VICTOR HUGO BEGAN writing his mammoth novel Les Misérables in 1846 and it was finally published in five volumes in 1862.
In his preface Hugo states that the purpose of his book was to highlight that
So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth … the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of women by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night … so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.
In its original form the book numbers some 2,783 pages, of which nearly 1,000 digress from the novel on a multitude of essays on random subjects. At the beginning of Volume II, entitled Colette, Hugo devotes nineteen chapters to the Battle of Waterloo; he visited the battlefield in 1861 and he completed the book there.
Date of printing:
1862
Location:
Private collection
He gives us a vivid and extensive account of the Battle of Waterloo which marks the defeat of Napoleon and the end of any hopes of reviving his empire. Hugo states that most accounts of the battle were told from the viewpoint of the victorious British, and he resolved to focus his account on the efforts of the French forces. In his version Napoleon is viewed in great awe by his soldiers, but despite his military brilliance they are defeated by the weather. Hugo claims, however, that the real victors of Waterloo are the individual men who are standing up for their rights and beliefs.
The ‘Wounded Eagle’ monument dedicated to the last combatants of the Grand Army.
During the description of the battle, Victor Hugo embellished a number of scenes with a novelist’s touch. He records that the delays in forming up the French artillery because of the mud allowed the Prussians time to arrive; he describes the fierce fighting at Hougoumont and claims that the French were massacred in the chapel, others broke into the formal garden and that the well was heartlessly filled with the bodies of both dead and wounded Frenchmen; that only forty-two defenders survived from La Haye Sainte; that the French cavalry was destroyed plunging into a hidden chasm behind the allied ridge line but still broke seven squares and took six Colours; that Cambronne died refusing to surrender, having replied, ‘Merde’ to British appeals for the Guard to surrender and that Wellington later said, ‘They have changed my battlefield.’
Over time, the novel’s descriptions of events have come to be taken as established fact and have distorted the telling of the true story of the battle. Recent investigative work within the primary source material in the archives and forensic archaeology on the battlefield have proven Hugo’s version to be factually incorrect and purely based on myths.
Hugo was also aware of the English and German memorials at the site, pointing out that there was no French memorial at Waterloo. He was an instigator of the ‘Wounded Eagle’ memorial, although it was erected in 1904, well after his death.
Hugo reconciled the defeat of the French army with the idea that it was a victory for civilisation. He was of the opinion that Napoleon’s defeat was pre-ordained because the tide of history required his removal from the stage. He went on to say that Waterloo represented the revenge of counter-revolutionary forces, but that changes in the political landscape prevented them from reasserting themselves completely afterwards, creating a post-war Europe with greater liberty than before, even under the old leaderships.
