#the first part of this chapter really pumped up the appeal of the barricades for me

[centrifuge-politics]

Brick Club 5.1.1

Oh, you already know I’m back on my bullshit.

Now, I know functionally nothing about the Revolution of 1848, but it’s my understanding that it actually succeeded, for a brief time at least, in establishing a republic. So I don’t understand why Hugo calls it an ochlocracy and insists it was an attack on ‘right.’ I’m kidding, I know exactly why! Welcome to Victor Hugo is wrong about violence, installment number yada yada etcetera.

The elitism of this chapter, “But how excusable he feels it, even while opposing it…we persist, we are compelled to; but the conscience, though satisfied, is sad, and the performance of the duty is marred by an oppression of heart.” This is pure, uncut upper class liberalism. The masses, the rabble can’t possibly know what it best for them, so it is up to us, the wise, to protect them from themselves by siding with the ruling class to stamp out their poorly thought through revolts. Try revolution again when you’re educated and civilized like me. This is absurdly patronizing and it’s the exact same mentality that allowed the bourgeoisie class to halt the Revolution of 1830 in its tracks. It’s a fear of the working class gaining any actual power masquerading as false concern for the greater good. In Hugo’s case, specifically, he has a general distaste for what he considers mob rule. It seems like he wants the working class to act like bourgeoisie when they revolt, to have a platform and a plan and a consensus (because the bourgeoisie definitely all agreed with each other, right). But that takes time, resources, and support, even if we ignore that the government had outlawed political gatherings. We’re talking about desperate starving people! And a bourgeoisie middle class that is only ever motivating into effective action when it comes to undermining the working class, never when helping them. Hugo explicitly advocates this: “The exasperations of this multitude which suffers and which bleeds, its violences in misconstruction of the principles which are its life, its forcible resistance to the law, are popular coups d’état, and must be repressed.” All violence is not equal.

It is telling that Hugo is only upset at the “June Days” of 1848 and doesn’t say a word of the events of February. You know, when the bourgeoisie happened to be on the side of the working class. Come June, it becomes “a revolt of the people against itself.” This idea is insidious because, yes, there may have been some incompatible interests among the lower class (according to some sources, and let’s just say I have an axe to grind with Frédéric Bastiat), but that’s hardly grounds for uniformly condemning an entire people’s movement the way Hugo is trying to. It shows a rather sloppy and narrow minded idea of what the working class was actually demanding and little understanding of how much the structure is designed against them.

It’s really difficult to pin down what criteria Hugo uses to judge a rebellion. He hates the Jacqueries and, to a lesser extent, June 1848, but he loves 1830 and, once he came around, 1832. I’m not a historian but as someone who studied class conflict and political movements, these uprisings are only superficially different in the specifics. The ‘big idea’ is all the same. What the specifics seem to affect, however, is how willing the bourgeoisie middle class are to support any given uprising. I’m speculating, but they’re fickle and Hugo is fickle right beside them. He’s always willing to say the right things, until it comes to radical action to back up those words. I’m very much speculating, but perhaps his tolerance of 1832 stems partly from the fact that it was mostly headed by relatively well-off, educated students. I don’t know enough to really bring down the gavel on that but there’s, at the very least, a pattern in his arguments. He expresses a distaste for “civil war” in this chapter—just like our moderate liberal Marius—which just comes across as a disparaging dismissal of class conflict between the bourgeoisie and working class. Recall the chapter detailing the rise of Louis-Philippe after the July Revolution. In it, Hugo mourns the fact that the knowledge of the wise was overtaken by the greed of the able. I vaguely remember arguing that this was a poor distinction that leaves the working class out of play entirely, despite being the ones who did the work. He does much worse here, actually advocating that the wise join the able in dismantling the revolutionary work of the working class for their own good. The poor don’t get to be wise or able, just oppressed and miserable foot soldiers for a philosophical struggle. Hugo might not be explicitly saying this, but it’s the logical conclusion of all his arguments.

I’d offer a more robust rebuttal but, as I’ve come to expect, Hugo has already provided it for us in 4.13.3 through Marius. He thinks, “outside of that holy thing, justice, by what right does one form of war despise another?” Put it this way: how can you condemn the revolution of the poor while supporting the “honest man’s” violent repression of it? “Oppression is the foreigner…despotism violates the moral frontier,” whether it comes from monarch or bourgeoisie. “Men must be aroused, pushed, shocked by the very benefits of their deliverance.” Hugo might do well to take his own advice—if he wasn’t being facetious in 4.13.3—rather than assume it only applies to those he believes know less than him.

And I guess I can talk about the two barricades. To cut to the chase, one is unbridled violence, the other guerrilla cowardice and Hugo approves of neither. He appears to have a fearful respect of them, however, and his description of the Saint Antoine barricade filled me with righteous antifa rage, “the spirit of revolution covered with its cloud that summit whereon growled this voice of the people which is like the voice of God.” This is meant to be a grim sight, but there’s something about a three story, seven hundred foot barricade built from the ruins of polite society, a testament to the people’s suffering bristling with fury and bitterness, “a mob of flaming heads crowned it; a swarming filled it; its crest was thorny with muskets, with swords, with clubs, with axes, with pikes, and with bayonets...It was a garbage heap and it was Sinai,” that just gets my fucking blood up. I love it. It’s the finale of the 2012 movie but howling.

On the other hand, the Faubourg du Temple is silent but no less angry. It simmers. The insult of ‘coward’ fizzles when you’re taking precise and deadly fire from hidden guerrilla fighters, it comes from a place of fear. And Hugo says it right, “Not one of the eighty cowards thought of flight; all were killed.” Don’t even mess. “Admitting that the gloomy and gigantic insurrection of June was composed of an anger and an enigma.” How can you possibly hate this? Unless you have something to fear from the people’s will made manifest. I’m getting dramatic but I’m so into these barricades.