Les Misérables
by Victor Hugo
translated by Norman Denny
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, 1862. Translation and introduction by Norman Denny, Folio Press, 1976. One-volume edition, paperback, 1,232 pages (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1982-1987).
A masterpiece of literature. I know it is not bold to repeat an established belief, but I have read it and I agree.
Victor Hugo appeared to write this novel with no self-control, and the translator Norman Denny suggests essays written separately were incorporated into the novel later. (Denny moved two long passages to apendices because he felt they had no bearing on the plot at all. I read them in the order they belonged, and they did’t — and they were hardly unusual in these respects.) Whenever they were written, Hugo frequently indulges in marvelously extravagant asides; a good example is Part Five, Book II, which comes during an escape scene and is dedicated entirely to a fourteen page, 400 words-a-page chapter on the the Paris sewer. (A key point, made on page 1061 and mentioned again later, is that human excrement is an excellent manure and to dump it into the sea is a huge waste of wealth.)
Plot and Characters
I saw the play first, a student production at the Catholic high school in Worcester, with actors from many schools, which Cathy took me to and which I liked. I will compare it to that play, the musical, which I take to be the standard theatrical presentation of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.
Everything I say in the plot and character discussion page has the capacity to spoil a plot for those who have not both read the book and seen the musical; nor would the comparisons make much sense to you. Therefore I recommend you read the book and watch the play and only read that page afterward, or not at all. You have been warned, don’t go to the plot and character discussion page.
History of France
Having not reached European history (by way of the rest of world history) by the time college ran out, I’m gleaning facts from Hugo’s novel rather than bringing knowledge of French history to it.
Louis-Philippe
What can be held against him except the throne itself? Dismissing the monarch, we are left with the man. And the man is good – good sometimes to the point of being admirable.
{Page 718.}
Hugo cites in particular his efforts to prevent executions.
This is not, incidentally, my own view on how to judge people in power.
The 1823 ‘Spanish war’:
The war was monarchy resolutely opposing progress, described as ‘anarchy’; it was a harsh assault on the principles of 1789 and a European cry of ‘halt’ to French ideas that were spreading throughout the world. The soldiers of the Empire again went to war, but under the white cockade, and saddened and eight years older. [...] Monks were to be found in our ranks; the spirit of liberty and progress was challenged by bayonets, and principles were mown down by gunfire. France destroyed by force of arms what she had created by force of spirit. For the rest – enemy leaders soborned, soldiers reluctant to fight, towns besieged by wealth, small military risk but always the dange of an explosion, as in the sudden invasion of a powder-factory; little bloodshed and little honour; disgrace for some and glory for no one . . . Such was that war, instigated by princes descended from Louis XIV and conducted by generals tought by Napoleon, sadly lacking in the lustre of grand warfore or grand policy.
Page 331 to 332.
God works in His own way. The convent itself, with Cosette, sustained and completed the transformation of Jean Valjean which the bishop had begun. It is certain that one of the paths of virtue leads to the sin of Pride, a bridge built by the devil himself. Jean Valjean had been tending in this direction when Providence brought him to Petit-Picpus. When he compared himself with the bishop he felt humble and unworthy; but as the years passed he had begun to compare himself with other men, and pride crept in. Perhaps, who knows, he would have lapsed into hatred.Page 488.
The July Revolution and Right over Fact.
This was the theory applied in France in 1830, having been applied in England in 1688.
1830 was a revolution arrested in mid-course, halfway to achieving real progress, a mock-assertion of rights. [...]
And who is it who checks revolutions in mid-course? It is the boureoise.
Why? Because the bourgeoisie represents satisfied demands. [...]
The attempt has been made, mistakenly, to treat the bourgeoisie as though they were a class. They are simply the satisfied section of the populace. The bourgeois is the man who now has leisure to take his ease; but an armchair is not a caste. By being in too much of a hurry to sit back, one may hinder the progress of the whole human race. This has often been the failing of the bourgeosie. But they cannot be regarded as a class because of this failing. Self-interest is not confined to any one division of the social order.
Pages 711-712.
In the charges levelled by history against Louis-Philippe there is a distinction to be drawn. There were three types of charge, against royalty as such, against his reign, and against the king as an individual, and they belong in separate categroies. The suppression of democratic rights, the sidetracking of progress, the violent repression of public demonstrations, the use of armed force to put down insurrection, the smothering of the real country by legal machinery and legality only half-enforced, with a priveleged clas of three hundred thounsand – all these were the acts of royalty. The rejection of Belgium; the over-harsh conquest of a Algeria, more barbarous than civilized, likje the conpquest of India by the English; the bad faith at Abd-el-Kadir and Blaye; the suborning of Deutz and compensation of Pritchard – these were acts of the reign. And family politics rather than a national policy were the acts of the king.
