by Brett Rutherford
Freely adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, “July 1871”
Note: The Battle of Forbach in August 1870, which defeated Napoleon III,
hastened the consolidation of the German states and led to the coronation of
German emperor William I in January 1871. On 10 May 1871, the Treaty of Frankfurt
was signed, establishing the new frontiers between Germany and France. In this
treaty, 1,694 French towns and cities in Alsace and Lorraine passed into German
control. Hugo’s poem reflects on the bitter irony of one emperor’s defeat leading
to another tyrant, and how the victor can now sit back and watch the French
murder one another in civil war. Hugo also sees that the implementation of martial
law and mass executions serve an immoral proposition that the best way forward
for the nation is to get rid of “the lower element” rather than address
systemic poverty. Hugo’s lines seem obscure in places without the specific
context of the events of early 1871, so I have added some lines for clarity,
and I have also embellished a little more than usual in this rather polemical
poem, where “Kill the Poor” seems an undercurrent.
II
One Emperor
down. Is it all over, then?
Alas for us all,
another pops up.
One is knocked down in France;
in Germany, they prop another up.
Forged on the anvil of Teutonic victory
(their triumph at Forbach),
a giant smithy hovers there,
as Germany forges
from the shards of a despot
a brand-new tyrant.
Kaiser Wilhelm!
Emperor of all
the German States —
must it be? then there is no escape
from these badged and beribboned
Emperors! Our traitor Caesar
is chased away by another who adds
an imperial title to his crown.
I care little,
if one comes in
all puffed up with his triumph,
so long as the other one is gone,
if this is the
year of Wilhelm
so long as it is not a year of Bonaparte,
if the hideous
night owl goes hooting off
to be replaced by an ominous eagle.
But no! What was
I thinking?
The grief! The shame!
Was this supposed to be
the end of troubles? They start all over.
Just when our
patching-up commences,
the storm resumes with all its fury.
The news that reaches me is monstrous.
Is one snake worse than another?
Once you have
faced a dragon,
can another make
an even grander entrance?
How tragic and
Greek,
these two European brothers.
Which, I wonder, is Thysetes,
and which is Atreus?
One hides his
face
amid plum-puddings;[1]
the German smirks,
applauding our feast
of mutual cannibalism.
The invasion ends,
and we act out upon our stage
cruel acts of puppetry
from which the world recoils.
O House of Bonaparte,
this is your wake!
Even the goddess
of Victory
averts her eyes at such behavior.
A nation of such shame
ought not to have
personified virtues on its soil.
Instead of
solving enigmas
we crush them underfoot.
You whose “wisdom”
is everyone else’s idiocy,
what future are you devising?
As you go forward
hatefully,
what reciprocity awaits
when the end of your own road
is another line of bayonets?
You see Utopia
while uttering “Martial Law”?
If, in their hunger and poverty,
the lowest of the low
seem like a wolf-pack intent
on biting the hand that brings them
bread,
unlettered and untaught,
proud in their fierce innocence,
if in their
filth, their laughter
comes off as a sinister mockery,
if their crushed spirits appear
to be the very dread of night,
a dark heart devouring all,
and you recoil
at their pain,
at the sight of their pale families
extended in legions to the end
of every dark city lane,
and if your only answer,
confronted with dilemmas
a millennium in the making,
is “Kill them all!” — is your excuse
that some of them once killed
a few of us — that eye for
eye,
and blow for blow, is just a natural
remedy that anyone can understand,
then where does
it end? Does murder
at last eliminate murder
when there is no one left to kill?
Then only? Just
whom does death appease?
Do the speeches
you make
still mention august ideals,
illuminated dawns,
extoling happiness,
and life in bloom,
an Eden of forthright facts
and generous edicts,
while your eyes
are closed,
your hand on the shoulder
of the one who guides you —
Medusa, sword in
her hand,
breast bare for all to see
(the future! the future!)
her eyes aflame
with paralyzing fire!
When, at the end
of so many of your acts,
the cemetery is the final scene,
and when the bone-yard is not big enough,
some bottomless well will do:
just hurl the victims down,
into a jumble of heaped skeletons,
do not concern yourself
with what goes on in those dark
cavities,
this sowing of earth that seeds
another generation of death,
are you not troubled a little?
Does the earth not shift at night
beneath your bed of luxury?
Presented with
the slums’ street-map
is your answer, “Build more cemeteries?”
The poor man is
in rags; the rich one
complains he must make do
with last year’s tattered overcoat.
Nothing is whole
for anyone,
and the infamous shadow
casts its pall everywhere.
Hearts without
love, souls
without a glimmer of blue sky
to brighten them; alas!
everywhere
tumult and anger,
dungeons and the threat of hell,
all in a darkness so intense
that an ever-greater dark
seems over and behind it.
The mind, under
this cloud
that muffles everything
to a stunned silence,
senses that something incubates,
and bides its time, enormous —
what is it? A mystery!
Something is
being constructed.
Awakening, we
shall find it.
Its imperceptible
onyx stone
will gain a chalky whiteness,
as the fatal black work
reveals the skeleton inside.
What we
encounter there
is not the desired goal,
some Gallic Utopia;
instead it is the thing
we have always ignored,
the obstacle itself.
Reefs show their
heads
one after the other,
because History has its Cape of Storms.
The clarity is
on the other side.
One more thing must be surpassed!
These ebbs and
flows,
these new beginnings,
these fights, may serve an end.
Above the
immense hatred,
there is a being who loves.
We are its object: have faith!
It is not
without some goal supreme
that constantly, in this abyss
where the sounders dream,
a prodigious wind blows from the depths,
and through the harsh night,
pushes and carries and returns again
to all the divine reef — whom?
We are not in or of some battered ship
that dashes on the rocks and perishes —
it is we, the whole of humanity,
we are the sea itself that hurls itself
on and ever forward. On!
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