The Legend of the centuries

the Legend of the centuries is a collection of poem S of Victor Hugo, designed like an immense unit intended to depict the history and the evolution of the Humanité.

Written by intermittencies between 1855 and 1876, so much its projects are numerous in these years of exile to Guernesey, the poems were published in three series: in 1859, 1877 and 1883. Carried by a poetic talent estimated as without equal where all the art of Hugo is summarized, after the achievement of the Châtiments and the Contemplations which opened new horizons to him, the Légende of the Centuries is regarded as the only true French epopee and, according to the judgment carried by Baudelaire, like the only possible modern epopee.

In front of him, in dream, the poet contemplates the wall of the centuries, vagueness and terrible, on which and all the scenes mix take shape with the past, the present and the future, and where the long procession of humanity ravels. The poems are the painting of these scattered and fugitively seen scenes, in an intermingling of terrible visions. Hugo sought neither historical exactitude nor even less exhaustiveness. On the contrary, it sticks more readily to obscure figures, generally invented, but which incarnate and symbolize their age and their century. As he announced it itself in the Foreword of the First Series, “it is history listened with the door of the legend”. The poems, sometimes lyric, epic or satirical, form a continuation of the human adventure, seeking not to summarize but illustrate the history of mankind, to testify, with the original direction of the term, of its long advance of darkness towards the light.

Ce delivers, it is the alarming remainder of Babel;
It is lugubrious Tour of the Things, the édifice
Good, evil, tears, mourning, sacrifice,
To trust formerly, dominating the distances horizons,
Today not having more but of hideous sections,
Scattered, lying, lost in the obscure valley;
It is the epopee human, rough, immense, - écroulée.

Small Epopees

The Légende of the Centuries was however not from the start the extraordinary intention which it became thereafter. Its origin, and the original idea, is in these Petites Epopees of which the title and the vague project appear among many others imagined and noted by Hugo in his notebooks as of 1848, and of which nothing indicates that they carried in them such a vast ambition.

After the Punishments and Contemplations , the editor Hetzel, hesitates in front of the End of Satan and God which is close being completed and which Hugo subjects to him. Hugo indicator ready to launch out in the metaphysical and practically eschatologic line of what the mouth of shade and says has that which remained in France which finished the Contemplations , it fears these two vast poems and their probable failure near the public. It is interested rather in these Petites Epopees that Hugo mentioned, which is still only outlined but which seems to him to better serve the spirit of time. In March 1857 Hetzel writes in Hugo his refusal Fin of Satan and God , but accepts with enthusiasm the Petites Epopees and commits it to follow this way.

The new order is subject to nevertheless the influence of the new thought of Hugo and of its close works, so much at that time all works of Hugo are frays, created in the same dash and a kind of magma of inspiration, poetic, mystical and philosophical, which is the mark of its first decade of exile. Besides this inspiration makes it write quantity of poems, more or less short, intended to be published under conditions and projects which are in perpetual evolution. Hugo integrates from now on the Petites Epopees into his poetic system , making they it the left human one his intention which the End of Satan and God form, and realiserealised of the range and the possibilities that the Petites Epopees offer, presented like scattered fragments of the great human epopee. Ideas of titles which note Hugo show it: the Human Legend , the Legend of the Centuries . The Hugo September 11th, 1857 signs with Hetzel the final contract of the Petites Epopees , keeping the right to modify the title of it.

Later, Hetzel was ready to publish the End of Satan and God but Hugo, quite conscious of the difficulties in completing its two great poems, from now on is launched entire in its new work. It adopts initially a plan which proposes the French revolution, which is for him the decisive and crucial moment of the History (this " climateric turning of the humanité" , he in William Shakespeare writes). A poem named the Revolution must be the pivot and the central point about it; other poems are assistant for him, like Supreme Pity or the Back of the page, aiming explaining and forgiving violence, and at prolonging the philosophical reflection on this turning of the History. Other poems still, whose titles are noted, are projected but were not never written, or took different forms: All spectra returned (in the section 19th century ) and the Archangel and Poëte (in that of the 20th century ). The following plan was finally established, for the 19th century: the Ocean - the Revolution - the Back of the page - Supreme Pity - the Poor People - the epopee of the Ass .

