Les Miserables is the third novel by Victor Hugo that I have read. The other two—Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Toilers of the Sea—are masterpieces of prose and verse (my analysis of each can be found here and here). I therefore had high expectations when deciding to read Hugo’s Magnus Opus, and they were not disappointed. Les Miserables is 1200 pages, but the commitment required to savour the entirety of this text is worth it, in part because of the sheer aesthetic pleasure, but also because of how enriching it is. The novel tells a gripping story about unmerited suffering, redemption, transformation, and the triumph of love, but it is also an historical and sociological analysis of early 19thcentury France, when the country was experiencing the political convulsions of the revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the Bourbon restoration. These political events impacted all areas of life, including the most intimate relations, a phenomenon reflected in the novel’s main characters, whose lives are weaved together with Hugo’s characteristic style of writing—poetic, rhythmic, a bit flowery, but nonetheless beautiful and emotionally satiating.
While narrating the story, and connecting it to French history, Hugo treats readers to an optimistic political philosophy which can be summed up as a celebration of the eponymous miserables, by which he means the lower orders—masses, outcasts, and impoverished. They—not the aristocracy nor the wealthy—are the embodiment of truth and the movers of the history, says Hugo in Les Miserables. Another crucial theme is the constant struggle between idealism, of which the excluded are the vehicle, and the forces of law and stability, which are avidly defended by the privileged even when they stray from what is objectively just. In this cosmic and Manichean clash between good and evil, says Hugo, the former is destined to prevail, and this remains the case even in the face of struggle, tragedy, and loss.
The Pervasiveness of Evil
The main character of Les Miserables is Jean Valjean. He was born into an impoverished family, and both of his parents died when he was young. One of his sisters, also poor, has seven children, and Jean must earn money at an early age to help support them. While other youngsters are attending their lessons, Jean is working for peanuts as a tree pruner, which helps to purchase the bare necessities for his nieces and nephews. Under these conditions, before the existence of social services to prevent penury, unexpected circumstances could literally mean starvation for people in Jean’s position. And this is exactly what transpires: a bad harvest one year—a not uncommon occurrence—leads to his unemployment. He has no income, which means starvation for him and his sister’s children. One evening, he steals a stale loaf of bread, one that, in any event, would have been thrown out shortly after. He gets caught and is sentenced to five years in prison, which was the actual penalty for minor theft in early 19th century France.
From here, a terrible odyssey ensues. The penal system was inhumane even by standards of the period, and Jean, who was by no means a criminal, is forced to live in close quarters with genuinely evil men—murderers, rapists, and psychopaths. He also must do forced labour with other inmates while being chained to them and treated like a beast by the prison guards. Jean, unsurprisingly, tries to escape several times, and is caught, leading to more sentences, receiving a total of 19 years. During his long incarceration, he becomes literate; but given the pervasive injustices in his life, knowledge and reason only deepen his ability to understand them and hardens his hatred for everything and everyone.
At the end of his sentence, he is released, but has the stigma of being a felon, which, in early 19th century France, was the equivalent of leprosy, evoking disgust, fear, contempt, and social ostracism. In provincial France, the site of the prison and the nearby town, it does not take long for word to get around that a convicted criminal will be released, and that all contact with him should be avoided. Jean enters the town of Digne tired and hungry, after walking 20 miles, and needs a room and board that he can pay for thanks to the little money he earned doing hard labour for almost two decades. But he is rejected everywhere. Consequently, he is forced to sleep outside, and, as if it could things could not get any worse, suddenly it starts pouring rain. He finds shelter in an empty dog kennel, but is disturbed when the canine master of this humble abode discovers the intruder and pushes him out.
Jean is homeless, hungry, desperate, and socially rejected, despite paying his debt to society for an act that, morally speaking, was not even a crime. This only confirms his deep sense of injury and visceral hatred for a society which treated him badly from the get-go. While strolling through the town, alone and dejected, he sees a bench in front of a church and decides to rest on it. A lady at the church sees his distress, and she recommends that he go across the street to the house of the local Bishop. It turns out that this turn of events was fated to have a striking impact on Jean and the rest of the novel.
