9 - 15 May 2002
Issue No.585
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 9 - 15 May 2002 Issue No.585 |
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Greeks of the World: Victor Hugo looks East
-Victor Hugo face à la conquête de l'Algérie (Victor Hugo faced with the Conquest of Algeria), Franck Laurent, Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose [Victor Hugo et L'Orient séries] 2002. pp155;
-Le Despote oriental (The Oriental Despot), Claude Millet, Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose [Victor Hugo et L'Orient séries] 2002. pp150
The French writer Victor Hugo, a major figure of nineteenth- century European literature and politics, was born in 1802, dying some 80 years later after a life spent, in the words of Graham Robb, author of the most recent English-language biography, as "the angelic prodigy of the early Romantics and the satanic 'Attila of the French language'; the militant monarchist and the revolutionary socialist; the symbol of a corrupt aristocracy and defender of the misérables; a represser of revolts and instigator of riots." For Robb, "wherever one looks in the nineteenth century, there is Victor Hugo," and it must have seemed to many that this is still true, if in a different way. Les Misérables, a musical based on Hugo's novel of the same name, is now apparently the second-longest running production ever on Broadway in New York, and Notre-Dame de Paris, another of Hugo's creations, has been hijacked by Walt Disney.
More seriously, 2002 is also the bicentenary of Hugo's birth, and France has been celebrating. For some time now, the bearded countenance of the older Hugo has been looking out from the covers of magazines, his writings being the subject of on-going year- by-year analysis in the newspaper Le Monde. Someone has now had the intriguing idea of examining Hugo's relationship with "the Orient" in detail, French publishers Maisonneuve & Larose having issued no fewer than 11 short books on the subject, each looking in detail at a particular aspect of this, at first glance, unpromising subject.
Franck Laurent's Victor Hugo face à la conquête de l'Algerie and Claude Millet's Le Despote oriental are available separately from the other 11 essays, the series as a whole being supplied in a smart presentation case, which includes the inevitable CD-ROM. Among the other books are considerations of Hugo's views on India and Iran, the reception of Hugo's work in China, Japan and Vietnam, and studies of the representation of the Orient in certain works by Hugo, including in Les Orientales (1829) and in Le Rhin (1842). Though Hugo, unlike contemporaries such as Lamartine and Tocqueville, neither visited the Orient, nor wrote on it to any significant extent, preferring instead to reserve his legendary energy for explaining France's missionary role in Europe, any full understanding of French intervention in Algeria, which began with invasion in 1830, is not complete without him.
Like many of his contemporaries, Hugo put special emphasis on what he believed was France's missionary role as the educator of humanity and bringer of civilisation and enlightenment. Though disappointed for much of the time in his compatriots -- who did not take this as seriously as he would have liked -- Hugo's belief in the special qualities of French civilisation, and particularly of French republicanism, explains his views both on French intervention in Algeria and on France's role in the Orient more generally, particularly when faced with "Oriental despotism", bugbear of many nineteenth- century Western European statesmen.
However, there were always two sides to Hugo's views, for while he firmly believed that France had a special mission with regard to the Orient, as indeed it also had with regard to Europe as a whole, he also thought that in carrying out that mission the country was in danger of losing precisely those qualities that had qualified it to do so, in this way becoming little better than England, the real enemy of the values that France stood for.
Thus, though Hugo declared in Le Rhin, an enormous work on Franco-German relations, that "from now on the function of the enlightened nations is to enlighten those nations that are still in darkness," commenting on Algeria that France, having "found a people still in darkness," had a duty to enlighten it, he also worried about what such activity entailed. "Greeks of the World" the nineteenth-century French republicans may have been, but in Hugo's eyes they were in danger of becoming barbarians if they allowed themselves to become colonisers.
For one thing, there was the violence that tended to go along with every civilising mission, undermining its character and coarsening those carrying it out. For another, the fruits of colonial success tended to be commercial and economic, not intellectual or philosophical, thus reinforcing the middle-class stranglehold over French national life.