Hetzel followed with fear this evolution, at the point to fear that the epopees so small only are provided and that the great philosophical questions born from the last parts of Contemplations is not felt again too much, and sought to moderate the heat of Hugo. After long and serious disease which stops it during the summer 1858, this one begins the writing of poems more strictly narrative, according to the wish of its editor (like the Small King de Galice and Zim-Zizimi ), and to think of a new ordinance of the collection, finally operating a selection rigorously turned this time towards the epopee. It does not give up however the general ambition, proclaiming it in preamble, and conceives the idea of a publication in several parts, so much the possibilities are immense. The title is decided only one month before the sending of the manuscript; with his direction of the formula, Hugo definitively chose the Legend of the Centuries , preserving subtitles of it that of the Petites Epopees .

Preface and Vision

In 1859, Hugo wrote two texts which can be regarded as two forewords with the Légende of the Centuries . From these two, the " Vision from where this livre" left; was written in first, immense poem inaugural showing the vision of the poet confronted with the wall of the centuries. True foreword in worms, it openly expresses the formidable ambition of work. Hetzel still judged it too philosophical and prophetic, accordingly to reinforce the narrative character and epic character First Series. In addition, Hugo on its side felt the need to clearly announce, above all, the constitution and the range of his intention beyond only the Légende and the fundamental unit of this one with the End of Satan and God . There thus wrote a Foreword, at the same time more precise and more general as for its thought, but remaining finally vaguer in the content than the Vision .

But the two texts express, by different means, the same thought. It is a question of showing “the Humanity, considered as a large collective individual achieving of time in time a series of acts on the ground”, in its swarming and its expansion, that Hugo wants to retranscribe by these small epopees in margin of the History. But beyond the anecdotic one and of legendary, it is a discussion thread that Humanity follows inlassablement: progress, this “large mysterious wire of the human labyrinth”. Hugo paints the picture of “the man going up of darkness to the Ideal”, precisely oscillating between God and Satan. On this fight of influence between God and the Fallen angel depends the release on Humanity, and its History is only that of the stamping from the Man of its chains and the Evil which corrodes it. As in the Fine of Satan where the catch of Bastille constituted the ultimate act of release, the Revolution - whose great poem was finally isolated - remains announced like the central point of the History, which goes “from Eve, mother of the Men, until the Revolution, mother of the People”; and appears in filigree in work, as a luminous shade which one conceals but who is present everywhere.

First Series

The First series appeared on September 28th, 1859 with Brussels, in two volumes. Since his ground of exile, Hugo dedicates it to France:

Livre, that a wind you emporte
In France, where I was born!
The tree déraciné
Give its sheet morte.

The finally adopted form was fully turned towards the epopee. If traditional Antiquity is forgotten (Rome, that Hugo liked hardly, is represented only for its decline), the framing is resolutely biblical, opening on Eve ( the sacring of the woman ) and closing on the trumpet of the judgment , vision traditional of the end of the time but leaving sourdre a dark concern, and preferred with too singular the Abîme . The other large texts written for it in 1857-1858, put at the variation, were deferred to a second future series. Like Hugo says it in the Foreword, it is only the beginning.

Composition

Foreword · I. Of Eve with Jesus (the sacring of the woman; Conscience; Power equalizes kindness; Lions; The temple; Deadened Booz; Invisible God with the philosopher; First meeting of Christ with the tomb) · II. Decline of Rome (With the lion of Androclès) · III. Islam (the new year of Hégire; Mahomet; The cedar) · IV. The Christian Heroic Cycle (the parricide; The marriage of Roland; Aymerillot; Bivar; The day of the kings) · V. the Knight-errants ( the ground saw formerly; Small king de Galice; Eviradnus) · VI. Thrones of the East (Zim-Zizimi; 1453; Mourad sultan) · VII. Italy - Ratbert · VIII. Sixteenth century - Rebirth. Paganism (the Satyr) · IX. The Rose of Infante · X. the Enquiry (reasons of Momotombo) · XI. The Song of the Adventurers of the Sea · XII. Seventeenth century, the Mercenaries (Le regiment of the baron Madruce) · XIII. Now (After the battle; The clamping plate; The poor people; Words in the test) · XIV. Twentieth century (Full sea - Full sky) · XV. Out of times (the trumpet of the judgment)

