As in Stendhal’s
Le Rouge et le Noir,
but in both upward and downward directions, a departure from the horizontal sometimes symbolizes independent choice: Jean Valjean plunging off the prison ship into the sea to feign drowning, so that he can escape to rescue Cosette; his climbing over the wall of the convent with her; and his descent into the depths of the sewers to save Marius. Hugo, moreover, refuses to let us hold God, rather than ourselves, responsible for political events. Suffering, violence, and injustice will be eliminated by
philia,
by a community of active mutual concern. Hugo, nevertheless, offers a realistic image of political change: one finds only a few fully committed militants on either side; others are drawn in through love, despair, affection, anxiety, greed, or hatred.
The Major Subjects of the Novel
How can we make sense of this sprawling, complex story? To a superficial reader, the numerous coincidences that bind the characters’ lives together seem like mere melodramatic contrivances. But for Hugo, multiple coincidences reflect his belief in an unseen, overarching Providence that interrelates and governs human destiny. The preface to
Les Travailleurs de la mer (The Toilers of the Sea)
identifies three “fatalities” in the fallen, material order: nature, religious dogma, and social inequities. By “fatalities” Hugo means obstacles to progress, which tempt us to despair and to renounce effort. How can we exercise our free will when we are caught between a spiritual Providence and a material/institutional fatality?
Considered in isolation, the generalizations and aphorisms with which Hugo characterizes the moral dynamics of his story might seem to rule out the possibility of enlightened choice: “Be it true or false, what is said about men often has as much influence upon their lives, and especially upon their destinies, as what they do” (p. 11); “it seems as if it were necessary that a woman should be a mother to be venerable [instead of merely respectable]” (p.12); “there is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher” (p. 15). Such generalizations appear to reflect a traditional belief in a “human nature” that remains invariable. But this impression is misleading. First, Hugo always grounds his maxims solidly in a social context, and in the social, financial, and biological contingencies of one’s individual existence. He is not La Rochefoucauld, the classicist whose aphorisms describe unvarying relationships among abstract nouns, as if wealth, health, gender, or ethnicity made no difference: “Hypocrisy is a form of respect that vice pays to virtue.” Second, throughout the novel he dramatizes the titanic inner struggles of Jean Valjean with his conscience; and he richly analyzes the moral evolution of many other characters such as Bishop Myriel, Fantine, Thénardier, Marius, Gillenormand, Eponine, and Javert.
Throughout most of
Les Misérables,
cosmic motifs are muted and implicit. They often appear subtly in descriptions of looming darkness and unexpected radiance. Nature seems hostile to the outcast Jean Valjean; as he contemplates the sleeping bishop, that man’s face seems to glow with an inner light; Eponine, hating her life as an outlaw and pursued by a larval form of conscience, describes the hallucinations of starvation to Marius by saying that the stars seem like floodlights, and the trees like gallows—her crimes are known to God, and she is doomed to hang, she feels. Hugo adopts the motif of the Transfiguration from the Bible: filled with the Holy Spirit, the faces of Moses or of Jesus shine.
Characters
Hugo integrates this worldview with his character depiction and plot development through the implied religious doctrine of supererogation (in French,
réversibilité):
exceptional individuals may accrue sufficient merit, through their loyal faith and virtuous acts, not only to ensure their own salvation but also to aid in the salvation of others, to whom some of their extra merit may be transferred. Supererogation is the dynamic and positive mode of the archetype of Inversion: what seemed bad (Christ’s betrayal by his friends, humiliation, torture, and agonizing death on the cross) proves good (mankind will be redeemed). It allows the concept of free will to be synthesized with the concept of Providence. Hugo represents this force not mystically, but quite realistically, through the influence of conversation and example, which often occurs partially, gradually, and belatedly. Good influences, in his view, are not compulsions, but invitations to which their objects must choose to respond. But they can create a chain reaction.
