"God is behind everything, but everything hides God," wrote Victor Hugo in his classic
Les Miserables, Book 5, Chapter 4.
Born FEBRUARY 26, 1802,
Victor Marie Hugo was hailed as the greatest of the Romanticist poets.
Victor Hugo is best known for writing
:
-The Hunchback of Notre Dame
, 1831;
-Cromwell
, 1827; and
-Les Miserables, 1862, an epic story of redemption set in Paris after the French Revolution.
Victor Hugo's father was a general in
Napoleon's army, and
Hugo supported his nephew and heir,
Napoleon III, until he turned out to be a tyrant.
Napoleon III got democratically elected as the President of the
Second French Republic, but in 1851 staged a coup d'état and declared himself Emperor.
Hugo opposed him, and as a result was forced into exiled for 19 years, living in The Channel Islands in the English Channel.
After
Napoleon III was forced from power in 1870,
Victor Hugo returned to France.
Victor Hugo wrote in
The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1831, book 5:
"The 15th century everything changes. Human thought discovers a mode of perpetuating itself ...
Gutenberg's letters of lead...supersede Orpheus's letters of stone ...
The invention of printing is the greatest event in history. It is the mother of revolution ... Whether it be Providence or Fate, Gutenberg is the precursor of Luther."
In his
Preface to Cromwell, 1827,
Victor Hugo wrote:
"Lastly, this threefold poetry flows from three great sources -- The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare ...
The Bible before the Iliad, the Iliad before Shakespeare."
Victor Hugo stated:
"England has two books, the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare, but the Bible made England."
When Mexico's leader
Benito Juarez captured
Maximilian I, Victor Hugo sent a telegram pleading for his life.
Juárez refused and had
Maximillian shot on June 19, 1867.
Over 3 million people attended
Hugo's funeral in Paris in 1885.
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Victor Hugo wrote "The Legends of the Centuries" (1859-1876), an epic poem memorializing how the
Prince Vlad III stopped the Muslim Sultan's
Islamic state from invading into Romania.
In 1459, the Sultan had been demanding payment from Romanian subjects which included an annual tribute of 500 young boys to be handed over to be put into Muslim pederasty -- the sodomy of the Turks.
Vlad's brother Radu had been taken captive and made into a boy-lover of
Sultan Murat II's son, Mehmet II. Radu subsequently converted to Islam and joined the Muslims in invading Romania.
Vlad III was made a captive and put in a Muslim prison where he witnessed their torture technique of impalement.
After escaping and returning to Wallachia,
Vlad III refused the payment of tribute to the Turks and the handing over of any more boys.
In 1461,
Vlad led the Romanian army to cross south of the Danube River where they won several victories against the Sultan near the Black Sea.
In 1462,
the Sultan led 100,000 Muslims into Wallachia.
Vlad's soldiers fought courageously, killing thousands of the Sultan's men.
One night during the battle,
Vlad, who knew the Turkish language, dressed as a Turkish officer and stole into the Sultan's tent to kill him.
The Sultan, suspicious of an attempt on his life, had switched tents allowing another soldier to be stabbed in his place.
Outnumbered,
Vlad retreated, poisoning the wells and burning his own villages so the invading Muslims would have no food and water.
Muslim warriors pursued, but
Vlad escaped capture by nailing the horseshoes on his horse's hooves backwards, so that when he rode in the snow away from his castle, the pursuing Muslims thought he was riding towards it.
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Sultan's army finally reached the capital of Wallachia in June of 1462.
Entering the deserted town of Tirgoviste, they were horrified to see the
"Forest of the Impaled."
Vlad, who had witnessed Muslim torture techniques, impaled 20,000 captives on stakes.
Greek historian Laonikos Chalkokondyles wrote in
Proofs of Histories (c1465):
"The sultan's army entered into the area of the impalements ... About twenty thousand ... had been spitted, quite a sight for the Turks and the sultan himself.
The sultan was seized with amazement and said that it was not possible to deprive of his country a man who had done such great deeds ... The rest of the Turks were dumbfounded when they saw the multitude of men on the stakes."
Witnessing this gruesome spectacle, the Muslim warriors lost the stomach to fight and turned back.
Vlad's successful tactic was to
"out terrorizing the terrorists."
The Sultan's practice was to bribe some of his enemies to not show up on the day of battle, similar to Mohammed's tactics at the
Battle of the Trench, 627 AD, or to capture a king's son as tribute and threaten to kill him if the king showed up on the day of battle.
As a result, the Eastern European kings, led by the King Hungary, formed the
Order of St. George of the Dragon Slayer, with the dragon being the Muslim Sultan.
