Decapitating God: Revolution in Victor Hugo’s Le Livre des Tables and Dieu

Hugo's experience of seances in exile is closely bound up with his protest at the Second Empire and this article studies the visionary images of revolution which appear in the transcripts of these dialogues with the dead, published as Le Livre des Tables. It compares a particularly ambivalent image, of revolution as a decapitation of God, to a passage in Dieu, a related poetic text of the same period, in order to examine the role played by metaphor and multiple voices in Hugo's depiction of the relationship between the civic and the cosmic, between progress and spiritism.