Part II, Book 1, Chapter 18
Another Outbreak of Divine Right
Yippee, it’s another chapter giving AP Euro that doesn’t really add anything to the plot! (Flashbacks to “The Year 1817.”)
In Chapter 18 Hugo muses on the historic upheaval and changing of the guard triggered by Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. He describes the collapse of the Empire and the rebirth of monarchy—hey, France, for a country whose museums have insisted to me that you invented democracy, this kind of seems like a step back.
Hugo lists—and I’ve realized how much this man loves listing things—all the changes the everyday observer saw throughout France: the changed flags and monuments, the change in sentiments and collective fears. He marvels at how all these changes came about because a shepherd guide in the forest told the Prussians to go one way and not another. Real “butterfly effect” stuff here.
There is a great passage, I have to say, criticizing blind “great man” worship, which still hits. “Man had been both magnified and diminished by Napoleon. During that reign of glorious physical achievement, the ideal had been given the strange name of ideology. […] The populace, however, that cannon fodder so fond of the cannon loader, kept looking to him.”
Wow! Ideal becoming ideology, the cannon fodder looking to the cannon loader—this is spicy social critique that absolutely applies to socio-political dynamics today. RIP Victor Hugo, you would have done so well on Resistance Twitter.
Then the man zooms out. “But what does it matter to the infinite?” he asks, and while this is a beautifully profound thought, it makes me want to shake him, or smack him upside the head with this absurdly heavy copy of his own book. Yes, what does all this matter to the infinite?? If you’re going to go there and none of it ultimately matters, why did you make us go through [gestures] ALL OF THIS?!?
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