Les Misérables and Its Afterlives: Between Page, Stage, and Screen 9781472440853, 9781315592213

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LES MISÉRABlES AND ITS AFTERLiVES

For John and Ant

Les Misérables and Its Afterlives Between Page, Stage, and Screen

Edited by KATHRYN M. GROSSmAN Pennsylvania State University, USA and BRADLEY STEpHENS University of Bristol, UK

First published 2015 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Kathryn M. Grossman, Bradley Stephens, and the contributors 2015 Kathryn M. Grossman and Bradley Stephens have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Les Misérables and its afterlives: between page, stage, and screen / edited by Kathryn M. Grossman and Bradley Stephens. pages cm Includes index. ISBN 978-1-4724-4085-3 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Hugo, Victor, 1802–1885. Misérables. 2. Hugo, Victor, 1802–1885. Misérables— Dramatic production. 3. Hugo, Victor, 1802–1885. Misérables—Film adaptations. I. Grossman, Kathryn M., editor. II. Stephens, Bradley, editor. PQ2287.M5M57 2015 792.6’42—dc23 2015011005 ISBN: 9781472440853 (hbk) ISBN: 9781315592213 (ebk)

Contents List of Plates   Notes on Contributors   Acknowledgments   Notes and Abbreviations   Introduction: Les Misérables: A Prodigious Legacy   Bradley Stephens and Kathryn M. Grossman Part 1

vii ix xiii xiv 1

Readings of Les Misérables

1

On (the Usefulness of Hunger and) Beauty   Isabel K. Roche

19

2

“Foliis ac frondibus”: Les Misérables and the Ecogarden   Karen F. Quandt

33

3

The Grotesque and Beyond in Les Misérables: Material Privation and Spiritual Transfiguration   Laurence M. Porter

4

“Eh bien, je suis une femme”: When La Misérable Acts   Briana Lewis

65

5

The Dark Side of Les Misérables: Hunger, Desire, and Crime   Philippe Moisan

81

Part 2

49

Receptions and Adaptations

6

Homeric Variations: From Les Misérables to the nouveau roman   97 Fiona Cox

7

The Making of a Classic: Les Misérables Takes the States, 1860–1922   Kathryn M. Grossman

113

8 Adapting Les Misérables for the Screen: Transatlantic Debates and Rivalries   Delphine Gleizes

129

9

The Many Faces of Javert in Anglophone Adaptation   Andrea Beaghton

10 Éponine on Screen   Danièle Gasiglia-Laster

143 159

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11 A New Creation: Histoire de Gavroche in Words and Song   Arnaud Laster

175

12 Les Misérables and the Twenty-First Century   Bradley Stephens

191

Works Cited   Index  

205 223

List of Plates 1 Gustave Brion (1824–1877). “Jean Valjean.” Photograph of an 1862 illustration. © Maisons de Victor Hugo / Roger-Viollet. 38138–2. 2

Gustave Brion (1824–1877). “Javert.” Photograph of an 1862 illustration. © Maisons de Victor Hugo / Roger-Viollet. 38344–1.

3

Gustave Brion (1824–1877). “Les Thénardier.” Photograph of an 1862 illustration. © Maisons de Victor Hugo / Roger-Viollet. 38138–10.

4

Jean Valjean (Fredric March), on the left, confronts Inspector Javert (Charles Laughton) in the 1935 20th-Century Pictures’ film Les Misérables (dir. Richard Boleslawski), which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.

5

Jean Valjean (Jean Gabin) carries Marius (Giani Esposito) through the Parisian sewers in Les Misérables (dir. Jean-Paul Le Chanois, 1958). © Roger Corbeau / Maisons de Victor Hugo / Roger-Viollet. 55782–11.

6

Jean Valjean (Jean-Paul Belmondo) in the opening scene of the TF1 / Les Films 13 co-production of Les Misérables (dir. Claude Lelouch, 1995): this scene is one of several where Belmondo appears as the character from the novel, whereas throughout the film he plays Henri Fortin, who resembles Hugo’s hero but who is also a composite of other characters. This adaptation won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film that year.

7

Jean Valjean (Liam Neeson), in his guise as Monsieur Madeleine (on the right), meets with Inspector Javert (Geoffrey Rush) in Mandalay Entertainment’s 1998 film adaptation (dir. Bille August).

8

The cast of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s stage musical Les Misérables performs “Do You Hear the People Sing” during the American Theatre Wing’s 68th annual Tony Awards at Radio City Music Hall in New York, 8 June 2014. © Carlo Allegri/Reuters/Corbis. Stock Photo ID: 42–59292404.

9

(a and b) Fantine forced into prostitution in UDON Entertainment’s 2014 Manga Classics version of Les Misérables (author: Crystal Silvermoon; art by SunNeko Lee), pp. 71–2. Credit: © UDON Entertainment Inc. and Morpheus Publishing Limited.

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10 Bishop Myriel gives his silver candlesticks to Jean Valjean during a flashback in the second episode of Nippon Animation’s 52-episode serial Les Misérables: Shōjo Cosette (dir. Hiroaki Sakurai, 2007). 11 Victor Hugo in the garden at Hauteville House (his residence on Guernsey during his exile from the French Second Empire, 1851–1870). Photograph by Charles Hugo, 1856. © Maisons de Victor Hugo / Roger-Viollet. 25946–6. 12 Emile-Antoine Bayard (1837–1891). “Cosette Sweeping” [Cosette balayant]. 1879 illustration for Les Misérables (Eugène Hugues 5-volume edition, 1879–1882). © Maisons de Victor Hugo / Roger-Viollet. 25946–14. 13 Fortuné Méaulle (1844–1901). “The Grandeurs of Despair” [Les Grandeurs du désespoir]. Photograph of an 1879 wood engraving used in Les Misérables (Eugène Hugues 5-volume edition 1879–1882). © AKG-Images. AKG256479. 14 (a) Cosette (Christiane Jean) reads a letter from Marius (Frank David) in the garden in the Rue Plumet, in G.E.F. / Société Française de Production’s film co-production (dir. Robert Hossein, 1982). (b) Marius (Cameron Mitchell) discusses his future with Cosette (Debra Paget) in 20th-Century Fox’s film (dir. Lewis Milestone, 1952). 15 The Friends of the ABC man the barricade on the Rue de la Chanvrerie in Pathé-Natan’s epic film adaptation (dir. Raymond Bernard, 1934). 16 Inspector Javert (Russell Crowe) surveys the carnage following the storming of the barricade in Working Title / Universal Pictures’ film version of the stage musical (dir. Tom Hooper, 2012). 17 Gavroche (Émile Genevois) bravely collects cartridges from the bodies of the fallen as the Friends of the ABC keep watch (dir. Raymond Bernard, 1934).

Notes on Contributors Andrea Beaghton’s MPhil thesis (University of Bristol) examined the figure of the priest in love (or “prêtre-amoureux”) in French Romantic fiction, especially the works of Hugo and George Sand. Select findings from this project were published in French Studies Bulletin (2010). Before turning to studies in the arts (thanks to seeing Les Misérables on stage for the first time), she had obtained a PhD in Chemical Engineering. She is currently the Vice-President and UK representative of the Société des Amis de Victor Hugo and continues to pursue postdoctoral scientific research in life sciences at Imperial College London. Fiona Cox is Lecturer in French at the University of Exeter. Her research interests lie in the reception of classical literature in French literature and culture since the nineteenth century. She is the author of Aeneas Takes the Metro—Virgil’s Presence in Twentieth-Century French Literature (Legenda, 1999) and Sibylline Sisters— Virgil’s Presence in Contemporary Women’s Writing (Oxford University Press, 2011) and is the co-translator of Marius Roux’s The Substance and the Shadow (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007). She has also published widely on the artistic imagination of Victor Hugo and is currently working on his transformation of epic conventions in Les Misérables as a forerunner of the modern novel. Danièle Gasiglia-Laster is a French writer and critic specializing in the works of Hugo, Proust, and Jacques Prévert. She co-edited both volumes of Prévert’s complete works (Bibliothèque de la Pléaiade, 1996), as well as a special number of the Revue des Lettres Modernes on women in Hugo’s work (Minard, 1991), and she is the author of Victor Hugo, celui qui pense à autre chose (Portaparole, 2006). She has also written literary fiction and plays for the stage, including dramas centered on Hugo’s relationship with his mistress Juliette Drouet (Moi, j’avais son amour, 2008) and with fellow Romantic novelist George Sand (Et s’ils s’étaient rencontrés? 2011). Delphine Gleizes is Associate Professor of French [maître de conférences] at the Université Lumière Lyon 2 and specializes in the relationship between French literary and visual cultures. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on the screen adaptations and illustrated editions of Hugo’s writing. She is the author of Les Éditions illustrées des Orientales au XIXe siècle (Maisonneuve et Larose, 2002) and editor of L’œuvre de Victor Hugo à l’écran: des rayons et des ombres (Harmattan, 2005). She has also co-edited both Hugo’s novel L’Homme qui rit (Livre de Poche, 2002) and a major study of nineteenth-century salon culture entitled Juliette Récamier dans les arts et la littérature (Hermann, 2011).

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Kathryn M. Grossman is Professor of French and Head of the Department of French and Francophone Studies at Pennsylvania State University. Her research centers on nineteenth-century French literature, especially Victor Hugo’s novels and other utopian, visionary, and/or poetic prose fiction. She is the author of two books on Les Misérables—Les Misérables: Conversion, Redemption, Revolution (Twayne Publishers-Macmillan, 1996) and Figuring Transcendence in Les Misérables: Hugo’s Romantic Sublime (Southern Illinois University Press, 1994)—as well as two further studies of Hugo’s other prose fiction: The Later Novels of Victor Hugo: Variations on the Politics and Poetics of Transcendence (Oxford University Press, 2012) and The Early Novels of Victor Hugo: Towards a Poetics of Harmony (Droz, 1986). Arnaud Laster is Associate Professor of French [maître de conférences] at the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III) and is President of the Société des Amis de Victor Hugo. He is especially interested in the ways in which Hugo’s works have been adapted through music and on screen. He is the author of numerous books, including Pleins Feux sur Victor Hugo (Comédie Française, 1981) and Victor Hugo (Belfond, 1984), and editor of Hugo à l’Opéra (L’AvantScène Opéra, 2002) and Hugo sous les feux de la rampe (Presses Universitaires de Paris-Sorbonne, 2009). He has also contributed to the most recent edition of Hugo’s complete works (Laffont, 1985), in addition to producing several new editions of Hugo’s writing. Briana Lewis is Assistant Professor of French at Allegheny College. Her research concentrates on nineteenth-century French literature, particularly the works of Victor Hugo, and on questions of individual, political, and social identity through narrative fiction. She is currently working on a book project on gender and identity in Hugo’s landmark novel, entitled “Plus le Même Homme”: Identity and Identity Change in Les Misérables, and has articles forthcoming in the Romanic Review and Women in French Studies. Philippe Moisan is Associate Professor in French at Grinnell College. His research and teaching focus on fiction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and he is particularly interested in the concepts of the end of Humanism and of the birth of Modernity. His book Les Natchez de Chateaubriand: l’utopie, l’abîme et le feu (Champion, 1999) addresses the beginning of this humanist crisis in Chateaubriand’s work, and he has published and presented papers on Chateaubriand, Hugo, Zola, and Robbe-Grillet. He is currently completing a book on Hugo’s last four novels, including Les Misérables. Laurence M. Porter is an Affiliate Scholar at Oberlin College and taught at Michigan State University between 1963 and 2009, where he was Professor of French and Comparative Literature. He was also an Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Pittsburgh. He has published 15 books and more than 120 articles and

Notes on Contributors

xi

chapters on nineteenth-century French literature, including The Renaissance of the Lyric in French Romanticism (French Forum, 1978), Literary Dream in French Romanticism (Wayne State University Press, 1979), The Crisis of French Symbolism (Cornell University Press, 1990), and Victor Hugo (Twayne, 1999). Karen F. Quandt is Assistant Professor of French at the University of Delaware. She is currently preparing her PhD dissertation for a book publication, entitled Landscape and the Imagination: Expressive Aesthetics in French Romantic Poetry. She has also published articles considering the relationship between word and image in French Romantic works, including a study of Hugo and Delacroix for a recent volume on The Art of the Text, edited by Susan Harrow (University of Wales Press, 2013). Forthcoming publications include articles on Lamartine’s art of poetry in French Forum and on Baudelaire and the poetics of pollution for Dix-Neuf. Isabel K. Roche is currently Dean of Bennington College, where she is Associate Professor of French. Her research specializes in the nineteenth-century French novel and especially Victor Hugo’s fiction. She is the author of Character and Meaning in the Novels of Victor Hugo (Purdue University Press, 2007) and of an introduction to The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004), in addition to numerous articles and chapters on Hugo’s major novels with journals such as French Forum and Nineteenth-Century French Studies. Bradley Stephens is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Bristol. His research focuses on the reception and adaptation of French Romantic works during and since the nineteenth century, with a particular interest in Victor Hugo. He is the author of Victor Hugo, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the Liability of Liberty (Legenda, 2011) and the co-editor of both Transmissions: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Cinema (Peter Lang, 2007) and a special issue of Dix-Neuf on adaptations of nineteenth-century French literature. He has also published numerous articles and book chapters in this field, including a new introduction to Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Signet Classics, 2010). Forthcoming publications include chapters in both The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism and The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical, expected in 2016.

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Acknowledgments This project began in earnest during the 38th annual Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium, hosted by North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC, in October 2012, and so a debt is owed to the Carolinian sun under which our first discussions took place. We had exchanged preliminary ideas in Bristol in May that year, during a visit that had been made possible by the award of a Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professorship and research support from the Bristol Institute for Research in the Humanities and Arts (BIRTHA). These events, in addition to colloquia organized by the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes and the Société des Amis de Victor Hugo, allowed us to work closely with our contributors as the book took shape. The finished volume is the result of many collaborations and encounters that deserve recognition here. Our Ashgate editors Ann Donahue and Seth F. Hibbert, along with their production team, have been supportive and patient through the editing process. Stacie Allan provided prompt English translations of chapters originally written in French, and Theresa Brock researched bibliographical material and references that demanded a keen eye. For our own contributions, colleagues at the Inathèque, the Centre National du Cinéma, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France were all helpful in locating key audio-visual and print material during research visits to Paris in 2012 and 2013; Marie-Laurence Marco at the Maison de Victor Hugo in Paris provided expert advice regarding bibliographical sources relating to Hugo; Dawn Childress at Penn State’s Pattee Library was a masterful and timely tutor in the use of online resources to organize and cite digital archive materials; and Nick Bartram in the School of Modern Languages’ Multimedia Centre at the University of Bristol gave invaluable support with the screen captures for several of our plates. We have also benefitted greatly from conversations with fellow Hugolians— Marva Barnett, David Bellos, Jean and Sheila Gaudon, and Claude Millet—in addition to the insights of colleagues working both in the nineteenth century and in adaptation studies, including: Michael Garval, Kate Griffiths, Nigel Harkness, Susan Harrow, Bénédicte Monicat, Willa Silverman, Tim Unwin, Andrew Watts, and Nick White. Our students at Pennsylvania State University and the University of Bristol respectively ensured that we remained as pensif [“thoughtful”] as Hugo hoped his readers would be.

Notes and Abbreviations Unless otherwise stated, English translations of references in French (including Hugo’s novel Les Misérables) are the work of the individual authors themselves. Because the title of the novel often lacks an accent mark in English-language periodicals, particularly older ones governed by moveable type, readers should assume when encountering such cases that they reflect original spellings and are not misprints. Numerous editions of Les Misérables are available in both French and English. Contributors have been allowed to work with their preferred versions, depending on their research and teaching patterns. For references to part, book, and chapter, citations are given as follows: I, 1, i (Roman, Arabic, Roman). The following abbreviations for the different editions of Les Misérables will be used: LMF

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables. Ed. Yves Gohin. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1995 [1973]; Folio Classique.

LML

Victor Hugo, Œuvres complètes—Roman II. Ed. Annette Rosa. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1985.

LMM

Victor Hugo, Œuvres complètes, XI. Ed. Jean Massin. Paris: Le Club français du livre, 1969.

LMPl

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables. Paris: Pléiade, 1951.

LMPc

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables. Paris: Pocket, 1998.

Other works by Hugo will be indicated by the following abbreviations of the three major collections of his complete writings, each of which is organized differently: OCL

Victor Hugo, Œuvres complètes. Ed. Guy Rosa and Jacques Seebacher. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1985.

OCM

Victor Hugo, Œuvres complètes. Ed. Jean Massin. 18 vols. Paris: Le Club français du livre, 1967–1970.

A complete list of works cited is available at the end of this book so as to avoid duplication between individual bibliographies.

Introduction

Les Misérables: A Prodigious Legacy Bradley Stephens and Kathryn M. Grossman

Few stories have worked their way into our popular consciousness as readily or as extensively as Les Misérables. The convict Jean Valjean’s quest for redemption against the backdrop of social revolution has demonstrated an enduring and widespread popularity that can be traced back to its origins. In the spring of 1862, a carefully orchestrated publicity campaign across more than a dozen international cities from Saint-Petersburg to Rio de Janeiro heralded the arrival of what was billed as the novel of the century. France’s greatest living writer, Victor Hugo, had already procured a colossal 300,000 Francs for his manuscript, including translation rights.1 It was a sum greater than the annual salaries of 120 civil servants at the time and the equivalent today of around $2.2 million, but his Belgian editor Albert Lacroix shared the novelist’s high ambitions. On the day before its release in Paris, and after months of anticipation in the press, critic Jules Janin proclaimed that “the appearance of such a book is an event” [“l’apparition d’un pareil livre est un événement”; 2]. Though the then-exiled Hugo himself would not step foot back in Paris for another eight years when the Second Empire would fall, he managed to become the talk of the French capital on 3 April 1862 when the first two volumes of Les Misérables went on sale. Copies sold out within three days, and the next three volumes were swept up within a matter of hours the following month. The spectacle of large queues of Parisians forming from the early hours of the morning along the Rue de Seine outside the Pagnerre bookshop, with Gustave Brion’s influential sketches postered across store windows (see Plates 1–3), may well be one of the earliest examples of “blockbusting” before the advent of cinema. As a work of both diversion and gravitas, Hugo’s stirringly dramatic tale of social injustice and personal salvation spoke directly to a century that had seen the novel become the most popular literary form and that was living in the shadow of the American and French revolutions. Readers across the world avidly devoured each installment thanks to no fewer than nine translations. Critics were divided by the novel’s socio-political commentary and spiritual vision of humanity (see Bach),2 but a global publishing sensation was underway, the likes of which had  In late November 1856, both L’Indépendance and Le Figaro ran reports concerning Hugo’s efforts to secure a substantial publishing deal, which would be followed closely by the press in subsequent years. 2  See also Pierre Malandain; and Kathryn Grossman, Conversion 14–18. 1

2

Les Misérables and Its Afterlives

never been seen before. The Parisian daily La Presse had rightly predicted that Hugo’s latest work was populated by “characters who will enter universal memory, never to be forgotten” [“les personnages qui entreront dans la mémoire universelle pour n’en plus sortir”; “Les Misérables”]. As the novel became ever more visible, parodies emerged that played on the public’s growing awareness of the story and its epic conventions, often poking fun at the enormous length and plot contrivances.3 Lacroix maintained the momentum by organizing a grand banquet in Brussels on 16 September 1862, complete with souvenir photographs of the author, to honor Hugo’s achievement in creating what one of the many invited members of the press called “incomparably the greatest work of imagination that has appeared in our time” (“The Banquet to Victor Hugo at Brussels” 103). Pope Pius IX may have placed the novel on the Catholic Church’s Index of prohibited books in 1864 for its perceived anti-clericalism and immorality, but Hugo’s most monumental work fast became a cultural landmark whose appeal and profile were undeniable. Notwithstanding that Hugo’s State funeral in 1885 consolidated his iconic status as a latter-day prophet,4 the connection between Les Misérables and audiences since that dizzying summer of 1862 has remained live and indeed has become ever more entrenched in popular culture thanks to the vast range of adaptations that the book has inspired. Captivating audiences worldwide, Les Misérables soon began to transcend the novel form as it permeated nineteenth-century culture. Over the past 150 years, it has been adapted in countries spanning the globe, from the Americas to the Far East. The international reach of these versions confirms a universal desire to return to the story, prolonging and expanding its enjoyment in line with what Julie Sanders has understood as the “pleasure principle” of adaptation (24). This desire has been realized in myriad ways. Les Misérables was notably adapted for the stage by Hugo’s own son Charles immediately after its publication, although this version was banned in Paris, given their status as political exiles, and would not be performed until the following year in Brussels. Other stage adaptations appeared in London and Buenos Aires around the same time, beginning a trend of dramatizations that continues today, for example, with Dominique Martens’s play (1996), which is performed every summer at the citadel in one of the novel’s key locales, Montreuil-sur-Mer. On screen, there have been at least 65 different film, television, and animated adaptations, outnumbering screen versions of two other popular nineteenth-century novels—Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861)—by a ratio of at least four to one. Beginning in 1897 with the Lumière brothers’ short film Victor Hugo et les principaux personnages des 3  Two such examples, both of which appeared only a few months after the novel’s final volumes were published, are A. Vémar’s humorous poetry collection, Les Misérables pour rire (1862), and a 10-part comic series by the caricaturist Cham in Le Journal amusant (6 September 1862–4 April 1863). 4  Jules Chéret’s famous advertising poster for an edition of the novel that appeared the following year places the writer’s name at the heart of the image, such was the appeal of Hugo’s renown by the time of his death (see this book’s cover image).

Introduction

3

“Misérables,” these versions have tended to be high-profile productions involving an array of major stars such as Charles Laughton, Valentina Cortese, Jean Gabin, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Liam Neeson (see Plates 4–7). Over the airwaves, Les Misérables has also been the subject of numerous radio plays, from Orson Welles’s seven-part production in 1937 with America’s Mercury Theater to Hélène Bleskine’s 14-part series with France Culture in late 2012. In fiction, M. C. Pyle’s Gavroche: The Gamin of Paris (1872) is an early example of literary rewritings of the novel, exemplified elsewhere in two unofficial sequels: Laura Kalpakian’s Cosette (1995) and François Cérésa’s Cosette, ou le temps des illusions (2001). In addition, print media has provided many comic or graphic versions, including a Classics Illustrated edition in 1943 and three recent manga adaptations in 2009, 2013, and 2014 respectively. It is in musical theater, of course, that the most famous of the novel’s adaptations can be found. Les Mis, as Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s hugely successful stage musical version has become affectionately known, has broken international theater records as the world’s longest running musical (see Plate 8). Les Mis has once again turned Hugo’s story into a household word, even more familiar worldwide than when the novel was first published. It is the first Western musical ever to be performed in mainland China, in 2002, and itself became a hit Hollywood movie in 2012. Alongside these more established media and encouraged by the ever-growing popularity of the musical, the advent of the digital age since the 1990s has opened up new possibilities for Les Misérables by empowering participatory cultures to create their own material online in what Lev Manovich theorizes as a culture of personalization (1–17). The result has been a wealth of fan fiction, visual content, flash mobs, and even four different video games.5 While the online resources of the Internet and social networking have made these multimedia adaptations easier to track and to share, such cultural shifts have at the same time underlined the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of putting a precise number on the abundance of versions of Les Misérables that now exist. Such an extraordinary history begs the question of how to explain this phenomenon that began in 1862. Surprisingly, no academic study has yet concentrated on the cultural legacy of Les Misérables and how it has managed to fascinate our popular consciousness for so long. Books about Hugo’s most famous novel regularly appear but only make passing reference to its cultural reception 5  Various fan fiction portals, such as http://www.fanfiction.net/book/Les-Miserables/, and video-sharing websites like YouTube open onto hundreds of fan-created examples; some take advantage of the new e-culture of self-publication, such as Arlene C. Harris’s six-volume Pont-au-change series (http://www.pontauchange.com/). Three of the video games—2009’s Enter the Story (http://enterthestory.com/), 2013’s Cosette’s Fate, and 2014’s Jean Valjean (both developed by Anuman Interactive: http://www.anuman-interactive.com/)—offer roleplaying experiences which require the user to work through the story’s events. The fourth has a much less cognitive purpose: ArmJoe (1998) is a two-dimensional fighting game from Takase, playing on the novel’s Japanese title of Ah Mujou, whose gameplay typifies the dōjin fan culture of Japan (http://db.tigsource.com/games/arm-joe).

4

Les Misérables and Its Afterlives

and to its different re-imaginings.6 The adaptations themselves have received critical attention, although such studies have looked at Les Misérables within the corpus of Hugo’s other works rather than in isolation and have done so mostly through film and television alone. In addition, for the Anglophone reader with no knowledge of French, such studies unfortunately remain untranslated from the original language.7 The novel’s intimidating length at well over 1300 pages and the ever-expanding horizons of its adaptations may understandably have been off-putting for prospective researchers; equally disconcerting was the often polarized nature of the critical and cultural responses—notoriously split between “Hugophobia” and “Hugolatry”—to the work of such a strong patriarchal figure in French literature.8 While no single volume could fully chronicle the first 150 years in the life of Les Misérables, however, ours will be the first to approach this history by offering new readings of the novel alongside original discussions of its reception and adaptation in different forms, including musical theater, the “new novel,” and film from the silent to the digital era. The question of how Les Misérables has come to be both timeless and yet consistently relevant is explored firstly through its own narrative workings as an epic novel and then through the popular receptions and adaptations to which it has given rise. Split into two sections, our volume looks at the novel itself before examining how it has been received and re-imagined, in order to identify how Les Misérables connects with its readers and how it continues to stimulate new audiences. Seen through this double perspective, Les Misérables illuminates our understanding of the relationship between popular literature and other storytelling media. Essential to our approach is the recognition that Les Misérables is, in multiple senses, a story of conversions. The narrative shifts between compound genres that make it resistant to classification as either one thing or another. It adapts different modes such as classical tragedy, Homerian epic, Shakespearean tragic-comedy, and the fiction of urban underworlds popularized by contemporary serial novels like Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (1842–1843). At the same time, it weaves together different textual fabrics—including letters, newspaper clippings, and journal entries—to create an innovatively hybrid literary work. Its plot charts, moreover, a social history that is forever evolving, following characters who themselves undergo major changes in their lives, while its adaptive appeal transcends both different media and different cultures, morphing from a nineteenth-century French novel into a universal, multimedia allegory. A shared consideration of the novel’s multiform character and eminent adaptability thus reveals the shape and dimensions of what could be seen as an 6  Most recently, Mario Vargas Llosa promotes Hugo’s belief in the socially transformative powers of literary fiction, although some factual errors are regrettable. 7  There are two excellent overviews of Hugo’s works as they have appeared on screen: see Delphine Gleizes, L’Œuvre de Victor Hugo à l’écran, and Mireille Gamel and Michel Serceau. For other media, see Arnaud Laster on opera (Hugo à l’opéra), and Michaël Ferrier, who looks at reinterpretations of Hugo through song and graphic novels. 8  This dual culture has been outlined by Bradley Stephens, “État present.”

Introduction

5

instruction manual of adaptation. When the film scholar Dudley Andrew notes that “the industry of adaptation was born with the industrial age itself” in the nineteenth century, his subsequent comments suggest a telling moniker: “Les Misérables might be considered its Bible, not just as a moral encyclopedia of the early nineteenth century (a drama of class struggle, crime, and social alienation) but as a bestseller, indeed the blockbuster of the century” (“Economies” 28). Owing to the slight ambiguity of the third-person pronoun’s antecedent at the start of this sentence, and before reaching the subsequent clauses, the reader may be forgiven for entertaining the notion of Les Misérables as a bible of adaptation itself; a user’s guide, in more flippant terms, to how texts travel across time, media, and place. In keeping with such a comparison, the ethical reflections that Les Misérables promotes are less regulatory codes of behavior than creative and free-thinking lessons in how the world works. In order to lay the groundwork for the discussions in our volume, we draw in this introduction on both Hugo’s writing and key aspects of adaptation studies to suggest how the appeal of Les Misérables might be conceptualized for future thinking. By enabling both fields to converge upon one another, we wish to elucidate the ideas of personal creativity and public ownership that are integral to the cultural history which we are investigating. The Universality of Hugo’s Novel The key to understanding how Hugo’s novel has both appealed to audiences and acted as the catalyst for so many different adaptations lies in its universalism. As a work whose form and content are concerned with the idea of transformation, Les Misérables looks past any sense of limitation and presents itself as a book about everything for everyone. It taps into the fundamental human desires for love, justice, and acceptance to indicate that the compassion of the human spirit contravenes all social and moral corruption, no matter what its specific context. Its immediate focus as a novel may be on the social inequality of post-Revolutionary France, but its underlying emphasis on these core impulses allows it far-reaching scope as a mammoth metaphor for the intolerance of human injustice. The novel has therefore struck a powerful chord with the crises of modernity, from the hierarchical privileges of fin-de-siècle society and the political extremism of Fascist Europe to the revolutionary atmosphere of the 1960s and the concentration of wealth in the twenty-first century’s so-called “age of the 99%.” As the British Quarterly Review put it in 1863: “This is the charm of [Hugo]: he is many-sided” (“Les Misérables” 124). Hugo’s triumph was instinctively understood by Tolstoy, who praised Les Misérables as exemplary of “the highest art” and as a major influence on his own epic War and Peace (1869). By seeing human experience as not only social but also spiritual, Tolstoy argued, Hugo had matched the reality of suffering with the strength of the human spirit as the mark of a higher order of being. Most importantly of all, Hugo combined that faith in divine humanity with an enticing universalism, which Tolstoy believed conveyed “feelings accessible to all” (166).

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This universalism is motivated by Hugo’s belief as a Romantic poet that all life exists in a creative, collaborative cosmos where everything is interconnected and therefore versatile. When writing Les Misérables, Hugo was highly mindful of what he saw as the natural law of dynamism over uniformity, as outlined in his famous preface to the play Cromwell (1827). This Romantic manifesto stipulated that contrasting forces such as life and death, light and darkness, could not simply be separated out or neatly fixed within real life: the sublime could be grotesque, the tragic could be comic, and vice-versa, so inclusive perspectives were needed that could look beyond constrictive categories or divisive lines. In such a world, the only constant was an endless cycle of transformation, which humanity could harness as the motor of a creative and infinite human freedom. Where the French Revolution had declared the rights of man, Hugo called upon his generation to recognize the natural order of democracy through their art as a free and unlimited enterprise that defied the symmetrical order and poised restraint of the previously dominant neoclassical taste. When he first began writing Les Misérables in November 1845, selftransformation and atonement had become especially attractive. Recently elected to the Académie Française and the French peerage, his last play had been a disappointment, and he had yet to write a novel matching the success of his bestselling Notre-Dame de Paris (1831). Hugo looked less like the triumphant leader of the French Romantics and more like a complacent member of the conservative establishment. Closer to home, the very public exposure of his affair with the married Léonie Biard had given him equal cause to atone for the past towards his heartbroken long-term mistress Juliette Drouet.9 The initial idea had been deceptively modest: “Story of a saint, a man, a woman, a doll” [“Histoire d’un saint, Histoire d’un homme, Histoire d’une femme, Histoire d’une poupée”] was the earliest scenario recorded, written across the back of an envelope in 1845 in reference to the characters of Myriel, Valjean, Fantine, and Cosette (Rosa 31). All four characters would dramatize the conversion of human suffering into meaningful salvation, drawn from research into real-life figures as well as events and people in Hugo’s own life. But the revolutionary turmoil of 1848 diverted his attention away from the project,10 as did the first years of his exile following the coup of December 1851. Hugo would not return to his manuscript until the spring of 1860, after he had refused the Empire’s offer of amnesty to all exiles on the basis that liberty was still lacking in his homeland. Exile was itself a transformative, transcendent experience for Hugo. Over time, his political journey to the Left and his isolation in the Channel Islands had brought new dimensions to his original idea of human plight with redemptive purpose. He spent the remainder of that year 9

 For more on the significance of events in 1845, see both Jean-Marc Hovasse’s magisterial biography and Graham Robb’s more concise but no less informative biography. 10  Hugo was elected to the Constitutional and Legislative Assemblies of the new Second Republic, where he made impassioned interventions against press censorship, poor education, and especially poverty.

Introduction

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rereading and reworking what he had already written, before using the first six months of the following year to write new material, which he completed during a trip to the battlefield of Waterloo. Crucially, a bout of laryngitis in December 1860 convinced him that death was nearing and that Les Misérables might be his last opportunity to converse with the public—hence his Romantic passion to engage with the fluidity of life in all its manifestations became ever more intense. As Guy Rosa has documented, the manuscript grew in size by some 65% as Hugo strove to maximize its historical and spiritual scope, incorporating greater visual and factual detail alongside a more audacious philosophical sweep (2008). “This book,” Hugo wrote to Lacroix on 13 March 1862, “is History mixed with drama, it is the century entire: a vast mirror reflecting humankind in action at one given moment in its immense life” [“Ce livre, c’est l’Histoire mêlée au drame, c’est le siècle; c’est un vaste miroir reflétant le genre humain pris sur le fait à un jour donné de sa vie immense”; cited in Leuilliot 214]. In another letter to the novel’s Italian publisher several months later, Hugo links this Romantic ambition to the universalizing mission of the French Revolution and confirms that “this book is no less your country’s mirror than ours. … To respond to the mounting growth of civilization, books must stop being exclusively French, German, Italian, Spanish, or English, and become European—or bolder still, more human” [“Ce livre n’est pas moins votre miroir que le nôtre. … les livres, pour répondre à l’élargissement croissant de la civilisation, doivent cesser d’être exclusivement français, italiens, allemands, espagnols, anglais, et devenir européens; je dis plus, humains”; “Lettre à M. Daelli”]. He insists that his work will speak to people all over the globe about critical issues that “concern us all” [“nous regarde(nt) tous”], whether directly or indirectly. The portrait that Hugo creates is animated by this will to speak of the universality of the human condition. Before completing Les Misérables, Hugo had already articulated this worldview in two major works of philosophical poetry, Les Contemplations (1856) and La Légende des siècles (1859). He expanded upon this notion of cosmic symbiosis in an abandoned preface to the novel itself, where he argues that there must be solidarity between all life: “Man is in solidarity with the planet, the planet is in solidarity with the sun, the sun is in solidarity with the stars, the stars are in solidarity with the nebula, and the nebula, that interstellar cloud, is in solidarity with the infinite” [“L’homme est solidaire avec la planète, la planète est solidaire avec le soleil, le soleil est solidaire avec l’étoile, l’étoile est solidaire avec la nébuleuse, la nébuleuse, groupe stellaire, est solidaire avec l’infini”; OCL—Critique 508]. Were one link in this chain to be removed, creation would collapse. Les Misérables therefore depicts a “nebulous” world that bears the hallmark of an irresistible divine power whose creativity is infinite, whose design encompasses us all, and whose meaning is therefore impossible to grasp in any singular sense. Such a divine force is neither dogmatic nor prescriptive, as emphasized in the narrator’s opening portrait of Bishop Myriel:

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He would reflect upon the greatness and the living presence of God; upon the strange mystery of the eternal future; upon the even stranger mystery of the eternal past; upon all the infinities unfolding in every direction before his own eyes … . Such movements are endlessly bringing things together and pulling them apart; therein lay all life and death. [“Il songeait à la grandeur et à la présence de Dieu; à l’éternité future, étrange mystère; à l’éternité passée, mystère plus étrange encore; à tous les infinis qui s’enfonçaient sous ses yeux dans tous les sens … . Ces rencontres se nouent et se dénouent sans cesse; de là la vie et la mort”; LMPl I, 1, xiii, 59.]11

This sense of the divine empowers the kindly bishop. It allows Myriel to see a man in the animal that Valjean has degraded into during his 19-year incarceration, and it enables the novel to convey the essential moral spirit of true democracy. Focusing on the drama of one man’s constant self-reinvention within a rapidly shifting historical reality, the novel confronts the reader with what Hugo often referred to as the flux et reflux of all life: an ebb and flow which ensures that “[t]his book is a drama whose main character is the infinite itself” [“Ce livre est un drame dont le premier personnage est l’infini”; II, 7, i, 526]. As the novel’s core figure, Valjean personifies this infinite flux. Myriel’s superlative act of kindness moves his life in a new direction that surpasses his previous fate and that opens his eyes to the transcendent reality of divine creation. Known by two different prison numbers and five different names, Valjean morphs between the different identities of convict, mayor, and fugitive and serves multiple functions as Cosette’s protector, parent, and sibling. Likewise, the novel’s amalgamate form and immense narrative scope dramatize this divine law of endless diversity. The structure grows ever outward from the central but by no means tight plot. It reaches back into history, glances aside, and looks ahead into the future thanks to Hugo’s mobile mind, as is particularly apparent in his celebrated narrative digressions, which account for more than one-quarter of the entire novel and which offer encyclopedic musings on everything from the slang on the streets to the filth underneath them. The novel itself becomes a melting pot of different generic modes—romance, epic tragedy, social history, cultural geography, popular adventure, philosophical essay, spirituality—all of which mix with and infuse one another while retaining their individuality. To categorize the novel definitively would be short-sighted, just as labeling its hero with only one of his many identities would be to underestimate Valjean’s human complexity as an agent of transcendence. Even Hugo submits to this immeasurability. He limits any supposed omniscience on his part by declaring that “we are but the narrator” [“nous ne sommes que narrateur”; II, 8, ix, 588], suggesting rather than dictating meaning in a work whose edges are forever mobile and whose depths are inexhaustible. When the novel’s final lines recount that the rains have slowly  All subsequent references in this introduction will be to the Pléiade edition of the novel (LMPl). 11

Introduction

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washed away the words on Valjean’s tombstone, the reader is left with a lasting image of inscription and effacement which serves as a reminder that flux is the only truly persistent power in this world. Hugo is careful to ensure that these reflections in the mirror that is Les Misérables are enticing and enthralling rather than overwhelming, so that the reader comes ever closer for a better look. The novel draws the reader in by being at once thrilling and thought-provoking. His visual imagination, stimulated by his ongoing graphic sketches and paintwork in private, fashioned a vivid, almost tangible world of social poverty and urban panoramas. Concurrently, his experience as a dramatist supported a supple use of characterization and lent the novel episodes of high excitement and suspense, such as Valjean’s escape with Cosette through Paris or the storming of the barricade on the Rue de la Chanvrerie. All this detail and drama is seen through the mind’s eye of a poet who was highly sensitive to what cosmic meanings might hide beneath those arresting historical surfaces as he surveyed “destiny, with its mysterious and fateful patience” [“la destinée, avec sa patience mystérieuse et fatale”; IV, 3, vi, 914]. While the digressions might otherwise suggest self-indulgence, Hugo’s aim is to encourage his readers to recognize their own reflection. Whereas Notre-Dame de Paris held a mirror up to medieval feudal society, Les Misérables exerted the same reflective powers on modern capitalist culture in order to prick and to prompt the reader’s conscience about the transient nature of reality and the injustice of exploitation. “Society must indeed look at these things, since it is responsible for them” [“Il faut bien que la société regarde ces choses, puisque c’est elle qui les fait”; I, 2, vii, 93]. Only through such an awareness could the human race make any lasting progress and achieve the ideals of a republic. Adaptation as Interpretation: Taking Ownership of Les Misérables Hugo’s determination to make his novel at once personal and universal through this boundless structure and scope has allowed readers and audiences over the past 150 years to see Les Misérables as their story. By catching their own reflection in this mirror, the reader is invited to look anew at their world, becoming what Hugo would later call the lecteur pensif or “thoughtful reader.” The novel’s truth can only be actualized in the moment of its reading, acting as a conduit between nature’s flux and the reader’s sense of reality. The relationship that Hugo envisages between his novel and his reader creates a paradigm of reception in which the adaptive legacy of Les Misérables can be explored. Each version of the story that has appeared marks an example of an audience taking ownership of the work that Hugo has bequeathed to the public, shaping the narrative to different media and allowing it to interact with their own biographical, social, and historical situations. Tellingly, Hugo had a highly permissive understanding of literary property that undergirds this contract, which he establishes with his readers in giving them ownership of the novel. In the winter of 1870, he waived his copyright when

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Les Misérables and Its Afterlives

public readings of Châtiments (1853)—his poetic collection satirizing Napoléon III’s Second Empire—were organized during the Prussian siege of Paris, declaring that: “What I write is not mine. I belong to the public” [“Ce que j’écris n’est pas à moi. Je suis une chose publique”; Choses vues 584]. Eight years later, during a session at the International Literary Congress, he clarified that he would always prioritize the public domain over the rights of an author: “Above all, we are men of dedication and sacrifice. Our work must place the needs of our fellow man above our own” [“Avant tout, nous sommes des hommes de dévouement et de sacrifice. Nous devons travailler pour tous avant de travailler pour nous”; OCL—Politique 1000]. Hugo had sanctioned various dramatic and musical interpretations of his works while still living, and he saw their dissemination in popularized form as a humanitarian service. By paying attention to adaptations of Les Misérables and reading them on their own terms, we can more effectively understand what Jerrold E. Hogle sees as the “cultural work” of a novel like Les Misérables as it influences a society’s selfawareness. Hogle makes this point by exploring the history of Gaston Leroux’s Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (1910) and its numerous adaptations, observing how different artists have expressed the interests and tensions of their own experiences through Leroux’s Gothic subversion of bourgeois self-fashioning (Hogle xii). This consideration of how literary works are adapted reveals their status as “a vehicle of active reflection, a cognitive resource,” to recall Terence Cave’s investigation of the afterlives of the character Mignon from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796; Cave 264). The universality of Les Misérables and its promotion of compassion over corruption or indifference as a means towards social progress could certainly be framed in these terms, because it compels audiences to question their complicity in the suffering around them. In today’s critical environment, Hugo’s notion of the reader as active participant in the novel can be read as an acknowledgement of what Stanley Fish has called “interpretive communities.” These communities determine that readings of an artwork are always culturally constructed in the moment of their consumption (“Interpreting the Variorum”). For the study of adaptations, such lines of thinking cut through the often unhelpful ideas of fidelity to an original source and free up more probing methodologies, as Robert Stam has eloquently summarized (8–11). Following the impact of post-structuralism in the 1960s and 1970s, the notion of meaning as being sacrosanct within an original text and guaranteed by the authority of its creator was blasted apart. A more fluid understanding emerged of how texts travel and intersect across time and media in a complex web of interpretations and borrowings. The question of how to conceptualize this intertextual process remains hotly debated. The common use of tropes from evolutionary biology and the natural sciences, for example, has been promoted by key adaptation theorists to envisage the adaptive process as being evolutionary in character: texts adapt to

Introduction

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new aesthetic, formal, and cultural environments.12 However, Henry Jenkins has recently criticized such metaphors, including the common term “viral media,” for their failure to implicate human agency, and instead he has championed the idea of “spreadable” content which can be molded simultaneously through different hands and forms.13 At first glance, Hugo’s metaphor of the mirror for his novel seems to offer a promising addition to these debates, combining human craft with natural effect. Each adaptation of Les Misérables could in itself be seen as another mirror in an ever-growing hallway, with each reflective surface catching its own range of images whilst reproducing, distorting, or even effacing Hugo’s original plane. Such an image is tempting, since it evokes the idea of Les Misérables as a plural entity: one that incorporates multiple manifestations and recalls André Bazin’s likening of an adaptive legacy to an “artistic pyramid.” The “work” cited would always be composed of its multiple faces rather than refer exclusively to an original source (“L’Adaptation” 40).14 By the same token, that image does not discount the individuality and originality of each version as a creative work that is subject to its own terms: rather than being a derivative or exact copy, each version reflects Les Misérables in varyingly divergent ways according to its own size, shape, and situation. But this metaphor is problematic in three respects. Firstly, it can only visualize the functionality of an adaptive history rather than its materiality: mirrors are all glass in substance, whereas different media rely on different textures and forms, each of which shapes the adaptation as much as the producer. UDON Entertainment’s 2014 manga version of Les Misérables utilizes the typically visual narrative of this print form, where emotions and themes are conveyed through the graphics rather than sophisticated dialogue. In contrast to Orson Welles’s 1937 radio play of the novel, which as a blind medium relied solely on sound and made evocative use of the actor’s passionate voice, this manga exerts a more abrupt impact on the audience’s imagination with moments such as phased pushes through the page’s frames onto Fantine’s disconsolate face after she is forced into prostitution (see 12  Linda Hutcheon sees adaptations working as memes, borrowing from the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (Theory 31–2). Such biological metaphors abound in the field: Dudley Andrew (Film Theory) supplants the notion of fidelity with fertility; Millicent Marcus refers to connections between source and adaptation as “umbilical moments”; Kamilla Elliott has spoken of adaptations as moments of de-/recomposition; and Thomas Leitch (“What Movies Want”) reiterates a view of adaptations as “biological organisms,” although he acknowledges the complex notion of agency. 13  “Many accounts of memes and viral media describe media texts as ‘self-replicating.’ This context of ‘self-replicating’ culture is oxymoronic. … Audiences play an active role in ‘spreading’ content rather than serving as passive carriers of viral media” (Jenkins et al. 19–21). 14  Bazin is referring to John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937), imagining “an adaptive sway” [“un règne de l’adaptation”] where a text is rescued from its supposed singularity.

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Plate 9). Secondly, and by extension, this image of reflective surfaces is restrictive when confronted with the plurality and simultaneity of influence in adaptive practice. Robert Hossein’s 1982 film, for example, draws on numerous reference points within the body of Les Misérables adaptations, including his own somber production of the original Boublil and Schönberg musical in Paris in 1980. But the film’s heavily stylized mise-en-scène and dark tone is also reminiscent of dystopian trends in early 1980s cinema: the film’s violence recalls that of George Miller’s first two Mad Max films (1979/1981) and of John Carpenter’s Escape From New York (1981), and its damp, often waterlogged atmosphere also projects the trace of Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner, released four months earlier. Lastly, this mirror metaphor indicates an inward-looking space rather than one that looks outward to the wider world, and it therefore runs contrary to Hugo’s key impulse. Beginning with the student “Friends of the ABCs” and focusing on the events in the novel surrounding the June 1832 insurrection, Marcus Bluwal’s 1972 television series clearly reflects the political tensions in the fallout from the revolutionary events of May 1968, rather than abstracting the concept of social revolution into a metaphoric hall of mirrors and its potentially ahistorical vacuum. More helpfully, Bazin’s notion of adaptation as transformation in the electrical sense of the word seems to anticipate the kind of dispersive but directed transmission that Jenkins describes. Bazin sees a source’s “voltage” as being channeled from page onto screen to energize new forms: “this aesthetic charge is reproduced almost in its entirety but distributed somewhat differently according to the demands of the cinematographic approach” [“l’énergie esthétique s’y retrouve presque entière mais différemment répartie selon les exigences d’une optique cinématographique”; “L’Adaptation” 39]. In this sense, Les Misérables can be seen as an electrical current to be harnessed within an expanding network of adaptations and cultural references which different adapters can plug into and further energize. Fidelity to the configuration of Hugo’s novel varies dramatically within this network. The notorious sprawl of Hugo’s work has powered up some equally epic re-imaginings, which themselves have encouraged some greatly compressed offerings in an age of abridged communication through digital media. Where Boublil and Schönberg’s musical initially ran to over three hours of theatrical performance and Josée Dayan’s miniseries in 2000 recreated the story arc across nearly six hours of television, the expansive narrative of Les Misérables has also been condensed into a pop parody video of just under six minutes and one 12-line emoticon page for touch-screen devices that is comprised of fewer than 100 symbols.15 Similarly, Hugo’s narrative content has been transmitted both strongly and faintly through this nexus. Henri Fescourt’s marathon 1925 silent 15

 See “Scream and Shout” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3fjFtlSz3Q), which parodies the story to a 2012 dance duet by will.i.am and Britney Spears, and “Les Misérables retold in emoticons” (http://cheezburger.com/6938439936) (both websites consulted 18 August 2014).

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film has often been cited as one of the most faithful reproductions of Hugo’s novel, including outdoor shots in locations from the book, such as Digne, and episodes that have usually failed to make the transition from the novel, such as the fire that breaks out in Montreuil-sur-Mer upon Valjean’s arrival. Conversely, Bille August’s 1998 Hollywood film narrows the focus onto the central characters alone (see Plate 7) and omits key happenings, not least Cosette’s wedding and Valjean’s death. In even starker contrast, the relationship between Valjean and Javert helped to inspire the 1960s American television series The Fugitive, with writers giving the show’s antagonist the surname Gerard to echo Hugo’s character. In August 2013 Fox Television announced that it had begun script work on another loose version, transposing Valjean into the role of a modern-day American lawyer pursued by a US attorney, while the following year Telemundo Studios premiered its own adaptation with a Spanish-language telenovela entitled Los Miserables, in which Valjean is transformed into a female protagonist, Lucia “Lucha” Durán, who returns from prison to modern-day Mexico City to rebuild her life. Ironically, Bazin himself may have misread the adaptive history of Les Misérables. He notes in another defense of literary adaptation in cinema that Hugo’s novels, like those of his contemporary Alexandre Dumas père, “simply serve to supply the filmmaker with characters and scenarios that are largely independent of their literary expression” [“ne fournissent guère au cinéaste que des personnages et des aventures dont l’expression littéraire est dans une large mesure indépendante”; “Pour un cinéma” 81]. Adaptations of their writing, Bazin continues, retain only character and a vague sense of plot, creating a mythology beyond the original novels, whereas works by such writers as André Gide and Denis Diderot have seen their literary structure deeply inform any cinematic reshaping. The reductive tone and passing nature of these comments betrays a value judgment on Bazin’s part, but one that overlooks the ways in which the literary framework of Hugo’s novel is necessarily adaptable and hybrid. The novel’s “voltage” is a universalizing drive and demands creative relocation as much as careful reproduction. The highly charged network that we might understand by the title Les Misérables and its intersections with other nets of activity is perhaps best illustrated by Claude Lelouch’s 1995 film version. On the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, and as a Jew with vivid memories of evading Nazi persecution alongside his mother as a boy, Lelouch transposes Hugo’s story into the first half of the twentieth century with a visual style influenced by both the mobile frames of Max Ophüls and the realism of Jean Renoir. This richly layered film celebrates both the adaptive legacy of Les Misérables and the creativity that the novel engages as a universal parable for human resilience. Hugo’s cast and narrative are dispersed so as to demonstrate our ability to make the story our own: to identify with more than one character and situation at once. The hero, Henri Fortin, typifies how each of the film’s characters is a composite figure. As a child, he resembles Cosette: he sees his mother forced to prostitute herself after his father dies in prison following an unjust conviction. As an adult, he splices Valjean, Marius, and Thénardier into one: he joins the French Resistance, helping both the

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Les Misérables and Its Afterlives

daughter of a Jewish family, Salomé Ziman, to go into hiding at a convent when her parents suffer Fantine-like exploitation, and a group of thieves to loot properties in order to fund the fight against the Nazis. Underlying this narrative is the film’s open embrace of other adaptations of the novel. Fortin sees Albert Capellani’s 1912 silent film as a boy and becomes fascinated by the story’s parallels with his own life. In adulthood, he gleefully watches Raymond Bernard’s mammoth 1934 film; moreover, he discusses the novel with other characters after Salomé reads it to him, intrigued by the fact that her own parents met when her mother performed in a ballet version of Les Misérables; and he has visions of scenes from the novel as enacted by the people around him. Just as Salomé’s mother can but sing along to the words of Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek” when she is emotionally reunited with her husband, so does Lelouch’s film appropriate Les Misérables to empower its own self-expression. Lelouch dramatizes how Les Misérables has travelled across time and media as a consistently relevant—and flexible—portrait of human and social nature.16 *** Through our individual approaches in this volume, each contributor relates to the ways in which Les Misérables encourages responsive readings that help account for the novel’s popularity and the ongoing cultural vigor that it primes. The essays in Part 1 deepen our understanding of Hugo’s epic as a work that combines realist observation with Romantic vision to fashion its universality as an ever-extensive perspective on human history. The universal texture of Les Misérables and its sweeping take on human experience is elucidated by five essays which address key aspects of the text. First, Isabel Roche discusses the importance to the novel of sustenance. Valjean’s famous theft of the loaf of bread foregrounds the novel’s depiction of hunger and malnutrition as a consequence of poverty, but Hugo’s gaze is not limited to physical nourishment. In particular, and within his longstanding poetic project, Hugo evokes the idea of aesthetic fulfillment, first suggested by Bishop Myriel’s defense of beauty’s value and subsequently connected to imperatives of other kinds throughout the text. The broad import of aesthetics beyond the exclusively artistic proves significant once again by way of the many gardens across the novel’s landscape, such as that at the Rue Plumet. Karen Quandt analyses their inclusion through an ecocritical lens to reveal the novel’s critique of human irresponsibility towards nature. Nature’s boundless energy reflects a restless French society in Hugo’s vision, anticipating contemporary garden designer Gilles Clément’s theorizing of the garden as a refuge for diversity that transforms an abandoned structure into a green land and that evokes a collective responsibility to garden for a richer future. 16  Jean Bellorini and Camille de la Guillonnière’s play Tempête sous un crane (2010) takes a similarly self-conscious approach, reciting Hugo’s work and reflecting on its importance.

