Les Misérables — Commentary

In brief

A man who stole a loaf comes out of the galleys after nineteen years with a yellow passport and a hatred of everyone, and a bishop gives him the silver he has just tried to steal. Everything else in these 365 chapters, the factory, the convent, the sewer, the barricade, tests what that gift was worth. Les Misérables is a thriller, a history of France from Waterloo to 1832, a treatise on poverty and a religious book written by a man who distrusted priests.

Hugo’s title means both the wretched and the despicable. His claim is that the first turn into the second by a process that can be described and stopped. His preface says so in one sentence: as long as “ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Misérables cannot fail to be of use”.

The argument

The novel has two theories of a human being and gives each a man. Javert holds that a person is what his record says. Valjean is the proof that he is not. The law in this book is not stupid or even especially cruel; it is exact, and exactness is the trouble. Valjean’s crime was “having broken a pane of glass and taken a loaf of bread” (1.2.6), five years for that and fourteen for trying to escape, and each step followed correctly from the one before. The bishop answers with an act no ledger can enter: “It is your soul that I buy from you” (1.2.12). He has no way of knowing it will hold.

It nearly does not hold. Hugo’s shrewdest touch comes one chapter after the most famous scene in the book, when Valjean, stunned and weeping, robs a small boy of a forty-sou piece (1.2.13). Grace does not change him at once; it lets him see what he has become. The rest of his life is a series of relapses refused: the tempest over Champmathieu, when he could stay safe and rich by letting another man take his name (1.7.3); the moment he saves the young man who is taking Cosette from him; the confession to Marius that nobody has asked for (5.7.1).

Hugo then turns the bishop’s gift on Javert, and this is where the novel is most original. Spared at the barricade with the words “You are free” (5.1.19), the policeman cannot absorb it. He can see “A benevolent malefactor” and has no column to put him in. Hugo calls what follows “the derailment of a soul” (5.4.1), and he gives it comic exactness: before he walks to the river, Javert writes his superiors a memo of practical suggestions headed “A FEW OBSERVATIONS FOR THE GOOD OF THE SERVICE”. Mercy saves one man and destroys the other, because only one of them had room for it.

The social argument runs alongside and is harder-edged than its reputation. “The guilty one is not the person who has committed the sin, but the person who has created the shadow,” says the bishop (1.1.4). The novel’s most repellent character, Thénardier, is not excused by this, and he prospers to the end. Hugo’s last bitter joke is that Marius pays him off, and “With Marius’ money, Thénardier set up as a slave-dealer” (5.9.4).

The shape of the book

Five volumes, each named for a person or a place: Fantine, Cosette, Marius, Saint-Denis, Jean Valjean. They divide into 48 books and 365 chapters. The story is easy to carry in the head. Valjean is converted, rises as a mayor, gives it up to save a stranger and takes on a dead woman’s child. She grows up, Marius falls in love with her, and the rising of June 1832 pulls every character to one street. Valjean carries Marius out through the sewers, Javert lets him go, the lovers marry, and Valjean dies of having been made unnecessary.

The plot depends on coincidence in a way no later realist would allow. Thénardier turns up everywhere: robbing the wounded on the field of Waterloo (2.1.19), starving Cosette at Montfermeil, setting his trap in the garret next to Marius (3.8.20), and holding the sewer key (5.3.8). The man Thénardier robs takes him for a rescuer, and Marius inherits the debt. This is not carelessness. The plot is a web of obligations meant to feel providential: nobody in the book can be disentangled from anybody else.

The digressions

The nineteen chapters on Waterloo open the second volume without warning: “Last year (1861), on a beautiful May morning, a traveller, the person who is telling this story, was coming from Nivelles” (2.1.1). Then come convents, the Paris street child, slang, the politics of Louis-Philippe, and a history of the sewers placed just as the reader is desperate to know whether Marius will live.

