by David Bellos
The French Revolution established new political rights for all its citizens, but it did not have much to say about the economic origins of poverty. Article 21 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, for example, reiterates the traditional distinction between the needy (orphans, the disabled, the sick and the aged) and everybody else: ‘Society owes subsistence to citizens in misfortune, either by providing them with work, or by giving means of existence to those who are not fit to work’.6 Had the article been put into practice it would simply have brought France into line with the Poor Laws of England as they had been for two centuries already, by providing income support to the destitute with no opportunity to work (‘citizens in misfortune’) and leaving the able-bodied and the unemployed to fend for themselves. But this was just a paper reform. In revolutionary France the state had no institutions or resources to provide alms to those who had no prospect of supporting themselves. As under the old regime, in towns large and small there were beggars on the corner of every street.
The ever more visible gap between needs and resources was filled to some extent by private charitable institutions, many of them acting on behalf of or in association with the church, and also by individual philanthropists. In Les Misérables, Bishop Myriel is an exemplar of private charity of that kind. He donates 90 per cent of his stipend to a range of philanthropic institutions, not all of which are specifically religious ones, some giving care to unmarried mothers (‘Societies for Maternal Charity’), others giving education to ‘girls in need’ or looking after foundlings, orphans and hospital patients.7 These charities are chosen by Hugo on Myriel’s behalf, so to speak, because Fantine’s life might have been less harsh and less short had she been helped by any of them. However, many potential donors to charitable enterprises were held back by a worry that the ideas of Malthus made sharper and more pressing: how can an association or a benevolent individual provide assistance to people in need without giving a free ride to the idle and the bad? Even those who rejected Malthus’s prediction of an ever-rising tide of scum needed guidance to allow them to distinguish ‘honest poor folk’ from the dangerous and inherently criminal underclass that could so quickly turn into a mob.
People face the same issue nowadays under a different guise. With a choice of over a thousand international organizations seeking to help poor countries (and the poor people who live there) by supporting development programmes, health programmes, environmental programmes, educational programmes, how do we make our charitable donations do only good and not exacerbate the problems they were meant to abate?
One answer among many was provided 200 years ago by Joseph-Marie de Gérando in a widely read ‘how-to’ book, Le Visiteur du pauvre (The Visitor of the Poor). The main solution he offered to members of the moneyed middle class was to put prejudice and distaste aside and to call on all the people in the same street who appeared to need help. Men and women of means should get to know ‘poor people’ as individuals and make their own judgement as to what kind of poor people they were. Paternalistic, condescending and also slightly sinister, a ‘visitor of the poor’ in de Gérando’s construction would become a benefactor of the honest and a corrector of the undeserving. But there is one important thing to be said in defence of Le Visiteur du pauvre: those who followed its recommendations would at least become less ignorant, and presumably less fearful, of the other side. It is a small step, but a step nonetheless, towards the social reconciliation that Hugo called for forty years later in Les Misérables.
‘Poor visiting’ is given a key role in the main narrative of Hugo’s novel. Valjean goes to pray in the church of Saint-Sulpice and is approached by a waif with a letter that begs him to visit her starving family. He agrees to do so. Éponine rushes back to the Gorbeau tenement to announce the imminent arrival of a ‘millionaire’. Valjean goes back to Rue Plumet to collect goods and also Cosette, for he wants her to accompany him to learn what it is to be a visitor of the poor. At this first interview, Valjean willingly hands over warm clothes, woollen stockings and blankets. When he is asked for money, however, he holds back. He’s as wary as any other bourgeois of his age of being the victim of benefit fraud.8 It turns out that the wisdom of de Gérando and all the cunning of Jean Valjean were not sufficient to pierce the Thénardiers’ scam. On his next visit to the tenement Valjean is ambushed by a whole gang.
If private charity was no real solution to the ‘problem of poverty’ in France, the Poor Laws of England also seemed powerless to thin the ranks of the ragged to be seen on the streets. Indeed, although England was at that time ahead of France in industrial development and material wealth, it was even further in front in the number of really poor people it had. On a brief visit to London, the political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville observed that, despite its galloping prosperity, it was the European capital of poverty too. How did that come about? The fault lay in the system, he wrote – in the entitlement to support fostered by Poor Laws inherited from an earlier age. Tocqueville stepped into a dispute over a reform of these ancient practices and took the side of those who wanted to do away with them altogether. Like many others he was convinced that abolition of ‘outdoor relief’ for the able-bodied would cause the number of poor people to fall.9 The out-turn of the political debate was not simple abolition, however, but a new kind of Poor Law that drove a wedge between people who didn’t have enough money to live on – the poor, in the modern sense of the word – and paupers, who were to be removed from public sight. Income support for the underpaid was indeed abolished, but so was direct payment to the ‘victims of misfortune’, who were now to be cared for in institutions called poor houses, or workhouses. These were designed to be as unpleasant as possible. The rationale behind the considerable expense of constructing them was to provide a standard of living lower than any that could be had from work: the workhouse should never tempt the able-bodied to abandon toil, however pitiful the wages of honest labour came to be. So horrible and humiliating were they that some indigents, like Mrs Higden in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, preferred to die on the road rather than enter the doors of a poor house for their last days.10
Charles Dickens, who had spent his teenage years putting shoe-black into pots in a rat-infested warehouse at Hungerford Stairs, was outraged by the new law. He blasted back at it in his story of a boy brought up in the workhouse. Oliver Twist appeared in 1837, came out in French translation in 1841 and has never been out of print in either language since then.11
The workhouse is an instance of the cross-Channel traffic that makes the stories of England and France so similar and yet not the same. The idea came from the dépôts de mendicité (‘beggars’ repositories’), prison-like dormitories set up by Napoleon in 1808 to put beggars, vagrants, lunatics and the disabled out of public sight. The scheme may have had a cosmetic effect in town centres, but it made no impact on the number of indigents and beggars in France. It was also open to abuse, as documented by Stendhal in his novel Red and Black: the unscrupulous M. Valenod, who runs the dépôt de mendicité at Verrières, makes a fortune from spending less to feed the inmates than he receives in fees from the state. Similar scandals in real life led to a gradual abandonment of the nationwide network of dépôts in France. There were hardly any left by the 1840s – when workhouses had spread to almost every English town.