Vlad was a member of this order. The Romanian pronunciation of dragon was
"dracula."
Vlad "The Impaler" -- a member of the
Order of St. George of the Dragon Slayer - did not bite necks or drink blood -- that was fabricated by the fiction writer Bram Stoker in his 1897 macabre novel
Dracula.
St. George the Dragon Slayer is considered a patron saint in many countries, including:
Georgia, Romania, Bulgaria, Malta, Montenegro, Genoa, Milan, Greece, Beirut, Ethiopia, Portugal, Lithuania, Moscow, Serbia, Brazil, Aragon, Catalonia, and England.
Victor Hugo mentioned
Vlad the Impaler and
Sultan Mourad (son of Murat II) in his epic poem
"Legend of the Ages," 1859-1876 (translated from French):
From Aden
(port in Yemen) and Erzeroum
(port in Greece) he
(the Sultan) made broad pits,
A mass grave of Modon
(city in Greece) overcome, and three clusters of corpses of Aleppo, Bush and Damascus
(piles of dead left by Muslims in cities of Anatolia and Syria);
One day, tie of the arc, he took his son for target,
And killed him;
(Sultans would kill siblings or sons to eliminate rival claims to power.)
Mourad Sultan was invincible;
Vlad, boyard
(prince) of Tarvis, called Beelzebub,
Refused to pay to the Sultan his tribute,
Takes the Turkish embassy
(300 soldiers) and all makes it perish
On thirty stakes, planted at the two edges of a road;
Mourad runs, extreme harvests, barns, attics,
The
boyard (Vlad) beats, makes him twenty thousand prisoners,
Then, around one immense and black battle field,
Builds a very broad floor out of large stones,
And made in the crenels
(openings in stone wall), full with dreadful plaintive cries,
To build and wall the twenty thousand prisoners,
Leaving holes by where one sees their eyes in the shade,
And leaves, after having written on their dark wall:
'Mourad, mason stone, with
Vlad, grower of piles.'
Mourad was believing, Mourad was pious
(Muslim);
He burned hundred convents of Christians in Euboea
(second largest Greek Island),
Where by chance its lightning was one day fallen;
Mourad was forty years the bright murderer
Sabring
(killing with a saber) the world, having God under his clamp;
He had Rhamséion
(tomb of Ramses in Egypt) and Généralife
(Moorish palace in Granada, Spain);
He was the Pasha, the Emperor, the Caliph,
And the priests said: "Allah! Mourad is great."
Victor Hugo's poem ends, but a historical is passed down that the Turks eventually killed
Vlad, cut off his head and sent it to the Sultan.
As
Vlad was such a threat to the Ottoman Empire, the
Sultan reportedly preserved
Vlad's head in a barrel of honey, pulling it out every now and then to make sure he was still dead.
Vlad III's success in stopping the Ottoman Muslims made him a Romanian national hero, similar to:
*Sigismund, King of Hungary fought the Ottoman Turks, 1387-1437, forming the Order of St. George the Dragon-Slayer, or Order of the Dragon, with the dragon being the Muslim Ottoman Sultan.
*Prince Fruzhin fought the Turks in Bulgaria, 1406-1444; King Wladyslaw III fought the Turks in Poland, 1434-1444.
*John Hunyadi fought the Turks in Hungary, 1438-1456.
*George Kastrioti "Skanderbeg" fought the Turks in Albania, Venice, and Naples, 1444-1479.
*Stephen the Great, "Athleta Christi," fought the Turks in Moldovia, 1457-1504.
Victor Hugo wrote in
Histoire d'un crime, 1852:
"An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come."
Ronald Reagan remarked to provincial leaders in Quebec City, Canada, March 18, 1985:
"
Victor Hugo once observed: 'No army can stop an idea whose time has come.'
Well, today the tide of freedom is up, lifting our economies ever higher on new currents of imagination, discovery, and hope for our future ...
A role for government that is less interventionist ... a role that creates a climate in which the entrepreneurial genius of the private sector can do what it does best--namely, create new wealth, new possibilities of employment."
On January 27, 1988,
Reagan addressed the Reserve Officers Association:
"
Victor Hugo once said that 'People do not lack strength; they lack will.'
Well ... the American people looked deep into their souls and proved to the world that they still had the will to be free and the courage to carry the torch of liberty ...
To these brave young men and women, to whom we owe so much, we restored the pride this country has in those who wear the military uniform of the United States of America."
Victor Hugo remarked:
"Courage for the great sorrows of life, and patience for the small ones, and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake."