"Ce cri que nous jetons souvent": Progress according to Victor Hugo

A body of work made up essentially of writings composed in exile, including all genres, (Napoleon le Petit, the first series of La Legende des siecles , Les Miserables, William Shakespeare, Paris) allows us to delimit the aest hetic, political and philosophical stakes of the definition of Progress in Hugo, as well as the constants of its representation: the stairway or the f light; the "disaster" or the monster. As the criticism of recent years, whi ch this article reflects, has shown, Hugo's thought is not at all a simplif ying and complacent optimism, but constantly encounters contradiction, even aberration. It is then a question of studying Progress in its modes of enu nciation in order to show that, if the passages where it is in question are usually eloquent rhetorical set-pieces, this is precisely because literary "discourse", reproducing in its elocution the movement of progress, has th e function making seen and heard the hope which the facts seem to dismiss.