Impact: Les Misérables

The Man Who Wrote It From Exile

Victor Hugo was already the most famous writer in France when Napoleon III seized power in a coup in December 1851. Hugo, who had been a politician as well as a poet and novelist, denounced the new emperor publicly and with spectacular venom — he called him 'Napoleon the Small.' This was not a safe thing to do. Within weeks, Hugo was fleeing the country with a false identity, disguised as a workman. He would not return to France for nineteen years.

He settled eventually on the island of Guernsey, in a tall, strange house he filled with his own paintings and furniture and a glass-walled writing room at the very top where he could look out over the sea. It was there, in the 1860s, that he finally completed the manuscript he had been carrying with him since the 1840s. Les Misérables was in one sense a political act — a broadside against everything Napoleon III's regime represented — but it was also the work of a man who had watched poverty, injustice, and institutional cruelty up close and could not stop thinking about them. The exile gave the book its fury.

The opening chapter of the novel — the pages introducing Bishop Myriel of Digne — gives you the measure of what Hugo is doing. Before Jean Valjean even appears, before any plot begins, Hugo spends dozens of pages constructing a portrait of radical Christian charity. Myriel, a former aristocrat ruined by the Revolution, has become a bishop who gives his palace to the hospital and moves into the hospital building himself. His encounter with Napoleon — where the emperor asks who this old man staring at him is, and Myriel replies, 'You are looking at a good man, and I at a great man. Each of us can profit by it' — is Hugo signaling the entire moral architecture of what follows: power and goodness are not the same thing, and it is goodness that the book will take seriously.

A Sensation Heard Across Europe

The publication of Les Misérables in 1862 was a commercial and cultural earthquake by any measure. The Belgian publisher Lacroix had paid Hugo an enormous advance — 300,000 francs, an almost unheard-of sum — and had coordinated a simultaneous release across Europe in multiple languages. On the morning the book went on sale in Paris, the queues were so long that some booksellers ran out of stock within hours. Within days, pirated editions were already circulating.

The critical response was messier. Many of Hugo's literary contemporaries were dismissive or outright hostile. Flaubert found it sentimental and melodramatic. The Goncourt brothers thought it vulgar. Baudelaire, privately, admitted it was powerful but publicly maintained a studied silence. Part of this was aesthetic snobbery — the novel's sweeping emotionalism, its readiness to halt the plot for thirty pages on the history of the Parisian sewer system, offended the sensibilities of writers who prized compression and irony. But part of it was political: the book was unmistakably on the side of the poor and against the institutions that ground them down, and that made the comfortable literary establishment uneasy.

Readers, however, did not share these reservations. Letters poured in from across Europe and the Americas. Working-class readers, many of them only barely literate, wrote to Hugo to tell him he had described their lives. Hugo reportedly kept much of this correspondence and was moved by it in ways the applause of other novelists never quite matched. The book was his argument to the world, and the world — or at least a large and suffering portion of it — was writing back to say it had been heard.

What the Book Is Actually About

The plot of Les Misérables is well enough known — the escaped convict Jean Valjean, the implacable Inspector Javert, the saintly Fantine, the young revolutionaries at the barricades — that it is easy to mistake the novel for its outline. But the book Hugo actually wrote is stranger and more radical than any summary suggests. Its central obsession is with a question that sounds simple and isn't: can a person change? Valjean is a man whom society has decided is permanently defined by a crime he committed in desperation. The entire machinery of the law, embodied by Javert, exists to enforce that definition. The novel is Hugo's long, furious argument that this machinery is wrong — morally, philosophically, and practically wrong.

The figure of Bishop Myriel, who appears only in the opening chapters and then largely disappears, is nonetheless the moral engine of everything that follows. His act of mercy toward Valjean — covering for him after Valjean steals the bishop's silver, then giving him the candlesticks as well, and telling the police Valjean was given them as a gift — is the act that cracks Valjean open. Hugo is not interested in crime and punishment so much as in crime and grace. Javert, the antagonist, is not a villain in any simple sense: he is a man who has built his entire identity on the belief that the law is justice, and the horror at the novel's center is watching what happens to him when confronted with proof that it isn't.

Hugo was also writing about money — about what poverty actually does to people, how it degrades and destroys and forces impossible choices. Fantine, who sells her hair and then her teeth and then her body to support the daughter she cannot keep, is not a moral cautionary tale. She is an indictment. Hugo wanted his readers to feel the specific, grinding, physical reality of destitution, and the novel's lengthy digressions on the history of Parisian slums, on the economics of child labor, on the workings of the sewer system, are not authorial self-indulgence. They are evidence, submitted to the jury.

