Ferrari on Roman (2023)

In her introduction to Le droit du Poète: la justice dans l’œuvre de Victor Hugo, Myriam Roman observes that for the past twenty years, students and the general public have been drawn to the author primarily for his social engagement. Following this trend in readership, Roman continues her earlier works on all nine of Hugo’s novels with this deep dive into the judicial theories and philosophy found in his poetry, plays, pamphlets, speeches, and letters. The book’s six chapters provide a comprehensive picture of institutional justice, that is the structures responsible for crime and punishment, the representation of the people, and the distribution of resources and opportunities. She tracks Hugo’s depiction of and commentary on the shifts in justice during the French Revolution from 1789–91 as well as the successes and failures in their nineteenth-century implementation. Drawing on Martha Nussbaum’s theory of the indelible connection between literature and the practice of the law in Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, Roman establishes the links between Hugo’s personal and professional participation in trials, prisons, and legislation and his fiction. As a result, Le droit du Poète creates a fascinating interaction between Hugo’s life and words, one that is essential to scholars examining his political engagement.

In chapters one (“La justice au XIXe siècle, une question historique”) and two (“La justice, la violence et le sacré”), Roman describes the first part of the French Revolution’s influence on Hugo and his contemporaries with regard to judicial reforms. She enumerates the new measures taken to rationalize, unify, and organize institutional justice throughout France from 1789 to 1791. Through close readings of fiction by Hugo (Quatrevingt-treize), Balzac (Le cabinet des antiques), d’Aurevilly (Les diaboliques), and Sand (Mauprat), Roman analyzes how these authors’ works judge the French Revolution and the society that emerges from it. For Hugo, judicial tyranny is a source of dread; he is especially haunted by the spectacle of public executions. Roman also elucidates the political influence that Cesare Beccaria (Des délits et des peines) and Joseph de Maistre (Les soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg) exercise on nineteenth-century institutional justice. While Hugo subscribed to Beccaria’s theories on penal reform, he strongly opposed Maistre’s theological view of punishment.

Chapter three (“Les lois, le droit”) explains Hugo’s distinction between rights as eternal and unchangeable and laws as malleable and imperfect, while chapter four (“Peut-on juger?”) illustrates how this distinction bears out in real criminal cases. The purpose of laws is to reeducate and reform criminals without nullifying their rights. Roman illustrates how Hugo does not espouse a fully secular model of justice, opting rather for a metaphysical link to God, who imbues each person with a conscience, and she frames her argument using Paul Ricœur’s assertion in Le juste that our sense of injustice is innate. Thus, rights should guarantee liberty, and the State should actively seek to correct social failures and appeal to individual conscience. Roman demonstrates Hugo’s keen interest in the penal code, especially regarding the people for whom the code remains silent, such as laborers, women, and illegitimate children. Chapter four focuses on deaf and blind judges in Hugo’s corpus and on the real cases over which the author himself presides. Roman compares the historic Claude Gueux of the newspapers, particularly in the Gazette des tribunaux, with the fictionalized Claude Gueux of Hugo’s homonymous short novel. Hugo’s Gueux reveals the nature of power-thirsty judges and public participation in trials, which can easily devolve into spectacle. Following this chapter, Roman includes a series of sketches by Hugo of judges, inquisitors, priests, and bishops from Poème de la sorcière, which lends a visual component to his poetry and prose.

Chapters five (“Doit-on juger?”) and six (“Quel pouvoir pour l’écrivain”) synthesize the ideas in the first four chapters. Roman articulates that Hugo’s philosophy of justice is shaped by the idea of pity, as represented in particular in La pitié suprême, La révolution, and Le verso de la page. Despite the prison innovations proposed by Jeremy Bentham and Alexis de Tocqueville, Hugo concludes that jails fail to reform criminals, and instead brutalize them. Moving justice beyond the secular, Hugo proposes a “supra-éthique” based on charity, pity, and the radical belief in the power of a personal conscience and repentance (345). Roman calls this Hugo’s “déséquilibre radical,” and localizes it especially in his poem “Sultan Mourad” or in La pitié suprême (345). In chapter six, Roman elaborates the three values that issue from his literature: to denounce, repair, and reflect on the faults in the law. Literature thus becomes a kind of laboratory for Hugo to designate which laws need to be rewritten. Roman argues that at the heart of justice is not power but influence. She concludes that penology must be characterized by education and agapē and must also call on our interior conscience so it engages, reflects, and changes in an inner trial of the self.

Undergirded by the scholarship of Guy Rosa, Claude Millet, and Franck Laurent, Le droit du Poète presents a convincing and thorough-going study of Hugo’s concept of justice with forays into his moral philosophy. This book will appeal to scholars working on both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies on literature and justice. However, the absence of North American scholarship on Hugo constitutes a lacuna in her research. To name just a few key examples, her inclusion of Hugo’s sketches would benefit from engagement with Stéphanie Boulard’s visual treatment of Hugo’s prose, drawings, objects, and ephemera, and her analysis of aesthetics would be enriched by dialogue with Kathryn Grossman’s significant contributions on this topic. Finally, her take on metaphysics and justice would be enhanced by Daniel Sipe’s concept of “sacerdocy.” Hugo never limited his vision to France but extended it across the Atlantic and beyond. Scholarship on this author is well-served when it follows his example.