by Victor Hugo
—from The Atlantic Monthly (February 1902)
Questions
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
Works by Victor Hugo
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.
Works about Hugo and Les Misérables
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.
Grossman, Kathryn M. Figuring Transcendence in “Les Misérables”: Hugo’s Romantic Sublime. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994.
—. “Les Misérables”: Conversion, Revolution, Redemption. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996.
Hiddleston, J. A., ed. Victor Hugo: Romancier de l‘abîme. Oxford: Leg enda, 2002. Half the chapters are in English, including an introduction by L. M. Porter.
Petrey, Sandy. History in the Text: “Quatrevingt-treize” and the French Revolution. Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Monographs in Romance Languages, 1980.
Porter, Laurence M. The Renaissance of the Lyric in French Romanticism. Lexington, KY: French Forum Monographs, 1978.
—. Victor Hugo. New York: Twayne Pubfishers/Macmiflan, 1999.
Poulet, Georges. The Interior Distance. Translated by Elliott Coleman. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959, pp.153-181.
Robb, Graham. Victor Hugo. New York: W. W. Norton,1997.
Savy, Nicole. “Cosette: Un personnage qui n‘existe pas.” In Lire “Les Misérables,” edited by Anne Ubersfeld and Guy Rosa. Paris: Corti,1985.
Swinburne, Algernon Charles. A Study of Victor Hugo. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1970.
Background
Bernheimer, Charles. Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Briggs, Asa, ed. The Nineteenth Century: The Contradictions of Progress. New York: McGraw-Hill,1970.
Chevalier, Louis. Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century. Translated from the French by Frank Jellinek. New York: H. Fertig, 1973.
Driskel, Michael Paul. Representing Belief: Religion, Art, and Society in Nineteenth-Century France. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992.
Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst. Paris as Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth-century City. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Geyl, Pieter. Napoleon: For and Against. Translated from the Dutch by Olive Renier. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1949.
Hemmings, F. W. J. Culture and Society in France, 1789—1848. Leicester, England: Leicester University Press, 1987.
Kselman, Thomas A. Death and the Afterlife in Modern France. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Edited by Peter France. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1995.
Schama, Simon. Citizens:A Chronicle of the French Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989.
Willms, Johannes. Paris: Capital of Europe: From the Revolution to the Belle Époque. Translated by Eveline L. Kanes. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1997.
Wright, Gordon. France in Modern Times: From the Enlightenment to the Present. Fifth edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.
Wright, Lawrence. Clean and Decent: The Fascinating History of the Bathroom and the Water Closet, and of Sundry Habits, Fashions, and Accessories of the Toilet, Principally in Great Britain, France, and America. New York: Viking, 1960.
a Napoléon was crowned Emperor on December 2, 1804, in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame.
b Madame Baptistine and Madame Magloire serve to contrast the contemplative with the active life; their names, respectively, suggest the spiritual and the material.
c Created as an administrative unit in 1789, a canton (roughly equivalent to a township) is larger than a commune (municipality) and smaller than an arrondissement (roughly equivalent to a county, and a subdivision of a département).
d An ultra-royalist believes that kings rule by God’s will; a Voltairean is a Deist, who believes that God does not intervene in human affairs.
e Myriel believes in universal, free primary education; until the Guizot Law of 1833, some 38 percent of French communes had no primary schools at all. In 1870, about 30 percent of peasants were still illiterate.
f The prosecuting attorney uses libel, slander, and forgery to persuade a woman to denounce her lover; he is more criminal than the man he condemns.
g A camail is a blue or purple ornament worn by a bishop over his vestments.
h By “pontifically,” Myriel means “as a bishop should: humbling himself to exalt God.”
i Unless God protects a house, they who guard it watch in vain.
j The Provost’s Court was a tribunal that passed judgment on the accused without giving them the right of appeal; it served Royalist vengeance after Napoléon’s fall in 1815.
k Myriel feels the joy of political progress was tainted by revolutionary atrocities; the conventionist feels this joy was blasted by the Restoration of the monarchy in 1814.
l Myriel counters the claim that the Revolution was “the consecration of humanity” by alluding to the Reign of Terror in 1793, when the King and Queen, and 20,000 others, were guillotined.
