Unlike most of his contemporaries who turned away from radical politics after the June Days, Victor Hugo was both energized and radicalized by his experience of politics during the Second Republic. This chapter traces the process by which this consummate establishment figure became a living symbol of fidelity to the republican ideal in France. It tracks the developing radicalism of Hugo’s speeches in the National Assembly and focuses especially on Hugo’s experience of the June Days – he was the only one of our nine writers who took up arms against the workers’ revolt in June – and it considers Hugo’s reassessment of 1848 in his later writings, especially Les Misérables. By 1850 Hugo had emerged as the leader of the republican resistance to the Party of Order and to Louis-Napoleon. After December 2, 1851, Hugo went into exile and spent the next 19 years hurling verbal bombs at ”Napoleon the Little.” Taking pride in his exile as if it were not simply a circumstance of his life but an identity, Hugo came to symbolize in his own person republican opposition to imperial rule. How to explain Hugo’s remarkable transformation? Unlike Lamartine, Sand and others, Hugo did not at the outset expect much of anything from the Republic.

After a general discussion of the experience of proscription, exile, and “internal exile,” we follow each of our nine writers into exile, retirement, or a new life. We then compare their assessments of particular events and individuals: notably the prison massacres during the June Days and the portraits of Auguste Blanqui and Adolphe Thiers. We turn to three themes: 1) the religiosity that pervaded the language of the ‘forty-eighters; 2) the repeated recourse to theatrical language and imagery to describe both the course of events and the tendency of revolutionaries to mimic the words, deeds and gestures of the first French revolutionaries; 3)the cult of “the people” elaborated as a source of democratic legitimacy by some of our writers and criticized by others. In conclusion, I maintain that in their effort to explain the failure of the democratic republic in 1848–1852, our writers raise questions that continue to concern us. Their central concern was the problem of democracy. When, and how, would the people be able to govern themselves? How was it that in the space of two generations democratic revolutions had twice culminated in Napoleonic dictatorship? There are worse questions to ask if we are to begin to understand the failures of democratic politics in our own time.