Pages 715 to 716.
Social Dangers
1789 averted the peril of ferocious upheavals...
Hardship engenders anger; and while the well-to-do classes close their eyes – or slumber, which comes to the same thing – the less fortunate, taking their inspiration from any spirit of grievance or ill-will that happens to be lurking in the background, proceed to examine the social system. Examination in a spirit of hatred is a terrible thing!
From this, if the times are sufficiently awry, emerge those ferocious upheavals knows as jacqueries, compared with which purely political agitation is child’s play, and which are not the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor but rather the revolt of the deprived against the comfortably off. Everything then collapses, for jacqueries are the tremors of the people. This peril, which was perhaps imminent in Europe towards the end of the eighteenth century, was harshy averted by the French Revolution, that immense act of probity. The French Revolution, which was nothing but idealism in arms, broke out and with a single decisive gesture slammed the door on evil and opened the door to good. It posed the question, promulgated the truth, dispelled the fogs, cleansed the century, and crowned the people.
The nineteenth century has inherited and profited by its work, and today the social disaster which seemed to be foreshadowed is quite simply impossible. Only the blind still rage against it, and only fools are afraid of it. Revolution is the antidote to jacquerie!
[...]
Revolutionary feeling is a moral feeling. The feeling for what is right, once it has matured, develops a sense of duty. The law for every man is liberty, which ends, in Robespierre’s admirable definition, where the liberty of others begins.
From Part Four, Book Seven (moved to Appendix B by Denny), Section III: “Argot that weeps and argot that laughs”. Pages 1227 to 1228.
...but poverty can also consume society
Does this mean then that all social dangers are over? Certainly not. There will be no more jacqueries, of this society can be assured; the blood will no longer rush to its head. But it has got to consider the way in which it breathes. Apoplexy is no longer a threat, but there is still consumption. Social consumption is simply poverty. One can die from wasting away as well as from being struck by lightning.
We never weary of repeating that we must before all else think of the disinherited, suffering masses, care for them, comfort and enlighten them, widen their horizon by bringing to them all forms of education. We must set them the example of toil, never of idleness, lessen the burden on the individual by increasing that borne by society as a whole, reduce poverty without reducing wealth, create great new fields of public activity, possess, like Briareus, a hundred hands to reach out to those who are in distress, use our collective power to set up workshops, schools, and laboratories open to men of all kinds, increase wages and decrease working hours, effect a balance between rights and possessions, that is to say, make the reward proportionate to the effort and the fulfilment to the need – in a word, derive more light and well-being from the social system for the benefit of the ignorant and oppressed. This is the first of fraternal obligations and of political necessities.
But all of this, we must emphasize, is no more than a beginning. The real question is, can work be the law without also being a right? We shall not pursue the matter, since this is not the place for it. But if the name for Nature is Providence, then the name for Society must be Provision.
Intellectual and moral growth is no less essential than material betterment. Knowledge is a viaticum; thought is a primary necessity; truth is as much a source of nourishment as corn. Argument lacking knowledge and wisdom grows thin. We must pity minds, no less than stomachs, that go unfilled. If there is anything more poignant than a body dying for lack of food it is a mind dying for lack of light.
From Part Four, Book Seven (moved to Appendix B by Denny), Section IV: “The two duties; to watch and hope”. Pages 1229 to 1230.
I have to pull out a couple of quotations: we must “lessen the burden on the individual by increasing that borne by society as a whole” and “use our collective power to set up workshops, schools, and laboratories open to men of all kinds, increase wages and decrease working hours, effect a balance between rights and possessions, that is to say, make the reward proportionate to the effort and the fulfilment to the need”.
Production and Distribution of Wealth: the Two Questions of Socialism
It will not surprise the reader that, for a variety of reasons, we do not here proceed to a profound thoretical examination of the questions propounded by socialism. We will simply indicate what they were.
Problem One: the production of wealth.
Problem Two: its distribution.
Problem One embraces the question of labour and Problem Two that of wages, the first dealing with the use made of manpower and the second with the sharing of the amenities this manpower produces.
A proper use of manpower creates a strong economy, and a proper distribution of amenities leads to the happines of the individual. Proper distribution does not imply an equal share but an equitable share. Equity is the essence of equality.
These two things combined – a strong economy and the happiness of the individual within it – lead to social prosperity, and social prosperity means a happy man, a free citizen, and a great nation.
