When 7.5 Million Voted Yes, Part 1

[The 1870 French Constitutional Referendum]

Victor Hugo

Translated and adapted by Brett Rutherford

PART ONE

Is it in my soul to pander to the crowd? No!

Ah, the People are above,
     but what of the masses below?
The Crowd, a dim shape bending over he rubble,
each one a numeral, a grain of dust within a number,
each a vague profile within the night’s shadows.
The Crowd passes and shouts,
     calls out, sheds tears, and flees.
We owe fraternal pity to their sorrows.
But when the Crowd lifts itself,
     having the force within it,
we derive a virile language
     from the crowd’s grandeur,
its perils, its sacred triumphs,
     its sense of rightness.
Since the Crowd is the mistress
     by sheer force of number, she needs
reminding there are laws above,
     that the soul spells out
     across the face of the heavens.
Those sacred principles
     are brilliant and absolute.
Only when naked, cold, and bleeding
     do they kneel and kiss the feet
of first principles, but no one dreams
in solitude of a life of groveling.
The Crowd and the Dreamer have rude encounters.
Only from a brow where anger boiled
could Ezekiel cry out to dead bones: Rise up!
Moses, bringing back the tablets, was furious.
Dante had a lion’s growl. Formidable thinkers
are grave, storm-tossed, same as the wind
that blows from deep sky into the drifting dunes
where Thebes is engulfed like a sunken vessel.
This savage spirit, weighted with shifting shadows,
has, truly, better things to do than go about
caressing, in night too sluggish to have its own stars,
some crouching stone monster that only meditates.
Having within him the riddle adorable or cursed,
this hurricane is not kind to trembling colossi.
It is not from smelling incense that the Sphinx
has lost his nose! And yet, in truth,
there is one sacred smoke, incensed, austere,
one gives to the mass where a mystery shivers,
and who, within his bosom, balances
two appetites, the just Right mixed
with an appeitite unjust. Oh, human race,
a chaos of souls, half light, half night!

The multitude can throw an august flame,
but one wind blows, and suddenly it falls
from virgin honor to the level of the sewer rat.
The Good, this grand a fatal orphan —
See, Joan of Arc transform to Messalina,
     martyr to sullied murderess.

Ah! When Gracchus mounted his thundering rostrum,
when Cynaeginus held on with his teeth
     the fleeing ship at Marathon,

when, with The Three Hundred, men and boys,
Leonidas goes to his fall at Thermopylae,

when Botsaris arises, when Swiss confederates
break Austria’s hand with its hard iron rod,

when the proud Swiss Winckelreid, arms wide,
dies pierced by Austria’s formidable pikes,

when Washington fights, when Bolivar appears
of defy, out of nowhere, the might of New Spain,

when hermit Pelagius puts up a roar
as falling stars shine on his anchorite woodland,

when Manin, waking up the graves, stirs up to war
the somnolent sleep of the Lion of Venice,

when the mere peasants, armed with guns
routed Lautrec of Lombardy and France,
with its artillery, struck down the English Achilles,

when Garibaldi, scorning the hypocritical priests
displays Homeric soul in the mountains of Sicily,
and suddenly blazes next to him from Aetna,
crater of Titanic wrath, o Holy Liberty!,

when the immovable Convention stands
against the will of thirty monarchs,
     all mixed in the same mad tempest,

when, leagued and terrible,
     and bringing back the night
all Europe rushes, groans, and faints —
as at the foot of a dike a wave dissolves —
before the pensive grenadiers of Sombre-et-Meuse

when all these things occur, it is the People!
     Hail, O sovereign People!

But when some Roman beggar or street thug
like Sixtus V kisses the cross upon his knees,

and when the crush of the crowd, insensible and wild,
smothers in its own waves, a wild wind propelling it —
(honor in Coligny, reason in Ramus) —

When a monstrous fist, from the dark
     where horrors float
comes out, holding by its hair
     the head of Charlotte
pale from the blow of the axe
    and red with her last breath,

this is the Crowd, and this appalls and offends me.
The element of blindness and confusion,
this is the number, sadly feeble yet grimly strong.
And from this human peat-bog comes tomorrow
the order to receive a master from its hand.

To snuff out our soul and take on shame,
do you believe we will accept this tally?

Truly, we venerate Athens, Sparta, Paris,
and all the great forums from where
     the great outcries issue,
but we must elevate above the shout,
     the august conscience.

A just man’s thought outweighs a world of wrong.
A mad sea pounds in vain against a single, great heart.
O Multitude, obscure and easy to conquer,
too often you lull about like beasts, or farmyard animals,
and we resist you! We others do not want,
having had Danton for father, and Hampden grand-sire,
a tyrant ALL, as bad as a despot ONE.

See the People. They die. Magnificent, they fight
for progress. Yet here is the Crowd: it sells itself,
eating its birthright in a viscid stew.
The eyes-averted Church just washes all away,
     wipes clean with shrigging, “So be it!”

Here are the People: they storm the Bastille.
They clear the shadows while walking forward.

Here are the masses:
They lie in wait for Aristide and Jesus,
Zeno, Bruno, Columbus, the Maid of Orleans,
     only to spit on them.

And see, the People, with its spouse, The Idea,
and there, the populace en masse with it prize,
The Guillotine. Small wonder I choose the Ideal.

Here are the People. In power, they change
the month of April to the lovely Floréal.
People become a Republic, they reign, deliberate.
Here is the populace en masse: they go
all in for cruel Tiberius and his caprices.

I want the Republic. I hunt down Caesar.

The horses cannot amnesty the chariot.

 

A constitutional referendum was held in France on 8 May 1870. Voters were asked whether they approved of the liberal reforms made to the constitution since 1860 and passed by the Sénatus-consulte on 20 April 1870. The changes were approved by 82.7% of voters with an 81.3% turnout. However, France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War caused the Empire to be abolished later that year. Although this was the ninth constitutional referendum in French history, it was the first to have more than 8% oppose the motion; four of the previous seven had officially gained 99% approval. – Wikipedia “1870 French constitutional referendum.”