Les Miserables (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (139 page)

In the mid-1990s a suite of film adaptations appeared, perhaps prompted by the hugely popular musical. Writer and director Claude Lelouch’s brilliant 1995 retelling of the novel is a layered epic that takes Hugo’s novel as its central reference point, much in the same way that Michael Cunningham’s novel
The Hours
draws on Virginia Woolf’s
Mrs. Dalloway.
Set during the Nazi occupation of France, Lelouch’s
Les Misérables
focuses on Henri Fortin, an illiterate boxer turned furniture mover who comes to see parallels between himself and Jean Valjean. The film moves between Fortin’s tale, the story of his father, and scenes from Hugo’s novel. Fortin is played by legendary French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, now aged and creased, and convincingly miserable; he also plays Fortin’s father and Jean Valjean. Belmondo’s exemplary performances and Lelouch’s skillfully woven cinematic tapestry unify all three stories, rendering them incarnations of one story: the common man’s struggle against the implacable powers that be.

Director Bille August
(Pelle the Conqueror and Smilla’s Sense of Snow)
remains strictly faithful to Hugo’s text and sets his 1998 film of
Les Misérables
in early-nineteenth-century France. This sweeping costume drama, which stars Liam Neeson as Valjean, avoids political overtones and concentrates instead on the adversarial relationship between the persevering Valjean and Geoffrey Rush’s icy Javert, characters who are more similar than different. The all-star cast includes Uma Thurman as a pallid Fantine, Claire Danes as Cosette, and Hans Matheson as Marius.

In 2000 director Josée Dayan, screenwriter Didier Decoin, and actor Gérard Depardieu collaborated in a faithful, made-for-television adaptation. The three talents, who had collaborated on
The Count of Monte Cristo
and a bio-pic of Balzac, convey the grit, grimness, and grime of pre-Revolution street life. The film stars Depardieu as Jean Valjean and John Malkovich as his nemesis Javert.

COMMENTS & QUESTIONS

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Victor Hugo’s
Les Misérables
through a variety of voices and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

Fantine,
the first of five novels under the general title of
Les Misérables,
has produced an impression all over Europe, and we already hear of nine translations. It has evidently been “engineered” with immense energy by the French publisher. Translations have appeared in numerous languages almost simultaneously with its publication in Paris. Every resource of bookselling ingenuity has been exhausted in order to make every human being who can read think that the salvation of his body and soul depends on his reading
Les Misérables.
The glory and the obloquy of the author have both been forced into aids to a system of puffing at which Barnum himself would stare amazed, and confess that he had never conceived of a “dodge” in which literary genius and philanthropy could be allied with the grossest bookselling humbug. But we trust that, after our American show man has recovered from his first shock of surprise, he will vindicate the claim of America to be considered the “first nation on the face of the earth,” by immediately offering Dickens a hundred thousand dollars to superintend his exhibition of dogs, and Florence Nightingale a half a mil lion to appear at his exhibition of babies.

The French bookseller also piqued the curiosity of the universal public by a story that Victor Hugo wrote
Les Misérables
twenty-five years ago, but, being bound to give a certain French publisher all his works after his first cel ebrated novel, he would not delight the world with this product of his genius until he had forced the said publisher into a compliance with his terms. The publisher shrank aghast from the sum which the author demanded, and this sum was yearly increased in amount, as years rolled away and as Victor Hugo’s reputation grew more splendid. At last the publisher died, probably from vexation, and Victor Hugo was free. Then he condescended to allow the present publisher to issue
Les Misérables
on the payment of eighty thousand dollars. It is not surprising, that, to get his money back, this publisher has been compelled to resort to tricks which exceed everything known in the whole history of literature....

From the bare abstract, the story does not seem to promise much pleasure to novel-readers, yet it is all alive with the fiery genius of Victor Hugo, and the whole representation is so intense and vivid that it is impossible to escape from the fascination it exerts over the mind. Few who take the book up will leave it until they have read it through. It is morbid to a degree that no eminent English author, not even Lord Byron, ever approached; but its morbid elements are so combined with sentiments abstractly Christian that it is calculated to wield a more pernicious influence than Byron ever exerted. Its tendency is to weaken that abhorrence of crime which is the great shield of most of the virtue which society possesses, and it does this by attempting to prove that society itself is responsible for crimes it cannot prevent, but can only punish. To legislators, to Magdalen societies, to prison-reformers, it may suggest many useful hints; but, considered as a passionate romance, appealing to the sympathies of the ordinary readers of novels, it will do infinitely more harm than good. The bigotries of virtue are better than the charities of vice. On the whole, therefore, we think that Victor Hugo, when he stood out twenty-five years for his price, did a service to the human race. The great value of his new gospel consisted in its not being published. We wish that another quarter of a century had elapsed before it found a bookseller capable of venturing on so reckless a speculation.