The Digression Problem (And Why It Isn't One)

No honest account of Les Misérables can avoid the question of its length and its habit of stopping the story dead to discourse on apparently unrelated subjects. Hugo spends sixty-odd pages on the Battle of Waterloo before any of his characters have any involvement in it. He devotes a lengthy section to the history and geography of the Paris sewer system. There are extended meditations on monastic life, on the argot of French criminals, on the tactics of street warfare. First-time readers frequently find this maddening.

But Hugo's digressions are almost never structurally irrelevant. The Waterloo section establishes the historical world — post-Napoleonic France, the society of defeated grandeur and grinding poverty — in which the novel's characters are trapped. The sewer sequence comes at the novel's climax, when Valjean is literally carrying a wounded man through the tunnels beneath Paris, and Hugo's pages on those tunnels transform a physical escape into something mythic: the city's hidden circulation, its dark underside, the invisible infrastructure on which civilization rests and which civilization prefers not to think about. It is exactly what the novel is about.

The digressive quality of Les Misérables is also, in part, what has made it so durable. It is not merely a story about particular people in a particular crisis. It is a novel that insists on the context — historical, economic, political, architectural — that produces those people and that crisis. Hugo wanted to make it impossible to read about Valjean and Fantine and then file them away as fiction. He wanted you to look out your window at your own city and see the same forces at work.

Cultural Footprint: Larger Than Almost Any Novel in History

The cultural afterlife of Les Misérables is so extensive that it has become genuinely difficult to separate the novel from its adaptations. The 1980 Claude-Michel Schönberg musical, which transferred to London's West End in 1985 and Broadway in 1987, has been seen by over 70 million people worldwide and is one of the longest-running musicals in history. The 2012 film adaptation grossed over $440 million. There have been dozens of film versions going back to the silent era, television miniseries in multiple languages, manga adaptations, anime, graphic novels, and innumerable stage productions in countries Hugo never visited and couldn't have imagined.

This is unusual not just in scale but in kind. Most classic novels, when adapted, lose their politics in the translation. What's striking about Les Misérables in its many forms is that the core argument — that society's treatment of the poor is a moral catastrophe, that the law is not the same as justice, that individual mercy can matter more than institutional machinery — tends to survive the journey. The musical, whatever its departures from the novel, still ends with barricades and dead young men and an audience that walks out thinking about something beyond entertainment.

The book's title has itself become a political phrase. During the 2005 French suburban riots, protesters carried signs reading Les Misérables. The same reference appeared during the Arab Spring, during debates about mass incarceration in the United States, during discussions of the refugee crisis in Europe. Hugo's phrase for the poor and the wretched — les misérables, those who are made miserable — has outlasted the novel's plot and characters and taken on a life of its own in political language. That doesn't happen to many books.

Why It Still Matters

There is a version of the argument for reading Les Misérables that is purely literary: it is a great novel, technically ambitious, emotionally powerful, historically rich, written by one of the towering figures of nineteenth-century literature. All of this is true and none of it is really the point.

The point is that the problems Hugo was writing about — the criminalization of poverty, the way legal systems enforce existing hierarchies rather than producing justice, the specific cruelties visited on women and children by economies that treat them as disposable — are not historical problems. They are current ones. Hugo's Jean Valjean, imprisoned for nineteen years for stealing bread and then unable to find work or housing because of his criminal record, would be recognizable in any contemporary conversation about recidivism and reentry. His Fantine, forced into choices that destroy her by an economic system that offers her no other options, would be recognizable in any contemporary conversation about women and poverty. This is not a coincidence. Hugo was not describing the particular cruelties of nineteenth-century France. He was describing the particular cruelties that show up whenever societies decide that some people matter less than others.

What the novel offers, beyond the argument and the evidence, is the figure of Bishop Myriel and what he represents: the possibility that a single act of radical generosity can break a cycle that law and punishment never could. Hugo was not naive about institutions — Les Misérables is one of the least naive novels ever written about how power actually works. But he believed, with a stubbornness that the novel embodies on every page, that human beings were capable of something better than what their institutions demanded of them. Seventeen years of writing in exile, watching the country he loved from a glass room above the sea, and that is what he concluded. It remains worth arguing with, and worth believing.

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