Hugo, Tolstoy, and the Soul of the Times
When Hugo looks back on the Restoration in Les Misérables, he sees a country that would like to go to bed. After the Revolution and the Empire, the demands of greatness have become exhausting, and ordinary life has acquired a new attraction.
The wish sounds simple until Hugo adds a second need: the changes already accomplished require guarantees. People are tired of upheaval without necessarily being ready to surrender what upheaval has won for them. A returning monarchy must govern this combination of weariness and altered expectations, and it is liable to mistake the first for permission to ignore the second. In Hugo’s account, that mistake helps destroy the Restoration.
This is where Hugo’s historical digressions feel wiser to me than Tolstoy’s. In War and Peace, the novelist creates a human world of extraordinary density; the philosopher of history increasingly asks us to see through the explanations its inhabitants give. Hugo remains interested in the differences between those explanations, including the differences that might make people willing to live under the same king—or determined to overthrow him.
The gift and the conquest
The restored Bourbons, as Hugo presents them, understand the constitutional Charter as something they have graciously granted. From this perspective, the crown can withdraw its concessions. Those who understand the new rights as the achievement of the Revolution have a different account of who owes what to whom.
Hugo puts the disagreement into the possessives of a single sentence: “What it termed its concessions were our conquests; what it termed our encroachments were our rights.” The change from its to our makes the same settlement belong to two incompatible histories. The monarchy remembers giving; the revolutionary nation remembers acquiring. A document meant to settle the relationship preserves the dispute inside it.
We can already understand something about the temper of this period without being offered a single commanding explanation of everything that happened. Exhaustion coexists with pride, and a desire for stability coexists with expectations the old regime cannot simply ask people to forget. Hugo’s collective France is a considerable simplification, but the desires he brings together refuse to resolve into one national mood.
After the July Revolution of 1830, the division shifts. The people who have obtained enough begin to fear further change, while the revolution’s unfinished promises remain available to those who have obtained too little. Hugo’s portrait of the bourgeoisie follows appetite into satisfaction and satisfaction toward satiety. Yesterday’s demand can become today’s reason for stopping. The political meaning of contentment depends on who has had the chance to become content.
Louis Philippe emerges from this half-completed revolution with the contradictions already in his person. In Hugo’s portrait, his manners belong to the old regime and his habits to the new. Royal birth and bourgeois domesticity offer reassurance to different expectations. The long accumulation of qualities makes him capable, decent, practical, evasive, and limited, sometimes through the same trait. A king who knows the value of a minute may fail to understand the value of a year.
Hugo’s most damaging distinction separates the king’s knowledge of facts, dates, and individuals from his ignorance of the aspirations moving beneath them. He can manage immediate interests while failing to understand where they are taking the country. The historical portrait measures a ruler’s intelligence against the times that have made use of it.
The question Tolstoy will not let go
Tolstoy has powerful reasons to distrust portraits that seem to explain an age through its rulers. At the opening of Book Nine, he asks why the invasion of Russia happened and sets familiar answers beside one another: Napoleon’s ambition, diplomatic grievances, commercial interests, the refusal to make a particular concession. Each presents the event from a position within it, without accounting for the event as a whole.
The soldiers who carry out an invasion are also indispensable to it. So are innumerable actions and circumstances that a history organized around negotiations and declarations barely notices. A ruler’s decision cannot march, feed an army, or kill anyone without the participation of other people. Tolstoy makes the customary explanation look grotesquely small beside the action it claims to explain.
His enumeration has an equalizing force. As possible causes accumulate, the emperor’s intention loses its privileged position among them. The procedure restores weight to people whom the grand account has treated as instruments, and it exposes the habit of assigning an outcome to whichever famous man stands nearest it.
His account of army morale also assigns collective feeling real explanatory force. The retreating French mass together because their willingness to fight has diminished; the Russians separate into attacking units because theirs has increased. These are meaningful differences within a historical situation, perceived by Tolstoy in his role as commentator.
Yet the demand for a complete explanation also makes partial explanations increasingly difficult to value. Knowing what a political grievance meant to those who acted on it cannot explain every condition of the war. It can still explain something we need to understand. Tolstoy’s argument presses so hard against the first claim that the second has little room to develop.
The opening of the Second Epilogue makes the cost visible. The upheavals beginning in 1789 become a movement of peoples from west to east, followed by a countermovement from east to west. The symmetry dislodges the familiar heroic sequence. Conquests and victories appear as mass movement, ruined livelihoods, burned houses, and Christians killing other Christians.
This description has enormous moral force. The distinction between glorious war and disgraceful slaughter becomes difficult to maintain when we have to look at what bodies actually do. But liberty, empire, revolution, and restoration also lose much of their historical difference within the repeated motion. We understand more clearly why a victorious ruler cannot explain the killing; we understand less about why the participants could experience one political order as intolerable and another as a promise.
What an idea permits
In Chapter Seven of the Second Epilogue, Tolstoy assigns political ideals a more sinister role. Liberty, equality, national glory, and civilization help people commit acts they would otherwise have to recognize as crimes.