The Triumph of Goodness
Bishop Bienvenu, as the locals call him, represents, in word, thought, and action, the highest expression of Christian idealism: self-sacrifice, utter devotion to society’s outcasts, humility, un-attachment to worldly objects, including his own life. His absolute trust in God makes him fearless about encountering danger and death; like many of the religion’s greatest martyrs, he combines extraordinary bravery with humility and commitment. He sleeps with the door unlocked, because, Bishop Bienvenu believes, material objects do not really belong to him and so he did not have the right to exclude others from their use; moreover, locking the door would mean trusting in his own efforts, and not on God, to ensure his security. When Jean knocks on his door, the priest, like the other people in the town, recognizes his condition and status, but no matter; to Jean’s utter amazement, he is welcomed with open arms into the Bishop’s house. During dinner and conversation, Jean, incredulous but in complete sincerity, asks, “how do you know whether or not I killed someone?” and the Bishop replies “that is God’s affair”.
Jean wakes up in the middle of the night, while others in the household, including the Bishop, are sleeping, and he decides to steal some valuable objects before leaving. He has an crowbar in his hand, which could be used as a weapon. The valuables he wants are in the Bishop’s room; Jean silently walks in, and sees the Bishop sleeping peacefully. It occurs to Jean that he could have easily taken him out in one strike. Here, a sense of impending doom arises, and readers feel that the seemingly cruel townspeople were right when they coldly refused to give Jean room and board. But, suddenly, Jean looks at crucifix hanging on the wall directly in front of the Bishop’s bed, which has a kind of majestic glow due the play of shadows and moonlight entering the room. Jean is taken aback by this scene, and decides only to steal valuable silverware.
He leaves the premises immediately, but shortly after is caught by the police, who find the objects and suspect they belong to the Bishop. They take Jean to the Bishop’s house, and when the latter answers the door, the reader expects him to thank the police for arresting this ungrateful, contemptuous criminal and for returning his valuables. Had this occurred, Jean would have spent the rest of his life in prison, doing hard labour, and living in inhumane conditions. Instead, to the reader’s—and Jean’s—utter amazement, the Bishop says to Jean in front of the authorities: “so here you are! I’m delighted to see you. Had you forgotten that I gave you the candlesticks as well? They’re silver like the rest, and worth 200 hundred francs.” The gendarmes subsequently leave, and when they are alone, the Bishop says “Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to what is evil but to what is good. I have bought your soul to save it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.”
Jean was stunned; more importantly, this is the beginning of his own transformation, which would eventually transform the lives of others in the novel. Hugo wants to convey that Bishop Benvenu’s immense power to change the destiny of others came, not from possession of resources, prestige, or influence; rather, it emerged from his living example of courage, forgiveness, humility, and self-denial. By virtue of his actions and by a kind of osmosis, Jean would be transformed into a saint. The change was emotionally painful, and Hugo memorably recounts the internal turmoil he experienced:
Obscurely he perceived that the priests’ forgiveness was the most formidable assault he had ever sustained; that if he resisted it his heart would be hardened once and for all, and that if he yielded he must renounce the hatred which the acts of men had implanted in him during so many years, and to which he clung. He saw dimly that this time he must either conquer or be conquered, and that the battle was now joined, a momentous and decisive battle between the evil in himself and the goodness in that other man…everything in him had changed. It was no longer in his power to behave as though the bishop had not spoken to him and touched his heart.
While he is walking down the road, in total disarray from the mental turmoil, he encounters a little boy, who drops a coin which lands beside Jean; the latter subsequently accidently steps on it. When the boy asks for his money, Jean is dimly aware of his external surroundings, and does not respond. The boy runs away, scared and crying, and tells others he was robbed by the man who others understood to be Jean Valjean, the recently released convicted felon. This misunderstanding would come back to haunt him.
