The Two Monuments

 

The National government from Versailles surrounds and bombards Paris. The rebellious Paris Commune threatens to destroy the Arc de Triomphe and the Napoleon column at the Vendôme. Hugo writes in defense of the two national monuments, and protests the civil war. The Commune later decides to defend the Arch and place cannons on its top, making it a primary target for the incoming army. The Napoleon column is toppled by the Commune.

THE TWO MONUMENTS

by Brett Rutherford

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

1

People, this century stood witness
to your superhuman works. Your hands
kneaded Europe like a pliant dough,
which swallowed up the nothingness
of scepters, and folded in the crowns,
making and unmaking throned lands.
With each of your steps, the speed
of change accelerated. You strode,
sowing with both hands the seeds
of new ideas that frightened the globe.
Your legions pushed overflowing waves
of progress, swelling so high they swept
one peak to another, unstoppable.

The Revolution plowed the row;
one hand sowed Danton in Germany,
the other, Voltaire in Spain.
Your glory, O people, walked with dawn
and day rose up wherever you passed.
Just as they once said in awe, “The Greeks!”
they now acknowledged, breathless, “The French!”

Where evil fed on vice, and horror on hell,
you smote the Middle Ages dead. As by
and earthquake the Holy Office was riven.
Superb, you fought against all harmful things.
Night ran off blinded by your bright clarity.
For once, the entire planet was bathed in light
(o to be free of kings and torturers!).

While you ascended your star-led path,
the desperate admired you, even when you failed.
Sometimes, soaring, you dared the distance,
so that even the galaxies were dazzled
when, for twenty years, from Tagus to Elbe,
and from the Nile to Adige, you were
the prodigy. Then everything vanished —
ah, History, remember, names graven here,
the giant leader who compelled a titan people.

The arch of victory, the pillar of power —
these are two monuments of the people’s glory.
Both are yourself, o sovereign people.
[The one, in granite, was three decades’ labor
to honor the armies of Revolution and Empire,
the names of warriors and battles solemnly inscribed;
the other in memory of Austerlitz, where France
brought Austria and Russia to their knees.
The column’s winding bronze bas-reliefs
were made from enemy cannons, melted down.]

It is good to be reminded, passing by,
that we were once a victorious nation.
Oh, these two monuments, feared
by a hostile Europe, we must protect!
Both day and night we must watch over them,
assured against harm by our somber affections.
Each is a witness from a better age;
     each is in spirit an avenger.

Do we not need more than ever now
this haughty marble, this haughty metal?
We draw from them the ardor to punish.
Not only by name but by sight as well
we watch with a melancholy eye for those,
the veterans, Sons of the Republic.

For the hour of falling is a time for pride;
defeat increases, as the people mourn,
the resplendence of these two monuments;
their fiery glow gives warmth to our souls;
when great things still stand,
     the small are comforted.

We will internalize these monuments —
behold the arch in me, the column! —
but still we must make them eternal, too.
They were built by those whose work,
     extraordinary, lives on.
Those powerful dead once thundered by us.
The drum-beat of their march is echoing still.

Those living today, tenebrous and pale,
are less like beings of light than things of the grave.
Listen! Someone breaks up the pavement there.
The pick-axe shatters the curfew silence. Listen!
A bomb! Does it go off of its own accord?
No! Someone arrives to do the demolishing.
And who is that, Paris? Why, Paris itself!!

All I can do is shudder, a thinker forlorn,
like old King Lear addressing, admonishing
the storm that roars around his head.
What frightening signs! Is it the end of days?
Do they mean to abort the future?
How far can the murder of posterity go?
Does this century die because the birth
of the Nineteen Hundreds was averted?
Topple a calendar, not a column!

Like Lear, we swoon in vertigo.
What force has come to prey on Paris?
One power divides the city in two.
    the other strikes it dead,
thus one Sahara sandstorm pummels
     another, each with a will to strike,
each with a destroying power.

O People, choose! Both kinds of chaos
    are wrong, the firmament above
in tyrant rage, the trembling earth
     pulling us down to rubble.

It’s one or the other, two baleful foes.
One has the force of tradition behind it,
     and the name of the law,
the other a sense of indomitable right.
Versaille has the aura of bells and parishes,
Paris the Commune’s light and clamor,
yet over and beyond these two contenders
     there is only one France.
Right now, when a consoling shoulder
     is what everyone needs,
is this the time to sink to cannibal rage?
Who watches while we fight one another?

O fratricide! On one side all the frenzy
of grapeshot, mortars, bombs, and cannons,
on the other, the wild melee of vandals.
Fleeing the grind of Carybdis,
     one is smitten by Scylla,
two dooms rolling down cobblestone alleys.

(more to come)...