But Oliver Twist takes for granted the transition from poverty to a life of crime. Oliver leaves the workhouse and joins a band of junior thieves working for Fagin, who resells what the boys steal. Oliver is mentored in scarf-snatching by Jack Dawkins, the ‘Artful Dodger’, a wisecracking Cockney who wears a (filched) top hat. Dickens’s happy scamp came to play a key role in the later history of the reception of Les Misérables. In 1960, Lionel Bart, a musical prodigy from London’s East End, devised a stage musical based on Oliver Twist. When Oliver! had another run in London in 1977, the French composer Alain Boublil went to see it. ‘As soon as the Artful Dodger came on stage,’ he recalled, ‘Gavroche came to mind. It was like a blow to
the solar plexus. I started seeing all the characters of Les Misérables – Valjean, Javert, Gavroche, Cosette, Marius and Éponine – in my mind’s eye…’12 Dickens’s warm-hearted vision of good and evil among the riffraff on London’s streets turned out to be the first prompting for the invention of a musical version of Les Misérables that has given a fresh impetus to Hugo’s novel over the last thirty years.
Oliver Twist is the first major work of literature that puts a child at its centre, and among the first to introduce the colourful language of the underclass, including many words borrowed from cant, or thieves’ slang. What brings it closer still to Les Misérables is its generosity of spirit. It is no mere coincidence that an adaptation of Dickens’s novel should have led to the most widely seen reworking of Hugo’s masterpiece to date.
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Hugo probably never read Oliver Twist, but he did get to meet its author, who visited Paris with his comrade John Forster in 1847. He granted an audience to the Englishmen in his splendid apartment in Place Royale. There’s not a trace of the visit in any of Hugo’s records, which suggests that Charles Dickens didn’t make a strong impression on the literary star of the day, but it was a memorable occasion the other way round. In Dickens’s eyes, Victor Hugo looked ‘like the Genius he was’; his wife Adèle had such a glowering air that he thought her capable of putting poison in the poet’s breakfast any day; and the daughter who brought in the tray looked so sinister that Dickens suspected her of carrying a sharp poignard in her stays ‘but for her not appearing to wear any’. In this lugubrious atmosphere that must owe something to Dickens’s wish to entertain his correspondent, Hugo addressed ‘very charming flattery, in the best taste’ to his English guests.13 That’s not surprising. Hugo may have had the status of a rock star, but he didn’t behave like one at all. He was always neatly and soberly dressed, and his manners were exquisite. It’s part of what made him the perfect ladies’ man.
At the time of Dickens’s visit Hugo had already drafted the basic narrative of most of what are now Parts I and II of Les Misérables, and the manuscript was most likely lying on the writing shelf just a few feet away from the deep sofa where the English writer sat. But the two great novelists did not talk about it. Despite all the feelings and ideas they shared, despite the parallel tracks they were following in their work, the conversation between them could only be an exchange of pleasantries. Hugo had never learned English (and never would), and Dickens knew no Latin, which was Hugo’s second tongue. They were stuck with the conversational French that Dickens learned quite late in life, for he had not been to the right kind of school. If only he had had a proper education … but then he would not have written the novels of Charles Dickens.
The real conversation between Dickens and Hugo didn’t happen in 1847, but fifteen years later. In 1861, the English writer completed his story of an ex-convict, Magwitch, transformed by an act of kindness into a power of good. Just a few weeks later, Victor Hugo brought the story of Jean Valjean to its conclusion. Great Expectations and Les Misérables say more to each other than their authors ever could.
Oliver Twist brought the lives of workhouse orphans and criminal gangs to attention in England, but in France, the lower depths were brought to the surface most spectacularly by Eugène Sue. His Mystères de Paris, published in daily instalments in a mass-circulation newspaper in 1842–3, were read by maids and mistresses, bootblacks and bosses, teenagers and adults, students and workers … It was such a huge success that it transformed the economics of newspaper publishing; and because it was often read aloud in cafés and bars, it reached beyond the literate to create the first mass audience for fiction in France.
