V
Paris est le point vélique de la civilisation.
Victor Hugo, Paris-Guide
Paris is the focal point of civilization.
The guidebook, ordinarily, makes few claims to greatness. Its great strength, but also its great limitation, is topicality. If customs change almost weekly, as these works often claim, then they are outdated as soon as they are published. The only answer possible is to put together another guidebook (which, indeed, seems to have been the strategy of choice in the 1830s and 1840s). The novel, on the other hand, proclaims its ambition to understand not the day or the week or the year but the century. The two modes of urban exploration would seem to be irreconcilable. Balzac's incorporation of his occasional pieces into his novels does not fundamentally alter either genre. But
when Victor Hugo takes on the introduction of a great collective guide to Paris, the genre virtually splits in two, utterly transformed by virtue of Hugo's reconceptualization of urban discourse.
The fusion of the writer and Paris, Paris and modernity, modernity and revolution, is nowhere more arresting than in the work and the persona of Victor Hugo. And nowhere is Hugo more insistent on making those affinities explicit than in his outsize introduction to Paris-Guide (1867 ) Given his tenacious, vocal, and highly publicized opposition to the Second Empire, Hugo represented a somewhat audacious choice to present a work timed to appear for the World's Fair sponsor d by the government. But any work whose title page boasted authorship par les principaux écrivains et artistes de la France simply had to include Hugo, so great was his reputation in France and abroad and so strong were his associations with Paris.[19]
The book, like Paris itself, is suffused with light. The title page carries a small seal with a large sun rising over Lutetia (though the buildings mark it as medieval Paris), and Hugo stresses that Paris-Guide is an edifice constructed by "a dazzling legion of minds." Further, if all the missing "luminaries" were added, the book "would be Paris itself."[20] Thus Hugo both affirms the writer's right to define the city and attests to the fact of that definition.
Yet, though Hugo speaks for authorial privilege generally, the claims that he makes on and for "Paris itself" are, finally, personal claims. For over thirty years Paris has been Hugo's city, his creation, from Notre-Dame de Paris to Les Misérables. His identification is total. Paris itself is text and intertext. Old Paris shows up distinctly under the Paris of today "as the old text shows up in between the spaces of the new" (x). So complete is Hugo's assimilation of the city that he conflates his exile with his marginal authorial status: "We are properly on the threshold, almost outside. Absent from the city, absent from the book" (xxxiv).
Hugo's colossal introduction essentially turns Paris-Guide into an oxymoron. However brilliant the contributions of the other "luminaries," they supply mere fragments; Hugo provides the only source of light for the City of Lights. He is then in person the guiding light of this work, the sole source of unity. Thus Paris-Guide explodes the genre of the literary guidebook. There will be other guides to Paris, of course, and no end of works on one or another aspect of Paris. But
Plate 7.
Frontispiece and title page, Paris-Guide (1867). The small seal at right
shows the sun rising over Lutetia. The seal of the modern city to the
left literalizes Hugo's conception of postrevolutionary Paris in a century of
progress. In contrast to the official seal, which displays a three-masted ship
viewed from the side, this seal exhibits a galley with a single square sail
going before the wind with its bank of oars raised. The great billowing sail
heading directly toward the reader pictures Hugo's impassioned affirmation in
the introduction to this work that "Paris is the center of effort on the sail
that represents civilization." Like the winds that converge on a single point of
the sail, the currents of modern civilization intersect in Paris. With the crossed
olive and oak branches that recall the garlands of the seal of the First Empire,
the editors discreetly placed the volume under Napoleonic protection—but that
of the first Napoléon not the third. Hugo should have been pleased at the
iconographic gymnastics that placed him in the company of the right Napoléon.
(Photograph by University of Chicago Medical Center, A.V. Department.)
no other writer lays claim to a vision of Paris anywhere nearly as comprehensive as Hugo's.
Its format places Paris-Guide squarely within the tradition of the collaborative, multivolume literary guidebook. The editors of the "encyclopedic enterprise" have the "absolute conviction" that they are publishing " the most complete work ever undertaken on Paris" (emphases theirs) (vi). Yet at the very outset Hugo subverts the aesthetic of iteration with his grandiloquent introduction (over forty pages of small type in double columns for the first edition). Hugo pays less attention to the real Paris, its topography or its history, than to the meaning of the city within the progressive development of France and of all western civilization. More than the head of a people, the city is the brain of the universe, indispensable to its life. "The universe without the city would be like a decapitation. One cannot imagine an acephalous civilization" (xxv).
