#i am not saying that Hugo literally anticipated Spider-Man

[fremedon]

Brickclub 2.2.2, “In Which Are to Be Read Two Lines of Verse Perhaps by the Devil,” and 2.2.3, “The Ankle-Chain Must Have Been Worked On Previously, to Break at a Single Hammer-Blow”

I don’t have much to say about 2.2.2 that isn’t said by @meta-squash​ here or @everyonewasabird​ here, so since I’ve fallen so far behind this week I’m just going to skip to 2.2.3.

The opening digression on the cost of cannon salutes is still depressingly relevant, mutadis mutandis. I remember being reminded of this passage when I read Patrick O’Brien: part of what makes Jack Aubrey such an effective fighting captain is that he spends his own funds--money he often does not have--to buy powder and shot out of his own pocket, because the admiralty won’t pay for enough extra ammunition to let him drill the sailors effectively. The money spent on ceremonial cannon-fire isn’t just taking bread from the poor, it’s taking training and effectiveness from the navy itself.

That’s the only part of this chapter I would actually call a digression--the long passage on the Spanish war is pretty thematically integrated. Briefly--Spanish forces being mustered at Cadiz to go and retake the rebellious colonies of Spanish America mutinied, sparking a liberal revolution that ousted King Ferdinand; France went to war to restore him to the throne.

(The Siècle on the Spanish war: Episode 18 and a supplement on Thiers’ war reporting.)

The Spanish war was unpopular with the left for obvious reasons and with the Ultras, who feared the monetary costs, the likelihood for opening another ‘Spanish ulcer,’ and the likelihood of the French troops mutinying themselves.

Militarily, the French intervention put down the Spanish revolution with surprising ease--enough that the war was not even terribly useful for stoking nationalist fervor. “It seemed clear that certain Spanish officers whose duty was to resist yielded too easily,” Hugo says. It is not just morally correct for revolutionaries to fight to the last man, to hold their ground as we saw at Waterloo and will see at the barricade--it’s also useful. The French armies leave Spain with no joy in victory and a loss of respect for the Spanish; readers in 1862 would be aware that in 1832 (and the insurrections that followed), even the monarchists were impressed and humbled by the dedication and bravery of the dead insurgents.

As for the Bourbons-- “They did not see the danger that lies in suppressing an idea by decree.... The seed of 1830 was sown in 1823.” Quite literally, the July Revolution of 1830 will begin with the attempt to suppress ideas by decree, by muzzling the press. But also, 1830 kicked off with Charles X’s invasion of Algeria--a foreign war specifically conceived to whip up conservative sentiments at home to sway the elections to the Chamber of Deputies. As in Spain, it was a surprisingly quick and overwhelming military success--a punitive expedition to shake down the Dey of Algiers in response to a diplomatic insult ended in the unexpected capture of Algiers and the start of more than a century of colonial rule. And politically, it did not work--it was seen from the start as a cynical political ploy (where it wasn’t seen as a mask for mobilizing troops to turn against political opponents at home) and only galvanized the liberal opposition, who won overwhelmingly. (And when revolution broke out over Charles’ attempts to dismiss the resulting liberal Chamber before they had even met, as well as cracking down on the press, the most loyal third of the army was still in Algeria. Oops.)

So that’s the current political situation.

"An army,” Hugo says, in the middle of this discussion, “is a strangely contrived masterpiece by which force results from an enormous amount of powerlessness.” The unquestioning obedience--a weakness--of soldiers comes together to create strength.

In contrast--and I’m going to quote at length because this is such a lovely passage--

"A ship of the line is one of the most magnificent conjunctions of the genius of man and the power of nature.

A ship of the line combines both the heaviest and lightest of components because it operates at one and the same time with the three forms of matter, solid, liquid, and gas, and must contend with all three. It has eleven iron claws to grab the granite sea-bed, and to catch the wind in the clouds it has more wings and feelers than any flying insect. Its breath is expelled from its one hundred and twenty cannons as from enormous bugles, and proudly answers thunder. The ocean tries to lead it astray in the frightening sameness of its waves, but the vessel has a soul, its compass, that guides it and always indicates north. On dark nights its lanterns act as substitutes for the stars. So against the wind, it has rope and canvas; against water, timber; against rock, iron, brass, and lead; against darkness, light; against immensity, a needle.”

In the ship, as in the army, small and weak things come together--ropes, lanterns, a needle--to create great strength. But the army wages war “by humanity against humanity despite humanity”; the ship contends with Nature, against which--as Hugo goes on to tell us--it is still immensely small, and can easily come to ruin.

Or, if it is lucky, to the drydock at Toulon, where it is gawked at by another of Hugo’s crowds: “Whenever immense force is deployed and ends up as immense weakness, men’s imaginations are stirred.” So the ship is also the opposite of the army--weakness created from the merging of strengths.

So, there’s a lot going on here. Going back to that line at the start of the passage--”one of the most magnificent conjunctions of the genius of man and the power of nature.” Possibly, after Waterloo, I’m seeing the Providence/Nature vs Fatalité/Man antithesis everywhere, but I think it is echoed here. If Waterloo is what Providence could create out of the threads of human choice, human fatality, in order to set itself right, the ship might be a model of what human choice--human genius, which is a phrase Hugo uses several times in Waterloo in contrast to Providence--can make of what Nature gives it: the sea, the wind, the magnet.

By that logic, the ship should be what humanity uses to set itself right. But if the ocean is still Society--that thing which is not quite humanity, but is of it--the ship is where the Man Overboard falls from; it’s human progress, humanity setting its own course. It’s functional institutions, legitimate government, networks of care.

And, moving back to the level of plot, we see a specific ship, a real man, overboard into a real sea--and Jean Valjean, whose presence immediately makes it clear why we’ve just spent all this time talking about the intersection of great strength and great weakness. 

His name isn’t confirmed until the very end of the newspaper article that ends the chapter, but that is his name now. He is Jean Valjean, who combines the immense physical strength--and social deference, as we’ve just seen again in Boulatruelle--of the convict 24601, now 9430, with the social and legal knowledge, the wealth, and the unprepossessing façade of the bourgeois Madeleine. Valjean never successfully made an escape as 24601--to make this one he needed the skills he learned on the outside, the ability to wait, to plan for the future, to even imagine a future, just as much as he needed his strength. The chapter title says it all--he prepared the shackle, so he could break it with one blow. 

Fursona Watch: Valjean climbs the rigging “with the agility of a tiger-cat.” Tigers are the one feline that’s not uniformly positive in this book, and the only one associated with Javert.

On his way down to the struggling sailor, he looks “like a spider coming to catch a fly, only in this case the spider brought life, not death.” I think--as with Waterloo, and as with the ship, which also keeps people out of the ocean--that here we start to see Valjean as Fatalité in the service of Providence. We’ve seen Providence suddenly arrogate his choices to its own ends--starting with the purchase of his soul, after he rejects the softer path to humanity that the bishop offers him. Now he’s offering them up freely--creating, out of renunciation and self-abnegation, great power. And he’s basically Spider-Man, because we know what comes with great power.