Before the Conclusion of the Treaty

France has fallen to the Prussians. Victor Hugo is elected as a main representative of Paris to the provisional government at Bordeaux, where he will briefly head the party of the Left, which is vastly outnumbered by royalists, and Bonapartist collaborators. Hugo writes this poem while waiting to hear the outcome of the peace treaty, in which the representatives have no say.

by Brett Rutherford

Translated from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “February 1871”

If we ended this war as Prussia wanted,
France would be like a glass on a cabaret table
to be emptied, and then smashed against the wall.
Our proud country is disappearing.
O mourning! That now we must despise,
     he whom we once admired.

Dark tomorrow! fear as the rule;
All the dregs are drunk in turn;
and the vulture comes after the eagle,
and the ravenous sea-eagle[1]
supplants the vulture;
Two provinces quartered;
Strasbourg strung on the cross,
Metz cast into the dungeon;
the day of Sedan, and the melees,
     marking France with a hot iron;

everywhere, in every captive soul,
the abject taste for base happiness
replaces pride; we grow the rank mold
of tentacled dishonor;
our ancient splendor fades.
Our great battles ended in disgrace;
the thunderstruck homeland
is not accustomed to bowed heads;
to the enemy hulked in our citadels,
the shadow of Attila in our towers.
The hovering swallows hesitate and say:
     France is no longer there!

Having had her mouth full of Bazaine,[2]
Renown with her broken flight
soils her old grey-green bugle
     with an unhealthy slime;

If we fight this, it is against a brother;
we no longer know your name, Bayard![3]
Are those who turned and fled
now to become respectable assassins?
Over the silent fronts a harsh night rises.
No dying spirit dares to fly away.
The sky marks our shame
     by refusing to show its stars.
Dark cold! we see, with funeral folds,
closing between the peoples
a depth of darkness such that
     we can no longer love one another;

In the mutual abhorrence of France and Prussia,
that whole herd of men hates us
and our eclipse is their dawn,
and our grave is their wish.
A shipwreck! Goodbye to great works!

Everyone has been deceived,
and all facts are seen as deceptions.
We say to our own flags: Cowards!
We spit on our cannons and say they are afraid.
Pride gone, hope gone, our history
already wrapped in a heavy shroud.
No, God, let not France fall
into the abyss of this peace!

 —Bordeaux, February 14, 1871.

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[1] Sea-eagle. Believed to be the eagle in German heraldry

[2] Bazaine. François Achille Bazaine (1811-1888), commander-in-chief of the Army of the Rhine under Napoleon III. His defeats, and suspicious political maneuverings before his disastrous surrender, led to a rancorous treason trial.

[3] Bayard. Pierre Terrail, seigneur de Bayard (c. 1476 – 1524). A legendary warrior known as “the knight without fear and beyond reproach.”