Les Misérables (, ) is a French epic historical novel by Victor Hugo, first published on 31 March 1862, that is considered one of the greatest novels of the 19th century. Les Misérables has been popularized through numerous adaptations for film, television, and the stage, including a musical.
In the English-speaking world, the novel is usually referred to by its original French title. However, several alternatives have been used, including The Miserables, The Wretched, The Miserable Ones, The Poor Ones, The Wretched Poor, The Victims, and The Dispossessed.Novelist Susanne Alleyn has argued that "the phrase les misérables, which has a whole range of subtly shaded meanings in French, is much better translated into English as 'the dispossessed' or even as 'the outsiders', which can describe every major character in the novel in one way or another, than simply as 'the miserable ones' / 'the wretched ones'. No, It's Not Actually the French Revolution: Les Misérables and History. Beginning in 1815 and culminating in the 1832 June Rebellion in Paris, the novel follows the lives and interactions of several characters, particularly the struggles of ex-convict Jean Valjean and his experience of redemption.
Examining the nature of law and grace, the novel elaborates upon the history of France, the architecture and urban design of Paris, politics, moral philosophy, antimonarchism, justice, religion, and the types and nature of romantic and familial love.
Hugo's sources An incident Hugo witnessed in 1829 involved three strangers and a police officer. One of the strangers was a man who had stolen a loaf of bread, similar to Jean Valjean, being taken to the coach by a police officer. Nearby, two onlookers, a mother and daughter, had stopped to watch the thief. They became the inspiration for Fantine and Cosette. Hugo imagined the life of the man in jail and the mother and daughter taken away from each other.
Valjean's character is loosely based on the life of the ex-convict Eugène François Vidocq. Vidocq became the head of an undercover police unit and later founded France's first private detective agency. He was also a businessman and was widely noted for his social engagement and philanthropy. Vidocq also inspired Hugo's "Claude Gueux" and Le Dernier jour d'un condamné (The Last Day of a Condemned Man).
In 1828, Vidocq, already pardoned, saved one of the workers in his paper factory by lifting a heavy cart on his shoulders as Valjean does. Hugo's description of Valjean rescuing a sailor on the Orion draws almost word for word on a Baron La Roncière's letter describing such an incident.Hugo, Victor, Les Misérables (Preface by A. Rosa), Laffont, 1985, , p. IV. Hugo used Bienvenu de Miollis (1753–1843), the Bishop of Digne during the time in which Valjean encounters Myriel, as the model for Myriel.
Hugo had used the departure of prisoners from the Bagne of Toulon in one of his early stories, Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné. He went to Toulon to visit the Bagne in 1839 and took extensive notes, though he did not start writing the book until 1845. On one of the pages of his notes about the prison, he wrote in large block letters a possible name for his hero: "JEAN TRÉJEAN". When the book was finally written, Tréjean became Valjean.Le Bagne de Toulon (1748–1873), Académie du Var, Autres Temps Editions (2010),
In 1841, Hugo saved a prostitute from arrest for assault. He used a short part of his dialogue with the police when recounting Valjean's rescue of Fantine in the novel.Victor Hugo, Things Seen, vol. 1 (Glasgow and New York: George Routledge and Sons, 1887), 49–52. The chapter is title "1841. Origin of Fantine". Behr quotes this passage at length in . On 22 February 1846, when he had begun work on the novel, Hugo witnessed the arrest of a bread thief while a duchess and her child watched the scene pitilessly from their coach.Victor Hugo, Choses vues: nouvelle série (Paris: Calman Lévy, 1900), 129–130 He spent several vacations in Montreuil-sur-Mer.
During the 1832 revolt, Hugo walked the streets of Paris, saw the barricades blocking his way at points, and had to take shelter from gunfire. He participated more directly in the 1848 Paris insurrection, helping to smash barricades and suppress both the popular revolt and its monarchist enemies.
Victor Hugo drew his inspiration from everything he heard and saw, writing it down in his diary. In December 1846, he witnessed an altercation between an old woman scavenging through rubbish and a street urchin who might have been Gavroche.Rosa, Annette, Introduction to Les Misérables, Laffont, 1985, He also informed himself by personal inspection of the Paris Conciergerie in 1846 and Waterloo in 1861, by gathering information on some industries, and on working-class people's wages and living standards. He asked his mistresses, Léonie d'Aunet and Juliette Drouet, to tell him about life in convents. He also slipped personal anecdotes into the plot. For instance, Marius and Cosette's wedding night (Part V, Book 6, Chapter 1) takes place on 16 February 1833, which is also the date when Hugo and his lifelong mistress Juliette Drouet had sex for the first time.