The first example appears in the figure of the conventionist G—(a representative of the assembly that dissolved the monarchy, and of which a majority excluding G—condemned Louis XVI to death). He humbles the initially scornful Bishop Myriel, who comes to recognize the moral excellence of his devotion to humanity and kneels before him to ask his blessing. “No one could say that the passage of that soul before [Myriel‘s] own, and the reflection of that grand conscience upon his own had not had its effect upon [the Bishop’s] approach to perfection” (p. 34). This blessing is later transferred, so to speak, from Myriel to Valjean, thus saving the ex-convict from further hatred and crime: “Jean Valjean, my brother: you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you. I am withdrawing it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I am giving it to God!” (p. 63). In turn, Valjean later symbolically transfers his own superabundance of merit to the dying Fantine, assuring her that since her motivation for prostituting herself was her pure wish to provide for her daughter, she remained innocent in the eyes of God. And in the final scene the repentant Marius, kneeling at the dying Valjean’s bedside to ask his blessing, recalls the initial scene between the conventionist and Myriel.
Hugo broadly signals the presence of supererogatory merit in his characters. He compares the parables of Bishop Myriel to Christ’s (p. 17). He suggests that the origin of Jean Valjean’s name is “Voila Jean”—there’s John (p. 48). That phrase recalls Pontius Pilate’s
ecce homo
(there is the man), spoken when he shows Christ, wearing the crown of thorns, to the Jewish priests who have accused him; see the Bible, John 19:5). A person condemned according to one law, and destined for suffering, will be vindicated according to a higher law. Years later in the plot, Hugo associates Valjean clearly with Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, when the mayor hesitates over whether to denounce himself in order to exculpate the pruner Champmathieu (pp. 148-149). Hugo reintroduces the image of the bitter chalice in the title of part V, book seven, “The Last Drop in the Chalice.” Marius’s point of view affirms Valjean’s absolute, self-sacrificial goodness and his total transformation unequivocally: “The convict was transfigured into Christ” (p. 821).
But although Bishop Myriel demonstrates for Jean Valjean the power of absolute trust in God, and active benevolence, this influence cannot be definitive. Through practicing virtue, he risks succumbing to pride. His “accidental” discovery of a refuge in the convent helps save him from pride: he must compare his involuntary suffering from social inequities and vindictiveness to the voluntary, altruistic suffering of the nuns (pp. 334—335). Their example foreshadows his voluntary self-sacrifice at the end. Through Cosette, he has learned of human love; but this love remains selfish (pp. 267—270). Cosette becomes indispensable to him. The illusion that she will grow up ugly, and thus stay with him always, consoles him. The narrator speculates that Jean Valjean might have needed Cosette’s filial love to persevere in the virtue that Myriel first inspired in him. As mayor, he had learned much more than before about social injustice; he had been sent back to prison for doing good; he needed the support of Cosette’s dependency to keep him morally strong (p. 70; see also pp. 523—524). And finally, he must accept his need to let her become independent of him as she matures. His desire to kill his “rival” Marius, or at least to let him die on the insurrectionists’ barricade, is so powerful that Hugo does not describe Jean Valjean’s next-to-last struggle with his conscience. The final struggle, ending in his decision to confess to Marius that he is an escaped convict, finally kills him.
Hugo does not consider redemption automatic. Some characters deteriorate morally: the criminal anti-father Thénardier becomes indifferent to not only the sufferings of his victims, but even to the survival of his own children. When his two youngest boys disappear, he makes no effort to locate them. And he does not care whether his older daughter Eponine will be killed by other members of their gang for interfering in a burglary. Others such as the police detective Javert, born to a prostitute in prison and lacking any family himself, react toward the accused with merciless moral brutality.
Gavroche, Eponine, Javert, Jean Valjean—the first two risk their lives and perish to save others, Javert commits suicide so that he will not have to denounce the man who saved him, and Jean Valjean wastes away to consummate his renunciation of Cosette. The motif of self-sacrifice shades into melancholy (anger against others turned back against the self) and even masochism. Virtuous suicide associated with renunciation recurs throughout Hugo’s career, from
Bug-Jargal
(1818 and 1826) to
Notre-Dame de Paris
(1831),
Les Travailleurs de la mer
(1866), and
Quatrevingt-treize
(1874), not to mention the hero’s suicide in order to join his beloved in the afterlife, in
L‘Homme qui rit
(1869). One could interpret this obsessive plot element variously: as a symptom of the weakness of the idealistic romantic hero who cannot bear to live in an imperfect world; as inspiring examples of the temporal sublime, of the choice to sacrifice one’s life to a transcendent value; or as a means by which the historical Hugo purged himself of any lingering traces of a desire to sacrifice himself for others—as opposed to treating them with benevolence. But his texts provide no clear answers.
