Passions au miroir: Hugo et Garibaldi dans la solitude de l’Histoire

Abstract

In Mythic Imagery, a warrior is a hybrid man – a divine human being or a divinized mortal – who stands out of his own kind for his extraordinary skill to generate power. Being an undefined figure of man, equidistant from deity and humanity, the warrior hero represents the Human Community. Using his knowledge of what Giuseppe Garibaldi had done to unify Italy, Victor Hugo had the chance to annex to his political and literary fighting a contemporary hero who shared his own ideology. An amazing relationship put their destinies together, and the epistolary exchange Garibaldi (1863) strengthened this union. Giuseppe Garibaldi in Mentana (1867) is invested with the heroic legitimacy of a symbolical progressive movement. The experimental brotherhood between the poet and the warrior symbolized for Hugo a continuous questioning of the real power of poetical language.