Les Miserables

Publishing date: 1862

Author: Victor Hugo

Finished reading on 6/23/24

I picked up this brick of a book in December 2023 and finished it 7 months later. Granted, I did read a few other books during that time as well. But there were periods of time where I rarely read it at all. More on that later. This is actually the second time that I have read this book. I did read it at the end of my senior year of high school. I doubt that I will ever read it again. I think two times is enough; however, you never know.

I think I’m going to simply divide this reflection into three parts: what I liked and what I didn’t like about the book and some things of interest. Let’s start with what I didn’t like.

There are really only two things that I didn’t like about the book. The first thing that I really didn’t like is Marius and in conjunction with Marius his romance with Cosette. It was at this exact place in the novel that I slowed way down in my reading. It was not capturing my heart or imagination. It carries none of the magnificence of the rest of the novel. Marius is a pretty pitiful character. I am not sure what is purpose is in the novel other than to contrast with Jean Valjean’s strength of character. In the musical they make Marius’s character much stronger. For example, Marius doesn’t go to the barricade because he feels compelled to help his friends as is the case in the musical. In the novel, he wasn’t even part of the revolutionary group, he was simply good friends with one of the leaders – not Enjolras. He goes to the barricade because Cosette is about to leave the country and when he asks his estranged grandfather for permission to marry her, he doesn’t get permission. So he would rather die than live without Cosette. That is why he ends up at the barricade – a death wish. I would rather read many more pages about the worthiness of the Bishop of Digne than the chapters and chapters filled with Marius’s depressions and ecstasies over the course of his love affair with Cosette. Hugo’s writing style is extremely detailed, more so than the typical 19^th century writer such as Charles Dickens (It always makes me laugh when people complain about Tolkien’s descriptive detail because they obviously have not read 19^th century literature). Hugo pours out descriptive detail like a firehose and when it comes to something as uninteresting as Marius’s wanderings or clandestine meetings with Cosette, then this descriptive detail is the most laborious reading in the world.

This carries me to my second point of contention with this novel: Hugo’s tangential essays. Some of them are fascinating. The one that I liked best was the Waterloo tangent, specifically the part about the last man standing in the battle and the language he uses to defy the English to the very end. Another one that I enjoyed was the one about the Benedictine nuns. However, others are simply torturous to wade through. Literally. Hugo dives into the depths of the sewers of Paris, their architecture, their maintenance, their improvement and somehow relates all of this to his social ideas. Just as Jean Valjean despairs of making it across the quagmire, I despaired of ever reaching the end of this novel.

So, what did I like about the novel? Everything up until Marius. When Marius takes center stage over Jean Valjean, Hugo lost me. But let us leave Marius behind us. Hugo actually gives an explanation of his book in the midst of the chapters about the barricade. He says, “The book the reader has now before his eyes – from one end to the other, in tis whole and in its details, whatever the omissions, the exceptions, or the faults – is the march from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from the false to the true, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from rottenness to life, from brutality to duty, from Hell to Heaven, from nothingness to God. Starting point: matter; goal: the soul. Hydra at the beginning, angel at the end.” This is obviously exemplified in the character of Jean Valjean. This character has caught our imagination for over a century. A man turned evil by the law and rescued by grace. Javert a slave to the law, pursues a man freed and transformed by grace. If you can’t see the connection to the Christian story in this masterpiece, you are indeed blind.

There are some things of interest to note before closing. For all of us who are great fans of the musical there are some striking differences, other than abridgement. I already noted one above when writing about Marius. I also found it very interesting that Jean Valjean does return to prison because he admits to being Jean Valjean to save the man suspected as Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean does not escape from Javert and he does not rescue Cosette from the Thenardiers until he manages to fake his death while at forced labor on a ship. For the rest of the novel, Jean Valjean is presumed dead; however, Javert gets a whiff of him and continues his pursuit. Something else to note is Gavroche who is actually the son of Thenardier but was severally neglected by his family and took to the streets. Gavroche is also the interesting connection between the pack of thieves, which by the way receives much more attention in the book, and the friends of the ABC. Actually, Gavroche joins the barricade without really knowing any of the revolutionaries. For him, it is just something interesting to do. Speaking of the barricade, it is one of several. The friends of the ABC did not lead this insurrection but simply participated.

Furthermore, for anyone confused about the timeline, this insurrection was not part of the French Revolution which began in 1789. This was really just a small riot occurring in 1832 which the government quickly put down. You have to have your phone with Wikipedia handy in order to get the sense of French history you need in order to at least make sense of some of the denser parts of the novel. In brief you must understand that the French Revolution began in 1789 and thus began the first French Republic which was replaced with Napoleon’s empire. Napoleon lost and was exiled. Napoleon came back but was defeated at Waterloo in 1815. The next portion of the French history is the restoration. By the way, Jean Valjean meets the bishop in 1815. During this period the monarchy was restored. In July 1830 a smaller revolution occurred which resulted in a different monarch. After the events of this novel France would undergo another revolution in 1848 resulting in the second Republic until 1852. The nephew of Napoleon then became the dictator of France for several decades until the revolution of 1870. This context helps understand that the insurrection described in the novel is small ripple in the midst of the vast waves washing over France during that period.

The novel is a sweeping history, vast in scope, and yet trained on one man. A convict who became a hero. It’s social, political, even philosophical at points. Hugo, a child of the revolution, believed in the power of progress which Jean Valjean embodies. He did not live to see the devastation of what progress meant in the 20^th century when certain ideologies were followed to their logical conclusion. For Hugo although progress required a near death struggle in the quagmire, there was light at the end of sewer. The musical captures this hope and so I do think the musical does the book justice. But I think the true meaning of the novel is not the march toward progress, the flag of the barricade, but the power of one act of grace. Good can overcome evil, not through revolution, but through grace and forgiveness. That’s my two cents.