Victor Hugo's romantic exile

ISSN： 1050-9585

Source： European Romantic Review, Vol.16, Iss.2, 2005-04, pp. : 253-267

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Abstract

Hugo's collected political writings, Actes et Paroles (“Words and Deeds”) divides his career into three parts: Before the Exile, During the Exile, Since the Exile. It thus endows Hugo's career with a quasi-theological shape in which his return to France at the end of the second empire confirms a narrative of secular redemption. This essay explores the complications that attend that narrative. These include the impossibility of stabilizing the redemptive role of the poet-exile who ultimately figures himself as the double of the emperor who exiles him. The poet incarnates “right” and the emperor “law,” which distorts right, but such distortions turn out to be inevitable. The narrative's complications also include the impossibility of stabilizing the scenario of return from exile. The poet finds Paris scarred by Haussmanization and Prussian bombs, and he suffers through still other episodes of expulsion and exile. Memory itself becomes subject to the shock of historical violence, as does the text of Actes et Paroles which is marked by lines of censorship to which Hugo draws explicit attention. His note on censorship suggests that the inscriptions made by historical violence cannot be subsumed to either right or law. They will never be redeemed but, in Hugo's words, they are not “entirely lost.” They remain for the future to read.