Victor Hugo - The Terrible Year

INTRODUCTION

Victor Hugo’s The Terrible Year (l’Année Terrible) is a poem cycle of epic length, in which the 68-year-old poet, returning to Paris after two decades of exile, lives and witnesses the siege of his city by the Prussian army, his nation’s humiliating surrender after bombardment and starvation, and then the chaos and violence of civil war. Members of the Paris Commune set Parisian historical and cultural landmarks on fire, and in the repression that followed, the new government carried out summary executions of as many as 15,000 French citizens. If the fall of Troy marked a “terrible year” for Homer, the disasters Hugo recounts from August 1870 through July 1871 are on a scale rivaling any epic of war and catastrophe.

Although some of the poems from Hugo’s cycle have appeared in English in various anthologies and magazines, there has never been a full version in English, this despite Hugo’s pre-eminence in poetry, drama, and fiction. The centenaries of the Franco-Prussian War, the Siege of Paris, and the Paris Commune came and went without an English edition of this work added to the pile of histories. I suspect that no more than a quarter of this work has been available in English until now.

Why is this so? There was a falling-off in critical interest in Hugo after World War I, and even French readers had already moved away from lengthy poetic works in favor of short, lyric poems — the shorter, the better. Hugo had no animosity toward his young successors; his goals as a mature master could only be achieved in long forms. The coming generation had no interest in epics. It is also possible that large numbers of British and American readers, for whom French was part of their upbringing, simply read or sampled l’Année Terrible in the original.

In Victor Hugo On Things That Matter, Marva A. Barnett sums up the sweep of Hugo’s poetry thus: “Seeming to have believed that the limits of knowledge are often the limits of imagination, Hugo wrote extravagantly, intensely (excessively, some say), in many ways epitomizing French Romanticism, yet going beyond it to be both visionary and realistic. Ferociously independent, Hugo refused to be bound by limitations. His work set itself in opposition to all strictures, to all attempts to tell people what to do or how to think — censorship, literary rules, religious dogma, tyrannical power.” (Barnett 8).

Another reason for the neglect of The Terrible Year may be that World War I dwarfed all prior European wars, and in many ways spelled an endpoint of European culture. The literature created in response to that war marked a new era, and the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune became a quaint and local chapter of history by comparison. There seemed to be nothing to learn from it. The shattering power of The Terrible Year was forgotten, in a flood of post-WWI publications so extensive that no one person could possibly read all of them.

A pity, since the narrative poems in The Terrible Year pack the same power as Hugo’s fiction, and a few have an overwhelming emotional impact. The epic’s philosophical and political poems, on the other hand, assume that readers have a deep knowledge of intellectual history, from Ancient Greece through Medieval Europe, through the complexities of French politics after Napoleon I. Many British readers, steeped in Continental history, would not find this daunting. Many American readers, on the other hand, with a New World history spanning only a few hundred years, might regard Hugo’s historical and philosophical musings as a confusing whirlwind of words, or the very “abyss” Hugo mentions so often. Impatient readers not interested in Hugo’s long thoughts on civilization and history, nod in assent when the epithet “windbag” is lobbed at Hugo. There is a man inside the rhetoric, and he allows his real persona to beam through frequently enough that the reader can gasp, shudder, or weep when Hugo reveals himself as the grieving father, the doting grandparent, the exile yearning for his homeland, and the champion of the poor and unjustly accused.

Footnotes can help, of course. I have added numerous notes, just enough to make clear what the poet is arguing, but I have not footnoted every proper name or allusion to historical events. Hugo asks us to rise to his level, and there is no harm, here and there, in letting a roulade of famous names pass by. By and by, he gets to his point. At some level, it is sufficient to know that the poet offers a list of the greatest French military victories all the way back to when France was Gaul, and that, in another poem, he lists a “catalog of shame” of the worst French defeats. I hope that I have provided sufficient notes to clarify the poet’s rhetorical intent.

