tayeb zayed
Chapter XXXIX of ” The last day of a condemned man ” offers Victor Hugo the opportunity to write in the twilight of his life one of the most terrible novels of his career. The cruellest, darkest, most deeply pondered things in life that must be cast off like a heavy burden are those that come with age. They come to us as a way to sound the alarm, as a conclusion in preparation for a departure from no return. And these are the darker things that resurface after being buried for so long within us throughout our youth and maturity. They need more space to be displayed in broad daylight, for the general public and for the rest of the soul. Victor Hugo gave this book of human decay the title of a date soiled by the blood she saw flowing in streams in a France torn by the revolution of its people against its monarchical system: Ninety-three! Quatre-vingt-treize is more of a history book than a novel of society or morals. It’s more of a documentary than a story of facts. We will have read all the history books on the French Revolution, we will have less understood its ins and outs, its executioners, its victims, its destructive ravages. It had taken this cry of distress, pain and revolt from the narrator condemned to the idea that the guillotine would be more lenient than the other means of execution it had just replaced, for Victor Hugo’s conscience to be shaken: ” are there any dead in their own way who have come to thank them and tell them: it’s well invented. Stick to it. The mechanics are good. Is it Robespierre? Is Louis XVIII?’ This unanswered cry, launched in the face of justice and society which had sent the condemned narrator to the guillotine, remained in gestation in Victor Hugo’s memory as one of those hideous things that we were fleeing but who ended up catching up with us. Hugo will take more than forty years before the readers of ”the last day of a condemned man” see the arrival of a no less hideous book to find in all its ugliness a good part of the answer to these two questions about these two illustrious men. whose names are mentioned in this chapter. Time ripens thought. Age too. And 27-year-old Victor Hugo is not the 72-year-old. What a coincidence ! Hugo the insurgent against the death penalty and Hugo the historian of a bloody chapter of the French revolution! The young and the old find themselves at different times just as Louis XVIII and Robespierre find themselves under the ax of the guillotine. A common fate and different paths. These two names thus juxtaposed that Victor Hugo cited as a disarming argument to decry a commonplace according to which the guillotine would offer the condemned person an end without suffering, cannot on their own be figureheads in a country set on fire and bloody. Marat, Danton, Saint Just and Robespierre are the most sinister figures of the French revolution to whom Victor Hugo dedicated one of his terrible novels ”Quatre-vingt-treize”. It is a date that marked the end of a monarchical regime, the dismissal and execution of King Louis XVI by the guides of the revolution. Ninety-three is also the year of the beheadings of the heroes of the revolution.
The slogan of the Republicans ”No mercy, no quarter” echoes that of the monarchists ”No quarter, no mercy”. To hatred responds hatred and Blood calls blood. Ninety-three the year constitutes the culminating point of the revolution which turns into tragedy. Ninety-three the book which is announced in chapter XXXIX of ”the last day of a condemned man” is the story of these atrocities committed in the name of an ideal which is disputed in Paris in the name of a republic bloody and in France in the name of a dying monarchy.
Louis XVI was guillotined on January 21, 1793, Robespierre on July 28, 1793, Danton on April 5, 1794, Saint Just on July 28, 1794, Vergniaud on May 31, 1793, Marat assassinated on July 13, 1793.
”At the time when they condemned Louis XVI to death, Robespierre still had Eighteen months to live, Danton fifteen months, Vergniaud nine months, Marat five months and three weeks…1”
The French Revolution has something tragic to leave to posterity.
It pitted Paris against France and France against Europe. A republican France against a monarchical France supported by foreign powers. And Paris had the upper hand over France and Europe.
Ninety-three is the year par excellence of the guillotine, which proved its worth as a ”humanist” machine against the heads of men in the highest sphere of French society. A machine that would have simplified death. A machine in front of which all convicts are equal.
”Ninety-three” the novel is said to have been born from a cry of pain from the condemned narrator of ”The Last Day of a Condemned Man”. Between Quatre-vingt-treize and The Last Day of a Condemned there would be a relationship of filiality and therefore of continuity, continuity, complementarity.
1-Ninety-three, Book Third, VII