by David Bellos
The world depicted in Les Misérables is far less marked by religious customs and objects than real France was at that time. No wayside crucifixes or shrines decorate the streets of Hugo’s Paris or the countryside around Digne; no character in Hugo’s novel turns to ‘the eternal book for all the weary and the heavy-laden, for all the wretched, fallen and neglected of this earth’, as Dickens calls the Bible in Dombey and Son;23 Bishop Myriel is seen officiating at no formal ceremony; Valjean refuses last rites; he never takes communion, although he goes into churches to pray after dark – but Marius, Enjolras, Gavroche, Thénardier and so forth don’t even do that. On Christmas Eve at Montfermeil, the millers and hauliers drinking at the inn don’t think of attending Midnight Mass. The wedding of Cosette and Marius – which has the potential to make a grand theatrical denouement to the whole plot – is dismissed in a couple of sentences.24 Hugo really does not want to take Les Misérables inside a church, so as not to let the church think it has a role in the ‘indefinite but unshakeable’ religious slant of Les Misérables.
Film directors often put back in what Hugo so pointedly omits. In a 1952 remake of Boleslawski’s film version, for example, Lewis Milestone has Valjean repent for his theft of forty sous from Petit-Gervais under a shrine to the Virgin Mary. Tom Hooper chose to shoot some scenes in his 2012 adaptation of the musical in Winchester Cathedral, and he places church-like candles in many other frames. These ecclesiastical decorations can be justified if the aim is to provide a plausible vision of nineteenth-century France, but they introduce ideas that Hugo took care to avoid. Films of Les Misérables that display the conventional symbols of the Catholic faith suggest that the work has a religious meaning to match. Hugo’s strongly held beliefs were much less specific than that.
A few months after reading a few pages from Les Misères to Juliette in April 1860, Hugo wrote two new chapters to insert near the start of the book. They contain the episode in which Myriel dines with an atheist senator (I.1.viii) and the story of his encounter with a dying radical holding views that were abhorrent to the church (I.1.x). Their aim is to establish in crystal-clear terms the religious position of the bishop and, by implication, the ideal faith of the whole book.
The main role of the atheist senator is to be knocked for six. This loquacious gourmand regurgitates a well-known eighteenth-century argument that human beings are no more than machines. On this view, which has no place for a god, the purpose of life is to have as much pleasure as possible.
What is there to do on this earth? To suffer, or to enjoy. I have the choice. Where will suffering take me? Nowhere. But I will have suffered. Where will enjoyment take me? Nowhere. But I will have had some pleasure. (I.1.viii, 31)
In this pre-Darwinian view, life is being created all the time, so questions about its origin are irrelevant. The senator also rejects renunciation and sacrifice: wolves don’t do it, and nor should we. He does not believe in a god or in the message of Jesus Christ, and, more generally, he denies that any moral law exists. There is no punishment after death, he says, because nothing can be done to a pile of old bones. However, something is needed to keep the poor in their place, and that’s where religion comes in. The soul, immortality, paradise and so on are human inventions that aim only to placate les misérables. They lap it up since it’s all they have to spread on dry bread. God is for the people, he tells Myriel, but not for us.
To modern ears, Hugo’s cynical senator seems to have been reading Karl Marx. That is obviously not possible, because Marx’s dismissal of religious faith as ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world … the opium of the people’ was written in 1844, decades after the senator’s dinner with Myriel, and it hadn’t been translated into French when Hugo wrote this chapter. However, the senator’s atheistic creed alludes directly to the probable source of what Marx said about faith. In 1793, the revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre (the man blamed for the Terror of 1793–4, and anathema to the church) rejected a proposal to set up a godless Cult of Reason as the official creed of the new French state. Why so? Because ‘atheism is an aristocratic creed, whereas the idea of a supreme being who offers succour to the oppressed and the innocent while punishing the triumphs of crime comes from the people’.25 At the dinner with the atheist, Myriel turns the tables by enlisting Robespierre: yes, he says, my congratulations, you have views entirely in keeping with your exalted position in society. Hugo scores a double hit in this witty banter. By putting Robespierre’s words in the mouth of a bishop to say that the rejection of faith is a typical invention of the idle rich he slams the door on the fingers of his unbelieving left-wing friends. Hugo is accusing them of being objective allies of the gut-stuffing upper bourgeoisie.
