1.1.1-Valdsbejakande

Club Ninety-Three 1.1: The Woods of La Saudriae
Even though we are given the names of several of the characters, the narration ignores them, which gives me the impression that their individuality isn’t all that important. They are all referred to by their place in the war, whether they are a grenadier, a canteen woman or just a woman, widow and mother who is only with her children.

The interesting part, for me, is the picture it paints of the chasm between the revolutionary soldiers and the civilian population. I mean, the guerilla tree talk is nice too, but.

Their cause, which makes these soldiers willing to die by the thousands, is completely foreign to her. Her husband was killed, but who did it is of more interest to the soldiers than it is for her. She doesn’t even seem to see the irony of her husband fighting for the people and institutions that killed her family members.

Commentary
Shirley-keeldar Ah yes here’s what I didn’t quite work out to say about the names not getting used in narration thing. Hopefully this will turn out to be not it, but, yeah, there’s a lot of Symbolic Structure to this chapter that makes it look likely.

Montagnarde1793 Be warned, I have a lot of thoughts on this subject:

The scene is great for its irony and symbolism, but you’re not wrong to suspect that it’s not the most accurate rendering of Breton peasants. I mean, for one thing, there were actual grievances behind the peasant uprisings in Bretagne and the Vendée, along the lines of the Revolution’s demanding greater sacrifices than its providing benefits. Which is true to some degree when you look at many of the economic, social, political and religious policies of the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies and the Girondine Convention.

If you’re a peasant anywhere for the first four years of the Revolution you might well conclude that you’re getting a raw deal, especially next to what you were led to expect: censitary suffrage, seigneurial dues being converted into “property” that had to be bought out at prices almost no one could afford, unlimited “freedom of the grain trade” and the martial law the accompanied it, national properties being sold in large lots to the highest bidder (who couldn’t be a village community, of course). If in addition to all these material concerns, you also happen to be religious, and some regions were more so than others, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the Church’s interpretation of it made it seem to many people who would otherwise have supported the Revolution that they had to choose between it and their immortal soul. (Not all revolutionaries thought making the oath to said Civil Constitution mandatory was a good idea - Robespierre, for one, was against it.)

Ironically, it’s just at the moment when the Montagnarde Convention was setting about reversing many of the above policies (censitary suffrage is the only one that had already been reversed) such that the Revolution might start having a greater benefit to peasants, that the need to raise troops for the foreign war begun over a year previous, became the last straw for peasants notably in those same, more religious regions. But it was always more of a “the Revolution hasn’t delivered on its promises and now it’s demanding I go and give my life for it far away while my crops go unharvested back at home” sort of a deal than a, “Well, of course I’m fighting the Revolution, my local lord said so” kind of deal.” Whether you want to phrase it that the aristocrats co-opted the movement or that the aristocratic counter-revolution and the peasant counter-revolution were natural allies because the enemy of my enemy is my friend, it’s an alliance that happened after the fact.

Now, do I consider it short-sighted to fight on the side of people who want to bring back all the abuses of the Ancien régime (even if it didn’t start out that way) because the Revolution hasn’t gone far enough? Absolutely. Were there other possible approaches? Yes, we see that in other regions there were peasants who absolutely realized that the problem was not the Revolution, but that the Revolution hadn’t gone far enough. But that doesn’t mean it was just a case of blindly following the people who had been in charge because they had always been in charge.

Basically, Hugo is right about the outcomes - fighting for the king, the lord, and the priest who screwed you over - but not the causes.

The character, or rather the archetype, of Michelle Fléchard of course poses a slightly different problem. We know that some people were and are more politicized than others. But how, when reading historical sources, can we access the understanding of those portrayed as ignorant in them? Because there’s ignorant and apolitical and there’s ignorant and apolitical - you don’t have to be a militant to understand the basic tenets of a civil war that’s going on around you. On the other hand, if you’re an illiterate peasant, you’re not going to be leaving your own texts for historians to analyze, so they’re pretty much going to be going on texts by literate people, who if they care to mention you at all, probably won’t have very complimentary things to say about your intelligence and political acumen on the whole. (There are exceptions, indeed the Revolution is particularly interesting in part precisely because there start to be more exceptions.) But when it comes to gaging the probability of such a person as Michelle Fléchard existing, things become a bit stickier. We can’t necessarily trust texts written by élites, but we don’t really have a lot more to go on.

Obviously, in Hugo’s case, he was writing a novel, not a history book - and several decades before Lefebvre’s work on the autonomous peasant revolution at that - so he really had a different set of questions to ask himself. Namely: Does this character serve my purpose, both in terms of symbolism and narrative? and Will my readers find this character plausible? I think Michelle Fléchard works as a character on both counts, but perhaps mostly, in regard to plausibility, because of cultural expectations about peasant ignorance - in particular when those peasants are also women and from Bretagne…

Also, is it me, or does Hugo’s note that public breast-feeding is indicative of an animal indifference to exposing one’s breasts seem like a bit of a 19th century-ism? *cue avalanche of revolutionary iconography valorizing women publicly breast-feeding*

Needsmoreresearch (reply to Montagnarde1793) Aha, thanks so much for the further background on the Vendée/Bretagne rural situation! And boy, there’s going to be plenty of “Hugo is writing a novel, and not a history book” conversations up ahead, aren’t there. (Confession: I’ve been reading ahead, about a third of the way, so I have some spoilers but no actual clue of where Hugo is going.) But the Peasant Ignorance (with a side of reverence for the lord-and-master) seems like a pretty major one of the “is this history or is it a novel” subjects.

Montagnarde1793 (reply to Needsmoreresearch's reply) I must confess, I’m going to have a hard time making myself avoid spoilers myself. This will be the fourth time I’ve read the book now, not counting my half-finished translation. If I have Thoughts it’s because I’ve had a while to ruminate on them. Though I promise not to treat you to a wall of text every day.

One thing I didn’t mention though, re: the assumption that peasants are ignorant and do whatever their lord tells them, is the probability of the influence of 19th century politics on Hugo (and his contemporary readers)’s view of the relationship of peasants to politics. It’s an area I know less well than the 18th century, of course, but it does seem to me that in the 19th century conservative and reactionary forces discovered the trick of instrumentalizing the universal suffrage they had once so feared and that it was common practice for rural élites to intimidate farmworkers into voting according to their directives. Which of course led to a greater political divide between city and country than had existed during the Revolution. Which in turn made the 19th century historiography largely ignore the importance of the peasantry in the Revolution.

…Which brings us back to Hugo on both ends: his historical sources, and the current events he’s commenting on in Quatrevingt-Treize.* (The Commune of 1871, which I expect will also come up quite a bit in the course of these discussions if people talk about the context in which the novel was written, was very much an affair of city vs country. “Majorité rurale, honte de la France” dixit Gaston Crémieux, author and participant in the Commune of Marseille - whose pardon Hugo had solicited in vain.)

* Since I once got a bit of flak for saying something similar, I feel I should add this disclaimer right now: obviously Quatrevingt-Treize is not just a running commentary on Hugo’s views on the Commune, and no I don’t think the only value or meaning of the novel must relate back to historical context. Historical context is just what I do.