by David Bellos
The summary leaves no doubt that Hugo was reading his family a version of the poem called ‘Melancholia’, which is now included in Les Contemplations, a collection first published in 1856. In the published edition, the poem is dated 1838; however, because Hugo frequently changed the dates of his compositions (for all kinds of reasons), the date of 1845 given by Adèle is much more likely to be the right one. That is when Hugo joined the Chambre des pairs, and the year when he started writing Les Misérables, which also tells the story of a poor woman who turns to prostitution for want of any other way to earn a crust. The tale of Fantine has the same outline and many of the same details as the subject of the first part of ‘Melancholia’. The ‘abuse of child labour’ is also a shared theme – Cosette’s suffering at the hands of the Thénardiers may seem more like a retelling of the Cinderella story now, but it highlights the general issue of how poor children were treated. Cruelty to working animals is also described in Les Misérables in a short but touching scene in front of Bombarda’s restaurant in 1817.18 It is therefore quite reasonable to see ‘Melancholia’ as springing from the same set of feelings and ideas as the prose work begun around the same time that eventually turned into Les Misérables, which, on Christmas Day 1855, was still only a draft and a plan. In any case, Hugo made no secret of the relationship between the two. When he finished reciting what was at that stage probably only about 110 lines of the 300-line poem, he told his family that it contained ‘the germ of his unpublished novel’.19
Hugo expressed himself with equal ease in prose and in verse, though he tended to concentrate on one type of writing at any one time of his life. What we can guess from the hints provided by Adèle’s account of the Christmas recitation at Hauteville House is that the ‘germ’ of Les Misérables, planted in Hugo’s mind and heart around or shortly after April 1845, as the new ‘lord of the realm’ took his seat in the Chambre des pairs, came to him more or less indistinctly in verse and in prose. His eventual decision to use that material for a prose work rather than a narrative poem is the real ‘source’ of the greatest novel he ever wrote. And if Les Misérables has aspects and dimensions that take prose into the realm of poetry, that is partly because some of its subjects were indeed expressed in verse.
Hugo does not describe the life of a sex-worker in ‘Melancholia’, and he says no more about it in Les Misérables. Fantine’s ‘fall’ is dealt with in just seven words:
‘Well,’ she said, ‘let’s get on with it and sell the rest.’
The poor girl went on the streets. (I.5.x, adapted)
These clipped sentences contrast with the opulence of Hugo’s habitual style and, partly because of that, they make a stronger impression in context than they do when quoted on their own. They ask readers to imagine what it meant to ‘go on the streets’ in a garrison town in 1823. What Hugo leaves out has been put back in by film-makers, graphic artists, adapters and the writers of fan fiction ever since, and some representation of Fantine’s life as a prostitute has become an almost obligatory sequence in modern adaptations of Les Misérables. These more or less explicit portrayals of nineteenth-century sex work are inventions that owe nothing to what Hugo wrote. They are best taken as mirrors of the attitudes prevailing in the time and place where they were made.
Les Misérables also offers no criticism of capitalism or of the conditions of industrial labour. Quite the contrary: far from being one of the causes of poverty, ‘wage-slavery’ is presented in the novel as a providential cure. The only material and moral respite Fantine ever gets comes from packing beads at Madeleine’s factory in Montreuil-sur-Mer: ‘When Fantine saw she was making a living, she enjoyed a moment of happiness. To live honestly by the work she did – what a blessing! She truly regained a liking for work’ (I.5.viii, 163).
These lines answer those who followed Malthus in thinking the poor were naturally lazy. Hugo demonstrates that even a ‘lost woman’ regains a liking for work once she is given a job to do. The implication is that the alleged moral depravity of the poor comes simply from the fact that there are not enough jobs to be had. The natural corollary is that men like Madeleine are to be admired for providing the work that allows poor people to become honest folk.
