by Brett Rutherford
Adapted
from Victor Hugo, l”Année Terrible, “July 1871”
We see you.
You frolic over Paris,
shrill birds whose screams
only the wind attends.
You invent new epithets
in jargon as obscure
as flapping semaphore.
We have no idea what you mean
as you mumble in Latin about us,
but we clearly perceive your goal.
The cup of blame that France
and Europe lined up to drink,
you, murderers, desire
that we willingly drink again.
Oh, boy! Here
comes the sacred Host from Rome,
and wouldn’t you know, the Pope
has declared himself infallible!
See, on his
robes, the blood
that Divine
Right spattered there.
Did no one think
to launder them?
The terror of what
pleases them,
our schoolbooks still recall,
their vices,
rich enough,
to sate the
palate of a Sultan,
they way their
visions cloud over
when contemplating crime.
The way they
feast among themselves
while the poor
must make do with crumbs,
hope dead again,
oblivion
the best that dreams can offer.
In order to win,
we must pull down this Christ,
and carry Barrabas instead
upon our
shoulders. We must,
if we are to live at all, remake
all things of spirit an empty slate
and start all over. Each time
this ancient thing rears up
its head we must undo it.
To make the
first become the last,
we need Voltaire in the mix,
and Jean-Jacques,[1]
too!
If a word from
Cato will fit the need,
let him be cited at the bar. And let
Monsieur Gaveau[2]
spout Tacitus.
If you plan to
coat over the past with tin,
that calls for insult and defamation,
denunciations, lies, slanders,
all kinds of slobbering inanities,
even a little howling and biting,
restoring good
taste as well as good order.
And under this black sky, with France
in mourning, you dare to laugh?
Who is it you accuse? You put
our old honor and pride to shame.
Among the crimes you accuse us of,
even France lifts her widow’s veil to see:
of setting mankind at liberty oh, my! —
of having made up Sparta
out of the ashes of Sodom;
of having debased herself
by wiping the sweat from the brow
of the poor; of being both brash
and brilliant, like a cleansing
thunderstorm; of blocking
the dullard’s horizon view
with her formidable silhouette;
of having risen lark-time tirelessly
to show the workers what must be done;
of saying to anyone who blusters,
“Look to Rome for word of God!”
a firm “No! He is elsewhere!”;
of confronting dogma with conscience;
of having patience so inexhaustible
that no one knows where it’s from;
of keening out the slim white hope
that must appear on our horizons
when the prison doors creak open;
forever calling out behind us “Walk!”
when old yokes and old regimes
seemed more than some could bear;
for goading all to weigh the scales,
no matter what, of right against duty.
What do you blame us for? It’s always the same!
Oh, the end of serfdom, for one thing.
The fall of the black wall Henri Latude[3]
made mock of by multiple escapes
(who misses the Bastille and its dungeons?)
For every beacon someone lit
to flash allegiance as we marched on by?
For the fact that the same constellations rise
one after another in regular order,
uninterrupted by biblical events?
For the stars’ refusal to usher in just yet
another era in the cosmos? For the smile
that Molière still brings us, apostle-wise?
For the fact that Pascal and Diderot
have never been refuted,
that Danton and Mirabeau’s names
have not been suppressed, but amplified?
For the grievous illusions
that some of us pursue,
like the True, the Good, the Great, the Beautiful?
For our bad attitude, ever and always
striding among the stars and looking profound?
For the way some of us embody still
the idea of Revolution,
through which the world reborn
in a second creation, makes Man
anew, amalgam of Christ, Cecrops, Japteth?
Unbearable to you, o pamphleteers
that we and you walk
beneath the same forgiving sky!
Such rascals you are, to put
the whole nation on trial again,
as if to violate an immense angel,
eagle-wings and all, because the sight
of her diminishes you. Well, then,
what if you defeat her? Her blood
is on your hands. Your shrieks
of “Down with her glory, Down
with her wishes, her struggles, her work!
She is the culprit of all disasters!”
Your dark feet would trample her.
Although immortal, you’d brand her
a perverse and immoral madwoman.
As these indignities stun France,
you cannot refrain from a hideous laugh,
as though a sacred misfortune earned
no more than your school-yard taunts.
Vile jesters and pedants, you stoop so low
as to insult your own mother. Now that
is a sinister project, the kind of crime
that used to make the sky break open
to show the wrath of offended gods.
Monsters, to pay for mother’s milk
with an offering of gall, gangrene
upon her wound, a venom philter
to treat her fever, to bow and scrape
“O Mother Dear, O France!”
lip-service while planning a parricide!
The way your pens are scurrying,
it seems you never seem to tire of this evil.
A bad minute, alas, can hurt
the century it overshadows.
I pity these men for being the ones
expected by History, whose
shadowy black Muse will shudder
before she relegates them all
to footnotes in her chronicle.
These smudgy pamphlets stun
her nonetheless, as she reads
how those who did their duty
were pilloried, how the people
are little more than prey to them,
and targets of their ferocity,
that mass killing is still possible,
and that in the present century
after Locke and Voltaire,
the cesspools of infamy re-open
and the Frérons,[4]
the Sanchezes,
the Monlucs,[5]
and the Tavannes[6]
were able to re-appear,
like mushrooms in the corrupted air,
more numerous than the flowers
on some boundless grass savannah.
People, these dwarves
cannot reduce your giants’ stature.
O France, one day on the Rhine,
and on the Apennines,
bearing the lightning of Prometheus
beneath your blazing brow,
you shall rise again, great risen one.
One view of your visage will send
the black gravediggers scurrying.
Your shouts of “Freedom! Peace!
Clemency! Hope!” will prevail.
Aeschylus in Athens, and Dante
in Florence, lean on the edge
of their beleaguered tombs, awake
again, regarding you with tearful eyes,
joyful and proud to see you,
mother of reason and revolutions.
One will see Greece in you,
the other, Italy.
France then will say to all,
Now here I am. I come to soothe,
and to untie your bonds!
All men are one Mankind! One people! One God!
Oh, happy globe, from Pole to Pole,
O Fatherland, in every place
our hands will be upraised toward you.
Snakes, hydras, and demons
cannot prevent your great works.
We are not yet done with being French.
The world is waiting for this sequel,
and wants, if anything, even more.
The sound of chains breaking is beautiful.
She returns. She is on the march.
We shall see the great oaks tremble again!
[1]
Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
[2]
Gaveau, one of the cruelest, and stupidest, of the judges condemning citizens
to death or imprisonment in the aftermath of the Paris Commune. He died in an
insane asylum a few months after his service. Lissagaray calls him “a savage
simpleton, without a shadow of talent.”
[3]
Henri Latude (1725-1805), French writer whose multiple escapes from the
Bastille were the basis of his 1787 memoir, Despotism Unveiled.
[4]
Élie Catherine Fréron (1718-1776), literary critic who opposed the French
Enlightenment, and an avowed enemy of Voltaire.
[5]
Blaise de Monluc (1502-1577), general and Marshal of France, known for brutal
killings and for founding one of the earliest militant Catholic organizations.
[6]
Gaspard de Saux, sieur de Tavannes (1509-1573), French general who helped plan
the Massacre of St. Bartholomew.