Rebirth and Renewal
Jean is quite literally a new man, having turned from being hateful, vengeful, and utterly self-absorbed into a genuinely loving and compassionate person, but because he is a convicted felon, he has to change his identity. He becomes Monsieur Madeleine, and settles in Montreuil. While there, he develops a new, cheaper, and better way of producing glassware, and becomes very wealthy. And yet he lives humbly, in a small abode, without any of the luxuries that his money would permit. His factory provides remunerative employment for locals, and creates revenue which funds public works, while a large portion of his income goes to the sick and indigent. In so doing, he uplifts the entire town, and is soon elected mayor, where he continues his wise and beneficent leadership. This occurs while nobody in the town knows about his past.
This also entangles him with other important characters of the book, Fantine and the Thenardiers. The former is a single mother to Cossette, and cannot afford to take care of her. Consequently, she leaves Cossette with the Thenardier family (more on them below) while she tries to find work, which she eventually does, at the factory founded by Jean but now managed by someone else. Most of her income goes to the Thenardier family, which uses it for their own children rather than, as promised, for Cossette, who is underfed, underclothed, and underwashed. Fantine loses the job at the factory because of the dispute with the manager, and is now unemployed, forcing her into utter humiliation to earn money to support Cossette (this section of the book evokes horror). One evening, she is assaulted by a passerby and responds violently, and is arrested by Javert. When Jean, or mayor Madeleine, discovers this as well as Fantine’s circumstances, he goes to the police station, and orders Javert to release her. This leads to clash between two archetypes—Javert, for whom authority and order are to be uncritically obeyed—and Jean, who knows how the law can be an instrument of evil, and, unlike Javert, is capable of independent ethical reasoning which allows him to identify the Good independently of legality.
This clash entangles their fate in ways which would have momentous consequences for both, and hence it is worth elaborating on its broader significance, which, I think, is a major theme of Les Miserables. While Jean embodies goodness and justice, Javert embodies the state. For the latter, what is legal is just, and what is illegal is immoral, while Jean’s experience teaches him otherwise: he spent 19 years doing hard labour, treated like a beast and living under the most humiliating circumstances, because he stole a stale loaf of bread to feed his starving nieces and nephews. And he eventually became good, not because of the law, but because of the saintly example of the Bishop. This personal experience with state-sanctioned injustice, plus his moral transformation due to a serendipitous encounter with Monsieur Bienvenu, gave Jean, among other things, the capacity to independently evaluate peoples’ circumstances. Fantine, Jean knew, was not a criminal. She was a victim of an unjust society, and incarcerating her would have added to the wrongs she suffered.
In Les Miserables, this clash between what is legal yet immoral, and what is good yet illegal, occurred at the level of the nation as well, and was epitomized by the conflict between monarchy and the democratic ideals of the Revolution. The old regime had legal sanction, but it was also the underwriter of an unjust society. Revolutionary activities, in contrast, were outlawed, but they included the morally just ideals of equality. The most noble revolutionaries often had humble origins and were themselves victims of an unjust political and legal order; accordingly, they were concerned precisely with uplifting persons like Fantine.
In the clash over Fantine, Jean’s will prevails, creating hatred and vengefulness in Javert. He gets his revenge by investigating the saintly mayor Madeleine and discovering his true identity: the convicted felon Jean Viljean, who was also on the run for allegedly stealing the coin of the boy he encountered on the road. Meanwhile, Fantine is ill and dying, and Jean ensures that she has the best medical treatment, while visiting her daily in the hospital. Here he learns about Fantine’s daughter, Cossette, and her tragic circumstances. Fantine’s dying wish was see and embrace Cosette one last time, but this cannot occur, and Jean promises her that Cossette will be cared for, a commitment which was destined to change the direction of his life. At the hospital, while Jean is selflessly attending to Fantine’s final needs, Javert arrives and arrests him, and he must now go back to prison. As if to confirm the wickedness of Javert’s approach to life, the town declines and deteriorates without Jean’s enlightened and beneficent leadership.
