Les Misérables

• 1. Introduction

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  Les Misérables, the French epic published on the 31st of March 1862, opens not with its hero but with a bishop. For fourteen full chapters, Victor Hugo describes the Bishop of Digne before a single word is spoken about Jean Valjean. That choice tells you everything about the novel's true subject: not one man's fate, but the moral architecture of an entire society. The book runs to 655,478 words in the original French, divided across five volumes, 48 books, and 365 chapters. More than a quarter of those pages contain no plot at all. What the reader finds instead are essays on Paris sewers, argot, cloistered convents, and the Battle of Waterloo. Hugo himself addressed his Italian publisher directly: this book, he said, was meant for everyone, from England to Ireland, from France to the republics that harbour slaves. The questions it plants are simple and brutal. Can a person escape the label society pins to them? Can law and mercy ever point in the same direction? And what happens when a man built entirely on rules meets one built entirely on grace?

• 2. Hugo's Sources

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  In 1829, Hugo witnessed an incident involving three strangers and a police officer on a Paris street. One stranger was a man being led away for stealing bread. Nearby, a mother and daughter watched in silence. Those three people became Jean Valjean, Fantine, and Cosette. Hugo wrote that observation down and then spent the next sixteen years turning it into a novel.

  Hugo went to the Bagne of Toulon in 1839 and took extensive notes, though he did not start writing the book until 1845. On one of the pages of those prison notes, he wrote in large block letters a possible name for his protagonist: "JEAN TRÉJEAN". Only when the book was finally written did Tréjean become Valjean.

  The ex-convict Eugène François Vidocq provided the template for Valjean's physical and moral qualities. Vidocq had become the head of an undercover police unit and later founded France's first private detective agency. He was also a businessman and philanthropist. In 1828, Vidocq, already pardoned, saved one of the workers in his paper factory by lifting a heavy cart on his own shoulders, the same act Hugo gave to Valjean.

  Hugo also drew on his own life with unusual intimacy. Marius and Cosette's wedding night in Part V, Book 6, Chapter 1 takes place on the 16th of February 1833, the same date on which Hugo and his lifelong mistress Juliette Drouet made love for the first time. He asked Drouet, along with his other mistress Léonie d'Aunet, to describe life in convents. He visited the Paris Conciergerie personally in 1846. He inspected the battlefield at Waterloo in 1861, and it was there, on that ground, that he finished writing the novel.

  In 1841, Hugo saved a prostitute from arrest for assault, and a short portion of his exchange with the police found its way into the scene where Valjean rescues Fantine. On the 22nd of February 1846, he watched a bread thief being arrested while a duchess and her child observed from their coach without pity. That scene reappears almost unchanged in the novel's opening movement.

• 3. Scale and Structure

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  955 of the novel's 2,783 pages, by one count, are devoted to essays that do not advance the plot or any subplot. Hugo used the same method in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Toilers of the Sea. One biographer described these passages simply: "The digressions of genius are easily pardoned."

  Hugo devotes 19 full chapters in Volume II to the Battle of Waterloo. He visited that battlefield in 1861, and his account of it opens the second volume with such a shift in subject that it reads like the start of an entirely different book. One critic called it "the spiritual gateway" to the novel, because its chance encounter between Thénardier and Colonel Pontmercy foreshadows the pattern the whole book will follow: heroism and villainy meeting in circumstances that blend chance and necessity.

  The novel's structure is not a mystery; Hugo explains it openly toward the end. The book is, he writes, "a progress from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsehood to truth, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from corruption to life; from bestiality to duty, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God. The starting point: matter, destination: the soul. The hydra at the beginning, the angel at the end."

  The opening chapter about the Bishop of Digne illustrates how far Hugo was willing to push his own structure. After introducing Myriel in 1815, the novel immediately shifts away, stating "Although these details in no way essentially concern that which we have to tell." Only after 14 chapters does it return: "In the early days of the month of October 1815... Jean Valjean."

• 4. Valjean and Javert

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  Jean Valjean was born in Faverolles, Aisne. He was convicted for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister's seven starving children. A five-year sentence became nineteen years, extended by four failed escape attempts and a violent resistance during the second. When he was released, his yellow passport marked him instantly as a former convict, and every innkeeper in Digne turned him away.

  Bishop Myriel gave Valjean shelter. Valjean stole Myriel's silverware that same night. When the police returned him, Myriel told them he had given the silver freely and pressed Valjean to take two silver candlesticks as well, as if Valjean had simply forgotten to take them. The police accepted the explanation and left. Myriel told Valjean his soul had been purchased for God and that he should use the money from those candlesticks to make an honest man of himself.

  Six years later, Valjean was a wealthy factory owner and the elected mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer, using the alias Monsieur Madeleine. When he crawled under a cart to free a man named Fauchelevent, the town's police inspector, Javert, grew suspicious. Javert had worked as an adjutant guard at the Bagne of Toulon during Valjean's time there and recognized the feat of strength.

