1793 (novel)

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Title page of the first illustrated edition from 1876.

1793 , also ninety-three or 1793 - the year of horror , original French title Quatrevingt-treize , is a historical novel by the French writer Victor Hugo . It is set in 1793 during the French Revolution . It is attributed to literary romanticism . 1793 is Hugo's last novel and was published in 1874.

action

The novel takes place from May to August 1793. It is divided into three parts, which in turn are divided into four, three and seven books of up to 15 chapters each. The first part, At Sea , tells how a battalion of Paris government troops, who have set out to fight counter-revolutionary insurgents under General Antoine Joseph Santerre , comb through a forest in Brittany and come across the widow Michelle Fléchard with her three young children. Although her husband fell on the side of the Catholic-Royalist insurgents, they accept her as a sutler . The following book tells how the Breton nobleman Lantenac incognito sets sail from Jersey on a corvette of the counter-revolutionaries that is supposed to take him to France, where he is supposed to take the lead in the Vendée uprising . The ship is damaged by a cannon that has broken loose and goes off course, so that the corvette is discovered by a Republican squadron. Before the battle begins, Lantenac lets himself row ashore by the sailor Halmalo, whose brother he had recently executed. Halmalo actually wants to murder him, but he submits when he learns that his passenger is his former liege lord . They went ashore near Mont-Saint-Michel and after Lantenac asked Halmolo to spread the news of his arrival in Brittany, they parted ways. Lantenac is already being searched for on profiles issued by the commander of the revolutionary troops Gauvain, a nephew of Lantenac, but the beggar Tellmarch hides him. The next morning Lantenac finds himself surrounded by peasants, who do not hand him over, but cheer him on as their leader. After a victory by the insurgents over the Paris battalion, with which the novel began, Lantenac has all the prisoners fusilized, including the women, and Michelle Fléchard's three children are taken hostage. She herself is saved by Tellmarch, a healer who regrets helping Lantenac.

The second part, To Paris , tells in the first book about life in the capital of revolutionary France with its rebellious city administration, its sections, its clubs. In addition to these elements, Hugo describes the " Évêché ", which he greatly exaggerates in its historical significance. He portrays them as a meeting place for particularly resolute sans-culottes , among which the former priest Cimourdain, Gauvain's tutor , excels in virtue and revolutionary determination. In the second book, the three “titans” of the revolution, Jean-Paul Marat , Maximilien de Robespierre and Georges Danton , argue about the war situation in a Paris pub. Danton sees the greatest danger in the advance of the Austro-Prussian troops in the east, Robespierre considers the uprisings in the west, which would allow an invasion of British landing forces to be more dangerous, while Marat considers the dangers of traitors and conspirators from within to be urgent and therefore advocates a dictatorship . They agree to put Gauvain, Cimourdain, the commander in the west, as political commissioner of the welfare committee . The third book of this part describes in detail the venue, the composition and the work of the Convention .

The third part, In the Vendée , takes place in Brittany again. After an introductory description of the Chouannerie , whose fighters live in the Breton forests and below them in caves and tunnels, the story is told of the civil war between the "white" troops of Lantenac and the "blue" troops of Cimourdains and Gauvains. By a ruse this succeeds in a victory over the royalists in Dol-de-Bretagne ; Michelle Fléchard has now recovered from her injuries and is wandering around the war zone in search of her children. Lantenac has withdrawn with only eighteen loyal followers to his ancestral castle La Tourgue, which consists of a medieval tower and a modern bridge castle, in whose library the children of Michelle Fléchard are held captive: if Gauvain's troops storm the castle, the besieged threaten the library to light and let the children burn. The republicans storm anyway, they manage to penetrate the castle through another ruse, and Lantenac and his remaining supporters are already preparing for a heroic death when, completely surprisingly, Halmalo steps out of a secret door and shows them the way to freedom. One of them stays to cover the rest of the retreat and lights the fuse that sets the library with the children on fire. At that moment, Michelle Fléchard appears and sees her children in the burning bridge lock, to which Gauvain and his troops cannot enter because the iron door to the library cannot be broken. Lantenac lets his mother's screams change his mind, returns and saves the children. He is then taken prisoner and locked in the castle dungeon . After a short process, he should be beheaded the following day. Gauvain is tormented by remorse to hand over his heroic uncle to the guillotine , which Cimourdain had specially brought in, and enables him to escape by taking his place in the dungeon. As a revolutionary consequence, Cimourdain condemns his beloved former student Gauvain to death, despite the soldiers' appeals for clemency, and shoots himself the moment his head falls.

shape

1793 is a historical novel in which the author mixes real events and characters (such as the Battle of Dol and the revolutionaries Marat, Danton and Robespierre) with fictional elements such as the Évêché, the siege of La Tourgue and the protagonists Lantenac, Gauvain and Cimourdain. Hugo had adopted this technique from Walter Scott . Hugo had originally planned a trilogy of historical novels: After L'Homme qui rit ("The Laughing Man") from 1869, which describes aristocratic life in Great Britain during the Baroque period , and in 1793 another novel about absolutism in France was to follow. but that didn't happen anymore.