Cossette and Paris
Meanwhile, Cossette is stuck with the evil Thenardiers, where she is mistreated; had she remained, she would inevitably be set on a path of misery and suffering for no fault of her own. Without external intervention, evil would have triumphed, but the state could not fulfill this role. Only Jean could save her, but this depends on his liberty, which would mean escaping from prison. Jean does precisely that, and changes his identity again, and goes to where the Thenardiers live. Here, he sees the story state of Cossette’s condition, and uses his wealth to adopt her, while the evil Thenardiers do their utmost to exploit the situation by demanding as much money as possible.
Cossette is nine years old, and after many years of abuse in the form of violence, neglect, and material deprivation, is now, for the first time in her life, safe and free. They find a dingy apartment in Paris, where she lives under the comfort and protection of Jean. But their situation is precarious because her well-being depends on Jean’s freedom, which is at risk because Javert is on the hunt for him. At a certain point, Javert discovers where Jean and Cossette live, and they are forced to escape. They find refuge in a convent, and here they are safe; Cossette takes her lessons with the other girls, while being raised to become a nun. Jean is happy with the simplicity and safety at the convent, but he recognizes that it would be ethically questionable to keep Cossette enclosed in the convent for the rest of her life without ever experiencing life outside of it. He must put her needs first, and so decides that they must move out.
Paris: the city of Love
They take daily strolls in the resplendent Jardin du Luxemburg. It is here that she encounters another important character, Marius, who would entangle her and Jean with Paris’s revolutionary movements. Marius saw Cossette and Jean every day in the Jardin, and when their eyes met, it was love at first sight. His circumstances and character—the secret struggles of chastity, and an overflowing goodwill towards all created things—make him ripe for love. Profound emotions are communicated with each glance, even from a distance, but Marius’s paralyzing fear, and Jean’s presence, inhibit him from approaching Cossette. Jean eventually recognizes what is going on, and fears losing Cossette, and so they stop going to the Jardin. But fate had other ideas, and their paths would cross shortly after because Marius, it turns out, lived in the same building as the Thenardiers, who now lived in Paris where they did n’importe quoi, however unethical, in order to survive.
Their daughter, Eponine, learns about the generous Jean, and his charity towards the unfortunate. She writes him a letter, inviting him over to witness the penury they find themselves in. He and Cossette arrive, and they see the sorry state of the Thenardiers, who are now living under a new identity, making them unrecognizable. Marius is watching through a hole in the wall, and witnesses Jean’s generosity first hand when he gives them his jacket and all the money in his pocket. When they leave, Marius discovers an evil plot: the Thenardiers know Jean is rich, and they hatch a scheme to kidnap him and Cossette while demanding an exorbitant amount of money. Marius goes to the police station to report the conspiracy, and here he encounters Javert, who has no idea that it involves his nemesis Jean.
As the scheme is being executed, Javert intervenes, and inadvertently prevents Jean’s certain death. This entangles the lives of Jean, Cossette, Marius, Javert, and the Thenardiers, and sets the stage for the most riveting section of the book, namely, the rebellion against the restored Bourbons, which is expressed with Hugo’s characteristic flair while conveying the deeper subtexts of the novel: the goodness of the masses, the clash between idealism and the forces of law and order, and, despite the pervasiveness of tragedy and loss, the unstoppable triumph of truth and justice.
The Revolt
There is an epidemic which is causing death and suffering, and wreaking havoc on the economy, creating a climate of anxiety and anger. The sudden demise of a symbolically important person leads to spontaneous and violent protests against the prevailing unjust order. I am not talking about the year 2020; it is 1832 in Paris, when a Cholera outbreak, and the death of a beloved public figure, lead to angry crowds gathering on the street, and to protests against the authorities (the parallels between the events in Les Miserables, and the Spring and Summer of 2020, are striking). Eventually, these spontaneous protests coagulate into a generalized rebellion against the monarchy—and, by extension, the reigning political order in Europe. It attracts a wide range of citizens, each frustrated for their own reasons—some are unhappy with the mistreatment by authority, others are bored with the tediousness of bourgeoisie life, while many, for intellectual and moral reasons, are willing to fight and die for the egalitarian ideals of the Republic.