  Javert was born in a prison, to a convict father and a fortune teller mother. He renounced both and built his identity entirely on law. He is the novel's clearest portrait of a man for whom rules and justice have become indistinguishable. When Valjean spares Javert's life at the barricade, and later carries the wounded Marius through the Paris sewers, Javert finds that he can no longer give Valjean up to the authorities but also cannot ignore his duty to the law. After writing a letter to the prefect of police detailing the abuses prisoners suffer, Javert throws himself into the Seine.

• 5. Fantine, Cosette, and the Thénardiers

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  Fantine was born in Montreuil-sur-Mer and moved to Paris as a teenager. She fell in love with a wealthy student named Félix Tholomyès, who eventually abandoned her and their daughter Cosette when the child was two years old. Illiterate, Fantine had others write her letters for her. She left Cosette in the care of the Thénardier innkeepers at Montfermeil, unaware they were beating the child and using her as forced labour while pampering their own daughters.

  To meet the Thénardiers' growing demands, Fantine sold her hair and two front teeth. She turned to prostitution. A man named Bamatabois harassed her in the street, and when she reacted, Javert arrested her. She eventually died of shock in a hospital room when Javert revealed to her that Valjean, who had promised to bring Cosette, was in fact a convict. Her body was unceremoniously thrown into a public grave.

  Valjean arrived at Montfermeil on Christmas Eve, paid the Thénardiers 1,500 francs for Cosette, and left. Thénardier ran after them demanding more, but Valjean produced Fantine's letter authorizing him to take the child and walked away. Cosette, who had been sleeping inside a storage space and fetching water alone through the woods, received from Valjean an expensive new doll that night, the first gift anyone had ever given her.

  The Thénardiers eventually lost their inn, relocated to Paris under the name Jondrette, and fell in with a criminal gang called Patron-Minette. Thénardier attempted to extort Valjean for 200,000 francs. Later he tried to blackmail Marius with knowledge of Valjean's past, but in doing so inadvertently revealed that Valjean had carried Marius to safety through the sewers. Marius paid Thénardier to leave the country. Thénardier and his daughter Azelma traveled to America, where he became a slave trader.

• 6. The Barricades

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  The Paris uprising of the 5th and the 6th of June 1832 followed the death of General Lamarque, a figure known for his sympathy toward the working class who was one of many victims of a cholera epidemic that had particularly devastated the city's poor. Suspicion spread that the government had been poisoning wells. The Friends of the ABC, a revolutionary student club whose name in French sounds identical to the word for "the abased," chose this moment to act.

  Hugo knew these streets personally. During the 1832 revolt, he walked through Paris, saw the barricades, and at points had to take shelter from gunfire. He later noted that "the author of this book" was caught in the crossfire during the 1832 street fighting, protected only by two half columns, and remained in that position for nearly half an hour.

  Gavroche, the unloved middle son of the Thénardiers, was a street urchin who slept inside an elephant statue outside the Bastille. He briefly sheltered his two younger brothers without knowing they were related to him. At the barricade he was shot dead while collecting ammunition from the bodies of dead National Guardsmen.

  Éponine, the Thénardiers' eldest daughter, disguised herself as a boy and manipulated Marius into going to the barricades, hoping they would die there together. When a soldier aimed at Marius, she reached out her hand and stopped the muzzle. The bullet passed through her hand and into her back. Dying on Marius's knees, she asked him to kiss her on the forehead when she was gone. Her final words to him were that she had been "a little bit in love" with him.

  Valjean carried the unconscious Marius out through the Paris sewers after the barricade fell. He paid Thénardier thirty francs to open a locked exit gate, then emerged to find Javert waiting.

• 7. Reception and Reach

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  The New York Times announced Les Misérables was forthcoming as early as April 1860, two years before publication. Hugo refused to let his publishers summarize the story or release excerpts in advance. A large advertising campaign preceded the release of the first two volumes in Brussels on the 30th or the 31st of March 1862 and in Paris on the 3rd of April 1862. The remaining volumes followed on the 15th of May 1862.

  Critical reactions were often sharply negative. Flaubert found "neither truth nor greatness" in it and complained that while all the characters spoke well, they all spoke in exactly the same way. He called it "infantile." The Goncourt brothers found it artificial and disappointing. L. Gauthier wrote in Le Monde on the 17th of August 1862 that the novel's depiction of riot planning produced "unconquerable disgust." Charles Baudelaire praised Hugo publicly for forcing public attention onto social problems while privately calling the book "repulsive and inept."

  The novel was nonetheless a commercial success from the moment it appeared. It was translated in the same year it was published into Italian, Greek, and Portuguese, and proved popular across Europe and abroad. The first English translation, by Charles E. Wilbour, was available in New York beginning the 7th of June 1862. A translation published in Richmond, Virginia in 1863 openly advertised in its preface that it had removed passages reflecting on slavery, explaining that "the absence of a few antislavery paragraphs will hardly be complained of by Southern readers."

  Upton Sinclair described Les Misérables as one of the half-dozen greatest novels in the world. Hugo himself wrote to his Italian publisher that the book was addressed to every country where people went in ignorance or despair: "Wherever men go in ignorance or despair, wherever women sell themselves for bread, wherever children lack a book to learn from or a warm hearth, Les Misérables knocks at the door and says: 'open up, I am here for you.'" Valjean is buried beneath a blank slab in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, his name finally belonging to no one.