m The conventionist quotes Christ’s “let the little children come unto Me,” and implies that the class system under the monarchy invalidates the monarchy’s claims to be truly Christian.
n Hugo makes Jean Valjean’s life parallel the history of France: he is imprisoned during Napoléon’s dictatorship, and hides in the convent during the rule of the reactionary Charles X; when he is free, France also is freer.
o Lot’s wife, spared by the angels who destroyed Sodom in a rain of fire, disobeyed them, looked back at the city, and was turned to salt.
p Hugo often described his most saintly characters with a glowing or gleaming countenance, transfigured by grace as was Moses descending from Sinai.
q This description of fleeing a holy dwelling by climbing over a wall constitutes an advance mention, with the situation reversed, of Jean Valjean finding refuge for himself and Cosette in Paris by climbing over the wall of a convent.
r Chimneysweeps were called “little Savoyards,” because only children were small enough to climb into chimneys to clea
n them, and because many such children came from Savoy in eastern France.
s The hallucination of menacing bushes comes from Jean Valjean’s guilty conscience, and anticipates Eponine’s impression that the bare trees are gallows.
t Comparisons between Jean Valjean and Satan or (later) Christ seem melodramatic, but they underline that damnation or salvation is at stake.
u French tradition distinguished sharply between the femme sensible, who has had only one love affair outside marriage, and the femme galante, who has had more.
v The Directory (1795-1799) was the transitional government between the Revolution and Napoléon’s assumption of the supreme power.
w The grisettes, poor young working women who wore gray smocks, were traditional targets of seduction attempts by students and young male professionals.
x In ancient Greek and Roman literature, an eclogue was a poem about the idealized loves of imaginary shepherds and shepherdesses; Hugo’s tone is sarcastic. ‡The sentence means “are people who jest always hard-hearted?”
y Vestals were virgin priestesses who served the temples of the gods in ancient Greece.
z Khair ed-Din Barbarossa (1466?-1546) was a notorious Turkish pirate who ruled most of the Mediterranean near the end of his life; he greatly admired a Byzantine statue of Diana, the ancient goddess of the hunt, the moon, and chastity.
aa Alain-René Lesage’s play Turcaret (1709) satirizes a lustful financier from the provinces. Priapus, son of Dionysus, was the Greek god of virility and procreation.
ab Here, as elsewhere, Fantine’s remark shows that only she among the four companions really cares for her lover. See the first half of the next chapter as well.
ac M. Madeleine’s assumed name, borrowed from Mary Magdalene in the New Testament of the Bible, connotes repentance; his attitudes here reflect whole-hearted faith in Providence.
ad Hugo believed in punitive reincarnation, and in universal salvation at the end of time (the Pelagian heresy). See “Ce que dit la Bouche d‘Ombre” in his Contemplations (1856).
ae The Faubourg Saint Germain refers to high society in Paris, and is applied to Montreuil-sur-Mer as a whimsical antonomasia (another example: “the champagne of bottled beers”).
af Reacting vehemently and blindly against his criminal family origins, Javert illustrates the psychological mechanism of overcompensation.
ag The Styx, the river of Death, surrounded the ancient Greek and Roman Hades nine times; once you crossed, there was no return. Javert believes redemption is impossible.
ah Lucius Junius Brutus, founder of the Roman Republic, condemned his son to death as a conspirator (509 B.C.); François-Eugène Vidocq (1775-1857), a famous criminal who became Chief of Police, inspired romantic writers with his badly written Memoirs (1828).
ai The Venezuelan hero Simon Bolívar (1783-1830) devoted his life to trying to create a federation of Latin American countries. Gabriel García Márquez tells his tragic story in The General in His Labyrinth (1989).
aj For details, see Emile Zola’s Nana (1880), and Charles Bernheimer’s Figures of lll Repute (Harvard University Press, 1989).
ak M. Madeleine’s beneficent influence on Fantine illustrates the transference of merit in the Communion of Saints. Bishop Myriel previously imparted redemptive grace to Jean Valjean.
al Hugo borrows two techniques from Balzac here: allusions to the pseudo-science of physiognomy, and the episodic observer brought in to deliver expert testimony.
