Thomas Carlyle - "Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History"

Guillermo A. Sherwell - "Simon Bolivar, the Liberator"

Julian Hawthorne - "David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales"

Georges Jacques Danton - "Discours civiques de Danton"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Napoleon the Little

V >> Victor Hugo >> Napoleon the Little




If she sleeps, if she is in a lethargy, silence, and off with your hat.
If she is dead, to your knees!

The exiles are scattered; destiny has blasts which disperse men like a
handful of ashes. Some are in Belgium, in Piedmont, in Switzerland,
where they do not enjoy liberty; others are in London, where they have
no roof to shelter them. One, a peasant, has been torn from his native
field; another, a soldier, has only a fragment of his sword, which was
broken in his hand; another, an artisan, is ignorant of the language of
the country, he is without clothes and without shoes, he knows not if
he shall eat food to-morrow; another has left behind him a wife and
children, a dearly loved group, the object of his labour, and the joy
of his life; another has an old mother with grey hairs, who weeps for
him; another an old father, who will die without seeing him again;
another is a lover,--he has left behind him some adored being, who will
forget him; they raise their heads and they hold out their hands to one
another; they smile; there is no nation that does not stand aside with
respect as they pass, and contemplate with profound emotion, as one of
the noblest spectacles which destiny can offer to men, all those serene
consciences, all those broken hearts.

They suffer and are silent; in them the citizen has sacrificed the man;
they look with firmness on adversity, they do not cry out even under
the pitiless rod of misfortune: _Civis Romanus sum!_ But at eve, when
one dreams,--when everything in the strange city of the stranger is
involved in melancholy, for what seems cold by day becomes funereal in
twilight,--but at night, when sleep does not close one's eyes, hearts
the most stoical open to mourning and dejection. Where are the little
ones? who will give them bread? who will give them their father's kiss?
where is the wife? where is the mother? where is the brother? where are
they all? And the songs which at eventide they used to hear, in their
native tongue, where are they? where is the wood, the tree, the forest
path, the roof filled with nests, the church tower surrounded by tombs?
Where is the street, the faubourg, the lamp burning bright before the
door, the friends, the workshop, the trade, the customary toil? And the
furniture put up for sale, the auction invading the domestic sanctuary!
Oh! these eternal adieux! Destroyed, dead, thrown to the four winds,
that moral existence which is called the family hearth, and which is
composed not only of loving converse, of caresses and embraces, but of
hours, of habits, of friendly visits, of joyous laughter, of the
pressure of the hand, of the view from certain windows, of the position
of certain furniture, of the arm-chair where the grandsire used to sit,
of the carpet on which the first-born used to play! Flown away for ever
are those objects which bore the imprint of one's daily life! Vanished
are the visible forms of one's souvenirs! There are in grief private
and secret recesses, where the most lofty courage bends. The Roman
orator put forth his head without flinching to the knife of the
centurion Lenas, but he wept when he thought of his house demolished by
Clodius.

The exiles are silent, or, if they complain, it is only among
themselves. As they know one another, and are doubly brothers, having
the same fatherland and sharing the same proscription, they tell one
another their sufferings. He who has money shares it with those who
have none, he who has firmness imparts it to those who lack it. They
exchange recollections, aspirations, hopes. They turn, their arms
extended in the darkness towards those they have left behind. Oh! how
happy they who think no more of us! Every man suffers and at times
waxes wroth. The names of all the executioners are engraven in the
memory of all. Each has something to curse,--Mazas, the hulk, the
dungeon, the informer who betrayed, the spy who watched, the gendarme
who arrested him, Lambessa, where one has a friend, Cayenne, where one
has a brother; but there is one thing that is blessed by all, and that
is thou, France!

Oh! a complaint, a word against thee, France! No! no! one's country is
never so deeply fixed in the heart as when one is torn from it by
exile.

They will do their whole duty, with a tranquil brow and unshaken
perseverance. Never to see thee again is their sorrow, never to forget
thee their joy.

Ah, what grief! And after eight months it is in vain that we say to
ourselves that these things are so; it is in vain that we look around
us and see the spire of Saint-Michael's instead of the Pantheon, and
Saint-Gudule instead of Notre-Dame,--we cannot believe it.

It is, however, true, it cannot be denied, we must admit it, we must
acknowledge it, even though we expire of humiliation and despair,--that
which is lying there, on the ground, is the nineteenth century, is
France!

And it is this Bonaparte who has caused all this ruin!

And it is in the very centre of the greatest nation upon earth! it is
in the midst of the greatest century of all history, that this man has
suddenly risen and has triumphed! To seize upon France as his prey,
great Heaven! What the lion would not dare to do, the ape has done!
what the eagle would have dreaded to seize in his talons, the parrot
has taken in his claws! What! Louis XI failed! Richelieu destroyed
himself in the attempt! Even Napoleon was unequal to it! In a single
day, between night and morning, the absurd became the possible! All
that was axiomatic has become chimerical. All that was false has become
living fact. What! the most brilliant concourse of men! the most
magnificent movements of ideas! the most formidable sequence of events!
a thing that no Titian could have controlled, that no Hercules could
have turned aside,--the human flood in full course, the French wave
sweeping onward, civilization, progress, intelligence, revolution,
liberty,--he stopped it all one fine morning, stopped it short, he,
this mask, this dwarf, this aborted Tiberius, this nothing!

God was advancing. Louis Bonaparte, his plume on his head, blocked his
path and said to God: "Thou shalt go no farther!"

God halted.

And you fancy that this is so! and you imagine that this plebiscite
exists, that this constitution of some day or other in January exists,
that this Senate exists, that this Council of State and this Corps
Legislatif exist! You fancy that there is a lackey who is called
Rouher, a valet who is called Troplong, a eunuch who is called Baroche,
and a sultan, a pacha, a master who is called Louis Bonaparte! You do
not see, then, that all this is a chimera! you do not see that the
2nd of December is nothing but an immense illusion, a pause, a
breathing-space, a sort of drop-curtain behind which God, that
marvellous scene-shifter, is preparing and constructing the last act,
the supreme, triumphal act of the French Revolution! You gaze stupidly
at the curtain, at the things painted on the coarse canvas, this one's
nose, that one's epaulettes, the great sabre of a third, those belaced
venders of _eau de Cologne_ whom you call generals, those _poussahs_
whom you call magistrates, those worthy men whom you call senators,
this mixture of caricatures and spectres, and you take them all for
realities! And you do not hear beyond them, in the shadow, that hollow
sound! you do not hear some one going and coming! you do not see that
curtain quiver in the breath of Him who is behind!


THE END.

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