VIRAGO

LES MISÉRABLES

 

 

The crowning achievement of Victor Hugo’s long and varied career, Les Misérables was published in 1862 to mixed reviews from critics and universal acclaim from readers.  The anecdote goes that Hugo wrote to his publisher, inquiring about the sales of the new book with the single character “?”  The publisher replied with the single character “!”

 

Yet it had not been an easy road to publication for Hugo’s masterpiece.  He had begun work on the novel in 1845, while enjoying a lucrative career in Parisian literary and theatrical circles.  He did not finish work on it until 1861, when he was living in bitter political exile on the wild, windswept island of Guernsey.  Most of this period, however, was not spent writing.  Hugo paused work on the novel on February 14, 1848, due to the political turmoil of the February Revolution, and did not pick it up again for twelve years.  In all, the writing of the novel only took about three years to accomplish, but the lengthy hiatus during its gestation would prove crucial for the development of Les Misérables as it is known today.

 

At its most fundamental, the novel is a tale of redemption, courage, forgiveness, and above all, love of all kinds.  When Hugo jotted down the first known outline on the back of some official correspondence in 1845, it was only four lines long, but still telling for the future direction of the novel: “Story of a saint / Story of a man / Story of a woman / Story of a doll.”  The plot follows Jean Valjean, a convict who, through a random encounter with a saintly bishop, learns how to reform himself and rebuild his life for the purpose of helping others.  In the epic course of this one man’s life, we meet many others who cross his path: Fantine, the single mother forced into prostitution to support her young daughter; Cosette, the little girl abused and enslaved by her caretakers; Marius, the young man trying to come to terms with his father’s legacy and his own beliefs; and Javert, the single-minded police inspector unable to believe that a convict like Valjean could ever reform. 

 

The novel’s approach to the nineteenth-century “social question” is direct and frank, from its first words.  Hugo’s prologue throws down the gauntlet to the reader right away:

 

"So long as there will exist, by virtue of law and of custom, a social damnation, artificially creating hells in the midst of complete civilization, and muddling destiny, which is divine, with a human fate; so long as the three problems of the century—the degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through hunger, the crippling of children through darkness—remain unresolved; so long as social asphyxia is possible in any part of the world; in other words, and from an even broader viewpoint, so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of this sort cannot fail to be useful."

 

["Tant qu’il existera, par le fait des lois et des moeurs, une damnation sociale créant artificiellement, en pleine civilisation, des enfers, et compliquant d’une fatalité humaine la destinée qui est divine; tant que les trois problèmes du siècle, la dégradation de l’homme par le polétariat, la déchéance de la femme par la faim, l’atrophie de l’enfant par la nuit, ne seront pas résolus; tant que, dans de certaines régions, l’asphyxie sociale sera possible; en d’autres termes, et à un point de vue plus étendu encore, tant qu’il y aura sur la terre ignorance et misère, des livres de la nature de celui-ci pourront ne pas être inutiles.”]

 

With such a start, it should not be surprising that political and social upheaval do eventually form part of Hugo’s plot.  The climatic scenes of the novel bring almost all the major characters and many of the minor ones together on the barricades of June 1832.  This uprising was a real historical event, of course, but in Hugo’s hands it becomes much more, interwoven into the stories of his characters.  These barricade scenes and the political events surrounding them received a much richer treatment from Hugo when he picked up the manuscript again in 1860.  Much had changed in his own life and views since the last time he had worked on the novel, and the bonapartist who had written suspiciously of street rioting in 1848 was now a republican with a very different perspective on insurrection.  When he began revising his work in 1860, Hugo invented a character who would help him portray the barricades in all their horror and hope.  This newcomer was Enjolras.

 

It was not at all unusual for Hugo to make sweeping changes to the novel.  After all, in the earlier drafts, many of the characters who would later take on more important roles—the bishop, Javert, Thénardier, Gavroche—were absent or barely present.  In the case of Enjolras and his revolutionaries, Hugo had already begun to develop the introductions for the Friends of the ABC in earlier drafts, but had left that section incomplete.  The barricade sections of his novel, which had been halfway finished by 1848, seem to have left their author somewhat uncertain and unsatisfied.  After his exile, Hugo, now politically radicalized, introduced widespread edits to these sections.  All chapters involving the Friends of the ABC were added, and almost the entire barricade narrative was rewritten into a more sympathetic portrayal of the radical revolutionaries.  Under Hugo’s 1860 edits, the Friends of the ABC had become more than a set of individual characters: they had grown into a “collective character,” a symbol of the ca. 1830 insurrectionary youth movement, and Enjolras himself became the symbol par excellence of all that was beautiful and terrifying about that movement.  Hugo’s Enjolras is not so much a fleshed-out character as he is a metaphor, the incarnation of a doomed Republic that continues to struggle towards the light even in the face of certain death.

 

This Enjolras, the inhuman but largely sympathetic symbol, is the starting point for Virago.