England has solved the first of these problems. She is highly successful in creating wealth, but she distributes it badly. This half-solution brings her inevitably to the two extremes of monstrous wealth and monstrous poverty. All the amenities are enjoyed by the few and all the privations are suffered by the many, that is to say, the common people: privilege, favour, monopoly, feudalism, all these are produced by their labour. It is a false and dangerous state of affairs whereby the public wealth depends on private poverty and the greatness of the State is rooted in the sufferings of the individual: an ill-assorted greatness composed wholly of materialism, into which no moral element enters.
Communists and agrarian reformers believe they offer the solution to the second of these problems. They are mistaken. Their method of distribution kills production: equal sharing abolishes competition and, in consequence, labour. It is distribution carried out by a butcher, who kills what he distributes. It is impossible to accept these specious solutions. To destroy wealth is not to share it.
The two problems must be solved together if they are to be properly solved, and the two solutions must form part of a single whole.
[...]
Solve these two problems – encourage the rich and protect the poor; abolish pauperdom; put an end to the unjust exploitation of the weak by the strong and a bridle on the innate jealousy of the man who is on his way for the man who has arrived; achieve a fair and brotherly relationship between work and wages; associate compulsory free education with the bringing-up of the young, and make knowledge the criterion of manhood; develop minds while finding work for hands; become both a powerful nation and a family of contented people; democratize private property not by abolishing it but by making it universal, so that every citizen without exception is an owner, which is easier than people think – in a word, learn how to produce wealth and how to divide it, and you will have accomplished the union of material and moral greatness; you will be worthy to call yourself France.
[Pages 722 to 724.]
Hear! Hear! Although I want to get closer to placing the rich and the poor on the same level rather than encouraging one and protecting the other, my exact goal is to “democratize private property not by abolishing it but by making it universal”. The emphasis on “compulsory free education” is a bit disquieting given public school’s role in crushing originality, dissent, solidarity, critical thinking and practically anything else good except perhaps literacy. Looking at French schools and their history might be interesting, because the Prussian model followed by the United States (for this very reason) was designed to pacify the population: isolate and stratify workers from one another.
The paragraph immediately following the above quotation reads in its entirety: “This, apart from the aberrations of a few particular sects, was the message of socialism; this was what it searched for amid the facts, the plan that it proposed to men’s minds. An admirable attempt, and one that we must revere.”
What I cut out from the above is available here in its entirety: two paragraphs on the distinction between a nation – the people – and a nation’s social structure. Hugo makes it clear he is only criticizing the latter.
Nothing is more dangerous than to stop working
(As I sit here, unemployed, typing out passages that interest me from a nineteenth century magnum opus...)
Nothing is more dangerous than to stop working. It is a habit that can soon be lost, one that is easily neglected and hard to resume. A measure of day-dreaming is a good thing, like a drug prudently used; it allays the sometimes virulent fever of the over-active mind, like a cool wind blowing through the brain to smooth the harshness of untramelled thought; it bridges here and there the gaps, brings things into proportion and blunts the sharper angles. But too much submerges and drowns. Woe to the intellectual worker who allows himself to lapse wholly from positive thinking into day-dreaming. He thinks he can easily change back, and tells himself that it is all one. He is wrong! Thought is the work of the intellect, reverie is its self-indulgence. To substitute day-dreaming for thought is to confuse a poison with a source of nourishment.
[Page 741.]
On the unimportance of names
This gives away a part of the plot too: a scene that shows names aren’t needed to know people from pages 810 to 811.
Revolution
Enjolras, at the barricade, explaining to his fellow revolutionaries what they must die fight and probably die for.
‘[...] And what is the revolution that we shall make? I have already told you: it is the revolution of Truth. In terms of policy there is only one principle, the sovereignty of man over himself, and this sovereignty of me over me is called Liberty. Where two or more of these sovereignties are gathered together, that is where the State begins. But there can be no withdrawal from this association. Each sovereignty must concede some portion of itself to establish the common law, and the portion is the same for all. The common law is nothing but the protection of all men based on the rights of each, and the equivalent sacrifice that all men make is called Equality. The protection of all men by every man is Fraternity, and the point at which all these sovereignties intersect is called Society. [...] But equality, citizens, does not mean that all plants must grow to the same height – a society of tall grass and dwarf trees, a jostle of conflicting jealousies. It means, in civic terms, an equal outlet for all talents; in political terms, that all votes will carry the same weight; and in religious terms that all beliefs will enjoy equal rights.
Page 1005 (Part Five, Book One, Section V).
Enjolras, probably speaking for Hugo, goes on to say that “Equality has a means at its disponal – compulsory free education” and that out of an egalitarian society created by identical compulsory primary schools and free secondary schools will come the end of war, famine, exploitation, want, destitution— almost the end of events, he says. The nineteenth century is great, the twentieth will be happy, he says.