Thus Hugo returns to the very source of unmeaning. Decapitation exemplifies the loss of meaning for monarchical Paris. Hugo's refusal of decapitation accomplishes the impossible. It puts Paris back together again, makes the city whole, and restores its meaning. That meaning has changed. The language through which Hugo accomplishes this miracle has become the language of revolution. The creator of meaning is no longer the monarch but the writer, who achieves thereby something that the man was never able to accomplish. Hugo's vehement opposition to capital punishment from the beginning to the end of his career amounts to an obsession. He presided at two international congresses on the abolition of the death penalty and wrote tirelessly on the topic for over half a century. (It is worth remembering that until France abolished the death penalty in 1981, capital punishment was exactly that, decapitation by the guillotine.)
Clearly, Hugo takes Paris-Guide in the higher sense: the book is a guide to Paris, Paris guides humanity. The Paris seal reproduced on the frontispiece shows the traditional ship but now with a great billowing sail that literalizes Hugo's impassioned affirmation that Paris is the point on the sail where all the winds of civilization converge ("le point vélique de la civilisation," xIx).
If the history of Paris is a "microcosm of general history" (vI), it is because of the Revolution. The unity of the city whose fragments follow in the table of contents comes from the Revolution. No longer metonyny but metaphor. Not the synecdoche implied by the pano-
ramic view or in the various personifications of the city, Hugo's city is the city of revolution, the city of the Revolution. The Revolution transforms the city into a vast and continually evolving chronotope. Neither the conventional personifications (Paris as hydra, courtesan, queen, monster, bird, colossus, goddess, devil, slave, giant, genius, gladiator) nor the classic metonymies (Paris as head, brain, heart, eye) nor again the familiar topographical comparisons (Paris as forest, volcano, river, ocean, sea, planet, prison, hospital, theater, metropolis, nation, paradise or hell) are able to subsume the fragments that comprise modern, that is, postrevolutionary Paris.[21]
If the most powerful of these figures is insufficient to the writer's task, it is because all of them are essentially static and ahistorical. The city that had been disrupted by the sudden and violent intrusion of historical circumstance and sequence into everyday life, the city that changed continually before the reader's very eyes, the city whose parts multiplied more rapidly with every new regime—that city could be rendered whole only by taking the movement of history into account. That is, the texts of modern Paris had to become the text of revolutionary Paris.
This is Hugo's vital contribution in his introduction to Paris-Guide. His assimilation of Paris with the Revolution, and with revolution, alters the very conception of the city. Writing the Revolution entails a revolution in writing. Paris then is the "pivot on which, on a given day, history turned" (XIII). That pivotal date was, of course, 1789, the date that has been the "preoccupation of the human race" for almost a century (XVIII). Rome may be more majestic, Venice more beautiful, London richer, but Paris has the Revolution. In an astounding series of comparisons, Hugo endows Paris with the powers of both nature and civilization: "Palermo has Etna, Paris has thought. Constantinople is closer to the sun, Paris is closer to civilization. Athens built the Parthenon, but Paris tore down the Bastille" (XVIII).
Revolution gives Hugo the larger figure that he needs to encompass modern Paris. The Revolution both explains and justifies the postrevolutionary city, including the decadent Paris of the Second Empire, to which Hugo gave no quarter. Thus the progressive vision of Paris-Guide counters the pessimism of Notre-Dame de Paris with its bitter lamentation on the lost unity of medieval civilization. As the medieval world coheres around the Church, so modern society finds its raison d'être in the Revolution: "this powerful nineteenth century,
son of the Revolution and father of liberty" (XXXIV). As Notre-Dame de Paris signifies medieval Paris, so the Panthéon, "full of great men and useful heros," represents modern, that is, revolutionary Paris. Saint Peter's may be the larger dome, but the Panthéon harbors the more elevated thought (XXVIII).
