The Novel of the Century

by David Bellos

  This is a mockery of the resurrection, though the humour is deeply hidden. In a different vein, it begins the transformation of Valjean from the Hercules of Montfermeil and the Batman of the Orion into the Christ-like figure of suffering and redemption that he becomes in the sewers later on. The convent chapters provide an appropriate background to this key turn in the significance of the novel’s main character and soul.

  Overall, however, Hugo is respectful but not kind to the monastic life. He turns the nuns into jokey mementoes by inventing civilian names for them that inscribe details of his own life: Mother Sainte-Mechtilde is ‘Mlle Gauvain’, the maiden name of Juliette Drouet; Mother des Anges is ‘Mlle Drouet’ directly. Mothers Saint-Joseph, Miséricorde and Présentation are respectively ‘Mlles de Cogolludo’, ‘de Cifuentes’ and ‘de Siguenza’, named for battles won in Spain by General Léopold-Sigisbert Hugo; Mother Compassion is ‘Mlle de la Militière’, the name of a property that Hugo’s father owned in Sologne, as was ‘Laudinière’, the civil name attributed to Mother Providence. These nods aside, Hugo makes it clear that monasticism is set on an irreversible decline. Whatever admirable functions convents may have played in the past, they have no future in France. Similar to his critique of King Louis-Philippe – a decent man trying to do a job that is not needed any more – Hugo’s investigation of monasticism broadens the sweep of this novel of the poor in a bid to make it the all-embracing portrait of nineteenth-century life.

  Albert Lacroix did not see the point. The convent chapters could be made to work, the publisher wrote, if they were tied up with ‘an action that is part of the tale’, or with a description or a philosophical argument that would give them life. ‘Ah! how I would love to talk about all that with you … Could you not come [to Brussels]? Please come, please come, dear Master.’8 Perhaps surprisingly, Hugo didn’t simply tell Lacroix to get on with printing the book, but asked him to mark up the sheets of ‘Picpus’ and ‘Parenthesis’ – in pencil, not in ink! – with suggestions for cuts, as if he too were worried that these chapters weren’t yet quite right. Lacroix didn’t dare or didn’t know how to mark up a manuscript like a modern line-editor, so instead he sent back a list of the sections and topics where he thought changes could be made. To implement them while still working on proofs and on revisions of the next part of the book, Hugo needed to have the fair copy manuscript sent back to Hauteville House. ‘Brutal cuts are impossible, there have to be transitions. I can only enter the transitions on the manuscript. Send it to me in haste. It is not possible to simply cut the whole of ‘Parenthesis’.9 However, the wary publisher did not trust the post for returning something as precious as the single fair copy of Part II of Les Misérables – not so much because it might be lost, but because it might be stolen, leaked to the press and pirated before his own edition was out. A logistical stalemate ensued, and the argument over the convent passages petered out. They stayed as they were because there was no way to make them different, even if Hugo had been willing to take (some) of his (somewhat blinkered) editor’s advice.

  13.

  The Politics of Les Misérables

  In the long Cold War that pitted the West against the communist empire from 1945 to 1991, Les Misérables had the unique distinction among literary works of being cherished equally in Moscow and New York. While Victor Hugo remained without contest the most widely read French author in the Soviet Union,10 Cameron Mackintosh adapted a French musical version for the London stage and took it to Broadway in 1987, where it broke all records in popularity and in the length of its run. The opposite outturn is just as imaginable, however, since Hugo’s novel contains much that ought to be quite unacceptable to communists, and even more prominent material that their opponents ought to reject outright. On one side, it states quite clearly that ‘the bourgeoisie’ does not exist and that ‘class warfare’ is a nefarious idea; on the other, it makes heroes out of young men who want to change society by violent means. Where, then, does the novel really hang on the great washing-line of political convictions stretching from the far left to the far right?

