by Victor Hugo
Hugo suggests a balance of these two extreme solutions, egalitarian socialism and mercantilism.
Thus he characteristically deconstructs naively categorical views that risk blocking compromise and solution. He contests the dichotomies of middle class and lower class, of police and criminals. He argues that the bourgeoisie is simply the materially satisfied portion of “the people,” and that on the other hand the mob can betray the best interest of “the people” through unthinking violence.
Aside from his steadfast opposition to capital punishment, Hugo offered no practical solutions for reforming the police, the courts, or the prisons. He merely tries to stimulate our moral sensibilities, as Fantine’s misadventures and her selfless love for her child stimulated the moral sensibilities of Jean Valjean. Hugo intends the reformed convict to provide a model for us as Valjean comes to know God, whom Hugo equates with conscience. His message comes from the Gospels: “Inasmuch as you have done unto the least of these my brethren, so you have done unto me” (Matthew 25:40). At length, Hugo explicitly compares the redeemed Valjean to Christ (Grant, pp.158—176, and Brombert, pp. 86—139).
As a symbolic representative of the working class enslaved by the former monarchy, Jean Valjean had been too debased and brutalized, Hugo believed, to promote historical progress through militant political action. But his destiny prefigures the eventual reconciliation of social classes: the ex-convict presides over the marriage of Cosette—the proletarian daughter of a prostitute—and Marius, the aristocrat adopted and cherished by the bourgeois Gillenormand. Cosette herself does not participate in or even become clearly aware of the insurrection. We must await the next generation that includes Cosette’s and Marius’s children to witness the full embodiment of the spirit of the new France. The courageous street urchin Gavroche, killed fighting on the barricades, foreshadowed the flowering of this spirit.
Hugo chose the now-forgotten uprising of 1832 rather than the glorious revolution of 1830 as the historical crux of the novel because he had been struck by the great historian Louis Blanc’s account of the 1832 worker-student insurrection. Hugo was less concerned with creating a practical manual for revolutionaries, or with celebrating any particular liberal, historical triumph than with providing a symbolic illustration of the French people struggling toward the light. Hugo thought that minor events as well as major ones could reveal the intentions of Providence. The self-sacrifice of Enjolras and his friends would serve to inspire and mobilize others. Like Bertolt Brecht a century later, Hugo does not want to serve up a cathartic vision of history: he prefers to imply that much work remains to be done.
Critics have generally been relatively unaware of how thoroughly realism and idealism in Hugo’s fictions are interconnected. He is not vapidly optimistic; his concept of Providence always represents a dimension of human responsibility that can alter outcomes. Hugo’s moral complexity appears when he describes how Jean Valjean learns how to read and write while in prison. Although Hugo associates education with the light that dispels darkness, he acknowledges that education can empower the evildoer. Jean Valjean “felt that to increase his knowledge was to strengthen his hatred. Under certain circumstances, instruction and enlightenment may serve as rallying-points for evil” (p. 53). But Thénardier, on the contrary,
was one of those double natures who sometimes appear among us without our knowledge, and disappear without ever being known, because destiny has shown us but one side of them. It is the fate of many men to live thus half submerged. In a quiet ordinary situation, Thénardier had all that is necessary to make—we do not say to be—what passes for an honest tradesman, a good citizen. At the same time, under certain circumstances, under the operation of certain occurrences exciting his baser nature, he had in him all that was necessary to be a villain. He was a shopkeeper in which lay hidden a monster (p. 257).
Even the arch-villain of the novel might not have had to become irremediably evil, but, as Jean Valjean had within himself the potential for redemption and saintliness, Thénardier’s soul contained seeds of the demonic.
[He and his wife] were of those dwarfish natures, which, if perchance heated by some sullen fire, easily become monstrous. The woman was at heart a brute; the man a blackguard: both in the highest degree capable of that hideous species of progress which can be made towards evil. There are souls which, crablike, crawl continually towards darkness, going back in life rather than advancing in it; using what experience they have to increase their deformity; growing worse without ceasing, and becoming steeped more and more thoroughly in an intensifying wickedness. Such souls were this man and this woman (p. 93).
