Guernsey’s most famous exile reminds us of the importance of the upcoming celebrations and of the island itself to today’s conflicts

It might seem obvious to say that Victor Hugo would have joined in with the Liberation Day celebrations and vouched for their importance. Of course the author of Les Misérables – and the man who called Guernsey his home in exile for 15 years – would cheer the anniversary of the Channel Islands being freed from a totalitarian dictatorship. But what Hugo had to say about the fight against the autocracy and inhumanity of regimes like Nazi Germany bears repeating. To do so does not just offer a reminder of how important Guernsey became to his own contribution to that struggle as the most iconic French writer of the nineteenth century; it also emphasises why commemorations like May 9 matter so much to the present day, and to our future horizons.

The date draws together two of the interests closest to Hugo’s heart: freedom from the tyranny of oppression; and peace between all countries. Even before the political extremism and military conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such ideals were not easy to hold onto for a man who lived through nearly all of the nineteenth century’s twists and turns – from the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and the Greek Revolution of 1821 to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and the Balkan uprisings of 1875-78. He himself was forced into exile in 1851 after Louis-Napoleon’s coup d’état laid the groundwork for the French Second Empire. He fled Paris for Brussels and then Jersey before settling on Guernsey in 1855.

He had many reasons for choosing Guernsey, the most significant of which he outlined in an essay on the Channel Islands that he wrote as a companion piece to his novel The Toilers of the Sea in the mid-1860s. Guernsey had tremendous symbolic value for him as ‘land and sea mingled’, ‘a compatibility of extremes’ with ‘granite to the south, sand to the north’, and ‘a place of asylum’ transforming reefs into refuges sat between Britain and France, where refugees could at once long for home and find new belonging. Its people channelled the soul of the sea by combining reliability with risk, becoming ‘more enterprising and bolder than ever’ as they worked over the seas and the across the globe.

This historical, geographic, and cultural hybridity was an ideal landing point for a mind like Hugo’s, which saw the world as interconnected and which therefore rejected any worldview that wanted to divide and dominate. It is why he sets Toilers on the island and why it is the recipient of the only dedication he ever made in his nine works of fiction. Guernsey – ‘the rock of hospitality and liberty’, as he called it – indeed inspired both Hugo’s imagination and his sense of purpose as the truth-telling writer choosing what is right over what is expedient.

It is on the island that he completed his two most commercially successful works (the poems of Contemplations in 1856 and his global bestselling epic Les Misérables in 1862); it is here that he rejected the French Emperor’s offer of amnesty in 1859, insisting that he would only return home when liberty did the same; and it from this relatively small platform in the English Channel that he expanded his reputation worldwide as an outspoken advocate for social justice. Hugo lent his increasingly influential voice to a variety of causes: the abolition of slavery in the United States; Garibaldi’s leadership in the Italian unification movement; Cuba’s resistance against Spain; clemency for the Irish Fenians; an end to capital punishment in Colombia and Portugal – the list goes on. As he told Mexico when its republic stared down the invading French army in 1863, ‘you are right to think that I am with you’.

The underlying principle in all of these examples is one which Hugo believed had to endure throughout history, otherwise humanity would lose its way. Guernsey was a microcosm of what civilisation should look like to him: honest, hard-working, and welcoming – a stark contrast to those social orders that silenced opposition and suppressed freedom of expression. For Hugo, all tyrants are usurpers, seizing power while circumventing the democratic process through populism and political violence. Where and when in the world they assault democracy may differ, but their goals and methods don’t. No matter their designated titles – shahs, tsars, caliphs, kings, princes, or presidents – they can all twist the path of progress back onto itself in a historical bind that stifles the human right to freedom and equality.

That vicious circle – ‘that perfection of infamy’ – had to be broken not by mimicking this same power grab, but by demystifying its cult of personality, by spurning its criminality, and by nursing a more inclusive and cooperative body politic. What Hugo told his fellow deputies in the National Assembly early in 1871 after Prussia’s victory over France could easily have been reiterated after Germany’s defeat in 1945: that humanity’s ultimate victory over tyranny had to be a world bound together in solidarity, in which the hand of friendship was stronger than any fist. As he put it to the International Peace Congress two years earlier towards the end of exile: ‘We want schools making citizens, not monarchs making machine guns.’  

Hugo’s plea for the dignity and prosperity of peace remains compelling in an era where the artillery for conflict has become all the more insidious. Disinformation and cyberattacks undermine social and national infrastructures in a similarly coercive way to military power. Likewise, many of Hugo’s interventions can seem uncannily familiar today, such as his fight against all forms of censorship, his fears about growing tensions in North American society, and his warnings against the impassivity of European governments in the face of imperialist aggression. In an era of ‘fake news’, hardening nationalism, and political polarisation, Hugo’s belief in the European Enlightenment’s values of truth, tolerance, and free speech remains powerful.

In this sense, Hugo would have greatly appreciated the fact that Liberation Day falls on the same date as the European Union’s Europe Day. It symbolically pairs the fight against tyranny with the commitment to building an international community. We may well despair that the socio-political struggles of the nineteenth and indeed twentieth centuries have persisted into our own century. We might equally take heart from the kind of resilience that Hugo found himself building here in Guernsey, where the view from the island helped him to develop an outlook on life that was anything but insular.

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Prof. Bradley Stephens

Professor of French Literature

School of Modern Languages

University of Bristol