It is a great and sublime crossing. Which, as well as the sailor checks the condition of the hull and the sails before lifting the anchor, requires respecting a few rules. That of plunging, and for five hours, into a multiple and moving work. That of being overwhelmed, since neither the work nor the man can be caught in a net. That of coming out rinsed and therefore alive. Terribly, literally alive. Overflowing with desires – at the very least those of going to sea and re-reading Victor Hugo (1802-1885). For all this, and much more, we must thank Christine Lecerf, who, after those she devoted to Simone de Beauvoir, Freud, Chaplin, or even Proust in the summer of 2022, signs an absolutely outstanding.
Perhaps precisely and first of all because it immediately accepts the crossing with what it entails, as a finished object, of imperfections and finitude – and this all the more so since France Culture has renounced ten, even fifteen hours that gave these programs a unique value and flavor. Then, because she decided to sail close-hauled, abandoning the Hugo of school books. That she went to the source, and therefore to the texts. Which she questioned – as if she had ten o’clock, because otherwise “what’s the point?” – Hugolians and readers. That she has, ultimately and all at the same time, designed an object that will be a date and a reference, an object of knowledge, therefore, but of sensitive knowledge.
A real sound soap opera in five episodes (particularly well put on the air by Anne Perez Franchini), this crossing is not chronological – Victor Hugo dies in episode 2 and, it is known, in 1885 – but built around five verbs . Five verbs from which man can radiate and give himself entirely to hear. Because for Christine Lecerf, Victor Hugo is not “the man from the overhang on his rock: he is a guy who dives, who has his feet on the ground and who takes off”. No more than he is this bearded grandpa in the Place des Vosges in which the photographs have frozen him. On the contrary. He is “the living man” – title of this “Grand Traversée”. And who, from the beginning, is the man of the movement.
Always on the losing side
Hence episode 1 around the verb “to live”, he who only had Hauteville (in Guernsey) as a real home, a sort of ship in the storm furnished with a huge library. Hauteville, a house made by hand and caressed by the “saliva of the sea”. House of exile too, which he will eventually leave. “He walks and he gets hard”, so goes the Hugo imagined and sculpted by Rodin, says Annie Le Brun, who underlines: “We censor Hugo’s eroticism, we act as if he does not exist, whereas it induces practically everything. »
Episode 2: “To Love”. Husband, lover, father and grandfather, Victor Hugo loves. Totally. The ocean and nature too. Episode 3: “Say”. Say what he sees. The abuse of power – with a sense of the phrase that earned him exile when Napoleon III became “Napoleon le Petit”. Saying The Last Day of a Convict (1829) – “Hugo had understood that, when we talk about abolition, we must go beyond the simple appeal to reason”, said Robert Badinter (2002 archive).
Say, too, misery. It is impossible not to quote an extract from his speech to the National Assembly on July 9, 1849, and so much the worse for the embittered people who reproached him for turning Parliament into a theatre: “I am not, gentlemen, one of those who believe that one can remove suffering in this world; suffering is a divine law; but I am one of those who think and affirm that we can destroy misery. (…) There are in Paris, in these suburbs of Paris that the wind of riot once lifted so easily, there are streets, houses, cesspools, where families, entire families, live pell-mell , men, women, young girls, children, having for beds, having for blankets, I almost said for clothing, only infected heaps of fermenting rags, picked up in the mire of the corner of the terminals, a kind of dung of cities, where creatures burrow alive to escape the winter cold. »
Hugo will always be on the losing side. On the side of those who have no rights: children, women, animals too. It must be said that he sees – subject of episode 4 (“See”). And first, and every morning, the ocean: surface AND depth. To read Hugo is also to experience darkness and the limit. “Haunted by suffering and injustice, attracted by the precipices of reverie and matter, Hugo has always had to fight against the unspeakable and the formless,” Christine Lecerf tells us. “Write” then (last episode). And write everything. Novel, theater, poetry, essays, political speeches and philosophical reflections, it is, and in the words of Franck Laurent, professor at the University of Maine, “the literary in all its states”. All that remains is to accept – but with what pleasure – to let yourself be carried away by the Hugo wave.
