Many Ceremonies Honor Writer : Victor Hugo Still France’s Conscience After Century

For France, 1985 is officially the “Year of Victor Hugo.”

The romantic novelist, poet, playwright and polemicist died 100 years ago, and the French are celebrating the anniversary with performances, readings, biographies, exhibitions, lectures, a new edition of his complete works and a commemorative stamp.

The Ministry of Culture is even sponsoring a T-shirt with the design of a youth on his knees looking upward and crying out, “Hugo, you’re the tops.”

This kind of excitement about a writer would be hard to duplicate elsewhere in the world. It reflects the awe and reverence of the French for great authors, and it reflects as well the way Hugo, the most popular French writer of the 19th Century, made himself the social conscience of his people. His furious tirades against injustice, like those in his famous novel “Les Miserables,” still strike a chord today.

Socialist Image

In fact, the official designation of 1985 as the “Year of Victor Hugo” by a Socialist government strikes some French conservatives as self-serving. They suspect that the Socialists intend to improve their own image by associating themselves with Victor Hugo.

“Victor Hugo was a great man who opposed the empire for many years,” a conservative woman in her 70s said. “The left has put him in its pocket. But if he came back today and saw what the left and its government have done, he would be completely upset.”

Even on the left, there is some uneasiness with the celebrations. “A hundred years after his death, what are we celebrating?” critic Jean-Pierre Thibaudat asked in the leftist newspaper Liberation. “Neither a man nor his work, but an icon. We are celebrating a myth.”

Thibaudat insisted that the French know Hugo less these days by reading his works than by seeing them adapted for the stage or the movies or songs. “We read Gustave Flaubert,” he said, “but we adapt Hugo.”

Grandfather of France

It is hard, however, for the French to find any fault with celebrating Victor Hugo. Starting with earliest school days, every French child is familiar with the portrait of the thick-bearded, white-haired, Olympian writer, a hand slipping beneath his vest like that of Napoleon, a finger thoughtfully tapping his head. He is the grandfather of France, the conscience of France, the literary genius of France, all in a single image.

On Wednesday, the day that actually marked the 100th anniversary of Hugo’s death, several thousand admirers paid homage to him at a ceremony in the auditorium of the University of the Sorbonne in Paris. Actors read poems and essays and pieces of plays in which he railed against capital punishment, the evils of the prison system, the treatment of former criminals, the suppression of women.

“There is a slave in our society--woman,” Hugo was quoted as saying.

The orchestra of the Republican Guard, the military unit that protects the president of France, played various classical selections, including the “Hymn to Victor Hugo” by Camille Saint-Saens.

An official of the Victor Hugo Commemoration Committee then introduced the main speaker, Minister of Justice Robert Badinter, a civil rights lawyer who was brought into his post by President Francois Mitterrand after the electoral victories of the Socialist Party in 1981.

A Symbolic Choice

The choice of speaker was symbolic. Badinter personifies the Socialist government that abolished capital punishment and thus ended the use of the guillotine. For many conservatives, Badinter reflects the image they have of a fuzzy-thinking, soft-hearted, liberal Socialist attitude toward social problems.

But, for many others, especially leftists, Badinter has a different image. In the tradition of Victor Hugo, he is looked on as a courageous battler against injustice.

“Victor Hugo fought all his life for the abolition of capital punishment,” the woman who introduced Badinter said. “Our next speaker is the man who introduced the legislation that finally brought it to an end.”

The audience of Hugo admirers rose and applauded the minister for several minutes.

Badinter described Hugo as “the battler against the violent injustice of our justice.” “He, more than any other public figure of his century, was the champion and hero of a justice that would be more humane, more fraternal than that of his time,” he said.

Badinter, who had announced only hours earlier that he would soon introduce legislation to reform the prisons of France, told the audience that although capital punishment has now been abolished in France, many of Hugo’s battles were still not won.

‘Still Miserable’

“The prisons are not changed,” he said. “They are still miserable.”

Hugo, who lived 83 years, wrote 9 novels, 10 plays, 20 volumes of poetry and scores of books, pamphlets and articles on political, literary and sociological subjects. He is best known outside France for the novels “Les Miserables” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” two of the most popular books ever written. But inside France he is probably more highly regarded for his poetry.

Literary fame made Hugo into a public figure, and he fought throughout his life against social injustice and political dictatorship. His bitter opposition to the Emperor Napoleon III forced him into exile in 1851, and he lived outside France, mostly on the island of Guernsey in the English Channel, for almost 20 years, returning to Paris in 1870 after the overthrow of Napoleon III.

“Citizens!” Hugo shouted to a waiting crowd at the Paris train station known as the Gare du Nord, “I said that I would return the day that the republic returned. Here I am.”

He became the symbolic hero and elder statesman of the Third Republic. When he died, on May 22, 1885, it seemed natural that the funeral would unleash an outpouring of affection and reverence for him and for the republic he symbolized. His funeral is looked on by modern historians as a moment of glory for those French in the 19th Century who supported the republic and despised the monarchy.

Hugo’s body lay in state under the Arch of Triumph. Perhaps 2 million people then followed the cortege more than seven hours across town to Hugo’s burial in a tomb of the Pantheon.

‘It Was a Coronation’

“We did not go to a funeral,” the playwright Emile Augier said later. “It was a coronation.”

The funeral upset many Catholics and monarchists. They were furious that the republican government had decided to bury Hugo, who had refused the last Catholic rites, in the Pantheon. The Pantheon had originally been a church that the Constituent Assembly of the French Revolution had transformed, in 1791, into a tomb for French heroes. Napoleon III had reconverted it to a church.

In order to make it the Pantheon again and bury Hugo there, the government had to desecrate it, pulling its crucifix down. That is probably the main reason why the Catholic and monarchist press, in its reporting on the funeral, denounced it as a “shameful bacchanal,” a “ danse macabre” and a “holiday of madmen.”

Now, 100 years later, the celebrations have begun again. The Socialist government has distributed thousands of copies of a booklet that lists 70 pages of Hugo events going on somewhere in France in the course of the year. This galaxy of commemorations is not surprising. The Socialists running France today see themselves as the heirs of Victor Hugo.