Among the startling ideas that Hugo presents here are the concept of a United States of Europe, a stinging rebuke of organized religion, a rejection of monarchy and the Divine Right of kings, and, above all, a defense of the rights of the poor and down-trodden. He is against all reprisals, exiles, and summary punishments. Contained herein is a humanist manifesto, albeit without an underlying politics. Hugo senses deeply how we should live and treat one another, while he remains conflicted about how we should govern ourselves. Are many of not equally confused?

How, then, is a reader to navigate this vast work? Each “Canto” in The Terrible Year covers events of one month, so I have compiled timeline texts detailing events in Paris, France, Europe, and elsewhere. I am also creating, as a work-in-progress, a web site that will contain translated passages from Hugo’s memoirs, journals, letters, and public documents. Additionally, this web page will contain translations of memoirs, journals, and news accounts by other French or foreign writers who were present in Paris during the siege and the Commune. As this documentary material grows, it will become a “study guide” for readers. If there is a demand, I shall then fold this material back into an expanded second edition of this book. The Study Guide for The Terrible Year can be found at www. poetspress.org/hugo1870.shtml

WHY THIS BOOK, AND WHY NOW?

Louis Napoleon, a nephew of Napoleon I, was a ne’er-do-well who believed himself entitled to be an absolute monarch, on no merit except his last name. After managing to get himself elected as President of France, he promised to serve only one term, and then to step aside. When the end of his term arrived, Louis Napoleon staged an overnight coup, arrested members of the French Assembly, cowed judges into silence, shut down opposition newspapers, and executed or exiled thousands of political “enemies.” Hugo, in self-exile, became the self-anointed Napoleon III’s worst nightmare: a humanist, liberal critic who could not be silenced. With the majority of French citizens complacent, compliant, or collaborating, he set an example for how an authoritarian coup could be achieved, and how it could perpetuate itself for decades. Only the folly of declaring war against Prussia, and the military ineptitude of the Emperor and his generals, brought an end to his Empire. Napoleon III surrendered and fled to England, and a new government was instantly formed with him. One day later, Hugo set out to return home.

At the time Victor Hugo returned to Paris in September 1870, no poet had ever been so important to his own country. He was greeted tumultuously, and thousands crowded into theaters to hear his long-banned poems. For nineteen years, he had hurled his Les Châtiments (Chastisements) across the English Channel into France, attacking the Emperor Napoleon III.

As an account of the fall of an absolute dictator, the conflicts of civil war, a popular uprising, and a devastating series of reprisals, The Terrible Year has much to say to the current moment in U.S. and European history.

Although I might have spent another year touching up, and further annotating, The Terrible Year, I felt an urgency about getting this work in front of readers. It is a book that, in some scenarios, would not even be allowed to exist.

ABOUT THE TEXT

I am a neo-Romantic poet, and this version of The Terrible Year is my personal “confrontation” with Hugo and his epic. Over the past few years, I have created poem cycles based on Rilke, the poems of two Greeks (Callimachus and Meleager) and one Chinese monarch (Li Yu, last emperor of Southern Tang). In each of these books I elaborated freely on the given texts, in a manner still respectful to the tone of the original.

I had translated and adapted several of Hugo’s poems before, and I felt a natural kinship with both his style and his philosophy. As a result of my working method, essentially a trust in my Muse, if you will, this book is not a word-forword, line-by-line translation. The Terrible Year is in rhymed couplets, for starters, and I believe than an English version matching Hugo’s meter and rhyme scheme would be lethal. Translator Steven Monte, in his volume of Hugo’s selected poems, defends the alexandrine meter but admits that rhymed couplets, to modern readers, may sound “trivial.”

Fear not: every word of The Terrible Year is here. Nothing is omitted. But the presentation is in my own manner, often employing shorter lines, and while many of the devices of poetry are employed here, including a tone appropriate to the content, rhyme is not. I also do not hesitate to add a few words when they would make an allusion clear, in effect making the poem self-explicate where necessary. There were moments, as I worked, when original new lines spoke themselves to me, and I kept them: they are my “confrontation” with Hugo. Here and there in the more philosophical poems, Hugo’s meaning is not clear, even if his French is always lucid. It is possible that I have erred in discerning what he meant to say, and perhaps I shall be enlightened on that count.