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Valjean’s suitability to such a utopian project as a gardener himself does not, however, smooth out the rougher edges of his condition as a tragic-comic hero, which are investigated in the next chapter by Laurence Porter. The irresistible pull of the sublime’s interaction with the grotesque that Hugo sees at work in all creation is played out in the plight shared by the ex-convict and his fellow misérables. The tragic-comic and the sacrificial often merge to create complex moral contrasts and metaphysical incongruities that compel our attention as readers. Such a discussion raises the question of individual agency, which is taken up by Briana Lewis and scrutinized for the attention that the novel pays to the gendered nature of sovereignty when dealing with its female characters. Relating self-awareness to the role of the visual through reference to Victor Cousin and other critical interlocutors, Lewis questions how the ability of Hugo’s female characters to see themselves as representative of a feminine ideal impacts upon their self-realization. These prospects and pressures of selfhood play out in an unsettled universe, the darker dimensions of which are then visited by Philippe Moisan to remind us that Hugo displays a pessimistic streak in his novel which is often tempted by the oblivion of nothingness. Beneath its luminous optimism as a novel of human progress, Les Misérables also generates a web of forces and images that not only question but also suggest a crisis in these very same ideas of perfectibility, happiness, and social harmony and that lend verve to the cosmic cycle of composition and disintegration that Hugo intuits. In Part 2, our contributors consider the novel’s adaptations across a wide range of areas to diversify how we think about not only its dynamic character but also the dialogic nature of adaptation as a practice. The creative possibilities and interpretive challenges that Les Misérables affords are demonstrated through six essays that engage with this adaptive history. Fiona Cox begins by studying how Hugolian imagery pervades the depictions of history and conflict in fiction by the “new novelists” Michel Butor and the Nobel Laureate Claude Simon, and how such unexplored links testify to the appeal of Hugo’s writing as a transhistorical but by no means abstract model. Cox importantly looks backward in this analysis, acknowledging Hugo’s own revision of both Homeric and Virgilian epic in his presentation of Waterloo in order to make a case for the key role of Les Misérables in the collective adaptation and reshaping of the epic genre for modern French identity. The question of how Les Misérables became a classic in the eyes of the public is tackled by Kathryn Grossman, who examines the novel’s reception trajectory in the United States between its publication in 1862 at the height of the Civil War and 1922, when many stage dramatizations and several silent film versions had already reached deep into American popular culture. Grossman identifies the features and adaptations of the novel that elicited the most passionate discussion and that captivated several generations of American readers long before talking pictures and musical comedies again took them by storm. This transatlantic dialogue between a French novel and American culture is then considered from a more contemporary angle, as Delphine Gleizes turns to how filmmakers on both sides of the Atlantic have transferred Hugo’s fiction to the

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Les Misérables and Its Afterlives

silver screen since the dawn of the twentieth century. Probing the early competition between French and American cinema, she draws out distinct national traditions that have shaped the understanding of Hugo’s story in terms of both socio-political fidelity and cultural optimism, in order to shed further light on the intercultural contexts of the novel’s appearances on screen. Casting his shadow across these film versions is the figure of Inspector Javert, who is the subject of Andrea Beaghton’s chapter. Beaghton focuses on how the character’s image has been shaped in the mind of English-speaking audiences by Hollywood and British cinema—and, of course, by key productions of the stage musical. Reading these different versions, she traces Javert’s evolution from antagonist to a compelling, even romantically appealing figure, suggesting the complex and often contradictory portrayals that Hugo himself encourages. The question of how adapters have responded to characterization in Les Misérables is repeated in the next two chapters. Danièle Gasiglia-Laster asks how various cinematic adaptations of the novel have dealt with the complexity of Éponine as both a socially marginalized girl in love and a markedly androgynous figure (a complexity within the novel that is also discussed by Lewis). Drawing on feminist historiography, and attending to the framing and movement of Éponine’s body on screen, Gasiglia-Laster demonstrates the ways in which the character has at once been modernized as an emblem of contemporary femininity and elsewhere constrained within an ideological agenda of patriarchy. Arnaud Laster similarly reflects on the significance of the street urchin Gavroche as a means of exploring the creative relationship between Hugo’s novel and musical forms, taking Fernando Albinarrate’s 2012 Histoire de Gavroche as his focus. Gavroche’s role was scaled back from Boublil and Schönberg’s original 1980 French version to the less substantial part he has played in the West End versions. Laster argues, however, that Albinarrate’s return to Gavroche as the character who sings the most in the novel helps to re-establish a key feature of the novel’s celebrated duet with musical media and to remind audiences of the character’s significance. A closing essay by Bradley Stephens shores up this volume’s methodology as a means of understanding the adaptive legacy of Les Misérables in the new millennium. Stephens returns to the build-up and responses to the stage musical’s London premiere and identifies their uncanny similarities with both the novel’s publication in 1862 and the 2012 release of the Hollywood film version of the musical. This continuity indicates exciting reasons for the novel’s enduring success, and highlights current and potential future directions for Hugo’s tale in the digital age—directions which suggest that Les Misérables now cannot be confined to one medium alone. Hugo’s appeal to his readers to take his story and to identify personal meaning within its universal reach remains distinctly audible, allowing the story of Les Misérables to continue proliferating with the kind of dynamism that Myriel distinguishes in nature’s own endlessly creative project.

PART 1 Readings of Les Misérables

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Chapter 1

On (the Usefulness of Hunger and) Beauty Isabel K. Roche

“Bed and board” [“Manger et coucher”].1 These three words, the first pronounced by Jean Valjean upon his arrival in Digne, at the beginning of the narrative proper of Les Misérables, simply and unequivocally posit the physiological imperatives of human existence. Refused by the innkeeper, who is informed of his convict status, Valjean becomes both more desperate and more insistent: “What the—! But I am dying of hunger. I’ve been walking since sunrise. I’ve covered twelve leagues. I’m paying, and I want something to eat” [“Ah bah! Mais je meurs de faim, moi. J’ai marché dès le soleil levé. J’ai fait douze lieues. Je paye. Je veux manger”; 54/51]. Multiple variations of this exchange follow as Valjean presses on, seeking food and protection from the cold (see Plate 1), first at a cabaret, then the town prison, followed by a private home. With the possibility of eating, or of sleeping indoors, increasingly remote, his attention turns wholly and instinctively to shielding himself from the elements. He takes shelter in a doghouse, from which he is chased, briefly goes outside the city walls in search of a tree under which to take cover; then, unable to find one, and vaguely affected by the menacing quality of his surroundings, returns and collapses, “exhausted and past caring” [“épuisé de fatigue et n’espérant plus rien”; 59/57], on a stone bench next to the church, before unexpectedly finding refuge—and more—with Monseigneur Myriel. The entirety of the chapter that recounts Valjean’s entrance in Digne in “The Night After a Day’s Walk” [“Le soir d’un jour de marche”; I.2.i] brings into sharp relief the hostility of the social and natural worlds in which the former convict finds himself—man and nature in seeming total collusion to hinder his effort to satisfy the most rudimentary of physical survival needs: food, sleep, and shelter. But if nourishment is one among several demands in equal and terrible competition in this moment, the state that defines its absence—hunger—dominates Les Misérables from beginning to end. It is hunger, we soon learn, that provoked Valjean’s descent—a loaf of bread, stolen 19 years earlier, to feed his sister’s family of seven children, “a sad bunch, enveloped by a poverty that was slowly squeezing them dry” [“un triste groupe que la misère enveloppa et étreignit peu à peu”; 72/69]. And if the circumstances of the theft are particular to Valjean and his (back)story—“One winter was particularly rough. Jean had no work. The family 1  Victor Hugo, LML 50. All references to Les Misérables are to this edition in the Laffont Complete Works. All translations of quotations from the novel are from the Modern Library 2009 edition, translator Julie Rose. Here, 52.

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had no bread. No bread. Literally. Seven children!” [“Il arriva qu’un hiver fut rude. Jean n’eut pas d’ouvrage. La famille n’eut pas de pain. Pas de pain. A la lettre. Sept enfants”; 72/69]—it is their unexceptional quality that is underscored through the narrator’s laconic recounting of them. Indeed, hunger is figured in Les Misérables as both a steady state and a broad and somber denominator linking the majority of the novel’s characters. Explicitly named in the epigraph as one of the three unresolved social problems of the nineteenth century, hunger permeates and determines the novel, with Hugo making the case for its eradication above all by laying bare its hideous effects. Those of physical diminishment, for example, are seen in Fantine and Mabeuf; but more insidiously, it is the likelihood of corresponding moral deterioration that characterizes the downward trajectory from bon pauvre to mauvais pauvre, “good pauper” to “bad pauper,” witnessed most spectacularly through the irreversible and insatiable appetite of Thénardier—“Oh! I could eat the whole rotten world” [“Oh! Je mangerais le monde”; 615/592]—and in the machinations of the ever-shifting underworld ruled by Patron-Minette. Save for a few who sit squarely or socially outside hunger’s immediate reach—such as Tholomyès or Gillenormand—or whose fortunes are in some way reversed—Jean Valjean, or Cosette as saved and raised by Jean Valjean—it never lessens, only worsens, and remains in its depiction as perilous an ill at the conclusion of Les Misérables as at its opening. It is no surprise, then, that hunger, as a principle driver of the narrative, has long been, and continues to be, probed by readers and critics alike, from the moral and ethical implications of Valjean’s desperate act and its disproportionate consequences, to the deeply embedded thematic and metaphorical dimensions of appetite and satiety.2 Hunger, as a force, compels, and all the more so—alas— through its continued relevance, through the reality of its prevalence to this day in much of the world. Yet if the stakes of physical sustenance are unambiguous in Les Misérables and play themselves out in multiple interrelated narrative threads, the novel also clearly suggests that food is neither all one hungers for nor alone (ever) enough. The story of Jean Valjean’s redemption, of his transformation from sinner to saint, is above all else the story of the needs of the body subordinated to the needs of the soul, of the material superseded by the spiritual. Valjean’s soul is at once the locus for and the prize in the battle of good against evil, light against dark, right against wrong, a battle that is shrewdly initiated by Myriel following Jean Valjean’s second theft, that of the bishop’s silver. Leveraging a promise never in fact made to use the profit from its sale to become an honest man, Myriel engages Valjean’s dormant conscience in a decisive pact—“Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you; I am taking it away from black thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I am giving it to God” [“Jean Valjean, mon frère, vous n’appartenez plus au mal, mais au bien. C’est votre âme que je vous achète; je la retire aux pensées noires et à l’esprit de  See in particular Kathryn Grossman’s fine analysis in Figuring Transcendence (16–23).

2

On (the Usefulness of Hunger and) Beauty

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perdition, et je la donne à Dieu”; 90/86]—that sets him on a course of arduous trials and tribulations. From his immediate regression in the Petit Gervais episode, to the affaire Champmathieu, to the discovery of Cosette’s love for Marius, to his decision to save Marius at the barricades, Valjean’s trajectory is built upon successive moments of crisis, increasingly internalized and self-imposed, and each capable of fully undoing his moral progress. It is the knowledge—hard won—that “[w]e are never done … with conscience” [“avec la conscience, on n’a jamais fini”; 1134/1090] which brings Jean Valjean to his ultimate test, removing himself completely from Cosette’s life, and to his salvation and sublimation. Les Misérables tells us, not just through Jean Valjean’s redemption but over and over, and in different ways, that “[m]an lives on affirmation even more than on bread” [“L’homme vit d’affirmation plus encore que de pain”; 429/410], contending, despite or perhaps precisely because of the omnipresence of hunger, the primacy of spiritual communion for both the individual and for society as a whole. Philosophie. Commencement d’un livre, the lengthy planned preface to Les Misérables begun in May 1860 concurrently with the novel’s completion and revision, lays out this argument even more directly, grounding the religious content of the novel in Hugo’s personal conception of man as a profoundly spiritual being who is part of an infinite, radiating universe. This universe, alternately called the “outer space” [“le cosmos”] or simply “the infinite” [“l’infini”], demonstrates by its existence the existence of an immanent divine force, co-mingled in the whole of the natural world and co-present in the soul but never entirely knowable to man. At the same time, the preface takes the opportunity to target the materialism and the growing and—from Hugo’s perspective—corrosive and politically dangerous atheism of the 1860s. From its opening line, “The book we are about to read is a religious one” [“Le livre qu’on va lire est un livre religieux”; OCL—Critique 467], Hugo is unequivocal in both his intent to establish man’s deep relationship to a metaphysical realm governed by a higher order and to draw attention to the dire consequences in the political realm of positivism, science, and anticlericalism taken too far.3 A belief in the divine, the preface tells us, is the compass that keeps both man’s individual moral progress and collective social progress firmly and safely on course. Although Hugo paused work on the preface in August 1860 to turn his attention fully to finishing the novel, he was satisfied enough with its shape and scope to declare in a note on the dossier’s cover that the text, even incomplete, was significant. It could serve as either a preface to Les Misérables or as a “general preface” [“préface générale”] to his body of work, or be included elsewhere in collected writings from 3  Hugo viewed these developments as both a perversion of shared political beliefs and a betrayal of his own (life-long) conviction of the existence of a God not bound by the formal structures of the Church and by those of Catholicism in particular. It is important to note that while Hugo uses, here and throughout his œuvre, the word “God,” it is in the context of this expansive frame. For more on the political dimensions of the text, see Pierre Albouy, Mythographies 121–37, Victor Brombert, Visionary Novel 118–23, Pierre Laforgue 133–62, and Myriam Roman 178–97.

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his intellectual life (LMM XII, 13). Indeed, Philosophie. Commencement d’un livre (his own title for the text) presents both concerns particular to Les Misérables spurred by the shifts in the political climate that span its lengthy composition and key elements of a more general “philosophy” that traverses Hugo’s body of work— chief among them the primacy of the soul, the relationship between, time, history, and progress, and the dynamism of the expansive and reductive forces ever at play all around us. Establishing the imperative of the spiritual belongs at once to the preface’s specific (political) and general (philosophical) aims, and it warns in no uncertain terms of the emptiness, for those who attain it, of physical and material satisfaction and fulfillment alone: “To be well dressed, well fed, and well sheltered, … to bite into bread made from white flour, to have a nice fire to warm oneself and a nice bed to sleep in, … to never want for anything, to prosper in and from what one does, to drink well, eat well, sleep well, it counts for a lot, certainly; but if it is everything, it is nothing” [“Être bien vêtu, bien nourri et bien logé, … mordre dans du pain blanc, avoir un bon feu pour se chauffer et un bon lit pour se reposer, … ne jamais manquer de rien, prospérer dans ce qu’on fait et par ce qu’on fait, bien boire, bien manger, bien dormir, c’est beaucoup, certes; mais si c’est tout, ce n’est rien”; 527]. Body and soul need simultaneous tending. The novel, too, is unabashed in its condemnation of those for whom material comfort and social status trump or triumph in exclusivity, for whom they come to represent a magnified and vacuous “everything”—Tholomyès, for example, or the alternate (equally indifferent) bourgeois versions of him that subsequently appear, such as Bamatabois or Théodule. It is also unambiguous in its condemnation of the notion that societal betterment is based in the betterment of physical circumstances alone, of the ideological decoupled from the spiritual.4 Its most strident condemnation, however, is that of the risks to the soul created by the conditions of misery, by absence and need, by poverty and abjection. For if Jean Valjean’s soul, sparked by his fortuitous intersection with Myriel (see Plate 10), is rescued and rehabilitated, allowing for his redemption and transcendence of the social world of the novel, the same lies decidedly beyond the reach of the majority of the novel’s characters. The sea of malnourished bodies, who bite not into pain blanc, but pain noir [“black bread”], or no bread at all, results directly and proportionately in a sea of malnourished souls, caught in the “concentric 4

 This critique of a world where nihilism and atheism threaten to take hold begins with the senator’s exchange with Myriel at the outset of the novel—“What am I supposed to be doing on this earth? … To suffer or to enjoy myself. … I’ve made my choice. It’s eat or be eaten. I eat” [“Qu’ai-je à faire sur cette terre? … Souffrir ou jouir. … Mon choix est fait. Il faut être mangeant ou mangé. Je mange”; 27/27]—and continues to its end, embodied in the materialism central to the character of Thénardier and exemplified by the dangers of his resilience and (relative) ultimate success. This position is at the same time countered from the novel’s beginning to its close: first, unexpectedly and provocatively by the dying Conventionel, who tells Myriel that “[p]rogress should believe in God” [“Le progrès doit croire en Dieu”; 38/37], then by the efforts towards Hugo’s own vision of metaphysical socialism put forth by les amis de l’ABC, who, despite their defeat on the barricades, are in every way positioned on the side of “the right sort of progress” [“le bon progrès”; 538/516].

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circles” of “the fathomless pit of the social Unknown” [“cercles concentriques” of “le gouffre de l’Inconnu social”; 1112/1070]. To rise in Les Misérables is above all to escape from that dormancy and atrophy of the soul, to rise above the circumstances of a harsh and unchanged social world, be it through forging one’s own path to moral salvation (Jean Valjean), through retaining innocence or idealism (Gavroche, Enjolras, Mabeuf), or through demonstrating selflessness or sacrifice in the face of self-interest (Fantine, Éponine). Les Misérables also demonstrates the salutary effect of other forms of sustenance—aesthetic, intellectual, emotional. These forms either reinforce the spiritual or stand distinct from it, depending on how they are accessed, and by whom. The promise of beauty, in particular, is asserted by Myriel at the novel’s outset—“The beautiful is just as useful as the useful. … Perhaps more so” [“Le beau est aussi utile que l’utile. … Peut-être plus”; 21/22]—and tested at various points in its unfolding. What of beauty, then, and of its usefulness in and for the novel?5 Myriel’s claim, made in response to Mme Magloire’s gentle chiding about the planting of flowers instead of lettuce in a corner of his garden, explicitly melds the aesthetic with the spiritual: the beauty of the natural world provides nutrients as or more necessary than those delivered by food. In this way, “He did not study plants, he loved flowers” [“Il n’étudiait pas les plantes; il aimait les fleurs”; 22/33]. Myriel grows flowers not to understand them better but to bask in the glow of their existence: an existence that affirms a higher order at work and from which he derives rich and direct spiritual nourishment. While the “cultivation” of the mind is assiduously practiced by Myriel in the form of daily writing, reading, and reflection, the contemplation of natural beauty is in no way the domain of intellectual enlightenment, as underscored in the description of the bishop’s evening walks around his garden: In moments like these, offering up his heart at the hour that night flowers offer up their perfume, lit up like a lamp in the middle of the starry night, full of ecstasy in the middle of the universal radiance of creation, he could not perhaps have said himself what was happening to his spirit; he felt something soar up out of him and something fly down into him. Mysterious exchanges between the bottomless well of the soul and the bottomless well of the universe! (47–8) [“Dans ces moments-là, offrant son cœur à l’heure où les fleurs nocturnes offrent leur parfum, allumé comme une lampe au centre de la nuit étoilée, se répandant en extase au milieu du rayonnement universel de la création, il n’eût pu peut-être dire lui-même ce qui se passait dans son esprit; il sentait quelque chose s’envoler hors de lui et quelque chose descendre en lui. Mystérieux échanges des gouffres de l’âme avec les gouffres de l’univers!”; 46]  In the context of this essay, I am using the term beauty (le beau) in its established nineteenth-century sense of an aesthetic ideal: “All that lifts the soul in provoking the feeling of pleasure” [“Tout ce qui élève l’âme en lui faisant éprouver un sentiment de plaisir”; Le Littré]. 5

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On the contrary, phenomena of natural beauty, whether they take the form of the small and tangible (an individual flower), or the large and diffuse (a constellation of stars) are spectacles that feed the soul through their aesthetic properties and immediacy of access. They illustrate the spiritual and its value in direct and deeply personal ways, ways in which the formal and rigid structures of religion—created and imposed by man, not by God—are incapable.6 Myriel, as we know, decisively marks the novel’s opening but does not enter, serving as the catalyst for Valjean’s radical change in course and as the exemplar of embodied virtue. For the remainder of Les Misérables, affirmation of the presence of God in all of nature is furnished through the metaphorical expression of God’s ubiquity and proximity to man, as manifest in both “light” [“la lumière”] and “shadows” [“les ombres”], and the preeminence of the spiritual confidently and continuously revealed through narrative commentary7. Yet for all of this certainty, the spiritual communion through the contemplation of beauty that Myriel experiences in the passage above does not extend beyond him, is never fully reproduced or realized, with few in the novel capable of apprehending le beau and thus benefiting from its “usefulness” in the manner that he does.8 The cultivation and contemplation of rare flowers that is practiced by Marius’s father, the former Napoleonic colonel Georges Pontmercy, is less a form of intimate spiritual validation and more a manner of deflection and emotional selfcomfort subsequent to his wife’s death and his retreat from his son’s life for the sake of his future: “not being able to have his son, he had turned to flowers” [“ne pouvant avoir son enfant, il s’était mis à aimer les fleurs”; 509/489]. This activity 6  This sentiment is directly expressed by Hugo in Philosophie. Commencement d’un livre: “The religious is not the Church; it is the opening of the rose, the breaking of dawn, the nesting of the bird. The religious is holy eternal nature” [“Le fait religieux n’est pas l’église; c’est la rose qui s’ouvre, c’est l’aube qui éclôt, c’est l’oiseau qui fait son nid. Le fait religieux, c’est la sainte nature éternelle”; OCL—Critique 526]. The formal structures of the Church are pointedly criticized throughout the novel, from the depiction of a hierarchical, detached, and self-important clergy in the opening book, to the dangers of religious orders and monastic life as figured through the anachronistic practices on display at the Petit-Picpus convent. 7  For example: “Only God could see this sad sight at this moment” [“Il n’y avait que Dieu en ce moment qui voyait cette chose triste”; 325/309]; “to see nothing in what a horizon offers us but fields, houses, or trees is to stick to the surface, for all aspects of things are God’s thoughts” [“ne voir dans ce que nous offre un horizon rien que des champs, des maisons ou des arbres, c’est rester à la surface; tous les aspects des choses sont des pensées de Dieu”; 481/461]; “behind this splendor, as behind a curtain of flame, you caught a glimpse of God” [“derrière cette splendeur comme derrière un rideau de flamme, on entrevoyait Dieu”; 1002/964]. 8  The only other character who can be seen as deriving sustenance from the beauty of nature in a similar way is also limited to the first book of the novel: the dying Conventionnel, who is comforted in his final moments by God’s immanent presence: “The sun is beautiful, isn’t it? … I’ll die by starlight” [“Le soleil est beau, n’est-ce pas?” … Je mourrai à la belle étoile”; 33/32].

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of substitution occupies Pontmercy’s body and mind as he produces new floral varieties, manifestations of uncommon beauty at which all of Vernon marvels, but which draw him further and further into himself: “He had given up everything, anyway, neither aspiring nor conspiring. He divided his thoughts between the innocent things he did now and the great things he had done” [“Il avait du reste renoncé à tout, ne remuant ni ne conspirant. Il partageait sa pensée entre les choses innocentes qu’il faisait et les choses grandes qu’il avait faites”; 509/489]. Unlike Myriel, whose experience with beauty is wholly visceral, Pontmercy derives his solace from the intellectual stimulation and satisfaction of attempting—and succeeding—in rivaling God’s generative powers. The botanical arts of M. Mabeuf are explicitly likened by the narrator to the labors of Pontmercy—“what the colonel did for flowers, he did for fruit” [“ce que le colonel faisait pour les fleurs, il faisait pour les fruits”‘ 568/544]—and the fulfillment that botany brings him is similarly rooted in emotional and intellectual dimensions rather than spiritual ones. Mabeuf is described from his introduction as a gentle loner, whose passion is reserved exclusively for plants and books and for whom the social and political world of his present holds absolutely no interest.9 His deep appreciation of the beauty of the natural world is born of his aspirations for cultivation, documentation, and collection, creating a solidarity with and closeness to nature that sustains him: “Father Mabeuf was one of those for whom plants have souls” [“Le père Mabeuf était de ceux pour qui les plantes ont des âmes”; 715/689]. The cultivated garden in Les Misérables serves at once as setting and as symbol, linking Myriel, Pontmercy, and Mabeuf in the art and practice of cultivation, if not in the exact form of nourishment this practice affords them. As Francoise ChenetFaugeras observes, “Everything happens as if the just individuals of the story … had a privileged rapport with the earth and adapt Candide’s advice: ‘We must cultivate our garden’” [“Tout se passe comme si les justes du récit … avaient un rapport privilégié à la terre et module le conseil de Candide: ‘Mais il faut cultiver notre jardin’”; 68]. The critic also notes that “our” garden is most often “their” garden (69), borrowed or rented space that points to the deficit of ownership in the economy of the novel and to the precariousness of individual social circumstances.10 9

 “Monsieur Mabeuf’s own political stance was to love plants with a passion, and books more than anything in the world. … he had never loved any woman as much as a tulip bulb or any man as much as an Elzevir typeface” [“M. Mabeuf avait pour opinion politique d’aimer passionnément les plantes, et surtout les livres … il n’avait jamais réussi à aimer aucune femme autant qu’un oignon de tulipe ou aucun homme autant qu’un elzévir”; 568/544–5]. 10  Thus the spaces do not outlast the characters’ (borrowed) use of them, as evidenced in the dismantling of Pontmercy’s garden after his death: “Nothing remained of the colonel. … The neighbors raided the garden and made off with the rare flowers there. The other plants became bushy and straggly or died” [“Rien ne resta du colonel. … Les voisins dévalisèrent le jardin et pillèrent les fleurs rares. Les autres plantes devinrent ronces et broussailles,et moururent”; 519/497].

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Indeed, while the relative social stability of Myriel and Pontmercy shields them from the conditions of misery (each lives a version of the restrained life of the bon pauvre), these conditions, and hunger in particular, encroach steadily on Mabeuf’s garden(ing) and are decisive in his fate. Subsequent to his failed effort to adapt and grow indigo in France, and to the dwindling and then halted sales of his Flore des environs de Cauteretz, Mabeuf—already necessarily modest in lifestyle— finds himself increasingly without resources. He is forced to give up his botanical experimentation and sell off his prized collection, volume by volume, so that he and la mère Plutarque may eat. In a terrible tug of war, the daily, physical needs of survival are pitted against his life’s passion and work—sustenance against sustenance—and when both are gone, Mabeuf, with nothing left to live for, joins up with the insurgents at the barricades.11 For the large majority of those who populate Les Misérables, driven by hunger and consumed by the imperatives of existence, the beauty of nature has even less usefulness. Indeed, while the beauty of the natural world in the myriad forms it takes is an equalizer of sorts, something to which all ostensibly have the same access regardless of social situation, the capacity to grasp and gain from that beauty is largely un- or underdeveloped in the misérables, stunted or shrouded by the demands of the immediate and the essential. The limits of this competency, which extend across many of the novel’s characters, are previewed in an early description of Jean Valjean: “The natural world scarcely existed for him. It would almost be true to say that for Jean Valjean, there was no sun, there were no lovely summer days, no radiant skies, no fresh April dawns” [“La nature visible existait à peine pour lui. Il serait presque vrai de dire qu’il n’avait point pour Jean Valjean de soleil, ni de beaux jours d’été, ni de ciel rayonnant, ni de fraîches aubes d’avril”; 80/76]. Contemplative, reflective engagement with nature and access to the nourishment and solace it provides—in the form of direct spiritual affirmation or emotional or intellectual fulfillment—require a stable footing that lies beyond reach. In addition, the natural world of the novel, whether serving as the direct setting for individual scenes or as the backdrop in a larger frame, is most often hostile when rendered from the perspective of these characters’ experience. The inhospitable conditions of Jean Valjean’s arrival in Digne—“I went into the fields to sleep under the stars. There were no stars. I reckoned it was going to rain and there was no good Lord to stop it from raining” [“Je m’en suis allé dans les champs pour coucher à la belle étoile. Il n’y avait pas d’étoile. J’ai pensé qu’il pleuvrait, et qu’il n’y avait pas de bon Dieu pour empêcher de pleuvoir”; 64/61]—are echoed in a series of other episodes: Cosette’s nocturnal trip to the well in Montfermeil, where “[o]ver her head, the sky was covered in huge black clouds” [“Au-dessus de sa tête le ciel était couvert de vastes nuages noirs”; 324/308]; Gavroche and 11  On the development of the character of Mabeuf by Hugo during his revisions of the novel, and particularly the layering in of the political import and ironies of his death, see Marius-François Guyard.

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his young brothers’ night in the Bastille elephant (“darkness covered the immense place de la Bastille, a winter wind joined the rain and blew in gusts” [“L’ombre couvrait l’immense place de la Bastille, un vent d’hiver qui se mêlait à la pluie soufflait par bouffées”; 763/793]); and the scene of Javert’s suicide (“A ceiling of clouds hid the stars. The sky was just a sinister density” [“Un plafond de nuages cachait les étoiles. Le ciel n’était qu’une épaisseur sinistre”; 1087/1047]). Alternatively, the beauty of nature, when on display, shows itself to be at odds with characters’ needs or aims. Thus Mabeuf’s arid garden lies under a lovely starry sky (“‘Stars everywhere!’ thought the old man. ‘Not the merest wisp of a cloud! Not the tiniest drop of water!’” [“‘Des étoiles partout! pensait le vieillard; pas la plus petite nuée! pas une larme d’eau!’”; 715/689]). And the unnamed Thénardier brothers, at the Luxembourg Gardens, starve while immersed in a display of the fecundity of nature: “Whoever was around inhaled happiness; life smelled good; all of this nature gave off candor, succor, support, fatherliness, tenderness, a golden yellow freshness of dawn” [“Qui était la aspirait du bonheur; la vie sentait bon; toute cette nature exhalait la candeur, le secours, l’assistance, la paternité, la caresse, l’aurore”; 964/1002]. Whether contributing directly to characters’ misery or underscoring it through opposition, the natural environment as setting also excludes. The notable counterpoint to this disharmony with nature is presented through the trajectories of Marius and Cosette, for whom the garden in particular— from the oft-visited Luxembourg Gardens, where their paths first cross, to the uncultivated, lush private and overgrown garden of the Rue Plumet—is a utopic and idyllic space that reflects, nurtures, and protects their love in its various stages of blooming.12 The book that recounts their meeting—“The Conjunction of Two Stars” [“La conjonction de deux étoiles”; III.6.i]—frames their intersection under the blue skies of sufficiency, which enables each to drink in fully the beauty of the natural world around them, and thus each other.13 For Cosette, this sufficiency is born of the secure life Jean Valjean has built for her in lifting her from the child servant of the Thénardiers to Mademoiselle Euphrasie Fauchelevant. For Marius, this sufficiency is born of the lessons of “good” misery learned following his departure from the home of his grandfather Gillenormand: “He gets in for nothing to the shows God puts on for him; he looks at the sky, space, the stars, the flowers, children, humanity among whom he suffers, creation in which he shines. He looks so hard at humanity, he sees its soul; he looks so hard at creation, he sees God” [“Il va aux spectacles gratis que Dieu donne; il regarde le ciel, l’espace, les astres, les fleurs, les enfants, l’humanité dans laquelle il souffre, la création dans laquelle il 12  For a detailed analysis of nature and the garden as universal metaphor in Les Misérables, see Grossman, Figuring Transcendence 301–15. See also Karen Quandt’s chapter in this volume. 13  The physical beauty of each, oft-referenced, additionally reflects and projects the harmony with God and nature that they share through their love. Moreover, Cosette, throughout her trajectory, is regularly likened to both birds and flowers, which both highlights her relationship to the natural realm and emphasizes the purity of her soul.

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rayonne. Il regarde tant l’humanité qu’il voit l’âme, il regarde tant la création qu’il voit Dieu”; 566/542]. A distaste for the material and for frivolity, the effacement of self in favor of compassion for others, and the satisfaction and sense of universal fraternity that can be culled directly and freely from nature are all internalized by Marius, who, if he suffers from being poor, never succumbs to it. Although Cosette and Marius’s love is subject to multiple trials and tests—the mystery of Cosette’s identity and location, the fallout of the ambush at the masure Gorbeau, Gillenormand’s initial refusal to let Marius marry Cosette, Jean Valjean’s plan to take Cosette to England, Marius’s near death on the barricades—it is at the same time explicitly placed and protected under the sign of the idyll (see Roman 283–300), representing, not insignificantly, the only successful romantic coupling in the novel.14 Reciprocal or reciprocated love, the novel shows us through Marius and Cosette, is another way for man to feed the soul: it is a communion with another blessed by God and nourished by the benevolence of nature. Gillenormand’s long sermon at the banquet celebrating Marius and Cosette’s nuptials underscores the fusional quality of this religion of love: “Behave in such a way that when you are with each other, nothing is lacking, and Cosette is the sun for Marius and Marius is the sun for Cosette” [“Faites en sorte que, quand vous êtes l’un avec l’autre, rien ne vous manque, et que Cosette soit le soleil pour Marius, et que Marius soit l’univers pour Cosette”; 1128/1085]. In this, love is at once expansive and reductive, a totalizing force that assures—and is assured by—the spiritual. Myriel’s assertion that beauty is “just as useful as the useful,” if not “more so,” is thus both validated in Les Misérables and neutralized by its failure to extend: the capacity of beauty to sustain the individual or the collective is demonstrated infrequently in a world where physical survival needs—hunger first among them— are satisfied minimally or not at all. This is because beauty simultaneously serves as an element of Hugo’s larger aesthetic and social vision of art, where it has 14

 Cosette’s successful romantic trajectory—supported by the structural and thematic frame of the novel’s fourth section, “The Idyll of the Rue Plumet and the Epic of the Rue Saint-Denis” [“L’Idylle rue Plumet et l’épopée rue Saint-Denis”]—is the direct counterexample to the false idyll of her mother, Fantine, also initiated under blue skies (“The world is a great fat diamond … Everything is beautiful” [“Le monde est un gros diamant … . Tout est beau”; 111/118]), but quickly revealed to be impossible. Éponine’s unrequited love for Marius is never placed under the sign of the idyll, its impossibility reinforced at every turn. As Cosette’s unhappy double [“Une Rose dans la misère” III.8.iv], Éponine undergoes a physical deterioration in direct relation to her circumstances and inverse to Cosette’s blossoming, masking her beauty in her young-adulthood: “the girl had not come into the world to be ugly … A trace of lingering beauty was dying in this sixteenyear old face” [“cette jeune fille n’était pas venue au monde pour être laide … Un reste de beauté se mourait sur ce visage de seize ans”; 606–7/584], just as Cosette’s was covered up during her childhood with the Thénardier family: “Cosette was ugly. If she had been happy, she might have been pretty” [“Cosette était laide. Heureuse, elle eût peut-être été jolie”; 317/333]. For more on the inversely proportional relationship between the two, see Isabel Roche 76–7.

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“usefulness” of another kind. While much of Philosophie. Commencement d’un livre, as discussed above, is a pointed response to what Hugo saw as the dangers of the atheistic political climate in which Les Misérables was completed, it also contains the continued expression of a social mission for art and for the novel, first articulated in the 1820s and 1830s and from which Hugo seldom veered thereafter. This vision is built on one of an all-encompassing art, in which the poet-author, endowed with heightened sensibilities, exposes the truths of the universe, as the preface to Cromwell (1827) specifies: “the poet wholly fulfills the multiple objective of art, which is to open … a double horizon, to illuminate at the same time the interior and the exterior of man … to bring together … the drama of life with the drama of the conscience” [“le poète remplisse pleinement le but multiple de l’art, qui est d’ouvrir … un double horizon, d’illuminer à la fois l’intérieur et l’extérieur des hommes … de croiser … le drame de la vie et le drame de la conscience”; OCL—Critique 26]. In this, good and bad, high and low, sublime and grotesque, and beauty and ugliness, defined at once by their opposition, their interdependence, and their relationship to a continuum, contribute equally and integrally to the creation of a fluid whole that reflects all of life—not through the replication of the real but through a concentration and amplification of it that allows us to discern larger meaning from the past and present. Art in this vision is unapologetically didactic, its “usefulness” rendered through the truth it tells in the name of social betterment. In this, le beau is both the metaphysical end and an aesthetic means for accomplishing progress: “Sublime upon sublime scarcely presents a contrast, and we need rest from everything, even the beautiful. It seems … that the grotesque is a stopping point, a comparative term, a starting place from which one rises toward the beautiful” [“Le sublime sur le sublime produit malaisément un contraste, et l’on a besoin de se reposer de tout, même du beau. Il semble … que le grotesque soit un temps d’arrêt, un terme de comparaison, un point de départ d’où l’on s’élève vers le beau”; 12]. The depiction of social hardship in Les Misérables, as Hugo presents it toward the end of Philosophie, is the product of this totalizing aesthetic, which beneficially exposes the depths of its perils: “To portray misfortune, all Misfortune, that is to say double Misfortune, human misfortune that comes from fate, social misfortune that comes from man; this is incontestably a useful attempt” [“Peindre le malheur, tout le Malheur, c’est-à-dire le Malheur double, le malheur humain qui vient de la destinée, le malheur social qui vient de l’homme; c’est là incontestablement une tentative utile”; OCL—Critique 533].15 Ugliness, too, is useful.

15  The novel’s epigraph also explicitly promotes the same kind of “utility,” justifying its existence—and deftly mitigating the controversial circumstances of its publication and Hugo’s substantial earnings—through its potential to effect social change: “as long as ignorance and misery exist in this world, books like the one you are about to read are, perhaps, not entirely useless” [“tant qu’il y aura sur la terre ignorance et misère, des livres de la nature de celui-ci pourront ne pas être inutiles”; xxxvii/2].

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This belief in the social mission of art is reasserted in William Shakespeare (1864), the exile outlet for many of Hugo’s longtime obsessions and recurring ideas. In it, Hugo’s progressive alienation from the conception of art and its purpose held by contemporaries such as Gautier, Flaubert, or Baudelaire comes up against other polemics of the 1860s and the evolution of the “art for art’s sake” current in particular. This movement, which proclaimed as early as 1818 (with Victor Cousin’s formulation of the term) the independence of art through the elevation of beauty as a philosophical, transcendent formal value, was one with which Hugo identified—yet from which he both initially and ultimately differed. His conception of liberty in art and of its reach (no subject is excluded, as the preface to Les Orientales in 1829 famously declares) was inseparable from his conviction of art’s social responsibility.16 If the whole of William Shakespeare cements the divide between Hugo and what can be called his second generation of contemporaries, from whom he is isolated geographically, philosophically, and artistically, it is in “Le Beau serviteur du vrai” that Hugo most directly lays out and defends his position on the value of art: “Art for art’s sake can be beautiful, but art for the sake of progress is more beautiful still” [“l’art pour l’art peut être beau, mais l’art pour le progrès est plus beau encore”; OCL—Critique 399]. The “beauty” of art is the truth it transports, rendered though the ideal, or “le Beau Utile” [“the Useful Beautiful”; 400], which is not compromised or diluted by its interaction with the (condensed and amplified) “real” but, rather, is strengthened: “At the point where the social question has arrived, everything must be done in common. Isolated forces cancel each other out, the ideal and the real are united. These two wheels of progress must turn together” [“Au point où la question sociale est arrivée, tout doit être action commune. Les forces isolées s’annulent, l’idéal et le réel sont solidaires. L’art doit aider la science. Ces deux roues du progrès doivent tourner ensemble”; 399–400]. This position is further elucidated and reinforced in “Le Goût” [“Taste”], and especially “Utilité du beau” [“Usefulness of the Beautiful”], two chapters that Hugo composed for but held from William Shakespeare. These chapters investigate the “cult of form” that developed during the nineteenth century, arguing that, whether desired or not, all art contributes to progress through its aesthetic power: “To confuse form with surface is absurd. Form is essential and absolute; it springs from the very guts of the idea. It is beauty; and truth is manifest in all that is beautiful” [“Confondre la forme avec la surface est absurde. La forme est essentielle et absolue; elle vient des entrailles mêmes de l’idée. Elle est le beau; et tout ce qui est beau manifeste le vrai”; 582]. Indeed, this power—the inherent capacity to move the interlocutor— is in Hugo’s view a critical and “civilizing,” that is to say instructive, force. Although Hugo firmly resisted any definition of his art that would take the form of a poetics or “rules,” reflections such as these on the mystery, potential, 16  For further analysis of Hugo’s relationship to this movement and to philosophical definitions of le beau, as well as of his aesthetic vision, see Paul Bénichou 286–95, Myriam Roman 169–77, and Jacques Seebacher, “Esthéthique et politique.”

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and responsibility of art abound in his writings and tell us much about the interconnectedness of his beliefs—artistic, social, and spiritual. If the whole forwards a confidence in the capacity for human progress, a confidence grounded in his belief in the existence of a providential higher order, Hugo’s artistic production itself reveals in myriad ways an anxiety relative to this confidence. In this, the multi-pronged application of le beau in Les Misérables finds its strongest expression in the depiction of an internalized beauty that contrasts with the “ugliness”—social, physical, moral—that the novel creates and carries to its end. If human social progress moves slowly or not at all in what the narrator describes as “the imperfect times in which we live” [“le temps incomplet où nous vivons”; 1013/975], characterized by stops, starts, fits, and regressions and illustrated in the “unresolved” social problems of the nineteenth century that Hugo singles out in the epigraph and then puts fully on display, individual human progress is undeniably realized. It moves apace with the moral progress—the beauty of the soul—made along the way, a progress that is rewarded with transcendence of the imperfect social world, the soul, or the “infinite below” [“infini d’en bas”], fully absorbed into the expanses of the “infinite above” [“l’infini d’en haut”; 428/409]. The beauty that Myriel succeeds in extending, and the kind that is thus the most “useful” in Les Misérables, is not the one that he argues but the one that he exemplifies (“all the beauties of human virtue” [“toutes les beautés de la vertu humaine”; 45/44]), transferred to Valjean with the gift of his silver and acquired and internalized with each crisis or test he faces. In this supreme effort to “escape the clutches of men and return to God” [“échapper aux hommes et revenir à Dieu”; 175/185], the natural world and its beauty, as shown above, is largely inaccessible to Valjean, who experiences nature in a literal way, motivated by its practical rather than aesthetic value. This functional orientation is demonstrated, among other moments, during his years as the convent’s gardener where he uses the tricks of his youth (“agricultural secrets and recipes” [“recettes et … secrets de culture”; 469/449]) to maximum benefit for the community. The triumph of the spiritual over the material occurs rather in direct proportion to the development of consciousness, Valjean’s soul nourished and sustained by Myriel’s example and the knowledge of what is at stake, as seen with an unflinching eye following his regression in the Petit Gervais incident: “there was no longer a middle course for him; that from now on, he would either be the best of men or he would be the worst of men; that he now had to rise higher, so to speak, than the bishop or fall even lower than the galley slave; that if he wanted to be good, he had to be an angel; that if he wanted to stay bad, he had to be a monster from hell” [“il n’y avait pas de milieu pour lui, que si désormais il n’était pas le meilleur des hommes, il en serait le pire, qu’il fallait pour ainsi dire que maintenant il montât plus haut que l’évêque ou retombât plus bas que le galérien; que, s’il voulait devenir bon, il fallait qu’il devînt ange; que, s’il voulait rester méchant, il fallait qu’il devînt monstre”; 95/90]. This understanding of the future before him—refigured here on the sharpest of vertical scales—requires Valjean to find both a path and a purpose forward—to put the mobility of man at the service of the mobility of the soul.

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Jean Valjean’s rebirth, as the novel’s central arc, expresses the fullest range of the possibilities of moral progress—self-sacrifice, the eschewal of self-interest, selflessness in the name of a higher good. Dimensions of this moral beauty are also achieved by others in the novel, assuring in turn their transcendence of the social world and salvation: Fantine’s fall from low to lower in the name of her daughter countered—and rewarded—by the moral regeneration that precedes her death; Éponine’s sacrifice of her own happiness—and life—for Marius’s with Cosette; Mabeuf’s and Gavroche’s innate, preserved goodness amid the hostility and degeneration of the world around them; les amis de l’ABC, and especially Enjolras’s death in the name of a future that is not theirs. In all of these cases, and passings, the relay of the soul is unambiguous, their moral rehabilitation or blossoming additionally reinforced by a corresponding return or highlighting of physical beauty, rendered most often through a fusion with nature: Fantine’s soul “plucked” by “the mysterious fingers of death” [“les doigts mystérieux de la mort”; 238/224], Enjolras at the moment of his execution (“I feel like I’m about to shoot a flower” [“Il me semble que je vais fusiller une fleur”; 986/1025]). While their hunger disappears with them, the physiological silenced in the radiance of their deaths and the rising of their souls, these characters leave in their wake the multitudes whose bodies and souls remain mired in the “relentless march of human society” [“marche implacable des sociétés humaines”; 82/78], in the misery that Hugo describes in “Les Fleurs,” one of the chapters he removed from Les Misérables in his final editing of the novel, as having “the appalling beauty of great size” [“l’épouvantable beauté de la grandeur”; OCL—Critique 543]. Absolved of fault but not redeemed, those who remain, all misérables in every way, remind us, both through the “beau utile” and “l’utilité du beau,” of the ugliness of hunger in all its dimensions. At the very same time, they remind us of the beauty of the unrealized—but, for Hugo, realizable—idéal social, of the progress whose ever-elusive potential continues to captivate and trouble today.

Chapter 2

“Foliis ac frondibus”: Les Misérables and the Ecogarden Karen F. Quandt

In the twenty-first century, “going green” has emerged as a pop culture slogan. The hip online Huffington Post touts a “Green” section, complete with green font, in which topics range anywhere from raising chickens in Brooklyn to “Broccoli Obama” t-shirts celebrating the American president’s predilection for the (green) vegetable. Aside from the folksy, nostalgic, and even patriotic connotations conjured by this back-to-nature buzz, scientists and environmental conservationists are serious when it comes to showing how we can and should preserve robust ecosystems in backyards or on urban rooftops. The biologist Douglas Tallamy outlines the ecological benefits of promoting diversity and leaving nature to chance by recounting how the otherwise uncommon blue grosbeak can flourish if offered the right garden. We have the snakeskins our grosbeaks use to build their nest because we have black-rat snakes, black racers, milk snakes, ribbon snakes, ring-necked snakes, and garter snakes in our yard. We have these harmless snakes because we have the mice, voles, shrews, and toads they eat, and because we have groundhog dens that are perfect places for snakes to avoid the weather extremes of winter and summer. And we have snake food because we have the plants that supply the insects and seeds eaten by mice, voles, shrews, and toads, and because we leave refuges for them so they can avoid being decapitated during Saturday mowings. (286–7)

All it takes is planting some trees and plants, and the rest unfolds effortlessly within the “complex relations” of this Darwinian garden-ecosystem. Resonating with the development of Hugo’s poetics as the natural world became integral to his aesthetic and visionary philosophy, Tallamy’s purposefully lengthy passage points to key sections of Les Misérables where nature spurs the transformation of characters or serves as a model of a free and healthy society. Part of the enduring fascination with the novel, this chapter argues, lies in Hugo’s model of an ecogarden that points to modern conservationist practices. It hardly seems anachronistic to apply the prefix “eco” to Hugo’s most famous work, since it features key protagonists who garden to promote communal sustenance and a kinder treatment of the earth’s fauna and flora. In the beginning chapters, Bishop Myriel’s routine of weeding and watering reflects his deep sense of responsibility to his community: “Sometimes he dug in his garden, sometimes he read and wrote.

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He only had one word for these two types of work; he called it gardening. ‘The spirit is a garden,’ he would say” [“Tantôt il bêchait la terre dans son jardin, tantôt il lisait et écrivait. Il n’avait qu’un mot pour ces deux sortes de travail; il appelait cela jardiner. ‘L’esprit est un jardin,’ disait-il”; LML 17].1 Similar to a twenty-first century gardening ethos that focuses on practical environmental concerns instead of received notions of beauty or traditional homocentric discourses, Myriel’s garden plot is perfect in its homely simplicity: He gladly spent an hour or two trimming, weeding, and digging holes here and there where he would put seeds. He was not as hostile to insects as a gardener would have liked. Furthermore, he made no pretensions to botany; … He didn’t study plants; he loved flowers. He had much respect for learned people, and even greater respect for the uneducated, and, without ever wavering in these two respects, he watered his flowerbeds every summer night with a tinplate hose painted green. [“Il passait volontiers une heure ou deux, coupant, sarclant, et piquant çà et là des trous en terre où il mettait des graines. Il n’était pas aussi hostile aux insectes qu’un jardinier l’eût voulu. Du reste, aucune prétention à la botanique; … Il n’étudiait pas les plantes; il aimait les fleurs. Il respectait beaucoup les savants, il respectait encore plus les ignorants, et, sans jamais manquer à ces deux respects, il arrosait ses plates-bandes chaque soir d’été avec un arrosoir de fer-blanc peint en vert”; 22.]

The narrator’s unassuming and deliberate tone, as well as his emphasis on the mundane aspects of this routine, further heightens the sense that gardening for Myriel is not a frivolous hobby but is inspired instead by a determined sense of obligation to better the earth. Within the garden of “Foliis ac frondibus” (“Of Leaves and Branches”; IV.3.ii) in particular, a chapter whose title explicitly refers to Lucretius’ De rerum natura (The Nature of Things) and thus situates the visionary novel in a parcel of nature rid of allegorical function, Hugo astutely examines each plant and insect as he leads us to a larger commentary on social progress. Hugo’s presentation of gardens has a distinct “earthy” quality that invites us to move out of the realm of literary myth and metaphysical contemplation and to ask the question that many of us are asking today: can gardening really make a difference in the scheme of things? Considering the garden in “Foliis ac frondibus” as emblematic of a fragile ecosystem that is revived due to human respect for nature’s movements and processes, I aim to show that the influence of natural history, garden treatises, and philosophical critiques of commodity and industry lays the groundwork for Hugo’s model of a utopian “green” society. Obeying a dynamic of evolution reflected by how the novel’s central characters transform and adapt, Hugo’s microcosm thrives and progresses with overgrown hedges, an abundance of weeds, and unmown grass. After tracing Hugo’s own evolving relationship with nature, which 1  References to all of Hugo’s works in this chapter, except when noted, are from the Laffont edition of his Œuvres complètes (henceforth only page numbers will be cited).

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was intricately tied to advancements in natural history and socialist discourses on gardening, I then consider how his role as a gardener and his intense interactions with “wild” landscapes resonate with twenty-first century environmental theories and practices.2 I. Eco Hugo The Whole Garden Hugo’s extensive travels in the 1830s and early 1840s led to what Jean-Bertrand Barrère calls “a realist reeducation of the imagination” [“rééducation réaliste de l’imagination”; La Fantaisie I: 407] that prompted the poet to shed conventional tropes such as picturesque or romantic landscapes, or decorative or walled gardens, and to train his eyes instead on every aspect of the microcosm that lies within and beneath sweeping vistas of nature.3 Hugo records in his travel memoirs Le Rhin (The Rhine, 1842), for example, how he has dismissed the view of the overall landscape to scrutinize its minutiae: “In Freiburg, I forgot for a long time the immense landscape that was before me due to the patch of grass on which I was seated. It was an uncultivated little mound on the hill. There, too, was a whole world” [“A Freiburg, j’ai oublié longtemps l’immense paysage que j’avais sous les yeux pour le carré de gazon dans lequel j’étais assis. C’était une petite bosse sauvage de la colline. Là aussi, il y avait un monde”; cited in Barrère, La Fantaisie I: 190]. The author goes on to mention with great precision every creature and vegetal detail in this vivid microcosm, producing sentences of disorienting length (similar to Tallamy’s description of his “utopian” garden cited above) laden with a plethora of species and explicit references to scientists that cast the poet-observer as an astute naturalist. In a period when the Jardin des Plantes was the “supreme attraction” in Paris, it is not surprising that Hugo’s writings reflect the influence of natural history, a fairly new discipline whose labels and categories inspired more than impeded poetic faculties (Le Dantec and Le Dantec 161 and 165).4 The travel writer and naturalist Bernardin de Saint-Pierre in particular had left a substantial legacy to French Romantic writers.5 The lush depictions of nature in his widely read Paul 2  I am indebted to Kathryn Grossman’s thorough tracing of gardens in Hugo’s novel (Figuring Transcendence 301–15). 3  Lawrence Buell describes travel narrative as one of the characteristic genres of environmental texts, given how the writer’s freer style reflects nature’s movements (23). 4  Barrère notes the extended influence of natural history on Hugo’s travel writings and poetry (La Fantaisie I: 291–4). 5  Bernardin was the director of the botanical gardens in Paris and established its zoo before it became known as the Jardin des Plantes. He played an early role in shaping our modern understanding of the earth as a biosphere: “[he] preached for a global approach— we would say ‘holistic’—that does not isolate the plant from its milieu” [“(Il) prêche pour

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et Virginie (1788) helped point the way to both literary and painterly “open air” landscapes at the outset of the nineteenth century: “Nature paints itself everywhere of its own accord; and when one of its rays falls on my soul, I reflect it” [“La nature se peint partout d’elle-même; et quand un de ses rayons tombe sur mon âme, je la reflète”; clvi].6 Bernardin’s scrutiny of nature proper would have appealed to Hugo’s cénacle of the late Restoration period, a group of unapologetic Romantics who were aiming to establish a modern aesthetic free of rhetoric and full of realistic details and vibrant imagery. In a review of the English Lake poets from 1825, the poet and critic Sainte-Beuve (who would for a brief period be a key member of Hugo’s inner circle) not only provides a crucial link between the well-known “nature poet” William Wordsworth and French Romantic poets but also figures the modern poet as a visionary botanist who enjoys a harmonious relationship with an animate and vibrant earth:7 “When we had exhausted exterior scenes and reproduced the external aspects of nature, we went further, we identified with it, and we no longer separated it from ourselves” [“Quand on eut épuisé les tableaux extérieurs et reproduit les dehors de la nature, on pénétra plus avant, on s’identifia avec elle, et on ne la sépara plus de nous”; 135]. Thirsting for new language and imagery, the modern poet turned to the natural world for inspiration and in the process appropriated the patient scrutiny and conservationist impulses of contemporary botanists and naturalists.8 A similar radical change in outlook occurs at a pivotal moment in Les Misérables. Jean Valjean, once a prisoner for whom “visible nature barely existed” [“la nature visible existait à peine”; 76], undergoes a spiritual and social transformation that depends on a renewed relationship with his natural surroundings. A tree pruner prior to his incarceration, Valjean goes back to his roots in a literal sense and subsequently turns into a modern Pan who takes long walks in the countryside, refuses to shoot birds, and makes good use out of seemingly insignificant plants (I.5.iii). Valjean must first become a mindful ecologist before he can transform into the enlightened mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer. It is significant that his sublime rise in society is initiated by a mere chilly night-time Alpine breeze in the uninhabited countryside: “All of the sudden he trembled; he had just felt the night chill” [“Tout à coup il tressaillit; il venait de sentir le froid du soir”; 88]. Valjean’s renewed une approche globale—nous dirions ‘holiste’—qui n’isole pas la plante de son milieu”; Drouin 64]. Environmental concerns and policies would emerge after the Revolution, following the eighteenth-century development of natural history, as Corvol and Richefort’s edited volume evidences. 6  The epigraph to Bernardin’s Paul et Virginie is “miseris succurrere disco” [“I learn to succor the unfortunate”; Aeneid, Book I], which clearly resonates with Hugo’s Les Misérables. 7  In Buell’s definition of an environmental text, “some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given is at least implicit in the text” (5). 8  Citing the influence of Erasmus Darwin in particular, Jonathan Bate notes a “consonance between poet and scientist” in the practice of field observation during the Romantic period (36–40).

