The Two Monuments, Part 2

 

The second part of Victor Hugo's protest against plans by The Paris Commune to destroy the Arc de Triomphe and the Napoleon column at the Place Vendome. (The column was toppled, but the Commune, unknown to the poet, chose to defend the Arch by placing cannons on top of it.)

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “May 1871”

2

O fratricide! For brother to kill brother
there must seem to be two sides. Is it
to be the arch against the column?

Must one stand, then, and the other fall?

We live in strangely sinister times,
a hammered hand smashing here,
and the whirling shell that falls from above.

 

But this is still France! For what, fellow citizens,
this overturning tumult, while an enemy
remains standing on the black horizons!

The great France is here! What does this little
Bonaparte matter when all is said and done?

Do we see a king when we think about Sparta?

Take away this latest Napoleon,
     and just like that, the people reappear.

One tree cut down, the forest makes new oaks.

 

Read the bronze plates’ ekphrastic tale,
follow the column’s spirals up and around:
great fighters crowd there in bas-relief,
filling the fields, the towers, the admiral’s boats,
dare over wall and bridge, wade ditch, wild
rivers ford, arms high in evil marshes,
all these are France in the assault for progress.

Justice! Take Caesar from his place if you will,
but put there the glory of Rome’s Republic
that is the dream behind our dream.

 

Put at this summit a people and not a man;
condense into a statue at the top of the pillar
the crowded people who live in this Paris,
knight, avenger of rights, conquering ferocious lies!

May the colossus tower here, and laugh
at the bullets’ laughing ricochet.

 

Make this statue of such pure alloy
that we no longer think vague or fatal thoughts;
embody the crowd, and embody the elite;
and may this giant fashioned after them,
provoke like a pillar-monk the distant ideal;
may it light the way, self-lit by the star
on his own forehead, the glint of sun
from the sword he always holds in ready.

 

On both monuments, the soldiers strive
like giants in some Titanic struggle.
Nothing matched their size and power.
As sculpted on the Arc de Triomphe,
the Revolution rumbles in their hundred battles.
War-crying Marseillaise stands petrified,
a fearsome spirit from the old, darkened world,
with the open-mouth call that never fades.
Both monuments sing in accord: “Deliverance!”

 

Why do I see this horror even when my eyes are closed?
Someone is coming! Tell me it is not our own hands
that do this? I am pulled onward by surging crowds.
The throw themselves against the double monuments!
This double-trophy the Teutons envied, surged now
with raised clubs and petrol-laden torches. Someone
is coming, with hammers and black powder. Blows
once aimed at soldiers now strike at statuary.
The glory of human art and beauty cracks apart.
We break it from above, we break it from below.
Cries echo from the Arch to the Column. It falls!
It resists! More powder! A battering ram! A bomb!

While all this goes on, the Prussians are watching;
oh, they are witnessing this, as they hold the sword
that was surrendered to them, their trophy, our shame!

 

These are the ones who make others carry crosses.
We shudder when Reichshoffen[6] is mentioned
     as though that could erase Wagram.[7]

Marengo’s glory fades out[8]
     before the shame of Waterloo.

The page of disaster overlays in lurid hues
the faded newsprint of former triumphs;
the blood-stained soiled thing outlives
the thing that shone resplendent once.

To assume we approve of Forbach’s loss,[9]

one must pretend we never won at Jena.[10]

These pygmy Emperors today;
     in the past, one giant.

And now, insult upon our injury,
I hear that MacMahon[11] and his cannons
have fired from afar upon the Arch,
a rain of lead and fire and iron!

 

Shame, then, to have a German flag fold out
above our heads; Sedan, not Austerlitz.
Where are the long-gone warriors? Have you
no madhouses, France, no asylums to empty
of elders and lunatics with rusty sabers
ready to sally forth to terrify old nemeses,
Brunswick, Cobourg, or de Bouillé?[12]

Must the graves open to yield us up
some veterans of the better wars?
To whom can we turn
if we wish to see again a vanished dawn?

 

Imagine, after a never-tiring life,
breaking the blockade of ancient evil,
to be expelled from history just like that;
a finger snapped, and they are gone, they
who held out against Popes and kings,
daring the black shadows of banishment
     and excommunication,
enduring capture and prison, assured
from within of their ultimate success; they,
the victorious fathers, banished by whom?
By us, their vanquished sons!

Alas! after such misery, this final blow,
amid the two bleeding ulcers we call peace’
after the vain fights of Avron, Bourget, and l”Haÿ!
After letting Strasbourg burn,
    and after the betrayal of Paris!
Is France not close enough to death?
If an enemy had done this to us, if Prussia,
accustomed to its savage pride, black flags
in keeping with black weather, its heels
upon the neck of Paris had said,
“We want to cancel all your past.
Frenchmen, these two proud monuments
annoy us, this pilaster of brass, this arch
of stone that survived our cannoning.
We want a scaffold where the pillar stood.
We want to see the blasted arch gone.
So do us the favor, will you?
    Demolish one, machine-gun the other.
Consider that an order. Let it be done!”

If Prussia had ordered this, o, fury!
What would our answer have been?
Let’s suffer! Let’s fight! This is too much!
Rather would be die a hundred times!
Our death will be our celebration.

We would have said, “Never! Never!”

And now we go and do it, unasked.

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[1] Tagus to Elbe. From Portugal to Germany.

[2] Nile to Adige. From Egypt to northern Italy. The two map allusions suggest a comparison of Napoleonic Europe to the Roman Empire.

[3] Battle of Austerlitz, 1809.

[4] Versailles … Paris. The National forces based in Versailles were called the “Versaillais,” as opposed to the National Guard militias under the control of the Paris Commune.

[5] Carybdis and Scylla. Greek mythological monsters associated with dangerous rocks on both sides of a narrow channel.

[6] Reichshoffen. The Battle of Reichshoffen, also known as The Battle of Worth, 5 August 1870, was a decisive Prussian victory over Napoleon III’s French army.

[7] Wagram. In the Battle of Wagram, 5-6 July 1809, Napoleon I’s forces defeated the Austrian Empire.

[8] In the Battle of Marengo, 14 June 1800, the forces under First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte drove the Austrians out of Italy.

[9] The Battle of Forbach, 4-6 August 1870 led to Forbach being folded into the ceded provinces of Alsace and Lorraine.

[10] The Battle of Jena, 14 October 1806, was Napoleon I’s crushing and unexpected victory over the Prussian army.

[11] Marie Edme Patrice Maurice de MacMahon (1808-1893), the failed leader of Napoleon III’s army, placed in charge of the Versailles forces against the Commune. He would serve later as French President.

[12] Three enemies of Napoleon I and the French Revolution in general: Frederick William, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, an ally of the Duke of Wellington against Napoleon; Prince Ferdinand Saxe-Coburg (1785-1851), commander-in-chief of the Austrian forces on the continent; and François-Claude Bouillé (1739-1800), a royalist general who opposed the French Revolution.