am Former convict.
an Like Jean Valjean elsewhere, Javert here applies the title word misérable to himself, in the sense of morally debased.
ao Hugo compares Jean Valjean to Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, ordered by God to accept the chalice of fear, pain, and death that is the Crucifixion.
ap This paragraph, in free indirect discourse, faithfully renders Jean Valjean’s point of view. The tone is at once sincere, because his rationalizations fully convince him for the moment, and ironic, because the reader can see through them so easily.
aq A whiffle-tree or single-tree is a pivoted horizontal crossbar attached to the harness traces of a draft animal and to the vehicle it pulls.
ar “Convictions” is a pun: the prosecutors and judges want to prove guilt and impose sentence, a social damnation; Jean Valjean, in contrast, comes to realize that his soul’s health depends on his accepting his material guilt.
as By claiming that prosecutors’ denunciations of criminals all are derived from Jean Racine’s récit de Théramène (Phèdre V.7), Hugo condemns the poverty of their imagination.
at Honest Javert is unfair to Jean Valjean, who tried to escape four times, not “five or six.” He is innocent of the Pierron robbery and was exonerated by the Bishop.
au The Restoration was so eager to reinstitute state-sponsored Catholicism, the moral basis of divine-right monarchy, that it accepted any manifestation of religious sentiment at face value.
av To have hair turn white overnight from an emotional shock is a common melodramatic device in nineteenth-century fiction.
aw The letters are the abbreviation for travaux forcés à perpétuité—hard labor for life. Compare the scene in Honoré de Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (1834) in which slapping the unconscious Vautrin’s shoulder reveals his convict’s brand.
ax To say “the Emperor” instead of “Buonaparte” (in four syllables) betrays that M. Madeleine admires or at least respects Napoléon, rather than considers him a foreign usurper, illegitimate and born in Corsica before that island had become French.
ay “This denoted” again reflects Balzac’s influence in seeing details of a person’s features or clothing as revealing deep-seated traits of their personality. The episodic observer (one who knew Javert thoroughly) is used again.
az Jean Valjean refers to the dead Fantine, again revealing his faith in immortality.
ba ... Who come from Savoy every year, / And whose hand deftly wipes out / Those long channels choked up with soot.
bb The newspaper stories at the beginning and end of this book illustrate what Georges May called “the bad conscience of the novel,” the desire to be taken seriously that leads it to invent “real” sources (Le Dilemme du roman français au XVllle siècle, 1963).
bc Hugo knew English and English literature fairly well; one of his sons translated all of Shakespeare’s plays into English. Here he alludes to Hamlet’s comparison of human life to “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
bd This wailing baby will reappear as Gavroche. Mme Thénardier’s monstrous nature appears in her total indifference to her three sons. Her cruelty gives the lie to her husband’s scruples, the next morning, about giving up Cosette.
be Hugo puns by calling Thénardier a filou-sophe instead of philosophe. Filou means “crook”; the whole invented word implies “someone who knows and loves crime.”
bf Here and in many other places, Hugo portrays himself as an investigative reporter who researches documents and questions witnesses.
bg The garrulous Thénardier, always lying, contrasts dramatically with the taciturn, invariably truthful Jean Valjean.
bh In this scene, frequent notations of posture, gesture, and voice quality reflect Hugo’s keen sensitivity to theater.
bi As Cosette proceeds farther into the darkness, her fear (“there were perhaps ghosts”) acquires a hallucinatory intensity (“she distinctly saw the ghosts”).
bj Hugo, typically, contrasts and dramatizes the microcosm (the “atom,” the human scale) and the macrocosm (the cosmos, the infinite).
bk A thousand crowns is 3,000 francs, double the amount agreed on.
bl Hugo suggests that Fauchelevent has been transformed by divine grace.
bm In French, c‘est là le bon écrou: that [death] is the best lock-up.
bn The Communion of Saints has transferred merit from both the nuns and M. Madeleine to Fauchelevent.
bo Fauchelevent mishears surnoms as surtouts.
; bp Cemeteries are locked at night to prevent grave robbing, desecration of tombs, and the sale of cadavers for dissection.