Hugo also took inspiration from Eugène Sue's Les Mystères de Paris (The Mysteries of Paris), a serialized novel that enjoyed great success when it was published during 1842 and 1843. Both novels view contemporary Paris from the perspective of the most-downtrodden members of society, and Les Misérables even borrows some plot elements from Les Mystères de Paris.
Novel form Upton Sinclair described the novel as "one of the half-dozen greatest novels of the world" and remarked that Hugo set forth the purpose of Les Misérables in the preface:
Towards the end of the novel, Hugo explains the work's overarching structure:Alexander Welsh, "Opening and Closing Les Misérables", in Harold Bloom, ed., Victor Hugo: Modern Critical Views (NY: Chelsea House, 1988), 155; Vol. 5, Book 1, Chapter 20
The novel contains various subplots, but the main thread is the story of ex-convict Jean Valjean, who becomes a force for good in the world but cannot escape his criminal past. The novel is divided into 5 volumes, each divided into several books and subdivided into chapters, for a total of 48 books and 365 chapters. Each chapter is relatively short, commonly no longer than a few pages.
The novel as a whole is one of the longest ever written, with 655,478 words in the original French. Hugo explained his ambitions for the novel to his Italian publisher:
Digressions More than a quarter of the novel—by one count 955 of 2,783 pages—is devoted to essays that argue a moral point or display Hugo's encyclopedic knowledge but do not advance the plot, nor even a subplot, a method Hugo used in such other works as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Toilers of the Sea. One biographer noted, "The digressions of genius are easily pardoned".A. F. Davidson, Victor Hugo: His Life And Work (J. B. Lippincott, 1929), Kindle Location 4026, 4189 The topics Hugo addresses include cloistered religious orders, the construction of the Paris sewers, argot, and the street urchins of Paris. The one about convents he titles "Parenthesis" to alert the reader to its irrelevance to the storyline.
Hugo devotes another 19 chapters (Volume II, Book I) to an account—and meditation on the place in history—of the Battle of Waterloo, the battlefield of which Hugo visited in 1861 and where he finished writing the novel. It opens volume II with such a change of subject as to seem the beginning of an entirely different work. The fact that this "digression" occupies such a large part of the text demands that it be read in the context of the "overarching structure" discussed above. Hugo draws his own personal conclusions, taking Waterloo to be a pivot point in history but definitely not a victory for the forces of reaction.
One critic has called this "the spiritual gateway" to the novel, as its chance encounter of Thénardier and Colonel Pontmercy foreshadows so many of the novel's encounters "blending chance and necessity", a "confrontation of heroism and villainy".
Even when not turning to other subjects outside his narrative, Hugo sometimes interrupts the straightforward recitation of events, his voice and control of the storyline unconstrained by time and sequence. The novel opens with a statement about the bishop of Digne in 1815 and immediately shifts: "Although these details in no way essentially concern that which we have to tell..." Only after 14 chapters does Hugo pick up the opening thread again, "In the early days of the month of October 1815...", to introduce Jean Valjean.Alexander Welsh, "Opening and Closing Les Misérables," in Harold Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Views: Victor Hugo (Chelsea House, 1988), 151–152
Characters
Major
Jean Valjean (also known as Monsieur Madeleine, Ultime Fauchelevent, Monsieur Leblanc, and Urbain Fabre) – The protagonist of the novel. He was born in Faverolles, Aisne. Convicted for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister's seven starving children and sent to prison for five years, he is paroled from prison nineteen years later (after four unsuccessful escape attempts added twelve years and fighting back during the second escape attempt added two extra years). Rejected by society for being a former convict, he encounters Bishop Myriel, who turns his life around by showing him mercy and encouraging him to become a new man. While sitting and pondering what Bishop Myriel had said, he puts his shoe on a forty-sou piece dropped by a young wanderer. Valjean threatens the boy with his stick when the boy attempts to rouse him from his reverie and recover his money. He tells a passing priest his name and the name of the boy, which allows the police to charge him with armed robbery – a sentence that, if he were caught again, would return him to prison for life. He assumes a new identity (Monsieur Madeleine) in order to pursue an honest life. He introduces new manufacturing techniques and eventually builds two factories, becoming one of the richest men in the area. By popular acclaim, he is made mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer. He confronts Javert over Fantine's punishment, turns himself in to the police to save another man from prison for life, and rescues Cosette from the Thénardiers. Discovered by Javert in Paris because of his generosity to the poor, he evades capture for the next several years in a convent. He saves Marius from imprisonment and probable death at the barricade, reveals his true identity to Marius and Cosette after their wedding, and is reunited with them just before his death, having kept his promise to the bishop and to Fantine, the image of whom is the last thing he sees before dying.