The Hunchback of Notre- Dame"). Set in 15th century Paris, it tells the moving story of the hunchback Quasimodo, the cathedral bell-ringer and his desperate love for the gypsy girl Esmeralda. The story condemns a society that heaps misery on its poor and helpless. The Hunchback became an instant success, stirring hearts around the world. Filmmakers have adapted it over 14 times for the screen, television, video films, video games as well as an animated version. It has become part of popular culture.
After the revolution of 1848 Hugo supported President Louis Napoleon, but when he established himself emperor, Hugo went into exile for 20 years, where he produced his best works. It is said that he wrote 100 lines of verse and 20 pages of prose every morning. Les Contemplations contains his best lyric poetry revealing his deep chagrin over the loss of his daughter Leopoldine, who was cruelly snatched away from him in a drowning accident leaving him with a gaping wound that would never heal. On returning from her grave he wrote:
On arrive, on recule on lutte avec effort,
Le vaste et profond silence de la mort.He picked his abandoned novel, which he had started 20 years before, and finally finished it. Les Miserables appeared in 1862. No other work of literature has been reproduced as has Les Miserables. Thirty-six film versions have been adapted for the screen to date, but the most outstanding remains the 1935 production with Frederic March as Valjean and Charles Laughton as inspector Javert. Its theme of social injustice and the human struggle for honour and decency despite the prejudices of a cruel society expresses Hugo's humanitarianism and his profound belief in the principles of democracy. Today, one version or another of Les Miserables is playing in major cities around the world. A musical version of Les Miserables was produced on Broadway in 1987 and is still running today in both New York and London. Les Miserables finds success in every language and every age, perhaps because there is a bit of Valjean in each of us.
Paris sizzles "every moment of the year", but especially this spring. If perchance you find yourself there, breathing the sweet spring air, walking up and down the "Avenue", you surely will stop at one of the delightful sidewalk cafés. Without a doubt, you will munch on a "Victor Hugo sandwich", sip an aromatic coffee from a "Victor Hugo mug", and maybe watch a rerun of Les Miserables on TV. In the evening you may attend a performance of his play Ruy Bas, at the Comédie Francaise.
Hugo returned from exile after the collapse of the Second Empire in 1870. He became a national hero, a symbol of republicanism in France. He was the poet of the common man and knew how to write with simplicity and power of common joys and sorrows. After his death on 22 May 1885 in Paris, Hugo was given a national funeral attended by two million people. His body lay in State under the Arc de Triomphe and later, in accordance with his wishes, borne on a pauper's hearse and buried alongside many famous French citizens in the Panthéon.
When asked who was the greatest French poet, André Gide replied "Victor Hugo, helas". If this was an expression of regret, alas, no other Frenchmen shares this feeling. To us and to the rest of the world, Hugo is the brilliant author of the Hunchback and Les Miserables. To the French he is their revered poet laureate, the most prolific and most powerful mind of the French Romantic Movement. Paris has good reason to sizzle!
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