It Is with Cannon Shots, Poem by Victor Hugo

Poem by Victor Hugo Themes PoliticsPeriod 19th century

It is with cannon shots that a people is made happy.
We have come back from all those grand hollow words:
– Progress, fraternity, mission of France,
Rights of man, reason, liberty, tolerance.
Socrates is mad; read Lélut who confounds him;
Christ, a strong socialist and demagogue at bottom,
Is a reputation, all in all, very overrated.
Earth! the shell is God, Paixhans is his prophet.
True goal of the human race: to kill correctly.
The men, whose saber is the only sedative,
Have the rifled ball as their masterpiece; their star
Is the brightness that comes from a Lancaster bomb,
And the admiration of every polite people
Goes from the Armstrong mortar to the Cavalli cannon.
God was mistaken; Caesar rises higher than He;
Jehovah made the word and Caesar made silence.
To speak is to abuse; to think is to usurp.
The voice serves to keep silent and the mind to crawl.
The world is flat on its belly, and man, haughty not long ago,
Gentle and pliant today, trembles. – Peace! says war.

Victor Hugo

Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.

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