The Novel of the Century

by David Bellos

  On 5 June 1832, a large crowd paid last respects to Lamarque as his coffin was paraded from Madeleine to Bastille, where General Lafayette was due to deliver the funeral oration. Organized agitators directed the crowd to attack the police, and running fights broke out in the streets. Barricades were thrown up in working-class areas but were quickly overcome, except for one. Lafayette sensed that the uprising was doomed, and he decamped to the countryside overnight. The suppression of the last enclave in the morning of 6 June was a bloody affair, but it did not last long. By three in the afternoon, the king could tell his ministers that there was nothing more to do.

  Hugo fictionalized the last hold-out by moving it to Rue de la Chanvrerie and changed its nature by having it led not by the angry poor, but by a loosely organized group of intellectuals, the ‘Friends of the ABC’, supplemented by the desperate Mabeuf and a ‘revolutionary urchin’ whose main interest in it is the chance of using a gun. The myth of student involvement in the vanguard of the revolution has a root in the quite different events of July 1830, when members of the elite military academy called Polytechnique manned some of the Latin Quarter barricades. However, the main source of the enduring myth of students leading the crowd against the forces of reaction is actually Les Misérables itself, where it serves several different dramatic and pedagogic ends. Hugo enlisted them because educated fighters for a cause they know is lost can plausibly be made to give speeches to each other to explain what they are doing and to help us understand. All believe in ‘Progress’ and consider themselves the children of the French Revolution, but there are important distinctions between them. Feuilly is motivated most of all by his opposition to empires (Austrian, Ottoman, Russian…); Prouvaire puts his mind to understanding economic and social questions; and Combeferre represents a rational and gradualist alternative to Enjolras’s rigid insistence on ‘all or nothing’. But the ‘Friends of the ABC’ is also a bunch of (male) friends. Some of its members – notably Courfeyrac – have more of a social than a political role; alcoholic Grantaire is sceptical of politics altogether, but indefectibly loyal to his hero Enjolras.

  If there is something we could call the politics of Les Misérables, then it would have to embrace and reconcile all these positions. But there is something else at work beyond the ideas and energies of a band of young men.

  Before dawn on 6 June, the defenders of the barricade know their cause is lost because all other parts of Paris are quiet. ‘Nothing to expect, nothing to hope for … You’ve been abandoned,’ Enjolras tells them (V.1.iii, 1,061). Why do they decide to fight on? Because ‘a voice from the group’s obscurest depths’ cried out and called on his comrades to carry on. Hugo elaborates on this interchange between the leadership and the masses:

  No one ever knew the name of the man who had spoken [those words]. He was some unacknowledged worker, unidentified, forgotten, a heroic passant, that nameless champion … who says the decisive word … and then disappears into the shadows. (V.1.iii, 1,061, adapted)

  This is the legendary ‘voice of people’. Heinrich Heine could hear it too: ‘We appear to have passed out of that period of world history in which the deeds of individual men mark them out. The heroes of the new age are peoples, parties and the masses in themselves.’16 Thirty years apart, the German reporter and the French novelist both think the bloody endgame arose not from the suicidal impulse of a hothead or two, but from a general will. Or from even higher up: ‘the decisive word … disappears into the shadows, having momentarily, in a flash of lightning, represented the people of God’ (1061).17 Here, Hugo quotes and translates a Latin tag without telling you what it is: vox populi, vox dei, ‘the voice of the people is the voice of God’. However, the one he does give in Latin in the text without translating suggests the opposite view of historical events: Fex urbis, lex orbis (V.1.i, 1,052), ‘Shit of city, law of world’, meaning that it’s not God but the rabble who have the last word.

  The two proverbs with their opposite meanings, one explicit, the other hardly hidden, sum up the political problem of nineteenth-century France (and of Victor Hugo) very well: the people must be in charge, except when they are wrong.