When wisely used in critical discourse, all categories represent not ways of establishing Truth, but of raising questions. On the borderline between the conventional critical categories of literary Character and Theme we find what could be called “moral themes”: generalizations about human nature that are illustrated by the characters’ discourse (by representations of their thoughts, writings, and words) and dramatized by their actions. Hugo’s central “moral theme” is that even the best of us is tempted—if not by rebellion against human laws, then by pride and complacency—and that such temptations are spiritual ordeals that test and strengthen us in the way of virtue. Unlike Milton, Goethe, Flaubert, or Thomas Mann, Hugo does not create personified seductive devils, but depicts characters at risk of being seduced by their own selfish desires and hypocrisy. Mistaken for Jean Valjean, alias the venerated mayor M. Madeleine, the obscure old tree pruner Champmathieu seems to Valjean expendable, whereas M. Madeleine’s arrest and imprisonment would end the prosperity of the village that depends on him, and doom Cosette to the streets. The accidental delays Valjean encounters while rushing to Champmathieu’s trial at Arras further tempt the ex-convict to abandon the attempt to exonerate his unfortunate substitute. (To heighten the urgency of this melodramatic situation, Hugo never raises the possibility that Valjean could still denounce himself
after
Champmathieu had been sentenced. Even idealistic love can deteriorate into possessiveness. Eventually, it must be refined into altruistic self-sacrifice—a theme also prominent in the novels of Hugo’s contemporaries Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Themes
So far we have discussed the prominent topics of self-sacrifice and supererogation in
Les Misérables
and throughout Hugo’s career, but we have not identified any themes. As the pun in Hugo’s title suggests, the theme he foregrounds in this novel is that we should not judge a book by its cover, or a person by appearances and social condition.
Les Misérables
can refer either to the underclass, people who are wretchedly poor, or to people who are morally depraved, or both. At one point, Jean Valjean calls himself
un misérable
in the second, moral sense. Hugo not only distinguishes between wealth and virtue, but also between premeditation and impulse (Jean Valjean acts impulsively when he steals the loaf of bread, or the chimneysweep’s coin), and between acts (Fantine’s prostitution) and their motives (her altruistic desire to support her daughter).
The initial inspiration for the creation of Jean Valjean, the protagonist of
Les Misérables,
probably came from Hugo’s work on
Le Dernier Jour d‘un condamné a mort (The Last Day of a Condemned Man,
1829). He was a lifelong opponent of the death penalty, much in the spirit of the recent American films
The Green Mile
and
Dead Man Walking.
He dramatized the plight of prisoners in the galleys at Toulon, especially one who, like Jean Valjean, had initially been sentenced to five years at hard labor for stealing a loaf of bread. “There but for the grace of God go I” is his message. He emphasizes the brutalization of the poor by society. Like his contemporary Charles Dickens in
Oliver Twist
or
Our Mutual Friend,
he deconstructs the simplistic opposition of innocence and crime that allows us to evade social responsibility. Jean Valjean’s only actual crimes are two acts of petty larceny, plus a third of which he is falsely accused (stealing a loaf of bread, a coin, and some apples). Hugo’s attribution of near-Satanic resentment to him seems overblown, but Hugo is making the point he had made in
Claude Gueux
(Claude the Beggar): harsh law enforcement breeds the monsters it claims to want to eliminate (Grant,
The Perilous Quest,
pp.157—158; see “For Further Reading”).
But Hugo’s dominant theme, which pervades his novels, poems, and essays (less so his plays) on every level, and which guided his life for decades, is that individuals, the world, and the cosmos all need rescuers. In his personal life, from 1833 until her death decades later, Hugo felt that he was “redeeming” the “fallen woman” Juliette Drouet, his mistress, through his love—although he never seemed to worry about the moral import of his own extraordinary promiscuity. In society, through paternalistic charitable acts and strategies of enlightened self-interest that allow wealth to trickle down to the poor, the wealthy and privileged must act to alleviate suffering and improve the material conditions of humanity, increasing productivity and eliminating crime.