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ability to feel nature returns his sense of being human and allows him to leave his past identity behind: “he had just come to realize how he had once been” [“il venait de s’apercevoir tel qu’il était”; 91]. Valjean’s transformation begins when he recognizes that the natural landscape, however bleak, is alive: “A glacial breeze was blowing and gave to the things around him a sort of gloomy life. The shrubs shook their little skinny arms with an incredible fury” [“Une bise glaciale soufflait, et donnait aux choses autour de lui une sorte de vie lugubre. Des arbrisseaux secouaient leurs petits bras maigres avec une furie incroyable”; 89]. The tiniest of nature’s breaths kindles Valjean’s benevolence and subsequent transcendent evolution. The Social Garden In a similar dynamic of evolution, the scope of Hugo’s writings continued to be impelled by his drive to incorporate all of humanity. Any attempt to contain or manicure nature would inevitably fail in this evolved scheme of a lyric macrocosm: “[My] work, taken as a whole, would resemble the earth” [“(Mon) œuvre, prise dans sa synthèse, ressemblerait à la terre”; OCL—Poésie IV: 919].9 By 1840, toil has replaced Romantic absorption in nature, and the traditional garden of the ‘hortus conclusus’10 definitively loses its walls and instead becomes the scene of a collective enterprise:11 I love you, O holy nature! I would like to absorb myself in you; But, in this eventful century, Each one of us, alas, owes ourselves to all. (“The Function of the Poet”)

 Preface to Les Rayons et les Ombres (Rays and Shadows, 1840).  The “hortus conclusus” has its origins in the monastery garden, a sealed-off microcosm that contained an orderly design of plant beds divided into sections: flowers, herbs, vegetables, etc. (Vercelloni and Vercelloni, Chapter 2). The narrator of Les Misérables critiques the Petit-Picpus convent garden in Paris, where Jean Valjean at one point takes refuge, by evoking cold and infertile surroundings: “[it was] one of those sad gardens that seem made to be looked at in the winter and at night” [“(c’était) un de ces jardins tristes qui semblent faits pour être regardés l’hiver et la nuit”; 363]. When it occurs to Jean Valjean that he must leave the convent so as to not “denature” [“dénaturer”; 697] his sheltered daughter Cosette, the narrator makes it clear that the traditional walled garden belongs to the past. Lynn White, Jr., has famously pinpointed the “exploitative attitude” of medieval agricultural technology and practices as informing today’s ecological crisis. 11  In Charles Fourier’s utopian model of society, gardens and plots of land do not have walls because the entire earth serves as communal terrain (Beecher 284). The vast plots surrounding the Phalanx, which included cherries, dahlias, mallows, vegetables, and strawberries, seem to serve as a template for Hugo’s description of Bishop Myriel’s “healthy” garden in Les Misérables: in addition to fruit trees, three plots maintained by his sister are reserved for vegetables while one plot planted by Myriel himself grows flowers (22). 9

10

Les Misérables and Its Afterlives

38

[“Je vous aime, ô sainte nature! Je voudrais m’absorber en vous; Mais, dans ce siècle d’aventure, Chacun, hélas! se doit à tous.” (“La Fonction du poète,” OCL—Poésie IV: 61–4)]

Now distinctly seeing his lyric self as an Other (played out in his creation of an alter-ego named Olympio), Hugo—the “pair de France” [peer of France] of the 1840s—came to view his poetic role less as an inspired vates and more as an interpretative and collaborative function of his political service to the public. The sharp rise in the number of public gardens during the first half of the nineteenth century reflects the socialist and democratic predilection for larger communal spaces that served as refuges from the daily grind of city life, political turbulence, and industrial toil (Levêque 158). The Luxembourg Gardens and other vast terrains in and around Paris are a constant source of respite for Marius in Les Misérables as he seeks to define his identity and role in society. The remnants of agriculture and nature that he manages to come across stir therapeutic contemplation: Marius’s pleasure was to take long walks along the exterior boulevards, or at the Champ de Mars, or on the less frequented paths in the Luxembourg garden. He sometimes spent half a day looking at a farmer’s garden, the beds of greens, the hens in the manure, and the horse turning the wheel of the noria. [“Le plaisir de Marius était de faire de longues promenades seul sur les boulevards extérieurs, ou au Champ de Mars ou dans les allées les moins fréquentées du Luxembourg. Il passait quelquefois une demi-journée à regarder le jardin d’un maraîcher, les carrés de salade, les poules dans le fumier et le cheval tournant la roue de la noria”; 547.]12

Paradoxically, Marius’s meditation on this mundane garden inspires his poetic and thus humanitarian outlook on French society that throws into question humans’ assumed dominance over nature and heedless will to power: “And then when, after a day of meditation, he came back at night by the boulevards and perceived through branches of trees space without measure, glimmers without name, abyss, shadow, mystery, everything that was just human seemed pretty small to him” [“Et puis quand, après une journée de méditation, il s’en revenait le soir par les boulevards et qu’à travers les branches des arbres il apercevait l’espace sans fond, les lueurs sans nom, l’abîme, l’ombre, le mystère, tout ce qui n’est qu’humain lui semblait bien petit”; 548]. As the unassuming description of the farmer’s garden morphs into the destabilizing portrayal of a celestial abyss, Marius’s connection 12

 The farmer’s garden [“jardin maraîcher”] would have been a thing of the past by the time Les Misérables appeared, and Hugo’s reference to it suggests a nostalgia for what we would now call “local” food (Elliott 65). As farmers’ markets became more regulated in the Second Empire, centrally located and huge market halls such as Les Halles in Paris pushed farmers out of the city.

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with nature, which he manages to establish even within the urban confines of the city, prompts him to perform charitable deeds and to sacrifice personal gain and happiness for the sake of a larger social cause. For the fugitive Jean Valjean and his adopted daughter Cosette, the Luxembourg Gardens provide a discrete hiding spot despite their role as a public strolling ground: “He led her to the Luxembourg, to the least used path” [“Il la conduisait au Luxembourg, dans l’allée la moins fréquentée”; 699]. Like an overlooked but hardy wild plant, love takes deep root within the nooks and crannies of this vast public space as Marius and Cosette encounter each other. The public garden, the utopian social space of refuge and unity, is thus appropriately located at the center of a mammoth novel (“The Conjunction of Two Stars,” III.6.viii) whose ultimate message reduces to love and mutual understanding: One day, the air was mild, the Luxembourg was inundated with shadow and sun, the sky was pure as if the angels had washed it in the morning, the passerines let out little cries deep within the chestnut trees, Marius had bared all of his soul to nature, he wasn’t thinking of anything, he lived and he breathed, he passed near this bench, the young girl raised her eyes to him, their eyes met. [“Un jour, l’air était tiède, le Luxembourg était inondé d’ombre et de soleil, le ciel était pur comme si les anges l’eussent lavé le matin, les passereaux poussaient de petits cris dans les profondeurs des marronniers, Marius avait ouvert toute son âme à la nature, il ne pensait à rien, il vivait et il respirait, il passa près de ce banc, la jeune fille leva les yeux sur lui, leurs deux yeux se rencontrèrent”; 557.]

This public refuge, breathlessly described here as the commas rapidly accumulate and as one image furls into the next until we reach the electric climax of a “coup de foudre,” protects the couple’s stirrings of love from any threat of vulgarity or dubious intentions. Cosette expresses this innocence by displacing the object of her desire onto the garden: “[She] sincerely believed she was expressing everything on her mind by saying to Jean Valjean:—How delicious this Luxembourg garden is!” [“(Elle) croyait sincèrement exprimer toute sa pensée en disant à Jean Valjean:—Quel délicieux jardin que ce Luxembourg!”; 711]. Void of any threat of a forbidden fruit, this contemporary and secularized Garden of Eden sows the seeds of pure love. Yet, there are “two sides to [the] modern democratic myth”: while public promenades opened with great flourish and frequency in the nineteenth century due to urban sprawl and bourgeois capital might, there was a simultaneous return to the private garden “in which the individual displayed his hopes and nostalgias” (Le Dantec and Le Dantec 159). In Les Misérables, Pontmercy’s and Mabeuf’s retreats to their respective residential gardens buffer the trauma of post-revolutionary life. Pontmercy, a former war hero in Napoléon’s army who has been ostracized by his royalist family and estranged from his son Marius, now contents himself with growing and creating new types of flowers at his home on the outskirts of Paris: “he spent his time hoping for a carnation or remembering Austerlitz” [“Il passait

40

Les Misérables and Its Afterlives

son temps à espérer un œillet ou à se souvenir d’Austerlitz”; 489].13 But while the evocative liminal space of the modern public garden—crowded but solitary, democratic but fenced-in—offers pockets of respite and hope, the walled-in private garden in Les Misérables appears stifled in its role as a laboratory or greenhouse. Pontmercy, for example, strategizes in his little garden in the same extraordinary way that he had on the battlefields.14 In contrast to Bishop Myriel, who is satisfied with a casually and even sloppily maintained garden (46) that nonetheless grows a healthy balance of food and flowers, Pontmercy is a horticulturist who earnestly feeds into the public’s growing appetite for pretty flowers: “the plot of land he called his garden was famous in the town for the beauty of the flowers he grew there” [“Le carré de terre qu’il appelait son jardin était célèbre dans la ville pour la beauté des fleurs qu’il y cultivait”; 486].15 Though he shuns material goods, gardening for Pontmercy is nevertheless more of an abstract science than a nurturing appreciation of the earth: “Through work, perseverance, attention, and pails of water, he had succeeded in creating after the creator, and he had invented certain tulips and dahlias that seem to have had been forgotten by nature” [“A force de travail, de persévérance, d’attention et de seaux d’eau, il avait réussi à créer après le créateur, et il avait inventé de certaines tulipes et de certains dahlias qui semblaient avoir été oubliés par la nature”; Ibid].16 This Napoleonic war hero attempts to imitate creation itself through artificial means and extravagant efforts. Mabeuf, for his part, is a forgotten remnant of the “ancien régime” who withdraws from society and cares for little except books and flowers. A modern hermit whose idea of heroism is publishing a luxury edition of prints entitled La Flore des environs de Cauteretz (Flora from the Surroundings of Cauteretz), he suffers the effects of his isolation by falling into abject poverty: “In times of trouble,” remarks the narrator, “the first thing that does not sell is a Flora” [“En temps de gêne, la première chose qui ne se vend pas, c’est une Flore”; 546]. Yet another reference to Austerlitz, which again conjures Napoléon’s heroic but ultimately chastised exploits, appears when Mabeuf moves to a village of the same name (also on the fringes of Paris) and attempts to cultivate indigo at the 13  Due to urban sprawl, the outskirts of Paris became an intermediary space of city and country. Citing Les Misérables, Luisa Limido notes how such a space reflects the specificity of modern life (37), as I go on to discuss. 14  Grossman reminds us: “After all, the battle of Waterloo begins in the garden at Hougomont” (Figuring Transcendence 307). 15  In her study of how color determined the economy of the nineteenth-century flower market, Laura Anne Kalba has shown that the introduction of exotic flowers in Europe from distant locales quickly led to a surge of flower growing and hybridization in the 1830s and 1840s. 16  Kalba quotes a nineteenth-century horticultural journal to emphasize contemporary gardeners’ deemed role as creators: “Already in 1845, the Belgian horticultural journal Flore des serres et jardins de l’Europe proclaimed that hybridization was ‘the true conquest of our age … the procedure which means that, just like the Creator, man too may create plants virtually at his convenience’” (91).

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expense of food and furniture. It is only when his flowerbeds wither that Mabeuf finally abandons his pretensions to wrest beauty out of nature and slips off to the barricades to meet his death.17 A more holistic approach to gardening instead requires conscientious care that focuses primarily on the plant’s roots and leaves instead of the fleeting seduction of its corolla. Jean Valjean is thus the exemplary gardener of Les Misérables in how he embraces all aspects of plants and actively respects his natural environment in order to nourish and rehabilitate it. As a mayor who has adopted the repentant name “M. Madeleine,”18 he tends to the “garden” of his town by instructing the peasant community in how to make use of nettles. Despite the plant’s harmful and unattractive qualities, Valjean understands its multiple benefits: if cultivated properly, it can serve as a vegetable, or as hemp, linen, animal feed, animal coat polish, yellow dye, and hay. Furthermore, the nettle’s potential for profit far exceeds the work necessary for cultivating it: “And what does the nettle need? Little land, no care, no cultivation” [“Et que faut-il à l’ortie? Peu de terre, nul soin, nulle culture”; 132]. In this parable passage, gentle and unobtrusive gardening leads to a better society: “My friends, remember this,” Valjean instructs the workers of the land, “there are no bad weeds and no bad men. There are just bad cultivators” [“Mes amis, retenez ceci, il n’y a ni mauvaises herbes ni mauvais hommes. Il n’y a que de mauvais cultivateurs”; Ibid]. If he rids nature of pests, he does so in an eco-friendly way that shuns rifles, poisons, or any “cruel or unusual” implements: He taught them to destroy the grain-moth by spraying the granary and inundating the cracks in the floor with a solution of common salt, and to chase the weevils by hanging everywhere, on the walls and on the roofs, in the buildings and in the houses, the flowers of the orviot. He had “recipes” to rid a field of corn-cockle, vetches, foxtail, and all the parasitic weeds that feed upon wheat. He defended a rabbit warren from rats simply with the odor of a small Barbary pig that he put in there. [“Il leur apprenait à détruire la teigne des blés en aspergeant le grenier et en inondant les fentes du plancher d’une dissolution de sel commun, et à chasser les charançons en suspendant partout, aux murs et aux toits, dans les héberges et dans les maisons, de l’orviot en fleur. Il avait des “recettes” pour extirper d’un champ la luzette, la nielle, la vesce, la gaverolle, la queue-de-renard, toutes les 17  The second part of Hugo’s “Préface philosophique,” entitled “Les Fleurs” (posthumous but originally intended for Les Misérables), is Baudelairean in how it links flowers to vice: “A prostitute loves a thief through a lily” [“Une prostituée aime un voleur à travers un lys”; OCL—Critique 536]. The flower frenzy in Paris also played a significant role in fueling the Irish gardener William Robinson’s seminal The Wild Garden (1870), which shunned the use of flowerbeds (Robinson noticed a superabundance of manicured flowerbeds in Parisian parks), costly endeavors to grow exotic plants, and labor-intensive practices in general. 18  In the Gospel of John (“Jean”), when Mary Magdalene sees Jesus outside the tomb prior to his resurrection, she initially mistakes him for a gardener.

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herbes parasites qui mangent le blé. Il défendait une lapinière contre les rats rien qu’avec l’odeur d’un petit cochon de Barbarie qu’il y mettait”; 131.]

Valjean thus “out-gardens” Bishop Myriel, not only by playing the role of a Christ figure who actively disseminates useful parables but also by breaking down the restrictive limits of the garden’s traditional walls and flower beds. While Myriel confines himself in solitude to a small garden plot, Valjean adapts to his land and its great potential according to the needs and interests of his town’s citizens. II. Hugo and the “Tiers paysage” Soot, Beans, and Cabbages France’s most visionary poet, it turns out, did not shy away from getting his own hands dirty. Occasional passages in Hugo’s journal or correspondence during his exile in the Channel Islands reveal that he was a somewhat serious gardener (see Plate 11). Graham Robb accentuates this delightful disconnect between the persona (exiled Romantic hero) and the person (a Thoreauvian bean planter): “This inoffensive man, who walked along the beach in a sweater and a floppy hat … and planted beans in his garden which he suspected his neighbor’s geese of digging up, was busy writing one of the most savage collections of poetry in French literature: Châtiments …” (325). Contemplating his garden at Marine-Terrace in Jersey in 1853, Hugo anticipates current eco-gardening sensibilities. Preferring to let his cabbages run wild and thus nourish surrounding critters and plants, which in turn invites a full aesthetic and philosophical experience of the surrounding landscape, Hugo sacrifices the needs and wants of the human gut to allow nature to run its full course: “My cabbages, in gratitude, are paying me back for not having eaten them by filling my horizon with yellow flowers. All that is not flowering cabbages is the sea. That is my garden” [“Mes choux, reconnaissants, me récompensent de ne pas les avoir mangés en remplissant mon horizon de fleurs jaunes. Tout ce qui n’est pas choux en fleurs est la mer. Tel est mon jardin”; Choses vues (Things Seen) 845].19 A year later, Hugo goes as far as to suggest that the low and even nonexistent yield of food in his garden is more than compensated by silent contemplation: I am here, I have two chairs in my room, a wooden bed, a pile of papers on my table, the eternal chill of draft from my window, and four flowers in my garden that Catherine’s hen comes to peck while Chougna, my dog, digs the grass and looks for toads. I live, I am, I contemplate.

19

 In “To philosophize is to learn how to die” [“Que philosopher, c’est apprendre à mourir”], Montaigne valorizes tending his garden and raising cabbages over fretting about death (135). Montaigne’s essay, which would have been on Hugo’s bookshelf at Hauteville House (Barrère, Hugo à l’œuvre 69), abounds with citations from Lucretius’ De rerum natura.

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[“Je suis là, j’ai deux chaises dans ma chambre, un lit de bois, un tas de papiers sur ma table, l’éternel frisson du vent dans ma vitre, et quatre fleurs dans mon jardin que vient becqueter la poule de Catherine pendant que Chougna, ma chienne, fouille l’herbe et cherche des taupes. Je vis, je suis, je contemple”; Ibid 850.]

The Hugo of exile had evolved out of many years of travel, intimate interactions with landscapes, and an acutely burgeoning social consciousness that extended to the welfare of plants and animals. Alongside his gardening forays, the sea-battered yet temperate and lush landscapes of Jersey and Guernsey dramatically reinvigorated Hugo’s relationship to the environment (Barrère, Hugo à l’œuvre 13–24), at a time when he was thinking seriously about returning to the unfinished manuscript of Les Misérables (started in 1845). The force that results from this intense contemplation of nature paradoxically leads to a state of ecstasy that transcends the material world: prominently featured in Hugo’s William Shakespeare (1864), Lucretius is a “Pan” who has arrived at an “excess of simplification of the universe that is almost its passing out” [“excès de simplification de l’univers qui en est presque l’évanouissement”; OCL—Critique 270]. Knowing nature is to accept that we cannot fully know it, a postulation that allows Lucretius to make the leap from matter to void: “there must be certain seeds in common / To many things, mingled in many ways, hid from our sight” (984– 5). Likewise, due to his recognition that any given atom of nature contributes to a vastly larger economy, Jean Valjean’s patience and diligence enable him to produce fruit out of the most unforgiving plants in the enclosed garden at PetitPicpus: “Jean Valjean worked all day in the garden and was very useful there. … Almost all of the trees of the orchard were uncultivated; he grafted them and made them produce excellent fruits” [“Jean Valjean travaillait tout le jour dans le jardin et y était très utile. … Presque tous les arbres du verger étaient des sauvageons; il les écussonna et leur fit donner d’excellents fruits”; 449]. The garden, freed of its allegorical function and subservient role, now serves as a microcosm of creation itself.20 Foliis ac frondibus Just as his relationship with nature had evolved before he metamorphosed into a charitable mayor and father, Jean Valjean’s gardening practices also evolve as the novel progresses. After leaving the convent and moving into a hidden, abandoned home on the Rue Plumet in the faubourg Saint-Germain, Valjean gives up gardening altogether in order to let nature run its course and provide shelter from prying eyes. Aside from the vegetation’s practical function, however, the narrator’s description of this small, seemingly insignificant natural space at the periphery of an urban area points to twenty-first century garden discourses. The prominent garden designer 20  The paleobiologist Michael Boulter underscores how Darwin’s humble experiments in his home garden (micro) informed the entire science of evolution (macro).

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Gilles Clément noted recently that contemporary gardeners, having been marked by the “cultural shock” triggered by the relatively recent impact of ecology and civilization’s subsequent growing (if begrudging) acknowledgment that human beings are not masters of but participants in a natural environment, “turn their attention to the one who plants and valorizes what lives unaided, taking inspiration from its natural capacities to take care of itself” [“(portent leur) attention sur ce qui installe et valorise le vivant sans assistance, en s’inspirant des capacités naturelles de celui-ci à s’autogérer”; Jardins 37]. Elsewhere, Clément theorizes the “Third” space of the modern natural landscape, “a territory of refuge for diversity” [“un territoire de refuge à la diversité”; Manifeste 13], as forgotten gray-zone areas of land that have managed to efface the marks of industry or cultivation. Similarly, the marginal space of leaves and branches [“foliis ac frondibus”] in the Rue Plumet provides a salient example of nature’s vigorous regenerative function: “Nothing in this garden went against the sacred effort of things towards life” [“Rien dans ce jardin ne contrariait l’effort sacré des choses vers la vie”; 700]. Much more than a hideout from the police, this “plumaged” garden21 represents Hugo’s ecophilosophy and ecohabits of exile as a “Third landscape” [“Tiers paysage”] that mitigates and even eliminates human impact on the environment: “The indeterminate character of the Third landscape corresponds to the evolution permitted, in the absence of all human decision, to the ensemble of biological organisms that make up the area” [“Le caractère indécidé du Tiers paysage correspond à l’évolution laissée à l’ensemble des êtres biologiques qui composent le territoire en l’absence de toute décision humaine”; Clément, Manifeste 9–10]. After having been abandoned for many years, partly due to its discreet location but also due to the shocks and aftershocks of the Revolution, the garden is completely overrun, there is no trace of a lawn, and the fences, benches, and plaster pieces are no match for the spread of foliage and moss. Jean Valjean—who above and beyond all other characters illustrates an unrelenting capacity for transformation and adaptation—is on equal terms with nature and its creatures. He thus abandons his role as a cultivator and gardener and allows nature to run wild at his new house: “Gardening had left, and nature had come back. Weeds abounded, an admirable adventure for a poor corner of earth” [“Le jardinage était parti, et la nature était revenue. Les mauvaises herbes abondaient, aventure admirable pour un pauvre coin de terre”; 700]. Going well beyond Bishop Myriel’s humble gardening routine and demonstrating no desire to limit, confine, or exploit nature, Valjean exemplifies the utopian eco-ideal of a nature left to generate and regenerate on its own. It is hard to miss the urgent sexual language or the breathless pace of the cumulative descriptions as the narrator proceeds to describe this promiscuous garden as the ideal site for copulation: 21

 Incubation, a process that inspires patience and tenderness as nature is permitted to run its full course at its own pace, is the running theme in L’Oiseau (The Bird, 1856), Jules Michelet’s first foray into natural history that Hugo greeted with admiration (Correspondance: 9 May 1856).

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In the spring, this enormous thicket, free behind the fence and within its four walls, came into heat in the mute work of universal germination, quivered in the rising sun almost like a beast that aspires to the exhalations of cosmic love and that feels the sap of April rise and boil in its veins, and, shaking to the wind its prodigious green mane, dispersed on the wet earth, on the worn statues, on the crumbling steps of the house and out to the pavement of the deserted street, flowers in stars, dew in pearls, fecundity, beauty, life, joy, perfumes. [“En floréal, cet énorme buisson, libre derrière sa grille et dans ses quatre murs, entrait en rut dans le sourd travail de la germination universelle, tressaillait au soleil levant presque comme une bête qui aspire les effluves de l’amour cosmique et qui sent la sève d’avril monter et bouillonner dans ses veines, et, secouant au vent sa prodigieuse chevelure verte, semait sur la terre humide, sur les statues frustes, sur le perron croulant du pavillon et jusque sur le pavé de la rue déserte, les fleurs en étoiles, la rosée en perles, la fécondité, la beauté, la vie, la joie, les parfums”; 700–701.]

The rush of physical excitement only increases as the garden, making amends for human interference, expands easily beyond the rusty fence and produces a jungle of plants and creatures along the way:22 forty years of abandonment and widowhood had sufficed to bring back to this privileged place ferns, mulleins, hemlock, yarrow, digitalis, tall weeds, great plants with large leaves of pale green drab, lizards, beetles, restless and rapid insects; to let the depths of the earth emerge and reappear between these four walls a certain wild and savage grandeur … . [“quarante ans d’abandon et de viduité, avaient suffi pour ramener dans ce lieu privilégié les fougères, les bouillons-blancs, les ciguës, les achillées, les digitales, les hautes herbes, les grandes plantes gaufrées aux larges feuilles de drap vert pâle, les lézards, les scarabées, les insectes inquiets et rapides; pour faire sortir des profondeurs de la terre et reparaître entre ces quatre murs je ne sais quelle grandeur sauvage et farouche …”; 701.]

At once a study in poetic creation and natural evolution, Hugo’s micro macrocosm of a garden demonstrates boundless vitality despite the “prison” of its very small and marginalized urban location, thus serving to fertilize the plot and character development in the novel as a whole. Aside from its function of leaving every last vestige of the “ancien régime” behind, Valjean’s ecogarden also plays the critical role of allowing Cosette and Marius’s love to flourish as they conceal themselves in the dense growth. “Recycled” versions of Adam and Eve adapted to modern times, the two comingof-age characters have the rare privilege of experiencing a truly green nature. Cosette becomes a part of the vegetation, a flower not to be plucked but wafted: 22  In The Wild Garden, Robinson would lament the increasing trend for iron fences, which were replacing “living fences” (hedgerows); see Chapter 6.

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“Cosette was for him [Marius] a perfume and not a woman. He breathed her in” [“Cosette était pour lui un parfum et non une femme. Il la respirait”; 794]. Since this garden is immune to human interference, their love is consequently shielded from the seductive artifices of landscape architecture, decorations, or flowerbeds; in this prelapsarian ecological utopia, it is precisely because nature is free to be lascivious that Cosette and Marius remain chaste. Marius’s easy access to this garden paradoxically means physical distance from Cosette; anything more would amount to succumbing to the vices of materialism, or profiting immaturely from nature’s offerings rather than letting its processes incubate and contribute wholly and effectively to a universal dynamic of crosspollination: “At night, when they were there, this garden seemed to be a living and sacred place. All of the flowers opened themselves around them and sent them incense, while the couple opened their souls and spread them out in the flowers” [“La nuit, quand ils étaient là, ce jardin semblait un lieu vivant et sacré. Toutes les fleurs s’ouvraient autour d’eux et leur envoyaient de l’encens; eux, ils ouvraient leurs âmes et les répandaient dans les fleurs”; 794].23 Cosette and Marius are free to love each other, but possessing each other physically before their love has matured would be the folly of arrogance, like growing flowers in a greenhouse for the sake of luring customers, or snatching a young nightingale out of its natural habitat only to cage it at a Parisian bird market (Michelet 243–56). Within this enclosed microcosm with universal reach, where love inspires pity, nature knows no harm: “A ladybug crushed, a feather fallen from a nest, a branch of a hawthorn broken, moved them to pity … . The most sovereign symptom of love is a tenderness sometimes almost unbearable” [“Une bête à bon Dieu écrasée, une plume tombée d’un nid, une branche d’aubépine cassée, les apitoyait … . Le plus souverain symptôme de l’amour, c’est un attendrissement parfois presque insupportable”; 796]. Rid of the garden’s associations with materialism and fleeting pleasure, the wild ecogarden in Les Misérables instead fertilizes the inseverable roots of a compassionate and thus healthy society. If, as Clément postulates, the garden is a whole planet that needs to be sustained, then today’s gardener bears the responsibility of providing and conserving for all: “Right up until the twenty-first century, the gardener was the architect of the garden, the provider of flowers, fruits, vegetables, the one who prunes, mows, rakes, waters, and nourishes... Suddenly, here he is responsible for the living, the guarantor of a diversity on which the whole of humanity depends” [“Jusqu’au début du XXIe siècle, le jardinier était l’architecte du jardin, le pourvoyeur de fleurs, de fruits, de légumes, celui qui taille, tond, ratisse, arrose et nourrit... Subitement le voici responsable du vivant, garant d’une diversité dont l’humanité entière dépend”; Jardins 34]. The public garden thus continues to be a distinctly modern feature 23

 In stark contrast, Cosette’s seduced mother Fantine had taken part in an idyllic, Watteauesque daytrip to Saint-Cloud (a royal playground) as well as to Issy, during which her carefree group encounters the material pleasures of flowerbeds, boats, exotic plant curiosities, grottoes, and swings (I.3.iv).

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of contemporary society in how it has “opted to improve the ecological health of the planet, trying to educate the public to understand the nature and the complex relationships of humans to their environments” (Hunt 248). More often than not a hybrid space of nature and artificial construction because of our planet’s continual loss of natural terrain, the space of the modern garden effectively addresses our need to conciliate nature with culture. Accordingly, the small, discreet garden in Les Misérables is distinctly public and universal in that its flora and fauna perpetually strive to be Clément’s “planetary garden”: “Nothing is in fact little,” remarks the narrator while reflecting on the Plumet garden; “whoever is profoundly affected by nature knows this” [“Rien n’est petit en effet; quiconque est sujet aux pénétrations profondes de la nature, le sait”; 701]. In this second half of “Foliis ac frondibus,” added in exile and thus at the height of Hugo’s development of a visionary aesthetic, the atom of the natural world interacts with an infinitely generative moral philosophy: “A cheese mite matters; the small is big, the big is small; everything is in equilibrium by necessity; terrifying vision for the soul” [“Un ciron importe; le petit est grand, le grand est petit; tout est en équilibre dans la nécessité; effrayante vision pour l’esprit”; 702]. Hugo’s garden propels humanity forward by teaching it how to come to terms with its harmonious relationship to nature—a view that anticipates Clément in capturing the unsettling implications of this epistemological shift. The democratic space that all trees, plants, and animals enjoy in “Foliis ac frondibus” represents humanity’s obligation to love and to be united as fraternal citizens. Hugo’s ideal garden thus reflects the very identity of Les Misérables and its enduring appeal to a better human nature. Since each atom is part of a larger and more complex order, not one “bad seed” can be overlooked. Today’s gardener even considers weeds and native plants more crucial than flowers: “What we used to keep outside of the enclosure—the wild, the weed—infiltrates the garden today. It can even be its main focus” [“Ce que l’on maintenait autrefois hors de l’enclos—le sauvage, la mauvaise herbe—pénètre aujourd’hui le jardin. Il peut même en être le sujet principal”; Clément, Jardins 28]. And so, aside from the mythological characters, the twists and turns of the plot, the thrilling or utterly crushing scenes, the barricades, the sensationalism, the fantasies, and the countless editions, translations, films, versions, and stage productions that this novel has spawned, Les Misérables simply serves as a small, unassuming garden of weeds that continues to flourish and thus nourish our collective consciousness.

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Chapter 3

The Grotesque and Beyond in Les Misérables: Material Privation and Spiritual Transfiguration Laurence M. Porter

Like most other influential concepts in literary criticism, “the grotesque” has as many different definitions and adaptations as it has strong critics. To take only two sharply contrasting examples, the social optimist Mikhail Bakhtin describes it in terms of inclusivity, as an ebullient, carnivalesque, liberating, many-voiced crowd scene, whereas the social pessimist Wolfgang Kayser characterizes it as a mode of sinister exclusivity, as an alienated, uncanny, fantastic world that leaves little room for the comic (cf. Peyrache-Leborgne, 13–21). Albert Halsall steps in to explain how the concept seems to apply to Hugo’s work: “Hugo never clearly defines the word ‘grotesque’ … by it he means anything ridiculous, comical, distorted, physically and morally ugly, strange or monstrous” (66). But he thus leaves us with a static vision that omits the dynamic progressions evoked by Bakhtin and Kayser and that does not engage the clear implicatures of Hugo’s texts. All three definitions, however, can be subsumed under the sociolinguistic concept of the “marked choice,” which provides a valuable way of analyzing literary phenomena at every level. In terms of reader-response theory as applied to the grotesque, a marked choice would involve a violation of formal or social expectations through the inappropriateness or deformity of a represented person, image, word, or object; the incongruous juxtaposition of clashing elements; or both. Observing the behavior of a foreigner or a child, we cannot always tell whether they are making marked choices on purpose; but for the literary critic, a convenient default position is to assume that an author’s marked choices were deliberate until proven otherwise. So far, this discussion does not distinguish the grotesque from caricature or satire. And any generalization, closely examined, unleashes myriad exceptions, as if we had opened a Pandora’s Box. These “exceptions” demarcate a realm of artistic creativity. To help differentiate the grotesque from speciously similar modes of literary expression, we can turn to Albert Cook’s excellent treatment of the difference between comedy and tragedy. Caricature and satire, like comedy, neutralize and expel the fictional villain from society, so that all that remains is well, all those who remain in the storyworld are reconciled, and order is restored.

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The grotesque, like tragedy, unjustly sacrifices an innocent or partially innocent victim, leaving a world in which evil remains, and obliging us to appeal to a higher, supervenient order through which the scandal of the tragic sacrifice may be justified. This perspective illuminates the fundamental purpose of the grotesque in Les Misérables, as an unjustly neglected essay by Suzanne Nash did years ago. She integrated Hugo’s literature with Bakhtin’s theory, perceptively emphasizing the diachronic dynamism of Hugo’s social dialectic: Hugo’s concept of divinity was very close to Bakhtin’s own ideal of a generative world body. … In Hugo’s work all grotesque figures are themselves dialogistic, containing the sublime within them. … the grotesque points to the generative power within the material bodily world that, if not perverted by society, … will bring about the realization of the utopian condition. (5)

Her line of thinking can be fruitfully pursued. A “generative world body” is a panpsychic (or, in some versions, pantheistic) creation in which all living things contain a spark of soul that potentially connects them to all others, in a manner crudely analogous to the Catholic “Communion of Saints.” Oppressing one’s fellows denies and weakens this network of connections. Validating and respecting them strengthens it and hastens the moment when all will be reunited in Paradise (see the conclusion of Hugo’s “Ce que dit la Bouche d’Ombre” of Contemplations in OCL—Poésie II, 550–552). For all their crudity and violence, the stirrings of political revolution (the grotesque in history, where the order of things seems to degenerate into chaos) portend this moment. Like Melville, Dostoevsky, or Tolstoy, in his mature works Hugo is writing allegory, with both an individual and a collective anagogic dimension suggesting the soul’s, and society’s, progress toward spiritual perfection. In his view of the individual, suffering is a necessary but insufficient precondition for spiritual progress. It must be understood and transformed through a connection to God— through conscience (God’s voice speaking to humans) and through prayer (humans speaking to God). Without this connection, suffering remains—to those of us who have been spared from it—merely grotesque and repellent.1 Nor can any single virtuous act guarantee salvation: the struggle to achieve grace continues throughout life. No single human individual, unaided, can achieve grace; this feat requires the example and encouragement of others, living and dead. Without labeling this communion, Hugo nonetheless clearly depicts it as a Communion of Saints intervening to help sinners. Moreover, as Hugo knows, in history, and through no fault of theirs, the noblest heroes often appear at the wrong time; no isolated individual can permanently transform society; and no single generation can definitively implement social justice. Despite his exemplary service as mayor of M … sur M …, Jean Valjean arrives too early in the evolution of society to effect 1  In his short story, “La Légende de saint Julien l’hospitalier” (1876), Gustave Flaubert memorably illustrates the principle of spiritual redemption through embracing the repellent grotesque.

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lasting institutional changes. Both Bishop Myriel and Gillenormand fall short of a political ideal until they each learn, late in life, to extend loving acceptance to persons with political views radically different from theirs. Even by the end of the novel, Marius is not yet mature enough actively to serve a virtuous political cause (his heroic leadership at the barricade was motivated by a lover’s suicidal despair). Like Alyosha at the end of The Brothers Karamazov (1880), or Ladislaw at the end of Middlemarch (1871–1872), where George Eliot fudges by saying he “became a useful public man”, he represents only potential. The notion of the grotesque evolved throughout Hugo’s career. His Préface de Cromwell (1827) has sometimes been misunderstood as a departure toward a new Romantic aesthetic in French literary history, whereas it was actually a revival and fusion of two non-Classical tendencies: the Baroque and the SelfConscious Tradition.2 As Dominique Peyrache-Leborgne has demonstrated in her recent book, the grotesque has deep roots and a wide international canopy in Western culture. For example, it appears as Hell on the lower stage of French medieval outdoor theater; the upper level represents Paradise. Swarming devils busy tormenting sinners contrast with beatific saints in hieratic postures, who welcome the blessed to Paradise (see Frank). Frances K. Barasch identifies three types of the grotesque in a tradition dating back to Jacques Callot (1592–1635): the demonic, the realistic, and the fantastic (79). I would add that the first may combine with either of the latter two, as in Breughel or in Flaubert’s Tentation de saint Antoine (1874) respectively.3 The grotesque can appear in static, dynamic, or diachronic forms. Statically, it functions like a “beauty spot,” a dark, deformed or chaotic local image that contrasts with and thereby heightens the effect of its sublime ground. Visually, the static grotesque disrupts form by superimposing an excess of matter and negative physical attributes on individual human beings such as the monster, the giant, the jester, the fool, or the chameleon-like Thénardier. Such excess is a form of hypotyposis, a vivid description of the atypical and unprecedented. Consider, for example, the gargoyles on a church parapet or column (as in Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris); Yorick’s skull in Hamlet’s hand; the jester or fool as a companion to royalty (as in King Lear [1605–1606] or in Musset’s Fantasio [1834]); the dwarf in a Velasquez court painting; “Bug-Jargal,” the ugly name of Hugo’s idealistic, sublime African king; or the debased, defaced street-walker Fantine, whose virtue is unrecognized by society but whose every degradation secretly reflects her maternal devotion. 2

 For a helpful overview of grotesque characters in Hugo’s theater, see Sylviane Roberdey-Eppstein 283–366. Heike Grundmann offers a brief but pithy discussion of the Préface de Cromwell as a “cultural counter-code” (69–71). 3  For the history of the terms “grotesque” and “arabesque” since the Revolution, see Wolfgang Kayser 52–9 and 184–8. He sees the grotesque as referring variously to 1) the creative process; 2) the work of art; and 3) the reception of a work by its public (180). For background on the concept, going back to classical antiquity, see David Summers and Frances S. Connelly.

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As a rhetorical “figure of thought,” hypotyposis accumulates marked choices. It may describe either idealized forms (as in Flaubert’s description of the virgin Carthaginian priestess Salammbô descending a staircase toward the mercenary armies below) or defective ones, such as the enumeration of Quasimodo’s physical defects in Notre-Dame de Paris: deaf, lame, hunchbacked, and one-eyed. Hugo’s L’Homme qui rit (The Man Who Laughs, 1869) extends the hypotyposis of physical ugliness throughout the novel, transforming the mutilated face of Gwynplaine into an allegorical, outward, and visible reminder of social cruelty and injustice, which even a belated partial reparation cannot eradicate from his life. Containing a greater social density and richness than L’Homme qui rit displays, Les Misérables does not generalize with such sharp focus. Within the detailed physical portraits of Hugo’s greatest novel, he uses three major forms to create the grotesque effect: colossal bodily size, an excess of prominent facial features, or partial nudity as an objective correlative of poverty. As proof that Hugo’s imagination was haunted by such visions, consider the well-chosen sketches by him reproduced on the front covers of the three volumes of Les Misérables in the 1967 Garnier-Flammarion edition: Fantine’s bared breasts on vol. I, when her need to support her child forces her to work as a prostitute; Gavroche’s implausibly abundant hair, wide mouth, and broad chin (connoting his vitality, loquaciousness, and resolve) on vol. II; Thénardier’s bushy hair, eyebrows, moustache, and beard, and his caricatural nose and ears (connoting his keen powers of observation) on vol. III. His various crude disguises augment his inherent grotesque excess. But in terms of explicit verbal description, and with the exception of some members of the Patron-Minette gang, Les Misérables is less a freak show than are most of Hugo’s other novels, and the variety of its implications concerning social injustice is greater. Hugo spells this out in Book 7 of Part IV, entitled “L’Argot” (313–40). True slang, he explains, is a grotesque deformation of language used by the underclasses in order to: do battle against all those who are fortunate and entitled: a fearsome struggle in which, cunning and violent by turns, … the desperately poor assail the social order with the pinpricks of vice and the bludgeonings of crimes. To serve them in this struggle, they have invented a militant secret language for outlaws. [“entrer en lutte contre l’ensemble des faits heureux et des droits régnants; lutte affreuse où, tantôt rusée, tantôt violente, … elle attaque l’ordre social à coups d’épingle par le vice et à coups de massue par le crime. Pour les besoins de cette lutte, la misère a inventé une langue de combat qui est l’argot”; LMF 317.]4

Its very words are deformed, stamped with a mysterious, fantastic, and bestial imprint (320). “Slang is the Word made into a condemned felon” [“L’argot, c’est le verbe devenu forçat”; 330]. 4  Here and henceforth in this chapter, references indicate the two-volume Folio Classique edition of the novel (LMF).

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In contrast, the virtuous characters become spiritually refined through material deprivation and scrupulous suffering. Fantine’s major characteristic is being physically diminished and consumed by her poverty; to support her child, she sells her labor, then parts of her body (hair and front teeth), then her body as a sexual object (see Plate 9), and finally, she contracts tuberculosis and wastes away. But the thought of reunion with her beloved daughter transfigures her: “A mysterious unfolding of invisible wings, which were ready to bear her away, made her whole body tremble. Seeing her thus, you never could have believed that her condition was nearly hopeless. She looked more like a being that was about to take flight than one that was going to die” [“Toute sa personne tremblait de je ne sais quel déploiement d’ailes prêtes à s’entrouvrir et à l’emporter, qu’on sentait frémir, mais qu’on ne voyait pas. À la voir ainsi, on n’eût jamais pu croire que c’était là une malade presque désespérée. Elle ressemblait plutôt à ce qui va s’envoler qu’à ce qui va mourir”; I, 8, i, 380]. Hugo takes care to represent the moment of death as an apotheosis for the good characters; the evil ones simply disappear from the scene without a trace, with the exception of the double agent Claquesous—the police identity card found on his body reveals the inextricable tangle of relationships between law enforcement and the underworld, a connection that the moral absolutist Javert never understands. A similar rhetorical proliferation of privation in detailed descriptions of the poor person’s body extends to descriptions of what the poor possess: Hugo often enumerates their tattered clothing, their meager furnishings, and their Spartan diet to emphasize their limited possibilities and their makeshift way of life. Hugo distinguishes between the frustrated rage of certain have-nots, such as Thénardier, and the meritorious, voluntary ascesis of Myriel, Cosette, Marius, and the nuns of the Petit-Picpus convent. One can be physically a misérable (desperately poor) without being morally so (depraved). The virtuous pauper’s dwelling will be clean and neat; whereas the possessions of the “bad pauper” or “mauvais pauvre” (Hugo’s title for Part III, Book 8 of Les Misérables) will be messy and dirty. To underscore this contrast, Hugo arranges to have Marius and the Thénardier family living side by side, the only renters in a dilapidated building on the outskirts of Paris. The description en creux of Marius’s furniture and food consists mainly in listings of what he does not have, such as heat, soup, or wine; but he sweeps the hallway in front of his door (II, 5, i, 855). In contrast, the Thénardiers’ apartment is compared to the den of wild animals. When Marius discovers a peephole and looks into his neighbors’ room out of curiosity, he sees “un bouge” (hovel). Marius was poor, and his bedroom sparsely furnished, but just as his poverty was noble, his garret room was clean. The hovel he was looking down into was abject, filthy, fetid, putrid, shadowy, and sordid. The only furniture was a cane chair, a wobbly table, some shards of pottery, and two indescribable mats in the corners. The only light came from a dormer window with four panes, festooned with spider webs. … The walls had a leprous look and were covered with welts and scars like a face disfigured by some horrible disease, and they were oozing with a dusty dampness. Obscene charcoal drawings had been scrawled on them.

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Les Misérables and Its Afterlives [“Marius était pauvre et sa chambre était indigente; mais de même que sa pauvreté était noble, son grenier était propre. Le taudis où son regard plongeait en ce moment était abject, sale, fétide, infect, ténébreux, sordide. Pour tous meubles, une chaise de paille, une table infirme, quelques vieux tessons, et dans deux coins deux grabats indescriptibles; pour toute clarté, une fenêtremansarde à quatre carreaux, drapée de toiles d’araignée. … Les murs avait un aspect lépreux, et étaient couverts de coutures et de cicatrices comme un visage défiguré par quelque horrible maladie; une humidité chassieuse y suintait. On y distinguait des dessins obscènes grossièrement charbonnés”; III, 8, vi, 30.]

In a word, these creatures have fouled their own nest. Heaps of rubbish lie everywhere.5 They heedlessly embody the hypotyposis of filth. Then Marius’s eyes adjust to the dim light, and he perceives Thénardier seated at a table. He seems a grotesque animal-human hybrid of a vulture and a would-be shyster lawyer. Excess facial hair, partial nudity, and androgynous clothing add to his grotesque appearance. “He was dressed in a woman’s blouse that revealed his hairy chest and his arms bristling with gray hair. Muddy trousers and boots with holes in their toes stuck out from under the blouse” [“Il était vêtu d’une chemise de femme qui laissait voir sa poitrine velue et ses bras nus hérissés de poils gris. Sous cette chemise, on voyait passer un pantalon boueux et des bottes dont sortaient les doigts de ses pieds”; III, 8, vi, 33]. Bitterly resentful of the greater wealth of others, he grinds his teeth and intones his sinister leitmotif, like one of the devils in C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. “Oh! I could devour the whole world!” [“Oh! Je mangerais le monde!”; III, 8, vi, 33]. He has apparently already sold his daughters into prostitution; Hugo will later complete the frame of Thénardier’s story by anticipating his final incarnation as a slave-owner in America. The evil Thénardier lurks; his generous-spirited son Gavroche prances. Hugo possesses an extraordinary kinetic sensitivity, and one sees obvious opportunities in his prose for traveling shots, tracking shots, zoom-ins, and zoom-outs. Hugo explores the kinetics of the benevolent grotesque by describing the skittering, irregular motion of isolated, humble characters that distracts the onlookers, detracts from the dignity of more serious dramatis personae, and suggests an ironic, defiant, sardonic rejection of social order. In particular, Gavroche and his fellow street urchins serve as indefatigable eirons to complacent Parisian society’s alazons (see Frye, 39–41 and passim). Gavroche’s main features—aside from his general good will and rebellious mockery of society (his behavior demonstrates interpersonal relationships as they should be; his satire denounces these relationships as they are)—are his inexhaustible motion and verbal energy. Ever ready with a quip or slang that allows the verbal grotesque to elbow its way into the French language, Gavroche dynamically emblematizes in miniature the growing force of social change that will lead to a Republic, as he darts and dances around the barricade, 5  In the next scene, Thénardier will ruin his hovel even further, putting out the fire, kicking in the seat of his cane chair, and breaking a window pane to try to arouse the sympathy of a potential benefactor (Jean Valjean under an alias).

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defying danger.6 In his final, heroic act of scooping up bullets and powder dropped outside the barricade by fallen combatants, “He lay down, then leapt back up, hid in a doorway, then bounded, vanished, reappeared, ran away, came back, thumbed his nose at the grapeshot, while scavenging cartridges, emptying ammunition pouches, and refilling his basket with them all the while” [“Il se couchait, puis se redressait, s’effaçait dans un coin de porte, puis bondissait, disparaissait, reparaissait, se sauvait, revenait, ripostait à la mitraille par des pieds de nez, et cependant pillait les cartouches, vidait les gibernes et remplissait son panier”; V, 1, xv, 598]. At the same time, he sings mocking couplets until he finally is shot and dies. He seems the very spirit of revolution, in the sense of active defiance of the established order. Diachronically, on the level of political praxis, Hugo’s grotesque appears in the form of popular riots, insurrections, or uprisings, providing the minor term of a political dialectic that may either abort or lead to a full-fledged Revolution.7 His crowd scenes deploy dense accumulations of verbs of force and motion to suggest the vast potential power of the people, as yet diffuse and unfocused. In Les Misérables, see, for example, IV, 10, ii–iv, 399–418, “Le 5 juin 1832.” The ideal synthesis of this dialectic, Hugo believes, is the right to vote, extended to all: “The admirable thing about universal suffrage is that it withers uprisings at their root, and by granting the right to vote to insurrections, it disarms them” [“Le suffrage universel a cela d’admirable qu’il dissout l’émeute dans son principe, et qu’en donnant le vote à l’insurrection, il lui ôte l’arme”; 404]. (At the time—1832— only about 1% of the population—propertied males—could vote). The thesis of governmental “order” maintained by injustice and oppression provokes the antithesis of a disorderly, confused, suicidal riot or insurrection, which sometimes unexpectedly leads to a successful Revolution (itself always at risk of perversion and decay). Analogous to a chemical reaction, as Hugo observed in Notre-Dame de Paris, and regardless of the immediate outcome, “from every great upheaval of the people, whatever its cause and its aim may be, there finally emerges the spirit of liberty” [“tout grand mouvement populaire, quels qu’en soient la cause et le but, dégage toujours de son dernier précipité l’esprit de liberté”; 213]. However, the dynamic tension between order and progress, sublime and grotesque, never will be entirely resolved; history never will be closed.8 Yet Hugo avoids vapid optimism: like good, evil can be perfected. For example, Thénardier’s essence consists in malignant plotting to exploit others; in his entelechy, he uses Marius’s money to travel to America to buy slaves. Respectively, Fantine, Gavroche, and Thénardier 6  See Karen Masters-Wicks 83–114. And note for example the three-fold pun Gavroche hurls at a disdainful young woman in the street: “Mademoiselle Omnibus”: anyone who has the money can get into you and ride you. 7  Hugo makes fine but clear distinctions among the various forms of popular upheavals, in his chapter on “Le Fond de la question,” IV, 10, ii, 399–406. 8  See Kathryn Grossman’s rich synthesis (Early Novels) of the sublime-grotesque dialectic (notably 175–7), and Kayser, passim.

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play the roles of the victim, the adversary, and the tyrant of social exploitation. In contrast, Jean Valjean (like Saint John the Baptist) becomes the precursor of a more just age; his time has not yet arrived in this life. Hugo’s grotesque verbal portraits in Les Misérables—and they are numerous— can also function as structural elements: they may foreshadow the plot. In other words, they enrich a second reading as well as a first reading. Consider the downfall of the young working girl Fantine, an orphan or abandoned child with no known family and no last name. Her innocence blinds her to others’ malevolent grotesqueness, and to its menace. Within the sphere of her perceptions, Hugo’s descriptions are unheeded warnings. We first see Fantine at an outing of four women friends and their boyfriends. Fantine “was living her first illusion” [“était à sa première illusion”; I, 3, ii, 181] in loving Félix Tholomyès, whose first name is a sinister syllepsis: he always takes care of himself, but others who rely on him will suffer. Hugo portrays him as “a thirtyish debauchee, already showing signs of wear. Some of his teeth were missing, and he was becoming wrinkled and bald … . His youth, breaking camp before the appointed time, was making an orderly retreat, laughing all the time, and people couldn’t see through it” [“un viveur de trente ans, mal conservé. Il était ridé et édenté; et il ébauchait une calvitie … . Sa jeunesse, pliant bagage bien avant l’âge, battait en retraite en bon ordre, éclatait de rire, et on n’y voyait que du feu”; I, 3, ii, 184; my emphasis]. His incoherent, witty, sadistic harangue to his companions makes condescending, veiled threats to abandon the young women, threats soon fulfilled. Without Tholomyès’s financial support, and with his child to care for, Fantine desperately returns to her native village to seek work. Child abandonment is often the touchstone of immorality in Hugo’s fiction—all the more shocking because never punished (see Plate 12). On her way home, and knowing that she must conceal her child’s existence if she wishes to be considered morally fit to be hired, Fantine falls subject to an even crueler illusion—that of maternal solidarity. As she passes the Thénardiers’ tavern, with its sign representing the owner heroically rescuing a general on the field of battle (he actually looted the possessions of dead and dying soldiers), Hugo signals the sign’s deceitfulness to the reader: aside from the two figures, “the remainder of the picture was obscured by smoke” [“le reste du tableau était de la fumée”; I, 4, i, 210; emphasis added]. In Fantine’s eyes, however, Madame Thénardier, rocking her two little girls on a swing improvised from a heavy chain, seems affectionate. “If that squatting woman had been erect, perhaps her height and her colossal frame, fit for a circus strongman, might have scared off the traveler at the beginning” [“Si cette femme, qui était accroupie, se fût tenu droite, peut-être sa haute taille et sa carrure de colosse ambulant, propre aux foires, eussent-elles dès l’abord effarouché la voyageuse”; 216], but she remains seated. Once Cosette’s care has been arranged, and Fantine departs, Hugo quickly spells out the Thénardiers’ moral deformity with grotesque metaphors of dwarfishness, animality, and darkness. They are “stunted creatures” [“des natures naines”] with an exceptional propensity for evil, always retreating, crabwise, from the light into the shadows, and “becoming steadily more evil” [“empirant sans cesse”; I, 4, ii, 220].

