The Secret Lives of French Literary Giants

Posted on September 25, 2006

New documents have surfaced that indicate that the French police spied up on the great writers of French literature. The police had quite a low opinion of Victor Hugo (a penny-pinching money grubber, poet Arthur Rimbaud ("a monstrosity") and Paul Verlaine ("a worthless human being"). The secret investigations were discovered by French parliament employee Bruno Fuligni who compiled them into a book called The Writers' Police.

Some of the tidbits in Fuligni's book, "The Writers' Police", were collected from 1879 through 1891 under police chief Louis Andrieux -- father of one of France's most famous novelists and poets of the next generation, Louis Aragon. As Andrieux wrote in his memoirs, "All of Paris, in the end, is on file."
The notes and reports on Hugo, the "Les Miserables" author and tireless campaigner for social justice who lived in exile for two decades after calling the self-proclaimed Emperor Louis Napoleon a traitor, take up three voluminous boxes, Fuligni said. The police monitoring the larger-than-life figure overlooked nothing: his ideas, his breaches of conventional morality, the company he kept -- what Fuligni prefers to see as "the little weaknesses of this great genius."
The book, for example, reproduces a detailed description of how Hugo was blackmailed by a mistress after she found out that her lover was, in fact, an illustrious poet and writer. Hugo is described in the files as "someone who exploits democracy" and as being obsessed by money, a trait born out by others.
"What is worrying is not the information itself but the way it is exploited," Fuligni says.

Current writers are worried that the surveillance didn't stop in the 20th century, but that it just went electronic. No word yet from the Chirac goverment if it is still spying on the personal habits of illustrious writers.