  Later that night, when a National Guard challenges the insurgents to identify themselves with the conventional words ‘Who goes there?’, the baby-faced leader of the group shouts out ‘Révolution française!’ ‘in a proud ringing tone’, prompting a barrage of fire that brings down the red flag (IV.14.i, 1,016). You could take this as a call for a new or continuing revolution, and read it as the dramatization of the political meaning of Les Misérables. But that is not what Enjolras means, let alone Victor Hugo. He is declaring his allegiance to the spirit of the French Revolution of 1789 – the only one that really happened and still deserves its name, which makes it ‘the greatest step forward taken by the human race since the advent of Christ’ (I.1.x, 39).

  Part of the essay chapter on 1848 that launches Part V of Les Misérables is devoted to making the distinction between ‘revolution’ and ‘riot’. English and French both have many more words to refer to civil strife, and they express not so much distinct forms of upheaval as what you wish them to signify. If you need or wish to dismiss violence as politically and socially insignificant, you refer to the ‘disturbances’ (troubles) or ‘the events’. For example, the war in Algeria was referred to throughout the 1950s by the French government as les évènements d’Algérie; and the barricades and tear-gas in the Latin Quarter in 1968 have always been called les évènements de mai.

  More worthy of attention are riots, émeutes, cast by the word used into the role of unjustifiable attacks on law and order. That’s why the barricade of June 1848 ‘had to be combatted, as a matter of duty’ by ‘the man of probity’ who ‘out of his very love for the mob … fights against it’ (V.1.i, 1,052).

  More significance is attached to ‘a revolt’, une révolte, a term that presupposes a genuine cause beyond the people’s inclination for mayhem, but, as it lacks political legitimacy, it must also be squashed. That’s the sense of it in the famous (but probably invented) story of how the news of the fall of the Bastille was received by the monarch in 1789. ‘Est-ce une révolte?’ (‘Is it a revolt?’) Louis XVI is supposed to have asked of his courtier. The reply: ‘Non, Sire, c’est une révolution.’

  But a ‘revolution’ is the turn of a wheel, of a planet around the sun, of a crank around its axis. Something that is more than a revolt but leaves things in the same place can’t be called a revolution. The word Hugo used for the events of 5 June 1832, is insurrection.

  Acts of violence committed in ‘disturbances’, ‘events’, ‘riots’ and ‘revolts’ are crimes punishable by ordinary laws. Acts of violence committed in revolutions are seen retrospectively as heroic steps on the path of progress. They are, of course, the same acts, or the same kinds of acts, just as the barricades of Rue de la Chanvrerie in 1832 looked much the same as the barricade at Rue du Temple in 1848 or the one in Rue Le Goff in May 1968. The difficulty is to know whether the acts of violence committed on both sides in an insurrection are to be understood as a problem of order, or as part of humanity’s stumbling forward march.

  The question of violence is the crux of the great debate on the barricades. All the young men accept that in the situation they have created they have to fight, to save their dignity and to leave a message to the future. For Combeferre and Courfeyrac, this is a temporary necessity, but not a principle. Enjolras insists that violence is the only way. ‘In that, he never varied’ (V.1.v, 1,067).

  He does not speak for the novel, or for Hugo. The hero, Jean Valjean, has arrived from Rue de l’Homme-Armé and shows the hotheads how guns ought to be used. His past as an occasional poacher has made him a marksman, and he uses his skill to save lives, not to take them – first, by shooting through a rope that was holding a mattress aloft, to be used to bullet-proof part of the barricade (V.1.ix, 1,078); then by forcing a sniper to move out of range with a shot that knocks his helmet off.

  ‘W
hy didn’t you kill the man?’ Bossuet asked Jean Valjean.

  Jean Valjean did not reply.

  Bossuet muttered in Combeferre’s ear, ‘He didn’t answer my question.’

  ‘He’s a man who does good deeds with a gun,’ said Combeferre. (V.1.xi-xii, 1,083)

  When he is detailed to finish off a government spy – Javert, again – Valjean refrains from putting a bullet in his head and lets him go. His actions, implausible as they may be, give the lie to Enjolras’s certainty that progress can only come from the barrel of a gun. Moral progress is not shooting people, the novel seems to say.