Creation and translations

To write in 1793 , Hugo had retired to the Channel Island of Guernsey for six months in 1872/73 . The novel appeared in three volumes in February 1874. A first German translation by Ludwig Schneegans , entitled Ninety-Three, appeared in the same year, another by Alfred Wolfenstein with a foreword by Heinrich Mann in 1925; At the same time, the novel was published under the title “The Year of the Guillotine” (edited by Leo Perutz and Oswald Levett with a foreword by Perutz) by Ullstein. In 1936 Anton Zimmermandl submitted another translation under the title 1793 - The Year of Terror .

reception

Gustave Flaubert liked, as he wrote in a letter in May 1874, especially the beginning of the novel, but he criticized the fact that all the characters remained pale and that their dialogues would recite like actors: “This genius lacks the gift of creating human beings. If he had had this gift, Hugo would have even surpassed Shakespeare ”.

Heinrich Mann called the novel in 1925 a book "Unleashed Mankind". Leo Perutz described himself in his preface (also in 1925) as someone who "has owned and loved the book for himself for twenty years" as the Bible ".

The literary scholar Christian Schäfer judges that Hugo did not succeed in capturing the atmosphere of the 18th century despite his intensive study of the sources. With a few exceptions such as the dispute between Robespierre, Marat and Danton, the dark romantic mood of the late Middle Ages predominates in the novel . As a result, Hugo lagged behind the realistic and naturalistic novels of his contemporaries.

The literary critic Rolf Vollmann calls the book "terrible" because of its numerous melodramatic effects (the cannon torn loose, the relatives' struggle, the children in the burning castle, the desperate mother, etc.).

expenditure

French
German
  • Ninety three . German by Alfred Wolfenstein . Deutsche Buchgesellschaft, Berlin 1932. New editions ao: List, Leipzig 1952 (with a foreword by Heinrich Mann ) and Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1994, ISBN 3499400391 .
  • 1793, the fateful year of France. Novel . German by Anton Zimmermanndl. Saturn publishing house, Leipzig and Vienna 1939.
  • Ninety three (1793). Novel . German by Hans Wimmer. Meister, Heidelberg 1951.
  • 1793. Novel . German by Eva Schumann . Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1956.
  • The year 1793. Novel . German by Alfred Wolfenstein, revised and supplemented by Alberte Schöne and Mireille Vildebrand. Kiepenheuer, Leipzig and Weimar 1989, ISBN 3378002956 .
  • 1793 or the conspiracy in the province of Vendée. Historical novel . Based on the translation by Alfred Wolfenstein, newly translated, annotated and with an afterword by Edgar Bracht. Bastei-Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 1995, ISBN 3404137442 .

Secondary literature

  • Victor Brombert : Sentiment et violence chez Victor Hugo: L'exemple de "Quatre-vingt-treize" . In: Cahiers de l'Association internationale des études francaises 26, 1974, pp. 251-267.
  • Pierre Campion: Raisons de la littérature. Quatrevingt-treize de Victor Hugo . In: Romantisme Vol. 34, No. 124, 2004, pp. 103-114.
  • Winfried Engler : Victor Hugo: Quatrevingt-treize (1874). Revolution, Teleology and Human History . In: Lendemains. Etudes comparées sur la France 10, 1978, pp. 55-72.
  • Franck Evrard and Suzanne Alexandre (eds.): Analyzes & réflexions sur… Victor Hugo, Quatrevingt-treize . Ellipses, Paris 2002, ISBN 2-7298-1072-2 .
  • Kathryn M. Grossman: The Later Novels of Victor Hugo: Variations on the Politics and Poetics of Transcendence . Oxford University Press, New York 2012, ISBN 0199642958 .
  • Peter Stolz: The French Revolution in a novel. Mixture of genres and mimesis, forms and functions of their design in Hugo's Quatrevingt-treize . In: Lendemains. Etudes comparées sur la France 75/76, 1995, pp. 93-102.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Christian Schäfer: Quatrevingt-treize . In: Kindlers Literature Lexicon . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 1986, Vol. 9, p. 7938.
  2. ↑ David Falkayn (Ed.): A Guide to the Life, Times, and Works of Victor Hugo. University Press of the Pacific, Stockton 2001, p. 266.
  3. ^ Christian Schäfer: Quatrevingt-treize . In: Kindlers Literature Lexicon . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 1986, Vol. 9, p. 7939.
  4. ^ "Le don de faire des êtres humains manque à ce génie. S'il avait eu ce don-là, Hugo aurait dépassé Shakespeare ”. Michel Martinez: Flaubert, le sphinx et la chimère. Editions L'Harmattan, Paris 2002, p. 138.
  5. ^ Christian Schäfer: Quatrevingt-treize . In: Kindlers Literature Lexicon . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 1986, Vol. 9, p. 7938.
  6. ^ Rolf Vollmann: The wonderful counterfeiters. A seducer of novels 1800 to 1930 . btb, Frankfurt am Main 1999, p.

Web links

Wikisource: Quatrevingt-treize  - Sources and full texts (French)