“Et s’il n’en reste qu’un… Contempt as a Combat Weapon in Victor Hugo’s Work”

Abstract

Victor Hugo, a man of combat, repeatedly adopted the posture of the “one against all” in his political life as well as in his literary life. Contempt, coupled with irony and a fierce sense of polemic, then appears to be a weapon of choice to disqualify the opponent and simultaneously build up a moral stature. It is these mechanisms that we will attempt to identify through Victor Hugo’s public speeches, his literary work and his drawings. We will attempt to highlight the strategies at work in these struggles: the ad hominem attack and the physical attack; the processes of exhibition by which the poet subjects these targets to public opprobrium; the processes of reductio ad absurdum of the opponent’s reasoning, emptied of meaning and ridiculed.