Critics have often spoken of Hugo’s keen visual sensitivity, manifested in the dramatic opposition of light and darkness in many scenes and in his striking visionary drawings, but they have not paid much attention to his use of color. It is important to recognize it, in order to understand the full profundity of his vision. In
Les Misérables,
bright colors and light accompany scenes of oblivious, shallow happiness. See, for instance, the color notations starting in paragraph five of “Four to Four,” chapter 3 of part I, book three: “long white strings,” “thick blond tresses,” “rosy lips,” “a dress of mauve barege, little reddish-brown buskins,” “sea-green eyes.” The sensuous iridescence of the material world gives way elsewhere to stark contrasts of good and evil, rendered in black and white; but the duality of these two non-colors is itself an illusion, as Hugo underlines in the chapter “Black and White,” in which Javert cannot endure the breakdown of his simplistic, polarized moral vision. Like colors, black and white are mere deceptive manifestations of a world based on a single ground of reality: God. The chapter explaining Napoléon’s defeat at Waterloo (and anticipating General Kutusov’s Providentialist meditations in Tolstoy’s
War and Peace)
explains this vision clearly in another way, through causality rather than through color.
As this discussion of the symbolism of color versus black and white just above suggests, Hugo often implies themes rather than stating them, by relating two passages of which the second nevertheless invites a new interpretation of the pair through its manifest contrasts with the first: he achieves a dialectical movement of thesis—antithesis—synthesis. In this way he particularly exploits the archetype of Inversion, and pairs of digressions. Inversion refers to a transvaluation of values, whereby that which had seemed bad proves good, or vice versa. Hugo invokes negative inversion to characterize the police agent Javert when the latter learns that M. Madeleine, who had humiliated him earlier, is really the convict Jean Valjean: “A monstrous Saint Michael,” Javert seems both imposing and hideous. “The pitiless, sincere joy of a fanatic in an act of atrocity preserves an indescribably mournful radiance.... Nothing could be more poignant and terrible than this face, which revealed what we may call all the evil of good” (p. 194). The sinister, deformed grandeur of Thénardier’s visionary engraving of Napoléon may also exemplify this archetype, like a spider’s ambition to rival the sun (p. 437; compare the poem in
Les Contemplations,
“Puissance égale bonté”). Thénardier, by trying to capture the emperor’s image, seems to aspire to appropriate for himself the soul of N apoléon’s genius.
The positive form of Inversion reveals that what seemed bad, proves good. Outstanding examples are the Beatitudes in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:2—12), and the Passion and Resurrection (Matthew 27—28, Mark 15—16, Luke 23—24, John 19—20). Appropriately expressing his tidy sense of structure, Hugo frames his epic novel with nesting layers of inversions. At the beginning and the end, we learn that humility can exalt the soul (in Bishop Myriel, whose last name is a near-anagram of “lumière” or light, and in Jean Valjean). In the middle, Javert’s bad excess of goodness yields to his shocked awareness of the possible goodness of badness, as he learns of Jean Valjean’s moral sublimity.
Near the end, Jean Valjean thematizes Inversion as he wins his final spiritual battle by confessing his past to Marius. Speaking for the author, who unlike all his contemporaries accepted two decades of exile rather than make any compromise with Napoleon III, he explains, “In order that I may respect myself, I must be despised. Then I hold myself erect. I am a galley slave who obeys his conscience. I know well that is improbable
[ressemblant].
But what would you have me do? it is so” (p. 779). The word
ressemblant
echoes Hugo’s pirouette at the beginning of the novel, as he concludes his idealized moral portrait of Bishop Myriel—“We do not claim that the portrait which we present here is plausible [
ressemblant
]
;
we say only that it resembles him” (p. 15). This subtle, nearly subliminal association of the two men reminds us of Myriel’s enduring moral influence on Valjean. Switching from the narrator’s voice to the hero’s voice in the second of these mirroring scenes makes the novel’s moral impact more immediate at the climax.
Hugo’s historical and cultural digressions set the stage for the characters, explain the limits of their possibilities, and often hint at, foreshadow, or symbolize what he sees as an overarching spiritual odyssey of Fall and Redemption. Unless we sin in thought or deed, we cannot benefit from grace and ascend nearer God. William Blake’s scandalous slogan “Damn braces; bless relaxes,” like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s concept of Faustian striving with its inevitable errors as essential to spiritual progress, are earlier, condensed versions of Hugo’s theme that godliness requires us to reject society’s image of a God who demands self-righteousness and conformity.