These variegated frustrations, in combination with the combustible elements which characterized Paris at the time—the plague and the economic crisis—are channelled against the same source, namely, the reigning authorities. Barricades are formed across the city, and battles between the revolutionaries and the police ensue. Epic clashes are occurring, and all, in their own way, represent a confrontation between ideals of social justice and the forces of preserving an unjust order. Les Miserables focuses on one barricade in particular: the one built by Marius’s old university pals but which also attracts others, notably Javert, Marius and Jean.
The latter two are motivated by heartbreak rather than any commitment to revolutionary ideals. Marius is informed that Jean and Cossette would be moving to England, and so he loses all hope for her and for life itself. Fighting and dying for the ideals of the Republic therefore seems like a good way to escape his emotional pain. Meanwhile, Jean discovered the love letters exchanged between Cossette and Marius, and is devastated because she is the only creature in the world he has ever loved. He also knows that Marius is upset about his plans to take her to England, and will deal with the pain by going to the barricade. In another example of Jean’s selflessness, he goes to save Marius, even though he hates him for taking the heart of his precious Cossette.
During this final phase of the novel, the main characters, mostly members of the lower classes, are grouped together. Here, the reader learns about the romantic side of the revolution: it brings together very different types who are united by a shared frustration with the prevailing order, and who have found meaning that transcends their individual lives. They are therefore ready to die for their cause, and this motivates great acts of heroism, and a willingness to persevere despite the inevitably of being overpowered by the forces of the status quo. The leader of the barricade, Enjolras, gives the reader a sense of how seductive their ideals are:
We are moving towards the union of nations and the unity of mankind. What Greece first essayed [i.e. democracy] is worthy to be achieved by France. In terms of policy, there is only once principle, the sovereignty of man over himself, and the sovereignty of me over me is called Liberty. It means, in civic terms, an equal outlet for all talents; in political terms, that all votes will carry the same weight…Citizens, our 19th century is great, but the twentieth will be happy [emphasis his]. Today’s fears will all have been abolished—war and conquest, the clash of armed nations, the course of civilization dependent on royal marriages, the birth of hereditary tyrannies, religions beating their heads together like rams in the wilderness…Brothers, we who die here will die in the radiance of the future. We go to the tomb flooded with the light of dawn.”
Javert is behind the barricade as well, but as a police spy. He is caught by Enjolras and condemned to be executed. At a certain point, Jean must carry out the task, and this would have been an opportunity to enact sweet revenge on Javert for all the misery he caused, in Jean’s and others lives, due to his uncritical and unquestioned obedience to authority. And yet the saintly Jean spares his life. Javert was confronted with absolute goodness precisely the same way that Jean was during his encounter with the Bishop. And Javert, too, experienced the turmoil of internal transformation, but rather than choosing the Good which was induced by Jean, he commits suicide. The lesson, Hugo seems to say, is that saintly persons like the Bishop and Jean can, by the sheer power of example, transform the lives and destinies of others, but those at the receiving end are active agents in the process. When the crucial and life-altering encounter occurs, a choice must be made: continue to accept the comfort and familiarity of one’s previous evil life, or the pain and risk of the new and unfamiliar good one. For Javert, the pain of the second path was unbearable, but because of the fatal encounter, he no longer had the option of returning to the unspoiled first one. Death was the only way out.
