Author: Victor Hugo
Year: 1976 (1862)
Publisher: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy
Language: Polish (translator Krystyna Byczewska)
In 1862,
renowned writer and French politician Victor Hugo was in exile on Guernsey. His
furious attacks on the emperor Napoleon III, most notably in his novella “Napoleon
le petit” ten years earlier, had made it impossible for him to stay in France
and he had had to seek refuge first in Belgium and later the Channel Islands.
During his exile, when he was not firing off bitter and offensive pamphlets in
the general direction of the French autocrat, he had worked on his magnum opus,
“Nedznicy” (known in English under its original French title “Les Misérables” but
sometimes translated as “The Wretched”, “The Miserables” or “The Miserable Ones”).
And this year, 1862, after 17 years in the making, he had crossed the last t
and dotted the last i.
The epic
novel was widely anticipated. Hugo had made no secret of his ambition to write
the novel that would eclipse all novels. His publisher had made great efforts
to build up the suspense long before the manuscript had been sent to the
presses. When it was finally launched, France was in a fever. Hugo, stranded on
his island and eager to know how sales were going, may have initiated the
shortest telegram exchange in world history when he allegedly sent a message to
his publisher with only one sign: “?”. The answer was equally short but
unmistakeable: “!”.
While the
commercial success was indisputable, the critics were less impressed. Some
complained about the flat characters which were considered to be stereotypes
rather than complex representations of true Frenchmen. Some even remarked upon
the fact that they all speak in a similar voice using the same vocabulary and
the same tone. Others criticised Hugo’s choice to idealise rebellion,
prostitution, and robbery. Others still, were discontent with the sentimental
storytelling and exaggerated drama. All in all, the contemporary literary elite
seems to have been disappointed with “Les Misérables”.
Much has
been written elsewhere about “Nedznicy” and I can hardly aspire to bring anything
new to the table, but for my own amusement and hopefully someone else’s benefit,
I have still taken the liberty of sharing some observations. The key points of
this epic novel, which spans across 5 parts, 365 chapters, and over 1,400
pages, are brought to the fore by the repeated and carefully orchestrated
dynamics between four male characters: Jean Valjean, Thernardier, Marius, and
Javert.
Jean
Valjean is an impoverished gardener who is sentenced to hard labour for
stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving children. After he is
released, he wanders around France disillusioned and hapless with no way of
supporting himself other than by theft and smuggling as his status as a former
convict disqualifies him from any honest employment. He grows hardened, bitter,
and vindictive. His encounter with Bishop Myriel changes all of that. The
kindness and patience of the aging clergyman resuscitates the good nature of the
long-suppressed gardener inside the body of the convict and Jean Valjean sets
off to repay the debt of gratitude to the bishop by doing good for the rest of
his life, although his past repeatedly stands in his way.
Thernardier,
like Jean Valjean, is impoverished and defeated by society but chooses a
different path through life. When he and his wife are first introduced to the
reader, they run a small and unsuccessful inn where they try to trick their
guests out of as much cash as they can while they can. Later, after the inn
goes bankrupt, Thernardier re-appears as a con-man, thief, robber, and probably
murderer in his hunt for a fortune. A path Jean Valjean may well have found
himself upon, had it not been for the intervention of bishop Myriel in the
first chapters of the novel.
Marius is
the son of a military officer and Napoleonic war hero, and the maternal
grandson of a wealthy royalist. He is raised by his grandfather and aunt to embrace
the memory of the “ancien régime” but eventually finds out about his father’s
exploits as a Bonapartist and is starstruck. This puts him at odds with his family
and forces him to break with them to go live with the bohemian students in the
poorest parts of Paris.
Javert,
finally, is the law-enforcer who, much like Jean Valjean and Thernardier, hails
from the lowest echelons of the French society, but chooses to cling on to the
law as his guiding star through life, putting aside all ambitions to develop a
personal sense of morality. He is intelligent and fiercely loyal to the letter
of the law and has little interest in investigating the underlying reasons for
people’s actions. During the course of the novel, he rises in rank to become
police inspector and his and Jean Valjean’s paths will cross several times.
In the
course of this novel the fates of these four men become ever more tightly
intertwined, as if in an involuntary death-grip spiralling together through the
vicissitudes of life, and through the clamour of their tumbling existence, Victor
Hugo addresses a variety of issues.
