I. The Bourbons and Rational Choice Theory
What Hugo is arguing here is that France had been in a constant state of rapid and dramatic transition and change from 1789 up until Napoleon’s overthrow in 1815. The Bourbon Restoration supposedly represented a break, a return to the status quo while everyone regathered themselves and figured their shit out. Or so we would think, he says. Hugo sums up the core issue pretty neatly here: “[The Bourbons] had the fatal simplicity to believe that it was it that gave, and that what it had given it could take back.” They’ve been reading Machiavelli and not getting that they’re the joke!
They don’t understand that the rules of the game have changed—there is no more status quo in France. The people expect certain things now that weren’t in the public consciousness when the Bourbons last held power. “These guarantees are a necessity of the times. The princes ‘grant’ them, but in reality it is the force of circumstances which gives them.” The Bourbons, if they wanted to stay in power, now have to meet the expectations of the public which include not being treated like shit anymore. This is a pared down, monarchical version of something called ‘electoral incentive,’ based on a rational choice model. Basically, what this means is politicians’ top priority is always to stay in office and every action they take while in office is to achieve this single end. It is a bit cynical; you’re saying any good a politician does for their constituents will always be incidental to their main, selfish goal of maintaining power. This isn’t automatically bad—social contract theory mediates this a little bit—because it’s also the prerogative of the masses to continue to grant a politician power. If a politician takes actions that harm his constituents, they can simply revoke that power (note that the modern rise of lobbying and PACs complicates this relationship). It will generally be in the politician’s best interest to please (the majority of) their constituents so, theoretically, while the core motivation for political actions might vary, the end result is ultimately the same.
And damned if the ex-kings can’t manage even that. “Their misfortune was greater than they.” Yeah, it was generations of exploitation and oppression followed up by befuddled confusion when it turns out people want off the ride. Hugo really softballs them on this failure because, I think, he mistakenly disregards the influence of centuries of unbroken power the Bourbons held over France. They still see themselves as the default and correct option because they’re too blinded by a history of total power to recognize any change that happens outside their influence. Their final descent isn’t a dignified, regal withdrawal in response to changing times, it’s the pathetic, childish death throes of a group of people unable to conceptualize a public good that exists beyond their own “Divine Right” to power.
Parts II and III under the cut...yeah I did that. There’s also another illustration, so tempting!
II. Violence, Fact, and Revolution
Hugo makes a poor appeal to civility: “Under the Restoration the nation became accustomed to discussion with calmness, which was wanting in the republic.” I’m not saying this is complacency but…the July Revolution still ended with a king on the throne again. It’s the same mistake he makes with the treatment of the final Bourbons. Royalty isn’t inherently noble and calmness isn’t inherently peaceful. There simply is no intrinsic value in these things. People who speak calmly can still be doing the same amount of harm as those yelling from pulpits. In calling the July Revolution “mild” and by painting the Bourbons as "worthy” despite their descent, Hugo cheapens the centuries of suffering of the common people and the validity of their anger.
I wouldn’t pick on these particular comments of his so closely, except Hugo himself is about to abruptly complicate his stance in the very next chapter without displaying any real understanding of why it was shaky to begin with. “The Revolution of July is the triumph of the Right prostrating the fact...Thence the glory of the Revolution of 1830, thence its mildness also. The right, when it triumphs, has no need to be violent.” The right is the ideal, the fact is reality. Hugo’s observations on how violence affects the triumph of right...don’t really work, do they? The July Revolution, in all its mild splendor, didn’t restore right, it resulted in a return to the very same fact it sought to prostrate. Why? The problem is Hugo characterizes fact as neutral, passive, nonviolent even and it isn’t. He seems to want to refuse to acknowledge the explicit and active opposition to right and why it exists. But if there are those who fight on the side of right, it has to follow that there are those fighting for fact. This constitutes the very definition of class conflict: the many workers fight against the few owners. And the owners fight back.
I’ll go ahead and spoil my answer, if you haven’t already extrapolated from my dive into rational choice theory: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a bourgeoisie in possession of power, must be in want of more power. Just as the politician in office wants to stay in office. Rational choice dictates they will make every action with the single-minded intention of maintaining and even amassing power, whether that be political, economical, etc. The bourgeoisie aren’t mindlessly resurrecting a dynasty, they are active agents in undermining the work of the revolutionaries. Not necessarily because they hate the lower class but because they want power for themselves. As in our election incentive example, this motivation doesn’t really matter because, ultimately, the outcome is the same.
I’ll repeat part of a quote above: “The right, when it triumphs, has no need to be violent.” But what about before it triumphs? *Or when it fails, like in the acclaimed novel Les Miserables? What’s the protocol then? The ideal and pure state of nonviolence after the Revolution will always be built on the violence it took to break free, Enjolras specifically acknowledges his violent role in bringing about a new day. For all Hugo sanitizes it, the July Revolution was violent, it was just usurped by neo-royalists directly afterward. Peaceful solutions might be preferable, but when violence is already being done to you, there isn’t always a real choice. This is why I don’t care much for Hugo’s appreciation of calm discussion with the Bourbons. It would be like me calmly exchanging points of view with a neo-Nazi.
