Les Misérables

THE NOVEL LES MISÉRABLES by Victor Hugo was published in 1862. But Hugo had worked on this novel, which many regard as his masterpiece, since the 1840s, in a first unpublished version that was called Les Misères. This long period of work reflects the scope of the novel, which embraces many experiences in France during the first part of the so-called long 19th century. The principal story is about Jean Valjean, a longtime prisoner convicted of stealing bread in 1795.

When he finally is liberated in 1815, society blocks any reintegration. Therefore Valjean changes his identity (a new “criminal” act), creates an invention, and becomes a rich and respected industrialist in the city of Montreuil-sur-Mer. He even becomes mayor of that city, but the police-inspector, Javert (the negative protagonist), still haunts him. Valjean has to leave Montreuil and decides to take with him Cosette, a young girl he [Page 631]had “adopted” from a poor dying mother (Fantine). Valjean and Cosette go to Paris, where he wants to live a peaceful life protected by the anonymity of a big city. When Cosette grows up, she falls in love with Marius, who becomes a revolutionary in the uprisings of 1832. Police-inspector Javert, who still haunts Valjean, falls into the hands of the revolutionaries, but is saved by Valjean. This help from his “enemy” Valjean irritates Javert to such an extent, that he commits suicide.

Valjean is able to save an unconscious Marius from Royalist reprisal after the uprisings fail. Marius and Cosette marry, but only on his deathbed, and a reunion among Marius, Cosette, and Valjean brings the novel to a tragic yet satisfying end.

The ongoing success of Les Misérables as a book, theater piece, movie, and—last, but not least—musical is due to the immense intensity of the characters created by Hugo and his literary achievement in including many aspects of 19th-century social and political practice in a novel of high quality. Whereas Valjean stands for the poverty-stricken suffering of common people during that period, Marius symbolizes the idealistic revolutionary of the first half of the 19th century. He is no longer only a bourgeois revolutionary fighting for representation, but already has a social agenda. Police-inspector Javert, on the other hand, stands for an oppressive state without any social conscience; only immediately before his suicide does he show human emotion.

Hugo was born into the family of a Napoleonic officer on February 26, 1802. He became a conservative romanticist, but transformed himself from a Bonapartist to a modern Republican at the end of his life. He soon established himself as a famous writer and from the 1840s on he held political office.

When he fell out of favor with Louis-Napoléon (the later Emperor Napoléon III), he went into exile in Belgium and on the Channel Isles during the 1850s and 1860s. When the Third French Republic was established in 1870, Hugo returned to France and became an icon of that republic. His death on May 22, 1885, was followed by a lying-in-state beneath the Arc-de-Triomphe in Paris and a burial in the Panthéon. The official adoration of Hugo came from his change from a Catholic Monarchist to a Republican.

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