This apologia for industrialism is a sentimental fantasy, even a sinister one, for some modern readers. The growth of manufacturing in the decades that followed Les Misérables gave rise to political ideologies focused on the needs and rights of the labouring masses, and they in their turn changed perceptions of the meaning of Hugo’s novel. Madeleine’s model factory at Montreuil-sur-Mer and the philanthropic munificence that its profits allow suggest there is nothing wrong with exploitation. The manufacturer may behave in a superficially kindly manner to the workers and citizens of Montreuil, but what he’s really doing is grabbing the fruits of their labour for himself – he amasses 630,000 francs (equivalent to 200kg of gold) in only six years. From this point of view the ‘objective meaning’ of Les Misérables is no more than propaganda on behalf of the robber barons of the industrial class.
Overall levels of prosperity have multiplied a hundredfold since the days of Fantine, but poverty hasn’t disappeared, under any political regime. The big questions asked by Malthus, by Tocqueville and by Victor Hugo – why do poor people exist, and how can we be rid of them? – have been answered again and again, but never so well as to make them disappear. Is welfare itself the cause of poverty? Should income support and unemployment benefit be merged? Is there an irredeemable underclass that will always be poor, whatever laws are passed? How much of a benefit seeker’s personal circumstances are relevant to assessing his or her needs? How much responsibility should be taken by the state for the relief of poverty, and how much left on the shoulders of the poor themselves?
Indeed, the social mechanisms that condemn some people to poverty today are not very different from what Hugo lays out in the plot of Les Misérables. The factors identified by modern social scientists as the main contributors to the cycle of poverty are these: loss of close family members; loss of financial support; unwanted pregnancy; low educational achievement; unemployment; falling rates of pay; ill health; being a victim of violence; and involvement with the law. Hugo put his finger on all those self-reinforcing disasters in his imagination of the life of Fantine. She is illiterate (the only illiterate character in the whole novel, I believe), has an unexpected pregnancy, is abandoned by the father of her child, loses his financial support, becomes unemployed, sees the rate of pay for piecework as a seamstress collapse, is physically attacked, gets arrested and falls ill. Her life is a classic example of the poverty trap.
We may want to take comfort in the tools that have been developed since the time of Les Misérables to prevent such an outcome. Universal primary education means that no modern Fantine has to rely on a tipsy letter-writer to correspond with the foster-parents of Cosette, so the existence of her illegitimate daughter would not be blabbed about around town. Birth-control methods make unwanted pregnancies less likely in any case, but when they occur, scoundrels like Tholomyès can be traced and obliged to provide child support. Anti-discrimination laws do not allow factory managers to sack employees just because they are single parents. If rates of pay fall below subsistence levels, some kind of income support is now provided by most states in the developed world. Caught in a squabble with a rough customer on the streets, prostitutes are no longer assumed to have lesser rights than members of the bourgeoisie, and the chest complaint that killed Fantine can be dealt with by antibiotics. We can congratulate ourselves on living in a less brutal age. We can relegate Fantine’s horror story to a past that’s been mended and made all right.
We really should not. In housing schemes, in the banlieues, in the de-industrialized wastelands of Europe and the slums of Mumbai, the disasters that fall on Fantine continue to make many lives utterly miserable ones. The destitute are not as numerous as they were in 1845 and not as visible in the centres of cities like Paris or New York. But even if Fantine’s story po
ints indirectly to all the progress that’s been made to limit the impact of life events to which women remain more vulnerable than men, it also underscores the need to carry on.
* * *
In Hugo’s youth, jails and dungeons were considered picturesque, and tourists in Paris visited all kinds of places that modern visitors shun. A prim Swiss student who came to Paris in 1830, for example, whiled away a Sunday afternoon at the women’s ward in a lunatic asylum and then dropped in at the morgue, just to see.20 Fashionable interest in ruins and medieval remains and a widely shared taste for the quaint and the bizarre – the main components of Romanticism when reduced to a statement of style – provided respectable cover for interests now served by the noirest genre of film.