III. Machiavelli
I just thought Hugo was wrong about Machiavelli, that’s it. The Prince is at the very least hyperaware of the system it describes and at the most hard hitting satire. The Bourbons are funny because they think they’re still the same princes and that ‘Machiavelli said we were doing everything right by oppressing the people! Why do they hate us?’ when, as I see it, that’s exactly the response The Prince is designed to garner. It exposes the cruel tactics of a strong-handed government and also explains why they are effective. When the lie of natural power is peeled away and the cogs of exploitation based in greed are revealed, it fuels outrage and pushback. Machiavelli may not be a font of revolutionary sentiment, but he’s hardly the slave to fact that Hugo describes. He basically leaked the playbook that the ‘princes’ were using to fuck everyone over, revealing their dirty tricks. When the Bourbons attempt to come back to power, they use these same tricks, except now the public is wise to it and neatly (yet violently) excise them.
This is definitely the part of the book where we start really getting into Hugo's Conflicting Feelings About Revolution. He is, at his core I think, something of an idealist. He wants people to do the right thing because it's the right thing to do, and he would really rather we do it without having to hurt anyone or fight about it. "Right triumphant has no need of being violent" seems like a good encapsulation of his philosophy at this point in his life. If we're just earnest and committed and right enough, everyone will see how right we are and they'll step aside to make way for what is clearly the better way.
This bit absolutely benefits from being more up to date on Hugo's biography and beliefs than I am right now, but even without that you can get a sense of some of his internal contradictions. (That said, I suspect it read very differently when it was published. Hugo's audience knew him and knew what he believed and how those beliefs had progressed over time. Hugo was many things at many times, but as far as I can tell one of the through-lines of his life was that, whatever he did, he did it in public. To an audience not only aware of his shifting politics but who had likely watched it happen in real time, Hugo's weird Thing about the Bourbons probably prompts a lot more reaction. Also possibly a fair bit of, 'uh-huh. Sure Victor.') Anyway, what I'm saying is that, even without the background, I think this is still a really telling chapter, when it comes to figuring out Hugo's philosophy. And it's interesting to me that it comes here, sandwiched between some Marius bits. Obviously it's here for timeline reasons, but I think the Marius bits help put things into context as well.
Because really, this feels to me like Hugo simultaneously rejecting Great Man history while admitting that he himself still kind of believes in the concept. Like in Waterloo, he's firmly denying Great Men the right to define a nation or a movement. "[The Bourbon Dynasty] thought that it had roots, because it was the past. It was mistaken; it formed a part of the past, but the whole past was France." Hugo is very clear on this point, and it's been a throughline of the entire novel. History is not made by Men, it's made by people and, as a result, it's people, rather than Men who have the right to chart and define the future. The crime of the Bourbons was in thinking that they had a right to rule, rather than in realizing that they had been offered an opportunity by a population that could just as easily take it away again.
But what he's not doing is taking that next step and saying that Great Men don't exist. Really what he's doing is more unlinking the concept from the right to rule. Napoleon was a Great Man, but that didn't give him the right to define the destiny of a nation. The Bourbons thinking that they did have that right in some ways stripped them of their Great Man-ness. And, in the ultimate insult, the July Revolution didn't do them the honor of treating them like they were Great. "In the eyes of despotic governments, who are always interested in having liberty calumniate itself, the Revolution of July committed the fault of being formidable and of remaining gentle." It's an interesting philosophical direction to take, and one that makes sense coming from Hugo, who simultaneously aspires to Greatness but, by this point I think, acknowledges that that doesn't make him any more suited to be in charge or to define his nation than anyone else.
But I think the most interesting thing is how much he wants the Restoration to have been a good thing. It definitely feels like he really wants the problem with the Bourbons to have been that they were bad rich people, and that if they had only been good rich people everything would have been fine. And I don't think it's him being wishy-washy about socialism or something! I think it stems from him having seen the effects of violent upheaval and watched the way that repression and revolution impact the nation and its people. I think he's being entirely honest when he talks about the nation being Tired. And LM is a very idealistic book. So it makes perfect sense to me that he would take a moment here to indulge in some wishful thinking about what would happen if people were just Good and Right and Understood What The Problems Were And How To Fix Them. As someone also living through a lot of turmoil, I empathize deeply.
I also wanted to talk for a bit about Marius. My thoughts about this aren't fully formed yet, so it's going to be brief, but I think that it does matter that this section comes right after our first big Marius bits. Hugo loves to open volumes on digressions, but, with the obvious exception of the Bishop, each opening digression calls back to the previous volume while also setting us up for what's to come. Waterloo, in emphasizing the importance of ordinary people in history, calls back to Fantine and how she was cast aside, while setting us up for Marius and how history influences the present. The gamins calls back to Cosette and the cloister and how one place contains, essentially, nested universes. That idea really carries forward throughout all of volume 3, which is about different people living lives that don't really overlap, either through deliberate isolation or because of the way social groups work. [Sidenote: I only just thought about this throughline, but now I really want to explore it further, because I think the idea of nested and non-interacting social groups is really important to the story in a way that I can't quite pin down. Anyone have any thoughts?] This bit, then, calls back to Marius and the ways in which he represents Hugo's shifting political and social ideas. It's a nebulous idea right now, not helped by the fact that I skipped out on the last part of 3.8 because Everything (in book and in life) Happens So Much, but I want to keep an eye on it as we go forward.
New Pokémon TV update version 4.1.1 now live on iOS, Android and other compatible devices
New Pokémon TV update version 4.1.1 now live on iOS, Android and other compatible devices:
The latest version of Pokémon TV is now available via web browsers and various set-top apps for Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV and Android TV-compatible devices. You can visit watch.pokemon.com or download the updated app on your TV-connected device today.
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What’s New on Android
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Captain Tsubasa: Dream Team Mod 4.1.1 Apk [God Mod/Weak Enemy]
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