Although many characters in Les Misérables, including Tholomyès (part I, book three) and Monsieur Batambois, who is explicitly characterized as a provincial version of Tholomyès (part I, book five, chapter 12), seem to damn themselves through their fatuous complacency, which as they age hardens into indifferent cruelty, they illustrate a mainly passive or heedless evil, the banality of evil. Hugo demonstrates in his depiction of the Thénardier couple a dramatic evolution toward a calculated evil. By creating such characters, Hugo counteracts whatever tendencies toward vapid optimism one may find in a moral universe where even Satan might be saved (the Pelagian Heresy: in addition to Les Contemplations, see La Fin de Satan).
The Great French Novel
Why do we still read Les Misérables? Not too many years ago, it was added to the required reading list for the agrégation in French literature, the competitive state examination that qualifies teachers at advanced levels. Its moral, social, and political messages remain pertinent to many of the situations we confront. But above all, Les Misérables is the unrecognized “Great French Novel,” analogous to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I do not mean that it is necessarily the greatest French novel: one might prefer Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, just as in the literature of other languages, one might prefer Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka’s The Trial, or Gunther Grass’s The Tin Drum. The social, moral, and intellectual range of Hugo’s characters far exceeds what we find in all these other great authors, whose social density is nonetheless noteworthy. Beyond that impressive achievement, Les Misérables in many respects conforms to an ideal type, an influential theoretical entity whose traits are realized only in part by any concrete example.
The Great National Novel is capacious: it covers substantial amounts of time and space. It contains many vivid characters belonging to varied social conditions: it is not intimist in its setting, not a drawing-room adventure limited to family, friends, and courtship. It tells its sprawling story in a traditional mode, dominated by the controlling perspective of an omniscient author who, despite flashbacks and digressions, generally proceeds steadily forward, following the protagonists as they age. It usually deploys la grande histoire (“big” history, revolutions and wars) in the background, although the main characters, affected as they are by political dramas, usually are not leading players in them. It implies some connection between individual and national destinies. By the time he wrote Les Misérables, Hugo had had more direct political experience at the highest levels of government than had many other writers of his time. Very often the Great National Novel suggests the looming presence of the supernatural, hidden but at times glimpsed behind the scenes, or during “second states” of consciousness such as dreams, drug experiences, visions, hallucinations, illness, passion, or prayer. Hugo began writing Les Misérables shortly after spending several years of evenings at mystical seances, and after elaborating the religious system, based on punitive and redemptive reincarnation, that he finally made explicit in his visionary poem La Fin de Satan. The Great National Novel usually relegates artistic self-consciousness to the background: it does not become a Künstlerroman—the portrait of the artist as a young man—nor does it foreground the cleverne
ss of the writer’s craft by radical experiments in point of view, plot structure, stylistic innovations, or characterization. Instead, the Great National Novel quietly insinuates the mature author’s hard-won wisdom through a series of aphorisms, or pithy, penetrating generalizations about human nature. These maxims demonstrate the author’s ability to synthesize many experiences. The digressions are miniature essays on varied subjects—authors of the Great National Novel are born essayists and amateur philosophers—that aim to instruct the audience. In contrast to the Self-Conscious Novel (Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot), digressions do not serve to tease the expectant reader by delaying the forward progress of the story, but to establish the writer’s authority as a portraitist of a wide world by giving glimpses into his or her encyclopedic knowledge.
The Influence of Les Misérables
In the late nineteenth century, Les Misérables anticipated both the naturalistic movement and its opposite pole, the Catholic Renaissance. Whereas the realistic novel typically deals with the middle class, Naturalism deals with the working class and with the underworld. Repetitious, menial labor is difficult to dramatize in a novel; but Hugo devotes ample space to describing members of the working class at play (Fantine and her friends), and the criminal class at work or trying to escape from the police. In the Paris scenes, he depicts the grisettes (young proletarian women who wore gray smocks at their jobs, and who were stereotypically easy targets for seduction). Notably in the chapter “L‘Année 1817,” he emphasizes the inequities of their sexual exploitation by middle-class men in a direct way that Zola, with his sexual insecurities, could not (compare Zola’s Nana, 1880, depicting female sexuality as a monstrous source of social corruption). Hugo has not yet received due credit for anticipating the naturalist movement in the chapters devoted to Fantine’s life both in Paris and in her hometown.