The Terrible Year has been called the last epic poem of the Nineteenth Century in Continental Europe. While it may be epic in length, and while its subject is as fraught as the Trojan War, it is not an epic in the traditional sense. The poems have a narrator, a poet approaching his 70th year of life who is not asked to lift a sword or fire a gun. He volunteered to man the ramparts, but was implored to go about the higher task of being France’s greatest poet. A further complication is that Hugo leaves Paris suddenly after the death of his son, and does not personally witness the events of the Commune. Until he returns to Paris, he must relate events as told to him by correspondents, escapees and survivors. Nonetheless, he addresses generals, heads of state, combatants, and citizens with an Olympian voice. He hurls thunderbolts, and every word he writes gets into Paris, immediately published and widely read.

Hugo has been taken to task by historians for offering poems instead of political solutions. It is important to recall that Hugo was a member of the national Assembly when Napoleon III seized power, and that he was elected to represent Paris in the new government formed after Napoleon III’s flight. Although he stepped aside from political power repeatedly, he always continued to effuse political poems and prose writings whose appearance in newspapers kept him before the public. Hugo’s prickly idealism and sense of honor made him an unlikely politician, but a powerful role model. As a political thinker, Hugo never really reconciles within himself the contrary pulls of Napoleonic hero-worship, Revolutionary zeal, anticlericalism, Age of Reason humanism, compassion for social justice, and belief in a pan-European union of free republics; he had even been seduced, for a time, into the ideal of a benevolent monarch under Louis Philippe. He taps all these ideals, and it is vain to seek in his writing an organized political ideology. He championed the noblest causes, and exasperated most of his potential allies. His long vision probably never helped elect anyone else, yet the best passages to be found in The Terrible Year are unforgettable expressions of love of country, love of his city, and a transcending love of humanity. This, no one could do better.

Hugo also needs to be seen as the most unmuffled voice among French writers. Napoleon III, on taking power in 1851, shut down newspapers, and arrested and exiled thousands of potential dissidents. Although there was an amnesty in 1859, and some opposition newspapers were again tolerated, there had been many artists and writers who thrived in those two decades, and who did not seem to mind so much that some of their peers languished in penal colonies. Hugo bears those who stayed behind and prospered during his exile no rancor. The poet’s inability to achieve much in the Assembly, and his abrupt resignation, reflect the utter absence of any moderate factions with whom to form alliances.

The Terrible Year, with its author as witness, political agitator, and journalist, is a chronicle of sorts rather than an epic. It is a journal, a memoir, and a series of urgent pleas for justice and compassion. Hugo knew that all of the poems were of the historical moment, and that they belonged together.

To make the text more approachable, I have broken up some of the longer poems, and I have given them all titles, where Hugo frequently did not provide any. From the 1872 deluxe French edition, I have selected engravings that were created expressly for The Terrible Year. Some are allegorical depictions of the poems, while most show actual events and locales. The illustrations as I found them were small and rather gray, on fading and crumbling paper. Using the technique pioneered by graphic designer Bradbury Thompson, I enlarged the engravings and selected details from them. Since Hugo himself would have approved these illustrations, I found it fitting to use them here, examples from the peak era of French wood engraving. It is fascinating to see how the artists not only depicted real scenes and events, but also attempted to personify some of the more abstract poems, such as the one showing a cavalcade of French military victories.

For the reader seeking a fuller historical context for The Terrible Year, I have provided a bibliography of historical sources in English. Rupert Christiansen’s Paris, Babylon (Penguin, 1994), although it seems to accept gossip at face value, offers a fine social history of Parisian life during the Napoleon III era up to and including the Commune. John Merriman’s Massacre: The Paris Commune is a fine and reliable modern history of the Commune and its aftermath.

I examined the few poems from The Terrible Year that have appeared in print editions of selected poems of Hugo. Most, from the turn of the 20th century, are painful attempts to force Hugo’s ideas into rhymes. A few by Toru Dutt, a young Bengali translator, in her Gleanings from a French Field, are exemplary even if not always in idiomatic English, but the remainder, to me, are painful to read, and I did not consult them further during my work.