In 1828, as a young man of his times and a maker of them, Victor Hugo went with his friend the sculptor David d’Angers to visit the prison of Bicêtre, where men condemned to death and hard labour were held. A serious interest in the preservation of the gothic past made Hugo keen to see the ancient prison buildings, but to do so he had to join a crowd of well-heeled gawkers who were permitted to watch what went on in the jail. The visitors were placed just behind the prison guards to get a close-up view of a detachment of men recently sentenced to hard labour being led out into the yard. The prison blacksmith set up his brazier and anvil and used a mallet to drive a red-hot rivet into the iron collar placed around each convict’s neck.
It is a dreadful moment that makes even the boldest go pale with fear. Each hammer blow struck on the anvil set up behind the man’s neck makes his chin bounce: the slightest movement forward or backward would have his skull cracked open like a nut.21
Once linked together in this humiliating and terrifying way, the convicts or forçats were made to mount open carts and sit face outwards on a bench in the middle to begin their long journey south to the bagne (prison) at Toulon. That is what Jean Valjean endured on 22 April 1796:
As the bolt was riveted into his iron collar with heavy hammer blows behind his head, he wept; his tears choked him, they prevented him from speaking, all he managed to say every now and then was ‘I was a tree-pruner at Faverolles’. (I.2.vi, 80)
Valjean’s ensuing twenty-seven-day journey to Toulon is not described in the narrative sequence of the novel, but it is brought back to life in an elegant and moving way some thirty-five years later on. When living in Rue Plumet, Valjean and Cosette go for an early-morning walk and encounter a grotesque and frightening scene: a procession of oxcarts bearing a ragged and filthy crew belting out a popular song. It is the chain-gang, on the first leg of a journey that Valjean had made twice over. People come out to watch, and urchins hurl abuse at the poor men.22 Cosette sees without knowing what sort of a man her ‘father’ had been, and the reader is reminded that the gentle philanthropist had once been no more than a human beast providing entertainment to a heartless crowd. From the iron-smithing scene in Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné The Last Day of a Condemned Man, written in 1828, to the last part of Les Misérables, composed in 1861, Hugo did not cease to be saddened and angered by man’s humiliation by man.
On his visit to Bicêtre, Hugo was also taken to inspect death row, and what he saw there shook him to the core. He imagined what it would be like to be a ‘privileged’ prisoner with a neck free of chain because it would soon be severed by the guillotine. Instead of writing a report, he composed a fictional, day-by-day diary of the thoughts of a man about to die. The Last Day of a Condemned Man doesn’t reveal the identity of the writer or the nature of the crime that earned him his sentence of death. The direct, almost deadpan tone and the absence of explanation made this short first-person novel more shocking to readers than the facts it conveyed. It came out in 1829 without Hugo’s name on it and was attacked in the press as a deplorable example of nerve-jangling Romantic excess. After the July Revolution of 1830, however, Hugo republished it in his own name, with a new preface making clear that he viewed capital punishment itself as a crime. From then on, he never wavered in his call to abolish the death penalty. It was finally done away with in France in 1981, after a century and a half of campaigning that had its source in the visit made by Victor Hugo to the prison of Bicêtre.
Brigands, outlaws, adventurers and tricksters figure in popular entertainment probably in every age, but the early nineteenth century seems to have invented contemporary crime as a social and literary topic. However, most of the ‘literature of crime’ of the Romantic era deals with spectacular and sinister forces of evil lurking just beneath the surface of polite society – Balzac’s Vautrin, for example, is the banker of the underworld, pulling a thousand unseen strings to manipulate otherwise respectable young men. Hugo’s contribution to the genre is entirely different: a sober, only lightly fictionalized report of a real case, that of a prisoner provoked to commit even greater crimes by the unmerciful application of unjust rules. Claude Gueux, which appeared in 1834, allowed or prompted Hugo to become quite knowledgeable about the system of justice and the organization of prisons, and it is in this short quasi-novel that he first formulated the view that he elaborates on a grander scale in Les Misérables on the link between poverty and crime: ‘Why did this man steal? Why did he kill?’ are the questions asked at his trial, and Hugo replies, ‘The people are hungry, the people are cold. It is poverty that leads men to crime and women to vice.’ 23
In Les Misérables, however, Hugo refrains from explicit comment on the injustice of the law that sent Valjean to prison. He deals with the trial in just a few words: ‘Jean Valjean was found guilty. The terms of the Penal Code were mandatory … What a fateful moment it is when society … irredeemably casts adrift a thinking being! Jean Valjean was condemned to five years’ hard labour’ (I.2.vi, 80).