  The character of M. Mabeuf, the ruined botanist-cum-bookseller who dies on the barricade, provides a keyhole example of the double-jointed politics of Les Misérables. ‘Get to the bottom of Mabeuf’ was number 10 in the list of points Hugo made after his first rereading of Les Misères in May 1860 (see p. 105 above), and for good reason. ‘Mabeuf’ is the same bar one letter as ‘Babeuf’, the name of the most extreme egalitarian among the political leaders of the French Revolution of 1789, yet Hugo’s Mabeuf has an almost comically non-political view of the world. He’s more interested in flowers and old books than in women, and he never understood ‘how men could get involved in hating each other over such nonsense as the Charter, democracy, legitimacy, the Republic and the like’ (III.5.iv, 621–2). What could possibly link Gracchus Babeuf, the emblematic figure of steadfast and violent opposition, with a kindly old botanist who doesn’t give a fig for politics of any kind? Perhaps only this, the song that first made Babeuf a popular figure in revolutionary France:

  Mourant de faim, mourant de froid.

  Peuple! dépouillé de tout droit.

  Tout bas tu te désoles.

  (Dying of hunger, dying of cold.

  O People! Deprived of all rights,

  You whisper your sad plight.)

  This revolutionary anthem of protest describes the state of poor M. Mabeuf on the eve of the uprising of June 1832. He’s lost his last cent and has nothing but starvation to look forward to in his old age, which can hardly last very long. That’s what makes sense of his otherwise senseless decision to join the revolutionary students and to die on the barricade. His trajectory in the novel seems to say that poverty can turn a mouse into a lion – that la misère is the fundamental cause of social strife.

  In the 1930s, a student society in Prague held a practice debate pitting the ‘communist’ against the ‘socialist’ interpretation of Les Misérables. No transcript of it survives, but I can see how Mabeuf might have provided the debaters with a suitably two-faced coin to toss. On the one side, the old man can be seen as a walking plea for retirement pensions and, more generally, for measures to relieve the victims of economic distress. That would be a ‘socialist’ interpretation of his case. A ‘communist’ interpretation, on the other hand, would see Mabeuf as Hugo’s vision of the vanguard of the coming revolution, to be fuelled by the anger of the dispossessed. For one side, the flag-wielding geriatric on the barricades serves to scare the bourgeois establishment into meaningful social reforms. For the other, he glorifies revolution led by those who have nothing to lose. Whatever the result of the debate in Prague may have been, the truth is that Les Misérables doesn’t come down on either side.

  Hugo was accustomed to being asked to say which side he was on, since so many factions wanted his prestige for themselves, and he became very adept at keeping his foot out of traps of that kind. However, Les Misérables was due to appear in volumes at dates spread out over months, and its initial reception would hang not on the whole, but only the first part. ‘The trouble with this book for people trying to review it,’ Hugo wrote to Lacroix, ‘is its size.’

  If it could be published in one go, I think its effect would be decisive; but since at the present time it can only be read in pieces, its overall design can’t be seen; but the whole is everything … This book is a mountain; you can only measure or even see it properly from a distance. That’s to say, all in one.11

  Unfortunately, the reception of just the first part would most likely determine the outcome of a literary and financial enterprise like no other. So it seemed reasonable – if not essential – to give the book’s first readers a steer at the start as to what its overall meaning was. The philosophical introduction Hugo had written in summer 1860 had already been set aside. Something snappier was needed, and needed very soon, since Volume 1, now in second proof, couldn’t be paginated until the front matter was in place. On 1 January 1862, he drafted a sin
gle sentence to say what he thought Les Misérables meant. He didn’t send it to Lacroix for five weeks (perhaps he didn’t really write it on New Year’s Day, just backdated it to give it the appearance of a new start). At any rate, what he did send in must be one of the grandest deployments of ancient rhetoric in modern dress and among the most quoted and least understood long sentences in literary history. Here it is, in a version slightly adapted from Christine Donougher’s English translation:

  As long as through the workings of laws and customs there exists a damnation by society artificially creating hells in the very midst of civilization and complicating destiny, which is divine, with a man-made fate; as long as the three problems of the century are not resolved, the debasement of men by the prolétariat, the moral degradation of women through hunger and the stunting of children by keeping them in darkness; as long as in certain strata social suffocation is possible; in other words, and from an even broader perspective, as long as there are ignorance and misère on earth, books such as this one may not be without utility.