Conditional on most of twentieth century history not being proven to not to have happened, I tentatively suggest that didn’t happen. And although I don’t know if France got its free education before the 1800s ran out, I will claim that that isn’t enough anyhow. Equal wealth would allow people to pick there own way and useful role in life better than identical schools could, and it of course has to be worldwide. But individual sovereignty and collective self-government, again globally, is indeed the future we still need.
Middle-class defense of their way of life
Those readers with any recollection of that already distant epoch will know that the volunteer Garde Nationale from the districts surrounding Paris, always sturdily opposed to insurrection, were particularly ruthless and intrepid during those days of June 1832. your honest cabaret proprietor in Pantin or Les Vertus or La Cunette, seeing a threat to the prosperity of his establishment, was lion-hearted in the defence of his dance-floor, ready to risk his life to preserve the state of order in which he flourished. In those days which were both bourgeois and heroic, faced by concepts which had their knightly champions, private profit also had its paladins. Prosaic motives in no way detracted from the gallantry of their conduct. The shrinkage in the value of money caused bankers to sing the ‘Marseillaise’. Blood was lyrically shed to safeguard the cash box, and the shop, that microcosm of the nation, was defended with a Spartan tenacity. It must be said that all of this was extremely serious. Two sections of the populace were at war, pending the establishment of a balance between them.
Pages 1019 to 1020 (Part Five, Book One, Section XII).
Progress and Ingratitude
Utopia without complaint serves those who have disavowed it...
It is indomitable in the face of obstacles and mild in the face of ingratitude.
In any case, is it ingratitude? Yes, in terms of the human species. No, in terms of the individual.
Progress is the life-style of man. The general life of the human race is called Progress, and so it is its collective march. Progress advances, it makes the great human and earthly journey towards what is heavenly and divine; it has its pauses, when it rallies the stragglers, its stopping places when it meditates, contemplating some new and splended promised land that has suddenly appeared on its horizon. It has its nights of slumber; and it is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker to see the human spirit lost in shadow, and to grope in the darkness without being able to awake sleeping progress.
‘Perhaps God is dead,’ Gérard de Nerval once said to the writer of these lines, confusing progress with god and mistaking the pous in its movement for the death of the Supreme Being.
It is wrong to despair. Progress invariably reawakens, and indeed it may be said that she walks in her sleep, for she has grown. Seeing her again on her feet, we find that she is taller. To be always peaceful is no more a part of progress than it is of a river, which piles up rocks and creates barriers as it flows; these obstacles cause the water to froth and humanity to seethe. This leads to disturbance; but when the disturbance is over we realize that something has been gained. Until order, which is nothing less than universal peace, has been established, until harmony and unity prevail, the stages of progress will be marked by revolutions.
What, then, is Progress? We have just said it. It is the permanent life of all people. But it sometimes happens that the momentary life of individuals is opposed to the eternal life of the human race.
Let us admit the fact without bitterness: the individual has his separate interests and may legitimately seek to further and defend them; the present has its excusable quantity of egotisms; the life of the moment has its own rights and is not obliged to sacrifice itself incessantly for the future. The generation which now has its time upon earth is not obliged to shorten this time for the sake of generations – its equals, after all – which will later have their turn. ‘I exist,’ murmurs someone whose name is everyone. ‘I’m young and in love; I am old and I want rest; I work, I prosper, I do good business, I have houses to rent, money in State Securities; I am happy, I have a wife and children; I like all these things and I want to go on living, so leave me alone.’ . . . There are moments when all this casts a deep chill on the large-minded pioneers of the human race.
Moreover Utopia, let us agree, emerges from its starry-eyed state when it goes to war. Being tomorrow’s truth she borrows her method, which is war, from yesterday’s lies. She is the future, but she acts like the past; she is the ideal, but she becomes the actuality, sullying her heroism with a violence for which it is right that she should be held responsible – tactical and expedient violence, against all principle, and for which she is inevitably punished. Utopia in rebellion defies the established military code: she shoots spies, executes traitors, destroys living beings and casts them into unkown shadow. She makes use of death, which is a grave matter. It seems that Utopia no longer believes in its own ideal, that irresistible and incorruptible force. She wields the sword. But no sword is simple; all are two-edged, and he who inflicts wounds with the one edge wounds himself with the other.
But subject to that reservation, made in all severity, it is impossible for us not to admire the glorious warriors of the future, the prophets of Utopia, whether they are successful or not.
Pages 1043 to 1044 (Part Five, Book One, Section XX).
Wedding Customs
In a brief digression on new wedding customs in France, Hugo penned some great cultural satire. I fully intend to lift this whole or modified slightly someday to ridicule today’s customs.