The Catholic Renaissance, which deplored Hugo’s bombastic prophetic rhetoric and his pretensions to revealing a new religion, also derived considerable indirect inspiration from Hugo. Like Claudel, who detested him and made a point of saying so, like Mauriac, or like Bernanos, from thirty to ninety years after him, Hugo in 1862 dramatizes his heroes’ relentless pursuit by conscience, meaning our instinctive awareness of God.
Hugo’s appeal to posterity depends not only on the awe-inspiring range and depth of his masterpiece, Les Misérables, not only on his inspiring, idealistic visions of political and social progress, but also on the acute visual sense that put him well ahead of his time, but that can be captured and reinforced by modern media such as film and television. His extraordinary visual imagination is both impressionistic—sensitive to colors, including colored shadows, and to changes in light—and cinematic, aware of varying angles of vision and shifting vantage points. It involves an exceptional responsiveness to both light and motion. One can find striking proof of this in Hugo’s correspondence. He does not write interesting letters; he wrote letters while resting from his continuous periods of creative work on most days, on his feet in front of his writing stand from 5 A.M. to noon, with a cup of hot chocolate nearby. In letters, he cares more about making contact with others than about thinking of precisely what he has to say. But the one interesting letter in the first volume of his correspondence describes his first ride on a train, and his fascination with how the landscape blurs and flickers as he passes it at speeds far greater than he had ever experienced before. Compare the description of what Jean Valjean sees on his carriage ride to denounce himself at the court in Arras (pp. 157—161). Notre-Dame de Paris provides even better examples. Hugo anticipates Claude Monet’s famous series of paintings of the same subject when he evokes the changing light on the façade of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Following this passage, he executes the verbal equivalent of a zoom-in shot to approach a balcony on which an engagement party has gathered. Earlier, the description circling Paris from the top of the cathedral towers (“A Bird‘s-Eye View of Paris”) anticipates the cinematic technique of the traveling shot. At the beginning of the twentieth century, polls rated Hugo as the greatest nineteenth-century French poet, but his gifts as a storyteller in his plays and novels were fully acknowledged on an international scale only when Les Misérables was produced as the first full-length feature film in France in 1909; within a few years Albert Capellani of Pathé and André Antoine of Le Théâtre-Libre produced a noteworthy series of silent films of Hugo’s works: Les Misérables (1912), the play Marie Tudor (1912), and the novels Quatrevingt-treize (1914) and Les Travailleurs de la mer (1918). Lon Chaney’s celebrated performance as Quasimodo in W. Worsley’s film The Hunchback of Notre-Dame de Paris (1924) consolidated these triumphs. More recently, television versions of the plays Les Burgraves (1968) and Torquemada (1976) were triumphs. Today (November 2002), Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schoenberg’s stage version of Les Misérables (1980), inspired by the rock opera Jesus-Christ Superstar, is still running in New York and on tour in the United States. It eclipsed the record number of international productions of a musical, previously held by Cats (see Porter, Victor Hugo, pp.152—156).
We cannot fully understand the novel Les Misérables by watching film, television, or staged versions. The flawed humanity that makes Valjean’s ambiguous rehabilitation and Javert’s anguished forgiveness of him possible is lacking from the “event theater” stage, where two forces must contend in stark opposition. And the successive political and moral awakenings of the young hero Marius cannot be represented in a musical. The same leveling affects lesser characters. Thénardier onstage is merely comic, a grotesque counterpart to the sublimity of self-sacrifice and young love, whereas in the novel he degenerates morally, while more than once unwittingly serving the designs of Providence. Hugo’s moments of blatant sentimentality and melodramatic contrasts of pure good with pure evil appeal to some readers and repel others, but tempt both camps to overlook his true complexity. Whereas Les Miz rushes to judgment, Les Misérables urges us to suspend judgment, to ponder the profundity of character, history, and Providence.