In the second inserted chapter, Myriel calls on a dying radical, G., who had been a member of the Convention, the body that fashioned the constitution of the first French Republic after 1789 and voted to execute Louis XVI. This political past makes G. a bogeyman in post-revolutionary France, which is why he lives in a shack far away from town. Myriel challenges G.’s past actions and tries to make him repent, but the old radical won’t apologize for anything he did. Abolishing the monarchy was the only way to abolish its crimes, he says; he hadn’t voted for regicide, but he didn’t think the death of a monarch more deplorable than the death of any other man. Myriel plays his last card: ‘Progress must believe in God. The good cannot be well served by the ungodly. He who is an atheist is not a fit leader of men’ (I.1.x, 43, adapted).
The dying man raises a finger to the sky, a tear comes to his eye, and with a shiver of ecstasy he addresses ‘the ideal’ directly, as if he could see someone there: ‘You alone exist,’ he confesses. This epiphany in extremis is what Myriel and Hugo both seek: a recognition that some kind of higher being exists beyond the material world. The bishop can now ask for the man’s blessing, because faith is what matters, not the form that it takes.
These two chapters provide the philosophical underpinning of Les Misérables: materialism and atheism exacerbate the opposition between rich and poor, but natural religion can reconcile even a man of the church with an anti-clerical radical. The broadest purpose of the novel is to encourage precisely this movement from conflict to harmony by representing it in the life-story of one man.
Les Misérables does not engage with any more specific religious topics, but one question raised by many faiths was never far from Hugo’s mind: where do people go when they die? He had always found it hard to accept that loved ones could cease to exist (which partly explains his willingness to experiment with turning tables). He and Juliette Drouet had both lost children to premature deaths. Claire Pradier, a daughter of Juliette’s by her lover James Pradier, died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty, in June 1846; Hugo’s first daughter, Léopoldine, had died even younger, at nineteen, in a freak boating accident on the Seine. At the time, he was on a jaunt with Juliette under a false name, so he only learned of Léopoldine’s drowning from a newspaper handed to him at an inn. Guilt combined with grief to make the loss of his daughter the gravest emotional wound in Hugo’s life. He wanted Léopoldine to come back and was sometimes on the brink of believing she would. In a poem that he wrote to honour Juliette’s lost child, he made it all but explicit that lost children never really go away:
Car ils sont revenus, et c’est là le mystère;
Nous entendons quelqu’un flotter, un souffle errer
Des robes effleurer notre seuil solitaire
Et cela fait alors que nous pouvons pleurer …26
(For they have come back and that’s where the mystery lies
We can hear someone hovering, a breath moving about,
Dresses brushing over our lonely front step
Which is what makes us able to weep…)
Les Misérables mostly conforms to our expectations of realist fiction, and, with the exception of Monseigneur Myriel, none of its characters actually rises from the grave. Yet the art of the novel did provide Hugo with a hidde
n tool for resuscitating the most loved of all the loved ones he missed. Léopoldine and her husband, who tried to save her, drowned in the Seine on 4 September 1843, when their sailing boat flipped over in front of her in-laws’ family home, not far from where the motorway bridge at Tancarville now stands. In Les Misérables, Valjean escapes from the sailing ship Orion in a feat of daring borrowed from Roncière le Noury. He disappears, and a local newspaper reports the death by drowning in the naval dockyard of prisoner No. 9430.
The digits of Valjean’s second prison number are there to signal to those who care to know it the date of the disappearance of Léopoldine. It may not be much, but it is one way of having her live on.
* * *
In 1858, a purulent sore broke out on Hugo’s back: it was woolsorters’ disease, a painful malady without an antidote at that time.27 The poet was lucky to survive, and when he recovered, he was keen to get all his work done while he still could. This reminder of his own mortal frailty wasn’t the only spur that led him to resume the writing of Les Misérables. On 16 August 1859 – the feast of Saint-Napoléon – the man who now called himself Napoleon III granted amnesty to political exiles who had been expelled for opposing his seizure of power in 1851. For eight years the proscrits in the Channel Islands had been living on grants and gifts and the few odd jobs the islands could provide; many of them were glad to be able to go home to pick up their careers and provide for their families again. Hugo did not stand in the way of their return but he would not accept the amnesty for himself. If France was not free, then it was nothing at all. He would go back only when freedom did. Hugo came close to sounding like Charles de Gaulle in 1940: real France was where he was and nowhere else.