New Series

The operational startup of one second series of small epopees started as of the publication of the First, but Hugo was initially occupied by the resumption of the project of the Misérables and its poetic activity concentrated, last once, on the End of Satan and God . The year even of the publication of the Poor wretches, 1862, it was harnessed with the New Series, taking again the primitive plan of the First Series and its isolated poems: the Ass , Seven wonders of the world (which it has just written), the Revolution , Supreme Pity . But again from other projects, novels in particular ( the Workers of the Sea , the Man which laughs ), come to interpose. 1870 is one decisive moment: Hugo decides to preserve the Revolution for his future collection the Four Winds of the spirit , and imagines a vast fusion between the Legend , God and the End of Satan , drawing up the following plan: the End of Satan , delivers first - the Ocean - Elciis - Vision of Dante - the Religions (drawn from God ) - Supreme Pity . But the disorders of the beginning of the Années 1870, which transfer Hugo to take again the political activity and to return to France, modified its vision.

The New Series finally was published, in two volumes, on February 26th 1877 for the sixty-fifteenth birthday of Hugo, was made of poems left in reserve after the First Series and writing before 1859, and of a great part written in 1875-1877, fruits of a new period of intense poetic activity. Again, Hugo put side these great poems which were to form part of it to keep more narrative poems. But the collection, much more than the First Series, feels recent events and is made the echo of it: The Common , the collapse of Napoleon III, adoption of the constitution of the IIIe Republic. The New Series has a heavy social and philosophical stake, and largely reflects the positions of Hugo in these years, clearly anticlericals and turned towards the security questions.

The History in which Hugo believes always positive, but is marked from now on by a certain pessimism, and the stress is laid on the brittleness of the human things ( the epopee of the worm , the disappeared city ). Hugo also wanted to return on the Antiquity and especially on the ancient Greece, which missed in the First Series. He primarily does it by the means of the Mythologie, that of the Gigantomachie and the Titanomachie. Hugo presents it like the fight of the workers of the shade against the powerful ones of the world and Olympe, and it is trying to see there the image of Hugo against Napoleon III, giant recluse in an island like Encelade, even if Titan were written after, in 1875.

Lastly, the collection is closed on formidable the Abîme , dialog vertiginous between the Man, the Earth, the Sun, the Stars, exploiting the scales until the Infinite one behind which is held God, replaçant the man in his smallness vis-a-vis the Universe.

Composition

vision from where this book left · I. the Earth (ground - anthem) · II. Supremacy · III. Between giants and gods (the giant, with the gods; Times panics; Titan) · IV. The disappeared city · V. After the gods, the kings (I: Inscription; Cassandre; Three hundreds; the strait of Euripe; The song of Sophocle with Salamine; Outlaws; Helps offered to Majorien; II: The hydre; The romancero of Cid; The king of Persia; Two beggars; Montfaucon; Reîtres; The count Félibien) · VI. Between lions and kings (Somebody puts the holà) · VII. Exiled Cid · VIII. Welf, Castellan d' Osbor · IX. Warnings and punishments (the work of the prisoners; Duplex Homo; Verse of the Koran; The eagle of the helmet) · X. seven wonders of the world · XI. The Epopee of the worm · XII. Poëte with the ground worm · XIII. Clearness of hearts · XIV. The falls (Rivers and poëtes) · XV. The Pyrenean Cycle (Gaïffer-Jorge, duke of Aquitaine; Masferrer; Paternity) · XVI. The Comet · XVII. Change of horizon · XVIII. The Group of Idylles · XIX. All past and all future · XX. A poëte is a world · XXI. Time present ( the Truth, frightened light ; All was vision ; Jean Chouan; The cemetery of Eylau; 1851 - choice between two passers by; Writing in exile; The anger of bronze; France and heart; Denounced with that which drove out the salesmen; Civil burials; The prisoner; After the forks caudines) · XXII. The Elegy of the plagues · XXIII. Small the (Civil war; Small Paul; Function of the child; Social question) · XXIV. Up there · XXV. The Mountains (Satisfying) · XXVI. The Temple · XXVII. With the Man · XXVIII. Abîme

Last Series

The New Series was appeared with the following warning: “The complement of the Legend of the centuries will be published soon, unless the end of the author does not arrive before the end of the book”.