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However, Hugo’s characteristic optimism can discern traces of providential action even in the belly of evil. The affected novelistic names of the Thénardier children, Éponine and Azelma, reflect a generalized, hidden democratic drift in culture: Today it’s not unusual for a cowherd to be named Arthur, Alfred, or Alphonse, and for the viscount—if viscounts still exist—to be called Thomas, Peter, or James. This shift, which labels the common man with an “elegant” name, and the aristocrat with a rustic one, is nothing more than an eddy of equality. … This apparent incongruity masks a deeper, wider phenomenon, the spirit of the French Revolution. [“Il n’est pas rare aujourd’hui que le garçon bouvier se nomme Arthur, Alfred ou Alphonse, et que le vicomte—s’il y a encore des vicomtes—se nomme Thomas, Pierre ou Jacques. Ce déplacement qui met le nom ‘élégant’ sur le plébéien et le nom campagnard sur l’aristocrate, n’est autre chose qu’un remous d’égalité. … Sous cette discordance apparente, il y a une chose grande et profonde, la Révolution française”; I, 4, ii, 222.]

Hugo believes that most people are often unaware of the way their political opinions gradually change under the influence of their milieu. Much later in the novel, Hugo returns to his theme of inevitable social progress by identifying Paris street urchins as the seeds of a future, militant People; revolutions are transfigurations, he adds, and “That crowd can be sublimated” [“Cette foule peut être sublimée”; III, 1, xii, 754].9 Behind the scenes of his novel, Hugo tirelessly loads the dice in favor of social progress. Jean Valjean and Thénardier comprise a contrasting pair of mythic characters with preternatural powers: Jean Valjean possesses extraordinary physical strength, but only when he uses it for the good. When he steals a loaf of bread, an ordinary baker can overtake and detain him; when he tries to escape from prison out of resentment, he is always promptly caught and returned to the galleys at Toulon. But when he escapes from prison to rescue Cosette and thus fulfill his promise to her dying mother, he succeeds. As for Thénardier, he possesses incredible persuasive powers, but only for the bad. As an innkeeper or a beggar— despite his systematic dishonesty—he is at best mediocre; nevertheless, in the service of evil he can convince the terrifying, merciless Patron-Minette gang to help him with a kidnapping-torture-ransom scheme that will net the others only about two months’ sustenance apiece if it succeeds; whereas Thénardier plans to keep for himself nearly all the ransom—enough to give him a modest independent income for life. Like many mythical beings in stories, he can consummate his moral vocation only “offstage” in another world, in America. Whereas the grotesque is a local phenomenon (although it can proliferate to take over entire works such as Flaubert’s Tentation de saint Antoine, Breughel’s 9  He had articulated this vision thirty years earlier, in Notre-Dame de Paris (213), and most comprehensively, in Le Rhin: Lettres à un ami (466).

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paintings, or Goya’s engravings), the arabesque is supersegmental, co-extensive with the entire text, and reflecting self-conscious artistic independence. It presents “a flexible, inventive mixture of forms that could transcend fixed genres” [“un mélange souple et inventif de formes qui conduirait à une véritable agénéricité”; Peyrache-Leborgne 268]. In the interpersonal moral sphere, benevolence corresponds conceptually to the bilateral symmetry of the arabesque (which coincidentally characterizes the anatomy of higher forms of life): do unto others as you would have them do unto you; the Golden Rule. Spontaneous acts of kindness, based on a character’s sense of a spiritual bond with others, are inspired by Hugo’s humanistic version of the (implied, not specified) Communion of Saints. Although Jean Valjean, released from the galleys after nineteen years, resents his excessive punishment and twice becomes a recidivist, he suddenly recalls Bishop Myriel’s recent exceptional kindness and mercy toward him; his horror at the beast within himself temporarily purges him of evil impulses, “as certain chemical reagents act on a murky mixture by making one ingredient precipitate out, thus purifying the other” [“comme de certains réactifs chimiques agissent sur un mélange trouble en précipitant un élément et en clarifiant l’autre”; I, 2, xiii, 171]. By using such metaphors of chemical transformation to characterize moral transformations, Hugo suggests that similar mysterious processes obtain in both the material and the spiritual orders, because God’s intentions and power operate everywhere. Analogous to chemical reagents, chance encounters with others in need can send the plot off in unexpected redemptive directions. In contrast, the moral grotesque is always evil, predictable, and impersonal, using others as means rather than ends, and cheating, robbing, and killing them at every opportunity, as part of the Hobbesian War of All against All. The grotesque opposite of benevolence appears in the pathological egotism of Tholomyès and his band of cynical sensualists who mockingly abandon their girlfriends, and in that of the depraved Thénardiers, who first abuse the child Cosette and then successively sell or drive away their own five children. Thénardier, a classic sociopath, lacks scruples and longs to destroy anyone he envies. As a failed innkeeper, he indulges himself in hateful fantasies where his wine poisons everyone who drinks it. He is so unfeeling that he does not recognize his own son Gavroche when the boy enables his escape from prison. And as soon as he has rejoined his fellow bandits outside the jail walls, he asks them “Now, who are we going to devour?” [‘Maintenant, qui allons-nous manger?”; IV, 6, iii, 311; see also III, 8, viii, 40; III, 8, xx, 89–92]. Unlike Thénardier, his moral opposite Jean Valjean, a sublime allegorical figuration of the pilgrim (see Plate 1), remains a realistic “round” character, who must struggle against vengeful rage throughout his life in order to merit salvation, “sufficient to have stood, though free to fall” (Milton, Book III, 97–9). To foreshadow in everyday life the eventual spiritual rewards of internal moral victories, Hugo initially evokes a more thoroughly idealized figure, Bishop Myriel’s sister. Her whole life was good works, he writes; she lived so modestly that she retained “hardly enough of a body for one to identify its gender; a little bit of matter that contained a glowing light” [“à peine assez de corps pour qu’il y

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eût là un sexe; un peu de matière contenant une lueur”; I, 1, i, 27]. In more detail, Hugo describes how Valjean’s future mentor, Bishop Myriel, has followed a similar path of actively charitable self-abnegation. A young man leading a dissipated life of pleasure, Myriel, like Valjean, loses his own family, but from political unrest. Being a member of the noblesse de robe, he flees from the Revolution into Italy with kindred “families of deputies, decimated, pursued, hunted down, scattered” [“familles parlementaires décimées, chassées, traquées, se dispersèrent”; I, 1, i, 35]. He has no children; his wife dies of tuberculosis; only his sister remains. Myriel charitably exchanges his roomy episcopal palace for the cramped hospital nearby; he goes without heat, wears patched robes, and donates reverse tithes so more than 90% of his revenues go to the poor. Knowing this, people begin to give their bishop alms, but the needs of the poor always exceed his: “So he gave away all that he had” [“Alors il se dépouillait”; I, 1, ii, 43]. Finally, he sheds his vestigial monarchist prejudices when he hears a compelling profession of faith and social conscience from a theist, republican Conventionnel,10 one of the men on the tribunal that had condemned Louis XVI. Near the end of Myriel’s life, when the bishop goes blind, this privation gives him a delightful foretaste of the afterlife. The constant, loving presence of his sister provides the greatest happiness and security possible in this life: “to feel all the more powerful as one’s strength fails” [“se sentir d’autant plus puissant qu’on est plus infirme”; I, 5, iv, 236]. As the allegorical undertones of Les Misérables suggest, Hugo’s link to his characters seems more often phenomenological (often unawares, they navigate a material/spiritual order similar to their author’s) than causal (when he needs them to move the plot) or proximate (when their life resembles Hugo’s or that of other people he knows). His allegory can even shape the novel’s chronotope. At the beginning of Part II, Book 5, the author digresses to recall the Paris streets and buildings he has longed for during 12 years of exile. Remembrance can extend the dimension of chronos—human, limited clock time—into the sacred, eternal domain of kairos, eternal time measured by values. Through memory, Hugo opens up a space within which salvation can emerge. He illustrates the difference between these two spaces concretely when Javert and his men pursue Jean Valjean and Cosette through the streets of Paris until the patrol reaches an empty cul-desac, while the fugitives climb a high wall and enter the infinite spiritual domain of a convent that will shelter them for years. Within this space, the demonic racket of the police outside is replaced by the kairos of the angelic voices of the nuns’ chorus, singing in perpetual adoration, “those voices that are no longer of this earth, and that resemble those that the newborn can still hear and that the dying hear already” [“ces voix qui ne sont pas de la terre et qui ressemblent à celles que les nouveau-nés entendent encore et que les moribonds entendent déjà”; II, 5, vi, 596]. In a significant correctio, Hugo specifies that Valjean and Cosette had 10  A member of the National Convention, the single-chamber assembly that founded the First Republic three years after the French Revolution. The Convention put King Louis XVI on trial for high treason, resulting in his execution on 21 January 1793.

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been led to this refuge by “chance: that is, Providence” [“le hasard, c’est-à-dire la providence”; II, 5, ix, 603], as Jean Valjean was earlier saved more than once from irreparable sin by “conscience: that is to say, God” [“la conscience, c’est-àdire Dieu”; I, 7, iii, 304]. Then Hugo in the role of omniscient author intervenes to coach us in how to contextualize his discussion of convent life that follows. “Besides, God has His ways: like Cosette, the convent contributed to maintaining and completing the transformation that the Bishop had initiated in Jean Valjean. … Cosette, through love; the convent, through humility” [“Du reste Dieu a ses voies; le couvent contribua, comme Cosette, à maintenir et à compléter dans Jean Valjean l’œuvre de l’évêque. … Cosette par l’amour, le couvent par l’humilité”; II, 8, ix, 724 and 729]. The convent setting literalizes the idea of a Communion of Saints. Later, elsewhere, and otherwise, through a similarly mysterious contagion of selfless kindness that, this time, is initially secular, Marius unwittingly transforms Thénardier’s elder daughter, Éponine, inspiring her with unrequited devotion for him. On his behalf, she risks her life to protect Cosette’s house from her father’s gang. When Cosette moves, Éponine informs Marius of her new location. Hugo’s brief description of how Éponine then appears to Marius, mixed with a heavy dose of omniscient commentary, economically reveals how material deprivation can second spiritual sublimation: “Strangely, she had become both more wretchedly poor and more beautiful, two steps it didn’t seem she should have been able to take. She had achieved a twofold development, toward the light and toward material hardship” [“Chose étrange, elle était appauvrie et embellie, deux pas qu’il ne semblait pas qu’elle pût faire. Elle avait accompli un double progrès, vers la lumière et vers la détresse”; IV, 2, iv, 185], similarly to Bishop Myriel, his sister, Fantine, and eventually Jean Valjean himself. Hugo says the same thing twice here to emphasize his theme that self-abnegation can produce spiritual growth. At last, behind the revolutionaries’ barricade, Éponine throws herself in front of a bullet to save Marius’s life at the cost of her own (IV, 14, iii, 501–2; see Plate 13). In a triumphant apotheosis, she explains to him that she had written a summons, supposedly from his friends, to bring him there to his death (because he is indifferent toward her and loves Cosette instead), but that she then wanted to die before he did. She has acquired faith in the afterlife; bleeding to death with her head on his lap, she says: “[W]e shall soon meet again [in Paradise]. People are reunited, aren’t they? … Promise to kiss me on the forehead when I am dead—I’ll feel it” [“nous allons nous revoir tout à l’heure. On se revoit, n’est-ce pas? … Promettez-moi de me donner un baiser sur le front quand je serai morte.—Je le sentirai” IV, 14, vi, 511]. Hugo does not contradict her. In an arabesque swerve back from the religious to the political, and without attempting to reconcile the disparate idealisms of these two spheres, Hugo then has Enjolras, a leader of the 1832 Paris insurrection, make a farewell address to his troops behind the barricade. He explains the world-historical significance of their effort, a material sacrifice of life itself, which will produce a posthumous, transcendent, albeit secular sublimation. He thematizes for Hugo: “A revolution is a toll we have to pay. Ah ! Humankind will be liberated, ennobled, and comforted!

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We are affirming that here on this barricade. … Brothers, dying here illumined by a radiant future, we are entering a tomb suffused with dawn” [“Une révolution est un péage. Oh! le genre humain sera délivré, relevé et consolé! Nous le lui affirmons sur cette barricade. … Frères, qui meurt ici meurt dans le rayonnement de l’avenir, et nous entrons dans une tombe toute pénétrée d’aurore”; V, 1, v. 567– 8]. With a characteristic inversion, after the resistance fighters have all been killed, and Jean Valjean has escaped unnoticed to carry the wounded, unconscious Marius out through the sewers (see Plate 5), Hugo comments that Parisians should not scorn their sewage: it could be transformed into fertilizer that could provide crops that would in turn nourish beasts and men: “This is the will of that mysterious Creation, which effects transformations on earth and transfigurations in Heaven” [“Ainsi le veut cette création mystérieuse qui est la transformation sur la terre et la transfiguration dans le ciel”; V, 2, i, 646]. This transmogrification, announced both on the fraternal and on the cosmic levels, then reappears on the individual plane. While rescuing Marius, Jean Valjean becomes cleansed of hatred for the young man who loves Cosette, and he is once again spiritually transformed.11 Javert, spared and freed by Valjean, has likewise been transformed; when he apprehends Valjean again at the sewer’s exit by the Seine, he takes Valjean and Marius to the grandfather’s house and disappears to drown himself, setting the escaped convict and the revolutionary free. But Jean Valjean must now undergo his most agonizing ordeal. Cosette’s love has been sustaining him for the last 10 years. Now she wants Marius as a husband (see Plate 14). Valjean has secretly removed all obstacles to the marriage. Moreover, his conscience obliges him privately to confess to Marius his criminal past; he does not wish to live in Gillenormand’s household, lest he someday be unmasked and disgrace Marius and Cosette by association. He does not realize that Marius thinks he had killed Javert out of revenge, and that the money Valjean gave to Cosette for a dowry was stolen. He refuses to spend it. He does not know he owes his life to Valjean, who gradually absents himself completely and allows himself to starve to death. Here Hugo strains a little when he tries to use Marius to suggest hope for the future of society and to dramatize the emerging collective soul of the people (cf. Journet and Robert, Le Mythe du peuple). To persuade us of Marius’s bright future, in Part III, Book 5, Hugo characterizes him with a rhetorical inversion: moral refinement attained by steadfastly undergoing material hardship. “Thus principled, elite beings are formed: nearly always a wicked stepmother, extreme poverty can sometimes be a spiritual mother, increasing the strength of one’s mind and soul. Hardship can nurture self-esteem; misfortune nourishes the great in heart” [“De fermes et rares natures sont ainsi créées; la misère, presque toujours marâtre, est quelquefois mère, le dénuement enfante la puissance d’âme et d’esprit; la détresse 11  Note the complexity of Hugo’s concept of redemption as the result of a lifelong spiritual struggle with one’s baser impulses, in contrast with the naïve Protestant fundamentalist trope of accepting Jesus as one’s savior and being saved once and for all.

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est nourrice de la fierté; le malheur est un bon lait pour les magnanimes” III, 5, i, 855]. Hugo develops this thought by tracing a path of meditative sublimation. The splendid thing about being poor during one’s youth, when it has beneficial effects, is that it focuses all one’s will toward striving, and one’s entire soul on aspiration. … Then [the young man] studies his fellow humans so closely that he sees their souls, and studies Creation so intently that he perceives God. … An admirable sentiment bursts forth in him; he escapes self-absorption while pitying everyone. [“La pauvreté dans la jeunesse, quand elle réussit, a cela de magnifique qu’elle tourne toute la volonté vers l’effort et toute l’âme vers l’aspiration. … (Le jeune homme) regarde tant l’humanité qu’il voit l’âme, il regarde tant la création qu’il voit Dieu. … Un admirable sentiment éclate en lui, l’oubli de soi et la pitié pour tous”; III, 5, iii, 862–3.]

But we must take Marius’s future transfiguration on faith. The open-ended conclusion reminds the readers that they too must assume responsibility for improving the world through social action, and discover their own path. As Kathryn Grossman explains, the transference of Jean Valjean’s social conscience to Marius matters far less than its transference to the bourgeois reader of Les Misérables. Indeed, she recognizes that “by restoring the lines of verse that had faded from the marker of Jean Valjean’s tomb, right up until the last line of the novel, Hugo compels the reader to gaze beyond the end of the text, and to discern there the Eternal Return that characterizes the movement of History as well as Jean Valjean’s journey” [“en reconstituant les vers effacés sur la tombe de Jean Valjean, Hugo continue jusqu’à la dernière ligne de contraindre le regard du lecteur à se lancer par-delà la fin du texte, à y discerner le perpétuel recommencement qui caractérise aussi bien l’Histoire que l’itinéraire de Jean Valjean” (“Nouer” 235). I would add that the latter’s very name signifies a Fall followed by redemption—an ever-recurring necessity for humankind in a fallen world. A final instance of the Archetype of Inversion whereby the grotesque becomes the sublime leads to the conclusion: an intended denunciation of Valjean becomes his vindication. Thénardier, the unwitting cause of Jean Valjean and Cosette’s union in the beginning, now becomes the unwitting agent of their reunion. He tries to blackmail Marius by disclosing Valjean’s supposed past crimes. Marius thus accidentally learns the truth about the ex-convict’s heroic, selfless actions. In the young man’s mind, “The convict was becoming a Christ figure” [“Le forçat se transfigurait en Christ”; V, 8, iv, 874]. Marius and Cosette rush to Valjean’s bedside to beg forgiveness. Comforted, Valjean confesses his faith in Christ and dies: but “[o]ne sensed that this particular corpse had wings” [“C’était un cadavre auquel on sentait des ailes”; V, 9, v, 884]. Call this poignant conclusion conventional or bathetic, if you will, but do not consider it in isolation. The thin, melodramatic frame of Les Misérables encloses a grand set of nesting thematic boxes (community, country, and cosmos)

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containing social problems and proposed solutions, national and world history, and a providentialist vision of a universe arduously but surely struggling toward a final resolution in organic unity. As in Doctorow’s Ragtime, the multiple parallel stories at first appear disconnected and arbitrary but are united through the motifs of grateful emulation and spiritual transfiguration, mediated through Hugo’s personal version of the Communion of Saints. Material privation, whose sufferers initially appear grotesque, offers believers the potential of spiritual transfiguration, provided they can escape the traps of self-pity, despair, and resentment. Overall, by flaunting deformity, the individual artist of the grotesque both defends and illustrates the imagination’s right to range freely beyond normative standards of beauty. From medieval religious sculpture to Breughel and Callot, and from the self-conscious tradition in Cervantes, Rabelais, and Shakespeare to Sterne, Diderot, and German Romanticism, the grotesque predates, competes with, and then supersedes orthodox Classicism. It pervades Hugo’s theater, much of his poetry, and all his novels. Supersegmentally, like Quasimodo’s skeleton entwined around La Esmeralda’s, the optimistic Romantic grotesque embeds idealistic visions of a future golden age of universal reconciliation within the realism of poverty, crime, hatred, and war. Such a description, however, does not fully convey the novelistic functions of Hugo’s grotesque in the corpus of his novels as a whole—that is to say, its role in an emplotted (connected, made both causally and thematically coherent) series of actions performed by characters. In a plot world composed of successive phases of stasis—disruption—restoration of order, the physical deformity of the grotesque figure (Han d’Islande, Quasimodo, Gwynplaine) provokes an aversive reaction in other characters. This template provides the basis for a richly diverse range of possibilities, of which several at once may be dramatized in the same novel. Sometimes they are hastily judged as evil, on the basis of their reputation (Jean Valjean) or political affiliation (the Conventionnel, Marius’s father), their name (Bug-Jargal), or their appearance. Sometimes their evil nature is revealed only after considerable delay, and by chance (Clubin in Les Travailleurs de la mer); sometimes it remains concealed from other members of a character’s society by moral complacency and blindness, by institutional insensitivity (in the prison system or in the church), or even by a character’s good looks (Gaston Phœbus in Notre-Dame de Paris; the Duchess Josiane in L’Homme qui rit). And sometimes, in various ways, an evil reputation can serve as a mask (a giant pretends to be Han d’Islande, who is actually a dwarf; the criminal gang leader Claquesous is actually a police spy, presumably profiting both from breaking the law and from helping to enforce it). Sometimes virtue itself becomes deformed through its own excesses (Javert, Claude Frollo in Notre-Dame de Paris). Sometimes an already virtuous character requires further spiritual enlightenment (Bishop Myriel, Jean Valjean, Marius). At the conclusions of Hugo’s novels, a hero’s apotheosis may be reported by a relay narrator long after the fact (Bug-Jargal—a device probably inspired by the example of Charles Nodier) or applauded by an admiring crowd (Quatrevingt Treize, or Ninety-Three, 1874). At other times, a false (socially sanctioned)

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apotheosis may be followed by an unrecognized true one (Les Travailleurs de la mer, or The Toilers of the Sea, 1866); or else only a few characters may witness it (Les Misérables), or none at all (L’Homme qui rit or Notre-Dame de Paris) In short, Hugo’s grotesque is a creative generative principle. It is akin to the unmasking literature of the Baroque, or the traditional comparison of Socrates to an ugly box that contains a precious ointment (wisdom). But the grotesque— like Bakhtin’s dialogism—cannot be circumscribed by theoretical speculation because, no matter how many existing examples we analyze, we never can predict a future work of art.

Chapter 4

“Eh bien, je suis une femme”: When La Misérable Acts Briana Lewis

In its landscape of complex male characters, the female characters of Les Misérables at first appear as stark sketches who remain more hastily explored. Even the most important among them seem to be mere signifiers of the Feminine, or a type thereof, driven by a single motivation: Fantine is the mother, desperate to nourish her child; Cosette is first the helpless child and then the idealized love object of Marius; Éponine is the unloved child of criminals whose adolescent love and jealousy drive her to self-sacrifice (see Plates 9, 12, and 13). All three are motivated by stereotypically feminine concerns—romantic love and maternity—whose universality may in part account for the characters’ iconic place in the popular imagination and in many adaptations, but which are not perceived to imbue them with the complexity of Jean Valjean or Marius. While, as Isabel Roche demonstrates, Hugo prioritizes “the transmission of a larger message” (11) over “the realist notion of the representable individual” in all of his characters, critics note his female characters’ passivity, objectification, and conformity to feminine stereotypes, beyond their “conceptual, nonpsychological function” (4). Nicole Savy writes that Cosette is “endowed with a particularly mediocre character; deprived of internal unity, of individuality, and ultimately of any interest” [“dotée … d’un caractère singulièrement médiocre,” and “dénuée d’unité interne, d’individualité et finalement d’intérêt propre”; “Cosette” 174]. Furthermore, Joanna Richardson likens Cosette, whom she calls “a pale cipher” (168), to many of Hugo’s other female characters. In Les Misérables, the alternative to this archetypal femininity appears to be its dissolution. Seemingly countless are the characters symbolically or rhetorically deprived of womanhood by age, suffering, or corruption: Mlle Baptistine’s thinness in old age leaves her “barely enough of a body for it to have a sex” [“à peine assez de corps pour qu’il y eût là un sexe”; LMPl I, 1, i, 5];1 Éponine’s difficult life, which she ends disguised as a boy, gives her the “voice of a drunk galley slave” [“voix de galérien ivre”; III, 8, iv, 751]; Madame Thénardier’s corruption is figured by hideous masculinization.2 Whether a “woman victim” or a “woman  All references to the text of Les Misérables are to the Pléiade edition (LMPl); part, book, and chapter numbers are included. 2  Claude Millet explores various forms that this dissolution of the feminine takes in La Légende des siècles, noting particularly a dissociation between femininity and maternity, with maternity passing to father figures (133), as it does to Jean Valjean in Les Misérables. 1

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myth” [“femme victime” or “femme mythe”; Lassegue 41], women in Hugo represent a double discourse on womanhood, “one clearly feminist, … that is, when his female characters are social types … ; the other idealist, … which rejects any realistic referent to project the character in the absolute” [“l’un nettement féministe, … c’est-à-dire quand ses personnages féminins sont des types sociaux … ; l’autre idéaliste, … qui rejette tout référent réaliste pour projeter le personnage dans l’absolu”; Savy, “Cosette,” 184]. A female character may be a model of a feminine ideal that is by definition a passive, objectified non-subject, or a creature so profoundly denatured as to no longer be feminine. Savy, perhaps the most vocal critic of Hugo’s treatment of women, argues that Fantine represents a “convergence” (“Féministe” 14) of these discourses, since her descente consists of a passage from one of these models to the other: from the idealized beauty, modesty, and dependence that first characterize her to the shameless prostitute disfigured by poverty and illness. What Savy does not explore, however, is that the placement of this convergence in the novel’s chief feminine personnage à thèse suggests that the convergence itself might inform our understanding of Hugo’s social statement on women. Indeed, criticism beyond Les Misérables, and particularly of Hugo’s later work, suggests that it might be read as an indictment of women’s status not only when they fall victim to la misère but, in fact, in either of these discourses. Danièle Gasiglia-Laster discerns an examination of the roles of women at the center of his play, Les Deux trouvailles de Gallus (1869; publ. 1881), and notes “a direct attack on the middle-class concept of marriage” [“une attaque directe contre la conception petite-bourgeoise du mariage”; 204]—a critique not of feminine misère like that suffered by Fantine at the end of her story but of the role to which she might have aspired at her first appearance in the novel. Charles Nunley reads in Quatrevingt-treize (1874) “a vision of the French Revolution according to which feminine values would be recognized as an essential component of the revolutionary process” (35–6). This vision lives up to the explicit call for gender equality that Hugo places in the mouth of his protagonist Gauvain. In this chapter, I examine the role of the feminine in the social and philosophical vision of Les Misérables through moments when female characters break out of feminine objectification to become subjects endowed with agency—particularly when they do so not by sacrificing their femininity but, rather, by grounding their subjectivity and agency in womanhood itself. Among les misérables, women are perhaps the most inexorably excluded, for their exclusion is based on the immutable fact of their gender. Through them, Hugo explores routes to subjectivity and agency available to all the disenfranchised, going beyond a call for equality. Instead he portrays the routes to selfhood that are cultivated within the male elite as inferior to the transcendent self available only to those excluded from that system, ultimately critiquing his culture’s basic concepts of subjectivity and agency.

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Selfhood, Subjectivity, and Agency Philosophical discussions of agency are complex and wide-ranging: the term has been understood broadly as the ability to move one’s body and act on the world, as well as more restrictedly, confined to actions involving intent, autonomy, and rationality. For our purposes, we will understand agency rather specifically as the power to undertake intentional action, or action toward deliberately chosen ends, involving the will and representing “one’s own power to choose,” for “an act’s source in the will may be thought to be what makes the act one’s own, an event behind which there lies one’s self” (Ekstrom 100). Such self-determined acts—those whose accessibility to characters deprived of subjectivity is most questionable—involve “our critical engagement with reasons, our evaluation of desires and courses of action with respect to worth, and our endorsement of some of them” (Ekstrom 104). In other words, it is rootedness of actions in the self that allows agency in the fullest sense of the word. We will therefore be interested in the participation of Hugo’s female characters in what Guy Rosa calls “the deliberationjudgment-will-action sequence” [“l’enchaînement délibération-jugement-volontéacte”; 1974]. The journey of an intention from its root in a character’s self and will to its effect on the world will allow us to better interrogate the nature of female subjectivity in Les Misérables. Among the novel’s misérables, and particularly its women, the precise nature of the self and will from which actions originate deserves examination, since they often appear not to act from any deliberate will at all. All of Hugo’s misérables are subject to portrayal as other than human, understanding and navigating the world, as animals do, by instinct; in just one example, during her altercation with Bamatabois, Fantine “let out a roar, turned, pounced like a panther and rushed at the man, digging her nails into his face” [“poussa un rugissement, se tourna, bondit comme une panthère, et se rua sur l’homme, lui enfonçant ses ongles dans le visage”; I, 5, xii, 198]. Beyond their animalization, the deliberation and judgment of les misérables belong more frequently to the irrational than the rational. France Vernier cites the famous chapter “A Storm in a Skull” [“Une Tempête sous un crane”], where, after 20 pages of internal debate before the moral dilemma posed by the Champmathieu affair, Jean Valjean “was no further advanced than at the outset” [“n’était pas plus avancé qu’au commencement”; I, 7, iii, 247]. Vernier explains that “the problem to be solved is not a problem posed to a character … it is the problem of belonging to the exploited class or to the other” [“le problème à résoudre n’est pas un problème posé à un personnage … c’est celui d’appartenance à la classe des exploités ou à l’autre”; 38]. Rational deliberation and resolution of a dilemma by a coherent subject, for which Vernier finds a paradigm in the famous Stances du Cid (1637),3 are inaccessible to les misérables and ill-suited to 3  Corneille, Le Cid, Act I, scene 6. This scene does in fact offer compelling comparisons with the dilemmas faced by Jean Valjean, Javert, Marius, and others—including, as we will see below, Éponine.

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their choices; Jean Valjean’s deliberation and apparent judgment (his departure for Arras) are separated by a dream. This process does not carry the negative connotation in Hugo that it might elsewhere; to the contrary, Bradley Stephens notes Hugo’s belief that “imagination, fantasy, and dream” play a “key role … in human endeavour” and that such processes give access to “the infinite from which we came” (Liability 53–4). According to Kathryn Grossman, whereas the novel’s criminal misérables are subject to a dissolution of self through its “excessive affirmation … whether through sheer ruthlessness or through the multiplication of aliases,” the selfsacrificing, saintly misérables exceed the bounds that a unified self would create: “through the transformational power of both empathy and metaphor, this can be that, the self can be another” (Figuring Transcendence 28, 118). While these processes make the autonomous, coherent self necessary to exercise judgment in one way or another incompatible with the misérable—and thus, as Rosa puts it, “A whole concept of ‘judgment’ and of the subject’s mastery of his acts is concretely rejected” [“Toute une conception du ‘jugement’ et de la maîtrise du sujet sur ses actes est ici concrètement récusée”; 1974]—they also suggest that something superior may lie beyond coherence and individuality.4 The inaccessibility of such a self to the novel’s misérables finds real-world explanation in the role of the self in post-Revolutionary France. Jan Goldstein shows the influence of Victor Cousin and his disciples, who, in the interest of quelling Revolutionary impulses, contended that: Political stability … required a different psychology, … a robust, active, unshakably unitary self … Their national educational program … routinized practices of introspection designed to ensure that students would directly perceive the activity of the self within them. … Because Cousin’s philosophy specified that only certain people had the intellectual gifts necessary to actualize the moi …, it established a hierarchy between the selved and the unselved. Based on class and gender, that hierarchy was then replicated and reinforced institutionally in the populations that were included in or, alternately, excluded from schooling … . (11)

The lack of stably unified selves among Hugo’s misérables is not a purely literary phenomenon; rather, it represents a real, historical use of the self to restructure society that developed the selfhood and “lively belief in personal agency” (Goldstein 11) of the male elite and excluded women and the lower classes from the process, leaving them among the “unselved.”5 Little surprise, then, that both selfhood and agency seem inaccessible to characters of any gender in Les Misérables. Their 4  Anne Ubersfeld sees a similar “fractured self” [“fracture du moi”; 16] in Hugo himself, arguing that it is a source of much of his literary work. 5  As Stephens has demonstrated, the philosopher Charles Renouvier set Hugo in opposition to the Cousinians as a poet-philosopher whose “unfalteringly subjective imagination” “restore[d] vitality to an increasingly sterile discipline [of philosophy]” (“Hugo and Renouvier” 2).

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lack is an extension of Hugo’s call for universal education, another terrible aspect of “the atrophy of children in darkness” [“l’atrophie de l’enfant par la nuit”; 2], and finally of the misère that is the novel’s central question. For les misérables “neither good nor evil is any longer possible” and they have “neither freedom, nor virtue, nor responsibility” [“ni le bien, ni le mal ne sont plus possibles” and “ni la liberté, ni la vertu, ni la responsabilité”; III, 8, iv, 752]. Still, some of Hugo’s female characters do manage temporary access to selfhood and agency; we will examine the cases of Fantine, Cosette, and Éponine in order to understand better the superior selfhood and agency that Hugo gives his misérables outside of the Cousinian system.6 Reflections: L’Avenir Possible and La Machine de Guerre Women’s passage from object to subject in Les Misérables comes, on two important occasions, through reflections produced by mirrors. Fantine is described as gazing frequently into her mirror when she is employed at Madeleine’s factory; Cosette, too, experiences a moment of self-revelation before her mirror, when she discovers her beauty and “notices that she is a war machine” [“s’aperçoit qu’elle est une machine de guerre”; IV, 3, v, 910].7 At the surface, this recurring image of a young woman admiring her own reflection does little more than reiterate the stereotype of female vanity, equating feminine identity with her body and agency with her physical beauty. However, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reflection as an optical, psychological, and metaphorical phenomenon had taken on a rich and complex relationship to identity and the idea of the self. In the British and German Romantic traditions, the word’s optical and mental senses become entangled. “‘[R]eflection’ links thought and reflexivity: it is thinking about oneself,” producing a result similar to the one the Cousinians intended: “we do not ‘start’ with a self and then at some point try the experiment of being aware of that self: self and self-awareness emerge as part of the same process” (Roberts, par. 3–4). As Frederick Burwick explains, drawing on examples from Coleridge, Lenau, Lamartine, and others, “Optical reflection becomes mental reflection. An image on the surface of the water provides the poet with another metaphor of perception and contemplation” (23), including contemplation of the self. Ideas about vision and perception in the period provide further insight into the act of seeing oneself. In 1710, George Berkeley claimed that esse is percipi, to 6

 Although they will not be the subject of this study, agency is not unknown among the novel’s minor female characters. Laurence Porter, for example, discusses the selfdetermined actions of the nuns of Petit-Picpus. 7  The violence implicit in the machine de guerre metaphor is foreshadowed by the child Cosette improvising a doll from a dagger, but thwarted by the use to which she puts her adolescent capacity for action—namely, her integration into a culture that must by its very structure render her passive. As we will see, however, this implicit violence reappears in Éponine, who intimidates six armed bandits at the Rue Plumet gate.

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be is to be perceived, a claim that Elizabeth Dolan summarizes, “because objects are collections of ideas … an object exists only in the mind that perceives it” (2). She cites this idea as an inspiration for British Romantics to “explore the creative ramifications of subjective perception” (2). This exploration was of course not unique to British Romanticism but, rather, inherent in the movement’s hallmark individualism and was pursued in a multitude of ways by the French Romantics, from Rousseau’s confessional and autobiographical writings to Gautier’s narratives of fantasy and hallucination. Dolan demonstrates that not only art but also medicine and philosophy of the period understood seeing as subjective in both senses: variable from seer to seer, and the work of a subject.8 By consciously engaging in the literal act of seeing, then, one could access this subjectivity; as Dolan puts it, “To see is to express the self” (13). Perception and contemplation bring the seen object into existence according to the point of view of the subject that sees it. In this context, the inherently reflexive act of gazing at oneself in a mirror becomes not narcissistic but foundational to selfhood—not just in the psychoanalytic sense that Jacques Lacan would draw out in “The Mirror Stage” but also as a figure of the subjective contemplation of the self that Romantics saw as constitutive of that self and that Cousinian education encouraged among the male elite. This is arguably the avenue to selfhood that is figured in Fantine’s and Cosette’s gazes in their mirrors. By being both the object of the gaze as well as the subject that reflects upon it and gives it meaning, the woman who peers into the mirror establishes her subjectivity, the first step toward agency. When Fantine is gainfully and honestly employed, in a surprisingly Lacanian gesture, she constitutes an idea of herself based on “her youth, and her beautiful hair and teeth” [“sa jeunesse, ses beaux cheveux et ses belles dents”] as she sees them in her mirror, and this idea allows her to imagine “the possible future” [“l’avenir possible”; I, 5, viii, 185] optimistically. Her mirror is associated with her ability to earn an honest living independently and to build this “avenir possible” from the opportunities that come with her legitimate income, including the right to a place in society. Cosette, too, by seeing her image through her individual, subjective perception, discovers an idea of herself founded in her beauty. She is surprised, in adolescence, to find an attractive face in her mirror, and the image causes her to reconsider her concept of herself, her status, and her place in society, particularly among other girls: “What? I could be like Miss So-and-so? … She returned to the garden 8

 In Paris hospitals, the turn of the nineteenth century saw advances in cataract surgery that made the restoration of sight and its accompanying adjustments in perception more commonly observed. One such experience in 1797 caused the observer to comment that the patient’s eyes, which at first saw only indistinct shapes, had not yet “received their education,” and so to conclude that it must be by touching objects that small children can “learn to see them” [“reçu leur education”; “apprendre à les voir”; Jauffret 13]. Hugo refers to this phenomenon in Les Misérables, saying of Javert’s “derailing” or déraillement, “He suffered the strange pain of a conscience suddenly cured of cataracts” [“Il souffrait les étranges douleurs d’une conscience brusquement opérée de la cataracte”; V, 4, 1349].

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feeling like a queen” [“Comment! je serais comme mademoiselle une telle! … elle redescendit au jardin, se croyant reine”; IV, 3, v, 910–911]. She perceives that power comes with her beauty; she invokes precisely the feminine ideal that most often objectifies female characters, paradoxically transforming it, through the subjectivity created by her gaze in the mirror, into agency. Unlike her mother, for whom the agency figured by the beauty in her mirror resulted from control of her destiny, Cosette’s awareness of her own beauty (see Plate 14) is itself the instrument of her new-found capacity to affect her world. Having discovered that she is a “machine de guerre,” Cosette can begin to wage war on the battlefield of the Luxembourg Gardens. In the parallel chapters that narrate Marius and Cosette’s first encounters from their respective points of view, military metaphors dominate the author’s descriptions of both lovers’ actions, but it is clear that Cosette emerges victorious. Marius “marched on the bench” [“marcha sur le banc”] where Cosette and Jean Valjean were seated with “a vague desire for conquest” [“une velléité de conquête”; III, 6, iv, 721] but was able to pass in front of her only after “a virile and violent effort” [“un effort viril et violent”; III, 6, iv, 722]. In fact, he is “taken prisoner” [“fait prisonnier”; III, 6, vi, 724] when, several days later, “War stirred deep within her. … Knowing she was beautiful, she felt sure … that she had a weapon” [“Un fond de guerre remua en elle. … Se sachant belle, elle sentait bien, … qu’elle avait une arme”; IV, 3, vi, 915], as she walked past his bench. Here, in contrast to her initial discovery that she is a war machine, she is described as having the weapon of her beauty, one which she, as a fully fledged agent, must decide how to wield. The image that she saw in her mirror leads directly to her capacity to act, to take initiative in her nascent relationship. Beyond Self-Contemplation But while reflection is a route to subjectivity and agency, for both the Romantics and modern theorists, it carries an uncertainty that it did not in the Cousinian articulation. Just as Lacan shows the subject’s recognition of itself in the mirror to be a misrecognition, Burwick highlights the Romantics’ representation of the illusory nature of what is reflected. The images in mirrors are, after all, only images. Hugo’s interpretation of this uncertainty of vision and reflection calls us beyond them, to a higher spiritual vision. In a manuscript fragment dated to approximately 1853 in which Hugo questions the nature of “the human self” [“le moi humain”], he cautions that “in philosophy as in cosmogony, the first immense difficulty that the truth meets is the all-powerfulness of optical illusions” [“en philosophie comme en cosmogonie, la première et immense difficulté que la vérité rencontre, c’est la toute-puissance des illusions d’optique”; Océan 31–2]. Beginning with the metaphorical example of Galileo’s heliocentric astronomy, in which the scientist’s discoveries meant that “evidence, the visible, the palpable, the human eye, … all that was mistaken” [“l’évidence, le visible, le palpable, l’œil

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humain, … tout cela se trompait”], Hugo then claims, “Man, for as long as he has existed, has been tricked, when it comes to the self, by the same optical illusion. This flesh and blood thing, this visible, palpable thing … that he takes to be the self, is not the self” [“l’homme, depuis qu’il existe, est dupe au sujet de son moi de la même illusion d’optique. Cette chose de chair et d’os, cette chose visible et palpable, … que l’homme prend pour son moi, n’est pas son moi”; 32]. The self, for Hugo, is not equivalent to the body, for it lies beyond the tangible world, but it is easily confused with the visible body because the visual provides, as in Ptolemaic astronomy, a compelling illusion. In his biography of Hugo, Graham Robb offers a possible explanation for this understanding of the visual, relating Hugo’s own literal vision to his “spontaneously metaphorical vision, the instantaneous translation of every event into an allegory of something else” (61). He suggests that such vision “normally … would be described as psychosis” (61) and that actual hallucinations brought on by opium taken in a cold remedy in 1825 may have inspired some of Hugo’s poetry (117), an experience that would certainly have contributed to both the power and the deceptiveness of vision that critics have seen in his work. Elsewhere, Victor Brombert expresses the “turbulence” of Hugolian seeing, as “the eye itself becomes a metaphorical abyss … where forms tend to vanish” (Victor Hugo 11), while the eye and the mind together make up a powerful instrument of what Michel Riffaterre calls “hallucinatory vision, by which Hugo sees and causes his reader to see supernaturalism, … ‘the part of nature that escapes our [sense] organs’” [“vision hallucinatoire, par lequel V. Hugo voit et fait voir à son lecteur le surnaturalisme, … ‘la partie de la nature qui échappe à nos organes’”; “La Vision” 225]—including, perhaps, the elusive idea of the self. Stephens explains that Hugo sees a creative force in “a poetic voyance that is at once perceptive of reality and yet visionary of something beyond it” but that he “emphatically implores his reader to be aware of the seductive dangers of our fantasies: … how quickly they can be distorted and disappointed in reality … lest [the daydream] become a destructive opiate” (Liability 54–5).9 In the context of vision thus understood, as both powerful and treacherous but always metaphysical as well as physical, simple visual self-contemplation becomes a meager tool for constituting a self. It is hardly surprising, then, that the selves that Fantine and Cosette construct in their mirrors ultimately fail; grounded entirely in physical vision and discounting the spiritual, what they see proves illusory. Because of society’s discovery of her illegitimate child, Fantine loses both her factory job and her ability to see herself as moral. She is then forced by poverty to sell the constitutive elements of her beauty (her hair and her teeth), and “she threw her mirror out the window” [“(elle) jeta son miroir par la fenêtre”; I, 5, x, 194], before turning to prostitution, 9

 Stephens explores Hugo’s thinking on such questions of “sight” and “insight” (Liability 55–6) through an examination of Hugo’s Proses philosophiques des années 1860–65, contemporary to the publication of Les Misérables, and states that they find particular expression in another female character: Déa of L’Homme qui rit.

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stripped of her agency. Cosette, having constructed her own self in the image of the usually passive feminine ideal, becomes less inclined to action as the plot progresses around her; the paradox of this ideal as a war machine does not hold. She must wait for Marius to find her in the Rue Plumet garden; she is unable, of her own accord, to change Jean Valjean’s plans to move their household to England; and she is finally cast in the passive role of la baronne Pontmercy who denies her autonomous selfhood by declaring to Marius, “I am Mrs. You” [“Je suis madame Toi”; V, 6, ii, 1397], and later asking, “Am I someone?” [“Est-ce que je suis quelqu’un?”; V, 7, i, 1425]. The Cousinian notion of self-contemplation as constitutive of a stable self fails Hugo’s female misérables in the context of the novelist’s Romantic vision, reinforcing Hugo’s indictment of the Cousinian system and of women’s place in it. La misérable must seek agency via another process. Éponine shares much with the mother-daughter pair that we have already examined; beyond their plot-based connections via the Thénardiers and Marius, “social destinies and physical suffering are exchanged between Cosette at eight years old and Éponine at sixteen” such that “it is in fact Éponine … who inherits Fantine’s social destiny in Cosette’s place” [“destins sociaux et souffrances physiques s’échangent entre la Cosette de huit ans et l’Éponine de seize … c’est bien Éponine … qui hérite, à la place de Cosette, du destin social de Fantine”; Savy, “Cosette” 175]. Furthermore, the illness that Fantine and Éponine share, tuberculosis, was seen by the Romantics as “a variant of the disease of love” (Sontag 20), and yet Cosette, heroine of the novel’s only true love story, is the only one of these women not to suffer from it—suggesting, perhaps, that her love does not participate in the self-sacrificial dynamic of the other two women’s passions. The rhyme—significant to the poet Hugo10—is after all to be found between the names of Fantine and Éponine, sisters in misère; Cosette is excluded from their sisterhood. However, an important distinction separates Éponine from these other two women: she is endowed with a far greater power than they are to act on her world and on the decisions and destinies of the novel’s other characters. Explaining Marius’s decision to risk his life at the barricade and Jean Valjean’s decision to flee Paris, the narrator declares, “Éponine had done everything” [“Éponine avait tout fait”; IV, 14, vii, 1170], attributing to her an ability to influence those around her that far exceeds Fantine’s or Cosette’s. Her influence is temporary; after her death, Marius is saved from the barricade and reunited with Cosette. Nevertheless, the impact of Éponine’s autonomous, willful action on the plot is considerable. She models a different strategy for accessing agency—one that, in belonging specifically to women and to the excluded classes, challenges the social order

10  Their names also rhyme with that of a third young woman—Hugo’s daughter Léopoldine (1824–1843), whose tragic death in a boating accident profoundly affected his subsequent writing.

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supported by the Cousinian idea of the self and transcends the Romantics’ parallel founding of the self in reflection. Like Fantine and her daughter, Éponine is seen at a critical moment gazing into a mirror. The mirror belongs to Marius, and she discovers it when she is sent to his room to deliver a letter from her father that asks for money and ominously promises, “My daughter will await your orders” [“Ma fille attendra vos ordres”; III, 8, iv, 751]. As Marius considers the suffering girl, she enters his room and examines his belongings. She notices the mirror, and the text takes care to record her startled “Hey, you have a mirror!” [“Tiens, … vous avez un miroir!”; III, 8, iv, 753], but surprisingly, she moves on without looking in it. Later that day, however, when her father sends her back to Marius’s room just before the ambush of Jean Valjean, her relationship to the mirror changes. Believing Marius to be absent when he is in fact hiding under his bed, she again makes herself at home in his room. Now, the mirror that did not interrupt her motion that morning interrupts it twice and retains most of her attention; her interest in her own reflection has been piqued. Unlike in the scenes of Fantine and Cosette gazing into their mirrors, we are not privy to Éponine’s thoughts in this moment, but the narrative does include another detail that initially seems out of place: “The sound of clanking metal could be heard coming from the next room” [“On entendait un bruit de ferrailles remuées dans la pièce voisine”; III, 8, xvi, 794]. We are given to believe that this is related to the impending violence, but its position, interrupting the narration of Éponine’s first gaze into the mirror, suggests a direct connection between the two—as if her view of her own reflection unchains her from the bonds of servitude to her father and initiates her for autonomous action. Indeed, before the end of the evening, she disobeys her father twice: once later in this very scene, when she tells him that she is looking under the bed for Marius while she is in fact considering her reflection, and later, when she leaves her lookout post during the ambush, a disobedience that temporarily defers her arrest and that may contribute to her family’s.11 The thoughtful reader or lecteur pensif that Hugo envisages can only speculate about this connection between the mirror and her autonomy, however; the narrator offers little account of Éponine’s thoughts. Her thoughts are in fact, throughout the text, more thoroughly obscured even than those of other female characters. It is not until after her death that the narrator divulges her motivations and reveals that nearly all of her acts were the result of deliberate planning, while her motives still remained in deep conflict. Her love for Marius is at once self-sacrificing and jealous: she strives simultaneously to protect Cosette and to separate her from Marius—the sort of classical dilemma of which 11  She is eventually arrested but soon released under circumstances that also suggest a developing agency of a different sort in the young woman. She tells Marius, “I hadn’t reached the age of discernment. I was two months short” [“je n’avais pas l’âge du discernement. Il s’en fallait de deux mois”; IV, 2, iv, 892], two months that have passed by the time she re-enters the action of the novel. From this point on, she has, at least according to the legal system, the capacity for responsible action.

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Les Stances du Cid serves as a paradigm. During the Champmathieu affair, as we have seen, Jean Valjean’s tenuously coherent self struggles and ultimately fails to follow this classical paradigm before making a “transcendent leap” in which he “bridge[s] apparently incompatible traits” (Grossman, Figuring Transcendence 145) to come to a resolution that lies beyond it; Éponine, when faced with such a dilemma, seems even further removed from the classical model’s quest for resolution. She is so thoroughly fragmented that she works toward diverse ends which sometimes dovetail but often conflict. Despite her conflicted will, however, the narrator makes it clear that this will is her own and that her equally conflicted actions—her protection of the Rue Plumet house, her encouragement to Jean Valjean to leave it, her failure to deliver Cosette’s letter to Marius, her urging Marius to go to the barricade, her self-sacrifice for him there, and her ultimate delivery of the letter—proceed directly from it, the fragmented will of a fragmented self. If other misérables’ tenuous hold on coherent selfhood and agency expresses a critique of an educational system that perpetuated privilege, Éponine’s capacity for action, despite her exclusion from this system and the selfhood it cultivated, questions the Cousinian route to agency more basically. Éponine acts deliberately on the conflicted will that is based in her conflicted self—conforming, interestingly, to our initial definition of agency. She does so, however, by circumventing the imperative of the “unshakably unitary self” (Goldstein 11) that Cousinians sought to develop—the same sort of self that formed the new basis for political stability, both reserved for bourgeois males in society and coded as masculine within the novel.12 Éponine’s agency is independent of any male-defined would-be prerequisites and can be read as subversive both from a feminist perspective and in the context of Cousinian policy. By eluding a route to selfhood that excludes her, Éponine accesses a transcendent selfhood that imbues her with more power even than that exercised by society’s powerful individuals. Her agency, in short, functions as a critique of their dominant concept of selfhood. Spirituality, Invisibility, and the Transcendent Self Where Fantine is a case study in the feminine ideal descended into feminine misère, and the suffering child Cosette matures into the very image of the Feminine, Éponine, despite her suffering, often falls outside these two discourses by becoming spirit; she is “more like a ghost than a flesh-and-blood character” (Vargas Llosa 83). When she comes to Marius’s room, she reminds him of the “shadowy shapes that pass through dreams” [“formes de l’ombre qui traversent les rêves”; III, 8, iv, 750] and moves around his room “with the audacity of a ghost” 12

 Grossman, drawing on Bachelard, explores the “structures of orderly, welldisciplined reasoning” (“Narrative Space” 101) that are associated with masculinity and with Javert before his déraillement—and are seen negatively, as insufficient to access the sublime.

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[“avec une audace de spectre”; III, 8, iv, 752]. Her visits to Mabeuf and Marius after the ambush and its legal fallout are described as “apparition[s]” (IV, 2, iii–iv, 886; 890), and Mabeuf, having told her that she is “an angel” [“un ange”] for helping him water his flowers, later wonders if she is a “spirit” or a “goblin” [“esprit” or a “gobelin”; IV, 2, iii, 889]. Agnès Spiquel associates Éponine’s conflicted actions and intentions with two other Hugolian female spirits: the daughters of Lucifer/ Satan in La Fin de Satan, Lilith/Isis and l’Ange Liberté, the first demonic, the second angelic. Like a spirit, Éponine also tends toward invisibility. Not only are her thoughts hidden from us as readers but she is also often physically hidden or depicted in shadow.13 For example, she waits outside the Rue Plumet gate in a corner where she “disappeared entirely” [“disparaissait entièrement”], remaining in this invisible position “for more than an hour without moving or breathing” [“plus d’une heure sans bouger et sans souffler”; IV, 8, iv, 1037]. She has nearly ceased to be a living being; since her existence has been reduced to its smallest possible manifestation, she is instead so terrifyingly undead that her voice frightens a passer-by. With the sense of sight invested, as we have discussed, with the power to constitute selfhood, willful invisibility like Éponine’s becomes a rejection of the authority of the would-be gaze, be it her own or that of others, and indicates different strategies for constituting the self, or even for refusing to constitute it at all. She is thus released from the imperative of a coherent selfhood by becoming other than human—not animal, but spirit.14 Through this supernaturalism, Éponine accesses a higher selfhood that transcends earthly power dynamics. As she defies the bandits at the gate, she tells them, “You are six; I am everyone” [“Vous êtes six; moi je suis tout le monde”; IV, 8, iv, 1042]. While this is literally a threat to summon “tout le monde” to her aid with her voice, it also “elevates her to a superior mode of selfhood” (Grossman, Figuring Transcendence 125). Being composed of a limitless multitude, however, this mode of selfhood is necessarily fragmentary and boundary-less, the opposite of the self that the Cousinians sought to instill in the dominant classes; it runs contrary to their social order by transcending it. Elsewhere in the manuscript fragment that we examined above, Hugo claims, “The human self is anterior, exterior, and posterior to life. … [M]an is a ghost. … Man belongs to a self that is not him” [“Le moi de l’homme est antérieur, extérieur, et postérieur à la vie. … [L]’homme est un spectre. … L’homme appartient à un moi qui n’est pas lui”; Océan 33]. In this way, the self is connected to the divine, which “suggests not a stable and singular entity, but an immeasurable and unfixed force” and “multiplies the elements of existence 13  This tendency toward invisibility is a characteristic of Éponine’s father as well, but in him it is sinister; it is from positions of invisibility that he commits crimes such as extorting Fantine (I, 4, i and I, 5, viii–x). The sinister male gaze from a position of invisibility becomes, in the case of Notre-Dame de Paris’s Claude Frollo, sexual voyeurism—a form of pleasure of which Hugo, according to Richardson, wrote from experience (48). 14  Fiona Cox (“The Shadowlands”) explores ghostly representations of other characters, notably Jean Valjean and the nuns of Petit-Picpus.