  What then was Hugo’s point in creating an attractive and varied group of young heroes with a range of topical ideas if they are to fall on a minor barricade while still failing to understand that the means they use are wrong? Shelley’s Ozymandias laments the futility of even the grandest historical achievements, which time wipes out: ‘Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away’. Hugo takes the opposite view of his heroes in Rue de la Chanvrerie.

  It is impossible for us not to admire … the advocates of Utopia whether or not they succeed.

  Even when they come to grief, they are to be revered, and it is perhaps in failure that they have the greater majesty. (V.1.xx, 1,109)

  Even when fallen, especially when fallen, they fight for the great enterprise … They do a sacred deed … to bring to glorious and universal fulfilment the magnificent and irresistibly human movement begun on the fourteenth of July, 1789. (1,110)

  What would such fulfilment consist of? In a high-flown peroration, Enjolras lays out what he can see on the far horizon, from ‘the top of the barricade’: the end of history itself, when ‘you might almost say there will be no more incidents’ (V.1.v, 1,070). That day, when Les Misérables will no longer be a useful book if the foreword is to be taken literally, would see freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of belief, penal reform going as far as the abolition of prisons, full employment, pacifism and political union. To a great extent those are the founding principles of today’s European Union. ‘Civilization will hold its conclaves at Europe’s summit, and later the centre of continents, in a great assembly of intelligence’ (V.1.v, 1,068). Enjolras seems to be gifted with prophetic visions of the Berlaymont in Brussels, where ‘conclaves at Europe’s summit’ are held, and of the United Nations and its agencies in Geneva and New York, which it is fair to call ‘a great assembly of intelligence’. These pillars of stability and peace in the modern world were built by men and women, of whom a great number must have read Les Misérables. There’s a sense in which we are all Hugolians now.

  * * *

  Enjolras also tackles the question of how a country racked by inner conflict and mass poverty will move towards such a future and drag the rest of Europe along with it. ‘We have tamed the Hydra and it is called the steamer. We have tamed the dragon and it is called the locomotive. We are on the verge of taming the griffin and it is called the balloon.’ (1,068)

  He’s right again. Science and technology have contributed massively to the eradication of poverty in the West over the 150 years since Les Misérables appeared. What Enjolras sets out here as the ultimate point of the insurrection of June 1832 is a broad sketch of the better side of European and world history since then.

  The worse side, he cannot imagine. He’s part of it already. The blond hair, fair skin and fine profile that Hugo gives him suggest he is a Greek or Roman demigod bearing values from the cradle of democracy or from the first republic of all. But his exclusive devotion to a political cause, the charisma he exercises over others more sensible than he is, his gifts for public speaking and for military action and his unshakeable faith in the purifying virtue of violence speak to us now of the kind of men who turned the twentieth century not into utopia but into sheer hell.

  People doing Javert’s job in the modern world might see Hugo’s Enjolras as an excellent reason for keeping a close watch on intellectuals, but that does not make Les Misérables a ‘right-wing’ book. Its incompatibility with the ideas of the mainstream left lies principally in what it says about social class. Hugo does not agree that ‘class’ is a viable concept to account for the existence of rich and poor people. In fact, he doesn’t really distinguish between ‘class’ and the much older term of ‘caste’. He slips from one to the other:

  Some people have wanted wrongly to identify the bourgeoisie as a class. The bourgeoisie is simply the contented section of the people. The bourgeois is the man who now has time to sit down. A chair is not a caste … (IV.1.ii, 745)

  Hugo had not read Marx (in any case Capital had not been published in French – nor yet in German, in 1862), but the idea of ‘class conflict’ was in the air and no doubt reached Hugo’s ears from the more advanced political activists in exile in the Channel Islands. But whatever ‘some people’ said, he, who was obviously ‘bourgeois’, could not believe he was ‘in conflict’ with the ‘people’. He was writing a novel precisely in order to show and to provoke solidarity with those left out, pushed aside and thrust down. He was a prosperous bourgeois, but he was generous and gave alms, like his hero, Jean Valjean. But even if ‘bourgeois’ were the name of a group of people who exploit and oppress workers, the bourgeoisie would still not be a ‘class’. ‘A class is not made up of those with a failing. Selfishness is not one of the divisions of the social order’ (IV.1.ii, 745).

