"A Qui la Faute?" is a poem written by Victor Hugo, one of the greatest authors and intellectuals of France. It is also one of my favorite poems, and that is why I have decided to put it here in my blog.The poem is a part of the Collection L'Année Terrible which basically translates as "the terrible year". The collection itself retraces the events of 1870 in France, a year where the country was ravaged by a war against Prussia, as well as a civil war in Paris. Hugo himself also lost a son this year.
The poem in itself, apart from its XIX century French, is not a very complex poem. The title of the poem could be translated as "who is to blame?" and is a sort of a response to a revolt that resulted in the burning of the public library of Paris, in which thousands of books where lost. It is written as a sort of a dialog between the narrator and an imaginary rebel, and it opens with the former asking the latter if he was the one that started the fire. When the rebel confirms, the narrator launches a long tirade, in which he claims the book, to which the library is the guardian, to be his "treasure, dowry and heritage" that makes of the night the "testimony of the dawn" and that "destroys the scaffold, war and famine". The book is the light that illuminates the past and the future. Alas, when he finishes his tirade by "... and you want to destroy all that!", the rebel simply responds by "I can't read".
There are several reasons as to why I like this poem. Firstly, it was the poem that made me discover Victor Hugo, who has later become one of my favorite authors. I like his way of writing - his descriptions are among the best - and I like his way of forming his phrases. When I study French, I tend to fancy a rich and very precise language, and such a language is unfortunately rare in today's France. In addition, the subject treated is one that I find interesting. If asked to sum up the "plot" in one phrase, I would say that it dealt with the problems of ignorance, and who is to blame for it (as the title indicates). Is it the rebel's fault, whose actions were behind the fire, or is it the ignorance which in a way was behind the actions that is to blame? And in the case of the latter, who is to blame for the ignorance? I believe that one is to be made responsible for one's own actions, as one is the person that decides whether to carry them out or not. But I also know and believe that the society, incarnated by the government, is responsible of the forming, teaching its citizens, something it has clearly failed to do in this poem. The criticism of the French society of the time is thus strong in V. Hugo's poem, and he reminds us that there are other forces then ourselves that can be said to be behind our actions.