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into an inconclusive but interconnected plurality” (Stephens, Liability 49). By approaching the supernatural through the incorporation of tout le monde into her self, Éponine accesses this spiritual selfhood that transcends the individual. Critics have noted that misérable is frequently a synonym for mort-vivant in the novel, and Éponine’s spiritual quality places her among the clearest examples of this metaphor for social exclusion.15 The precariousness of her life figured in her ghostliness is a direct result of her gender, social position, and physical and emotional suffering. In addition to being near death symbolically, thanks to her portrayal as spiritual or undead, Éponine is so both medically, as her speech is interrupted at the gate by a cough that brings to mind Fantine’s, and chronologically, since she will sacrifice herself on the barricade two days later. Again at the Rue Plumet gate, she tells the bandits: This summer, I will be hungry, this winter, I will be cold. Are they kidding, these foolish men, thinking that a girl is afraid of them? Afraid of what? … What difference does it make to me whether they pick me up off the Rue Plumet tomorrow, knifed to death by my father, or if they find me in a year in the nets at Saint-Cloud? [“Cet été, j’aurai faim, cet hiver, j’aurai froid. Sont-ils farces, ces bêtas d’hommes de croire qu’ils font peur à une fille! De quoi! peur? … Qu’est-ce que ça me fait à moi qu’on me ramasse demain rue Plumet sur le pavé, tuée à coups de surin par mon père, ou bien qu’on me trouve dans un an dans les filets de Saint-Cloud?”; IV, 8, iv, 1042]

Proximity to death in this sense does not make any supernatural claims; rather, it is closely associated with hunger, cold, and girlhood. But as was the case when she waited in shadow and frightened the passer-by, her power is only increased by this state, for she is thus less susceptible to fear than a man might be. She suggests that womanhood and misère imbue her not with weakness but with a different sort of power than that of six armed men. She tells them, “There are six of you, what difference does that make? You are men. Well, I’m a woman. You don’t frighten me” [“Vous êtes six, qu’est-ce que cela me fait? Vous êtes des hommes. Eh bien, je suis une femme. Vous ne me faites pas peur”; IV, 8, iv, 1042]. Her femininity and their masculinity are presented in juxtaposition as matters of fact, stripped of the power/weakness connotations that they would normally carry, implying that there is a different, unique power in femininity that makes six armed men unable to frighten a girl.16 This surprising power of the female misérable, rooted in a precariousness that is figured by ghostliness, causes the bandit Brujon, “who was a bit of an oracle” [“qui était un peu oracle”; IV, 8, iv, 1044], to call off the planned burglary. While 15

 See, for example, Guy Rosa in the notes to his edition (1975), and Chantal Brière’s lecture, “Mourir dans Les Misérables.” 16  For readings of how this power has been represented in some of the novel’s screen adaptations, see Danièle Gasiglia-Laster’s argument in this volume.

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he does not claim that Éponine herself is supernatural, he associates her feminine assertion of power with a supernatural sign. Furthermore, after the repeated implication by Éponine herself that it is feminine misère that makes her fearless and intimidates the bandits, the subsequent chapter attributes this power entirely to her supernatural qualities. In a typically Hugolian series of poetic antitheses, the narrator explicates the scene that he has just described: Blood-drinking brutality, voracious appetites in search of prey, … see and sense with anxiety the impassive spectral shape that wanders covered in a shroud, standing in its vague trembling robe, and that to them seems animated by a dead and terrible life. … What comes from the graveyard intimidates and disconcerts what comes from the den; … wolves retreat when they meet a ghoul. [“La bestialité buveuse de sang, les voraces appétits affamés en quête de la proie, … regardent et flairent avec inquiétude l’impassible linéament spectral rôdant sous un suaire, debout dans sa vague robe frissonnante, et qui leur semble vivre d’une vie morte et terrible. … Ce qui sort du cimetière intimide et déconcerte ce qui sort de l’antre; … les loups reculent devant une goule rencontrée”; IV, 8, v, 1045.]

The animality of the “unselved” misérables of Patron-Minette, which does not fear the ordered selfhood of dominant society or submit to its laws, is subdued by the superior, transcendently spiritual self of la misérable. *** Éponine is among the most iconic characters of Les Misérables, thanks in part to her role in the novel’s adaptations, most notably the musical theater version (see Plate 8). Yet the appeal of this adapted character, particularly for young female audience members, lies primarily in the universal tale of unrequited love that forms her most superficial plotline. Despite the creative possibilities surrounding the invisible in visual media such as film and theater, this adapted image largely neglects a more profoundly appealing aspect of her young womanhood: her obscurity and mystery, her proximity to death and to supernaturalism, born of feminine misère, that both allow and require her to sidestep conventional routes to agency. By avoiding vision, Éponine harnesses the incoherent, the non-rational, all that is powerful—be it woman, misérable, shadow figure, or otherworldly phantasm—precisely because it remains unconstituted by sight. In order to attain this superior selfhood, Éponine explicitly rejects the singular, autonomous selfhood that Cousinian programs promoted among the privileged in favor of one that is loftier due to its “failure” to attain this dominant ideal. In contrast, Fantine and Cosette attempt to access coherent selfhood through optical reflection of their own images in their mirrors, figuring the self-contemplation encouraged among male elites by the Cousinian system. However, because this selfhood

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founded in physical vision neglects to embrace the uncertainty or potential of the metaphysical, it ultimately proves insufficient to secure their agency. The cumulative result of all three women’s attempts to access agency is a sharp critique of the Cousinian system and its notion of selfhood. Through Éponine, Hugo advocates for a higher, more spiritual idea of the human self, suggesting that society’s outcasts—its misérables and particularly its women—have a chance to access a supernatural force relinquished by those who embrace the dominant model, as Fantine and especially Cosette do. As women, conformity to such a system casts them in a role of permanent exclusion and unselved status, and as human beings regardless of gender, it denies them access to the powerful potential of true metaphysical vision.

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Chapter 5

The Dark Side of Les Misérables: Hunger, Desire, and Crime Philippe Moisan

Punctuated and illuminated by rays of light and hope, Les Misérables is an undeniably optimistic novel, one that clearly articulates Enlightenment ideals of perfectibility and progress, and revolutionary ones of political change. The forces for good and light can be seen in multiple ways—in the redemption of Jean Valjean, the political propositions of the amis de l’ABC, the rescue of Cosette, and, more generally, through the denunciation of injustices throughout the text. These political and social dimensions, in conjunction with multiple literary effects— such as Valjean’s escapes, the battle scenes, family dramas, the depiction of the underworld, or Marius and Cosette’s love story—have contributed immensely to the work’s unfailing popular success. And yet, despite the novel’s status as a universal cultural object, some of Victor Hugo’s contemporaries professed reservations at its publication that should not be forgotten. In the second volume of his biography on Hugo, Jean-Marc Hovasse sketches out the panorama of reactions to the work: Republicans George Sand and Jules Michelet were troubled, even despairing, over the predominance of the priest Myriel in the first chapters; for Barbey d’Aurevilly, the book was simply bad on all counts; Proudhon was scandalized by all the publicity surrounding the book’s publication; and Baudelaire, after having praised the first volumes, became likewise exasperated with the incessant hype and was also disappointed by the last sections of the novel (Hovasse, Pendant l’exil 704–16, 713–4, 724).1 Within this critical landscape, Alphonse de Lamartine’s detailed analysis, which he published in his Cours familier de littérature, is quite fascinating because it responds to the text in a different way. For Lamartine, Victor Hugo’s novel is above all “a poem of over-punished vices, perhaps, and of well-merited punishment” [“le poëme des vices trop punis peut-être, et des châtiments les mieux mérités”; 357]. Throughout his analysis, Lamartine describes a story that functions through a mode of violence, one that serves as an apology for crime and terrorism and that sets the stage for an ideological drift prefiguring a kind 1

 All of these reactions show the extent to which Hugo’s text occupied a central place in the ideological debate during the period following the failed republican revolution of 1848 and the foundation of the Second Empire. Les Misérables arrived at the intersection of various tensions and expectations, and readers interpreted the novel according to their own reading of history.

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of nihilism; in sum, he concludes: “[it is] a very dangerous book in two ways: not only because it makes the happy too fearful, but also because it makes the miserable too hopeful” [“un livre très dangereux de deux manières: non seulement parce qu’il fait trop craindre aux heureux, mais parce qu’il fait trop espérer aux malheureux”; 224]. For him, the true title of the novel should not have been Les Misérables; rather, as he writes, “it would have been better entitled The Culprits, and some [of those “misérables”] should even be called The Villains, namely Jean Valjean” [“(ils) seraient beaucoup mieux intitulés Les Coupables; quelques-uns même Les Scélérats, tels que Valjean”; 432]. Almost no one and almost nothing in Victor Hugo’s novel finds favor in Lamartine’s eyes, with the exception, perhaps, of the love story between Marius and Cosette, and under his pen, Les Misérables becomes, in the image of how he describes Jean Valjean, “a block of incorrigible vices, contemptible instincts, and ferocious brutality” [“un bloc de vices incorrigibles, d’instincts ignobles et de brutalités féroces”; 12]. Despite his excesses and occasional stridency, Lamartine’s analysis opens a series of perspectives that upend our typical reading of Les Misérables, which then becomes no longer just an epic of the human race and of progress, but also the story of characters and of humanity always at the point of self-destruction. In the end, Lamartine directs us to look at the dark and malevolent side of Les Misérables.2 This aspect of the text is of course evident in the themes linked to the character of Thénardier and to all the criminal fauna that congregates around him. The function of Thénardier and his acolytes is to pull the narrative constantly away from the ideal of progress; he is a source of inertia which, through his language (slang), the spaces he occupies (the battleground on the evening of Waterloo, the inn at Montfermeil, the Gorbeau tenement), and his different criminal activities, prevents the sublime from operating and brings the story toward the mire and towards the abyss. Kathryn Grossman shows how, like a vampire, Thénardier sucks the life out of his victims and contaminates them. In effect, it is partly because of her debts to Thénardier that Fantine tumbles into prostitution, self-destructs, and even self-dehumanizes (Figuring Transcendence 18–19).3 The same phenomenon reproduces itself at several other points in the text—for example, during the ambush of the Gorbeau tenement, during which M. Leblanc, a charitable bourgeois and one of Thénardier’s potential victims, is transfigured, under the malevolent influence of Thénardier, into a former convict, a beast, insensitive  For Robert Denommé, it is also necessary to place Lamartine’s reading of Les Misérables within the political context of the Second Empire, which saw a growing virulent opposition between moderate liberals, whose point of view is here represented by Lamartine, and both radical republicans and utopian socialists, certain of whose ideas are at work in Hugo’s text (218–9). 3  Lamartine had already signaled this image of Thénardier as a vampire: “The Thénardiers are human vampires” [“Les Thénardier sont des vampires humains”; 358]. For his part, Pierre Albouy, speaks of a blood-sucking brutality [“brutalité buveuse de sang”; Création mythologique 201] among Thénardier’s acolytes. 2

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to threats and torture (LML 640).4 In these episodes, Thénardier’s actions reveal the hidden, tainted, and dangerous sides of Fantine’s and Valjean’s identities. He thus has the skill of revealing the worst in other characters, of integrating them into his own value system; he is the predator who returns his victims to their own animality.5 In this sense, he has the status in the narrative of the ogre who insatiably swallows and then digests his victims, for Thénardier’s incessant urge to control and destroy resembles a beast’s voraciousness in devouring its prey. Furthermore, his crimes are often linked to a process of tearing something to pieces: through her successive mutilations, Fantine is in essence dismembered by Thénardier’s actions; and at the end of the attack at the Gorbeau tenement, Valjean is threatened to be “escarpé” (641)—that is to say, hacked to bits. Moreover, this voraciousness does not seem to have any limits, since it extends throughout the literary space, into, for instance, the very significantly titled chapter “The beast in its lair” (III.8.vi), where Thénardier says, “I could eat the world” [“Je mangerais le monde”; 592]. In this way, the insatiable drive to degrade, to destroy ideality, and to consume the universe shows that Thénardier is a deadly threat to the entire narrative architecture, which is, in turn, always on the verge of being annihilated by him.6 Thénardier’s status, and notably his prominence at certain moments in the story, reveals the extent to which Hugo explores not just notions of progress and social justice in Les Misérables but also the dark territories of humanity (see Plate 3). Thénardier’s voraciousness in effect allows us to glimpse the motivations of other characters, the flaws that they are made of and that are the source of their undoing. In order to understand how this theme of hunger works and all of its implications with respect to other major characters, it is necessary to undertake an archeological search of sorts in the works preceding Les Misérables and in particular in Claude Gueux, a short text published in 1834, which contains several links to Les Misérables. The most evident connection between the two texts is the similarity between the two main characters, Jean Valjean and Claude Gueux. Both are poor workers, responsible for families, forced to steal in order to eat, and imprisoned with a disproportionate prison sentence. On the whole, Claude Gueux puts into place all of the elements later developed in Les Misérables: the direct relationship between poverty and crime, the brutality of the prison system, and the blindness of Justice (and of society more generally) towards questions of 4

 All references in this chapter to the novel are to the Laffont edition (LML).  Isabel Roche demonstrates that the animality of the characters is not unique to Les Misérables but can be found in numerous instances elsewhere in Hugo’s works of fiction (82–3). Thus, underneath the Hugolian human hides a beast. 6  For André Brochu, voraciousness is a constant in the Hugolian criminal: “Every villain in the Hugolian oeuvre tends to be symbolically identified with a gluttonous monster. The villain is, ontologically, starving” [“Tout malfaiteur, dans l’œuvre hugolienne, tend à s’identifier symboliquement au monstre vorateur. Le malfaiteur est, ontologiquement, un affamé”; 95]. Thus, the dangerous classes in Hugo’s works are characterized not only by their violence but also by their voraciousness. 5

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social inequality. Yet, unlike Les Misérables, which treats Valjean’s 19 years in prison as an ellipsis (we learn notably little about Valjean’s daily life during this period), Claude Gueux examines in detail the conditions of the prisoners’ lives: the organization of the Clairvaux Prison, the daily work schedule, the workshop spaces, the prisoners’ diet, and the relationship that the incarcerated have amongst themselves. In a sense, the story of Claude Gueux illuminates the remaining shadows of Jean Valjean’s journey; it is therefore possible to read Claude Gueux as a text that makes explicit all that is not said and is repressed in Les Misérables. One of the central narrative threads of Claude Gueux is this prisoner’s relationship to another prisoner named Albin. Hugo attempts to mask or diminish the homoerotic aspects of this relationship, but it is evident that Claude and Albin’s affinity for each other contains a loving dimension—this dimension is borne out by the fact that the model for this character, the real Claude Gueux, sentenced to death in 1832 for having killed a guardian, had an erotic fascination with his fellow prisoners (OCL—Roman I: 947–8). Moreover, and here we find the theme of hunger again, the character is described as having an uncommonly large appetite: “Claude Gueux was a big eater. It was a particularity of his constitution. His stomach was made in such a way that food consumed by two ordinary men barely sufficed him for the day” [“Claude Gueux était grand mangeur. C’était une particularité de son organisation. Il avait l’estomac fait de telle sorte que la nourriture de deux hommes ordinaires suffisait à peine à sa journée”; 865). In prison, his appetite makes him an exception, an aberration, someone not like the others. His sentimental relationship with Albin, “a young pale, blond, fragile man” [“Un jeune homme, pâle, blond, faible”; 865) who approaches Claude in order to share his ration, is based on their mutual affection, certainly, but also on the fact that they share all their meals. When the prison director arbitrarily separates them, Claude suffers just as much from being separated from Albin as he does from not being able to eat his fill—his loss of Albin manifests itself in the return of his heightened appetite: “We are forced to say that the pain of this separation did not in any way change the somewhat unhealthy voracity of the prisoner. … He walked alone in the yard during recreation time, and he was hungry” [“Nous sommes forcés de dire que le chagrin de cette séparation n’altéra en rien la voracité en quelque sorte maladive du prisonnier. … Il se promenait seul dans le préau aux heures de récréation, et il avait faim”; 867]. When he explains his affection for Albin to the prison director, he emphasizes the importance of sharing food: “Albin shared his ration with me; I loved him first of all because he fed me, and second of all because he loved me” [“Albin partageait sa ration avec moi; je l’ai aimé d’abord parce qu’il m’a nourri, et ensuite parce qu’il m’a aimé”; 869]. Here, Claude very clearly expresses the correspondence between food and love; what is more, it is the act of eating together that generates their passion. In Claude Gueux, hunger, the sharing of meals, the act of swallowing, of absorbing food thus represents a way of describing the indescribably insatiable desire that he has for Albin. A clear pattern emerges with respect to the way Claude

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functions in the text: his never-satisfied voracity is a symptom of irrepressible urges that nothing can stop, neither the rigors of the penal system nor the withdrawal of the object of his desire. And this limitless desire justifies everything, including the most violent of crimes, such as murdering the prison director with an ax. The story of Claude Gueux highlights a narrative mechanism comprising three poles: hunger, desire, and crime. In this system, morality has no place; only the satisfaction of urges counts. The importance of this story for Les Misérables is that it dramatizes, in a sort of primal nudity, all that is not said elsewhere in Victor Hugo’s work. Like an origin myth that Hugo reworks and adapts, Claude Gueux can help us to better understand the characters in Les Misérables. For in Les Misérables, the image of this appetite, of this desire capable of engulfing the world, comes back recurrently in episodes that are not linked to Thénardier or with characters who have not yet come into contact with him. We can take, for example, the trajectory of Fantine, whose fall starts in one of the dining rooms in the Bombarda Cabaret on the Champs Elysées, when Tholomyès and his fellow students abandon her and her friends. In the space where they are eating, which is in fact also a bedroom “with an alcove and a bed in the back” [“avec alcôve et lit au fond”; 105], disorder reigns: “the four couples [were] sitting around a joyous jumble of dishes, plates, glasses and bottles; beer jugs were mixed up with wine flasks; not much order on top of the table, some disorder underneath” [“les quatre couples attablés autour d’un joyeux encombrement de plats, d’assiettes, de verres et de bouteilles; des cruchons de bières mêlés à des flacons de vin; peu d’ordre sur la table, quelque désordre dessous”; 105]. All of these elements indicate that there is a parallel action, in addition to eating, going on in this scene: that the visible disorder of plates, glasses, and bottles refer to other disorders, those that the narrator suggests with the expression “some disorder underneath.” As in Claude Gueux, this mealtime scene functions as a bridge to describe an unspeakable subtext about the characters, a way to pass from the public space of the dining room to the private one of the alcove.7 At the same time that she is a victim, Fantine is a character who evolves here within this space of intoxication, exhilaration, and desire. Her fall, which is starting to take shape, is thus not uniquely the result of mechanistic social processes but is also the product of human urges. Before she even meets Thénardier, before she is ever led into a life of corruption to pay off her debts, Fantine, along with her associates, loses herself and immerses herself in all possible pleasures.8 This libertine dimension of Fantine did not, furthermore, escape Lamartine’s notice in 7

 Grossman underlines the link between an insatiable appetite and desire in her analysis of Tholomyès, Fantine’s lover. In his speech to his guests, Tholomyès mixes metaphors of food and sex (Figuring Transcendence 71). 8  This analysis of a Fantine who loses herself to pleasure gives a new sense to the preface and in particular to the expression “the degradation of woman by hunger” [“la déchéance de la femme par la faim”; 2]. In this reading, hunger no longer represents only sensations brought on by a lack of food but also perhaps another sort of desire, the one in action in the Bombarda café.

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his 1863 analysis; in describing this scene as a debauchery, an orgy, he links the characters to their animality, calling them “males and females,” and he insists on the four women’s status as “instruments of pleasure” or, rather, as “sultanesses” who have been broken and corrupted by the students (15–16). Hugo’s Fantine occupies practically the same symbolic space as Sade’s Justine, since their two fortunes greatly resemble each other: the same alcoves, the same lost innocence, but as well the same self-delusion, the same loss of self in pleasure and intoxication.9 The same question of the insatiable appetite existing alongside a destructive desire can be found in Marius. Marius begins to exist within the sphere of lack and desire when he discovers the existence of poverty and its corollary hunger, that is to say, in the first months following his break with his grandfather, when he lives in extreme destitution. During this period, which occurs just before he meets Cosette, Marius also lives outside of the sphere of love. Although several young girls turn and look at him as he passes, Marius remains unmoved, even farouche, enduring remarks by Courfeyrac, who calls him Monsieur l’abbé, and spending sometimes “eight days avoiding women more than ever, young and old alike” [“huit jours à éviter plus que jamais les femmes, jeunes et vieilles”; 554]. The period of food shortages thus corresponds with a period of abstinence. Everything changes when he meets Cosette, when he is touched and troubled by her beauty (see Plate 14). After having watched her for several days from a respectable distance, their eyes finally meet: “The young girl passed, and in passing she looked at him. She watched him fixedly with a sweet pensiveness that made Marius shiver from his head to feet. … Marius was dazzled before these eyes full of rays and abysses. He felt a fire in his brain” [“La jeune fille passa, et en passant elle le regarda. Elle le regarda fixement, avec une douceur pensive qui fit frissonner Marius de la tête aux pieds. … Marius resta ébloui devant ces prunelles pleines de rayons et d’abîmes. Il se sentit un brasier dans le cerveau”; 561]. Marius’s feverish reaction shows that he does not exist completely outside the realm of desire. After this meeting, on the way back from the Luxemburg Gardens, he runs into Courfeyrac who invites him to dinner, and that evening “Marius ate like an ogre” [“Marius mangea comme un ogre”; 561]. As the narrator specifies a few lines later, “he was madly in love” [“Il était éperdument amoureux”; 562]. The following day, Courfeyrac invites him to dinner again, and Marius “ate even more than the previous evening” [“mangea encore plus que la veille”; 562]. The connection between Marius’s desire and his appetite is clearly established here; these two physical symptoms appear as two instants in the same process. His voracious appetite in the restaurant ensues directly from the amazement he feels from Cosette’s gaze. Even more interesting is his subsequent transformation: the young man who was ascetic, timid, the object of the female regard takes on the qualities of a 9

 Patricia Mines establishes the connection between Sadean and Hugolian themes in Hugo’s late novels: “the female characters of Hugo’s late novels mirror Sade’s Juliette in their derivation of sexual pleasure from their assaults upon males in their presence” (12). The homonymic and biographical closeness of the names Fantine and Justine suggests that this Hugo/Sade link exists in Les Misérables as well.

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predator by the comparison “he ate like an ogre,” or, in other words, he transforms into a monster who swallows his victims. Passionate love and its corollary, an appetite that has become abnormal, are linked then not to an ethereal and chaste sentiment but, rather, to a violent urge liable of swallowing, of destroying the other, the beloved. This entire episode reveals a subterranean part of Marius’s identity; just as a “Fantine-libertine” existed underneath the “Fantine-victime” at the Bombarda, here with Marius we see the figure of the ogre just underneath his status as a jeune premier.10 And this figure of the ogre closely connects that moment to the other figure of the predator in the text, Thénardier. With Fantine and Marius we can see another pattern in action in Les Misérables, one that shows that underneath the desire for progress and social justice there exists a parallel desire, a parallel impulse toward self-destruction or destruction of the other. This subterranean movement of the novel’s overarching concept, along with the incessant temptation or tendency to give in to one’s urges, is also evident in the central and emblematic character of Jean Valjean. And this is true even though his first appearance in the text occurs during a transitional moment between evil and good, when his character emblematizes the idea of recovery. Valjean is at first a threatening figure when he arrives in Digne one October evening in 1815 (see Plate 1); his meeting with Monseigneur Myriel in effect starts a long process of redemption that takes him to Montreuil-sur-Mer, and to the rescue of Cosette and Marius. From convict, he becomes a benefactor who sacrifices himself for others’ happiness. Yet the succession of events that take place in Digne also represents a relapse for Valjean; the stealing of Myriel’s silver, the temptation to assassinate his benefactor, and, above all, his attack on Petit-Gervais—all confirm that he is torn by competing urges. There is the Christ-like Valjean, the savior, and the Valjean inhabited by violent compulsions. Monseigneur Myriel’s sister recognizes this underlying wildness, this latent savagery in Valjean, as she describes his comportment at the table, “this man didn’t pay attention to anyone. He ate with the voracity of a starved man” [“cet homme ne faisait aucune attention à personne. Il mangeait avec une voracité d’affamé”; 64]. This brief assessment of Valjean accentuates his egoistic and impulsive side; the fact that he eats with “the voracity of a starved man” primes us for the silverware robbery that takes place later that evening and for the attack against Petit-Gervais the next day. It is, moreover, after this crime against a defenseless child, a gratuitous, almost sadistic act, that Valjean becomes fully conscious of the evil identity sleeping within him, and after having wandered for several hours he cries out: “I am a wretch” [“Je suis un misérable”; 90]. “Misérable” here is no longer meant in the sense of a victim of social circumstance but instead as an object of hate and contempt, as a predator and a figure of evil, the ogre always just about to destroy his victims. In this perspective, Valjean joins up with the other figure of evil in the text, Thénardier. Once again Lamartine’s reading of Hugo’s novel is instructive here, 10  Cf. Roche, who shows how Marius’s transformation does not occur uniquely in the realm of love and desire but also on a political level, as he converts from a royalist to a republican (96–7).

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notably in his perception of the wretched dimension of Valjean. Of course, Valjean’s theft of Petit-Gervais, and more generally everything that happens in Digne, signals the beginning of his conversion, and it is undeniable that the figure of the convict is erased by that of the savior. Nevertheless, throughout the story, and despite the fact that this is a conversion narrative, Valjean’s identity remains troubling and mysterious. In Montreuil he is the logical object of Javert’s suspicion, but he is also at the center of numerous local rumors, an enigma whom people describe as “a kind of adventurer” [“c’est une espèce d’aventurier”; 130]. Drawing on imagery of the bogeyman and the bandit, Guillaume Drouet notes how the character of Valjean is ambiguous. Drouet remarks that Hugolian writing is often polysemic when it comes to Valjean, for example, when he saves Cosette in Montfermeil. In this episode, during which Valjean offers Cosette a doll and also takes her away into the night, the image of Santa Claus merges with that of a kidnapper (Drouet 24–5). This double image of savior and criminal comes up again at several key points in the text: when being chased by the police, he takes Cosette through the dark streets in Paris; when he escapes from the Gorbeau ambush (which leads Javert to remark “that should have been the best” [“ce devait être le meilleur”; 645]), “best” here in the sense of best criminal; or the moment when he comes out of sewers, where the trajectory of his Stations of the Cross merges with Thénardier’s criminal itinerary.11 In these episodes of rescue, of passing from one space to another, the image of Valjean as a convict, as a criminal, is suggested subliminally by his relationship to darkness and to fleeing, and by his repeated textual proximity to Thénardier. Through this nocturnal lens and dimension another reading of Les Misérables emerges, whereby the text is not just a story of weaklings and victims but also is a narrative being shaped, in a subterranean way, by predatory characters and their urges. Two sorts of dynamic forces generate the text: on the one hand, there is an undeniable upward and transcendent trajectory, which lifts the novel toward themes close to the sublime, those of social progress or the redemption of Jean Valjean; and on the other hand, there is a descending trajectory, just as undeniable if we can judge by books entitled “The Fall” or “The Descent” and just as undeniable also by the presence of themes that constantly deconstruct the notion of ideality. This duality between the opposing forces of good and evil takes us back to the theory of Romantic drama that Hugo elaborated in the Préface de Cromwell (OCL—Critique). For Hugo, it is from this harmony of contrasts, from the union of the sublime and the grotesque, that modern genius is born (10). The union of opposites within a given text is thus for him a source of fecundity, creating new images and liberating new energies. In Les Misérables, the harmony of contrasts, the multiple and incessant combinations between good and bad, make 11

 Brochu signals Valjean’s kinship with Thénardier, calling him a “‘brother’ of Thénardier” [“‘frère’ de Thénardier”]; and throughout the novel, even during his acts of rescue or his periods of redemption, there exists “in Valjean the permanent possibility of the Mauvaise Action or ‘wicked act’” [“en Valjean la possibilité permanente de la Mauvaise Action”; 216].

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this text, in light of the Préface de Cromwell, a space of germination that fertilizes the radiant future dreamed by Enjolras on top of the barricade: “the twentieth century will be happy” [“le vingtième siècle sera heureux”; 941]. Notwithstanding these energies that are liberated within the text, certain characters’ compulsions, as we have seen, produce an inverse effect as well, a movement that deconstructs or unweaves the myth of progress. The interaction, the friction between opposites, between good and evil, transforms Les Misérables into a device that leads to fragmentation and generates debris.12 Take, for example, the story of Valjean’s first urge, the one that determines his entire novelistic trajectory: the stealing of the bread. This foundational crime, beyond leading to Valjean’s imprisonment, suggests the dispersal and the subsequent disappearance of his family: What happened to the sister? What became of the children? Who took care of that? … They left the country. The bell tower from what had been their town forgot them; the marker of what had been their field forgot them; after several years of absence in jail, Jean Valjean himself forgot. … Nothing more about them came to him; he would never see them again, never meet them, and in what is to follow in this sad and painful story, we will not come across them again. [“Que devint la sœur? Que devinrent les sept enfants? Qui est-ce qui s’occupe de cela? … Ils quittèrent le pays. Le clocher de ce qui avait été leur village les oublia; la borne de ce qui avait été leur champ les oublia; après quelques années de séjour au bagne, Jean Valjean lui-même les oublia. … Plus rien n’arriva d’eux à lui; jamais il ne les revit, jamais il ne les rencontra, et dans la suite de cette douloureuse histoire on ne les retrouvera plus”; 70–71.]

The primary literary consequence of Valjean’s crime is the rupture and then disappearance of this first family nucleus. All of the sketched-out potential of the sister and her children is erased by Valjean’s robbery. Valjean’s impulsive act starts a process of degeneration for the family, since, rather than creating characters, the text makes them disappear, producing absences and blank spaces. This first dismantlement inaugurates a series of succeeding fragmentations throughout the narrative: the group surrounding Tholomyès disappears after the scene at Bombarda; Fantine is separated from her daughter Cosette; the social utopia of Montreuil breaks up following Madeleine’s imprisonment; Marius develops as a character through consecutive separations; and the Thénardier family gradually dissolves. In all of these examples, the original group breaks apart, and the fragments are destined to disappear at some point in the text.13 The characters evolve in the narrative like objects, like debris resulting from a systematic shattering, from an atomization of the social body. The first book of  Cf. Françoise Chenet-Faugeras, “Du roman,” who discusses Les Misérables as being “the very novel of waste” [“le roman même du déchet”; 31]. 13  Roche demonstrates that this motif of disappearance occurs not only in Les Misérables but also throughout Hugo’s work (127–50). 12

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the third part of Les Misérables, the part that introduces Gavroche, is even entitled “Paris Atomized,” and the same reference to the atom comes back in Book 11, “The Atom Fraternizes with the Hurricane.” Both titles indicate the end of the fragmentation process, the moment when only the smallest element of the larger entity remains. For at the same time that he symbolizes the revolutionary ferment in Paris, Gavroche is also the ultimate atom, the smallest residue produced by this process of fragmentation: “In this present civilization, still so incomplete, it is no longer uncommon [to see] these fractured families emptying into the darkness, no longer knowing what has happened to their children, and symbolically disemboweling themselves on the public streets” [“Dans la civilisation actuelle, si incomplète encore, ce n’est point une chose très anormale que ces fractures de familles se vidant dans l’ombre, ne sachant plus trop ce que leurs enfants sont devenus, et laissant tomber leurs entrailles sur la voie publique”; 462]. Added to the break-up of families, we can also see dissolution, a loss of substance. Families are thus described as things that dematerialize and leave behind waste. The phenomenon of fractured families and separation is, of course, the result of a social reality that crushed and atomized poor and marginalized populations in nineteenth-century cities, but it is also a pervasive narrative device within Les Misérables, one that isolates characters from each other, sending them back to their atomistic state. Along with Gavroche, numerous other protagonists of the story are the product of multiple fragmentations, all expelled in some way from their original group, refugees from a familial, social, or political shipwreck and forced to exist on their own. The same applies to Valjean/Madeleine, Fantine, Cosette, Marius’s father, Marius when he is in the Gorbeau tenement, Père Mabeuf, Éponine, Gavroche’s two brothers, and even Javert. Beyond the destructive impulses and desires of certain characters, it is thus the narrative itself, through the repetition of the theme of separation, that generates the obliteration of the social, political, and family fabric. This drive towards fragmentation is not limited to the family or the group; it is disseminated throughout many levels of the narrative structure, and we can frequently see signs of its presence at key moments. When the narrator visits the battleground of Waterloo in 1861—an episode that not only recalls the end and the failure of the Napoleonic adventure but also announces the final moments of the novel’s composition—the only remaining visible signs of this essential moment in nineteenth-century history are broken remnants:14 “One can catch a glimpse in the ruined wing, through the barred windows, of the dismantled rooms of the main brick buildings; the English guards were ambushed in these rooms; the spiral staircase, cracked from the ground floor up to the roof, looks like the inside of a broken shell” [“On entrevoit dans l’aile ruinée, à travers des fenêtres garnies de barreaux de fer, les chambres démantelées d’un corps de logis en brique; les gardes 14  The ruin as symbol can be found elsewhere in Hugo’s work; Bradley Stephens uses Benjamin’s notion of the ruin to analyze how Notre-Dame de Paris “presents the text as a ruin, but also the ruin as a text” (“Reading Walter Benjamin’s Concept” 162).

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anglaises étaient embusquées dans ces chambres; la spirale de l’escalier, crevassé du rez-de-chaussée jusqu’au toit, apparaît comme l’intérieur d’un coquillage brisé”; 244]. What remains of the Napoleonic era only exists in a heap devoid of meaning outside its own physical deliquescence. The historic moment and space of Waterloo are described by a series of terms that highlight fragmentation: ruined, dismantled, cracked, and broken. Waterloo does not exist anymore; it can only be rebuilt or integrated into a myth by the narrative that follows, but in reality, according to the perspective of the visitor in 1861, only a heap of rubble remains. The passage of time and the process of dissolution make the reading of History nearly impossible. In the episode on the barricade, which is likewise the story of political failure, the same patterns are at play. If, on the one hand, the barricade is the undeniable source of a vital and revolutionary energy, on the other, it also sets the stage for a collapse. The barricade is in effect composed of objects found here and there in the road and also of dismembered elements of fallen neighborhood buildings. In the description of the barricade of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, which was built during the revolution of 1848, the architecture of the riot is presented as a practice and an aesthetic of destruction: Of what was this barricade made? Of the collapse of three six-story houses, demolished expressly for this purpose, said some. Of a prodigious anger, said others. It had the dismal appearance of all constructions made from hatred, from ruin. One could say: who built that? One could also say: who destroyed that? [“De quoi était faite cette barricade? De l’écroulement de trois maisons de six étages, démolies exprès, disaient les uns. Du prodige de toutes les colères, disaient les autres. Elle avait l’aspect lamentable de toutes les constructions de la haine, la ruine. On pouvait dire: qui a bâti cela? On pouvait dire aussi: qui a détruit cela?”; 926]

The barricade of Les Misérables (see Plate 15) does not seem to be the first building of a new system. A provisional monument, never complete, it intrinsically contains within itself, like the ruins of Waterloo, the signs of its own dissolution. The barricade is a ruin that nourishes itself from other ruins. It is a transitory monument in a greater movement of deconstruction at work throughout the episode: we thus move from the dismantling of the surrounding buildings to the creation of a bizarre and unstable assemblage, only to finish in the rubble that imprisons Marius and Jean Valjean.15 In fact, one of the principal functions of the text at this point is to produce ever-shrinking fragments. This fragmentation of space operates as well on the level of the characters, for the majority of the protagonists on the barricade are themselves caught up in this same movement of 15  Janice Best shows that the barricade, at the same time that it generates hope and brotherhood, is also the locus of a collective suicide (244). In other words, the barricade is a monument that symbolizes the inherent failure of political violence.

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disintegration: they are themselves ever-crumbling, always more disjointed living ruins until they disappear.16 The ideas, the systems, and the epics are thus, just like families and groups, atomized; both Waterloo and the barricade, by this process of fragmentation of which they are the object, and in their role as symbols of two major political movements of the nineteenth century—Bonapartism and republicanism— represent a certain pessimism in Victor Hugo with respect to the notion of historical progress.17 All the more so since, in Les Misérables, the ultimate stage of what we could call the disintegration of the historical process is not debris but excrement: Waterloo ends on Cambronne’s merde, while at the end of the barricade episode, Marius and Valjean escape by fleeing into the sewers. Hugo offers an explicitly positive reading of these two events: Cambronne’s merde and the Parisian sewers are presented as regenerative moments and spaces. Cambronne’s impertinence in front of all the European monarchies is what allows the Revolution to persist: “the man who won the Battle of Waterloo is Cambronne” [“l’homme qui a gagné la bataille de Waterloo, c’est Cambronne”; 271]. Later on, the link to the Revolution is explicit: “Cambronne finds the word of Waterloo as Rouget de L’Isle finds the Marseillaise” [“Cambronne trouve le mot de Waterloo comme Rouget de L’Isle trouve la Marseillaise”; 272]. The sewers, because of their ability to fertilize, and because they are a purification tool, are, to be sure, instruments of social and sanitary progress, yet they also signal, along with Cambronne’s merde, a more general process of decomposition. At the end of the battle of Waterloo, “when the smoke dissipated, nothing was left” [“quand la fumée se dissipa, il n’y avait plus rien”; 272]. And Hugo continues by describing the imperial guard that was under Cambronne’s command: “this formidable remainder was destroyed, the guard was dead” [“ce reste formidable était anéanti, la garde était morte”; 272]. After the bravery of the French cavalry and Cambronne’s popular impertinence, only nothingness is left. The section on Waterloo ends with a description of the scavengers and looters for whom 16  Jean Maurel identifies the barricade as a model narrative structure, “a formidable barrage by which literature violently rewrites itself in order to erect a monstrous complexity of words and signs, with its outer and closed façade simultaneously accumulating and crumbling, immense and infinitesimal” [“un formidable barrage par quoi la littérature se rature elle-même violemment pour dresser une monstrueuse complication de mots et de signes, la façade flagrante et fermée d’un entassement-écroulement, tout à la fois immense et infinitésimal”; 81]. 17  Victor Brombert speaks on several occasions about Hugo’s perspective on history. For him, in effect, “there is another constant running through Hugo’s thought, one that is more surprising than finding the horror of the executioner in the work of this visionary of progress, and that is his pessimism towards history—notably his conviction that history is violence and evil” [“il existe une autre constante dans la pensée de Hugo, plus surprenante que l’horreur du bourreau chez ce visionnaire du progrès, et c’est son pessimisme en face de l’histoire—et notamment sa conviction que l’histoire c’est la violence et le mal”; “Le Dernier Jour” 82].

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the battlefield is no more than a vast garbage heap, a kind of open sewer of the Napoleonic era: “The embankment of the track was full of horses and bodies inextricably heaped together in a terrible entanglement. There was no more slope; the cadavers leveled the route and the plain and came flush to the edge like a full bushel of barley” [“L’encaissement du chemin creux était comble de chevaux et de cavaliers inextricablement amoncelés. Enchevêtrement terrible. Il n’y avait plus de talus, les cadavres nivelaient la route avec la plaine et venaient au ras du bord comme un boisseau d’orge bien mesuré”; 282]. What we see here is a process of maceration, of digestion, during which animals, men, and countryside join together and become a common material. The description that follows makes this strange metamorphosis all the more explicit: “a pile of dead bodies in the top part, a river of blood in the lower part” [“Un tas de morts dans la partie haute, une rivière de sang dans la partie basse”; 282]. In two phrase segments, we pass from the description of dead heroes in the “top part” to the insignificance of a bodily fluid in the “low part.” This passage points to what Victor Brombert calls the liquefaction of the landscapes and characters of the Battle of Waterloo; it is indeed the mud of Waterloo, more so than Wellington, that disintegrates, digests, and dissolves all the glory of the first Empire, now rendered to the status of a bodily discharge, indeed to the wretched vicinity of excrement.18 The Napoleonic epic certainly produces heroes and a mythology in the images of its long digression on Waterloo, but it also leaves behind a field of debris about to be recovered and recycled by the garbage collectors of the battlefields and of History, like Thénardier saving Marius’s father. Both on a historical level and from a narrative point of view, the conclusions of the Waterloo episode and the episode of the barricade signal two essential moments for comprehending nineteenth-century history and Hugo’s novel. From a historical perspective, Waterloo announces the completion of a revolutionary cycle in France, put to an end by European monarchies; at the same time, the barricade symbolizes the revolutionary ferment that traversed a large part of the century, reaching its peak with the Revolution of 1848 and its resulting disenchantments. These two cases reveal a historical failure. On a narrative level, Waterloo concludes a cycle of catastrophes, failures, dispersals, and disappearances. Beyond its status as a textual digression, Waterloo—and, more specifically, the final descriptions of the decimated cuirassiers, the heaps of bodies, and the blood that flows on the road— also symbolizes the fate of Valjean’s nephews, the lost futures of Petit-Gervais, Fantine, and Cosette, and the end of the social utopia of Montreuil in the first part of the novel. The barricade reveals as well the end of a narrative cycle with the disappearance of all the characters linked to themes related to the social question. These two central turning points in the novel are controlled by one character: Thénardier. Within both of these spaces it is he who, in effect, moves the narrative forward; it is he who in part enables what happens next. By saving Pontmercy at 18  Cf. Brombert, Visionary Novel 92–3. For Brombert, Waterloo in Les Misérables also marks the moment where European history no longer takes place on the battlefield (Ibid 97–101). Napoléon the warrior leaves his place, in the end, to Madeleine the industrialist.

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Waterloo, he lays the foundation of Marius’s biography—his relationship with his father and with his grandfather, his encounter with the friends of the ABC and with Cosette, his lodging in the Gorbeau tenement, and his presence on the barricade.19 And in opening the gate of the sewer, Thénardier unleashes the events of the denouement: Javert’s suicide, Marius and Cosette’s marriage, and Valjean’s fade-out. Thénardier is thus symbolically the one who controls whole sections of the story. After the episode at Waterloo, he is the battlefield looter, the looter of history who transforms and contaminates the Napoleonic epic with, for example, his pictorial representation of the battle, The Sergeant of Waterloo, or with the blurred lines between good and evil. It is in part because of this ambiguity that Marius hesitates in calling the police during the ambush of the Gorbeau tenement, for he does not know whether he should send the hero who saved his father to prison or arrest the thug who attacked Cosette’s father. In the structure of the story, the end of the part on Waterloo and the beginning of the following chapter, “Number 24601 Becomes Number 9430,” is the first moment of contact between Thénardier the looter about to invent his own heroic mythology and Valjean/Madeleine, the fallen industrialist once again a convict. This first crossing of these characters’ respective itineraries places Valjean and all of his following actions, notably the rescue and education of Cosette, within Thénardier’s evil shadow. After the episode at the barricade, and after the journey through the sewer, when Valjean and Marius are blocked, it is again Thénardier who makes the passage to the end of the novel possible, as he holds the key to open the gate. Thénardier’s key here, even more than being a physical object that unblocks Valjean and Marius’s trajectory, symbolizes the role of Thénardier in Les Misérables. He is the narrative authority that controls the important intersections of the story, and, in this way, the novel remains to a large extent under his influence. For if Valjean possesses Monseigneur Myriel’s candlesticks—a guiding light that illuminates the story, transcending all suffering and redeeming souls—Thénardier possesses the key that controls almost everyone’s destiny and that prevents transcendence and complete liberation. He is the obscure and subterranean force constantly pulling Les Misérables towards material inertia and compulsions. The universal appeal of Les Misérables resides, no doubt, in its presentation of humanity’s march towards progress and social justice, but an undeniable and powerful darkness permeates Hugo’s epic, creating a subversive, subterranean textual space in which the forces of hunger, desire, and crime dominate. This rarely explored area of the text shows that Hugo also envisages history as a process that deconstructs or, to borrow Thénardier’s words, that eats the world.

19  This analysis joins up with Brombert’s on the narrative role played by Thénardier, especially with respect to his meeting with Pontmercy on the battlefield that prepares “for the conjunction in love of Cosette and Marius” (Visionary Novel 88).

PART 2 Receptions and Adaptations

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Chapter 6

Homeric Variations: From Les Misérables to the nouveau roman Fiona Cox

When Hugo traveled to the site of Waterloo seeking inspiration for the final stages of Les Misérables, he was acutely aware of what it meant to be drawing from this lieu de mémoire. In Les Misérables he transfigures the site of the battle, so that it is haunted not only by the mythology it possessed within France’s collective memory but also by the ghosts of the mythical epic warriors whom Hugo invoked to people his vision. In the summer of 1861 he wrote to his son François-Victor: “And so I have come to study this adventure on the ground and to pit the legend against reality. What I will say will be true. Of course it will only be my sense of what’s true. But each of us can only give his version of reality. Furthermore, I cannot think of anything more moving than wandering through this benighted plain” [“Je suis donc venu étudier cette aventure sur le terrain, et confronter la légende avec la réalité. Ce que je dirai sera vrai. Ce ne sera sans doute que mon vrai à moi. Mais chacun ne peut donner que la réalité qu’il a. Du reste, je ne sache rien de plus émouvant que la flânerie dans ce champ sinistre”; OCM XII, 1117]. This legend of Waterloo that Hugo has travelled to scrutinize is, of course, part of the myth of French national identity. It is a tale told and retold, refashioned and reworked so that it can be accommodated as comfortably as possible within the national memory. As such it becomes integral to Hugo’s ambition to write the supreme epic of France, a literary monument in which the French could find reflections of and on their individual and collective stories both within and beyond Hugo’s lifetime.1 While there had been various attempts in French literary history to pen an epic that would consolidate and celebrate a national identity, most notably Ronsard’s unfinished La Franciade (1572) and Voltaire’s La Henriade (1723), the French nevertheless continued to feel that a national epic was a palpable gap in the literary landscape. In a review of Alexandre Soumet’s Divine Épopée (1840), Théophile Gautier observed that it was “a commendable effort to 1

 Mikhaïl Bakhtin identifies the construction of national memory and identity as one of the constitutive features of the epic genre: “The epic as a genre in its own right may, for our purposes, be characterized by three constitutive features: (1) a national epic past—in Goethe and Schiller’s terminology the ‘absolute past’—serves as the subject for the epic; (2) national tradition (not personal experience and the free thought that grows out of it) serves as the source of the epic; (3) an absolute epic distance separates the epic world from contemporary reality, that is, from the time in which the singer (the author and his audience) lives” (Dialogic Imagination 14).

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attain the Olympian peaks that bear only the footprint of Homer’s sandal” [“un louable effort pour arriver au sommet olympien qui n’a gardé sur son front que l’empreinte ineffaçable de la sandale d’Homère”; qtd. in Usher 212].2 Hugo, who had adopted the pen-name Olympio, aimed to scale the epic heights in Homer’s footsteps, while recognizing the need to adapt epic conventions to the genre of the novel, which had supplanted poetry as the vehicle by which to surpass one’s predecessors and ensure literary progress. In a letter of 1860 he observes: “The novel is practically a conquest of modern art; the novel represents one of the engine-rooms of progress and one of the forces of human genius in this mighty nineteenth century”3 [“Le roman est presque une conquête de l’art moderne; le roman est une des puissances du progrès et une des forces du génie humain en ce grand dix-neuvième siècle”; OCM X, 363]. In her study of Hugo’s re-visioning of the sublime, Kathryn Grossman analyzes the way in which Hugo simultaneously looks toward his literary predecessors while forging an epic vision for the future: Following a lineage of poets whose central mythos deals with understanding human and national destiny, Hugo produces in Les Misérables his own great vernacular version of the sublime. The text thus represents both Hugo’s response to his patrimony and his legacy to the future by offering a prototype of the modern prose epic. (Figuring Transcendence 12)

This chapter will explore one part of that legacy, by examining how Hugo’s subversive techniques underpin and shape the ways in which later writers question and reject epic’s cultural authority. The frequent allusions in Les Misérables to the authors of canonical Western epics, especially Homer, reveal Hugo’s epic ambitions. Famously he conflates his own identity with that of Homer in his creation of the black gang member named “Homère Hogu” (LML 575).4 This gesture not only allows him to identify with the father of the Western tradition but reveals an urge to wrest authoritative literature away from being the exclusive preserve of educated, white, male readers. Throughout his life Hugo enjoyed establishing parallels between Homer and himself. When afflicted with eye problems, he could not shake off a certain frisson that, if he were to go blind, he could align himself with Homer and Milton (Robb 117–18; Grossman, Later Novels 161), and he was reportedly visited on his deathbed by Homer’s spirit.5 In William Shakespeare (1864; OCL—Critique), when establishing his list of top-ranking literary geniuses, Hugo again names 2

 Usher’s final chapter offers a fascinating overview of epic ambition in France from the fifteenth century to the twentieth (202–17). 3  See also Edward Saïd’s observations: “Since my exclusive focus here is on the modern Western empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I have looked especially at cultural forms like the novel, which I believe were immensely important in the formation of imperial attitudes, references, and experiences” (xii). 4  All references to the novel will be to the Laffont edition (LML). 5  “The extraterrestrial audience was also in attendance—the family ‘angels’ and his fellow magi: Homer, Jesus Christ, Dante, Shakespeare” (Robb 522–3).

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Homer and is at pains to point out that the list is not a closed one. Since he has indicated that the infinite or l’infini, ostensibly the subject of Les Misérables, is the quality that confers genius upon a writer, it is clear that in his mind the conjunction of the names Homer and Hugo is an entirely natural one. Homeric allusions pervade Les Misérables. At the very start, the bishop, Mgr Myriel, is enchanted to discover murals depicting scenes from the Odyssey beneath layers of wallpaper in his home (LML 28). Toward the end, as Jean Valjean nurses the injured Marius, there is an emotional corollary with the episode from the Iliad when Priam kisses Achilles, the man who slaughtered Hector, his son, lamenting: “I have endured what no-one on earth has ever done before—I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son” (Homer 24, 590–591). Through ensuring that Jean Valjean treats Marius “with the gentleness that a brother would show a wounded brother, … while he gazed at him with inexpressible hatred” [“avec la douceur de mouvements qu’aurait un frère pour un frère blessé, … il le regarda avec une inexprimable haine”; 1017–18], Hugo charges this scene with a comparable blend of tenderness and loathing. Hugo borrows from Homer in order to show that his characters carry the same DNA as the heroes of classical epic. They engage in “a Herculean struggle” [“une lutte herculéenne”; LML 632]. They establish partnerships and rivalries that match those of the heroes of old: “There are men who seem born to serve as another man’s other side, complement, or reverse. Such men include Pollux, Patroclus, Nisus, Eudamides, Ephestion, Pechmeja” [“Il y a des hommes qui semblent nés pour être le verso, l’envers, le revers. Ils sont Pollux, Patrocle, Nisus, Eudamidas, Éphestion, Pechméja”; 522]. The subtext to observations such as these is that we are to read Les Misérables as if it has already attained canonical status—the names of its characters will be as familiar to us as the names of Patroclus, Pollux, and Nisus.6 One of the effects of this strategy is that the characters themselves become more readily recognizable to the reader.7 Later on (982), Hugo inserts a passage from the Iliad (VI, 12–36), before observing that anyone inspired by the breath of duty can attain epic grandeur: This naive little soldier who yesterday was a peasant from Beauce or Limousin, who skulks around the children’s nannies in the Luxembourg Gardens, his cabbage-knife at his side, this pasty student hunched over a book or a bit of anatomy, a blond adolescent who trims his beard with scissors—take them both, inspire them with the breath of duty, pit them one against the other at the Boucherat crossroads or in the Planche-Mibray cul-de-sac, and let one fight for his flag and the other for his country. It will be a mighty struggle—and the shadow cast by this young soldier and this medical student at odds with each other in this mighty epic field of warring humanity will equal the shadow cast by 6

 See also “Gueulemer was a downgraded Hercules” [“Gueulemer était un Hercule déclassé”; 572]. 7  “Every character struck a chord and had such a profound effect that even on a first reading one has a vague recollection of having read the novel before” (Robb 379).

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Megaryon, king of the tiger-filled Lycia, as he grappled body to body with the mighty Ajax, the equal of the gods. [“Ce petit soldat naïf, hier paysan de la Beauce ou du Limousin, qui rôde, le coupe-chou au côté, autour des bonnes d’enfants dans le Luxembourg, ce jeune étudiant pâle penché sur une pièce d’anatomie ou sur un livre, blond adolescent qui fait sa barbe avec des ciseaux, prenez-les tous les deux, soufflez-leur un souffle de devoir, mettez-les en face l’un de l’autre dans le carrefour Boucherat ou dans le cul-de-sac Planche-Mibray, et que l’un combatte pour son drapeau et que l’autre combatte pour la patrie; la lutte sera colossale; et l’ombre que feront, dans ce grand champ épique où se débat l’humanité, ce pioupiou et ce carabin aux prises, égalera l’ombre que jette Mégaryon, roi de la Lycie pleine de tigres, étreignant corps à corps l’immense Ajax égal aux dieux”; 983.]

