In Georgia, in 1894, a young priest-in-training called Ioseb Jughashvili was discovered reading Victor Hugo’s Ninety-Three. The book, Hugo’s final novel, was confiscated as unauthorised secular literature and the trainee-priest was “punished with a prolonged stay in the punishment cell”. Illicitly reading Hugo’s account of the French revolution, he had been intrigued especially by the character of a former priest turned absolutist revolutionary, who believes any number of eggs should be cracked to make the utopian omelette. Small wonder that such a person would appeal to Jughashvili, who decades later, as he became more prominent in the Bolshevik movement, gradually adopted the pseudonym “Stalin”.
Hugo published Ninety-Three in 1874. The success of Notre-Dame de Paris lay decades in the past; Les Misérables had been a stonking hit; he was a national hero. Napoleon III had fallen from power, the Third Republic had been proclaimed, and Hugo, by this time a staunch republican, could finally return to France after years of self-exile in Guernsey. Nevertheless, he worked on his novel back in the Channel Islands, widowed, in hot pursuit of a 23-year-old maid, and telling himself he was dying (he wasn’t) in order to make himself write. The result was a book that has been called his best by rather more trustworthy admirers than Stalin, not least Robert Louis Stevenson and André Maurois.
This summer, Penguin Classics has recalled this significant but dormant novel to life with a vivid new translation. Until this year, Anglophone readers had access mainly to long-out-of-print translations from the 19th century. No new English translation had been published since 1962, when an independent press released an edition, now hard to find, with the dubious garland of an introduction from Ayn Rand. That the book could impress figures as politically opposed as Stalin and Rand speaks of its capaciousness and compassion, its acrobatic ability, despite its author’s own politics, to witness the tumult from every angle. The novel’s great act of compassionate rescue is from a marquis; no punches are pulled in depictions of republican terror.
The title is the year in which the book is set, 1793, picking up the chronology almost precisely from the end of A Tale of Two Cities. It was the year of the execution of the king, the constant swish of the guillotine and a civil war between “Blues” and “Whites”, with republicans and royalists alike committing unspeakable violence. Hugo’s accounts of the executions are never of a far, far better thing that leads to a far, far better place; here are thumping heads and spurting blood. There are astonishing set pieces: a forest swarming with invisible spies; a cannon loosed from its moorings and careering round the deck of a ship like some wild animal, indiscriminately knocking men to their deaths and slicing them into bits. Hugo shows us first an aristocrat, the Marquis de Lantenac, for whom the death of women and children is a necessary evil in the quelling of revolution. Cimourdain, the priest whom Stalin so admired, meanwhile espouses the cause of “humanity” with inhuman passion. Bridging the gap between the two, and offering a tentative hope for the future, is the younger Gauvain. On the plot goes, straight to the guillotine.
So far, so rollicking. And as Penguin is keen to reassure us, at 370 pages, the book is not very long. But this is no mere adventure story. Historical novels usually work in one of two ways. There are the well-researched accounts populated mostly with real figures from history, as with Hilary Mantel’s or Ford Madox Ford’s Tudor sequences, or Mantel’s own telling of the revolution, A Place of Greater Safety. And there are those that, with huge historical events swirling in the background, tell an entirely fictional story, as with A Tale of Two Cities. Hugo collides both methods. His fictional plot (of Lantenac, Cimourdain, and Gauvain) is inlaid into an account of the revolution in which, and to a greater extent than in War and Peace or Eliot’s Romola, historical characters such as Danton or Robespierre take over.
The closest comparison I can think of is to Moby-Dick
And he goes further, in long sequences that cannot be called narrative: teeming chapter-length descriptions of revolutionary Paris, where marchionesses sewed in the streets, crowns were sold as bric-a-brac, weeks had 10 days and the King, Queen and Jack were removed from playing cards. There are even page references to historical sources. One scene is given as a playscript. The result is a disconcerting hybrid of fiction and documentary, thriller and morality play, bringing to mind the method of Notre-Dame de Paris, where the well-known story of Quasimodo is likewise paused for long stretches of disquisition, on architecture, on the printing press, on medieval Paris. The closest comparison I can think of is to Moby-Dick (which had no complete French translation until 1941), where the plot is folded in to accounts of whaling or of the colour white. Hugo was straining at, and stretching, the formal bounds of the novel.
That Penguin has filled this gaping hole in their vital catalogue of classics is a wonderful thing. This is an important novel, a handsome edition and a taut and vivid new translation from David Bellos, who died last year, shortly after completing the work. In 1997, Hugo’s biographer Graham Robb regretted that all the available English translations of Ninety-Three had been “pruned and disinfected”. Bellos gives us all of Hugo’s startling violence and daring, lopping off historical pruderies (“hindquarters” becomes “bottom”), and faithful to an account of warfare unparalleled in explicitness by any British writer of the time. Translators are accused of sexing up Victorian literature for sales, and readers might think that that is happening here, when Bellos gives us a “foul bucket of shit called Brise-Bleu… a fucking brigand”. But there, in the original, Brise-Bleu is described as “Gribouille-mon-cul-te-baise”, of which a literal rendition would be, “a fucked-by-my-arse idiot”.
What Bellos catches superbly is the variety of tone. Hugo is capable of rhapsodic landscape painting and grandiloquent proselytising, but his is a voice modern in its economy, his dialogue laid out as staccato rallies, shorn of he-saids and she-saids (on the page, much of the prose looks like Evelyn Waugh). “Tout bruit cessa” ends one chapter, a phrase softened by all previous translations (“then every sound died away…”). Bellos has it right: “all sound ceased”. While he didn’t have to solve all those Russian variations on “devil take it” that still bedevil modern Tolstoys, he did have to decide what to do with the idiom for Hugo’s soldiers. Presumably concluding that the novel’s first readers found its historic diction atmospherically outdated, he settled for equivalent English archaisms. Some are still with us (“knee-high to a grasshopper”), but on the whole there is too much odds-bodkins rhubarbing. Danton not “giving a toss” is the one perfect solution (it’s a phrase you can find in George Eliot). But elsewhere we have “pfui”, “Egad!” and (for “mordemonbleu”, a bastardised “death of my god”) “Gadzounds”. Even by the 18th century these had become comical oaths, some were Walter Scott’s neologisms rather than authentic slang and these days they make the text sound like Carry On Don’t Lose Your Head.
But what Bellos so thrillingly conveys is the novel’s humanism, and the simplicity and directness of its expression. Ninety-Three castigates those who would rebel against progress, and it can seem almost coldly fatalistic. Hugo’s answer, as to why such terror was perpetrated in the name of values he admired and values he didn’t, is “because”. In the face of history, praise and blame do not apply. But republican that Hugo was, the novel’s real sympathies lie with humanism, in its refusal to distinguish between the screams of dying men and beaten children. As Stalin did not understand, it is an agonised consideration of actions and consequences, means and ends, eggs and omelettes. “Are you a republican? Are you a royalist?” a beggar is asked. “I am a pauper,” comes the reply. Or: “Are you with the Blues? Or the Whites?” Answer: “I’m with my kids.” Or: “who killed your husband? … was it a Blue? Was it a White?” “It was a gun.”
This I take to be the unadorned point that lies at the heart of this complex and protean novel: that regardless of its cause, poverty is poverty, and regardless of its purpose, war is war. Which is reason enough to read this book, God knows.