  Stripped of rhetoric and put into bullet-points, this is what it says:

  • While some people still live in a hell on earth artificially created by laws (Valjean’s yellow passport, for example);

  • and while customs complicate the blows of fate (those that affect Fantine, for example);

  • while the three main problems of this century remain unsolved;

  • and, more generally, while there is still ignorance and poverty on earth;

  • Les Misérables will always be a useful book.

  The preface does not say how the ‘problems of this century’ should be solved, nor does it even hint at a political programme to bring about the happy day when Les Misérables would become a useless book. It lists what the problems are, but not their solutions. Obviously, even the most objective-seeming analysis of ‘the problems of our age’ is a political act, but to assess the political colour that Hugo gives to his book in this brief preface we need to understand what he means in the phrases that identify what those problems are.

  Those phrases are not easy to translate into any language, including contemporary French. Let us look first at what Hugo wrote in the original before trying to decode them for today. The three problems are:

  • ‘la dégradation de l’homme par le prolétariat’

  • ‘la déchéance de la femme par la faim’

  • ‘l’atrophie de l’enfant par la nuit’

  The third phrase has the literal meaning ‘the atrophy of the child by night’. ‘Night’ is used here as the opposite of ‘light’, which, though unstated, must be understood as the conventional metaphor for ‘education’ or ‘enlightenment’. In other words, the lack of education for the children of the poor is a ‘problem of the century’ because it ‘dries them out’, stunts their moral growth. It’s hard to disagree that mass education held the prospect for a great improvement in the lives of the poor. But it does not match the lessons you could just as easily draw from the stories of uneducated Éponine and Gavroche. Their resources of generosity, passion, intelligence and good cheer make them heroes as well as victims of the society they illustrate.

  The middle phrase can be represented word for word as ‘the fall of woman from hunger’, but in this context déchéance, ‘fall’, means prostitution and nothing else. Nineteenth-century translators give ‘the ruin of women’, and they were right for their own time, since that was the regular English euphemism for commercial sex.

  The first of ‘the problems of our age’ is the hardest to crack. Literally translated, it says: ‘the degradation of man by the proletariat’. But whatever can that mean?

  ‘Proletariat’ is not a real word of classical Latin. It was invented at some point in the nineteenth century from proletarius, a term that designated a member of the sixth and lowest class of citizens in Ancient Rome. Proletarii were not slaves, and only incidentally tradesmen or workers. What made them proletarii was that they had no property and paid no tax, and consequently did not have a vote and were not eligible for public office. Their principal function in society was to produce the next generation of citizens – and that is what the word proletarius actually lays down, since it is derived from proles, meaning ‘genitor’.

  Hugo, whose knowledge of Ancient Rome was beyond reproach, took the abstract noun proletariat to mean the ‘state of being a proletarius’, that is to say, deprived of civil rights. If I had to coin a term to translate it, ‘outcastness’ would come to mind. Indeed, the conventional translation of Les Misérables into Russian, Otverzhennie, means just that: ‘The Outcast’.

  That is not what ‘proletariat’ means now, in English, German, Russian or in French. ‘Workers of the World, Unite’, the rousing last sentence of the Communist Manifesto of 1848, translates Marx’s German appeal to ‘Proletärier aller Länder’, and in the body of the text he uses Proletärier (proletarians) and Proletariat interchangeably. Friedrich Engels was aware his friend had taken a liberty with Latin roots and explained what he meant in a clever footnote to later editions of the Manifesto: ‘By proletariat [is meant] the class of modern wage labourers, who having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live’.12 The Roman sense of ‘having no property’ is switched to ‘having no means of production’. The substitution has worked very well and has obscured the meaning that Hugo thought prolétariat had.