In each episode of the Mystères, the recurrent hero, Prince Rudolph of Gerolstein, delves into a corner of Paris misérable, the hidden city of the poor. There he encounters prostitutes and pimps, exploited workers and oppressed artisans, crooks and dealers, single mothers, orphans, beggars and cripples. To each of the social ills that he finds, he brings some noble, practical or charitable relief. Rudolph is more like a figure from popular theatre or pantomime than what we expect to find in a literary novel: he’s an aristocrat and a master of disguise who can pass himself off as a bourgeois, a worker or a crook, as required, because he’s also as fluent in street slang as he is in the dialects of artisans or the language of the court. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of readers recognized their own situations in the serial and wrote letters to the author begging him to tell them how their own lives would work out, or else asking him to insert episodes they had written themselves.14 Such was the popular impact of Sue’s novel that nobody could pretend any more not to know about the poor. It wasn’t the only thing that drew Hugo’s eyes towards the problem of poverty, but it surely confirmed that it was the burning issue of the day. Not just in France, moreover. In Russia, Gogol’s Petersburg Tales focused on the lives of the lowest ranks in the civil service; Dostoevsky’s first full-length novel, Poor Folk, was written in 1845, just as Hugo was beginning the first draft of Les Misérables; and in London, Bulwer Lytton’s Paul Clifford (1830) and Disraeli’s Sybil (1845) created a new awareness of the ‘condition of England’ and its two nations of rich and poor. The only one of these that Hugo is likely to have known about is Les Mystères de Paris. Sue was just a little ahead of Hugo in responding to a sea change in literary and social sensibilities across Europe as a whole.
I find Les Mystères de Paris turgid and boring to a degree, but as it was read with enthusiasm by such a wide public the fault must surely lie with me. The French novelist Honoré de Balzac objected to it for other reasons besides. He was jealous of Sue’s earnings, for a start, but he also deplored the appeals to ‘social justice’ that its episodes contain. Unlike Hugo, Balzac saw French society in decline and thought that only a return to the legitimate monarchy and the rule of the church could provide ‘a complete system of repression of the depraved tendencies of the human race’.15 His response to Les Mystères de Paris came in two sombre masterpieces gathered together under the topical title Poor Relations ‘to overthrow the false gods of that bastard literature,’16 by which he meant serial fiction in the manner of Eugène Sue. Hugo’s response, which he never acknowledged as such, took much longer to work out. But it is buried just under the surface of the prose work he began in 1845 and which eventually turned into Les Misérables.
There are some obvious parallels between the two works. Like Prince Rudolph, Jean Valjean dies and is reborn many times: sent down for the theft of a loaf in 1796, he loses his name and becomes 24601; on his release in 1815 he goes to Montreuil-sur-Mer, where he changes into M. Madeleine; after owning up in 1823 to being a wanted man, he is reincarcerated as convict 9430; then he jumps off a mast into deep water and is given up for dead, but is spotted by Javert in Paris a few months after that; he flees, then disappears over a wall into a convent. But to have the right to stay there he first has to leave it in a coffin, and is nearly buried alive. He becomes ‘Ultime Fauchelevent’, and when he leaves the convent five years later others know him by the names of ‘Monsieur Leblanc’ and ‘Urbain Fabre’. Valjean vanishes and reappears under new names more times than the Count of Monte Cristo, more often than Princess Bari, like the hero of some ancient saga – or of a modern one, like Sue’s.
2.
Fantine
It is Christmas Day 1855, and the Hugos are living in a large rented house in Hauteville Street, overlooking Havelet Bay. As the house does not yet belong to them, the remodelling and interior decoration that eventually made it into a showcase for Hugo’s strange imagination have not yet begun. What has begun, however, is the routine of family dinners prepared by Marie, a commandingly competent cook teasingly called ‘Mary Sixty’, as if she was one of the island’s seizeniers, or local bigwigs. Hugo always sits at the head of the table, as befits a paterfamilias, and he usually holds forth on some topic or other. On this day, he talks not of politics or science, but of his own work. ‘What I’m going to read to you came to me at the H
ouse of Lords in 1845, and I even began writing it in the chamber, on this piece of paper…’
In those years, Hugo’s still unmarried twenty-five-year-old daughter Adèle (called Adèle II to distinguish her from her mother) kept a meticulous diary in which she noted down almost everything her father said. Her summary of her father’s recitation on that 25 December describes a poem about a young woman who loses her family and has to fend for herself sewing clothes. When winter comes and days are short, the high cost of lamp oil plunges her into debt. She pawns her watch, her coat, her ring, even her father’s war medal, but these do not meet her needs. She has no option but to go on the streets, where she’s laughed at by urchins and told to move on by police. The second topic in the poem that Hugo’s dutiful daughter recalled expressed horror at the cruel treatment of working animals, and the third section protested the use of child labour in factories.17