Victor Hugo was getting on for sixty and beginning to feel his age. He now had to wear spectacles to read after dark, and his mind turned towards making a will. His brush with an unpleasant disease reminded him that the hated dictator was six years younger and might not die before he did. The rejection of amnesty therefore meant that the Guernsey idyll could last the rest of his life. Neither the grandeur of Hauteville House nor the inspiration that Hugo drew from the sea would ever make St Peter Port a real home. He now needed a means of making himself present in France, whilst accepting he might never set foot in the country again. Completing his unfinished novel was the most powerful tool that he had to show who was the tallest tree in the land.
It was no simple matter to come back to a story written so long ago. Another writer might have put a line through the draft and started all over again. Hugo took a different approach, which was not obviously a less demanding one. He read through the manuscript slowly once more and made detailed notes on what he needed to do to adjust it to changed circumstances and times, and then set about turning the text that he had into the crowning glory and vindication of his life and work.
The title had already changed from Les Misères to Les Misérables. The new wording shifts the focus from the abstract issues of poverty and woe to characters afflicted by them, signalling unambiguously that what it names is a novel, not an essay or tract. (A secondary effect of the change is to silence the phonetic echo of Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris, which was irrelevant to readers of the 1860s and to the project in hand.) Even so, it is not immediately obvious what either of the two titles meant to Victor Hugo, or what he meant his readers to understand by them. That is probably the main reason why Les Misérables keeps its title in French in the English-speaking world, joining a small handful of translated religious works, national epics and novels and films labelled in English by the names they have in their original tongues.
La misère is the French word for ‘poverty’, and misérable often serves as the adjective associated with it, meaning ‘poor’. Some translations of Hugo’s title restrict the meaning in exactly that way: Nyomorultak, which means ‘poor people’, is the standard Hungarian name of the novel Les Misérables. Hugo uses the word more than a hundred times in the text of the novel as well, and in many cases it means no more than ‘short of cash’. When Marius tells Cosette that he can’t follow her to England because he is ‘un misérable’, for example, he means that he is an ‘impoverished wretch’ and cannot pay the fare (IV.8.vi, 922).
However, misérable isn’t actually an adjective based on the noun misère, just as English ‘miserable’ isn’t derived from ‘misery’. The ending –able (or –ible) is always used in English, French and Latin to make adjectives not from nouns, but from verbs: ‘doable’, ‘thinkable’, ‘regrettable’, ‘edible’ and so on are things that can be done, thought, regretted, eaten, etc. ‘Miserable’ and misérable are not exceptions to the rule. What has happened is that the verb that lies behind them has disappeared.
These words all have their ultimate origin in the Latin adjective miser, ‘unhappy’, and the noun miseria, ‘misfortune’ or ‘woe’. Miser has found its way into English with its meaning restricted to avarice, just as miseria narrowed its meaning to ‘poverty’ as it turned into French misère. Latin was Victor Hugo’s second tongue – he read Latin every night in bed before going to sleep, he knew thousands of lines of Latin verse by heart to the end of his life, and he frequently used Latin phrases and quotations when writing and speaking in French. He gave a Latin title to a pen-and-ink sketch of a haggard woman that he thought might be used as a frontispiece of Les Misérables. It could be a portrait of Fantine, but its title Miseria does not mean that it is a picture of poverty. It is an image of woe.
Latin miseria can be put in the plural, miseriae, just as in English we can talk of ‘the miseries of life’. In French, however, plural des misères most often means ‘a trifling sum’, ‘peanuts’, and it is not at all common in other senses. Hugo’s original title, Les Misères, obviously doesn’t mean ‘peanuts’, but it is hard to say what it signifies unless we hear behind the French formulation the Latin word in Hugo’s mind. Les Misères is Latin miseriae in French dress, and it means something like ‘all the woes of the world’.