For the reader whose appetite for Hugo in English is whetted here, I commend the magisterial Selected Poems of Victor Hugo, translated by E. H. And A. M. Blackmore (University of Chicago Press, 2001). The poems translated faithfully and beautifully in that volume span Hugo’s entire career. Also commendable is Steven Monte’s 2001 Routledge edition of Selected Poetry, with a fine essay on Hugo’s poetics and the choices and dilemmas facing translators.

Finally, I wish to thank Dr. Lester Olson and David Messineo for proofreading the first galleys of this book, and to my poet friends who endured the last two years of my immersion in The Terrible Year as I imposed my work-in-progress upon them.

—Brett Rutherford

Pittsburgh, PA

October 2025

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

VICTOR HUGO (1802-1885) was simultaneously the greatest poet, playwright, and novelist in Nineteenth Century France, and a titan among European writers. Romantic, visionary, and humanist, he created shocking stage-plays that lifted the lid off the abuses and evils of monarchism, and continued the long project of the French Enlightenment to resist monarchist and religious repression of human rights and dignity. His novel, Les Misérables, omnipresent today in film and music-drama, is known worldwide, as is the classic Hunchback of Notre Dame (Notre Dame de Paris). Hugo’s thrilling dramas are occasionally revived, and also remain half-concealed as the libretti for enduring operas like Rigoletto, Ernani, Lucrezia Borgia, and La Gioconda. His lyric poems were set by many composers, and some even inspired larger works of art music, such as Liszt’s “Dante” Sonata from Hugo’s poem, “After a Reading of Dante,” and the finale of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique.

During his 19 years of political exile, Hugo wrote Les Châtiments (Chastisements), a collection of poems satirizing and attacking Napoleon III and his Empire. On his return to Paris in 1870, the poet received a tumultuous welcome, only to be thrust into the Prussian army's siege of Paris and the political upheavals around the Paris Commune. Both republicans and radicals attempted to involve Hugo in their schemes, while monarchists and Bonapartists reviled him.

Later Hugo would return to Paris for a long career autumn of further poetic work, and the one final novel, Ninety-Three, in which he finally came to grips with the French Revolution and The Terror, the one historic period he had not previously portrayed. While many Romantic poets died young or lived long, abandoning their early radicalism, Hugo’s world-view evolved and expanded to an all-embracing humanism, even while retaining an undying defiance of authoritarianism and organized religion.

AMERICAN NEO-ROMANTIC POET BRETT RUTHERFORD, born in Scottdale, PA, began writing poetry seriously in his fifteenth year. His first poems were in Latin. During his twenties he lived in New York City, San Francisco, and at the glacial lake in Edinboro, PA where he attended college. He founded The Poet’s Press in New York City in 1971, and the press still operates today with more than 390 titles produced. He returned to his native state in 2016, and now resides in Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh.

Most of his middle years were divided between New York City and New England. After a literary pilgrimage to Providence, RI, on the track of H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe, he moved there with his press in 1985. Several moves back and forth from New York City, Weehawken NJ on the cliffs overlooking Manhattan, and Boston, found him again in Providence, where he returned to college at University of Rhode Island.

After finishing his master’s degree, he worked there in distance learning, and taught several courses for the Gender and Women’s Studies Program.

In Pittsburgh, he has taught at the University of Pittsburgh’s OSHER adult education program.

In addition to his many volumes of his own poetry, Rutherford has turned his attention in recent years to adaptations and translations from Russian, German, French, Spanish, Latin, Chinese, and Greek poets and writers.

He sees this as a continuation of the kind of cross-cultural poetic work done by American poets like Longfellow in the 19th century.

He has also prepared annotated editions of Matthew Gregory Lewis’s Tales of Wonder, the poetry of Charles Hamilton Sorley, the poetry and criticism of Sarah Helen Whitman, and the collected writings of Emilie Glen and Barbara A. Holland.