LES MISÉRABLES

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.