Hugo’s five main pairs of digressions are:
1) “The Year 1817” (p. 73) and ”The Story of an Improvement in Jet-Work” (p. 99), which contrast social irresponsibility and responsibility; 2) ”Waterloo“ (p. 205) and the Convent of the Perpetual Adoration (described in part II, books six and seven, which do not appear in this unabridged edition), which contrast self-aggrandizement and material pomp with self-effacing service and spiritual grandeur; 3) the street urchin (p. 341) and the underworld (part III, book seven, chapters 1 and 2), contrasting social dysfunction in the idealistic child and the corrupt adult; 4) King Louis Philippe (part IV, book one) and slang (part IV, book six, chapter 3), contrasting the summit and the underside of society; and 5) the origins of the insurrection of June 5—6,1832, (see the unabridged edition) and the sewers of Paris (part V, book two), offering political and metaphorical analyses of social corruption. The brutal treatment of the workers who provide the foundations of prosperity causes rebellion; similarly, unless the sewers are studied, rebuilt, and cleaned out, he argues, they will overflow onto the streets above as they have done before. Flushing fecal matter into rivers poisons our environment and wastes a precious potential resource, Hugo argues, as does locking the poor into prisons. Hugo skewers the euphemistic pseudo-progress that claims to be making humanitarian advances while merely changing the words or their order, which refer to our instruments of control. ”Formerly these grim cells, in which prison discipline delivers the condemned to himself, were composed of four stone walls, a stone ceiling, a floor of paving stones, a camp bed, a grated air-hole, a door reinforced with iron, and were called
dungeons;
but the dungeon came to be thought too horrible: today it is composed of an iron door, a grated air-hole, a camp bed, a floor of paving stones, a stone ceiling, four stone walls, and it is called a
punitive detention cell”
(p. 566).
The Writer’s Role
Hugo believed that the culture hero must also enter politics to ensure social justice, as he did before and after his exile, during the 1840s and 1870s. There he preached international understanding, imagining (like Thomas Paine, Immanuel Kant, and Madame de Staël before him) a united Europe led by France together with the German states. The genius must reveal God’s purposes to humans. When unable to act directly—Hugo’s situation during his two decades of exile on the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey—he can write; and writing always supplements personal contacts. Thus,
Les Misérables.
Les Misérables
focuses on the work of class reconciliation. The title, a syllepsis (a supersegmental pun, a word used with two different meanings depending on its context), seems to confuse material poverty
(la misère; les misérables
are the impoverished underclass) with moral degradation
(un misérable
can mean a wretch or morally reprehensible person), but Hugo’s plot of fall and redemption works precisely to dissociate the two notions through the protagonist Jean Valjean’s progressive regeneration. Poverty dehumanizes the poor, Hugo demonstrates, leading to prostitution, child abuse, and other crimes that subject the underclass to a purely punitive prison system that offers no hope of rehabilitation. Hugo wants us not to prejudge the poor, but to separate their unsavory reputation from their varying reality and its extenuating circumstances.
Historical and Political Dimensions
In part I, the chapter entitled “The Year 1817,” Hugo characterizes the immoral frivolity of the early Restoration period (1814—1830). In so doing, he dissociates himself from the Royalism of his early career: at twenty-two, he had even managed to wangle an appointment as the Poet Laureate to commemorate the coronation of the arch-conservative Comte d‘Artois, who became Charles X. The remainder of the first part details the horrific consequences of such immorality for the unwed, abandoned single mother Fantine. Hugo shows as much as he tells his opposition to the sexual double standard that treats prostitutes as criminals while their clients go free. The wealthy young men of 1817 who abandon their impoverished mistresses are respected; their victims are blamed. Fantine, as a streetwalker working to pay for her baby’s room and board after having been fired from her factory job for being an unwed mother, is despised; M. Batambois, who assaults her by shoving snow down her dress, seems exempt from the law; later, indeed, we find him serving on a jury. Jean Valjean, as a convict evading a warrant for robbery, is considered a menace to society; but, disguised as M. Madeleine (whose name, evoking Mary Magdalene, evokes repentance), he alone can ensure the prosperity of his entire community through his responsible, enlightened capitalism in establishing the manufacture of glassware in the town where he has come to serve as mayor.