By placing epic status within the reach of ordinary people, Hugo is beginning the process of democratization that leads in the twentieth century to the subversive adaptations of epic in the hands of the nouveaux romanciers. That Homer’s shadows deepen the darkness of the Hugolian battle scenes is especially evident in the Waterloo episode.8 Homer’s observation that “Our work drags on, unfinished as always, hopeless” (Iliad 2, 161) suggests an awareness that the Greek wars will act as a prototype for war from generation to generation. It is an observation paralleled by Hugo’s own description of the nineteenth century as “[t]his incomplete era in which we live” [“Les temps incomplets où nous vivons”; LML 975]. It was the Iliad that first employed water imagery to depict the transformation of individual soldiers into an inhuman surging force, obeying its own impetus and power: As a heavy surf assaults some roaring coast, piling breaker on breaker whipped by the West Wind and out on the open sea a crest first rears its head then pounds down on the shore with hoarse, rumbling thunder, and in come more shouldering crests, arching up and breaking against some rocky spit, exploding salt foam to the skies— so wave on wave they came, Achaean battalions ceaseless, surging on to war. Each captain ordered his men and the ranks moved on in silence … You’d never think so many troops could march holding their voices in their chests, all silence, fearing their chiefs who called out clear commands, and the burnished blazoned armor round their bodies flared, the formations trampling on. (Iliad IV, 489–502)

 Brombert (Visionary Novel 94–112) provides an excellent analysis of the Waterloo episode. He is alert to Hugo’s epic ambitions in this episode, observing: “In this modern reenactment of the Iliad, every soldier has something of the heroic stature of his general. Every act of valor, every individual death, is a collective event” (94). 8

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Hugo’s adoption of this trope allows him to portray the Waterloo armies as being entirely caught up in the same mindset, so that the individual must yield to the collective: “The line of battle floats and undulates like thread, streams of blood follow an illogical course, the faces of the armies shimmer” [“La ligne de bataille flotte et serpente comme un fil, les traînées de sang ruissellent illogiquement, les fronts des armées ondoient”; LML 251]. The element of the fantastic that this unity suggests becomes one of the mysterious forces governing the action: “From a distance you would have thought that you were seeing two huge steel snakes stretching and expanding up to the crest of the plateau. It went through the battle like something from another world” [“On croyait voir de loin s’allonger vers la crête du plateau deux immenses couleuvres d’acier. Cela traverse la bataille comme un prodige”; 261]. Such a phenomenon, having been catalyzed by Napoleon’s human ambition, crosses the battlefield without the direction of human intelligence or compassion, paralleling the blind forces that enable us collectively to turn a blind eye to the plight of the most vulnerable in our societies. These are the forces that the ancient Greeks personified as gods, as Bernard Knox observes when he points out that the Homeric gods: are the personification of those mysterious forces which through their often violent interaction produce the harsh patterns of human life—the rise and fall of nations, the destructiveness of the earthquake, the terror of the flood, the horrors of the plague, but also the sweetness of passionate love, the intoxication of wine, the extra strength that surges through a warrior’s limbs at the moment of danger. (43)

Indeed, these are the forces that complicate “divine destiny with human-forged fate” [“d’une fatalité humaine la destinée qui est divine”; LML xviii]. And the soldiers caught in the serried ranks surging through the battlefield can have no idea that defeat has been decreed for Bonaparte and for them: “It was no longer part of the law of the nineteenth century that Bonaparte should be victorious at Waterloo. Another set of laws was in motion, in which there was no place for Napoleon. The inauspicious will of these events had been brewing for a long time” [“Bonaparte vainqueur à Waterloo, ceci n’était plus dans la loi du dix-neuvième siècle. Une autre série de lois se préparait, où Napoléon n’avait plus de place. La mauvaise volonté des événements s’était annoncée de longue date”; 262]. The idea that Napoleon’s downfall had been decreed long before looks back to the etymology of the word “fate.” The Latin fatum literally means “that which has been spoken/ decreed.” The collapse of Napoleon’s dream of empire marks a turning-point in the history of France, of the world: “Waterloo is not a battle at all. It is a complete change in the physiognomy of the universe” [“Waterloo n’est point une bataille; c’est le changement de front de l’univers”; 262].9 These are precisely

9  See also “On that day the outlook of the human race changed” [“Ce jour-là la perspective du genre humain a changé”; 269].

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the thresholds of history that demand an epic perspective, that need history to be refashioned and retold so that the nation can believe in its set of myths. The ruined landscape of Waterloo provides an ideal setting for Hugo to bestow an epic perspective upon his novel. He meditates on the physical remnants and traces of the battle, depicting the battle-plains as a site that has become incurably infected by the spectacles that it endured: “All this grass has been soaked with blood” [“Toute cette herbe a été mouillée du sang”; 246], he observes, and he presents us with a landscape where the only sign of new life serves simply to counterpoint the deathliness that is so pervasive: “The skeletons of dead trees abound in this orchard. Crows fly through the branches, and at the far end there is a wood full of violets” [“Les squelettes d’arbres morts abondent dans ce verger. Les corbeaux volent dans les branches, au fond il y a un bois plein de violettes”; 246]. The passer-by who happens upon the decaying remnants of the battle establishes a link between Waterloo and the ancient world by remembering a tag from Virgil’s Georgics: “At almost the exact spot of his horse’s hooves, he picked up decayed bullets, old sword blades, and shapeless projectiles eaten away by rust” [“On a ramassé, presqu’à l’endroit où étaient les pieds de son cheval, des boulets vermoulus, de vieilles lames de sabre et des projectiles informes, mangés de rouille. Scabra rubigine”; 256].10 But he is also looking back beyond Virgil to Homer, and his clear-sighted awareness that the fate of warriors was to rot on the site of battles: “But the plowland here will rot your bones, my brother, / as you lie dead in Troy, your mission left unfinished” (Iliad 4, 202–3). The fusion of Homeric and Virgilian echoes in the Waterloo episode is highly potent. Brombert is right to point out that “[t]he literary register is that of the epic tradition” (Visionary Novel 94), but he is also correct in identifying the epic elements of the scene as being Homeric rather than Virgilian. And yet Hugo is directing our attention explicitly to Virgil at this point, not just in quoting directly from the Georgics but also in aligning the passer-by at Waterloo with the figure of Virgil on the plains of Philippi: Yet at night a sort of visionary mist rises up from there, and should a traveler walk there, look around and listen, should he dream as Virgil did on the plains of Philippi then he is gripped by the hallucination of the disaster. The terrifying events of June 18th come to life; the fake monumental hillock with its nondescript lion fades away, while the battle-line regains its reality; infantry lines  “Souvenir de Virgile” [“A memory of Virgil”; Georgics 1, 495]: “‘While turning over his field a peasant will find weapons that have been eaten away by corroding rust.’ Here Virgil imagines the future state of the fields of the two battles that founded the Roman Empire: Pharsalus, where Caesar beat Pompey, and Philippi, where Octavian and Antony undid the army of Caesar’s murderers, Brutus and Cassius” [“‘En labourant son champ, un paysan trouvera des armes rongées d’une rouille rugueuse.’ Virgile imagine là l’état futur des champs des deux batailles qui fondèrent l’Empire romain: Pharsale—César l’emporte sur Pompée—et Philippes—Octave et Antoine défont l’armée des meurtriers de César, Brutus et Cassius”; LML 1183–4]. 10

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curve through the plain, and a furious galloping crosses the horizon; the appalled dreamer can see the glint of sabers, the sparks from bayonets, the flare of missiles, the monstrous merging of thunder; he can hear, like a groan from the depths of a tomb, the indefinable roaring of the phantom battle. Those ghosts are grenadiers, those gleams are cuirassiers—that skeleton is Napoleon, that skeleton is Wellington. None of this exists anymore but it all still engages in this clash and combat. [“La nuit pourtant une espèce de brume visionnaire s’en dégage, et si quelque voyageur s’y promène, s’il regarde, s’il écoute, s’il rêve comme Virgile dans les funestes plaines de Philippes, l’hallucination de la catastrophe le saisit. L’effrayant 18 juin revit; la fausse colline monument s’efface, ce lion quelconque se dissipe, le champ de bataille reprend sa réalité; des lignes d’infanterie ondulent dans la plaine, des galops furieux traversent l’horizon; le songeur effaré voit l’éclair des sabres, l’étincelle des baïonnettes, le flamboiement des bombes, l’entre-croisement monstrueux des tonnerres; il entend, comme un râle au fond d’une tombe, la clameur vague de la bataille fantôme; ces ombres, ce sont les grenadiers; ces lueurs, ce sont les cuirassiers; ce squelette, c’est Napoléon; ce squelette, c’est Wellington; tout cela n’est plus et se heurte et combat encore”; 275–6.]

There is a great deal going on in this passage, and this is why I have quoted it at length. Hugo is not, here, engaging in the epic qualities of démesure and mythical exaggeration.11 As he surveys the scarred and spectral landscape, the battle plays itself out once more in his imagination, but its protagonists, now shades and skeletons, perform a danse macabre rather than the heroic acts of an epic victory or even a glorious defeat. All of the epic tropes that Hugo has deployed collapse into a terrifying vision of endless and futile extermination. When Hugo alludes to Virgil at this point, it is not in order to harness and re-vision the epic tradition but, rather, to depict an event that has failed to live up to its epic ideals. In contrast to Hugo’s frequent invocations of the Iliad there are barely any references to the Aeneid in Les Misérables. When Marius mistakenly believes that the scoundrel Thénardier saved his father by carrying him off the battlefields of Waterloo, there is a distortion of the iconic image of the heroic Aeneas carrying his aged father on his shoulders in order to rescue him from the Trojan War. Later in the book, when depicting the fighting at the barricades, Hugo recalls Virgil’s observation in the Aeneid that despair can serve as a catalyst for victory.12 Other than this, the Virgilian references in Les Misérables are from the Georgics, a 11  “The figural pattern remains deliberately epic. So does the process of amplification. … The mythical nature of such amplifications is made still more explicit by reference to legendary archetypes. … Hugo, in fact, provides an epic reading of his own text” (Brombert, Visionary Novel 94–5). 12  “Despair, the ultimate weapon, which does lead sometimes to victory. Virgil says so” [“Le désespoir, dernière arme, qui donne la victoire quelquefois; Virgile l’a dit”; 944]. The reference is to Aeneid II, 354.

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poem that meditates on the relationship between humankind and the earth and that teaches us how to tend the earth so as to live in harmony with it.13 Given that Hugo was at pains to present France as the new center of civilization, the new Rome, this turning away from the foundational epic of Rome is striking.14 Virgil’s name is also absent from Hugo’s list in William Shakespeare of those who possess the quality of genius, even though there are numerous instances elsewhere of homage to Virgil. In language that echoes Dante’s depiction of Virgil throughout the Commedia, Hugo had addressed Virgil in Les Voix intérieures as “Oh, Virgil! Oh, Poet and divine master” [“O Virgile! O poète! Ô mon maître divin”] and had described him as a “god close to being an angel” [“dieu tout près d’être un ange”; Les Chants 174 and 190]. Furthermore, Virgil, along with Tacitus, was the writer whom Hugo selected to accompany him on his travels down the Rhine. But Les Voix intérieures was published in 1837 and Le Rhin in 1842, and much had changed in the 20 years separating these publications from Les Misérables. Like many in the Romantic period, Hugo had always seen Virgil as an imitator of Homer, his filial affection notwithstanding. But his later turn against him was also driven by the rise to power of Napoleon III in 1851, whose attempt to impose a new empire had led to a virulent attack from Hugo culminating, of course, in Hugo’s exile. Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, moreover, with whom Hugo was now on acrimonious terms, had been appointed Professor of Latin at the Collège de France by this imperial government and had sent his lectures on Virgil to the Moniteur, the government’s official publication (see Vance 176). Comparisons were immediately drawn between Virgil, the official poet of the emperor Augustus, and Sainte-Beuve, the officer of the Légion d’Honneur and court-professor of Napoleon III.15 This fact alone would be enough to distance Hugo from Virgil, even if it were not combined with Hugo’s belief that the quality of “genius” separated Virgil’s distinctions from those of Homer. This politicized reception of Homer and Virgil strikes, therefore, at the very heart of French national identity;16 specifically, it reveals the insecurities and agenda of writers such as Sainte-Beuve and Hugo, engaged in shaping French  For example, LML 109, 111, and 254.  See “The historiography of the French Romantic period, whose work, crucially on the Middle Ages, fostered a narrative of the making of ‘Frenchness’ and French cultural identity, which, in contesting the Frankish-Germanist story of the formation of medieval and modern France, sought to recover the prestige of Rome and the heritage of Latinity” (Prendergast 16). 15  “(Imperial Rome) had, of course, figured previously in the iconography of imperial power under Napoleon and was to return with a vengeance during the Second Empire, most notably in the hands of Sainte-Beuve himself” (Prendergast 97). 16  George Steiner sees this as a global phenomenon resulting from the centuries when the study of Latin and Greek was at the heart of the educational curriculum in the West: “A suggestive history of Western moral, literary and political sensibility could be written in terms of the relative status, at given periods and in different societies, of Homer and Virgil” (10). 13 14

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culture and literature and anxious about the position that they would hold there.17 Through his fusion of Virgilian and Homeric references, Hugo has ensured that on the plains of his Waterloo the battle is not simply between the armies of Napoleon and Wellington but between the literary and cultural influences by which French national identity is established. There is surely an irony in the fact that, through his promotion of Homer over Virgil, Hugo is encouraging us to associate Napoleon with the hotheaded and famously petulant Achilles rather than with “pious Aeneas.” Moreover, by invoking a Virgilian work that is not the epic celebrating Augustus and establishing the founding myth of Rome, Hugo is still able to pay homage to Virgil while presenting himself within the Homeric mould. Through the allusions to the Georgics, Hugo ensures that the brutality of Waterloo is underpinned by a longing for the sweetness of a secure domestic life, and the melancholy of this discrepancy glances back to the implicitly utopian vision of the preface to Les Misérables. The Virgil of the Georgics is a Virgil who states that he is not yet ready for the epic enterprise. Not only this, but when he stands on the plains of Philippi, it is with the conviction that already the age of heroes has passed, that the warriors of his time cannot hope to compare in stature to their forebears.18 Hugo’s epic vision, his inscription of Les Misérables into the epic tradition, oscillates between the urge for amplification, to surpass his predecessors, and a recognition that his ambitions of depicting infinity and attaining utopia will always fall short of his goal. However, the significance of Hugo’s legacy is undiminished by this failure. The epic designed as the authoritative and supreme epic, the Bible of nineteenthcentury France, is a work that is torn between Hugo’s nationalism and his painful awareness of the cost of empire. In 1860 he pondered the implications of opening his work with the evocation of Waterloo: “(possibly Waterloo—a great epic narrative merged with the novel)—begin the novel with that?” [“(peut-être Waterloo—grand récit épique mêlé au roman) commencer le roman par là?”; OCL—Chantiers 736]. This impulse to use epic conventions as a sphragis at the beginning of Les Misérables indicates Hugo’s awareness that, if he is to question and subvert the very notion of authority, he must adapt the generic medium of that authority and transfer these anxieties from epic poetry to the novel. Through 17

 Christopher Prendergast argues that for Sainte-Beuve the distinction between Homer and Virgil equaled a contest between barbarism and civilization: “the Virgilian epic (and also the Virgilian pastoral) exemplify a new kind of ‘civility’; or what SainteBeuve will constantly refer to as the cultural values of urbanité (ce mot tout romain) … as against ‘hard, rustic, wild, and fanatic minds’” [“les esprits durs, rustiques, sauvages et fanatiques”]. In this frame, Virgil is the epic poet of civilization, Homer the epic poet of barbarism” (145). 18  See Martindale: “In an evocative passage at the end of the Georgics Virgil imagines the day when the countryman will dig up the rusty weapons and giant bones left from the battles of the civil wars. The lines movingly counterpoint a sense of degeneration—men are getting smaller—with the healing changes that time brings as the sword gives way to the ploughshare” (John Milton 141).

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its conflicted relationship with empire and authority, Les Misérables becomes a vital forerunner of the nouveau roman. Its probing of imperial certainties forces open the cracks of insecurity that threaten to engulf us and that are depicted by the uncontrollable surge of language—the “battle of the sentence” [“bataille de la phrase”; Ricardou 226–56], which will prove so fundamental to Claude Simon’s writing. Michel Butor’s depiction of Hugo’s cascading rhetoric both highlights the convergence of his technique and concerns with those of Simon and points to his astonishing modernity, which has yet to receive due recognition: Through these vital gaps that we’ve seen opening up in Les Misérables, isn’t it formlessness that is going to swallow us up? The sea is there, threatening; whoever is foolhardy enough to open the barriers runs the risk of being engulfed, doesn’t he? Sometimes panic seizes Hugo. You can see this by his manic use of negative prefixes: certain pages are truly drowning in the words infinite, innumerable, boundless, impalpable, unknown, unfathomable etc. This is a vocabulary that has collapsed in disarray. [“A travers ces fissures essentielles que nous avons vues s’élargir dans Les Misérables, n’est-ce pas l’informe qui va nous envahir? La mer est là, menaçante; celui qui a l’imprudence d’ouvrir les digues ne court-il pas le risque d’être englouti? Hugo est parfois pris de panique, et cela se traduit par une sorte de délire du préfixe négatif: certaines pages sont véritablement submergées par les mots: infini, innombrable, incommensurable, impalpable, inconnu, insondable etc. C’est un vocabulaire en déroute”; “Victor Hugo romancier” 556.]

It is unsurprising that it should be a nouveau romancier whose acute reading of Hugo emphasizes his terror of impotence and lack of authority. These boundless and uncontrollable currents surge forth from Les Misérables to shape both Butor’s and Simon’s vision of history. Simon’s La Bataille de Pharsale (1969) depicts numerous battles, among them the battle of Pharsalus, but the most significant is “la bataille de la phrase,” the attempt to make verbal sense of a world of sound and fury, where absurdity reigns. Hugo’s process of amplification drives him to depict a frenzy of killing which is so extreme that everything becomes petrified: “In battles there are moments when a man’s soul hardens to the point of changing the soldier into a statue, where all this flesh becomes granite. The English battalions didn’t move in the face of frantic attacks” [“Il y a des moments dans les batailles où l’âme durcit l’homme jusqu’à changer le soldat en statue, et où toute cette chair se fait granit. Les bataillons anglais, éperdument assaillis, ne bougèrent pas”; LML 263]. In La Bataille de Pharsale the noise of battle becomes so overwhelming that it outroars itself and freezes into silence, a “furore that freezes at that point of paroxysm where it destroys itself and is also immobilized in the silence” [“tapage figé à ce niveau paroxysmique où il se détruit lui-même, immobilisé lui aussi dans le silence”; Bataille 118]. Simon’s image is also reminiscent of Hugo’s observation later on that at the barricades: “You would have thought you were looking at a petrification of the bedlam” [“On croyait voir du vacarme pétrifié”; LML 927].

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Moreover, by suggesting this process of petrification, Hugo freezes his scenes, transforming them into textual paintings for his readers. Elsewhere in the episode he muses on who would be the best painters to depict Waterloo, concluding that: “For battle paintings you need those cogent painters who wield chaos in their brushes. Rembrandt does a better job than Vandermeulen. … Geometry gives a false image; only the hurricane is true” [“Pour peindre une bataille, il faut de ces puissants peintres qui aient du chaos dans le pinceau; Rembrandt vaut mieux que Vandermeulen. … La géométrie trompe; l’ouragan seul est vrai”; 252]. In La Bataille de Pharsale Simon evokes Breughel’s war paintings, and animates them by imagining some of the distant figures as being the drops that have splashed off the soldiers’ helmets: “Like splashes, like gleaming drops that have sprung from the torrent of black helmets, little silhouettes are scattered over the hillside” [“Comme des éclaboussures, des gouttes luisantes, jaillies du torrent de casques noirs, des petites silhouettes s’égaillent sur les pentes des collines”; Bataille 228]. This image also indicates Simon’s use of water imagery, demonstrating the survival of this topos that has come down from Homer via Virgil and Hugo. And as Hugo employs water imagery to depict an army that is collapsing, he uses the term “inouïe” to remind us that, even in its evocation of failure, his epic is mapping new ground: “A disbanding army is like a thaw. Everything snaps, fissures, cracks, floats, rolls, crashes about, gathers pace and hurries onwards. Such disintegration is unheard of. … [F]riends kill each other in order to make their escape, squadrons and battalions separate and break up one against the other. This is the mighty seafoam of battle” [“Une armée qui se débande, c’est un dégel. Tout fléchit, se fêle, craque, flotte, roule, tombe, se heurte, se hâte, se précipite. Désagrégation inouïe. … (L)es amis s’entretuent pour fuir; les escadrons et les bataillons se brisent et se dispersent les uns contre les autres, énorme écume de la bataille”; LML 268]. This foam is a feature of Simon’s battleground also, where once again the mass of helmets resembles a host of bubbles: “the foam of serried helmets, like bubbles clinging to the surface of whirlpools of black, thick water, eddying slowly and belching over the edges, spewing forth a filthy foam, a yellowish spittle of detritus and dead horses” [“les casques serrés, moutonnant, … semblables aux dômes de bulles agglutinées à la surface des tourbillons d’une eau noire, épaisse, tournoyant lentement, et qui rejetteraient sur les bords, expulseraient une écume sale, une bave jaunâtre de détritus et de chevaux morts”; Bataille 114]. Where Homer’s water imagery depicts the overpowering force of a well-regulated army, Hugo and Simon adapt the imagery to convey the chaotic forces of armies that are not united behind a common goal. Simon’s whirling current strengthens into a maelstrom that sweeps away everything in its path: some maelstrom … and a horseman appeared, not riding, forging his way through, but surfacing, so to speak, like a cork: one minute he was visible, drifting slowly over the tumult at the will of the swell as if everything, man, armor, horse … was floating above the black tide, fluctuating, shuttled about, drawn forward and backward, then dragged on once again, and in the end

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foundering, one arm raised, holding up toward the sky in a last gesture of pride or valor a pathetic weapon. [“quelque maelström … et un cavalier apparut, non pas chevauchant, se frayant un passage, mais faisant pour ainsi dire surface, comme un bouchon: un moment il fut visible, dérivant lentement au-dessus du tumulte au gré des remous comme si le tout, homme, armure, cheval, … surnageait au-dessus de l’obscure marée, oscillant, ballotté, tiré en avant, en arrière, puis de nouveau entraîné, et, à la fin sombrant, un bras levé, tendant vers le ciel dans un suprême geste d’orgueil ou de vaillance une arme dérisoire”; Bataille 114–15.]

This maelstrom is a version of the hurricane that Hugo wants the painters of battles to convey through their brush. The language that Simon uses here to evoke the plight of ordinary men submerged by the currents of history is strongly evocative of Hugo’s depiction of those doomed to sink beneath the waves of social injustice: “The man disappears and then resurfaces, he plunges and comes back up again, he calls out, he stretches out his arms. Nobody hears him … . [T]here he is, forever rolling through the gloomy depths that have sucked him down” [“L’homme disparaît, puis reparaît, il plonge et remonte à la surface, il appelle, il tend les bras, on ne l’entend pas … . (L)e voilà qui roule à jamais dans les profondeurs lugubres de l’engloutissement”; LML 77–8]. Both writers depict individuals who heroically, if vainly, attempt to defy the currents that are pulling them under. In Les Géorgiques (1985), another meditation on war, humanity, and our relationship with the earth and with the past, Simon evokes the current of life as a whirlwind that twists and turns back on itself, annihilating a linear view of history and jeopardizing any hope of progress or development: “Time, both static and pent-up at one and the same time, as history begins to spin on the spot, without going forward, with sudden surges backward, unforeseeable hitches, wandering aimlessly and dragging in its wake everything that is within reach of this sort of whirlwind” [“le temps à la fois statique et emballé, L’Histoire se mettant à tournoyer sur place, sans avancer, avec de brusques retours en arrière, d’imprévisibles crochets, errant sans but, entraînant tout ce qui se trouvait à la portée de cette espèce de tourbillon”; Géorgiques 386–7].19 And this current dictates the narrative of Simon’s novels, preventing him from acquiring absolute mastery over its shape or over the destiny of his characters: “History itself taking charge of the rest, overtaking with mischievous perversity those authors who amuse themselves by casting their readers into confusion as they give several names to the same character or, conversely, the same name to different characters and, as ever, acting (history) with its terrifying excess, its incredible, heavy humor” [“l’Histoire ellemême se chargeant du reste, surpassant par sa facétieuse perversité ces auteurs qui 19

 Hugo also freezes time, showing that battles that took place yesterday are still being enacted in the present tense: “the uproar of the melee has been frozen there; it lives, it dies, it was yesterday” [“le bouleversement de la mêlée s’y est pétrifié; cela vit, cela meurt, c’était hier”; LML 243].

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se divertissent à plonger le lecteur dans la confusion en attribuant plusieurs noms au même personnage ou, inversement, le même nom à des protagonistes divers, et, comme toujours, agissant (l’Histoire) avec sa terrifiante démesure, son incrédible et pesant humour”; Géorgiques 340]. Part of Simon’s joke is that canonical works, such as Les Misérables, are swept along by the course of history to appear as intertexts in works such as his own, which query and undermine earlier versions of history. Simon’s adaptations of these Hugolian themes alert us to Hugo’s innovation in opening up his epic, so that it becomes the story of everyone. Jean Valjean has no real name, simply a nickname, but acquires a whole range of different names and identities in the course of Les Misérables. In his guise as “passer-by,” as “no-one,” he looks back to Odysseus giving himself the nickname of “no-one.” And the lettering on Valjean’s grave is eroded and illegible; his very tomb lies open for future readers so that they can inhabit his place in the narrative. The image of the eroded epitaph ghosts the scene in Simon’s Les Géorgiques when an idiot laboriously traces the letters of an eroded gravestone. The crumbling stone functions as a memento mori for all people. All that will remain of our passage on earth is a “clumsy and heart-rending epitaph doomed to be deciphered word by word by an idiot in the melancholy and silent stir of autumn rain” [“maladroite et déchirante épitaphe destinée à être déchiffrée mot après mot par un idiot sous le mélancolique et silencieux bruissement d’une pluie d’automne”; Géorgiques 197]. The epitaphs on both Hugo’s and Simon’s fictional graves allow us, as readers, to inscribe ourselves into the texts, even as the imagery alerts us to how fleeting our presence within these texts must be. The fact that we are all vulnerable to this collapse into meaninglessness and absurdity is indicated by Hugo’s vision of the mighty Napoleon stumbling across the plains of Waterloo, blindly pursuing a dream of glory that has fallen into tatters: “It was Napoleon, still trying to go on, a colossal sleepwalker in this shattered dream” [“C’était Napoléon essayant encore d’aller en avant, immense somnambule de ce rêve écroulé”; LML 270]. The collapse of this dream is inextricably linked to the collapse of the dream of empire. Here Hugo is torn in several different directions; between the lure of establishing a new cultural empire in France and his growing suspicion of empire, between his genuine love of Virgil and unease at what “Virgil” meant in Napoleon III’s regime. He emphasizes that the Waterloo episode strikes at the heart of his sense of himself as a genius by the way in which he inscribes his name onto the plain, pointing out to us the landmark “Hougomont.” This elevation of himself, however, is beset by tensions about the meaning of empire, and his position within it. And if we probe these competing anxieties from the vantage point of Michel Butor’s novel La Modification (1957), we shall see that, once again, Hugo anticipates the concerns Butor expresses about Rome, and about what Rome means in a world that has seen the horrors of Fascism. Butor’s protagonist, Delmont, also expresses a longing for a cultural center, even as he is forced to acknowledge what such dreams have cost. His dream of Rome

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that he shared with his mistress—“an enormous dream that you share and that becomes ever more concrete, precise and justified” [“un énorme rêve qui vous était commun, de plus en plus solide, précis et justifié”; Modification 167]—and in which he is frozen “like a sleepwalker” [“comme un somnambule”; 196] aligns him to the figure of Hugo’s defeated Napoleon, the “mighty sleepwalker through this shattered dream” [“immense somnambule de ce rêve écroulé”; LML 270]. Unlike Napoleon, however, he is forced to see the historical costs of such centers: And so one of the great waves of history draws to a close in your consciousness, a history when the world had a center that was not simply the earth in the middle of Ptolemy’s spheres, but Rome at the center of the earth, a center that shifted and that attempted to become fixed after the collapse of Rome at Byzantium and then much later on in imperial Paris, the black star of the railways throughout France somehow ghosting the star of the Roman ways. [“Une des grandes vagues de l’histoire s’achève ainsi dans vos consciences, celle où le monde avait un centre, qui n’était pas seulement la terre au milieu des sphères de Ptolomée, mais Rome au centre de la terre, un centre qui s’est déplacé, qui a cherché à se fixer après l’écroulement de Rome à Byzance, puis beaucoup plus tard dans le Paris impérial, l’étoile noire des chemins de fer sur la France étant comme l’ombre de l’étoile des voies romaines”; Modification 279.]20

By looking back at Hugo’s Napoleon through the prism of Butor’s view of history, we can see that, for Hugo, the imperial dream was already close to collapse. By translating epic tropes and conventions into the novel, with his frequent invocations of Homer and Virgil (and Dante and Milton), Hugo is attempting to mold his meditation on infinity into an appropriate form. He knew that Les Misérables was a work that would outlive the nineteenth century; indeed, he posits its immortality in the Préface by asserting its usefulness for as long as social ills persist. In his fashioning of himself as a nineteenth-century Homer, he attempts to confer an element of divine distance upon the work. These efforts are, however, subverted by the position he shares with Virgil of witness, and of shaping his nation’s sense of identity, a position made all the more fraught by his contests with Sainte-Beuve. As he looks to the past to create his “classic,” he anticipates T. S. Eliot’s observations about tradition and the individual talent: the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. … No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. (14–15) 20

 “Paris is synonymous with the Cosmos. Paris is Athens, Rome, Sybaris, Jerusalem, Pantin. It is a condensation of all civilizations and all barbarisms as well” [“Paris est synonyme de Cosmos. Paris est Athènes, Rome, Sybaris, Jérusalem, Pantin. Toutes les civilisations y sont en abrégé, toutes les barbaries aussi”; LML 468].

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The battles about the standing of French culture and identity that are played out on the plains of Waterloo parallel those confronting Eliot in the entre-deuxguerres period. Hugo’s success in writing himself into the Western canon entails his shaping of the literature, especially French literature, that follows him. Where Homer, Dante, Virgil, and Milton haunt Les Misérables, Malcolm Bowie points out that Hugo plays a comparable role in Marcel Proust’s epic: “A la recherche du temps perdu is a self-deflating epic, but Homer, together with Virgil, Dante and Hugo, is an inexorcisable phantom within it” (105). But Hugo was already showing Proust the power of a “self-deflating epic.” He sought to surpass his epic predecessors by penning the epic of infinity; he strove to furnish France with an epic of her identity that would confirm her at the center of Western civilization. Yet these overweening ambitions are haunted by a constant disquiet about the hidden, unspoken costs of empire. Paradoxically, it is through acknowledging this vulnerability that Hugo ensured one of his most significant afterlives—his adaptation of epic tropes and themes within the genre of the novel has enabled him to exert his influence on the postwar nouveau roman, a genre that shakes us out of our myopia, forcing us to see the soiled underside of epic dreams, by challenging and subverting the authority of “classic” texts.

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PLATE SECTION

Plate 1

Gustave Brion (1824–1877). “Jean Valjean.” Photograph of an 1862 illustration. © Maisons de Victor Hugo / Roger-Viollet. 38138–2.

Plate 2

Gustave Brion (1824–1877). “Javert.” Photograph of an 1862 illustration. © Maisons de Victor Hugo / Roger-Viollet. 38344–1.

Plate 3

Gustave Brion (1824–1877). “Les Thénardier.” Photograph of an 1862 illustration. © Maisons de Victor Hugo / Roger-Viollet. 38138–10.

Plate 4

Jean Valjean (Fredric March), on the left, confronts Inspector Javert (Charles Laughton) in the 1935 20th-Century Pictures’ film Les Misérables (dir. Richard Boleslawski), which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Plate 5

Jean Valjean (Jean Gabin) carries Marius (Giani Esposito) through the Parisian sewers in Les Misérables (dir. Jean-Paul Le Chanois, 1958). © Roger Corbeau / Maisons de Victor Hugo / Roger-Viollet. 55782–11.

Plate 6

Jean Valjean (Jean-Paul Belmondo) in the opening scene of the TF1 / Les Films 13 co-production Les Misérables (dir. Claude Lelouch, 1995): this scene is one of several where Belmondo appears as the character from the novel, whereas throughout the film he plays Henri Fortin, who resembles Hugo’s hero but who is also a composite of other characters. This adaptation won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film that year.

Plate 7

Jean Valjean (Liam Neeson), in his guise as Monsieur Madeleine (on the right), meets with Inspector Javert (Geoffrey Rush) in Mandalay Entertainment’s 1998 film adaptation (dir. Bille August).

Plate 8 The cast of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s stage musical Les Misérables performs “Do You Hear the People Sing” during the American Theatre Wing’s 68th annual Tony Awards at Radio City Music Hall in New York, 8 June 2014. © Carlo Allegri/ Reuters/Corbis. Stock Photo ID: 42–59292404.

Plate 9

(a and b) Fantine forced into prostitution in UDON Entertainment’s 2014 Manga Classics version of Les Misérables (author: Crystal Silvermoon; art by SunNeko Lee), pp. 71–72. Credit: © UDON Entertainment Inc. and Morpheus Publishing Limited.

Plate 9

(continued)

Plate 10

Bishop Myriel gives his silver candlesticks to Jean Valjean during a flashback in the second episode of Nippon Animation’s 52-episode serial Les Misérables: Shōjo Cosette (dir. Hiroaki Sakurai, 2007).

Plate 11

Victor Hugo in the garden at Hauteville House (his residence on Guernsey during his exile from the French Second Empire). Photograph by Charles Hugo, 1856. © Maisons de Victor Hugo / Roger-Viollet. 25946–6.

Plate 12

Emile-Antoine Bayard (1837–1891). “Cosette sweeping” [Cosette balayant]. 1879 illustration for Les Misérables (Eugène Hugues 5-volume edition, 1879–1882). © Maisons de Victor Hugo / RogerViollet. 25946–14.

Plate 13

Fortuné Méaulle (1844–1901). “The Grandeurs of Despair” [Les Grandeurs du désespoir]. Photograph of an 1879 wood engraving used in Les Misérables (Eugène Hugues 5-volume edition 1879– 1882). © AKG-Images. AKG256479.

Plate 14

(a) Cosette (Christiane Jean) reads a letter from Marius (Frank David) in the garden in the Rue Plumet, in G.E.F. / Société Française de Production’s film co-production (dir. Robert Hossein, 1982). (b) Marius (Cameron Mitchell) discusses his future with Cosette (Debra Paget) in 20th-Century Fox’s film (dir. Lewis Milestone, 1952).

Plate 15

The Friends of the ABC man the barricade on the Rue de la Chanvrerie in Pathé-Natan’s epic film adaptation (dir. Raymond Bernard, 1934).

Plate 16 Inspector Javert (Russell Crowe) surveys the carnage following the storming of the barricade in Working Title / Universal Pictures’ film version of the stage musical (dir. Tom Hooper, 2012).

Plate 17

Gavroche (Émile Genevois) bravely collects cartridges from the bodies of the fallen as the Friends of the ABC watch on (dir. Raymond Bernard, 1934).

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Chapter 7

The Making of a Classic: Les Misérables Takes the States, 1860–1922 Kathryn M. Grossman

When Les Misérables began appearing worldwide in serial form on 3 April 1862, the United States were far from united: 11 of 34 states had seceded over the previous 14 months, and a bloody civil war ensued that would last another three years. Yet nationwide, where the literacy rate among white American adults had reached about 95% by 1850, the public devoured Hugo’s novel.1 Amid all the strife and disarray, sales of the work did exceptionally well, continuing briskly into the end of the century and beyond. As we contemplate Hugo’s monumental prose masterpiece 150 years after it appeared, we might well wonder what accounted for its extreme popularity early on and how it eventually became not just a classic but also part of the American national consciousness. After all, it was a foreign import, a French book no less, and thus seemingly removed from the pioneer ethos and frontier mentality of the US. I propose to study these questions both temporally and, like Google Earth maps, spatially, in order to show what vast expanses Les Misérables flew over to reach its audience. As Elinor Shaffer has noted, “[n]ew electronic technology makes it possible to undertake reception studies on this scale” (xiii). My database of approximately 2,000 newspaper and periodical articles extends from 1860, when Hugo announced completion of his novel,2 to 1922—60 years after publication and four years following the end of the Great War, when many dramatizations and several silent film versions had already reached deep into American popular culture and talking pictures had just been invented.3 By then, the operation of 1

 The comparable figures were under 70% in England and Wales and not yet 60% in France (Machor 21). 2  According to Machor, the number of newspapers published in the US exploded in the 1800s, growing to 1,600 by 1840—more than “twice the number of newspapers in England and France” (20)—with periodicals reaching similar proportions as well. The exponential growth of the print industry continued well into the twentieth century. 3  While Joseph Tykociński-Tykociner was the first to give a documented demonstration of a sound-on-film movie in the US, in June 1922, the process had been invented three years earlier in the States by Lee De Forest (see Sponable passim; and Eyman 49). The current chapter represents but a small part of my research on this 60-year time frame, to be incorporated in turn into a longer study of the reception of Hugo’s novel in the US press from 1860 to the premiere of the English-language musical adaptation in London on 8 October 1985.

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what Michel Espagne has termed “cultural transfers” [“les transfers culturels”] had effectively transformed “otherness into a form of identity” [“l’altérité en forme d’identité”; Transfers culturels 221]. After examining how the novel was reviewed in the US, how it was sold, and how it was read, I identify the features of Hugo’s work—including characters, ideas, and adaptations—that elicited the most passionate discussion. We should then be able to understand how Les Misérables captivated several generations of Americans long before talking pictures and musical comedies again took them by storm. Official Reception A little blurb in the New York Times on 10 April 1860 was the first to trumpet that “Victor Hugo, still in exile in his stubborn unwillingness to accept any favor [from] Emperor [Napoléon III], has just finished a novel called Les Miserables. It is a collection of touching tales designed to illustrate the sufferings of the people …” (“Personalities”).4 Some of the initial reviews were less than glowing, though we must recall that one could hardly have a view of the whole work until the last two of five parts appeared three months after the first. The Albion magazine, for instance, recycled in May a long review from the London Atheneum, based on Part I, “Fantine,” that criticized the book as “devoted to an impossible Saint, an impossible penitent Sinner, and a wretched, tortured woman, who bequeaths to the story a demoralized child. Every crime committed is charged on the state of society …” (“‘Les Miserables,’ by Victor Hugo”). Subsequent sections of the novel fared no better in either the Atheneum or its American counterpart.5 Likewise, the review of “Fantine” in the July 1862 Atlantic Monthly by noted critic Edwin Percy Whipple lamented that the book’s appearance in multiple languages had “evidently been ‘engineered’ with immense energy by the French publisher. … Every resource of bookselling ingenuity has been exhausted in order to make every human being who can read think that the salvation of his body and soul depends on his reading Les Misérables.” Still, the critic concedes, the work itself is “all alive with the fiery genius of Victor Hugo. … Few who take [it] up will leave it until they have read it through. It is morbid to a degree that no eminent English author, not even Lord Byron, ever approached … .” As with the review in The Albion, the danger presented by Hugo’s text is that it “weaken[s] [the] abhorrence of crime … by attempting to prove that society itself is responsible for crimes it cannot prevent, but can only punish” (Whipple). The unsophisticated reader is thus likely to adopt attitudes inimical to social order. Society needs more

4

 The novel’s title frequently appeared without the accent mark, perhaps due to typesetters’ constraints. I have reproduced the original spellings throughout this essay. 5  For the role of reviewers in magazines and periodicals in general in forming “an interpretive community that played an important role in the collective reception of fiction in the early nineteenth century,” see Machor 31–2.

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Javerts and fewer Jean Valjeans. This view of the novel remains an undercurrent of commentaries that extend well into the twentieth century. Nonetheless, Les Misérables turned out to be the “most remarkably successful novel” of 1862, selling around 50,000 copies in the States that year in its American translation and in a “somewhat abridged” version of the English edition (American Annual Cyclopedia). Early reviews of “Fantine,” such as that in the widely circulated Saturday Evening Post, cannot have hurt its fate: “Fiery vigor, burning earnestness permeate and vivify it, and carry the reader resistlessly along. … [W]e may revolt from some of its teachings; but [it] brings us face to face with facts and principles which we cannot afford to ignore” (“New Publications” July). In other words, it was a good read that might well scandalize but that would also educate in essential issues. These initial judgments return in various forms over several generations. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, two sets of articles illustrate the dichotomous opinions. Because of the telegraph, “monopolistic news services [had long since] converged with the rising metropolitan paper,” exposing “the entire nation … simultaneously to the same diet of information …” (Nerone 241).6 The first, published from Virginia to Oregon, listed the 100 leading events of the 1800s—where Les Misérables figures among eight great works of “Literature” (see, e.g., “Leading One Hundred Events”).7 The second centers on a letter to the New York Times railing against the shortcomings of Hugo’s text. According to the author, “The feeling of millions of my compatriots toward that book partakes more of the … fervor of a religious creed, to question which were sacrilege.” He then denounces the novel, so often called “an indictment of social conditions” as “a masterpiece of solemn rubbish, the most ridiculous farrago of nonsense and bombast ever put together.” Hugo is “utterly [humorless],” Jean Valjean is an “insufferable ass,” the interpretation of the Battle of Waterloo is “preposterous,” and so forth (Newberry). The letter elicited defenders, detractors, and rebuttals for more than two months, as the dispute raged in the paper’s public opinion columns (see, e.g., Lewis). By the centenary of Hugo’s birth in 1902, the public had been immersed in the ongoing debate over Les Misérables for a full 40 years. The Book and its Readers Between the appearance of Les Misérables and its translation into mass media, booksellers made the most of the novel’s phenomenal popularity—and in so doing, helped to keep its reputation intact and its title foremost in the public mind. 6  See also Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway 10, regarding the spread of the telegraph following its invention in 1837. 7  Les Misérables is listed second, after Goethe’s Faust (1808), but above, e.g., Thomas Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution (1837), Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays (1841–1871), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859).

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Hundreds of advertisements for various editions of the work were published, many bursting with unabashed hype.8 In May 1862, the New York Tribune carried a long ad for the American copyright translation that enthused: “[The] appearance [of this magnificent work] has been followed by a furore unparalleled in the literary world. … It is the acknowledged literary event of the century” (“Victor Hugo’s Great Novel”). Soon a New York Times ad cited reviews in eight other papers, each more laudatory than the next (“Classified Ad 2”). And before long, Hugo’s best seller was being used to launch other sales: ads for his earlier fiction, his treatise on Shakespeare, his later novels and poetic works, and his spouse Adèle’s biography—all were pitched by evoking Les Misérables, often in panegyric terms. Even more print was devoted to selling illustrated and handsomely bound editions or fresh translations, especially during the holidays, thereby fostering the cultural transfer of Hugo’s work into the American idiom and culture.9 One inducement to purchase an 1887 translation from Routledge, with about 500 illustrations by a broad range of artists, declared: “‘Les Misérables’ is yet more timely in the present day of Anarchists and dynamiters, … when the problems of labor and pauperdom are rising even in the United States … (“New Books”). The edition sold out in less than four months and was quickly reissued by subscription only. The same year, two other translations, along with an edition in French, appeared in the US, creating a veritable cornucopia of choices. Each new version was, of course, reviewed, a process that multiplied references to Les Misérables years after the book was first published. An ad even exists that plugged Les Misérables as “[o]ne of the masterpieces of English literature” on the same page as ads for works by George Eliot and Thomas Carlyle (“Advertisement”). The translation sold so well that the writer supposed English to be Hugo’s native language. Eventually, children’s editions were issued—spinoffs for youthful consumption. Thus might several generations in an American household all find themselves reading Hugo’s novel at the same time. A condensed version by Professor F. C. De Sumichrast at Harvard University appeared in 1894, and a subsequent review is revealing: “[The book] presents within a compass suitable for class use the story of Jean Valjean …” (“Literature”). In just over 30 years, Hugo’s work had gone from delineating the collective world of Les Misérables to depicting just le misérable. Little surprise, then, that the “Classics for Children” series soon brought out The Story of Jean Valjean from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, again concentrating on the main character (see, e.g., “Book Notes”). Even more abridged, the “complete story in itself” of Jean Valjean’s encounter with Bishop Myriel, as recounted in The Story of the Candlesticks, was published in 1904 (“Display Ad 24”). Indeed, it 8

 Trevor Ross (69) confirms that this practice dates back to at least the sixteenth century. 9  For Espagne, “it is clear that the history of translators and translation lies at the heart of the cultural transfer enterprise” [“il est clair que l’histoire de traducteurs et de traduction est au cœur de l’entreprise des transfers culturels”; “Quelques aspects actuels” 169].

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is very possible that many who purported to have read the entire book in fact had merely perused one of these editions aimed at children. Later abridgments in the adaptations of Hugo’s novel may well be motivated as much by these contracted readings as by the demands of different media. Notwithstanding these critical and commercial responses, the reactions of ordinary American readers warrant sustained attention. Perhaps the most famous instance came during the Civil War itself, when Les Misérables was reportedly a favorite of Confederate soldiers fighting for secession. Given Thénardier’s ironic end as a slave trader in the Americas, it is hard to understand why. An 1863 review in The Southern Literary Messenger certainly impugns Hugo’s abolitionism while declaring the work “grandly brilliant”: though some may “think it fashionable … to decry Les Misérables as an immoral book,” that is “simply because they have not the brains to understand it. To us,” the writer concludes, “it is a Bible in the [fiction] of the nineteenth century” (T W M). In short, so the argument went, Hugo’s stance on slavery and social reform should not be an impediment to enjoying its many riches. Evidently, many followed this advice. Later that year, the same periodical reported: “There are thousands in the Confederacy, who are, in the language of the ladies, ‘half crazy to see how [the novel] ends’” (“Editor’s Table”). Southern men joined their wives or sweethearts in gobbling up the work. In 1869, John Esten Cooke published a novel entitled Mohun: or the Last Days of Lee and his Paladins that described this phenomenon: “[General Robert E. Lee’s] soldiers, … seized upon [Hugo’s work], and thus by a strange chance the tragic [French] story had become known to the soldiers in the trenches. … Our men were rocked to sleep by it—and many, how many, to their last sleep” (“Lee’s Miserables”). That the besieged troops dubbed themselves “Lee’s Miserables” was a theme that long echoed through the press. One Confederate major, imprisoned behind enemy lines, was even inspired by the description of Jean Valjean’s escape through the sewers to dig down to the air chamber beneath his cell floor and from there to make his way back home (“Morgan’s Escape”). The pervasiveness of Hugo’s text also extended to the North. An 1897 issue of The Youth’s Companion, a children’s periodical published in Boston, reported: “During our Civil War a special edition of “Les Misérables” was printed for our soldiers, who carried the book in their knapsacks, devoured it between the battles, and called one another by the names of the various characters” (“Victor Hugo”). It would appear then, that Union soldiers, too, read Les Misérables in droves, thereby ensuring a nationwide audience from the outset. Beyond the heavy advertising and immediate popularity, several other factors kept Hugo’s work before the public, slowly turning it into part of America’s cultural vocabulary. Barbara Sicherman has delineated the culture of self-improvement that permeated the United States in the nineteenth century, thriving on the spread of print culture: “opportunities for self-study proliferated for those lacking formal education. In addition to reading how-to-books … , Americans could join debating or self-improvement societies, [belong to] libraries, and attend lyceums or popular

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lectures” (286). Les Misérables figured largely in these efforts. It not only featured an autodidact hero who, like many of Hugo’s American readers, embraced selfstudy and character formation, while providing encyclopedic knowledge about French history that was an education in itself; it also fed into a more cosmopolitan model after the Civil War that, “[i]nspired by a new intellectual elite that looked to Europe … , added intellectual and, to a degree, aesthetic considerations to the traditional moral ones” (Sicherman 286). The book’s rhetorical range, elevated style, and philosophical concerns promoted the kind of refinement sought by the expanding American middle class. Lists of book recommendations with Les Misérables highly ranked would proliferate in the press, surfacing year after year in outlets as diverse as Michigan Farmer, The Methodist Review, and The Houston Daily Post. The works selected for local libraries or for the edification of public school teachers were also sporadically reported, often in the new states or territories, as if to assert their cultural credentials (see Bell). A tidbit inserted in the Wichita Daily Eagle in 1890 suggests that Hugo’s text always won best book contests in Kansas over Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850) and Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur (1880) because of the chapter devoted to the famous Civil War figure “John Brown of Osawatomie” (“Sunflower Shimmer”). And an issue of the Chicago Daily Tribune observed that Les Misérables was the “favorite story” thus far at the newly opened county jail library (“Books in the Jail”). As in the case of its Civil War audience, many readers of the novel were not highly educated—a notion confirmed by its appearance in other works of fiction as the favorite of the working class, embodied, for example, by a hat trimmer or housekeeper (see Weyl and “Forum, the Mistress and the Servant”).10 At the same time, public readings flowered from New York to Missouri to Idaho to Texas. Men and women, amateurs and professionals alike, acquainted the American public with the novel’s broad outlines, as well as with some of its characters, especially Jean Valjean, Bishop Myriel, and Gavroche. Readings were not, however, the only form of contact the public had with the novel. As the century drew to a close and the anniversary of Hugo’s birth approached, papers and lectures on Les Misérables began to proliferate, ensuring that the book became a ubiquitous object of study and public edification—a piece of America’s “cultural capital” (see Machor 27 and 30). The educational value of challenging and compelling texts was certainly not lost on the American public—nor was the commercial value of extending Hugo’s best seller into everyone’s home. Such

 See also Margaret Mitchell, in Gone with the Wind (1936): “Melanie sat down and … reached for a book on the table. It was a ragged copy of Les Miserables, that book which caught the fancy of the Confederate soldiers. They had read it by camp-fire light and took some grim pleasure in calling it Lee’s Miserables” (800). 10

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“humanism” proposed “enrichment through consumption” (Ross 200).11 But the question of what exactly drew readers to the text is more complex. Appropriating Hugo’s Characters and Ideas While Hugo’s ideas attracted ample debate, his vividly drawn characters fueled even more discussion, and we might be surprised by which ones captured the most attention. People who have seen the musical adaptation on either stage or screen may be amazed that, in the earlier US press, Jean Valjean is more visible than all the other characters combined. The Thénardiers, Éponine, and Marius are rarely mentioned, and the second most cited figure is not Javert but the benevolent bishop. This early coalescence of interest around so few characters is intriguing in light of today’s trends among audiences. The central focus on Jean Valjean was evident right away. Within months of the novel’s appearance, the Saturday Evening Post remarked that a curious hollowed-out French coin purchased by a collector resembled the one used by Jean Valjean to free himself during Thénardier’s ambush (“News Items”). Two years later, a Kansas paper reported that two inmates had tried to escape from a military prison, as Jean Valjean did from the Petit-Picpus convent, by substituting themselves for bodies in coffins (“Unsuccessful … Attempt”). Such topics related to the protagonist’s ingenuity in outwitting the criminal justice system return frequently over the years as a way of illuminating current cases. By alluding to some of the most memorable scenes in the book, journalists could reactivate in other contexts the strong emotions attached to the outlaw hero and his deeds of daring. Two young men scale a New Orleans prison wall the same way that Valjean eludes Javert in Paris (“Depravity”). When a contractor in Manhattan saves a workman trapped under a fallen wall by acting as a human “jack,” “[i]t was like a scene out of ‘Les Miserables’”—and the report of the hero’s arrest for the accident similarly indicts the overreaching arm of the law (“Jail”). And a paroled convict in Nebraska makes good under an assumed name, like Jean Valjean as M. Madeleine, but is hunted down by the “Javerts of Lincoln Penitentiary” and returned to prison (“Just like JV”). In the end, Hugo’s protagonist passes into other literary works, as a figure in a book read by someone who has either suffered a similar fate or been moved by the man’s devotion to duty (see, e.g., Beach). Clearly, for many Americans, Jean Valjean embodied the essential meaning of Les Misérables. His transformation into a kind of literary myth, sometimes simply evoked in an instance of intertexuality, sometimes rewritten hypertextually as a 11  In the US, as in England several centuries earlier, “an increased readership at all levels of society” resulted in “a growing number of readers who were not classically educated and for whom English works, beginning with English translations of the classics, could serve as acceptable substitutes within their acculturation” (Ross 210). The rapid entry of Les Misérables into the literary canon had made it a relatively instant “classic” (see also Ibid. 220 and 297).