Back to the battle. At a certain point, Marius is mortally wounded, and while others are being slaughtered in the final throes of hand-to-hand combat, Jean lifts Marius on his shoulders, finds a sewer and escapes through the excrement-filled bowels of Paris. He brings Marius to his grandfather’s house, where he recovers. He was unconscious throughout the entire ordeal in the sewers, and has no idea that Jean saved his life and made possible his desire to be with Cossette. Meanwhile, Cossette and Jean visit him frequently as he is convalescing, and the families give them their blessing for marriage.
Jean confesses his criminal past to Marius, who still has no idea that he owes his life to him. This revelation, plus Marius’s and Cossette’s total absorption with one another, slowly creates distance between them and Jean. The latter’s worst fear of losing Cossette has been realized; he is heartbroken and slowly withdraws from their lives. At this point, Jean is in his early sixties; the loss of the beloved Cossette is overwhelming. He isolates, stops eating, ages rapidly, and becomes ill. As death approaches, he is alone at his humble apartment, and Marius discovers the truth about the saintly character of Jean. He and Cossette rush to his apartment, but it is too late: Jean is on his deathbed. Like other saints, he does not fear death; the spirit of the saintly Bishop Bienvenu is in the room, and Jean will soon be reunited with him. In his final moments, his beloved Cossette and Marius are kneeling and crying at his bedside while he caresses their hair; the fading candlelight, slowly burning on the candlesticks given to Jean by the Bishop, shine their final flickers on the dying man’s face. It is the final scene of the book, and I literally wept when reading it.
The Triumph of Goodness
Jean was struck down by loss, heartbreak, and death, and there is a sense that it was undeserved. After all, he became a kind of saint who was a blessing in other’s lives. His successful business uplifted Montreuil, his charitable activities helped countless poor people, he saved Cossette from the evil Thenardiers, and saved Marius from an early death. He merited, therefore, a longer happier life, perhaps passing his twilight years tending to his garden while enjoying the company of his grandchildren.
But the goodness he represents did not die with Jean, just as it did not with the passing of Bishop Bienvenu. The latter set the stage for the rest of the novel by his selfless treatment of Jean, transforming him by the power of his example. And Jean, in turn, continued this triumph of the Good by serving others and by saving Cossette and Marius. This couple, consequently, would continue this legacy via their beneficent contribution to their community and to the larger society. Tragedy, loss, and pain could not arrest the inevitably of what is right. It is precisely the same underlying dynamic, Hugo says in Les Miserables, that operates at the level of the nation. The French revolution would eventually become bloody, and lead to countless deaths; but its ideals of justice ultimately transcended the setbacks, losses, and tragedies placed on the path to its realization.
The most important vehicles for these transformations, we learn in Les Miserables, were people like Jean, with humble beginnings, the “splendour from below,” as Hugo poetically expresses:
Those bare feet and arms, the rags, the ignorance, the abjection, the dark places, all may be enlisted in the service of the ideal. The common sand that you tread underfoot, let it be cast into the furnace to boil and melt and it will become a crystal as splendid as that through which Galileo and Newton discovered the stars…where history scrutinizes the facts, it often finds greatness hand-in-hand with misery. Athens was a mobocracy, down and outs made Holland, the common people more than once saved Rome, and the rabble followed Jesus
I read Les Miserables while in Paris in the summer of 2020, which greatly enriched completing this masterpiece, in part because of the parallels between the story and my own experiences in the city. The Jardin du Luxemburg—where Jean and Cossette would go for their daily walks, and where the budding of the love story between her and Marius commences—is where I would go frequently to work out using the outdoor exercise equipment, or read a book while sitting under a tree, bathed in a soft and gentle summer breeze. I stayed in an apartment in the neighborhood of Montmartre; Jean travelled through the excrement filled sewers of that area when he saved Marius’s life. The social parallels are even more striking: I was in Paris during the height of Covid-19 pandemic which created economic pain and frustration, and the death of George Floyd sparked protests around the world, including in Paris. In a similar vein, the final sections of Les Miserables are set in 1832, during the deadly Cholera epidemic, which ravaged Paris and created frustrations that sparked the violent clashes between the authorities and those fighting for social justice
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