Victor Hugo
It was [Victor] Hugo, who, during the International Peace Congress that was
held in Paris in 1849, declared, “A day will come when you France, you
Russia, you Italy, you England, you Germany, you all, nations of the
continent, without losing your distinct qualities and your glorious
individuality, will be merged closely within a superior unit and you
will form the European brotherhood.” The idea of the European Union has
by now been allowed to seem so narrowly bureaucratic that it is hard for
us to recall that it once shone with the light of a romantic vision.
Each year, the British historian John Julius Norwich publishes a
“Christmas Cracker,” a commonplace book full of fragments of funny
reading from the pas twelve months; for 2012, he includes Gerry Hanson
pointing out that, while the Lord’s Prayer contains sixty-nine words,
and the Declaration of Independence two hundred and ninety-seven, an
E.U. directive on duck eggs contains twenty-eight thousand nine hundred
and eleven words.
O.K., it has its absurdities. But the dream of European union was for
Hugo not just a way of preventing the disasters of war and approaching
the problem of poverty; it was a larger way of insisting that cultural
pluralism—indeed, pluralism of every kind—was essential to freedom. Hugo
kept Republican liberalism from seeming fatuous by insisting that the
liberal Republican has a singular, mystic insight into the intrinsic
doubleness of life. At the height of the twentieth century’s calamities,
Hugo’s Romantic Republicanism could seem fragile and unconvincing; the
Javerts then held the floor. There are many things wrong or encumbering
or even foolish about the European Union, but when we watch “Les
Misérables,” we should save a thought for how much of Hugo’s vision has
now been achieved. What Hugo wanted, and what he used all that
melodramatic and storytelling power to promote, was a Europe accepting
in its pluralism, and widely based in its prosperity. His ghost now has
it.
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