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real person or another literary character, was thus already accomplished by the early part of the century (see Mortier 63.) Javert, in contrast, comes to exemplify a kind of “police hero” (Williams) whose sense of duty and conscience is opposed to Valjean’s (Sheldon)—or, less attractively, as the pitiless forces that “hound [the] poor unfortunates” released from prison (“Defends”). Given all the coverage of Valjean types relentlessly pursued across time and space, we might expect at least some corresponding glimpses of his pursuer. An 1897 story about a man who commits suicide by throwing himself from a train near Wheatland, Indiana, since he may have “imagined himself hounded by detectives … ,” thus includes a startling detail: the copy of Les Misérables found in his room was “open at the chapter detailing the dramatic death of Javert …” (“Ward”). To be sure, Javert is not “hounded” by anyone in the book, so one must assume that the man in this case identified with Jean Valjean but sought the Inspector’s way out of a complicated situation. The literary allusion may be muddled, but the use of the novel to probe a dead man’s psyche assumes widespread familiarity with Hugo’s work. Fantine, Cosette, and Gavroche each receive approximately the same marginal attention as Javert. Fantine represents “[maternal] love and [self-]sacrifice” (Lowry), and the plight of poor and fallen women who are compared with her is a recurring motif, especially with the growth of the women’s rights movement. Cosette mainly appeals through her childhood suffering and her attachment to dolls (see Turner); as an adolescent or new bride, she is nowhere to be found. The public’s interest in the fate of children extended to Gavroche, who evokes the “New-York … gamin of the market, of the docks, and those who lounge in idleness and dirt in all the densely crowded quarters”—including the “boys’ department of the City Prison” (“Gamin”). He also offers the model, as “a type of pure and dauntless heroism,” for a twelve-year-old “gutter-snipe” driven to valiant martyrdom in battle during the Civil War (“Disappearing Type”). More than any other character except Jean Valjean, however, it is Bishop Myriel who captured the popular imagination. The most substantive discussions revolve around the bishop’s positive traits: his aim to heal human suffering (“Bishop”); the simplicity of his language to express great truths (“Seeking”); his contrast with corrupt political leaders in the American Midwest (“Coming”). Even The Intermountain and Colorado Catholic weekly finds in Hugo’s “terrible novel” a model of charity for the forgiveness bestowed by a Chicago priest on a man who had tried to kill him (“And He Forgave”). This focus on the moral aspects of the novel through Myriel’s character reveals just the tip of the iceberg for ways that the work was mined for social, political, and religious ends. Because the book and its characters were so well known, it was easy to translate them to American contexts. Such transpositions testify unequivocally to what Charles Martindale calls the “capacity [of texts] for reingrafting themselves within new contexts, and thus remaining readable. … [E]ach work becomes an intervention within an intertextual field … whose meanings are constantly realized anew at the point of reception” (Redeeming the Text 16–17). But the recontextualization

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of Les Misérables in the US involved more than just the superposition of some of its characters’ traits and trajectories onto people in the news. As in the cultural practice of adaptation, this appropriation of sources also made it possible to use the novel to promote specific agendas. As one might expect from a novel with such a striking will to universal appeal, Hugo’s readers found material in Les Misérables to support many an argument. Thus a country that had been divided by a savage war was intrigued by the account of the Battle of Waterloo. An ad for the newly published novel noted that, “In France, the sale of the work is unprecedented. In England—notwithstanding that Victor Hugo’s description of Waterloo shocked the nerves of the British people—it is still the leading literary sensation” (“New Publications” Aug.). The implication is that if the British were appalled by the depiction of Waterloo, Americans would surely like the book. Many reviewers heaped praise on the “thrilling description of the battle” (“Reading”) and on the writer’s ability to conjure the entire encounter so vividly. After the beginning of World War I, several publications evoked Hugo’s famous version of Waterloo, reproducing long passages on the subject (see, e.g., “Battle”). The fascination with this part of his work for twentieth-century history culminated just after Armistice Day: an editorial in the Wyoming State Tribune cited “the verdict rendered by Victor Hugo … on another and a greater man than the one who has today the scorn … of the whole world,” urging punishment for Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had, like Napoleon, “‘vexed God’” (“He Vexed God”). In this way, Hugo’s interpretation of Waterloo as fulfilling the divine plan provided a perspective from which to view current political and military events as well. Along with the interest of organized religion in Hugo’s work—including his Providential reading of Napoleon’s downfall—the American press reported on many of the social issues that it raises. For instance, social reformers exploited the intense interest in Jean Valjean’s character to inspire changes in attitudes toward the penal system. The president of the Chicago Ethical Culture Society lectured in 1895 that, through the outlaw hero, Hugo exposes “the imbecilities in the existing penal codes … , which crowd the penitentiaries with small offenders, and leave the great offenders to escape” (“Mangasarian”). The progressive Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, echoed this view: “The galley ships of eighteenth-century France and Jean Valjean have their successors in the convict trains and the convict slaves of our American penitentiary system” (“Art. VIII”). Drawing lessons from the novel, rationalist and religious thinkers alike attempted to alert the public to abuses occurring under their own eyes. The importance of education was, of course, a primary theme of the text, as well as another cause espoused by reformers during this period. How ironic, then, that one of the biggest stories concerning Les Misérables in the late-nineteenth century revolved around its being banned in 1897 from use in French literature classes by the Philadelphia Girls’ High School on the grounds that the book was “impure.” Though, according to Espagne, foreign language and literature courses constitute a primary means of mediating and conveying cultural transfers (“Quelques aspects actuels” 170), special barriers were raised in this case against

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the entry of Hugo’s text. An essay on “Moral and Immoral Literature” a few years earlier in the reformist magazine The Arena had, after all, characterized Hugo as “intolerable to prudes,” giving in Les Misérables “a most shocking picture of a Parisian grisette and her illegitimate child” (MacQueary 450).12 In other words, Fantine’s fall was a harmful example to children, “especially girls,” even though, the writer argues, parents should introduce works that provide “strong mental and ethical food” as soon as children are sufficiently mature to “draw the right lesson from them” (MacQueary 453). This conclusion seemed to have escaped the two men on the Philadelphia Board of Education, who considered Les Misérables to be “decidedly improper” and “perfectly shocking in its relation to the French side of life”—that is, the sleazy morals of French working-class girls; in contrast, the only woman on the board defended “Hugo’s immortal work” but was overruled (“Not for Philadelphia”).13 With that, the novel was struck from the reading list of the school’s advanced French class. It was now up to the rest of the country to judge whether the novel was immortal or immoral. Details of the ban made the rounds in dozens of columns from New York to Hawaii. The New Haven Evening Register simply stated, “‘Les Miserables’ has been ruled out of the Girls’ High School by the Philadelphia Board of Education. Comment is unnecessary. In fact, the action defies comment” (“Comment”). The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on divided opinions nationwide about the wisdom of putting the novel in the hands of schoolchildren. The article ended with an interview with the City Librarian of Chicago, who brought in a dose of reality: “‘The life of Jean Valjean … is an epic poem, a noble inspiration, and the book, … instead of a menace to the young, is an instructor and an education. … “Les Miserables” is one of the six most popular works of fiction [in the library]. We have fifty copies … , and yesterday and to-day … twenty-three have been taken out. By to-morrow night all will be out’” (“Opinions”).14 An editorial in the New York Herald concurred that, following the ban, “there will no doubt be a great rush for the book in order to see wherein it is really improper” (“Opinions”). The moral police, in calling so much attention to Hugo’s work, had ignited new eagerness to read it. The embarrassed board reconvened to approve the use of De Sumichrast’s abridged volume for use in class. Again, the story spread like wildfire under such headlines as “‘Les Miserables’ Wins” and “Cut Out the Bad.” 12

 Kaestle notes that a similar reaction in the American press greeted the publication of Émile Zola’s Nana in 1880: “In late Victorian America, gaining the opprobrium of book reviewers did not require an author to describe sexual activity but only to describe promiscuous people without condemning them” (41). 13  The article’s subtitle exclaims: “The Mighty Intellect of the School Board’s Chairman Gives [‘Les Miserables’] the Double Cross.” 14  The danger of having readers for Les Misérables was evidently so intense that two days after the Philadelphia story broke, the librarian of the Columbus, Ohio, library “proscribed … Victor Hugo’s masterpiece,” saying “that hereafter the work would be handed out only to persons of a mature age” (“‘Les Misérables’ Again”). Such debates echoed arguments about whether public libraries ought to carry novels, especially works of popular literature (see Sicherman 291).

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For Roman Catholics, alas, the question was soon moot: within a month, Les Misérables—along with works by Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, Balzac, George Sand, and Zola—would number among the thousands of books included on the Vatican’s Index Expurgatorius (“Index”). Early Adaptations Such moral sniping about Hugo’s text did not diminish its popular appeal, stoked by numerous adaptations in other media that brought new audiences. Though derived from the novel, such versions should, in the end, be considered independent works of art unconstrained by Hugo’s vision or values. Adaptation was already a time-honored practice in England, where “[a]lmost every book published in early nineteenth-century London which achieved any kind of popularity as a book was adapted and transformed on the stage” (St Clair 371). Stagings of Les Misérables versions in the US dated back to 1863, when the English translation of the play by Hugo’s son Charles was booked in Alexandria, Virginia, while a musical drama, “Fantine, or the Fate of a Grisette,” was performed in Washington, DC (“Charles Hugo” and “Advertisement—Grovers’ Theatre”). A few months later the Britishborn actress Laura Keene was heralding “a splendid dramatic version of Victor Hugo’s ‘Les Miserables’” at her own theater in New York City (“Amusements”). From the outset, then, the novel permeated the American cultural consciousness in part through its theatrical presence, which had been facilitated by Hugo’s flair for (and understanding of) popular melodrama. In the archival materials available from this period, several references occur to dramatic renditions of Les Misérables by unspecified authors (see, for instance, “Advertisement—Wood’s Museum”). These local attempts to profit from the book’s popularity might even have been adapted (if not plagiarized) from English plays, like John Coleman’s 1863 take on Jean Valjean in The Yellow Passport, rather than from Hugo’s text itself. Bronson Howard’s version, called “Fantine,” played in Detroit in 1870 (“Stage History”); the British actor and producer Alfred Dampier was a big hit in 1895 playing Jean Valjean in his own recreation of the novel (“Advertisement—Alcazar Theatre”); and the great French actor Constant Coquelin, taking up in late 1899 Charles Hugo’s script (reworked by Paul Meurice) in the role of Valjean, received coast-to-coast acclaim for the play’s successful revival in Paris (“Kaiser”). With its “seventeen tableaus” and “fifty-two personages” (“Mercier”) the show ran five hours long and played to packed houses (“Another Opinion”). These productions all helped to keep the story in the popular consciousness and even to cross-market the novel.15 Whether inspired by the approach of the Hugo centenary in 1902 or by Coquelin’s success in reenacting key scenes centered on Jean Valjean, the early twentieth century saw a proliferation of performances based on the book, some with limited casts. In 1901, the noted impersonator Montaville Flowers, 15  Similarly, the success of the current musical version of Les Misérables contributed to Penguin’s sizeable sales of the text in the 1980s and beyond (Grossman, Conversion 22).

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fresh from his triumph as Ben-Hur, “appeared in … ‘Les Miserables’ before an audience that almost filled the [Richmond, VA, Y.M.C.A.] hall” (“Amusements: ‘Les Miserables’”) in a heavily advertised event. He was a virtual one-man show, a bit like readers today who enact all the characters in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. More frequently, however, plays based on Les Misérables involved two or more actors. A 1902 play by the prominent Scottish actor Norman McKinnel, “The Bishop’s Candlesticks,” was picked up, beginning in 1909, by various student drama clubs (see, e.g., “Coeds”), as well as by the accomplished American actor, James Hackett, who took it cross-country for the next four years (see, e.g., “Hackett” and “Society”). The popular show, in effect, condensed the book to just 50 pages, namely the ex-convict’s encounter with the saintly bishop. We should recall that in 1904 it had been similarly reduced for children in The Story of the Candlesticks, so it is entirely plausible that audiences would enjoy seeing this well-known abridgment on the stage. Thus, some members of the American public might have known Hugo’s text only through a vastly condensed form, whether on the stage or in print. These readers and spectators, whose knowledge of Les Misérables did not extend beyond the early scenes of sin and redemption, would have been utterly mystified by the Philadelphia controversy over the book’s “immorality,” as well as by its condemnation by the Vatican. Other American theater-goers at the beginning of the century would, like the Parisian audience for Coquelin’s performance, have been able to experience much more of the novel through the famed character actor Wilton Lackaye’s “The Law and the Man.” This full theatrical version of Les Misérables, in which Lackaye himself starred as Jean Valjean, garnered unusually large press coverage before and during a tour that began in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1906 and then headed south and west before ending up in New York City. The Waterbury opening, for instance, was noted as far away as Anaconda, Montana, whose local paper ran a long review: “The play not only marks the first effort to condense this great poem of civilization into one drama … but it has probably given to the stage one of the greatest plays produced for years …” (“Stage”). The description of the scenes, right up to Valjean’s death, sounds in many respects like a prototype for Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s musical, although the original French composers of Les Mis may simply have looked to Coquelin’s script for inspiration. When a New York reviewer remarks, “The effective use of incidental music in connection with this play suggests that a good opera might be built upon ‘Les Miserables’” (“Drama”), we again glimpse the germ of our own modern stage version of the text. Hugo’s great prose poem was begging for a lyrical soundtrack. With the invention of moving pictures, the staging moved to the silver screen and could be shown simultaneously all over the country. By 1909, there were already “over 20,000 movi[e] theaters” in the US (Goss), and producers were churning out both original works and representations of literary classics in order to draw in the public. While some sources give 1913 as the date of the first American photoplay of the novel (see, e.g., Centenaire, 207–8)—the recycling in English of Albert Capellani’s 1912 French film with Henry Krauss as Jean Valjean—two pictures inspired by the book appeared in 1909 and toured widely. Indeed, the first

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feature-length film produced in the US was Vitagraph’s four-reel production of Les Misérables, each reel of which was released separately and lasted about 11 minutes; the same year saw a rival multi-reel version by Thomas Edison’s company, directed by Edwin S. Porter (see “Complete Index” and “Motion Picture”). That such adaptations reached deep into rural America shows the pervasive popularity, the bankability, of Hugo’s work. But it was the 1913 release by the Eclectic Film Company of the two-and-ahalf-hour Pathé-Frères/Capellani film that took the country by storm. Headlines touted, “Victor Hugo’s Immortal Classic Reproduced on a Scale of Magnitude. Fantine, Cosette, Marius and the Martyr-Hero, Jean Valjean, Live Their Tragic Lives Again” (“‘Les Miserables’ Staged”). Of course, it helped that all of those wonderful French actors were speaking English in the captions. The movie was advertised from early to mid-August in San Francisco and characterized as “Hugo’s Great Drama of Humanity Acted by an Extraordinary Aggregation of French Stars” (“Advertisement—Theaters”). The picture, which reproduced Hugo’s narrative with minor changes, was released in multiple cities at once, making its way around the country. Whereas the circulation of stage versions was limited by the need for the actors to be present for each performance, the actors in the movies could be everywhere at once—not unlike the ubiquity of the printed text itself. The film itself may have felt theatrical at times thanks to silent cinema’s reliance on expressive gesture, but its success marked the start of a new era in the history of Les Misérables. Publicity for the film assumed a variety of approaches, beyond universal praise for the “gifted Parisian players” (“Amusements: ‘Les Miserables’ in Films”) and the beautiful locales. Some reporters underscored the popularity and impact of the novel—its role in the cultural landscape as “the text for sermon[s],” a support for “appeals to juries,” and an inspiration to “great painters”—while observing that new methods had at last made it possible to “reproduc[e] the big scenes” in ways unimaginable on the stage (“At the Theatre”). Others emphasized the thrill of Europeans in “Paris, … London, Berlin, Vienna, and St. Petersburg” who had already pronounced the show the “ne plus ultra of motion picture art” or reminded readers that the film, offered in theaters to well-paying audiences, was too expensive ever to be seen “in regular picture houses” (“Amusements: ‘Les Miserables’ a Sensation”). One store in Montgomery, Alabama, gave employees half a day off and provided them with complementary tickets so they could catch “the greatest Motion Picture ever made” (“Montgomery Fair”). The Morning Oregonian in Portland began banging the bucket a week before the movie arrived by means of a somewhat fanciful biography of Hugo, followed by an equally fanciful account of the novel’s “scenes of the reign of terror in Paris” (Baer). Whether the columnist had confused 1832 with 1793 or had read only an abridged version matters little. The idea was to get people in the door to enjoy a great show and to help defray the cost of bringing it to town. These efforts met with unheard-of success. In contrast with the brief engagements of previous stage and film adaptations of Les Misérables, the French movie ran as long as seven months, in this case at New York’s Carnegie Hall (“‘Les

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Miserables’ Told”). In St. Louis, 70,000 people attended in 16 days; the Chicago audience numbered 116,000 spectators; and in San Francisco, the film “was greeted not merely by capacity audiences, but by so many standees that fully 500 persons were turned away each evening” (“VH’s Renowned Story”; see also “‘Les Miserables’ in Motion Pictures”). Advanced publicity elsewhere could cite such triumphs in order to sell seats. The film was praised for its “realism” and “amazing … fidelity” to Hugo’s text. And while discussions of the novel itself often touched on its portrayal of Waterloo, the picture garnered attention for its representation of the barricade scene: “we have seen many battle[s] on the screen,” the same reviewer writes, “but never one that could equal this” (“Graphic Photo Play”). Another critic declared that all of the excitement generated by this “photoplay that held vast audiences spellbound” made it “safe to predict an increased sale of the book” (“‘Les Miserables’”). The marvelous French movie would cross-market the novel on an even vaster scale than the stage presentations. As Ellen Gruber Garvey affirms, “Hollywood boosted sales of works that had been adapted for film by advertising the title itself with more extensive and expensive campaigns than any book publisher could attempt. Movie posters often borrowed the prestige of the physical book by including an inset of the book’s cover, further promoting that image …” (181). One review raved, after opening night, “The play is so eminent in its finish[,] so worthy in its theme that every collegian and school child old enough to understand should see it” (“‘Les Miserables’ is a Remarkable Picture”)—a far cry from the urge to prevent advanced-level secondary school girls from soiling their minds with the “immoral” text just 15 years earlier. This first feature-length film of Les Misérables in the US went on and on—all the way to June 1918, an extraordinary run of almost five years (“Advertisement— Strand”). Its astonishing appeal blurred the distinction between elite and popular culture. The movie was universally praised as “the most successful [motion picture production] ever made” (“Pearce’s Theatres”), provoking a conversation about the huge potential of film as a medium and art form (see, e.g., “Moving World”), and by 1914 movie exchange subscribers could watch “Les Miserables” at home (“Display Ad 1”). Shows eventually moved from upscale theaters and opera houses to regular playhouses, thereby attracting whole new audiences paying “popular prices” (“VH’s ‘Les Miserables’ at the Orpheum”). When Pathé shortened the picture to two hours, it packed movie houses countrywide for days on end (see, e.g., “Advertisement—Latest Pathe News”). Perhaps most important to the film’s later success, the ongoing war in Europe prompted special sensitivity to the “scenes of Paris and those of rural France” for those thinking of “our soldiers fighting in the land of the tricolor” (“Theatricals in Gulfport”). Americans, who had derived so much from Les Misérables during the Civil War, now had a vested interest in Hugo’s faraway nation. As 1917 drew to a close, an entirely new American production was released. Made by Fox Film Corporation, shot on a set in New Jersey, and starring William Farnum as Jean Valjean (“‘Les Miserables’ Marks High”), it began its rounds, like its predecessor, in regular theaters, then quickly spread to movie houses. Both

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the film in general and Farnum in particular received high praise. The Tucson Citizen cited reviews, all glowing, from eight New York papers in advance of the film’s arrival. Interestingly, three of them focus on its fidelity to Hugo’s text—“an excellent example of what the movies can do for [literary] classics (qtd. from New York World in “‘Les Miserables’ Greatest Drama”).16 A number of papers included a lengthy synopsis of the picture (see, for instance, “Wm. Farnum”), and if that may have spoiled the story for some, it doubtless reassured those who had read and loved the novel that much of the original had been faithfully preserved. One Texas daily noted: “Just as ‘Les Miserables’ is the strongest human story ever written, so is … Fox’s … screen adaptation … the most absorbing film drama that has ever been shown in El Paso” (“Today’s Amusements—Alhambra”). The Pathé version had opened in El Paso just one year earlier to similar reviews (“Today’s Amusements—‘Les Miserables’”), but no matter. The Fox movie provided another opportunity for many non-readers to “know” Hugo’s work, while encouraging others to pick up the book for the first or second time. The Mohave County [Arizona] Miner said so more directly: “If you have not read the book you can see this great piece of fiction unfolded upon the silver screen and be entertained as well as educated. Those who have read the book will enjoy seeing their favorite characters portrayed. Don’t miss it” (“Lang’s Theater”). The crossmarketing thus continued unabated into the 1920s, keeping the novel alive in the popular imagination three generations after the book itself had been received by equally enthusiastic readers. *** These various early fortunes of Les Misérables in America prompt a number of possible conclusions. First, like Hugo’s own fantastic productivity, the novel had a remarkably fertile trajectory, spawning a host of textual, dramatic, and cinematic offspring that kept it perpetually in the public eye. Second, though it is evident that many people knew the text only through an abridged or adapted version, many others, in every corner of the developing country, read, reread, discussed, and passed on the book to their children and grandchildren.17 In this way, Les Misérables became part of the American landscape, a cultural property useful to teachers, clergy, lawyers, and politicians. Third, the book’s “transfer” or “displacement” from its native culture to the US resulted, to use Espagne’s terms, in a host of “recontextualizations” and “reinterpretations” that allowed for its assimilation into the host culture (see “Quelques aspects” 171). As Hugo’s 16  As a new art form at the time, cinema required the validation of literature, its much older sibling—hence the emphasis on “fidelity” as a criterion. 17  “Not only were literary activities deeply embedded in family and social life [in nineteenth-century America], but people read to one another, exchanged books as tokens of love or friendship, talked endlessly about them, and used stories and characters as referents for their lives” (Sicherman 301).

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characters became universalized, thereby fulfilling their intended destiny, they lost their French “otherness” and began to serve as a common frame of reference for the whole nation. Finally, the novel was an incredible marketing machine, a boon to capitalists seeking to sell everything from luxury editions to newspapers, theater tickets, and movie seats. The recycling of Hugo’s story in plays and motion pictures, themselves recycled in new productions using the latest technologies, continues, of course, to this day. Hugo, himself no stranger either to marketing or to adapting his fiction in other media, would be pleased to see how deeply rooted Les Misérables became from the outset in the American consciousness. As a sister nation in his eyes to nineteenth-century France, and as the leading superpower of the next century, the US offered an optimal environment—one whose cultural mix and commercial opportunities have, from the start, been integral to the novel’s history.

Chapter 8

Adapting Les Misérables for the Screen: Transatlantic Debates and Rivalries Delphine Gleizes (Translated by Stacie Allan)

Founded on a mistrust of the Hollywood system and its ability to do justice to the literature of the old continent, the reception of American adaptations of Les Misérables in France has often been cool, if not glacial. Accordingly, Julien Boivent’s analysis of Bille August’s 1998 adaptation (see Plate 7) in Les Cahiers du Cinéma deemed that: “while it is important to say that the film does inevitably massacre Victor Hugo’s crowning glory, it is also the very essence of literary masterpieces to survive the deepest insults inflicted upon them, notably the almost welcomed abridgment” [“Il faut quand même dire que le film massacre forcément le monument de Victor Hugo, mais que c’est aussi le propre des chefs d’œuvres littéraires que de toujours survivre un peu à tous les profonds outrages qu’on peut leur faire, et notamment à cette cure d’amaigrissement assez réjouissante”]. Reaction was cooler still for the recent version by Tom Hooper (see Plate 16), who, in some ways, really stuck the knife in by adapting not directly from the novel but from the musical.1 The Cahiers called it a “dumbed-down and hyped-up drama” [“Dramaturgie schématique et boursouflée”], full of “pretentious organs” [“orgues pompières”] according to the Nouvel Observateur, and just misérable for almost everyone else. Apart from Le Figaro, which praised Hooper’s decision to take big risks, not many critics gave the director his dues. Moreover, this particular case is significant: the unease that this adaptation provoked in the French press greatly contrasted with the triumphant reception that it received in the United States, demonstrated by its collection of three Oscars. The overwhelming rejection in France is perhaps indicative of the difficulty in categorizing Hooper’s film. Inspired by a French musical but largely capitalizing on Anglo-Saxon models and tastes, it is a fundamentally hybrid film. Placing the audience in such an unstable position, the film, in short, highlights the conflictual existence of two concurrent yet partially divergent traditions of adaptation that exist on either side of the Atlantic. These traditions are manifested in the scripting of the plot, just as much as in the portrayal of the characters, the film’s approach to and visualization of certain scenes, and the reading of the novel’s social and political issues. 1  The film was a relative commercial flop in France with fewer than 300,000 tickets sold, despite being shown in more than 300 cinemas.

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Rivalries and Echoes The transatlantic debates that surround adapting literature for the screen, and Victor Hugo’s novels in particular, were grounded in a rivalry between two cinematic industries. In fact, from the first days of cinema, Hollywood has been trying to adapt Les Misérables, and the regular releases of new opuses can be tracked over the decades—along with their critics who, in comparing French and American versions, assess a film’s chance of success. In France, the first real adaptation of Les Misérables was Albert Capellani’s Le Chemineau in 1906, which centered on the episode of the bishop’s candlesticks.2 The American versions that appeared just a few years later, such as Edwin Stanton Porter’s three episodes for Edison Studios in 1909 or James Stuart Blackton’s production for Vitagraph in the same year, were more ambitious. In 1913, Herbert Brenon dealt again with the episode of the bishop’s candlesticks. Capellani’s 1912 adaptation, a veritable super-production for its time, was released in 1913 to acclaim in the United States and rejuvenated the process of adaptation.3 This French adaptation was still present in collective memory when Frank Lloyd’s version was made in 1917, and contemporary critics could use it as a point of comparison. Variety wrote: The film production by William Fox of “Les Miserables” is a big feature. It differs entirely from the French one shown here a few years ago, and if a comparison were to be made it would suffer through incompetent acting. A pity so much time, money and intelligent direction should have been coupled with such mediocre histrionic talent. (“Les Misérables” 1917)

But the open-mindedness demonstrated by this particular critic in awarding Capellani’s film first place over Lloyd’s version should not hide the noticeable effects of Franco-American competitiveness. Once the French film industry was back on its feet after the First World War, lengthy adaptations that reflected the power of production companies would offer the chance to celebrate the excellence of French cinema abroad. As Christophe Gauthier has pointed out, a gala evening with the French ambassador in attendance was organized in London on 9 April 1926 for Henri Fescourt’s Les Misérables, followed by another event held in Washington in June 1926 (29). The rivalry also became apparent in 1934–1935 with the almost concurrent release of Raymond Bernard’s version in France and Richard Boleslawski’s in the US (see Plates 15 and 4). While recognizing the qualities of the French version, the American press

2  For extensive Les Misérables filmographies, see Arnaud Laster, “Les Misérables,” and Delphine Gleizes, “Filmographie” 245–52. 3  With its 3,400 meters of reel, Capellani’s adaptation would for a while hold the world record for longest feature-length film. The 1912 film is the French original, whereas the 1913 release in the US was the same version, simply using English on the dialogue cards. See Kathryn Grossman’s chapter in this volume.

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noted that its arrival on the market in the wake of the American one worked against it.4 In 1936, Variety commented that: It comes only a little more than a year behind Twentieth Century Pictures’ “Les Miserables,” the March-Laughton starrer, which was enough “Les Miserables” for most patrons for a couple of years to come. Hollywood’s taste for the French opus consequently must have evaporated as much as the general public’s. … Another market may be found in colleges or college towns where extreme faithfulness to Hugo is desired. (“Les Misérables: French Made”)

Consensus on the other side of the Atlantic is clearly that French adaptations are especially faithful to Hugo’s text—and this is true. American cinema, in contrast, is more concerned about the conditions of the film’s release, so its length must not discourage the audience or a nationwide distribution. When adapting Les Misérables, Hollywood pulls out all the stops, as evidenced, for example, in a constant feature of its choice of directors. The majority of these are of European origin, and most often they have also achieved public success and institutional recognition. Boleslawki was born in Warsaw in 1889 and worked as an actor at the Moscow Art Theatre under the direction of Stanislawski before immigrating to the US (see Laster, “Les Misérables” 86). Lewis Milestone was a Ukrainian-born director who was best known for his All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), which won the Academy Award for best film. The Danish director Bille August received the Palme d’Or twice at the Cannes Film Festival,5 and once crowned with these glories he embarked upon a career in Hollywood. As for the British director Hooper, he earned the recognition of the general public with The King’s Speech (2011), which was awarded four Oscars, including Best Film and Best Director.6 Therefore, besides drawing on the undeniable know-how of the Hollywood film industry, the choice of directors adds another dimension to this portrait by integrating the same European cinema with which Hollywood is directly competing. However, far from blurring the differences between the two cinematographic traditions, this rivalry only makes them more pronounced. The divergence is particularly noticeable in the strategies that govern the distribution of roles. French cinema has established two archetypal portrayals for the role of Jean Valjean: emphasis is placed either upon an inner suffering borne by the actor (e.g., Harry Baur in Bernard’s 1934 version) or, in contrast, upon the character’s athletic physique and marginal or rebellious status (Lino Ventura in Robert Hossein’s 1982 4

 For a comparison of these two adaptations, see Martin Barnier 35–46.  For Pelle the Conqueror in 1988 and The Best Intentions in 1992. The former also received the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. 6  Hooper claimed in an interview with Première that he was raised on the aesthetics of English realism, with directors such as Ken Loach and Mike Leigh: “What we saw, and what we had around us, were hyperrealist dramas which promoted the idea that what is true must be real” (Golhen). 5

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version, Jean-Paul Belmondo in Claude Lelouch’s 1995 film [see Plate 6], or even Gérard Depardieu in Josée Dayan’s 2000 telefilm). In general, and conforming to a certain tradition of French cinema, these star actors who, in the main, carry the films also have famously harsh features. They are therefore chosen more for their charisma than for their appearance. American tradition prefers refined actors who are considered handsome and even graceful, such as Fredric March and Michael Rennie in Boleslawki’s and Milestone’s versions respectively. Liam Neeson, while filming August’s version, undoubtedly benefitted from the buzz around his performance in Schindler’s List (1993), another story of fault and redemption. Hooper’s recent adaptation points to a renewed public interest in action films. The audience is certainly reminded of the superhero Wolverine with Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe’s role in Gladiator. Whatever individual resonances may exist, Jean Valjeans in American cinema are, on the whole, characterized by an undeniable glamour in opposition to the more rugged portrayals in French cinema. In addition to the choice of actors, cinematography on both sides of the Atlantic has relied upon traditional strategies of representation. This imagery is itself rooted in mechanisms of reception and release that in some cases were established prior to the invention of moving pictures. Hugo’s novel had already undergone numerous reworkings in the form of popular illustrated books, paintings, and “tiein products,” to use today’s terminology (see Georgel). The creation of archetypes therefore began in the nineteenth century, for instance Gustave Brion’s memorable sketched character silhouettes that appeared in the 1865 illustrated edition (see Plates 1–3): Cosette carrying a pail of water that is too heavy for her or the stiff and menacing figure of Javert. From its very origins, cinema was largely built upon the persistent effect of such visual cues, yet the link to these archetypes anchored in the collective imagination of nineteenth-century France is probably weaker in the US. Thus, in the French adaptations, Javert’s costume conforms to Hugo’s descriptions of his “lowered hat” [“chapeau rabattu”] and to Brion’s vignette. In contrast, the American tradition, which is far less likely to be subject to the illustrations’ cultural resonances, has opted for a bicorne as worn by Charles Laughton (Boleslawski), as well as by Geoffrey Rush (August). This lack of imagery in the collective imagination has afforded American versions more room for interpretation, along with the opportunity to distance its screenplays from the original text, which, while being “sacrilegious,” is no less revealing in its effects. Screenplay Traditions and Genre Hybridization Whatever one thinks about the Hollywood versions of Les Misérables, the greater liberty taken in the process of adapting and interpreting the text must be recognized. The best (Fescourt, Bernard) and worst (Le Chanois) French versions cannot avoid the sometimes cumbersome homage to Hugo’s literary monument. Since the creation of the first French film production companies, such as Pathé

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and its offshoot the SCAGL, Gaumont, and Le Film d’Art, the ambition to derive both legitimacy and added value from literature as an art form has been at stake.7 This question regularly resurfaces in French debates, as shown by the arguments orchestrated by the New Wave against “a certain idea of cinema” [“une certaine idée du cinéma”] or the “French quality” [“qualité française”; Serceau]. Making reference to the literary work has also always been a commercial argument when hyperbole is concerned. For example, the tagline for Bernard’s adaptation, “the immortal masterpiece of the French screen” [“L’immortel chef-d’œuvre de l’écran français”],8 assimilates the novel and the film within one common glory. We must acknowledge that American cinema also uses these arguments but associates them with other factors such as the adaptation’s creativity, sometimes to the horror of the guardians of the Hugolian temple. In 1935, Variety evaluated the qualities of Boleslawski’s adaptation: “‘Les Misérables’ is both a ‘prestige’ picture and a potential box office smash. A remarkable screen tabloidization, it will satisfy the most exacting Victor Hugo followers, and at the same time please those looking only for entertainment regardless of literary background” (“Les Misérables” 1935). In short, we can say that these adaptations are the site where issues of literary readings and mass entertainment conjoin. Indeed, the American adaptations seem less worried about the practicalities of genre hybridization than their French counterparts. By mixing genres, this method, on which the hope of success at the box office seems to vie with creative efforts, is far from being absurd when it comes to the aesthetics of Hugo’s novel. The novelist himself applied a similar approach to literary genres. Les Misérables is simultaneously: a popular novel with its improbable twists and turns and incredible coincidences; a proto-detective novel with its confrontation between Jean Valjean and Javert; a social novel; and a “true poem” [“vrai poème”], as Arthur Rimbaud described it in a letter to Paul Demeny (“Lettre du Voyant”). But while borrowing some of the most tried and tested formulas from these genres, Hugo’s novel is not limited to them. Instead, he works with them and subverts them, as Myriam Roman has shown. The French adaptations seem less comfortable with this process, perhaps because the cinematic practice is evaluated in France in terms of style rather than register. From this point of view, Fescourt’s and Bernard’s versions owe very little to the imitation of established genres. Both films are remarkable in terms of the aesthetic decisions that govern them, such as their lighting and framing, as well as their search for symbolic imagery. Directors like Lelouch or Hossein who have tried their hand at mixing genres have done so partially through experimentation, borrowing in turn from detective films and war films, to cite but two examples. Critics sometimes foresee this difficulty of varying the registers. Of Le Chanois’s adaptation (see Plate 5), Pierre Mazars wrote: “In the book’s image, it was 7

 On this point, see Alain Carou.  My emphasis highlights the use of this term in a promotional poster for Bernard’s film drawn by G. C. Chavanne. 8

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necessary for the film to alternate between intimate episodes and sections of bravado, the familiar and the epic. What I would especially reproach Le Chanois for is that there is too much uniformity in the manner of narrating” [“Il fallait que, à l’image du livre lui-même, le film fît alterner les épisodes intimistes et les morceaux de bravoure, le familier et l’épique. Ce que je reprocherais surtout à M. Le Chanois, c’est une trop grande uniformité dans la manière de conter.”] In this regard, American adaptations demonstrate a greater liberty. The New York Times underlined that Les Misérables’s narrative trajectory could be summarized as one enormous manhunt that makes the work’s message eternal and relevant for every era. This message obviously echoed the contemporary situation in 1935, with its depiction of social issues and poverty reopening the wounds of the Wall Street Crash in 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression: “Despite its costumed surfaces, this odyssey of the greatest man hunt in literature possesses a topical significance in 1935 as real and moving as it did in 1862, and it is as undated as man’s inhumanity to man” (Sennwald 1935). The American adaptations can thus be characterized by their greater pliancy and by their aptitude for playing with registers that are immediately recognizable to the audience. The fast pace of genre shifts in the American versions is arguably also related to production choices, particularly concerning the length of the films. On the whole, American adaptations are more jam-packed, with the episodes rapidly following on from one another. What is striking when watching Hooper’s Les Misérables, for example, is the frantic rhythm at which scenes and musical performances come one after another. There is no dead time, no standing still, in this version that ultimately appears excessive when we consider that Hugo created a contemplative dimension to his novel in anticipation of a “thoughtful reader” [“lecteur pensif”] who could conduct an unpredictable interpretation.9 In addition to the film’s conception as an entirely sung-through musical, we must take into account the weight of the Hollywood tradition and the decisions of producers who believe that the audience must be given a show, which, consequently, must captivate them enough by avoiding any boredom. The throbbing rhythm and numerous plot omissions are unfortunately not always enough to avoid this pitfall. While most of the French adaptations take the form of extremely long blockbusters—Capellani’s Les Misérables was the longest and most costly film of its time in world cinema—American adaptations have a more reasonable running time, but then carry out huge cuts in the screenplay. Darryl Zanuck, the producer of Boleslawki’s adaptation, pushed for the story to be streamlined in order to focus the film’s efforts and attention on the manhunt on one hand and on the romance between Marius and Cosette on the other (see Barnier 45). As a result, entire sections from Hugo’s plot were removed: Petit-Gervais and M. Gillenormand were omitted, and the Thénardiers played a greatly reduced role. These drastic 9  This notion appears in a draft of the preface dedication to L’Homme qui rit: “Only thoughtful readers exist. I dedicate my works to them” [“Il n’est que lecteur pensif. C’est à lui que je dédie mes œuvres”]. See Marie-Christine Bellosta and Myriam Roman.

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choices regarding the screenplay also affect the way that the work is read. The plot finds itself narrowed down to four characters, with Jean Valjean occupying a central role. The concept of a social saga that other versions, like Bernard’s, put forth partially fades here into the background. American versions therefore look for inspiration in two types of cinematic genres: the romance and the western—or any other variations that pit a representative of order against an ex-convict. The imagery of the western is seen in the chase scenes that certain American versions spectacularly stage. In Boleslawski’s film, Jean Valjean once again escapes Javert by fleeing with Cosette across the countryside on horseback. He rides at a frantic pace and leaves his empty Tilbury carriage running in order to set the Inspector off on a false lead. The manhunt also forms an oxymoron between the emblematic actors, such as Fredric March and Charles Laughton, or Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe more recently, who contrast in character, stature, or posture. Yet the contrast, as black and white as it may be, offers some nice surprises, like Laughton’s mind games with his trembling bottom lip and unblinking eyes, or even the choice that Milestone makes in treating the character. In his version, Javert is uncompromising but nonetheless tries to be fair, according to his principles at least. The director humanizes the character and, in some ways, anticipates the evolution of the Inspector in Hugo’s novel: “a few hours ago, Javert ceased being uncomplicated” [“Depuis quelques heures Javert avait cessé d’être simple”; LML 1040]. Milestone’s policeman, for example, pays Jean Valjean the exact amount due him on leaving prison, in spite of the wardens’ attempts to deduct part of his savings and use it for their own gain. This variation on “some observations for the good of the service” [“quelques observations pour le bien du service”; LML 1046] that the Inspector writes at the moment of his suicide is not present in the text. The treatment of the character in Hooper’s version is also surprising. In Javert’s individual scenes, the camera literally circumscribes Russell Crowe using a low-angle shot that captures the character facing up to his destiny in a circular movement, and in so doing reveals behind the Inspector the panorama of Paris. The presence of Notre-Dame Cathedral in the background allows for a comparison with the tormented spirit of Claude Frollo, the tortured priest from Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831). Moreover, the position of the Inspector overlooking the city and the scene’s twilight setting is, to a certain extent, reminiscent of the caped crusader Batman contemplating the depravity of Gotham City.10 Through genre hybridization and the effects of reference, a new depth is added to the character. Turning to romance, the importance that is placed upon Romantic sentiment in the American versions, up to and including Hooper’s adaptation of the musical, 10

 The links between Hugo and Batman originate in the creation of the character of the Joker, who was based on Hugo’s character Gwynplaine in Paul Leni’s 1928 film adaptation of L’Homme qui rit, although they have been explored further through a number of telling perspectives. See Bradley Stephens, “Dialogue culturel,” Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, and Isabelle Nougarède.

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is striking. This increased importance of the “Idyll in the Rue Plumet” [“idylle de la rue Plumet”; IV] section goes hand in hand with the normalization of Cosette’s story and, beyond that, of Fantine’s. No doubt for Boleslawski’s and Milestone’s versions, the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code played a major role: we barely catch on that the factory worker is an unmarried mother. This toning down of the characters contrasts with the return to a harsher vision of Fantine’s destiny in more recent versions, which conform more to the text itself. Hooper’s film restores Fantine’s degradation into prostitution. Her moral and physical decline is shown on screen and vocalized in the famous song, “I Dreamed a Dream”—a performance that earned Anne Hathaway the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. The character of Cosette is also noticeably normalized. Several adaptations do not make use of the novel’s sudden developments brought about by the rescue of the little “lark” [“alouette”] and limit themselves to showing the ultimate reunion of the daughter with her mother in the throes of death. The scars of poverty likewise quickly heal, leaving in their place a beautiful and seductive young woman who will very naturally capture the heart of Marius. Milestone even places the idyll in the Petit-Picpus convent, where Marius finds refuge between two altercations with the National Guard. For a time, this unlikely locus amoenus shields the two lovers from the violence of history. The constant borrowing from other genres and cinematographic references in the American tradition would have meaning for an audience that is undoubtedly more familiar with Hollywood cinema than with French Romanticism. Milestone’s adaptation is marked by one obvious case of filmic citation. In an unprecedented move, Jean Valjean, played by Michael Rennie, is represented as a brute placed in prison under the moral influence of another inmate who teaches him to read and count. If Hugo mentions Jean Valjean (who later teaches Cosette to read) learning to read while incarcerated, he does not cite the convict under whose influence he might have been placed. To the contrary, when the novelist does mention his former inmates at the trial in Arras, it is to underline Valjean’s charisma and moral ascendancy over his friends. The character, then, is in keeping with Hugo’s fictional figures that preceded him, notably Claude Gueux in the eponymous story (1834). Milestone’s characterization is completely different: Jean Valjean is at the beck and call of one of his unfortunate companions. When a prisoner finds himself stuck under an extremely heavy wooden beam following an accident, Valjean refuses on the spot to go to his rescue, considering “that he will be better off dead than alive.” It is his mentor who orders him to save the man, commenting, “I’ve spent years teaching this brute to read and write and this is how he repays me.” Under the influence of another man, this Valjean is therefore not the master of his own destiny, and it will require time for him to take charge of that fate once he is released from prison. If this interpretation considerably distorts Hugo’s vision, it doubtless spoke to an American audience who would have been able to recall the character of Lennie from John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937), which Milestone had adapted for the screen in 1939. This choice is a way of dramatizing the profound interior transformation of the character and of making it meaningful

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for the contemporary viewer. Where the French adaptations work to show Jean Valjean evolving through the interpretation of an actor confronted with the agony of his conscience—the scene from the “A Tempest in a Skull” [“Une tempête sous un crâne”] becoming an expected high moment—the American versions, which skip this scene, privilege the character’s trajectory, his physical transformation, and, in a behaviorist logic, the contrasts in his conduct. Another example, in this case concerning generic hybridization, is the treatment of justice and the reference to the courtroom drama genre born in the US. Certainly the novel’s bravura passage, where Jean Valjean denounces himself during Champmathieu’s trial in Arras, is an indispensable scene for any adaptation: it offers the actor playing Jean Valjean the opportunity to show off multiple facets of his talent through simultaneously interpreting both roles. However, nothing obliges the adaptations to include Jean Valjean’s initial sentencing to five years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread, whereas the successive versions by Boleslawski and Milestone did just that in their opening scenes. Milestone distinguishes his film slightly from its predecessor by accelerating the scene—and staging it from the viewpoint of the accused. Most often, trial scenes in American cinema serve as a controversial and contradictory manifestation of the truth. In a number of ways, these scenes show the workings of democracy. The unjust exertion of the law, then, manifests itself more clearly through the models that the American viewer might have in mind. Historic Readings vs. Democratic Visions One of the criticisms that resurfaces most often from the pens of French journalists when they mention American adaptations is their ignorance of the historical context in which Les Misérables takes place. The way in which the barricades episode is treated can certainly raise a smile at times. It is clear that even if a pedagogical effort is regularly made to try to explain the reasons behind the insurrection, these attempts on the whole lack substance and credibility—and this is the case from Boleslawski to Hooper, including Milestone and August. The reconstruction of old Paris is often quite fanciful—for example, August’s film was shot in Prague—and Hugo’s evocation of the socio-political motivations that govern the insurrection is but a distant memory. Yet what is of interest in these adaptations is not what they fail to say about the society of nineteenth-century France, but rather what they suggest about that of twentieth-century America. The concept is no doubt a key divergence between the American and French adaptations. The French films propose, admittedly with varying success, a historical reading of the novel that is based on reconstructive work. The American versions offer a symbolic and simplified analysis of the developing workings of democracy, often abstracted from the socio-political context in which they emerged. It is difficult indeed to summarize the multitude of French adaptations within one single principle. The chronological spread of the corpus and the variety of

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aesthetics make for a risky task, but there are nevertheless some clear constants, in that the facts presented on screen have a socio-historical grounding. Undoubtedly influenced by the persistence of a collective imagination still indebted to the nineteenth century, the pre-war versions (Capellani, Fescourt, and Bernard) place greater emphasis on the importance of France’s history. After the Second World War, this enduring memory of the nineteenth century fades away but is compensated by the deliberate approach of the directors. Le Chanois affirms that: “It will not be a historical film, but you will see history in it. It will not be a film that reconstructs the past, but you will see the Paris of another age. It will not be a costume drama, but you will rediscover an era” [“Ce ne sera pas un film historique, mais on y verra de l’histoire. Ce ne sera pas un film de reconstitution, mais on y verra le Paris d’autrefois. Ce ne sera pas un film de costumes, mais on y retrouvera une époque”]. If this is the proposed intention, the result can still leave the spectator perplexed: the movie labors to resist the logic of reconstruction, despite the efforts of the set designer, Serge Pimenoff, who spares nothing to resuscitate the old Paris with nineteenth-century city maps, etchings, and photographs, the latter notably by Charles Marville.11 Notwithstanding this relative failure, the adaptations from the second half of the twentieth century do keep the socio-political issues of the novel in their sights: Marcel Bluwal rereads the events of 1832 in light of the social context of May 1968 (see Un aller and “Scénario” 1–2; see also Gleizes, “Manifestations populaires”), and Lelouch transposes the plot of Les Misérables onto a chaotic twentieth century. Against this French trend, American versions of Les Misérables have freed themselves from the historical background in order to privilege a reflection on the current status of democracy. In general, directors in the US reserve a specific approach toward the barricades episode: the insurrection, a violent form of contestation cut off from its social foundations, is quickly eliminated. This was of course the assessment already formulated by Hugo. In the novel, the context is somber, and the prospect of overcoming the crisis is only a utopian dream: a “horizon” that one “sees from atop the barricade” [“voit du haut de la barricade”], yet there is one major difference. Even if Hugo calls their hopes “gradual progress” [“progrès en pente douce”], he integrates the question of violence into the story and does not dismiss it, always preferring the “barbarians of civilization” [“barbares de la civilisation”] to “civilized barbarism” [“civilisés de la barbarie”; LML 675] in spite of everything. The same cannot be said for American adaptations, in which the insurrection takes on a highly sensitive meaning through the looming specter of the American Civil War and its savage military conflict between different states. In France, by contrast, depictions of the insurrection are structured around the figure of the French Revolution and a more overtly ideological struggle. The American 11

 These archives are held at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris and are used within the ANR’s research program Cinémarchives. See http://www.cinematheque.fr/ sites-documentaires/pimenoff/rubrique/la-collection-serge-pimenoff-les-collectionscomplementaires-archives-et-decor-de-cinema.php.

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unease toward revolutionary violence in Les Misérables is epitomized in Hooper’s version, where working-class women mop up the pools of blood that stain the streets of Paris after the barricade attack, and there is the sense that the young men have died for nothing. For Hollywood directors, the dismissal of violence gives way to the evocation of alternative forms of democratic conquest, seen in the dramatic treatment of social space as well as in the focus on the journey of the main character, Jean Valjean. Numerous scenes that take place in an enclosed space in the novel and in the French adaptations are transposed to a public location in the American versions. In Boleslawski’s film, the students lecture the crowd in a park (incidentally, that is how Marius meets Cosette); for August and Hooper, however, it is in the street. Social space is an open space that can be dangerous. But whereas the social and political history of contestation in France was largely built on an underground model akin to that of the “Friends of the ABC” [“amis de l’ABC”], the American versions reveal a debate that unfolds in public, albeit in its initial stages. For Boleslawski, the student-run opposition is well established. They proudly display “Student Society; Law Reform” on the front of their premises, and Jean Valjean takes money out at the bank to support them financially. Together, the American adaptations seem more confident with the workings of democracy than the French adaptations. If they show the machinery of a profoundly vicious justice system, they also highlight individual strategies that oppose the development of injustices. In August’s film, for example, Jean Valjean serves at a soup kitchen. Without falling into oversimplification, the American adaptations ignore Thénardier’s angry rant that suggests that public charity has never been a political solution to poverty,12 preferring to privilege other perspectives. While the collective initiative that the student revolt represents is shown to be a dramatic failure, the personal path, as exemplified by Jean Valjean/Monsieur Madeline’s success story, is valorized. From silent movies onward, the synopses insist upon Jean Valjean’s new life, and subsequent versions do not vary on this point. Moreover, if Jean Valjean remains an ex-convict, it is not, as in the novel and a 12  “Ah!” he cried, “we finally meet again, Mr. Philanthropist! Mr. Ragamuffin Millionaire! … Ah! You’re finally going to learn that it’s not a bed of roses, going to people’s houses like that under the pretext that they are inns, with pathetic clothing and the stench of poverty so that people would donate money, misleading them, targeting the generous, taking their bread-and-butter from them and threatening them in the woods. Offering a coat that is too big and two old blankets from the hospital afterward, when people are ruined, doesn’t make us quits. Old rogue! Kidnapper!” [“Ah! criait-il, je vous retrouve enfin, monsieur le philanthrope! monsieur le millionnaire râpé! … Ah! on va voir enfin que ce n’est pas tout roses d’aller comme cela dans les maisons des gens, sous prétexte que ce sont des auberges, avec des habits minables, avec l’air d’un pauvre, qu’on lui aurait donné un sou, tromper les personnes, faire le généreux, leur prendre leur gagne-pain, et menacer dans les bois, et qu’on n’en est pas quitte pour rapporter après, quand les gens sont ruinés, une redingote trop large et deux méchantes couvertures d’hôpital, vieux gueux, voleur d’enfants!”; LML 628].

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number of French adaptations, because he committed a new crime: as we have seen, the episode where he steals from Petit Gervais is most often omitted from American versions. There is, then, no rechute or relapse for Jean Valjean, due as much to moral nature as to crime against the law. Rather, he is pursued for having destroyed his former identity and for no longer being subject to judicial control. Certain adaptations, like Hooper’s, even depict the destruction of his dreadful yellow passport. Moving in a different direction to their French counterparts, these adaptations insist upon the rapid social ascension of Jean Valjean and the material success of the former convict. In Milestone’s version, we see the character negotiating a good price for the Bishop’s silverware, a nest egg that gives him the initial funding for his new business. Both Boleslawki’s and Milestone’s versions portray a welldressed Jean Valjean, enjoying real material comfort and leading a life of domestic bliss in the company of Cosette. Milestone’s version goes even further by having Bishop Myriel’s own sister advise the convict: shaving and dressing properly are the first stages in the process of integration and rehabilitation. Similarly, when the fugitive arrives in the small village where he ends up establishing himself, he begins by studying the artisanal techniques of making earthenware dishes before immediately suggesting to the foreman solutions for organizing the workload that are supposed to improve the final quality of production.13 Putting Taylor’s principles in place avant la lettre,14 his suggestions include dividing up the tasks and placing at each workstation the most talented artisan for carrying out the work. In this way, Jean Valjean’s journey appears as an answer to a life in destitution, and the happy ending to which most American versions subscribe is only the confirmation of such a trajectory’s success. The former convict therefore earns salvation through redemption and, ultimately, capitalism, whereas the French adaptations, and the novel itself, insist upon the inescapable nature of social damnation. In privileging an optimistic vision of Jean Valjean’s destiny, American cinema does not remove all the power of anger and revolt that the original novel can carry but appears to transpose it onto other issues that are inherent to US history. Suspicions toward social utopias combined with the ghost of the Civil War have doubtless removed from Hollywood adaptations any epic and valorized treatment of the barricades. Tellingly, the figure of Gavroche, on whom rests the touching emotion of the entire episode, is only either briefly alluded to or not included at all in these films. In contrast, their emotional power is concentrated on the evocation of poverty, which is perceived as a form of slavery. This comparison goes back to Blackton’s 1909 version, where the first part is entitled “The Galley Slave.” This 13  The script of Milestone’s version invents this new character of the foreman who plays a significant role in the action, becoming the friend and confident of Jean Valjean. He uncovers Valjean’s true identity and, in this sense, is a sort of positive double to Javert. 14  At the forefront of the Efficiency Movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856– 1915) was a pioneer of industrial engineering whose ideas were highly influential in turnof-the-century America.