They are the book’s argument, not a holiday from it. Waterloo sets the story in a world where history has just changed hands: “Waterloo is a battle of the first order, won by a captain of the second” (2.1.16), and the one word Hugo honours in it is the obscenity of a general facing the guns (2.1.15). The slang chapters insist that the speech of thieves is worth a scholar’s time (4.7.1). The sewer pages establish what the descent will mean before Valjean makes it: “The sewer is the conscience of the city” (5.2.2). Hugo is making the lowest things in France admissible to literature by treating them at length, in the high style. The tedium is real in places. So is the effect: by the end nothing and nobody has been left outside the book.

The most remarkable interruption opens the fifth volume. Before the climax of his barricade of 1832, Hugo stops to describe two others, from “the fatal insurrection of June, 1848” (5.1.1). He had been on the other side of those: as a deputy he helped to suppress them. He sets down plainly that a people can rise against its own republic, and that the fault lies with “those who reign” more than “those who suffer”.

The voice

Nobody else sounds like this. The narrator is a public orator, a preacher and a poet who has lost patience with moderation, working in antithesis and piling up nouns until a sentence becomes a procession. “There is a spectacle more grand than the sea; it is heaven: there is a spectacle more grand than heaven; it is the inmost recesses of the soul” (1.7.3). Flaubert hated this, and on a bad page you can see why. But the same voice can stop dead. Éponine’s last words are about the most understated in the book, “I believe that I was a little bit in love with you” (4.14.6), and Gavroche, shot while singing and collecting cartridges, gets one sentence after the second bullet: “This grand little soul had taken its flight” (5.1.15).

His real gift is for the image that thinks: Valjean under a cart, the elephant of the Bastille used as a shelter for street children (4.6.2), the bishop’s candlesticks at the deathbed. The novel works by recurring pictures as much as by reasoning.

The people

Jean Valjean

A peasant of enormous strength who learns to read in prison and thinks slowly and without vanity. His last act of self-punishment, withdrawing from Cosette’s house step by step, is hard to read (5.8.2). His tragedy is that his one human love is possessive, and he knows it.

Javert

“Javert had been born in prison, of a fortune-teller, whose husband was in the galleys” (1.5.5). He polices the class he came from, and his rectitude is real: he asks to be dismissed when he thinks he has wronged his mayor (1.6.2). He is the book’s honest man and its villain.

Bishop Myriel

Fourteen chapters of goodness before Valjean even appears are a risk, and Hugo saves them by letting the bishop be corrected. A dying old revolutionary out-argues him and he kneels for the man’s blessing (1.1.10). His creed is two words, “Love each other”, and when a senator calls that nonsense he says the soul should shut itself up in it “as the pearl in the oyster” (1.1.14).

Fantine and Cosette

Fantine is the novel’s case study, taken in order: abandoned, dismissed, her hair sold, her “two upper” teeth sold (1.5.10), then the streets. Hugo’s indignation is genuine and her dying is staged for tears. Her daughter gets a harrowing childhood, including one of the great scenes of fear in fiction, the walk into the woods for water (2.3.5), and then an adolescence of almost nothing. Adult Cosette is the book’s weakest creation.

Marius

A young man of real principle and poor judgement, who changes his politics on discovering his father (3.3.4) and who is wrong about Valjean until nearly too late.

The Friends of the ABC

Enjolras, severe and beautiful, whose only mistress, he mutters, is “Patria” (5.1.14), and the drunk Grantaire, who believes in nothing but Enjolras and wakes from a stupor to die beside him: “Do you permit it?” (5.1.23).

How it was made

The book took about seventeen years with a long gap in the middle. Hugo had been gathering material long before: The Last Day of a Condemned Man (1829) and Claude Gueux (1834) had already taken up the death penalty and a theft driven by hunger, and he visited the prison at Toulon in 1839. He began the novel in 1845, a peer of France and a member of the establishment, under the working title Les Misères. In February 1846, his notebooks record, he saw a man being led away by gendarmes for stealing a loaf. He stopped work in February 1848 when revolution broke out, and in the years that followed went from suppressing the June rising to opposing Louis-Napoleon, and into exile after the coup of December 1851.