It is on June 9th, 1883 that appeared the volume fifth and last of the Legend of the Centuries , entitled " series complémentaire". As opposed to what this one and other recent publications (such Four Winds of the spirit, in 1881) let think, it is acted in fact of texts written well before and not of ultimate works of apparently inexhaustible Hugo. One reproached thus, well wrongly, with this last publication to be the work of a growing old poet, pouring with excess in the facility and hatred anticlerical. Actually, the stroke whose Hugo was victim in June 1878 had almost put an end to its writing. In did its advertisement of the next series to come, Hugo intend to write especially for this one? The thing is possible, even if it seems that no poem was written between the publication of the New Series in February 1877 and June 1878. At all events, the series published was in fact only one meeting of former poems, isolated of other collections: thus Vision of Dante (written in 1853, initially planned for the Punishments ) or Four Days of Elciis (written in 1857 and projected in turn for the First or the New Series, the prolog having been perhaps added towards 1880). This assembly of not very narrative but rather psychological poems for some, alternating dark and luminous visions, gives the impression of a contemplative and timeless epilog, very with share of the two preceding series.

Composition

I did not feel alive any more · I. Great Laws · II. Low voices in darkness · III. I leant · IV. Mansétude of the former judges · V. the Scaffold · VI. Inferi · VII. Four days of Elciis · VIII. Peasants at the seaside · IX. Spirits · X. the Bey insult · XI. The song of the gilders of prows · XII. Darkness · XIII. Love · XIV. Rupture with what reduces · XV. Words of my uncle · XVI. Victorious or dead · XVII. The circle of the tyrants · XVIII. Words of Giant · XIX. When Cid · XX. Vision of Dante · XXI. God makes the questions · XXII. Ocean · XXIII. O God, whose work further goes than our dream

Collective edition

In September 1883, some month after the Last Series, appeared a final edition in which the three series molten and were reorganized, according to a pretext more or less, if one can say, chronological, or in any case logic, aiming at creating an overall unit and reading. Did it correspond to the vision and the desire of Hugo? It is not sure. It is not impossible that the poet, weakened physically and intellectually since his congestion, affected by the death of Juliette Drouet, was influenced or let make his friends and exécuteurs".
It was raised indeed many times that this fusion harms in a regrettable way internal logic of work. If it has the merit to replace " vision from where this livre" left; at the head of the unit, in its role of second foreword, it makes disappear specificities from each series, in particular that of the New Series conceived like a witness of its time. It also introduces, whereas each series respected it with its manner, of the bizarreries of chronology: antiquity (Greek mythology) is very whole after Jesus and Cid appears, first once, before Mahomet… Hugo had studied the balance of each volume and each poem had a well affirmed and defined place, which the meeting of the series could only break, with an aim of facilitating the reading, while making alternate the long poems with shorter, méditatifs or " reposants". It gave as the impression, distorts, as final fusion was a goal fixed by Hugo, as if the publication in series had been an unhappy and transitory scattering whose obliteration became obvious. The modern editions, for practical reasons and simplifications, still adopt the collective edition, presenting the following fitting:

