The Dreaded Waterloo Moment

Or The Point Where I Realise I’m Going to Need to Know More About the War than the Lyrics to the Abba Song. 

So, it’s 1815 in the novel, and rather than continue with the highly intriguing story of Valjean’s arrest Hugo ‘treats’ us to a big long history-based rant about the Battle of Waterloo, complete with description, historical anecdote and analysis of exactly why Napoleon lost despite being awesome (okay, I’m paraphrasing here).  This allows Hugo to comment on various issues such as war and the place of the historian. It’s here that we start to see that Les Mis is a historical novel completely in the traditional vein, and Hugo tries to give us a sense of the place and how it has been affected since the war.  I admired his description, but still think that the man seriously needed an editor.

Still, the setting is chosen deliberately as an extended metaphor on one of the central themes of the book, that of destiny and whether humankind is able to escape it. According to Hugo’s view within this part of the novel:  “For Napoleon to have won Waterloo would have been counter to the tide of the nineteenth century.” (Penguin 1976, translated by Denny, p302). Napoleon was “troublesome to God” (ibid, p303) and is therefore destined to fail despite odds apparently being on his side. Hugo has no great admiration for Wellington and obviously believes that the Allies won through a combination of luck and destiny rather than the skill of the commander. 

I hadn’t realised the importance of Waterloo on the future of Europe, despite studying some Enlightenment poets during a university course. GCSE and A Level history of the late 1990s suffered from the inevitable surfeit of Nazis. I believe some people studied the French Revolution at A Level, but I think it was mostly to do with the first part. Despite having an interest (Marie Antoinette, The Scarlet Pimpernel and my dear French teacher telling us all about Bastille Day complete with both the gory bits and the historical bits), I didn’t know anything about the subsequent revolutions and quite frankly had thought that Les Mis itself was set during the first part. 

After contentedly wading through a variety of wiki articles it has started to make some kind of sense and I can see what Hugo meant and why he set the book at this point and went into so much detail about Waterloo. Starting with the Enlightenment, Europe had begun to change, most importantly (in Hugo’s opinion) in the way that it was governed. Whereas the English “...still cherish their feudal illusions” (ibid, p316), France was ‘progressive’ enough to overthrow their monarchy. With Waterloo, their Emperor (and dictator) is also overthrown, and although the monarchy is restored it is not the same – subsequent monarchs are constitutional and have to abdicate if they try to act as if they are the ones in charge. Europe and France are re-organised, there is an end to the outbreaks of war and Empire building characterising the first part of the century.  This doesn’t only affect people who are ruling the country in France, it affects everybody and the people are not prepared to put up with tyrants or dictators who try to curtail their freedom or are corrupt. If anything, knowing something about the history has made the book more interesting. 

Just when you wonder when Hugo will ever get back to the plot there is a description of a figure wandering the battlefield looking for people to rob. It’s our old friend Thernadier, the scoundrel. He’s just robbed Officer Pontmercy, who thinks that Thernadier’s saved his life. Somehow  I don’t think Thernadier is going to set him straight about that.