SPOILER
ALERT
Three of
the four men have their roots in the social class of the miserable; the poor,
the uneducated, the outcasts. They represent three different ways to cope with
their fate. These choices will place them at direct collision courses with each
other. The fourth, Marius, gets a taste of poverty after he breaks with his
wealthy grandfather and tries to fend for himself in Paris. He is not at direct
conflict with any of the others and instead interacts with them in a more or
less nonpartisan way.
Notably, there
are two virtues distributed among the four men in various combinations. Jean
Valjean, being a reformed ex-criminal, stands on the wrong side of the law but
on the right side of morality. Javert, the ruthless lawman, caring little about
the people around him and holding on to the letter of the law as his only
precept, stands on the right side of the law but as he will find out, on the
wrong side of morality. Thernardier stands on the wrong side of both being both
a criminal and a cur. Marius, is the one standing on the right side of both law
and morality, as symbolised by his choice to become an attorney as well as a
devoted son, friend, and lover.
Each of
these combinations are repeatedly tested. Jean Valjean is tempted to let
someone else take the punishment for crimes that he had committed. Thernardier
gets a chance to start anew. Marius is torn between his oath to his dead father
and the love of his life. Javert’s faith in the indubitable righteousness of
the law is time and time again challenged by his encounters with morally
superior Jean Valjean.
A fifth
character deserves some special attention: Fantine. Although her function in
the book is to give Jean Valjean a suitable foundation against which to manifest
his moral and physical strength, of all the miserable ones she is, by far, the
most miserable, sacrificing everything for her daughter in a world where women
have no rights and essentially no hope. I find it regrettable that Hugo chose
to portray her as a little daft as I believe that the magnitude and power of
her sacrifice would have exerted an even more crushing effect if the reader had
got to know her as an emotionally balanced and intelligent young woman. On a
more general note, it is noteworthy that the women who appear in the novel,
despite some of them receiving a fair share of attention and space, like Fantine,
Cosette and to a certain extent Eponine, none of them serve any other purpose
but to function as a trigger for the choices and decisions of the male
characters. Presumably, in 1862 this was considered acceptable writing and I
cannot fault Hugo for it, although to a modern reader this seems inadequate.
Chronologically,
Hugo cleverly places the events in the time of the Paris uprising in 1832. Being
a well-known pacifist and defender of peaceful political activism, he does not
allow the dauntless deeds of his characters to amount to a successful violent
revolution. While the story requires an arena for the characters to heroically perish
or valiantly prevail, the historical truth of the uprising in 1832 is that it
was unsuccessful. Nothing in “Nedznicy” is ever solved by violence.
Hugo uses
the sheer size of the story to advertise a wide range of his opinions, sometimes
in somewhat lengthy passages which abridged issues of the novel typically do
away with. These passages typically appear from nowhere like in the final part
where Hugo basically says ‘we’ll now take a break from the exhilarating events on
the revolutionary battlefield to discuss plumbing.’ It is also to be expected
that a novel of these proportions will have some minor inconsistencies like for
instance when Hugo convinces the reader that it makes perfect sense for Jean
Valjean to hide in Paris after having rescued Cosette from the Thernardiers because
only a city like Paris can offer such a dense and diverse population that it is
possible for a person to spend a lifetime there and never be spotted, and yet Jean
Valjean keeps running into both Javert and Thernardier over and over again in
the most unexpected situations throughout the rest of the tale.
Some of the
criticism that Hugo received from contemporary literary figures was probably legitimate.
The novel is highly sentimental and emotional, and some key scenes, including
the ending, are so obviously designed to squeeze tears from the reader that they
risk becoming corny. Having said that, I will readily concede that Eponine’s
death in Marius’ arms put a lump in my throat.
It is not
altogether surprising that “Nedznicy” became a massive and immediate success in
France and much of Europe. Hugo was already a celebrated writer and his name
alone was a sales pitch. But more importantly, his writing touches on issues
that had just begun to interest the reading portion of society. The hardship of
the poor had been taken as a matter of course for a long time but with the
newly established liberalism and increased calls for equality, the poor masses
were beginning to garner the attention from the middle-class. It has to be
placed in the context of a growing social movement. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had published
the Communist Manifesto in 1848 and John Stuart Mill On Liberty in 1859. The
public interest in equality, individual freedom, distribution of wealth, and alleviation
of poverty and despair had spread far enough to form an appreciative audience
for Hugo’s work. Still today, when Les Misérables continues to reap success in
movie theatres and musical stages, many of us continue to find inspiration from
Jean Valjean’s indomitable resolve and rectitude.