Chronology
Part I (“Fantine”), book two (“The Fall”), chapter 6 mentions that Jean Valjean was 25 when, at some indeterminate date, he began supporting his widowed sister and her seven children. During the hard winter of 1795, when he had no work, he stole a loaf of bread for them, and was immediately arrested. He was imprisoned in 1796, and released after 19 years, in 1815. Cosette is born around 1817. Hugo says Jean Valjean is 50 and Cosette is 8 when he rescues her. The insurrection described at the end of part IV and the beginning of part V occurs in 1832. Cosette is 16 or 17. She and Marius marry a year or two later, and Jean Valjean probably dies within the year—no later than 1835. Hugo says he is 80 then, which would mean he had been born in 1755, but it sounds as if he had managed to support his sister and her children only for two or three years, which would make him in his late 60s in 1835. Hugo has aged him artificially, as a melodramatic way of emphasizing his emotional suffering when he loses Cosette to Marius.
Money
Hugo’s novel has many realistic elements, notably the importance of money. Precise sums are frequently mentioned, and nearly all the characters must earn, beg, or steal money in order to live. Here are the units of currency referred to in the text:
3 deniers (“the widow’s mite”) made a liard. 240 of them made a franc.
5 centimes or 4 liards made a sou.
20 sous made a franc (also referred to as a livre).
3 francs made an écu.
20 francs made a gold Napoléon or Louis (both were in circulation).
Because the relative cost of items differed greatly from their cost today, 1 franc—the most common unit of currency—equaled between 5 and 30 U.S. dollars in today’s purchasing power. Rent was cheap; clothing, transportation, and food were expensive (farms had no tractors or combines; flour was ground in mills by water power; each loaf of bread was made by hand). A worker who earned less than 1 franc a day was being severely exploited. The Thénardiers’ rent in the Gorbeau tenemen
t is 20 francs a quarter (7 a month), the equivalent of $200 a month. Bishop Myriel makes 15,000 francs a year (say, $150,000) with free lodging, but gives all but 1,500 to the poor. Jean Valjean accumulates a fortune of 600,000 francs in manufacturing, making Cosette a multimillionaire. The formidable Patron-Minette gang is happy to risk six to ten years’ imprisonment in a double kidnapping-torture-ransom scheme, in exchange for a chance at 500 francs apiece.
Napoléon’s Name
Napoléon’s last name becomes highly significant in this novel. As First Consul and then as Emperor, he ruled from 1799 till 1814, with another three months (Les Cent Jours) after his escape from exile in 1815 until he was defeated at Waterloo. Louis XVIII took over as King in 1814, and was succeeded by Charles X from 1824 to 1830. After Charles X was ousted by a revolution, he was replaced by the constitutional monarch Louis Philippe from 1830 to 1848. Those who supported the institution of the monarchy, and particularly those who believed in the divine right of kings to rule, always said Buonaparte (pronouncing the final e as an extra syllable) to emphasize the Emperor’s foreign origins (he was born in Corsica before that island became French) and therefore to imply his illegitimacy. Those who say Bonaparte in the French manner, without pronouncing the final e, are already suspect to the legitimists; and those who say L’ Empéreur, betraying lingering admiration and nostalgia for his grandeur, label themselves as enemies of the throne and the church. Thus the presiding judge (under a monarchist regime) at the Champmathieu trial, although he admires Monsieur Madeleine, issues an order for his arrest because the mayor said “Bonaparte,” showing that his political convictions are left of center. And Fauchelevant, speaking with the Mother Superior in the convent, catches himself just in time as he is about to refer to Napoleon as “L‘Empéreur.” Fortunately for him and Jean Valjean, his slip “L’Emp-” goes unnoticed.