Hugo wants to excite our compassion. But his benevolence remains paternalistic, and his modest proposals for the partial, voluntary redistribution of wealth—as in Charles Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol—could
not threaten wealthy readers. Regarding social progress in general, Hugo was optimistic. He shows Jean Valjean, alias M. Madeleine, reading at every meal. Hugo once declared that twenty years of good free mandatory education for all would be the last word and bring the dawn. Having become a utopian socialist, as was his creation M. Madeleine, Hugo believed that salaries would increase naturally along with profits, and that the dynamism of capital expansion would naturally resolve the problems of working conditions for the better. In fairness to Hugo, one must recognize that in 1862 an organized proletariat had not yet formed, although it was foreshadowed by a workers’ uprising in Lyons in 1832 and by the medieval guilds, an institution to which he pays his respects in the novel
Notre-Dame de Paris
(see Porter,
Victor Hugo,
pp. 20—23). Labor union movements as such had not yet developed. Hugo still thinks that guidance and enlightenment must descend on the people from “above,” from intellectuals. Nevertheless, at times his trenchant political analyses reveal the irresolvable contradictions one encounters by adopting either of two opposing positions—which, as it happens, are those of liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans in the United States today:
All the problems which the socialists propounded, aside from the cos mogonic visions, dreams, and mysticism, may be reduced to two principal problems.
First problem:
To produce wealth.
Second problem:
To distribute it....
England solves the first of these two problems. She creates wealth wonderfully; she distributes it badly.... [she has] a grandeur ill constituted, in which all the material elements are combined, and into which no moral element enters.
Communism and agarian law think they have solved the second problem. They are mistaken. Their distribution kills production. Equal division abolishes emulation. And consequently labour. It is a distribution made by the butcher, who kills what he divides (pp. 505—506).
Hugo suggests a balance of these two extreme solutions, egalitarian socialism and mercantilism.
Thus he characteristically deconstructs naively categorical views that risk blocking compromise and solution. He contests the dichotomies of middle class and lower class, of police and criminals. He argues that the bourgeoisie is simply the materially satisfied portion of “the people,” and that on the other hand the mob can betray the best interest of “the people” through unthinking violence.
Aside from his steadfast opposition to capital punishment, Hugo offered no practical solutions for reforming the police, the courts, or the prisons. He merely tries to stimulate our moral sensibilities, as Fantine’s misadventures and her selfless love for her child stimulated the moral sensibilities of Jean Valjean. Hugo intends the reformed convict to provide a model for us as Valjean comes to know God, whom Hugo equates with conscience. His message comes from the Gospels: “Inasmuch as you have done unto the least of these my brethren, so you have done unto me” (Matthew 25:40). At length, Hugo explicitly compares the redeemed Valjean to Christ (Grant, pp.158—176, and Brombert, pp. 86—139).
As a symbolic representative of the working class enslaved by the former monarchy, Jean Valjean had been too debased and brutalized, Hugo believed, to promote historical progress through militant political action. But his destiny prefigures the eventual reconciliation of social classes: the ex-convict presides over the marriage of Cosette—the proletarian daughter of a prostitute—and Marius, the aristocrat adopted and cherished by the bourgeois Gillenormand. Cosette herself does not participate in or even become clearly aware of the insurrection. We must await the next generation that includes Cosette’s and Marius’s children to witness the full embodiment of the spirit of the new France. The courageous street urchin Gavroche, killed fighting on the barricades, foreshadowed the flowering of this spirit.
Hugo chose the now-forgotten uprising of 1832 rather than the glorious revolution of 1830 as the historical crux of the novel because he had been struck by the great historian Louis Blanc’s account of the 1832 worker-student insurrection. Hugo was less concerned with creating a practical manual for revolutionaries, or with celebrating any particular liberal, historical triumph than with providing a symbolic illustration of the French people struggling toward the light. Hugo thought that minor events as well as major ones could reveal the intentions of Providence. The self-sacrifice of Enjolras and his friends would serve to inspire and mobilize others. Like Bertolt Brecht a century later, Hugo does not want to serve up a cathartic vision of history: he prefers to imply that much work remains to be done.