Paris-Revolution—the third term in the equation is Art: "That which completes and crowns Paris" (XXVIII) is its literary destiny, a consecration that comes from the "trinity of reason," Rabelais, Molière, and Voltaire (XXVII). In Paris reason and art go together: "Great poetry is the solar specter of human reason." Paris leads humanity, and the poet leads Paris (XXIX).
At the very moment that Hugo writes his revolutionary utopic, Haussmann is drastically rewriting the urban text of Paris, creating a very different city from the one that Hugo knew or imagined. Haussmann produces a Paris to be seen and admired, a bourgeois Paris of parks and broad avenues to compete with the royal Paris of the ancien régime. By way of contrast, Hugo is concerned not with the seen but with the seer. His domain is not the material city but the spiritual one. His view of the city takes as its vantage point not the towers of Notre-Dame but rather the dome of the Panthéon, the tomb that radiates above the city like a star. The panorama from which Hugo dominates the city is the sacred place of revolution, the edifice erected for the ancien régime but transformed, like Paris itself, by the Revolution into the very symbol of the new age.
The metaphorization of the city is, of course, made all the easier by Hugo's exile, off the coast of France in British territory, far from the real, confusing, and rapidly changing city of the Second Empire. The Paris of Notre-Dame de Paris implies the Revolution of 1789, but Hugo had not yet found in the Revolution the vital synecdoche that so powerfully unifies the introduction to Paris-Guide in 1867 and the whole of Quatrevingt-treize five years later. That figure is not his invention. As we saw, the collaborative literary guidebooks of the 1830s and 1840s assume the centrality of the Revolution to contemporary literary activity of every sort. But it is in this later work, as the actual Revolution recedes further and further into the past, that Hugo comes to define the city, and the century, in terms of what he views as the fundamental t ransformation of modern times.
Hugo tells us in the preface to Notre-Dame de Paris that he has constructed this novel on a word—"ANAI'KH" (Fatality)—which he found inscribed on a pillar of the cathedral itself. Notre-Dame de Paris
foretells the fated destruction of a unified civilization: "Ceci tuera cela" ("This will kill that") (bk. 5, chap. 1). The world of the book, of the printing press, destroys the cathedral and the world that it embodies. The mobility of the printed word is bound to shatter the stability that Hugo assigns to the medieval world. This is the original revolution ("la révolution mère") that precedes and prepares the other. The architectural decadence that Hugo denounces so vehemently in Notre-Dame de Paris is but the symptom of this fundamental transformation in the mode by which humanity makes itself intelligible. But although Notre-Dame de Paris points to the Revolution, the dominant tone is lamentation for the civilization that is no more, that has scattered with the pieces of printed paper and has irremediably fragmented contemporary society. Thirty years and two regimes later, Hugo finds in the Revolution the metaphor that will unify that fragmented civilization and the city that is its center. The introduction to Paris-Guide looks forward, not back, to a time when all humanity will have realized the promise of revolutionary Paris.
In due time, Hugo himself will lie in the Panthéon, the sacred place of the Revolution, among the great men and useful heroes of France. For the moment, in 1867, for Paris-Guide, he writes from afar, the distance of his exile allowing him to imagine Paris without the encumbrance of visible realities of the bourgeois city. Hugo stakes these claims on the very last page of his introduction to Paris-Guide with the name of his home on the Isle of Guernsey. Hauteville House does not simply tell the reader where Hugo lives; it is a sign that designates his relationship to Paris—Hauteville House, high above the city, high within the city. In exile Hugo claims Paris as his own.
It is supremely fitting that Hugo should be so intimately associated with the Republic and that he, in effect, becomes its hero. It is also right and proper that the Third Republic inscribe this metonym for Paris on the cityscape itself. In 1881, to celebrate the beginning of his eightieth year, the street where he lives becomes the avenue Victor Hugo. And it is Hugo's burial in 1885 that definitively transforms the Panthéon into a republican sanctuary, what Hugo himself calls the "tomb star." The city itself confirms what Hugo believes as firmly as Carlyle, namely, that the writer is the hero of postrevolutionary society, for it is through the writer that revolutionary Paris becomes literary France, one more step in the glorification of the writer and of literature that makes genius a national rather than simply individual affair.