Composition

Préface · Vision from where this book left · I. Earth · II. Of Eve with Jesus (the sacring of the woman; Conscience; Power equalizes kindness; Lions; The temple; Deadened Booz; Invisible God with the philosopher; First meeting of Christ with the tomb) · III. Supremacy · IV. Between giants and gods (the giant, with the gods; Words of giant ; Times panics; Titan) · V. the disappeared city · VI. After the gods, the kings (I: Inscription; Cassandre; Three hundreds; The strait of Euripe; The song of Sophocle with Salamine; Outlaws; Helps offered to Majorien; II: The hydre; When Cid had entered ; The romancero of Cid; The king of Persia; Two beggars; Montfaucon; Reîtres; The count Félibien) · VII. Between lions and kings (Somebody puts the holà) · VIII. Decline of Rome (With the lion of Androclès) · IX. Islam (the new year of Hégire; Mahomet; The cedar) · X. the Christian Heroic Cycle (the parricide; The marriage of Roland; Aymerillot; Bivar; The day of the kings) · XI. Exiled Cid · XII. Seven wonders of the world · XIII. The Epopee of the worm · XIV. Poëte with the ground worm · XV. The Knight-errants ( the ground saw formerly; Small king de Galice; Eviradnus) · XVI. Thrones of the East (Zim-Zizimi; 1453; Mourad sultan; the Bey insult ; the song of the gilders of prows ) · XVII. Warnings and punishments (the work of the prisoners; Duplex Homo; Verse of the Koran; The eagle of the helmet) · XVIII. Italy - Ratbert · XIX. Welf, Castellan d' Osbor · XX. Four days of Elciis · XXI. The Cycle Pyrenean (Gaïffer-Jorge, duke of Aquitaine; Masferrer; Paternity); · XXII. Sixteenth century - Rebirth Paganism (the Satyr) · XXIII. I leant ·XXIV. Clearness of hearts · XXV. The falls (Rivers and poëtes) · XXVI. The Rose of Infante · XXVII. The Enquiry (reasons of Momotombo) · XXVIII. The Song of the Adventurers of the Sea · XXIX. Mansétude of the former judges · XXX. The Scaffold · XXXI. Seventeenth century, the Mercenaries (the regiment of the baron Madruce) · XXXII. Inferi · XXXIII. The circle of the tyrants · XXXIV. Darkness · XXXV. Up there · XXXVI. The Group of Idylles · XXXVII. Peasants at the seaside · XXXVIII. Spirits · XXXIX. Love · XL. The Mountains (Satisfying) · XLI. Ocean · XLII. With the Man · XLIII. The Temple · XLIV. All past and all future · XLV. Change of horizon · XLVI. The Comet · XLVII. A poëte is a world · XLVIII. The return of the Emperor · XLIX. Time present ( the Truth, frightened light ; All was vision ; Jean Chouan; After the battle; Words of my uncle; The cemetery of Eylau; 1851 - choice between two passers by; Writing in exile; The anger of bronze; France and heart; Denounced with that which drove out the salesmen; Civil burials; Victorious or dead ; The prisoner; After the forks caudines; Words in the test) · L. the Elegy of the plagues · LI. Low voices in darkness · LII. The poor people; · LIII. The clamping plate; · LIV. Vision of Dante; · LV. The great Laws (+ I did not feel alive any more ; God makes the questions) · LVI. Rupture with what reduces · LVII. The Small ones (Civil war; Small Paul; Function of the child; Social question) · LVIII. Twentieth century (Full sea - Full sky) · LIX. O God, whose work further goes than our dream · LX. Out of times (the trumpet of the judgment) · LXI. Abîme

Chronology of writing

The study of the chronology of the principal poems of the Legend and those which are closely dependant for him makes it possible to note the evolution of the initial idea, the intense activity which occupies the years preceding the first two publications, and the fact that the last collection of 1883 is in fact made up only of poems written at various times of the two preceding series:

1840 : The Song of the Adventurers of the Sea; The Return of the Emperor (added in the collective edition)
1846: The marriage of Roland
1849: Mahomet;

damages

“Did you read the Légende of the centuries of the Hugo father? I found that simply enormous. This book strongly has me cap! What a immense catch! One made forever of worms like those of the Lions ! ”.

“I very thoughtless and am dazzled by two new volumes of Hugo, from where I leave at the moment. I have suns which turn to me in front of the eyes and of howlings in the ears. What a man! ”.

“A splendid thing has just appeared: the Legend of the centuries , Hugo. Never this colossal poet had been so high. You who like the ideal and which feel it, I recommend the stories of knighthood to you which are in the first volume. What a enthusiasm, what a force and what a language! It is despairing to write after a similar man. And you gorge read with that, because it is beautiful and healthy. I am sure that the public will remain indifferent to this collection of masterpieces! Its moral level is so low, now! One thinks of hardened rubber, the railroads, the exposures, etc, with all the things of the beef stew and the wellbeing; but poetry, the ideal, Art, the great dashes and the noble speeches, thus let us go! ”. Théophile Gautier, support of always, in spoke in praise in its Rapport on progress of poetry , in 1868: “if we do not have yet the regular poem epic into twelve or twenty-four songs, Victor Hugo us gave of it the currency in the Légende of the centuries , currency struck with the effigy of all the times and all civilizations, gold medals of the purest title”. The collection was also greeted by Baudelaire, which wrote the most famous comment about it, and undoubtedly just: " To return from there to the Legend of the Centuries , Victor Hugo created the only poem epic which could be created by a man of its time for readers of its time” ( romantic Art , 1861). However, Baudelaire died before the publication of the New Series; undoubtedly he would have appreciated less there than it called " the enseignement" of Hugo, this role of prophet and philosopher which caused already its irritation. Because last the first amazements, some " amoureux" were done more critical, as it was perhaps the case of Flaubert. It is at least what a note of the brothers Goncourt in their newspaper of May 4th, 1860 implies: “We cause with Flaubert of the Légendes of the Centuries , of Hugo. What especially strikes it in Hugo, who with the ambition to pass for a thinker, it is the absence of thought; it is, according to its expression, a naturalist. He has sap of the trees in blood”. This reproach of absence of thought, in 1860, was perhaps due to the difference between the ambition posted in the Foreword and the primarily narrative matter of the First Series. At all events, Flaubert made less comments in 1877, in a direction and the other.