He compares these justifications to the broom mounted in front of a locomotive to clear snow from the rails. The image assigns ideas a practical function: they remove moral resistance from the path of collective action. They can make the killing easier without supplying the force that moves the whole train.
The person who invokes humanity while arranging the death of human beings cannot be understood solely through the nobility of the word. Tolstoy’s suspicion catches something that a generous account of an age’s aspirations may prefer to leave out.
Even here, though, the different ideals converge on a common function. Once liberty and civilization have both been shown clearing the way for violence, their distinctive contents recede. We still need to know what each permits people to demand from authority, what institutions it makes defensible, and what inherited arrangements it makes difficult to endure. The Charter’s rival meanings belong to this further history of ideas as lived expectations.
Hugo can follow the gap between an intention and an outcome without making the intention historically negligible. In his judgment of Waterloo, the victorious counterrevolution acquires liberal consequences it did not desire, just as Napoleon’s despotism had carried revolutionary consequences beyond his own rule. The reversal preserves the political differences on which its irony depends. We have to understand what the victors wanted in order to understand what they failed to restore.
A world can escape its rulers’ intentions and remain intelligible in its changing demands. Hugo’s historical intelligence is most convincing when he follows those changes closely enough to show why a victory cannot deliver everything its winners expected.
Hugo’s temptation
The difficulty is that Hugo also knows, far too confidently, where history is going.
At Waterloo, his explanation can rise from the contingencies of the battlefield to the declaration that Napoleon had become an obstruction to God. “He embarrassed God,” Hugo writes in “The Unexpected.” The defeat receives a divine necessity. Elsewhere in the same account, progress can turn even its enemies into useful instruments, because its eventual advance is assured.
Tolstoy’s criticism of historians who smuggle a predetermined goal into their explanations bears directly on this confidence. If victory serves progress and defeat serves it too, the conviction has become difficult for any event to disturb. Hugo can make the nineteenth century fulfill his own hope for it, and hope is no guarantee of historical perception.
His portrait of Louis Philippe, however, survives that doubt. The king’s immediate competence can obstruct his understanding of a changing country whether or not those changes lead toward a better future. We can follow the failure of this particular political intelligence without knowing where history ought to go.
That is what I mean by the soul of the times: the uneven distribution of hope, fatigue, fear, pride, and entitlement through which a period becomes livable for some people and intolerable for others. Hugo sometimes speaks as though France possessed one mind, yet his most perceptive passages give us demands that remain at odds even inside the same political settlement.
Tolstoy’s historical arguments are formidable at exposing the presumption that people control the events in which they participate. Hugo more fully conveys what those events ask people to accept, relinquish, or defend. His advantage lasts as long as he lets the conflicting desires of a period complicate his faith in its destination.
I return to the exhausted France that would like to rest. A king may hear in that wish an invitation to put the old order back. Hugo hears the further condition: the country wants peace with the changes it has already lived through. The difference is enough to make a restored throne misunderstand the people beneath it.
A further reading path
Begin with Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma. Fabrizio is inside Waterloo but cannot reliably identify what he sees. Follow the delays between sensation and recognition, and the heroic expectations that distract him from the battle happening around him.
Then turn to Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. The dinner after the June 1848 fighting makes a sharp companion to Hugo’s bourgeois contentment: possessions feel newly precious after the fear of losing them, the guests joke about fraternity, and Frédéric attends to Madame Arnoux. Notice how political conversation gives way to private desire.
Finish with Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, beginning in Sicily in 1860. The opening makes aristocratic authority physical: Prince Salina takes pride in the floor trembling under him, yet watches his class’s decline without trying to arrest it. His bodily command and historical passivity make an uneasy pair.
A few questions
Does this make Les Misérables the better novel?
The comparison concerns the historical digressions. Tolstoy’s scenes can give social feeling and individual perception a richness his general arguments compress. Preferring Hugo’s account of an age’s competing expectations leaves the relative achievements of the two novels open.
Is Hugo the more reliable historian?
Sensitivity to political experience does not guarantee a sound explanation of events. Hugo’s providential account of Waterloo is where his confidence outruns what he can establish. His attention to conflicting expectations remains valuable without accepting his certainty about history’s destination.
Which passages should I read side by side?
Start with Hugo’s Restoration and Louis Philippe chapters at the beginning of Part Four. Pair them with Tolstoy’s opening of Book Nine and Chapters One and Seven of the Second Epilogue. Return to Tolstoy’s discussion of army morale in Book Fourteen, Chapter Two, to test how far the contrast holds.
Sources
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, translated by Isabel F. Hapgood: Part II, Book I, Chapters IX and XVII; Part IV, Book I, Chapters I–III.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude: Book Nine, Chapter I; Book Fourteen, Chapter II; Second Epilogue, Chapters I and VII. Links lead to the Project Gutenberg editions used here.
Further reading: Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Volume One, Chapter III; Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education, M. Walter Dunne edition (1904), Volume II, Chapter XV; Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, opening excerpt published by Vintage/Penguin.
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