In Defense of the Necessity of Enjolras's Death

[stripysockette]

A little piece of meta on the necessity of Enjolras's death under the cut.

I don't think I can agree with the positioning of Enjolras within a Hugolian narrative of redemption, or indeed within any narrative form in which he survives, for several reasons.

Enjolras does not die for his sins. He does not throw himself in the way of a bullet from any sense of suicidal impulse, any grand and noble gesture of elimination. He dies within Les Miserables as the inevitable result of a sequence of events that he has always understood to end in his death. He acknowledges this before he is at risk of dying, before he knows of the failure, because Enjolras is fighting for a world that has no need of him.

Enjolras is a figure out of classical legend- the language used to describe him is precisely the language that clothes and encompasses specific heroes and the movements those heroes were part of, but along with that inevitably comes the same structure and same placement of Enjolras in those overarching narratives as those heroes. Achilles is aware of his fate, aware of what he sacrifices in attainment of his specific goal (immortality of name) in precisely the same way as Enjolras accepts that the inevitable result of the world he wants is the elimination of himself. This doesn’t manifest just on a conscious decision-making level, but in the fabric of the story that Hugo tells. It’s Oedipus aware of his fate, whose every step leads him closer to his inevitable doom, who cannot escape the path that has been set. Enjolras is in the same groove, only unlike Oedipus he has chosen it.

However we’re not discussing the way he did die, we’re discussing worlds in which he could have survived and still retained a sense of being Enjolras and I don’t think it’s possible to create one- not with the Enjolras we’re given in Les Mis, as opposed to the softened and consistently more variably idealistic and naive presentation of Enjolras that seems to be a popular figure. The Enjolras of Les Mis is Achilles, he’s the distilled representation of the idealised Harmodius and Aristogeiton (those who had died in the pursuit of democracy, as Hugo would have known them) there is no space, nowhere for him to exist in a post-Barricade world.

If he survives the Barricade as is, what does he have? A world changed by revolution and moving slowly into the dream Enjolras had for it? No, he’s left with his ideals broken completely, his faith gone beyond restoration, with blood on his hands and the patent helpless knowledge that he has failed, that everything he has done is less than nothing. That his comrades have died and that he remains, the impotent and nerveless man who did not give of himself to the last drop, did not fight with everything he had, and with the slow painful spectacle of the world still in the same cart tracks.

There are two other ways he can survive. In one the Barricade succeeds. But Enjolras has already laid out his own, constant and unchanging belief that he does not belong in that world. To change that result, that belief is to deny Enjolras the thoughts, the beliefs that drove him to attempt revolution. It’s to change a basic part of his character, his motivation and to deny what has brought him to this point.

In the third way, the Barricade never happens. Something goes wrong, the plans are upset, Lamarque’s death passes without note. But that is not the turning point of Enjolras’s attempt. Regardless of missed opportunity, he will press on. There will be other occasions, he will pick another time for revolt. It always ends there. On the barricade, death dealt by his hands, and received in the end. The merchant meets Death in Samarra try as he might to avoid him. Oedipus marries his mother. Achilles dies. Enjolras fights to his last breath in the knowledge that win or lose, this is where he ends.

While it’s fair to say that Les Mis itself is pretty big on the theme of redemption, of the possibility of hope and happiness, it’s also rather big on self determination. Enjolras living is not redemption. It is not hope or happiness, it’s a diminishment of his goals, of the life he has sought to lead, of the visions he has hoped to become real. Hugo understood that Enjolras must die, and in the moment of his death he gives him understanding, he gives him a death that he would have wished for (a man chooses to die with him), rather than life that would destroy him more thoroughly than any bullet ever could.