William C. VanderWolk - Victor Hugo's Ideology of Disorder.

This talk will examine how Victor Hugo in exile became a counter-historian to the régime of Louis-Napoléon by espousing an ideology of disorder in which l'harmonie des contraires became a natural counterweight to the emperor's orderly society.

Louis-Napoléon's reign was permeated by the use of the fear of disorder, for him represented by liberal republicans whom he described as purveyors of chaos, "les éternels ennemis de l'ordre.” Immediately after the coup d'état of December 1851, Louis went to work creating his propaganda machine that would eliminate all such enemies, expelling from France certain lawmakers in the name of general security, as if some imminent danger threatened the very existence of the French nation.

One of those expelled from France was the man who would become Louis' nemesis, Victor Hugo, who eventually took refuge in Guernsey. Over the next eighteen years, Hugo would write piece after piece denouncing tyranny based on the fear of disorder. Hugo would become the disorder that Louis dreaded and would prove the power of literature to affect the collective memory of the French people.

In the preface to his play, Cromwell, in 1827, Hugo outlined l'harmonie des contraires which posited that the world finds harmony in the interplay of good and evil, love and hate, the sublime and the grotesque, precisely the kind of disorder that the ideology of order seeks to control. Yet Hugo's call for disorder is in fact a vision of a new order, one in which debate, dissent and upheaval are seen as sources of progress rather than dangerous forces to be repressed.

Hugo was a critic in exile, not subject to censorship or imprisonment, and texts such as Napoléon le petit, Les Châtiments and Les Misérables freely attacked the emperor and his orderly society. Hugo became a historian in his own right, a counter-historian, whose version of events was constantly at odds with those of the official history of the regime, a historical reading which had a profound effect on the collective memory of the French people.