Brickclub: 2.1.3
“How much blame lies with Napoleon for the loss of this battle? Is the shipwreck attributable to the helmsman?"
Hugo says no, because Hugo is all about the all mighty, uncontrolled power of nature. Hugo says that Providence alone is at fault for these kinds of things, these things no one could have predicted or planned for. And certainly, he’s right that no one can control the rain, but I have to agree with @melle93 that some fault probably should lie with the general who did not plan for rain.
But nature is Inexorable, and Napoleon is not, and so the rain defeated the general and no one was to blame but God. And in doing so, Hugo is once again shifting the narrative. He ends his chapter by saying, “In our view, the two leaders at Waterloo are ruled by a concatenation of accidents. And where that mysterious culprit destiny is involved, we share the verdict of that naive judge, the people." He’s once again taking the power away from the Great Men, the Napoleons and the Wellingtons and the Bluchers, and giving it back to the ordinary people, the soldiers and the peasants and the travelers coming by long after the battle’s over. Once again, we return to our running idea that what actually happened is far less important, in the grand scheme of things, than what people say happened and what they believe.
And that’s what we’re getting with this section. Not the factual, historical truth of what happened, which you can get from historians, or Napoleon’s version of the truth, which you can get from Napoleon, but how the battle is remembered now, 50 years on. Sure, it’s a lot clearer than most people’s memories tend to be, what with the precise details and names and all, but even so. It’s a history that opened with the narrator wandering through a pastoral scene full of life and people doing chores and moved into its historical setting by way of a peasant offering to tell us the story of what happened.
On an unrelated note, I didn’t point this out yesterday, but Hugo’s ability to write creeping horror is underrated. “We are but a remote witness, a passer-by on the plain, one seeking to learn from that soil composted with human flesh...” is a great sentence, and there were a whole bunch more last chapter. The man has his gothic tropes down.
