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.

Comments

[genarti]

How did I never even notice the Washington comparison before? That's an excellent point!

It occurs to me that I was kind of conflating two questions too, in the section about narrative necessity. There's the utopian hypothetical happy future, and then there's the actual realistic result of a successful revolution.

I do believe that Enjolras has no place in the hypothetical happy future where violent revolution is no longer warranted, where the night of tyranny and despotism has passed, where there are no kings and all men are brothers etc etc. (Whether this future is humanly possible is another question entirely, but it's the one Hugo keeps arguing with himself about and the one that at least some of the Amis believe in -- not as the immediate result of a successful insurrection, but as the end goal.) As a person, I don't know whether he fully believes that he has no place in it until the Le Cabuc scene, but as a character I think he's too much the incarnation of bloody revolution to have a role in the world where revolution is an outdated concept.

But neither Hugo nor any of the Amis is arguing that winning this revolution and getting a republic again is going to instantly lead to a utopia. (They would have to be exceedingly ignorant and naive to believe anything of the sort, given the historical precedent, and none of them are.) Winning this fight, in the absolute best-case scenario where the transition to a democratic republic goes as smoothly as humanly possible, still entails a whole lot of complicated messy politics. There's mopping-up and constitution-rewriting and electing people and arresting other people, and making sure everybody's legally tried instead of getting killed by a mob or by fiat, and keeping a sharp eye out for signs of anyone trying to co-opt the government or roll back reforms or start a counter-revolutionary coup -- and all that without neglecting the harvest or the budget or getting invaded by England/Prussia/Russia/etc. And there's no reason whatsoever that Enjolras wouldn't expect to have a role in that, before the Le Cabuc scene (or after, if he were pardoned by someone else), and there's no narrative reason that his character couldn't do so. Except, of course, that Hugo wanted most of his cast to die, and that Hugo set this story in 1832 when the historical revolt did fail. But if Enjolras has to die before the glorious (but hypothetical) 20th century of peaceful equality can come about, there's nothing inherent in his character or his narrative comparisons that says he has to die before his country has another go at cobbling together a republic of flawed humans groping towards that eventual illuminated future.

[baeckahaesten.livejournal.com]

Genuine thoughtful question! What do we do with a hypothetical February 1848 AU, including the April elections which marginalised the Left and the June Days? I both...agree and don't agree about the complications post-Revolution - the Amis *aren't* naive, but at the same time the nature of the complications that did arise in '48 were not the same as those of the French Revolution, and certainly shocked Republicans at the time. Hugo himself writes with deep conflictedness about it, "a revolt of the people against itself"

"This is one of those rare moments when, while doing that which it is one's duty to do, one feels something which disconcerts one, and which would dissuade one from proceeding further; one persists, it is necessary, but conscience, though satisfied, is sad, and the accomplishment of duty is complicated with a pain at the heart."

Especially with Hugo's framing of events via two June barricades, I think there is a certain sadness to the political goals of 1832 - once universal suffrage is established, once there's a Republic, then surely everyone's interest will be represented? it's a difficulty that no one really foresaw.

I agree that there would be so much more work to do - and, hey, living in a modern democracy - "thinkers entirely at liberty, believers on terms of full equality...no more hatreds, the fraternity of the workshop and the school, for sole penalty and recompense fame, work for all, right for all, peace over all, no more bloodshed, no more wars, happy mothers!" - we've still got a long way to go to get to *that* Enjolraic speech! But I don't know whether or not Enjolras is someone who can operate in a world of compromise, essentially. This is a really interesting discussion!

[genarti]

That's an excellent question, and one I honestly don't know enough about 1848 to answer with any confidence in specifics! I must sheepishly confess that I never studied much French history before getting into Les Mis, and in my brushing up for fannish purposes I've been mostly concentrating on the directly canon-era stuff. So I haven't yet branched out much into the later stuff, even the events that obviously very much influenced Hugo's own perspective on what he was writing.

I do absolutely agree that, whatever events might follow a successful insurrection that the Amis survived, they wouldn't be entirely prepared for them. Not because they're naive, but because how could they be? You can't accurately plan for that kind of thing. You can try to plan, and try to think of all the contingencies for how it's going to go down and what you'll do if you do win, but what actually materializes is a complicated messy tangle of people with individual motivations intersecting in complex ways. So whether it's an 1848 AU or any other scenario where their revolution did lead to a changed government, they're not really going to be prepared for what happens after that, and neither is anyone else. Whether that means disaster or just a lot of frantic compromising and negotiations and making the best of everything they can, it's going to be a changed paradigm for everyone involved.

So figuring out what role Enjolras, as a particularly absolute-minded person, would play is complicated too, because what compromises he'd be asked to make and whether he'd be capable of doing so are questions whose answers depend a lot on both your character interpretation and on how everything goes down. And that latter factor is a huge question. But an interesting one!

[bobbiewickham]

Yes, I think there's a difference between what role Enjolras would have had after the revolution, and the role he would have After The Revolution, so to speak. The capitalized "After," which is a glorious utopia, probably has no role for Enjolras as he exists in canon (if we're looking at him as a person rather than as a Symbol, of course it's possible for him to change and adapt, but narratively he's a symbol). But the lower-case "after"...well, that's a different matter.