French misérable, like English ‘miserable’, is a direct import of Latin miserabilis, an adjective formed from the verb miserere, ‘to feel sorrow for’, ‘to take pity on’ or, in the usage of the King James Bible, ‘to have mercy’. In English the meaning of ‘miserable’ has been narrowed to refer to the psychological state of someone on whom we might (perhaps) take pity, and now refers to roughly the same inner state as ‘glum’, ‘sorrowful’, ‘downcast’ or ‘depressed’. That process of specialization has not affected the meaning of its French twin misérable, which never means ‘miserable’. Even now the French word retains some of the senses it had in classical and church Latin: ‘deserving of pity and sorrow’. These meanings were even nearer the surface in the mind of a man who was as good as bilingual in the two tongues.
The Latin meaning of misérable was all the more present in nineteenth-century France because miserere and miserabilis were constantly heard in a country where Latin remained the language of the church. Vermis sum, miserabilis sum (‘I am a worm, I am a wretch…’) were commonly recited homilies, and the opening of Psalm 51, read or most often sung at funerals, weddings and masses, begins: ‘Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam’.
Hugo reminds readers of the root meaning of his title when the retired bookseller Mabeuf has his peaceful evenings disturbed by his housekeeper’s tomcat. The animal’s vocal range is so wide and the volume so high, the narrator jokes, that his yowling could have filled the Sistine Chapel with the sound of Allegri’s setting of the Psalm. In other words, if you don’t know the miserere, you’re in a class lower than Mme Plutarque’s pet.28
When Jean Valjean laments the sin he has committed by purloining Petit-Gervais’s two-franc coin outside Digne, he calls out ‘Je suis un misérable!’ (I.2.xiii, 103). Here, most obviously, but also elsewhere, he does not mean ‘I am poor,’ but ‘I am a moral wretch.’ Latin frequently lies behind the French words of Hugo’s text.
But it is more complicated even than that. Misérable is one o
f those many words that can switch their value from positive to negative without notice. There are many similar cases in English too: a wretched person is worthy of pity but may just as well be beneath contempt. Un misérable is similarly two-faced. Context and common sense usually tell you, but taken on its own misérable may refer either to a scoundrel to be scorned or to a soul in distress.
A novel called Les Misérables could therefore be about many different things: poor people, of course, but also people deserving of our pity, people who have sinned, and contemptible wretches. The broad arguments of Hugo’s time about how to deal with the poor and with crime discussed on pp. 8–14 above were focused on making distinctions between those different groups and, implicitly, on separating out the different strands in the meaning of misérable. Hugo’s huge, subtle, overpowering response is to lump them all together. That is the true significance of the new title of his book. It came to him on Jersey when, despite his eminence and his bluster, despite his good health and his multiple partners, despite his beliefs, his gifts and his hopes, he was an outcast too. It took time to work out what he had done by reinventing his novel of the poor as a novel of Les Misérables, but in the end he was able to make it completely explicit. When revising his description of the wretched lives of the wretched Thénardier clan, the novel’s mauvais pauvres or ‘villainous paupers’, he inserted a broad reflection on what poverty and crime have to do with each other on a page that turned out to fit in at the exact mid-point of the whole book:
They seemed very depraved, very corrupt, very debased – heinous, even – but rare are those who fall without sinking into vice. In any case, there is a point where the poor and the wicked become mixed up and lumped together in the one fateful word: les misérables. And whose fault is that? (III.8.v, 671, adapted)
It’s a truism that you can’t change the meaning of a word on your own. Except that sometimes you can, and in this central redefinition of the meaning of the title word of Les Misérables you can see it being done. Henceforth it will mean not ‘poor’ or ‘pitiable’ or ‘despicable’ and not even all three in turn. It becomes a way of naming what these groups have in common: a moral and social identity that had no name before. ‘The Outcast’? Maybe. ‘The Wretched’? Quite plausible. ‘The Oppressed’, ‘The Humiliated’, ‘The Downtrodden’ … there are many strands that can be picked out and named, but no way of reinventing Hugo’s inclusiveness in any other tongue. That’s why Les Misérables remains Les Misérables.