[by Xavier-Laurent Salvador]

Le The New York Times recently devoted an article about the disfigurement of the statue of Victor Hugo by Ousmane Sow in Besançon, having led to exactions condemnable by radicalized and ill-advised identitarians attacking a statue of Victor Hugo. This subject led me to mention the “ Opportunistic revisionism of the Besançon town hall"In the meantime, the iconoclasts were fortunately arrested by the police, while at the same time we learned the obscure links which unite the town hall of Besançon with the sect of anthroposophyAll this would be anecdotal, if the American press had not come at the same time to take advantage of this complicated affair to make it, for the duration of a controversy, the symbol of the French political climate.

Victor Hugo, woke

It seems important to me to return to a few points before the report that is made of our discussion. The article indeed opposes the progressive camp of those who would think roughly that Victor Hugo, if he lived today, would be woke as they themselves define themselves as "woke":

“So, for me, if wokism is the fight against discrimination, then I reaffirm, I am woke.”

Madame Mayor of Besançon, Anne Vignot

“If the definition of being woke is awakening to discrimination, and combating against it, then we can say he was woke.”

Lise Lézennec, the cultural and scientific manager at the museum.

And on the other, the universalist camp of those who remember that Victor Hugo himself was indifferent to the question of skin color because he believed in the universal:

On the other side are those like Xavier-Laurent Salvador, who co-directs the Observatory of Decolonialism and Identity Ideologies, set up to challenge the use of critical race and gender theories in France. He said the real danger was not far-right vigilantes, but attempts by a government to impose its race-centered view on society.

It goes without saying that the restoration attempt imposed by the Besançon city hall, whose mayor defines himself as "woke", is a failed attempt to impose a revisionist view on the work of the brilliant Senegalese sculptor. To understand what this is about, we only need to return for a moment to the nature of the message conveyed by the exhibition of a statue.

When considering a work of art, it is always good to ask the question of enunciation: who is speaking? To whom? About what?

When the statue of Victor Hugo was inaugurated, it goes without saying that Ousmane Sow's message was audible. But not only him: we could also hear the political discourse that had wanted to entrust Hugo's sculpture to Sow, to exhibit it in his hometown and to make it a masterpiece, present in the beating heart of the history of the Republic. No one has ever thought of contesting the brilliant work since its inauguration; no one has ever even thought of seeing anything other than the celebration of an extraordinary vision of an African sculptor on an equally brilliant character, the union of the two forming the eternal celebration of the welcoming Republic, "color blinded" as our American friends say, quite simply fraternal.

Two iconoclasms

So where does the scandal come from?

It simply comes from the interference of the original message of the first co-authors by the speech of the restorer, whose process must never be exposed, and of the current town hall which assumes part of the message as soon as it engages the municipality, the citizens of the city, their money, their tax in a restoration work and in its exhibition in the conditions that we know. It does not matter that it is then said that the "work was not finished": as soon as the message is published, it becomes ... public. And it is on this basis, and on this basis only, that it is judgeable.

The interference of the message is evident once we understand the polyphony at work in the exhibition of the restoration work.

Of course, we do not know what Ousmane Sow's first intention was at the time of creation: we do not probe the kidneys or the hearts. But all the work of the literary consists precisely in protecting the work in all the plurality of its interpretative dimensions, against all the fantasies of purity or corruption that surround it. No, there is no purer work that would be closer to the origin than the one that was voluntarily delivered by the artist, signed by him and assumed by him. No, it is not possible to go back to the work of creation to restore the first, supposedly purer, intention of the artist. No, the origin, the first stroke, the first intention are not more beautiful than the work published and delivered.

Take for example a pencil sketch of a painting by Poussin: do you sincerely think that the pencil sketch is "truer" than the canvas exhibited in the Louvre? Do you think that the canvas wanted by the author, given and exhibited by the author, should be erased to make it in black and white more in line with the rough draft, the first draft? This is an iconoclastic approach that is akin to revisionism. The same reasoning applies to the book: do you think that editions enriched with an author's annotations are "truer" than those wanted by the author himself? But this is absurd. It is just as legitimate to ask "why did Proust write this in the first place" as to ask, and this is more subtle: "why did he choose not to keep this version". To go back to the original intention is to re-establish the corrected hesitation, the approximation, the heaviness, the error and the fault. This is not without interest: but in no case can this archaeological enterprise replace the study of the work and the message as the author conceived them once finished.

In this sense, all work on the work which erases its definitive form on the grounds of an archaeological fantasy of purity is an iconoclasm, a revisionism from which the author – muzzled by death – cannot defend himself. Perhaps he would have agreed? Perhaps not! In these conditions, it is our job as literary scholars to defend the discourse of the dead: not the dead themselves (they may be wrong and read their work very badly), but their work.

If someone wants to try the adventure of reproducing a work by Sow, of sculpting an African Hugo or an alien Zola: let him do it! Let him create a school, let him work, let him impose himself by his genius as the master of a political and artistic message of a new school. Good for him and so much the better for the Republic of Letters! That is the whole difference between the work of restoration and the work of creation. Only literary people, who are not bound by the laws of the market or by the ties of the heart, can be the advocates of posthumous works. That is the whole ambiguity of the Republic of Letters to be composed of ghosts who have left to their descendants the care of reading them without anyone being able to definitively answer the questions raised by their works.

I said how much I condemned the identitarians who found nothing better to do than to vandalize the statue of Victor Hugo: I say it again and again, they are condemnable. The journalist who asked me the question asked me: "Why didn't you write a column to condemn them too?" The answer is simple: racists are criminals. I pay taxes so that the police can arrest criminals. And in the French Republic of the 24st century, the France that the Minister of National Education Mr. N'Diaye tells us suffers from "systemic racism": the arrest of two racist vandals did not take XNUMX hours and the police accomplished their mission. There is nothing out of the ordinary about that.

On the other hand, who is to shine a light on the exactions of a municipality that defines itself as woke? Who is to protect the dead from the rewriting of their work?