  Some translations of the foreword try to compromise between the now obviously meaningless ‘degradation of men by the proletariat’ and the suspicion that Hugo must have meant something by his strange formulation. The result is to make Hugo march under a banner that was not his. ‘The debasement of men through proletarianization’ is a defensible interpretation of the main thrust of Dickens’s Hard Times and Zola’s Germinal, but it doesn’t express the message of Les Misérables. Waged labour in Madeleine’s model factory in Montreuil is the solution to Fantine’s woes, not their cause. As we’ve seen on p. 157, Valjean heartily recommends Montparnasse to ‘sell his labour power in order to live’ instead of living off crime. Thanks to Karl Marx’s approximate Latin and to the long-lasting impact of the political movement he founded, a single word at the head of Les Misérables has had Hugo’s masterpiece labelled a left-wing book. It is certainly a progressive one and it surely expresses moral outrage at the plight of the poor, but it does not come close to recommending any of the economic principles to which the European left has long adhered. It is a much more even-handed work than that.

  All the same, it puts an act of revolutionary violence at its core. The barricade episode of Les Misérables is closely based on historical events, but the book’s meaning is hard to assess without knowing what changes Hugo made to the events themselves.

  According to official reports, the June uprising of 1832 pitted about 3,000 rioters against 30,000 government troops and National Guards. Some sources say that seventy-three soldiers and ninety-three civilians died, with around 300 wounded on either side; a more recent study reckons there were about 300 dead overall.13 Measured against other moments of turbulence in the history of France, the barricade Hugo describes was the merest squall.

  What set it off were circumstances that Hugo acknowledges but does not make much of in the text. On 16 May 1832, cholera carried off the prime minister, Casimir Périer, leaving the government leaderless. A group of deputies headed by Laffitte seized the moment to draw up a hostile assessment of the policies followed up to that point. They paid lip service to the monarchy, but their unrelenting critique of the government’s actions amounted to a call to overthrow the king. To what purpose? There was no agreement about that. Supporters of the Bourbon monarchy that had disappeared in 1830 were waiting for a chance to stage a comeback; a network of supporters of Bonaparte were still on the lookout for an opportunity to stage a ‘liberal-imperial’ putsch; and republicans, still smarting from what they saw as the confiscation of the 1830 Revolution by King Louis-Philippe, were just as
eager to head off a reactionary coup d’état as to seize power for themselves.

  On 30 May, Évariste Galois, the mathematical genius of his era, died in a duel, fought for reasons still unknown. Galois was a militant republican, and sketchy plans were made to use his funeral as the pretext for an uprising. But before his corpse could even be loaded on a hearse came news that a better-known republican hero, General Lamarque, had died of cholera. Galois’s funeral was postponed until 2 June and Lamarque’s was scheduled for 5 June.

  A masked executioner was stalking Paris with an invisible portable guillotine. ‘We’ll all be put in the sack one after the other,’ my servant said with a sigh every morning when he told me how many had died … ‘Put in the sack’ was no figure of speech: coffins ran short and most of the dead were buried in bags.14

  With people of all classes dying like fleas, disgust at Louis-Philippe’s foreign policies threw more oil on the fire. The ‘bourgeois monarch’ had too easily given up the northern parts of France to allow the creation of the new state of Belgium and had lost an area enjoying rapid industrial growth. The king had also refused to come to the aid of the Poles when the Warsaw uprising was put down by the tsar’s troops the previous year. Despairing of their land, tens of thousands of Poles migrated to the West. By 1832, many of these mostly high-status migrants had found sanctuary in Paris, where they were seen as living reproaches to the cowardly refusal of Louis-Philippe to assert France’s role as the defender of freedom and civilization. (Wenceslas Steinbock, the weak-kneed sculptor in Balzac’s Cousine Bette, was one of them; Adam Mickiewicz, Poland’s national poet, was another, alongside the wealthy Prince Adam Czartoryski, who bought one of the finest houses in Paris.) That’s why ‘Long Live Poland’ is the battle cry of Feuilly, the only worker member of the ‘Friends of the ABC’.15