Hugo lets the imbalance between the crime and its punishment speak for itself, but adapters of the novel for stage and screen often feel the need to spell it out. Richard Boleslawski, for example, the director of the classic Hollywood film of Les Misérables made in 1935, imagines a trial by jury in which the defendant takes the witness stand and delivers an impassioned, almost Shakespearean speech against not only the unfairness of the law, but the injustice of poverty that drives men to steal bread. It is a fine early example of that quintessentially American film genre, the courtroom drama, and the actor Fredric March surely speaks more for the victims of the Great Depression than he does for any eighteenth-century French misérable (especially because there were no jury trials at that time, and under the civil law system defendants cannot take the witness stand or make speeches on their own behalf). Many subsequent film versions have followed Boleslawski’s lead, contributing to a general impression that Hugo’s story begins with a denunciation of the injustice of the law. In the literal sense, it does not; but the attitudes and emotions expressed in these anachronistic and invented courtroom scenes are not contradictions of what Hugo expected his readers to understand.
Les Misérables treats Valjean’s nineteen years of life in jail with equivalent brevity. We learn only that the poor convict acquires the nickname of ‘The Jack’ because of his strength, illustrated by his ability to hold up a falling stone column on the town hall in Toulon; that he learns to read and write; that he tries to escape four times; and that he is cheated of some of the money due to him on his release in 1815.24 What we certainly do not see in the novel is Valjean pulling on oars as a galley-slave – but it is with just such a scene that the Broadway version of the musical by Boublil and Schönberg begins.
The adapters of the musical did not invent the idea: they got it from Boleslawski’s film, which shows a dozen bearded giants heaving-ho to a rhythm beaten out by a glistening black man on a huge gong, seen through the low, slant angles that Welles used to such effect in Citizen Kane. As a substitute for the episode illustrating Valjean’s strength at the town hall in Toulon, Boleslawski’s Valjean lifts a broken beam that has trapped a man below decks, and the overseer – Javert, in his first manifestation as a prison guard – comments aloud to himself that
he’s never seen a prisoner so strong. That is where the opening chorus of the musical comes from. But why did Boleslawski invent a scene of seaborne labour in the first place?
It comes from a single word in the text. It is said by Valjean to Bishop Myriel, to make sure his unexpected host knows what kind of man he has allowed into his home: ‘Avez-vous entendu? Je suis un galérien. Un forçat. Je viens des galères’ (‘Did you hear? I’m an ex-convict. Sentenced to hard labour, I come from the prison hulks’) (I.2.iii, 71). This translation is taken from the currently available English edition, but earlier versions such as those available in the 1930s reproduced the French with English words that look more like them: ‘Did you hear? I am a galley slave; a convict. I come from the galleys.’ The older translation can’t be called wrong: the French word for ‘galley’ is indeed galère and ‘galley-slave’ is galérien. From the founding of the naval port of Toulon in 1679 to the middle of the eighteenth century, moreover, men sentenced to hard labour were sent there to serve as oarsmen on military vessels powered principally by sail. That’s why hard labour was called ‘the galley punishment’, la peine des galères, and convicts were called galériens. Around 1740, however, new kinds of cannon were fitted to warships. These much heavier pieces had to be housed below decks, otherwise the ships would have become unstable in bad weather. That left no room for the galley-slaves, and from then on the French navy relied on sail alone until the introduction of steam around 1830. The literal peine des galères was formally abolished in 1748, and by 1796, when Valjean was sent down, galley-slaving was not even a memory in Toulon any more – except in the words used to refer to the prison and its inmates, les galères and galériens. You could say that the words changed their meaning, but that’s not really true, since the original meaning of the words survives to this day if you need to speak of galleys and slaves (in Ancient Rome, for example). What changed was the world in which they were used.