  It is not likely that any other book would have been allowed to say such things in the Soviet Union, but even in the darkest years of rigid literary censorship, Les Misérables continued to be published in Russian translation without cuts.18 Hugo was the most widely read French author in the USSR, ‘and anyone who knows Russia … also knows that every Russian cherishes two writers above all others, Pushkin and Victor Hugo’.19 One result of Hugo’s unassailable prestige was that Soviet readers had a better idea what Les Misérables said about history and politics than British ones did for many years.

  Les Misérables does not lay out any particular political creed, but a limited if still ambitious programme of social action can be drawn up from the implications of the story Hugo tells. One of these policies is stated explicitly, but the others are no less incontestable parts of the message Hugo wished to pass on:

  1.   Allow offenders to re-enter society after they have done their time. For example, abolish the ‘yellow passport’ that makes it so difficult for Valjean to find food, lodging and work in 1815.

  2.   Amend the penal code, so that justice may be tempered with mercy. For example, do not send poor peasants to do hard labour because they steal bread to feed children.

  3.   Create more jobs for the uneducated masses. Imitate M. Madeleine, for example, whose profitable glass bead factory gave dignity to Fantine.

  4.   Build schools for the poor and make elementary education universal and obligatory. (This is the one policy that is proposed in eloquent and strident terms; it was also put into effect in Hugo’s lifetime by the ‘Jules Ferry Law’, passed in 1877.)

  These four aims don’t add up to a ‘politics’, but they do lay out a pathway we can easily agree to be right because all these measures have been put into practice by governments of the left and the right over the last 150 years. We should not dismiss Hugo’s blustering confidence in the future improvement of society. Nor should we underestimate the degree to which Les Misérables encouraged and maybe even accelerated its coming about.

  14.

  The Stumbling Block

  Many obstacles stand in the way of the kind of progress of which Enjolras, Combeferre, Courfeyrac and Victor Hugo dreamed: the institution of monarchy, dysfunctional laws and punishments that foster instead of correcting the criminal tendencies of men, the disenfranchisement of women, human vanity and impatience, the scarcity of work and food … But even if all these moral and social maladies were to be cured by wise government and collective harmony, there would still be angry holdouts in t
he ‘third floor below’. The deserving poor can certainly be helped in a thousand ways. But what can be done about the mauvais pauvres, the ‘bad poor’ who resent and undermine what others may gain?

  In the musical and in the film that has been made from it, the Thénardiers provide light relief from the mostly sombre subjects of Les Misérables. In this book, too, I’ve pointed out how comically clumsy are their repeated attempts to launch business ventures that come apart. In the novel, however, they are not funny characters at all. Hugo treats them very seriously indeed, because they complicate and threaten to unravel all the values for which he stands.

  Thénardier is not a victim of any misfortunes, except those he brings on himself through debt and crime. Nor is he particularly ill equipped to make something of his life: he can read and write and do his accounts, and he has quite enough intelligence to run a business and to organize fairly elaborate plots. He’s not a drunk or a skirt-chaser – indeed, the Thénardiers provide the only model in the whole of Les Misérables of a conventional family that stays together and looks after (some of) its own. But they make poor use of their assets and gifts. Mme Thénardier reads the wrong kinds of books, addling her brain with trashy romances even more than Flaubert’s Emma Bovary. Thénardier uses his not-quite-perfect literacy to write mis-spelt begging letters that give themselves away. The two of them use parental bonds to exploit their daughters on the streets (Azelma sells her charms to bring cash into the home), but ignore their male children unnaturally. What is it that turns these half-poor, half-professional people into the ultimate villains of the book?