An interrupted sentence

VICTOR HUGO was born in 1802, and his bicentenary promises to be the biggest celebration of any writer in years. The French ministries of education and culture have set up enormous Hugo websites, listing enough Hugo-related events, from Madagascar to China, to last another 200 years. The education ministry's homepage shows a cartoon Hugo riding a globe, wielding a lyre and waving like a Gallic Mr Magoo. It urges schoolchildren to dive into the “man-ocean” of this universal writer. The culture homepage, meanwhile, shows a stretch of coast and a quotation from Hugo's “Tas de pierres”: “Life is an interrupted sentence”. It presents the bicentenary as a celebration of “the values on which our republic is founded”.

This is a risky thing to say about a man who began as a court poet, became the ringleader of the young Romantics, cosied up to three monarchies and managed to be a hero to socialists at the same time. In 1848 Hugo stormed the barricades with government troops. Three years later he was on the other side, trying to stir up resistance against the coup d'état of Napoleon III. He fled on the night train to Brussels, disguised as a worker, and spent the next 19 years in exile, first on Jersey, then on Guernsey.

Hugo's inflammatory poems were smuggled out of the Channel Islands and inspired revolutionary movements around the world. The exiled poet was an embarrassing blot on the shiny Second Empire. The British government treated him as a diplomatic disaster and tried to send him to America. “The question now is”, wrote Lord Palmerston in exasperation, “do these Islands belong to us or to Victor Hugo and Co?”

This year, Guernsey belongs once again to Victor Hugo. There will be lectures, exhibitions, themed walks, film and music festivals, a pantomime “Hunchback of Notre Dame”, and special “Les Misérables” stamps issued by the Guernsey post office. Hauteville House—a dignified Georgian townhouse which Hugo turned into a DIY Gothic cathedral—is to be reopened. It was there that Hugo wrote the greatest works of English literature in French: “Les Misérables” and three magnificent novels that used to be international bestsellers: “Toilers of the Sea”, “The Laughing Man” and “Ninety-Three”.

In Paris (which some thought should be re-named Hugopolis), the face that appears on posters and newsstands is the white-bearded sage of the Third Republic—the secular god who used to stare down from classroom walls at pupils who were forced to memorise his poems. But even the old sage in a suit refused to be a passive mascot. The same Victor Hugo went gadding about Paris on the top deck of the omnibus, scribbling poems and picking up pretty women, to the embarrassment of his son-in-law, who sat in the French parliament.

If Hugo had been the logo of a single regime, no one would now be celebrating his 200th birthday. It was his spectacular betrayals and courageous posturings, his willingness to be the scapegoat and the buffoon, that made him the national poet. Hugo's oratory suits grand occasions, but he was also the voice of his nation's bad conscience, and that nation still lives with the ghosts of its past: the Dreyfus affair, the Vichy government, the Algerian war and the rise of the National Front. “There are some crayfish souls”, said Hugo, thinking of Napoleon III, “forever scuttling backwards into the darkness.”

Birthdays are not conducive to free speech. But a republic that invites its citizens to open the Pandora's box of Hugo's vast oeuvre is a visible improvement on the last Napoleon.