—from
The Atlantic Monthly
(July 1862)

 

In
Les Misérables
... there is perhaps the nearest approach to literary restraint that Hugo has ever made: there is here certainly the ripest and most easy development of his powers. It is the moral intention of this great novel to awaken us a little, if it may be—for such awakenings are unpleasant—to the great cost of this society that we enjoy and profit by, to the labor and sweat of those who support the litter, civilization, in which we ourselves are so smoothly carried forward. People are all glad to shut their eyes; and it gives them a very simple pleasure when they can forget that our laws commit a million individual injustices, to be once roughly just in the general; that the bread that we eat, and the quiet of the family, and all that embellishes life and makes it worth having, have to be purchased by death—by the deaths of animals, and the deaths of men wearied out with labor, and the deaths of those criminals called tyrants and revolutionaries, and the deaths of those revolutionaries called criminals. It is to something of all this that Victor Hugo wishes to open men’s eyes in
Les Miserables;
and this moral lesson is worked out in masterly coincidence with the artistic effect. The deadly weight of civilization to those who are below presses sensibly on our shoulders as we read. A sort of mocking indignation grows upon us as we find Society rejecting, again and again, the services of the most serviceable; setting Jean Valjean to pick oakum, casting Galileo into prison, even crucifying Christ. There is a haunting and horrible sense of insecurity about the book. The terror we thus feel is a terror for the machinery of law, that we can hear tearing, in the dark, good and bad between its formidable wheels with the iron stolidity of all machinery, human or divine. This terror incarnates itself sometimes and leaps horribly out upon us; as when the crouching mendicant looks up, and Jean Valjean, in the light of the street lamp, recognizes the face of the detective; as when the lantern of the patrol flashes suddenly through the darkness of the sewer; or as when the fugitive comes forth at last at evening, by the quiet riverside, and finds the police there also, waiting stolidly for vice and stolidly satisfied to take virtue instead. The whole book is full of oppression, and full of prejudice, which is the great cause of oppression. We have the prejudices of M. Gillenormand, the prejudices of Marius, the prejudices in revolt that defend the barricade, and the throned prejudices that carry it by storm. And then we have the admirable but ill-written character of Javert, the man who had made a religion of the police, and would not survive the moment when he learned that there was another truth outside the truth of laws; a just creation, over which the reader will do well to ponder.

With so gloomy a design this great work is still full of life and light and love. The portrait of the good Bishop is one of the most agreeable things in modern literature. The whole scene at Montfermeil is full of the charm that Hugo knows so well how to throw about children. Who can forget the passage where Cosette, sent out at night to draw water, stands in admiration before the illuminated booth and the huckster behind “lui faisait un peu l‘effet d’etre le Père éternal?” The pathos of the forlorn sabot laid trustingly by the chimney in expectation of the Santa Claus that was not, takes us fairly by the throat; there is nothing in Shakespeare that touches the heart more nearly. The loves of Cosette and Marius are very pure and pleasant, and we cannot refuse our affection to Gavroche, although we may make a mental reservation of our profound disbelief in his existence. Take it for all in all, there are few books in the world that can be compared with it.

—from
Cornhill Magazine
(August 1874)

Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables” represents the first attempt in fiction to show that if sin dims the divine image, conscience disturbs the soul with sore discontent, while Christ never despairs of making bad men good, but toils ever on until publican and outcast alike stand forth, clothed in every courage, every heroism, and every virtue, being of goodness all compact.

—from
Great Books as Life-Teachers: Studies of
Character Real and Ideal
(1898)

It has always been impossible for [Hugo‘s] English and American critics to find common ground. Matthew Arnold, for example, could say of him, in that apparently casual and parenthetical manner which veils some of his most audacious assumptions, that if the French were more at home in the higher regions of poetry “they would perceive with us that M. Victor Hugo, for instance, or Sir Walter Scott, may be a great romance-writer, and may yet be by no means a great poet.” In the eyes of Mr. Swinburne, Hugo was “the greatest Frenchman of all time,” “the greatest poet of the century,” “the spiritual sovereign of the nineteenth century,”—no less! Mr. Dowden, in an eloquent and sympathetic essay, considers chiefly Victor Hugo’s public aspect,—his relation to politics, his patriotism, his character as a representative Frenchman. Throughout at least the early half of Hugo’s career a large part of our public knew him as a dramatist and romancer almost exclusively. And yet, of the eminent French writers who, in this hundredth year from his birth, are estimating his place and importance in their literature, it is unlikely that many will take his romances into very serious account, or treat his dramas as if they possessed much vital and intrinsic excellence. Already, too, as in the case of Coleridge, it is being said of Victor Hugo that his value lies in the innovations which he made and the impulse he gave to other writers as much as in the power or the beauty of his works.

—from
The Atlantic Monthly
(February 1902)

1.
Les Misérables
has many coincidental encounters among the characters, all of which have large and dramatic consequences. Do these coincidences shake our faith in Hugo’s aesthetic integrity, or do they work in a way that redeems it?

2. Realism is a method; it creates the illusion of a fidelity of word to thing, of a direct relation between the novel’s words and observable reality. But realism is not the only way of getting at the truth—think, for example, of Franz Kafka’s metaphorical writing. Is Hugo a realist, an occasional realist, or something else?

3. Does Hugo strive to represent observable reality or to present fictional events that illustrate a system of religious belief?

4. Would the novel have been more satisfying if Hugo had allowed Jean Valjean to live?

5. What is the source of evil in Hugo’s world? Human nature? Bad social arrangements and laws? Accident? Some supernatural agent?

FOR FURTHER READING

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.
New York: Random House, 1995.

The Last Day of a Condemned Man.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Napoleon the Little.
New York: H. Fertig, 1992.

Ninety- Three.
Mattituck, NY: Amereon, 1976.

Notre-Dame de Paris.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1993; New York: Penguin (film and TV tie-in edition), 1996.

Œuvres complètes de
Victor
Hugo.
Edited by Jacques Seebacher and Guy Rosa. 16 vols. Paris: Laffont,1985-1990.

Affron, Charles.
A Stage for Poets: Studies in the Theatre of Hugo and Musset.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971.

Barrielle, Jean-François.
Le Grand Imagier Victor Hugo.
Paris: Flammarion, 1985.

Brombert, Victor.
Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Grant, Richard B.
The Perilous Quest: Image, Myth, and Prophecy in the Narratives of Victor Hugo.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1968.