by Brett Rutherford
Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "May 1871 - Paris in Flames, Part 2"
Without Paris,
the world goes back
to a cold and reptilian future.
There were no politics among the dinosaurs.
Paris takes naked ideas in,
to dress them in a coat of light.
Here, one need only examine errors,
and the way to make them tremble
and collapse, seems to reveal itself.
It is not labor when the beam of truth
passes from lightning eyes to all
who stand within its radiance.
In the raising of one is the raising of all.
As below the temple we find the crypt
of those who strove in vain to live forever;
as under Greece we find Egypt,
sleeping in its old gods’ stupor;
as under Egypt we find India,
the unacknowledged mother nation;
as under India, if one dare
to dig there, one finds only night.
Just so
beneath Paris,
by all these times and races built,
we find, by study and diligence,
the whole world’s history.
The common man won Paris, and deserves
it.
His Victory includes this inheritance.
To take it from him, and then give back
some stale bread and a workman’s pack?
What worth his work? For what was he
striving?
What is the point of so hard a struggle
if everything good and fine vanishes?
Thebes, Ellorah, Memphis, Carthage
past,
the London of the present moment, too,
a giant among peoples — all these are bound,
as by a wedding vow. Reason and Duty
merged over time to create the Alphabet.
Paris is the book the whole world wrote.
If Paris may be said to “reign,”
on its own and self-sufficient,
why would you cancel that?
What else, by merely existing.
gives so much to everyone?
When that dreamer murmurs
“We’ll always have Paris?”
did he imagine a petrol can,
a fuse, and a lit match?
Look at the city’s coat of arms:
a vessel thrusting its bowsprit forward
in the perpetual crossing
between ignorance and new thought!
The ship knows the route, and each time
out,
despite its ever-longer journey to where
one never dreamt to go, unerringly comes back.
And everything that is discovered by Paris,
is given free to all the world.
Even when the whole globe evolved
in one great start, the pivot was Paris.
If it did not happen here, likely as not
it will never be “universal.”
London felled Charles the First,
Paris decapitated the Sixteenth Louis.
London merely killed its king;
Paris mowed down its royalty.
There a single axe-blow seemed to suffice;
here the enormous and decrepit web
of titled monsters had to go.
The past, the night, the hell on earth
all cried out for the heads to roll.
Even in such awful business, we set the tone!
When a word
comes from Paris,
it is as though an ambassador
has spoken. Paris sows laws
in every field, whether shallow
of deep. Clearing away
the shadows and the unhealthy mists,
a speaking flame emerges
from this sacred table, its tongues
of fire illuminating the blue sky itself.
We see at every moment a troop of
dreams,
sublime, some with a torch, some armed
with an assurèd sword, flying in radiant
waves from Paris into the universe.
Dante came here to write his first poems.
Here Montesquieu drew up
the principles of law,
Pascal the rules which make sense
of Nature. Such eagles of thought
spread out in flocks from our city!
Paris is one
place where everything can rise
to the highest point in its orbit. Here the Ideal
holds sway against the Excessive. Taking
always the side of Progress, embracing
the give and take of ideas, here Reason
can tower a hundred cubits high.
Nothing is enthroned on top except
the majesty of principles themselves;
the air up there is bright and clear,
not incense but clean and lofty clarity.
We have an invisible Acropolis where
Truth accepts its fit devotion.
Surprises and contradictions abound,
as when Mirabeau slips away
from the century of Walpole,
as when this generous city which does
what it can for everyone is sometimes
a Sybaris if one wishes, but never
a Lilliput. In Paris, one never thinks small,
as if one thought that wickedness
accompanies the small in scope and mind;
that the narrow-thinking mind becomes
a nesting-place for baseness. Paris,
accustomed to the tread of giants
since the time of Rabelais, is huge.
Even our dust is large, even our
Nothingness is bigger than that
anyone else has imagined.
When Paris grows angry,
be assured a good cause
provoked it. Hate is unnatural.
Do not disturb her august anger;
and step aside to let her pass.
The heart is softened better
when the mind is in accord,
and one can only the best
by holding the greatest always in sight.
This is the
Paris I know,
goodness in dignity draped,
a logician suffering for man
with a tragic gentleness.
The word “Fraternity”
is always there amid
the shout of justified wrath.
The tyrant armies hear her
and shudder in their tents,
the owl-kings fear her,
huddled in their oaken hole.
Desiring peace, she wants
a dawn they loathe and dread.
Men know not what they want.
The future is obscure and vague.
Paris does not forget. She makes
a bed for all, she sets a goal;
she gives a meaning to going on;
she knows the just must climb,
while the unjust fall,
on the same slope struggling.
To take courage one need only think
of the morning sun above Paris.
Notes:
Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Law (1748) influenced the framers of the U.S. Constitution. The French thinker was the first to write formally about the nature of despots, and the need for a separation of powers in a modern state.
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was a mathematical and scientific child prodigy who astonished Europe with his discoveries. His early attacks on the ideas of the Jesuits would have appealed to Hugo.
Victor de Riqueti. Marquis de Mirabeau(1715-1789), emerged in mid-life with The Friend of Man (1756) as a radical thinker. He also attacked France’s corrupt tax system.
Robert Walpole (1676-1745), British statesman and the first Prime Minister of Britain. In his 20-year ascendancy, he worked to balance the power of the monarchy against the increasing political power of the Commons.
Sybaris was a wealthy Greek colony in Italy, famed for its hedonism and over-eating.
Lilliput, from Jonathan Swift’s 1626 satire, Gulliver’s Travels, is populated with people one-twelfth the size of normal humans, and is riven with absurd religious controversies, wars, and cruel punishments.