As a result, Hugo thought that France was "too civilised" a country to colonise others, even if this was necessary for the spread of civilisation. England, therefore, should be allowed to carry out the first step in "educating the peoples of the world" by colonising them, since there could be little threat of damage to English civilisation in its doing so. This phase achieved, France could then step in to carry out the second step, which was the more difficult one of "civilising the colonised world". France, Hugo thought, should be the country of grand, philosophically inspired romantic gestures, as it had been when Napoleon Bonaparte had set out to modernise Europe in the country's image. As it was, in colonising North Africa France was in danger of becoming a "nation of shopkeepers," little better than England when it came to stamping on every initiative that threatened the bottom line.
Hugo was also alarmed at the mix of "mediocrity and ferocity" that European colonization of the non-European world in fact entailed. Witnessing a visit by the Bey of Tunis to France in 1846, he approved of signs of increasing French influence in that country, while mourning the flattening out of North African life that seemed to go with it, making the Bey and his entourage look like characters from the court of Louis Philippe. "The Bey, if you can believe it, was dressed in the uniform of a French lieutenant-general," he wrote. "For this kind of disguise the Turks have abandoned their national dress, which was of the most magnificent kind. The Turks were a more beautiful people than us, and we've succeeded in giving them some of our ugliness. Our pedants of civilisation would call that progress."
In addition, colonial violence could easily backfire at home. Louis Philippe, wishing to secure French power in the Mediterranean and reinforce French prestige, had extended French colonisation in Algeria, opening a new phase in hostilities. Unprecedented violence was the result, and Hugo warned that the same French army that had carried out such acts in Algeria, turning the "dream of civilisation into a nightmare" as it did so, was also a threat to parliamentary and civil liberties at home. It was this coarsening of values that allowed Louis Bonaparte to use colonial troops in his coup d'état in 1851, ending the Second Republic and driving Hugo, among others, into exile.
Aside from French colonialism in Algeria, Hugo thought that France's missionary role also involved the renovation of political institutions in the Ottoman Empire, Hugo's views on Franco- Ottoman relations being the subject of Claude Millet's study Le Despote oriental. While Hugo thought that despotism was retreating in Europe, in the East -- the Ottoman Empire and Russia -- it was still very much alive. The "Eastern Question" involved deciding what to do with the ailing Ottoman Empire, significant parts of which, including Egypt, had broken away in the early nineteenth century, with other parts, such as Libya and the Hejaz, being increasingly tenuously linked.
Millet traces Hugo's views on "Oriental despotism" in detail, noting that many nineteenth- century Europeans tended to superimpose Aristotle's division of "Asian despotism" from "Greek democracy" onto contemporary geography, drawing on a venerable European literature that imagined "Asian and African nations to be subject... from the Ancient Assyrians to today... to the same apathy and enthusiasms, the same luxury and ignorance, the same servility and simple-mindedness," as one European observer put it.
While Hugo did not share all these ideas, he certainly shared some of them. However, he did not think that this condition was innate, instead considering that French-led reform could put an end to Oriental despotism in the region while staving off the greater threat of "Asian despotism" represented by Russia. Millet describes this point of view as "Kantian cosmopolitanism," expressed by Hugo in his Légende des siècles as the result of France's role, thanks to the French Revolution, of "delivering the world from the night of despotism," and it chimes with the role he envisaged for France elsewhere, for example in Algeria.
Full of striking quotations from Hugo's now rarely consulted political writings, speeches and sprawling, unclassifiable works, such as Le Rhin, both these books show up the post-Enlightenment, post-revolutionary Hugo in a particularly clear light, while also indicating the pitfalls of such a missionary posture, however it may have been disguised.
For Hugo, the drawback of France's civilising mission in North Africa and in "the Orient" was that it flattened out a certain native colour, replacing what he saw as Turkish exoticism and exuberance with the sober values of bourgeois civilisation. A further drawback was that it exposed France to the threat of violence: having exported violence to the colonies, it should not have come as a surprise when it came home to roost.
Yet nowhere does Hugo seem to have admitted the view that French intervention may have been experienced by those who suffered it less as a source of enlightenment and more as a sudden, unasked-for trauma, a kind of forced bringing-into- line that involved the loss, or massive disruption, of native society and its replacement by structures that had not grown up there and thus had few local roots.
In this perspective, Hugo's writings both on Algeria and on the Orient look like arrogance, though arrogance of a fascinating kind.
Reviewed by David Tresilian
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