The publication of the New Series knew it also an immense noise, but actually was not really read. Poems having been published in “before first in newspapers (like the Idylles , which were a great success besides), one abstained from reading the complete collection. Literary criticisms were shown rather embarrassed and public success was finally poor. If the pride were there to have finally a “epopee of France”, the dedication of will have popular and almost crowned figure of Hugo stuck rather to his person that with her work. The New Series nevertheless was very criticized by a whole part of the intellectuals of the time, of which especially Barbey d' Aurevilly and of course Zola: “I do not believe in the descent of Victor Hugo. He will carry the romanticism with him, as a rag of poor in which he cut a royal coat”. In fact especially the conveyed ideas were attacked and made fun, each one being appropriate finally of the poetic excellence of Hugo.

Lastly, the Last Series was not even less better accommodated, by this reproach not to be any more but the work of a growing old poet. But that hardly any more had of importance nor of stake, so much Hugo “was then sanctified”, incarnating last fires of the romanticism and a soon completed age.

Famous worms

Among the few twenty-five thousand worms which the three series of add up the Legend , all forged on one of the most formidable poetic trades than French poetry generated, some became immensely famous:

the eye was in the tomb and looked at Caïn ( the Conscience , 1st series)
You appeared to me in this man, Seigneur ( the Small King de Galice , 1st series)
My father, this hero with the so soft smile ( After the battle , 2nd series)

Topics

Sticking to Humanity, Hugo wanted to approach all the ages and all the kinds, diversifying his style to adapt to each one. But beyond the general topic of the Progress, which appears in work taken as a whole, the poems of the Légende of the Centuries approach several specific topics, which all are dependant between them. Most immediately identifiable with the reading, constant at Hugo since the exile, is that of the punishment which falls down on those which misused their power and which struck the innocent ones, that divine justice comes to strike in their turn ( the Eagle of the Helmet , Ratbert ) or to continue for eternity ( the Conscience , the Parricide ). These will have to answer and expier their crime, as Napoleon had expié the 18 brumaire and as Napoleon III will have with expier the crime of the December 2nd, 1851), and to answer about it in front of the Judge, as they had to face the Juste who always draws up himself against the powerful ones, him also messenger of a justice above that of the men: Welf, Elciis, the Satyr, Titan; figures behind which that of Hugo himself is held, upright on its rock in front of the ocean eternal. The Manichéisme hugolien is however more complex than it does not appear to with it: the fight of the Good and the Evil occurs inside even of humanity in its progression towards its future release, and it is necessary. This multiple topic approaches that of the Hybris, the Greek topic eternal of the disproportion of the men and their pride, and of the inevitable fall who accompany them, and is placed at the base of the thought of Hugo; such was already the destiny of Nemrod in the End of Satan , and in fact of Satan itself. Lastly, it finds its echo in the vision of the brittleness of the human things, intended for the ruin like Babel punished: the ground worm, which has its epopee ( the epopee of the worm ), which comes after the Seven wonders of the world. Hugo sings the Man, but knew, even if it violently rejected the new theses of Darwin and if the poems are not made to the echo of a world before the man, to carry on him a new glance which the scientific theses of the 19th century influenced. He shows through in Abîme , which returns the Man to his measure to the universe, and Twentieth century , which shows finally released Humanity. A possible reading of the famous Twentieth century could make of it an ancestor of the Science-fiction. By leaving side the symbolic system of the poem, its deep sense and its function of hope in the Legend , it is trying to see in the couple Pleine Sea / Plein Sky the traditional opposition Dystopie/Utopie: The Léviathan , immense boat, floret of industry, symbol of the disproportion and the pride of the men, to lie failed and broken in a deserted world, storm-tossed and the fury of the elements, from where the man seems to have disappeared to have caused the anger of wounded Nature. But makes some, joined together, reconciled, humanity left towards stars in an immense arch, to seek and bring “freedom in the light”.