He picked the manuscript up again on Guernsey at the end of 1860, and noted in it that here the peer had broken off and the exile had carried on. The later layers, including most of the great digressions, are the work of a republican with nothing to lose. He went to see the battlefield of Waterloo in 1861 and finished there, in June. Real models fed the characters: Bishop de Miollis of Digne for Myriel, and something of Eugène-François Vidocq, the convict turned police chief, for both Valjean and Javert. The first part came out in Brussels on 30 March 1862 and in Paris on 3 April, after a publicity campaign run by the Belgian publisher Albert Lacroix.

Readers and critics

The public bought it; the writers mostly did not. Flaubert found “neither truth nor greatness” in it. Baudelaire praised it in print and told his mother it was “immonde et inepte”, a filthy and stupid book. The sharpest response was Lamartine’s. He objected that the novel made the fortunate too afraid and the unfortunate too hopeful, which is a compliment of a kind: he at least took it for a political act. The story that Hugo telegraphed his publisher “?” and received “!” is too neat to be sure of.

The readers Hugo addressed in his letter to his Italian publisher, printed at the back of this edition, were all nations, including “Republics which have slaves as well as to Empires which have serfs” (letter to Daelli). The test came quickly. In 1863 and 1864 a Richmond firm issued an edition for the Confederacy, based on the American translation and with passages on slavery removed, and Lee’s soldiers read it widely; the joke that they called themselves Lee’s Miserables survives in several versions. Later critical interest has rested less on the plot than on the ambition: Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Temptation of the Impossible (2004) is a novelist’s long reading of it, and Graham Robb’s biography of Hugo (1997) is the best account of the man.

Afterlives

Raymond Bernard’s film of 1934, with Harry Baur, runs four and a half hours; Richard Boleslawski’s of 1935 has Fredric March and Charles Laughton; Jean-Paul Le Chanois’s of 1958 stars Jean Gabin. The Boublil and Schönberg musical began as a French concept album and Paris staging in 1980, reached London in Cameron Mackintosh’s production in 1985, and has effectively replaced the novel for most people who think they know it. Tom Hooper filmed it in 2012.

The musical keeps the love triangle and the barricade. It loses the digressions, and with them the argument that all this has causes. It also leaves many audiences believing the barricade is the French Revolution. The most pointed recent answer is Ladj Ly’s film of 2019, which uses none of Hugo’s story, sets itself among police and teenagers in present-day Montfermeil, and ends on a line from the book about bad cultivators: “there are no such things as bad plants or bad men” (1.5.3).

How to read it

Know which text you are in. This commentary quotes Isabel Hapgood’s complete translation of 1887, all 365 chapters. It is free and faithful, somewhat stiff, and its Gutenberg file prints a dash for Cambronne’s word with an editor’s note giving it. If you are buying a copy, Christine Donougher (Penguin, 2013) and Julie Rose (Vintage, 2008) are complete and modern, as is the Fahnestock and MacAfee revision of Wilbour (Signet, 1987). Norman Denny’s Penguin version is readable but moves two long digressions to appendices.
Do not skip Waterloo on principle. It is a good battle story, and in the final chapter the plot quietly comes back.
Allow yourself the convent and the slang. Those are the slowest stretches. Skim them if you must, but read the sewer history, which pays off almost at once.
Stop at the Tempest. “A Tempest in a Skull” (1.7.3) is the book’s centre as a study of thought, and Baudelaire singled it out.
Read to the very end, after the barricade. The last pages, about an old man being politely dropped, are the most modern in it.

Victor Hugo, The Last Day of a Condemned Man (1829). The short, furious first draft of the book’s anger, told by a man with hours to live.
Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma (1839). Waterloo as confusion seen by a boy who cannot find it: the opposite of Hugo’s view from above.
Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot (1835). Another great convict, Vautrin, who draws the opposite lesson about society.
Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education (1869). The 1848 that Hugo agonises over, written by his harshest critic without a single speech to the reader.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (1866). The crime, the conscience and the policeman again, in a smaller room.