His poems celebrate the days of July and their martyrs, and express indignation at the refusal of the Chamber of Deputies to allow the body of Napoleon to be brought back to France, a project to which the royal family offered no objection, and which was afterwards carried into execution by the Prince de Joinville. The poem directed against Deutz, who gave up the Duchess of Berry to Louis Philippe's government for money ("A l'homme qui a livré une femme "), strikes indirectly not only at Thiers, but at the King himself.
This is, however, an opposition based not upon political, but upon social sympathies. The disappointment of the proletariat at the insignificance of the result of the Revolution of July as far as they were concerned, and the sullen hatred of the well-to-do which was fermenting in the masses, find expression in such poems as "Sur le bal de l'hôtel de ville," with its masterly picture of the women of the people, who, gaudily decked out, beautiful and half-naked, like the ladies who are driving to the ball, stand "with flowers in their hair, dirt on their shoes, and hatred in their hearts," watching the carriages arrive. Vague anxiety and restlessness, warnings to the crowned heads of Europe to make for themselves friends betimes amongst their people, show that the poet has his hand on the pulse of his age.
Nothing could be a better proof of the close relation between Victor Hugo's writings and the spirit of the day than the circumstance that Louis Philippe's government prohibited the performance of his dramas quite as strictly as the Legitimist government had done. Hernani had, indeed, been played in the preceding reign, Charles X. cleverly replying to those who would have had him prohibit it, that, as far as the theatre was concerned, his place was amongst the audience. But, in spite of his personal partiality for Hugo, he had forbidden the performance of Marion Delorme because it was suggested to him that its representation of Louis XIII.'s attitude towards Richelieu, would be interpreted as satire of his own submissiveness to the clergy. This prohibition had long since been repealed, but now the government of Louis Philippe quite illegally forbade the representation of Le Roi s'amuse. During the lawsuit which ensued, Hugo made the following caustic remarks:
"Napoleon also was a despot, but his behaviour was very different. He employed none of the precautionary measures by means of which our liberties are now being juggled away, one after the other. He put out his hand and took everything at once. The lion does not behave like the fox. Things were done in the grand style then, gentlemen. Napoleon said: 'On such and such a day I will make my entry into such and such a capital,' and he made his entry on the day and at the very hour he had named. A proclamation in the Moniteur dethroned a dynasty. Kings had to sit crowded together waiting in the anterooms. If a column was desired, the Emperor of Austria was obliged to provide the bronze for it. The affairs of the Théâtre Français were certainly regulated in a somewhat arbitrary manner, but the regulations were dated from Moscow. That was the day of great things, this is the day of small."
These words convey a good general idea of Hugo's poetico-political attitude at the beginning of the Thirties.
Round about him his younger friends were working their way to fame. Almost all the frequenters of his house in time revealed themselves to be poets. Hugo would occasionally request Sainte-Beuve to recite, and after much pressing the latter, begging little Léopoldine and little Chariot to make plenty of noise the while, would repeat to the assembled company one or two of his charming, mannered poems. Alfred de Musset, a youth of seventeen, was brought to the house by Paul Foucher, Hugo's brother-in-law. One morning De Musset went up to Sainte-Beuve's garret, wakened him, and said with a shamefaced smile: "I too write verses."
The verses he wrote have attained world-wide fame.
If, amongst French laymen, one were to ask a man of the people—say an artisan, and amongst authors, either a Romanticist or a Parnassian: Who is the greatest modern French poet? the answer would undoubtedly be: Victor Hugo. But if the question were put to a member of the upper middle class—a public official, a savant, a man of the world, or amongst authors, to a member of the naturalistic school, or if one were to appeal to the ladies, in all probability the answer would be: Alfred de Musset. Whence this difference of opinion and what does it denote?
Alfred de Musset made his literary début in 1830, at the age of nineteen, with Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie, a series of tales in verse abounding in situations which it would be scarcely permissible to describe. In the longer ones (Don Paez, Portia, &c.) treachery runs riot; we have the wife who deceives her husband, the mistress who deceives her lover, the countess who knows nothing about hers except that he has killed her old husband; we have brutal pleasure, to obtain which men hack and hew at each other, youthful sensuality which knows neither ruth nor shame, senile depravity which employs love potions and listens to the death-rattle with voluptuous pleasure; and, scattered about amongst all this, songs, fiery sparks of passion, savagery, and arrogance. Shakespeare's earliest works are not more wanton than these, and these are, moreover, not naïvely, but refinedly wanton. There is also a constant parade of unbelief, with odd interruptions in the shape of unconscious confessions of weakness and spasmodic longings for the comforts of religion.
Some were scandalised by the book, more praised it enthusiastically. The young men of the literary circles were much struck by it. This was Romanticism of an entirely new kind, much less doctrinaire than Victor Hugo's. Here was a still more direct defiance of the classic rules of metre and style; but this defiance was frolicsome and witty, not martial like Hugo's. These attacks were enlivened by the presence of an element entirely wanting in Hugo's books, and that an essentially national element, what the French themselves call esprit. This jesting, jeering Romanticism was refreshing after Hugo's pompous, serious Romanticism. Here too the scenes were laid in Spain and Italy; here too were medieval backgrounds, sword-thrusts, and serenades; but it all gave twice as much pleasure with this addition of jollity, of subtle satire, of doubt which scarcely believed what it said itself. Take, for example, the notorious, offensively indecent ballad of the moon, which aggravated the Classicists by its metre and the Romanticists by its disrespectful attitude to its subject, their chief favourite. It was a ballad which parodied its own style; its writer seemed to be walking on his hands, kissing his toes to his readers.