Scholarship hugolienne and myth

The very particular atmosphere of the Légende of the Centuries , which made in particular the success of the First Series, comes mainly from the extraordinary and vertiginous accumulation of details and names, selected for their particular consonances and creating an ancient and mysterious climate. These multiple details, Hugo drew them from very serious sources of his library, the such Livres crowned of the East (compilation of Pauthier), the universal Histoire of Dom Calmet or especially the Grand historical dictionary of Moréri which it had in an edition of 1683. Hugo thus blackened pages of notes and names, with an aim acknowledged envoûtement to produce this immediate effect of sound but not in that, as that was often reproached to him, to make think of the reader that itself has an unlimited knowledge. This scan for the unknown and specific nouns goes hand in hand with this choice of the subjects ignored compared to the great historical facts. Hugo exposes itself his step in the Foreword, in connection with the Raisons of Momotombo : “an unperceivable rudiment, lost in the chronicle or the tradition, hardly visible with the naked eye, was often enough”. Anecdotes, forgotten stories gave him the starting points of many poems. Thus it did not move back, when it was needed, in front of the personal invention, in particular for the names of its heroes of the shade: Elciis, the Titan Phtos, Eviradnus. One knows also the case of famous Jerimadeth (Booz deadened), on which the specialists in the Bible are lengthily leaning. The Bible, of which he had been exerted to versify long passages in the Années 1840 (which were sometimes included in the Fin of Satan and God , and even in the Légende ), was also one of its primary sources, and Homère, Virgile and Dante its models absolute.

By taking the party of the legends, in their giving their full value symbolic system, Hugo reproduced the mechanism of creation of the myths, and was made equal the Old ones. Its step was basically different from that of Leconte de Lisle, which reproached him for seeking to melt itself in the times only it describes but for using the executives of civilizations only to install there its own thoughts. Hugo was however closer to this creation of the myth than Leconte de Lisle, by exceeding the only imitation of the process to reinvent it. By its vision and its prophetic song, by its infallible poetic talent, by this real or pretended naivety, undoubtedly sought, Hugo appears to reach something of at the same time ancient and timeless, which seems to give the impression to attend the accounts of Homère singing its epopee, and with the childbirth of the legends.

French epopee or epopee of France?

the Legend of the Centuries is looked like the masterpiece of Victor Hugo and sometimes like the only French epopee since the song of Roland , after the half-failures or the half-successes of Henriade or of Franciade , undoubtedly because precisely it is freed from the ambition to make an epopee of only France all while putting it in its center through the epopee of the Révolution and the Napoleonean epopee. The Legend is however much less known than its novels in the nonFrench-speaking countries, undoubtedly more for the reason first that recent poetry is not easily transmissible in other languages that for this place given to the French history.

This “modern epopee” is also the last glare of romantic poetry, and in the final analysis the equivalent of the large novels which are contemporary for him. Its first publication in 1859 occurs at the time of the apogee of the poetic romanticism, its last in 1883 seems its last breath, witness of a completed age and a thought and however entered immortality.

the Legend of the Centuries appears especially, finally, like the voice of the XIXe century and of this formidable release of the spirits and the hearts which followed the era of the Révolution S, whose Romantisme was one of the most extraordinary demonstrations, and who relates from now on on the way traversed by the Man and to the future a new glance.

Appendices

Editions and sources

the Legend of the Centuries (extracted) , introduction, notes and analyzes by Georges Bonneville, Bordas, Paris, 1985
the Legend of the Centuries (First Series) , note by Jean Gaudon, complete Œuvres of Victor Hugo - Poetry II , Robert Laffont, Paris, 1985.
the Legend of the Centuries (New Series) , note by Jean Delabroy, complete Œuvres of Victor Hugo - Poetry III , Robert Laffont, Paris, 1985.
the Legend of the Centuries (Last Series) , note by Yves Gohin, complete Œuvres of Victor Hugo - Poetry III , Robert Laffont, Paris, 1985.
the Legend of the Centuries , introduction and notes of Leon Storeroom, Paris, Garnier-Flammarion, 1979
the Legend of the Centuries - End of Satan - God , edition and notes of Jacques Truchet, Paris, Gallimard ( Pleiad ), 1950

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