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second meaning of forçat (convict or slave) conjures an anachronistic image of the galleys, a penal system that was replaced in France in 1748 with prison labor, as it figures in Hugo’s novel. Nevertheless, American film adaptations continue to depict shackled galley slaves maneuvering heavy oars. Such is the case in Boleslawski’s and Milestone’s versions, which are barely distinguishable from one another. As for Hooper, he stages a gigantic shipyard that is closer to Hugo’s descriptions, but visually the image of convicts lined up, towing by sheer strength a ship emerging from an imperial defeat, recalls the first image of galley slaves. This prevalent choice of historical representation in the American adaptations confirms a rather loose relationship with the story’s actual socio-historical context. It is, however, not unreasonable to consider that this choice is fully conscious and that the staging of modern-day slaves incorporates the image of the deportation of Africans to the US, along with their long struggle for the recognition of their rights. Certainly the imagery that governs the representation of Jean Valjean at the galleys in Boleslawski’s and Milestone’s versions is also one of Christ’s passion. Yet Hooper’s film connects all slaves more perceptively still: convicts, paupers, and perhaps implicitly African-Americans (citizens of color figure in the first scenes in Montreuil-sur-Mer). Thus, referring to the National Guard who represent the powers-that-be, one of the leaders of the insurrection exclaims: “We shall overcome their power.” It is difficult not to read beyond this declaration of the students gathered at the Parisian barricades and hear the echo of the early American gospel that became the protest song “We Shall Overcome.” The song accompanied the civil rights movement in the United States during the 1960s and was taken up by Martin Luther King in a speech in Memphis on 31 March 1968. The prologue of Hooper’s film also refers to the imagery of slavery of which the archetype, present in the suggestive manner of certain gospel songs as well, is that of the Jews in Egypt (see, e.g., “Mary Don’t You Weep”). The director does not hide this allusion, explaining that: My first scene is almost biblical with the convicts, the water, the violence, the whips, and the close-ups on the faces. It had to have an enormous and monstrous feel. I wanted to alternate between the two poles: a brutal and savage realism to anchor the songs in, but also a more lyrical and epic style than in my previous films. (Golhen).

From Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments (1956) leading his people in slavery before becoming their prophet, or in Ben Hur (1959) as a wronged galley slave whose redemption coincides with Christ’s sacrifice, to Hugh Jackman retrieving the mud-stained tricolor flag from the wreck that he is towing, three versions of slavery and revolt are embodied. Beyond the personal choices of the directors discussed here, the mediocrity of certain efforts, or the resounding successes that win over audiences, the strategies of adapting Les Misérables on either side of the Atlantic fall under two quite distinct traditions of reception. The French approach privileges a focus on the novel’s socio-historical context and a fidelity to Hugo’s political discourse, whereas the

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American versions offer a more voluntarist—and optimistic vision—of social progress. The French adaptations focus on understanding the harsh reality of the human condition in the nineteenth century, whereas the American ones show the narrative possibilities of the novel and their potential exploitation through the hybridization of cinematographic genres. Both traditions deliver a reading that is validated by the nature of the text itself, which encourages an understanding of the act of reading as one of interpretation and, by extension, adaptation.15 As one journalist notes: No one will ever betray Les Misérables. Even the Comédie-Française’s pathetic show didn’t. And why? Because it is the most beautiful French novel, and perhaps the only one that shows no fear. It is not afraid to be a tragedy or a melodrama; it is not afraid of its flair; it is not afraid of its power. [“Personne ne trahira jamais Les Misérables. Même la minable représentation de la Comédie-française n’y parvenait pas. Et pourquoi? Parce que c’est le plus beau roman français et peut-être le seul qui n’ait pas peur. Pas peur d’être une tragédie, un mélo, pas peur de sa verve, pas peur de sa force”; “La plus belle histoire en images.”]

As a “force qui va” or strident strength, to paraphrase Hugo himself, and with open channels of communication to its various audiences, Les Misérables authorizes all of its readers, without anathema or constraint, to navigate their own interpretive path through the margins of the text. As these varying adaptations demonstrate, Hugo’s work is one of those rare novels that possess the emancipating imaginative power of history’s great myths.

15  For more on how adaptation as reception can be theorized, see Jeanne-Marie Clerc and Monique Carcaud-Macaire 91–4.

Chapter 9

The Many Faces of Javert in Anglophone Adaptation1 Andrea Beaghton

Of all the characters in Victor Hugo’s novel, Inspector Javert is the most susceptible to the changes and mutations of adaptation, for he inhabits the unstable boundary between villain and tragic figure. Throughout the novel, Hugo complicates a straightforward reading of Javert. He encourages the reader’s reaction to oscillate from antipathy to pity and admiration, often evoking several contradictory responses to Javert at the same time through antithetical terms such as “all the evil of good” [“tout le mauvais du bon”; LML 230].2 Critical studies reveal the character’s paradoxical ambiguity and irreconcilable duality (Dubois; Roche 83–91). Kathryn Grossman analyzes him as a “failed hero” (Figuring Transcendence 80) who moves from self-confidence to self-destruction, observing that Hugo balances Javert’s infernal side with qualities deserving of respect (86– 8). The possible ambiguity of how to judge Javert extends to his suicide, as J. A. Hiddleston’s varied readings of Javert’s “suicide” note suggest (204; see also Bradley 158, and Grant 163). By contrast, Valjean and characters such as Fantine remain sympathetic protagonists with whom we can empathize or admire in their positive trajectories toward selflessness. For a character such as Javert, even small changes through adaptation have the potential to tip the balance in our judgment of him as a villain or as an honorable though misguided man. Furthermore, since Javert is characterized as outwardly impassive and his external actions appear cruel, an understanding of his character and motivation depends crucially upon the access Hugo’s narrator gives us to Javert’s inner thoughts. This results in an additional challenge in transposing Javert to visual media, where psychological conflicts and mental processes are harder to convey. Indeed, the powerful internal drama of Javert’s suicide, crucial to Hugo’s larger message in the novel, runs the risk of being incomprehensible onscreen. Inspector Javert is thus arguably the character who is most prone either to flattening or to expansion in unexpected directions due to the freedoms and constraints of adaptation.

1

 I am indebted to screenwriter William Nicholson and to performers Earl Carpenter, Hadley Fraser, Michael McCarthy, Geoffrey Rush, and Andrew Varela for graciously taking the time to engage in interviews with me for my research for this chapter. Quotes from personal interviews are denoted in the text by (Beaghton). 2  References will be to the Laffont edition of the novel (LML).

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These effects are further amplified outside France, where adapters have more freedom to re-imagine Javert since Hugo’s novel does not form a part of the national cultural heritage. Abroad, there is more possibility for portrayals of this ambiguous antagonist to fluctuate between two opposing poles of villain and hero. In France, where Hugo’s novel and characters have an almost mythic familiarity, adapters must contend with expectations of fidelity from audiences and critics. As Delphine Gleizes points out, the menacing silhouette of Gustave Brion’s original illustrations of Javert (see Plate 2), which follows Hugo’s description, is so imprinted in the French cultural consciousness that even the detail of the Inspector’s hat is faithfully reproduced in French films, while in nonFrench adaptations Javert often sports a bicorne (“Archétypes et stéréotypes” 82), evoking Napoleonic “Frenchness” to Anglophone viewers. In France, lengthy cinematic and television versions try to accommodate the details and scope of Hugo’s text (Dast 35), but abroad, condensation to shorter films often results in a distillation of the novel to Javert’s pursuit of Valjean, potentially overshadowing the psychological complexity and admirable qualities with which Hugo enriches his character. It is the emphasis on the chase in adaptation outside France that has led to Javert becoming a byword in English for “a relentless, merciless prosecutor,” as defined in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of Allusions (1999). Indeed, Javert has been used extensively in US law courts in past decades as a metaphor for overzealous prosecution (Beckman 83–4), most recently to suggest excessive federal action against whistle-blowers by the Obama administration (Johnston). Javert has even been appropriated as an analogy in American football to describe a lineman’s determined pursuit of a quarterback (Bradshaw 83). At the same time, we may note the surprising directions in which Javert evolves out of France through adaptation, from his unexpected transformation into a romantically appealing figure in English-language fan fiction and websites, a gun-toting US marshal in the film The Fugitive, or a vengeful Old-Testament figure who sparks theological discussions in online religious forums (see Guyton). Outside France, a reader is likely to discover Javert through stage or screen adaptations without prior knowledge of the novel. When Saul remarks, “Well, if it isn’t Javert” in a December 2012 episode of the US television series Homeland, or when Javert is invoked to describe a character in a bestselling book (Coben 167–8), there is little doubt that the shared allusion in Anglophone countries is to the character in the internationally popular stage musical, and not to the novelistic figure. Representations of Javert will therefore play a crucial part in constructing him in local popular imagination. Someone coming to Hugo’s characterization of Javert in the novel for the first time is likely to do so with one of the “faces” that incarnate Javert on screen or stage imprinted in their mind. Such a reception of Javert will be significantly impacted by the performance of the actor as well as audience association of the character with the actor’s “star” aura, which is constructed by his roles in other films, along with media discourse surrounding the actor (Dyer). Consequently, I will focus on Javert in English-language adaptations only, allowing me to study him within a mono-lingual culture that has a collective familiarity with Anglophone cinema and star personas, as well as a West End/

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Broadway musical theater tradition. In such an analysis, it is appropriate to draw upon Robert Stam’s intertextual approach and analyze Javert’s reincarnations as a network of interconnected readings and interpretations that interact with each other as well as with Hugo’s text. I will explore how renowned actors from Charles Laughton (1935) to Russell Crowe (2012) redefine Javert’s image and engage Anglophone audiences. The ever-changing cast of Alain Boublil and ClaudeMichel Schönberg’s musical adaptation offers particularly wide scope not only to evaluate the effects of individual performers, but also to explore the different possibilities of a musical treatment over film for representations of Javert. Early Hollywood Boleslawski’s critically acclaimed and commercially successful Hollywood film adaptation of Les Misérables (1935) set a precedent for Anglophone portrayals of Javert (see Plate 4). Hugo’s novel was drastically condensed to focus on Javert’s monomaniacal pursuit of Valjean, and this distillation both shrank roles such as Fantine and Gavroche and almost entirely eliminated Thénardier. The chase theme is further strengthened by reworking scenes according to the emerging conventions of the American Western: Javert’s tracking of Valjean and Cosette becomes a horse-and-coach chase, with Javert and his “posse” in thundering pursuit of the fugitives. As in other films that followed, Javert’s single-mindedness is intensified to dangerous levels by depicting a gun-toting policeman who follows Valjean down into the Paris sewers. The film amplifies the tension through closeup, face-to-face exchanges that express their different outlooks: Valjean: “Don’t you ever temper justice with mercy?” / Javert: “I administer the law—good, bad, or indifferent—it’s no business of mine, but the law to the letter.” The increased yet narrowed focus on Javert-as-hunter has consequences for the audience’s judgment of him. Given the significantly reduced role of the novel’s most dangerous character, Thénardier, Javert is pushed from his middle position in the moral spectrum between Valjean and Thénardier into the role of the villain of the film. Without scenes from the text such as Javert’s cool confronting of the PatronMinette gang, Valjean becomes Javert’s sole prey; Javert’s pursuit thus becomes a personal vendetta rather than a policeman’s duty. While in keeping with the tight focus on the two main characters, ending the film with Javert’s death creates the impression that an over-zealous policeman is the only real obstacle to Valjean’s new life: the sound of a celestial choir and a close-up of Valjean’s eyes raised heavenward suggest that all will be well now that the “bad guy” is dead. The film’s simplified dynamics of evil vanquished increase Javert’s importance to the plot but at the same time strip him of the greater resonance he has in Hugo’s novel as the symbol of an unjust society.3 3

 Hugo’s protest against societal injustice is further muted by the film’s downplaying of the misery of the underclass and the revolutionary aspect of the student revolt, an outcome of Boleslawski’s focus on the concerns of the Depression-era audience and the restrictive Hays Code of the period (Szabo 86–7).

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But as would be the pattern in Anglophone adaptations, the spotlight on Javert provided more leeway for the actor playing him to influence our interpretation of this potentially ambiguous character. Charles Laughton, with his round figure and moon face, presented a marked physical contrast to the good looks of Hollywood leading man Fredric March as Valjean, superficially further emphasizing the simplified hero vs. villain framework of the film. Laughton was also far from the Javert of Hugo’s description, whose tall, shadowy figure suggests menace and whose furry sideburns and muzzle-like jaw evoke a hunter’s aggression. However, Laughton used his distinctive face with its drooping lips to create a psychologically powerful portrait of Javert. The first main scene with Laughton, invented for the film, sets the tone for his interpretation of Javert and our understanding of his motivation. With quivering lips, close to tears, but bravely staring ahead with military discipline, a humiliated “Emile” Javert begs his superior for a promotion that has been denied to him because of his convict father and vagabond mother. He swears his total commitment to the police: “The book of law enforcement is my Bible, if you take this away from me, what is there left? … It’s my whole life; ever to fail would break me, sir.” Thus the film immediately sets up the psychological weakness that underlies Javert’s fanatical devotion to law and order. In his biography of Laughton, Simon Callow analyses how the actor plays Javert as a tortured spirit desperately trying to hold himself together: “the curious feeling of someone about to burst apart is physically uncomfortable to watch” (95). The collapse of Javert’s fragile psyche after he is unable to arrest Valjean is played out in a close-up of Laughton’s face, marking his final scene in the film with the same trembling lips and precarious emotional state featured in the beginning. Laughton explains his intention that viewers understand Javert as a complex figure: “‘What a tragedy!’ I wanted the audience to exclaim, ‘to have one’s whole life overshadowed by a fanatical sense of duty!’” (qtd. in Callow 44). James Shelley Hamilton, a reviewer of the period, wonders admiringly if Laughton brings even more than Hugo imagined to the character (12). However, in her existential reading of Javert, Fiona Cox suggests that he is portrayed by Hugo with remarkably modern psychological acuity as a man who counters despair by clinging to a selfconstructed false identity (“Dawn of a Hope”), and it is this aspect that Laughton’s representation brings to the fore. Laughton’s performance, judged as “one of the great screen portraits” by a New York Times reviewer in 1935 (Sennwald 14), was the first in a trend in Anglophone adaptations in which Javert’s role unexpectedly overshadows Valjean’s. Indeed, Roger Allam, the first Javert in the UK stage musical, said it was the way that Laughton seemed to make the story “all about Javert” that decided him to take the musical role (qtd. in Nightingale and Palmer 38), and the film and Laughton were remembered by Cameron Mackintosh when he agreed to produce the musical (Sweeney; Nightingale and Palmer 16), as well as by director Tom Hooper when creating the film version (BroadwayWorld 2).

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Screen Variations Incarnations following this 1935 film illustrate the variance with which Javert’s character can be read. In Lewis Milestone’s Les Misérables (1952), Robert Newton’s portrayal of Javert recalls his role as caricature pirate Long John Silver in Treasure Island (1950), confirming his typecasting as a one-dimensional villain. In 1960, the Javert/Valjean chase theme from Hugo’s Les Misérables inspired the long-running US TV series The Fugitive (later made into a film), featuring policeman Lt. Gerard (the name purposefully echoing Javert’s). Barry Morse as Gerard went back to Hugo’s novel to sophisticate the role beyond that of a conventional detective (Morse 201).4 Co-director of the stage musical Trevor Nunn claims that it was producer Mackintosh’s initial description of Les Misérables as a nineteenth-century version of The Fugitive (neither of them had read Hugo’s novel) that made a strong impression on him (Behr 63). Glenn Jordan’s British TV adaptation of Les Misérables (1978) corrects some of the former versions’ omissions or alterations to Hugo’s story and likewise returns to Hugo’s novel to incorporate more of Javert’s dialogue with Valjean, sometimes in word-for-word translation. However, the adapters follow the overall Anglophone model of distilling Hugo’s vast narrative to the pursuit, reducing Thénardier’s role and ratcheting up the personal antagonism between the two men: when prison-guard Javert coldly sentences Valjean to additional months for escaping, Valjean vows “I’ll kill you!” The film’s highlighting of Javert as pursuer is shown on DVD covers that showcase actor Anthony Perkins as Javert, one with the caption: “he would stop at nothing to extract justice and vengeance!”5 Again, the enlarged role of Javert called for a box-office star. After 1960, Perkins was forever to be associated with his role as the mentally unstable killer Norman Bates from Hitchcock’s horror film Psycho. While Perkins’s Bates, whose sensitive presence and jumpy nervousness hides a dangerous mental illness, is far from the role of the authoritative policeman of Jordan’s Les Misérables, viewers associating Perkins with Psycho may feel unease at the actor’s brittle Javert. Tall and thin, with thick sideburns and hair combed forward, face set in stern lines, he recalls Hugo’s character most strongly in his rigid bearing, arms folded firmly across his chest. In his stiff, almost taxidermic figure, Perkins embodies Javert’s unyielding outlook but shows us the turmoil within through twitchy movements of his face and eyes. Further signs of internal conflict are expressed in his clenching jaw, discouraged sighs, and flaring nostrils, lending poignancy to his cry to Valjean when he holds the latter at gunpoint in the sewer: “Why did you let me go?” The ramrod-straight inflexibility of Javert’s body in his head-over-heels flip into the water expresses Hugo’s description of a single-minded man who cannot bend or change course. However, the camera’s immediate cut to a happy ending with 4  In the 1993 film, the Gerard prototype relaxed into a conventional protagonist, with Tommy Lee Jones combining gruff intensity with integrity as a cowboy-hatted US marshal. 5  This caption can be seen on the 2000 DVD release by Carlton Visual Entertainment.

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Cosette and Marius’s wedding ultimately undermines the tragic impact of Javert’s inability to accept Valjean’s mercy. In contrast to the preceding films, Bille August’s 1998 Hollywood film (see Plate 7) was received by Anglophone audiences who would have the stage musical Javert as their main reference point.6 The phenomenally popular musical had been running for 13 years, and a concert version made the stage performance widely available. However, confounding any preconceptions, Rafael Yglesias’s screenplay is more extreme than either the musical or previous films in its stark positioning of Javert as adversary not only to Valjean, but also to Cosette and Marius. The script is built almost exclusively around the confrontations between Valjean and Javert: Thénardier and Éponine are jettisoned, and whole new scenes are invented to make Javert’s hunt more combative and obsessive. He acts with sadistic police brutality: he strikes a fallen Fantine, kicks Valjean when he is down, and in the most startling departure from the novel, choke-holds Cosette at gunpoint. As the film progresses, Javert’s determination to catch Valjean mounts to a personal, Ahab-like obsession, including a western-style carriage chase. In his quest, Javert uncharacteristically challenges authority, admitting to Valjean/Mayor Madeleine: “I resented you; I chafed at your authority.” At the end, Yglesias combines Javert’s freeing of Valjean and the suicide into a single tense scene: Javert holds Valjean menacingly at gunpoint by the Seine with ambiguous comments such as “I’ve been thinking about what you deserve,” but in the last moment he frees Valjean, cuffs himself, and falls back into the water. This compression inevitably sacrifices an exploration of the internal conflict Javert is experiencing and thus the symbolic significance of his death. The judgment of more sympathetic characters also serves to reinforce Javert’s role as villain. Valjean strolls off smiling after watching Javert’s suicide in a Hollywood happy ending, but most damning is the reaction of Javert’s inferior in the police force. He is horrified at the Inspector’s striking of Fantine and after Fantine’s death expresses regret that Madeleine did not kill Javert, even giving him a gun to protect himself. The script’s slanting of Javert toward a “rogue cop,” while effectively showing the dangers to the psyche of an obsessive adherence to rules, mutes Hugo’s larger message about the need for social change when it is mainly one sadistic policeman who poses a threat, rather than the entire legal and societal structure of nineteenth-century France. The screenplay’s positioning of Javert as a darker, more violent adversary than in previous films or the musical runs the risk of the character being perceived by audiences as one-dimensional. But as with Laughton’s portrayal, the performance of award-winning actor Geoffrey Rush infuses the character with complexity. Rush cites Hugo’s novel rather than the musical as his inspiration. As testament to Hugo’s powers of characterization and dramatization, the actor explains 6  As Geoffrey Rush comments: “For most of the promotion of our film, particularly in North America, the most prominent critical pop-cultural response was ‘where are the songs?’!” (Beaghton).

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that Hugo’s text provided “an invaluable acting template”: “no director, only the author of the material, could ever give you, the actor, such a reverberative, personalized account.” Rush describes how Hugo’s novel became his annotated “bible” during the shooting, providing him with endless insights. He points to the contradictory metaphors that Hugo associates with Javert as “rich imagery for an actor to wrestle with,” and he credits the novel as the inspiration for his nuanced enactment: “entering this creative zone with these guidelines cleared the decks of the pitfalls of sentimentality and melodrama.” Rush particularly cites the text’s screenplay qualities in the passage in which a dignified Javert encounters Valjean at the students’ hide-out: “the crystalline sense of the rhythm of a scene; the double-edged contradiction within a character; the astonishing sense of stoicism” (Beaghton). Rush’s subtle playing of this scene as true to Hugo’s text inspired Andrew Varela, recent performer on Broadway and in the US twentyfifth anniversary tour of the stage musical: “It’s not antagonistic; it’s dismissive, contemptuous. That caught me” (Beaghton). Far from labeling Javert a villain, Rush asserts that Hugo has given Javert an “assertive philosophy” comparable to Valjean’s moral journey: “Hugo details that Javert has a strong moral code and an immoveable belief system in respect for authority.” He adds that stereotype is avoided by Hugo’s characterization of Javert as having “comparable demons” to Valjean, due to the shame he feels about his lower-class background (in the film, a prostitute mother) (Beaghton). Through Rush’s performance, we can interpret the aggression and violence of the character as motivated by the self-inflicted pain of a man fighting his internal contradictions. At the time of the film’s release, Rush had just won an Oscar for his role in Shine (1996) as a psychologically ravaged yet endearing piano prodigy. He suggests that the connection between the characters was that they were “extremists in some form,” but his energy needed to be directed inward for Javert (qtd. in Sterngold). Rush’s screen presence is characterized by a controlled intensity, and he cites August’s directive of emotional minimalism during Javert’s resignation scene (Beaghton). On occasion, however, Rush allows the policeman’s contained aggression to escape. His screamed “I knew it!” when he realizes that the mayor is indeed Valjean embodies Hugo’s evocation of the demonic hideousness of a self-righteous man (see LML 229). Rush’s calm, quiet delivery of Javert’s single comment of explanation before his suicide, “I tried to live my life without breaking a single rule,” hints at the Inspector’s tragic limitations and echoes Hugo’s description of Javert’s ideal: “it was not to be humane, not to be great, not to be sublime; it was to be irreproachable” [“ce n’était pas d’être humain, d’être grand, d’être sublime; c’était d’être irréprochable”; LML 1042]. While the screenplay presents Javert as strongly unsympathetic, Rush’s portrayal shows how a talented actor’s interpretation, mining the richness of Hugo’s description, can add an unexpected depth. Such a marked susceptibility to the interpretations of adapters and actors attests again to the ambiguity of Hugo’s character.

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Stage and Stars Although Laughton’s and Rush’s performances left strong impressions, no one film actor ever became Javert’s definitive “face.” Rather, due to its phenomenal popularity, it was Mackintosh’s stage musical (1985) that defined the character for Anglophone and indeed worldwide audiences, with an ever-growing number of performers providing endless variations. While film adapters condensed Hugo’s novel, the creators needed to expand Boublil and Schönberg’s 1980 French popopera concept album, which had been staged as a musical spectacle for French audiences familiar with the story, into a longer English-language version that would fill in the blanks for non-French audiences (see Plate 8). Crucially for the development of the character outside of France, the adapters decided to make Javert the pivot of the new production, going back to the novel to flesh out his character; the discussions about Javert affected all aspects of the production from the settings to improvisational work involving the entire company (Gerard 8). Rather than fashioning Javert as a conventional evil adversary to Valjean, the adapters wanted to fully explore his motivation, as co-director John Caird explains: “He’s not just an archetype. He’s morally and intellectually someone to be reckoned with” (qtd. in Ibid.). English lyricist Herbert Kretzmer went further: he sees Javert’s character as that of “a worthy protagonist” who can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Valjean as a figure of equal moral strength (qtd. in Sheahan). In Hugo’s novel, Javert venerates law and authority and is only superficially religious in that he sees the Church as the highest point in the social hierarchy (LML 236; 1043). The films also portray Javert as a lawman above everything else. In the stage musical, however, Javert’s devotion to law and order is linked with a belief in a God of fear and retribution. Although directors Caird and Nunn initially wanted to develop the political aspects of the French version, they agreed with French composers Boublil and Schönberg that it was important to highlight the spiritual element of Hugo’s novel as well as his protest against social injustice (Nightingale and Palmer 22). Contrasting Javert’s, Valjean’s, and Thénardier’s views of God in solos provided the musical framework by which to express Hugo’s spiritual themes, with Javert positioned between two poles. As Nunn explains: Javert … is someone who believes in a vengeful, Old Testament God who will bring down plague and pestilence on all those who disobey the law; Valjean … has come to believe in redemption and that justice can exist in our world; Thénardier not only believes that God is dead but that he died a long time ago and that we are all fair game for him. (qtd. in Behr 78)

To bring out this complexity, the adapters exploited the possibilities of sungthrough musical performance. In non-sung cinematic versions, Javert’s internal conflicts must be inferred from visual and verbal cues, so the audience is left to deduce motives for his abrupt suicide. In musical theater, solos provide a direct means of voicing Javert’s inner thoughts. A musical treatment thus has an important advantage over film in its potential to dramatize internal conflict,

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especially important for adaptations of works by Hugo, for whom the interior of the human soul is the site of the ultimate epic: “there, underneath the outward silence, are combats of giants as in Homer” [“Il y a là, sous le silence extérieur, des combats de géants comme dans Homère”; LML 175]. The adapters created new songs for Javert and re-worked the French ones (Swain 385–408) to contrast him with other characters. In the emotionally charged face-off at Fantine’s deathbed, Valjean and Javert singing in counterpoint emphasizes Javert’s antagonist role: his implacable worldview (“Men like me can never change / Men like you can never change”) is overlaid with Valjean’s desire to save Cosette (“There is a duty that I’m sworn to do”). But the counterpoint also complicates our judgment of the authoritative policeman by linking him with Valjean as a fellow member of the underclass, although having followed a different path: “I was born inside a jail / I was born with scum like you.” In his solo “Stars,” Javert articulates his motivation, as lyricist Herbert Kretzmer explains: “Javert is a devout man, upright and incorruptible, … neither the hunter nor the hunted in this story exclusively occupy the moral high ground” (qtd. in Sheahan). Javert’s deep conviction (“Mine is the way of the Lord”) is emphasized by the song’s stately pace, rising steadily in power and ending on a thumping rhythm accentuated by trumpet blasts and cymbal clashes in what acclaimed performer Michael McCarthy likens to “pulpit-pounding” certainty (Beaghton): “And so it must be / For so it is written / On the doorway to paradise.” The song embodies the terrifying righteousness of Hugo’s Javert, who guards the social order like a ferocious, avenging archangel (LML 229–30). Yet the soft guitar strains when Javert, alone onstage, gazes upward into the night sky evoke a thoughtful inwardness, and we may also understand him as the idealist Hugo portrayed: “He was stoical, serious, austere; a melancholy dreamer” [“Il était stoïque, sérieux, austère; rêveur triste”; 137]. Javert’s belief that he is the upholder of a system of immutable laws is reflected in the order of the stars: “Silent and sure / Keeping watch in the night.” In contrast to the discordant music of Thénardier’s chilling “Dog Eat Dog” solo, in “Stars,” the initial gentle arpeggio, the largely major key, and the timbre of a thrilling voice lend the nobility to the character that Hugo evokes: “an incontestable grandeur in this monstrous St. Michael” [“une incontestable grandeur dans ce saint Michel monstrueux”; 230]. Varela says that the powerhouse song, usually received by thunderous applause, is “a real opportunity to affect people,” and he stresses the importance of a strong voice to convey the character’s awe-inspiring conviction (Beaghton). The complex nature of Javert’s mental struggle of ideals, to which Hugo devotes an entire chapter (“Javert Derailed,” V, 4), is articulated in musical theater through the lyrics of his suicide “Soliloquy.” The score mirrors this song with Valjean’s crisis of conversion, “What Have I Done?” While reinforcing their opposing theologies (Bradley 159–60), the contrafactum and shared lyrics make Javert’s internal struggle to accept mercy of similar significance to Valjean’s, with music being an “ideal symbol of psychological or emotional action” (Swain 2). After his initial rage and desperation at Valjean’s act of mercy (“Damned if I’ll

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live in the debt of a thief! … / I am the law and the law is not mocked!”), we discover that, as in Hugo’s text, Javert’s greatest anguish is his loss of certainty: “And must I now begin to doubt / Who never doubted all these years?” Melody, lyrics, and the vividly dramatized “jump” from the bridge in swirling mist and darkness together emphasize the explosive shattering of Javert’s belief system. The effect on audiences and performers is powerful: original Broadway performer Terrence Mann describes Javert’s breakdown as an erupting volcano (Nightingale and Palmer 41). Since “Stars” has shown us the strength of Javert’s conviction, its collapse in the suicide scene is all the more striking; as performer McCarthy describes: “I remember hunching over and feeling almost sick; you are basically realizing that the way you have conducted yourself for most of your life is wrong” (Beaghton). While the original French version’s “Blanc ou noir” presents Javert’s suicide as the logical decision of a government agent who refuses to betray his duties, the lyrics of the English version are the intensely despairing and questioning words of a man who is torn up by the roots according to Hugo (LML 1042). Arguably more emotionally engaging, Kretzmer’s lyrics emphasize the conflict that destroys Javert (“And my thoughts fly apart”) and his struggle to understand Valjean’s mercy (“Can this man be forgiven?”), and they end on a discordant note of despair (“There is no way to go on!”). While “Stars” reveals Javert’s honorable motivation, according to West-End performer Hadley Fraser, “it is in death that he becomes human” (Beaghton). Javert’s suicide is lent a final poignancy through a reprise of a bar from “Stars,” and unlike the film adaptations discussed above in which his death is portrayed as an event that solves Valjean’s problems, Javert’s “Soliloquy” is followed by the melancholy strains of “Turning,” on the futility of lost lives. This continues a somber mood that gives the audience time to absorb and reflect upon the tragedy of Javert’s inability to live in the new world that Valjean’s mercy has revealed to him. McCarthy notes that the emotional impact on the audience is reflected in the shocked silence and stillness that generally follow this number: “I actually loved it when the audience didn’t applaud” (Beaghton). Unlike the Hollywood star system that casts well-known actors like Laughton to shape the character, in musical theater, Javert’s role is tightly constructed through costume, gestures, music, lyrics, and even lighting to replicate the same character night after night, city after city. Earl Carpenter, another Javert performer, attests that this alone can carry an actor along (Beaghton). Nonetheless, Javert’s role as a complex antagonist means that even small variations in physicality, voice, and acting can affect our interpretation. The diversity of portrayals brought by so many performers is reflected in websites comparing different singers in the role, and as Fraser points out, even the same performer may nuance Javert differently “in the moment” (Beaghton). Long-running incarnations such as McCarthy’s (roughly 4,400 world-wide) and recorded performances such as Australian Philip Quast’s in the tenth anniversary concert have, however, established a certain tradition of a physically imposing Javert, with a commanding yet restrained stage presence. McCarthy explains that among so many other plots and characters,

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Javert “must beat to a different drum than the rest of the show and have a stillness that makes you listen to everything he does” (Beaghton). Fraser was conscious of this tradition and audience expectations of a “big, tall tree-trunk of a man” (qtd. in Julie Robinson) when taking the role after Norm Lewis, who starred in the twenty-fifth anniversary concert. Fraser went back to the novel to bring out a different angle, recalling Hugo’s description of Javert as a wolf with a human face (Julie Robinson), evoking the character’s more animalistic features and sometimes almost growling words, “like a tiger striking at prey” (Beaghton). The same actor performing at different ages can also subtly shift Javert’s portrayal. Les Misérables general manager Alan Wasser observes the “striking” difference between Mann’s performances 16 years apart, with Mann projecting a “serious older force” in the final Broadway run compared to his “super vigor” as Broadway’s first Javert (qtd. in Fleming). Despite these variations, the common theme among many accomplished singers who have performed the role is their strong desire to convince the audience that Javert is not a melodramatic villain; as Fraser says: “I don’t think Javert is inherently evil, I think he’s just massively misunderstood” (Julie Robinson). From the start, the performers have been involved by directors in the creative process of bringing depth to the role, often by returning to the novel (Nightingale and Palmer 38–41). Perhaps fittingly, considering that Hugo linked his Romantic artistic ethos with the mix of sublime and grotesque in Shakespeare’s drama, performers in the English-language production (originally produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company) also find parallels: Mann played Javert “like Shakespeare, because it had big emotions, big words and big outcomes” (qtd. in Henderson), and Carpenter also sees Javert as akin to a complex Shakespearean protagonist whose core beliefs are challenged (Beaghton). Varela aimed to make it clear that while Javert falls short on humanistic compassion, he is doing what he thinks is right: “I wanted his position as an antagonist to not be an easy one for people to accept” (Beaghton). A critic’s review of a stand-out performance by Varela—“You’re not supposed to root for the villain in ‘Les Miz,’ but now you do” (Dolen)—exemplifies the potential of talented singers in the role to influence our interpretation. Co-director Nunn notes that some may think that the musical has tried to soften or justify a monstrous character, but he points out: “we’ve faithfully followed Hugo, who makes it clear that Javert’s behavior, from his own perspective, is the behavior of an utterly righteous and inspired man” (qtd. in Gerard 8). And indeed, I would argue that no adaptation has ever completely brought out the cool courage and even flair that Hugo’s Javert exhibits when he is arresting Thénardier or facing death at the barricades, and which leads Dubois to read in the character the ironic style of a literary dandy detective (26–34). But a further unexpected twist in audience reaction to Javert outside France would no doubt have surprised Hugo, who emphasizes Javert’s unattractive and even bestial physiognomy (LML 136): the interest in Javert from fan communities as a romantically tragic figure. Of course, a large part of this appeal is simply the audience’s association of Javert with the performer who incarnates him. When played by a good-looking

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and charismatic performer in a dashing greatcoat and long ponytail, and with a beautiful voice that can touch hearts to admiration or pity, it is inevitable that the character attracts idolizing fan attention. Such a conception of the character is amusingly interpreted by Varela in his video spoof of a cool, sunglassessporting rapper Javert (“Hot inspector that you will dream of / There’s nothing he can’t do!”; Varela). Fraser traces audience interest in the musical’s Javert to the perverse attraction of the “quiet, silent, yet powerful and dangerous type” (Beaghton). McCarthy also suggests that romantic attraction to the nineteenthcentury policeman may parallel that exerted by a modern-day “bad-boy” movie actor, speculating that the fantasy of a fan might be: “if Javert met me, I would be able to change him; to expose him to love and compassion” (Beaghton). Indeed, a fundamental part of Javert’s appeal stems from how affected spectators are by his inability to give or accept mercy and by the tragedy of his suicide. In dedicated fan sites and fiction, fans and authors re-imagine Javert’s past, create scenarios in which he finds love and redemption, or even invent a different ending in which he survives the Seine.7 While such attention by fans strays from Hugo’s intentions on how we are to interpret Javert, it underscores the success of the musical character in strongly connecting with the audience. The Film Musical Since Tom Hooper’s 2012 cinematic version of the musical has even greater potential to reach new generations of Anglophone and international audiences than live stage performances, due to its digital form, it is worth analyzing its representation of Javert closely. The casting of Hollywood star Russell Crowe works in several ways to push Javert toward a far more sympathetic character than previously seen. Unlike his predecessors, Crowe is known primarily for heroic protagonist roles rather than character or antagonist parts. The film capitalizes on audience identification of Crowe with his Oscar-winning role as tough Roman hero Maximus in Gladiator (2000), chosen by Hooper as a “formidable” opponent for Hugh Jackman as Valjean, known for his role as X-Men hero Wolverine (qtd. in Dorris). Our identification of Javert with Crowe’s iconic Gladiator is strongly played up through the actor’s appearance in the film, which recalls little of Hugo’s tall figure with greatcoat and cudgel; Crowe sports a close beard and Caesar-style cropped head, military-style uniform with tassel epaulettes and medals, sword and pistols, and is horseback-mounted in full regalia (see Plate 16). The military connotations, while strongly linking the character with the repressive government of Louis-Philippe against which the students are protesting, also lends Javert an air

 See, e.g., C. A. Shilton, Arlene Harris, and numerous stories on Fanfiction.net. Websites such as “Inspector Javert of Les Misérables,” by WordCustard, Squidoo, n.d., Web, 14 April 2014, and “Across the Years: Javerts of Film and Theatre,” Geocities, n.d., Web, 14 April 2014, compare performers and analyze the character’s appeal. 7

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of soldierly heroism that further plays into Crowe’s hero roles such as naval officer Aubrey in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003). In marked contrast to August’s film, Hooper’s Javert is a man just doing his duty: a restrained Javert even stops his subordinate from interfering when Fantine spits on Valjean. Referring back to the novel, Hooper finds Hugo’s character “deeply honorable” in his attempted resignation to Valjean/Madeleine, and he sees Javert’s willingness to “fall on his sword” as expressing a rigid honor code of “Japanese levels” (qtd. in BroadwayWorld 2). Although missing in the musical, this scene is included in the film and, according to the film’s screenwriter William Nicholson, helps us to understand that “his [Javert’s] harshness is a kind of moral purity, not sadism” (Beaghton). Hooper’s casting choice of a performer with no opera or musical theater training such as Crowe also influences the portrayal and interpretation of Javert here, albeit perhaps inadvertently. By the time of the release of the film, Javert for audiences was strongly associated with a rich, commanding voice. Lacking the vocal power to transmit this intensity, Crowe’s performance was necessarily softer and more muted, leading to criticism from audiences who identified the character with a powerful baritone.8 The steely yet passionate conviction of a stage Javert who then shatters in an agonized suicide is absent; Crowe’s character instead expresses the stoic determination of a soldier. However, Crowe’s understated singing style also lends his solos a thoughtful air of interiority, the sadness in his eyes and the troubled crease in his brow hinting at vulnerability under his stiff outer bearing. Moreover, Crowe himself added a change that tipped the balance toward an arguably more “human” Javert than in any previous adaption. As a testament to the difficulties of interpreting an unconventional antagonist, Crowe says that he initially struggled with understanding Javert’s motivation, finding nothing to like about the musical character (Harp). He then improvised an extra touch in neither Hugo’s novel nor the musical: Javert, visibly moved, pins his own medal on Gavroche’s dead body. In the context of the military slant given Crowe’s Javert, this translates as a soldier’s battlefield gesture of respect for the boy’s bravery and signals that Valjean’s mercy to Javert at the barricades has already melted the Inspector’s stony heart. But as further evidence of how even a tiny change through adaptation can strongly alter our interpretations, screenwriter Nicholson disagrees with the scene. He believes that it mutes the moral rigor of Javert’s worldview and is over-sentimentalized: “I myself would never have included such a moment, which seems to me to misunderstand entirely Javert’s psychology” (Beaghton). What is certain is that for the first time in Anglophone adaptation, Javert here momentarily crosses over from an antagonist to a protagonist by channeling the viewers’ emotions of shock and compassion at the scene of carnage; the audience 8

 Had Crowe been directed more strongly to sing in a rock-and-roll style suited to his voice, he might have delivered the intensity expressed by Jean Vallée’s pop-rock delivery in the original French version; indeed, composer Schönberg gave the French recording to Crowe as inspiration (Halperin).

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is encouraged to feel with Javert. The orchestral accompaniment to Crowe’s gesture is the swelling violin climax of Valjean’s moving prayer for Marius’ safety, “Bring Him Home,” which musically links Javert’s gesture with Valjean’s selfless compassion. The casting of Crowe thus results in a character that conforms closely to the actor’s own star image as a protagonist/hero but is a strong departure from Hugo’s own depiction. Return to Hugo’s Novel As Les Misérables has been reshaped and molded for Anglophone audiences through the years from Boleslawski’s 1935 film to the present, a consistent outcome has been a strong focus on Javert. We have seen that, due to the character’s sensitivity to even subtle changes, the adaptation process operates on Javert in unpredictable ways, sometimes darkening and sometimes elevating him. The influences of adapters and performers can even work in opposing ways: while a screenplay may distill Javert’s role to Valjean’s pursuer, a talented actor such as Laughton or Rush re-amplifies him with intriguing depth. The medium of adaptation is also an important shaping factor. A stage Javert who must vocally and visually project to the back row necessarily delivers an emphatic, emotion-stirring performance, while onscreen close-ups favor more understated enactments. While one might be concerned that the symbolic value of Hugo’s Javert is lost in evolutions of the character that stray far from the novel, on the contrary, re-creations of Javert for Anglophone audiences allow Hugo’s universal themes to resonate. Refashioning Javert’s pursuit of Valjean as “western” horse chases and gunpoint confrontations as in many film versions increases the involvement of American viewers with the less-familiar historical setting of nineteenth-century France. Actors’ screen personas from other roles in films outside France bring out different dimensions of Javert by association, whether hints of a Psycho warped mentality or a Gladiator code of honor. In the stage and screen musical versions, Javert’s righteous belief in an authoritarian, punitive God becomes shorthand outside France for a dogmatic outlook, enabling audiences to relate more easily to the rigidity of Javert’s mindset: “He [Javert] felt driven by divine right to capture Valjean, and that resonated with me, having grown up in the South going to church” (Mann, qtd. in Henderson). While it is difficult for an adaptation to convey the complexity of Hugo’s religious outlook, the musical’s juxtaposition of Javert’s and Valjean’s different theologies is consistent with Hugo’s belief, as a socially minded Romantic, that the spirituality which would regenerate the social order would not be found in a dogmatic, vengeful faith but, rather, through individual acts of selfless love and forgiveness. Furthermore, the creation of a singing Javert in stage musical theater, a tradition not well established in French culture, provides a musical means for audiences to emotionally engage with Hugo’s antagonist. Through the effectiveness of music and song in communicating Javert’s motivation and inner conflict and by casting

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charismatic performers with affecting voices, the musical “Les Miz” has taken the character on a new course toward a compelling, tragically heroic figure. It leads us to interpret Javert as not only the formidable representative of the anankè des lois or “fatality of laws” (OCL—Roman III 45) that Hugo portrayed as weighing upon mankind in Les Misérables but also as its victim. This trend culminates in Hooper’s film version, marking a new cinematic stage of Anglophone representations of Hugo’s Inspector in which a star known for playing Hollywood heroes is cast as Javert, thus moving the character closer than ever before to a protagonist figure. Reception of Javert by fans of the musical as a sympathetic, tragic figure, even an object of romantic attraction, may be considered a step too far from Hugo’s forbidding, unappealing Inspector. Yet it is precisely such emotional involvement with the character that has the potential to spark the deeper reflection and independent thinking Hugo wanted to provoke in his lecteur pensif, or “thoughtful reader.” Through Javert, Valjean, and other characters in Les Misérables, Hugo associates his political championing of social justice and liberty from repressive government with the freedom—and responsibility—of individuals to make choices according to their own conscience, rather than blindly follow man-made rules or dogma.9 The more an adaptation makes us feel for Javert and view the consequences of his fatally rigid mindset as a universal human tragedy, the more we are stimulated to reflect, as Javert himself is finally forced to do, on larger moral and philosophical questions. Indeed, Varela observes in relation to Javert’s ultimate crisis of conscience in the stage musical: “Imagine, if all the way through, you do think you’re the hero, then you find out you’re the bad guy. … I can only hope that every night I present that sort of intellectual challenge to people” (Braun). In his transformations for Anglophone viewers, Javert diverges from Hugo’s nineteenth-century French Inspector to follow unexpected and varied trajectories yet ultimately travels full circle by leading audiences back to the text to (re)discover Hugo’s richly complex character.

9  For an analysis (centering on Notre-Dame de Paris) of how Hugo puts his Romantic belief in the importance of individual sovereignty into narrative practice, see Bradley Stephens (Liability 121–51).

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Chapter 10

Éponine on Screen Danièle Gasiglia-Laster (Translated by Stacie Allan, with Kathryn M. Grossman and Bradley Stephens)

“That poor Éponine is one of my secret, sorrowful favorites” [“cette pauvre Éponine est une de mes préférées secrètes et douloureuses”; OCM 1177], wrote Hugo to his friend Paul Meurice. The character is full of contradictions: “an envoy of darkness” [“envoyée des ténèbres”; LMPc II 178] and a “rose in misery” [“rose dans la misère”; 171]; a kind yet devilish spirit; monster and heroine. Yet Éponine is above all one of the most interesting portrayals in Les Misérables of “female” gender and of the place of women in a century dominated by the “masculine.” At the very bottom of the social ladder, Éponine is an unconventional figure whose behavior disregards the rules of a society that rigorously codified the duties and image of respectable women. Rarely omitted from cinematic adaptations of the novel, her place cannot be neglected, even if she sometimes deviates from the character created by Hugo. In fact, she is one of the essential drivers of the plot: without her, Marius would not see Cosette again; without her, Cosette, Marius, Jean Valjean, and his servant Toussaint would have been assassinated by Thénardier and his gang; without her, Marius would not have mounted the barricade; and without her, the soldier aiming for Marius would have killed him. Studying a small selection of the numerous films inspired by the novel, I will attempt to show how some directors develop and transform the character, who has been played by a range of actresses diverse in looks and manner, as revealed by the divergences from the original work. Comparing these reinventions of Éponine with Hugo’s own atypical creation enables a reflection on what the writer does with nineteenth-century stereotypes of femininity.1 While examining women’s place in nineteenth-century society and during each film’s period, in addition to highlighting the question of gender, I also engage with issues surrounding adaptation. I concentrate on four adaptations whose treatment of Éponine as an adult seems particularly interesting:2 one of the oldest, the 1925 silent film directed

1

 Briana Lewis’s chapter in this volume analyses Hugo’s approach in detail regarding each of the novel’s three main female characters. 2  Hugo’s characterization of Éponine as a child is not particularly unique and so will not be the focus here.

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and adapted by Henri Fescourt with Suzanne Nivette3 in the role of Éponine; Raymond Bernard’s 1934 version with Orane Demazis; the 1958 film directed by Jean-Paul Le Chanois with Silvia Monfort; and Tom Hooper’s 2012 adaptation with Samantha Barks. From Ghoul to Angel: Marius’s Perspective on Éponine The first key scene for understanding a director’s depiction of the character is Éponine’s appearance in Marius’s room—a theatrical apparition par excellence with knocks at the door followed by the girl’s entrance. The theatricality is somewhat lost in Fescourt’s shot of Éponine leaving the Thénardiers’ and skulking along the wall as if visiting her neighbor in secret. Her tiptoed walk is both cat-like and serpent-like. Slim, with long, waist-length black hair that falls on her face, she is ghostly in appearance, almost vampiric, echoing an earlier meeting with Marius in the novel where Éponine and her sister brush past the young man in the fog of a winter’s evening. They have “deathly pale faces” [“figures livides”] and “wild hair” [“cheveux épars”; LMPc II, 165],4 and they vanish into the darkness like hazy white spots fading away. Marius compares them to “ghouls” [“goules”; 166]: female vampires from the East who devour corpses in cemeteries. Agnès Spiquel has drawn parallels between Éponine and Lilithisis, a character in Hugo’s religious epic La Fin de Satan (1886): a “veiled specter” [“spectre sous un voile”], the “solidification of shadow under a white shroud” [“concrétion d’ombre sous un linceul blême”; 99–110]. Fescourt’s actress, Nivette, is barefoot and dressed in rags: a torn skirt full of holes revealing her legs and occasionally her thighs, and a blouse with one sleeve shorter than the other. After having given her father’s letter to Marius and briefly looked at herself in a mirror on the wall, Éponine at first contemplates the young man with a suggestive look that is full of insinuation. Isolated in the shot—the viewer does not see Marius—she continues to stare at him, becoming aware that her clothes do not match those expected of a pretty woman. It is as if Marius’s gaze is another mirror, yet more unforgiving than the real one. This is one of the film’s strongest moments: she crosses her arms to hide both her rags and her body, tries to pull down one of her sleeves, and sets her smile. Then, an unexpected look of kindness suddenly appears on her face. She smiles again at Marius, not provocatively like before but with feeling. The title card reads, “Do you know, Monsieur Marius, that you are a very good-looking guy?” [“Savez-vous, Monsieur Marius, que vous êtes très joli garçon?”]. Marius claps his hands and bursts out laughing as if he has just heard a joke. Clearly, his reaction is not because the compliment appears excessive but because it comes from an unattractive creature. Hugo writes: “the 3

 Nivette was the wife of the actor Georges Salliard and is credited as Mlle Saillard. Most often, however, she is listed as Suzanne Nivette. 4  All references hereafter will be to the second volume of the Pocket edition of the novel (LMPc II).

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same thought occurred to them both, which made her smile and made him blush” [“il leur vint à tous les deux la même pensée, qui la fit sourire et qui le fit rougir”; 175]. Marius’s blushes are not the product of desire but, as Hugo describes, come from “disgust and pity” [“le dégoût et la pitié”; 173]. Fescourt, however, replaces disgust with a mockery that proves just as unkind. His Éponine turns away, understanding how little she resembles an object of desire for the young man, and rushes toward the exit. She then suddenly turns around and leans her back against the door; her face is tense with pain. She sees the piece of bread on the sideboard and seizes upon it. Marius gets up, watching her. Almost devouring it whole, she sadly tilts her head and cries, “Oh! Hunger” [“Ah! la faim!]. This gesture and plea provoke pity in Marius, who rummages in his coat and gives her a coin, which a wide-eyed Éponine studies. Clutching her prize and almost forgetting Marius, she, as in the novel, gives her generous neighbor a “casual wave of the hand” [“vague signe familier de la main”; 173] on leaving. By eliciting Marius’s compassion, she obtained what her charms often earned her from satisfying men of easy tastes. Hugo calls girls like Éponine “[s] ad creatures, nameless, ageless, and without gender” [“Tristes créatures sans nom, sans âge, sans sexe”; 173]. Nivette’s portrayal is very close to the novel’s, save for the character’s age: “fifteen going on fifty” [“cinquante ans mêlés à quinze ans”; 171]. Despite the damage caused by poverty, she nevertheless appears in Hugo as an adolescent, a child even as she is described several times. Further on, he affirms that she is 16. “The graces of youth were still fighting against the hideous decrepitude that awaited her following a life of debauchery and poverty” [“La grâce de l’âge luttait encore contre la hideuse vieillesse anticipée de la débauche et de la pauvreté” 172]. Nivette was in fact 31 at the time of filming. Demazis was the same age when she played Éponine in Bernard’s film, where she wears a blouse and a coarse canvas skirt in the equivalent scene. The v-neck blouse with two short ripped sleeves is almost monastic. Despite her skirt’s numerous holes, her legs are scarcely glimpsed. A rope belt corresponds to Hugo’s account: “String for a belt, string for a hairdo, … a blonde and lethargic pallor” [“Pour ceinture une ficelle, pour coiffure une ficelle, … une pâleur blonde et lymphatique”; 171]. Demazis’s fine unkempt blonde hair resembles “string.” Her sad, gentle face is a far cry from the vagrant and bold character played by Nivette and described by Hugo. She knocks persistently on the door to no response, but goes in, dust cloth in hand. Evidently, she is there to clean. Unsurprisingly, she then makes herself at home. The beginning of this scene immediately inverts the signs in the novel itself. The camera angle shows both Éponine and the untouched bed. She deduces from it sadly that Marius has spent the night away from home. Hugo remarks: “She entered without hesitation, scanning the whole room and its unmade bed with a sort of self-confidence that touches the heart” [“Elle entra résolument, regardant avec une sorte d’assurance qui serrait le cœur toute la chambre et le lit défait”; 172]. Undoubtedly Marius’s undisturbed bed was deemed more appropriate to a director in 1934 than an unmade bed and its implications of carnal pleasures. Furthermore, the fact that Éponine’s presence in the room is normal undermines the scene’s subversive nature. When Marius returns, he hands

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her his coat to put away and speaks to her about Gavroche, whose interest in politics amuses him. “You can laugh,” retorts Éponine, “but he’s nobody’s fool. You know, you learn things on the streets” [“Vous pouvez rire mais il en sait long là-dessus. Vous savez, dans la rue, on apprend des choses”]. In response, she hears, “Quickly get my coat, will you?” [“Sors-moi vite mon habit, veux-tu?”]. Éponine obeys Marius, who, in contrast, barely cares what she is saying. The entrance of Le Chanois’s actress, Monfort, is by far the most theatrical. When she raps on the door, Giani Esposito’s Marius is seated at his desk deep in thought. The knocks and Éponine’s entry wake him from his dream. She works the room and controls the conversation, introducing herself without letting him speak. Contrasting greatly with her two predecessors, Monfort’s Éponine wears a spotless white blouse without tears that sometimes hangs off her shoulders and prominently highlights her breasts. Her checked skirt outlines her slim waist and falls slightly above her ankles. This simple, hole-free skirt looks clean too. While neither Nivette nor Demazis lingers at the mirror, Monfort pauses there, picking up the pair of scissors hanging on the wall and trims her bangs. “Oh! Well, that’s some look. … Oh! Well, it’s not surprising that you don’t pay attention …” [“Oh! ben j’en ai une tête. … Oh ! ben, c’est pas étonnant si vous faites pas attention …”]. Her exclamations mix audacity and naivety, as if her uneven haircut explained Marius’s lack of interest. Facing this somewhat intrusive hurricane, a perplexed Marius asks, “What can I do for you?” [“Qu’est-ce que je peux faire pour vous?”]. Éponine explains that she has brought him a letter from her father and warns Marius of Thénardier’s crookedness while emphasizing the realities of her family’s poverty: “We eat when we have time” [“On mange quand on a le temps”], an understatement meaning “when we can” [“quand on en a l’occasion”]. Éponine rushes toward a piece of bread in the corner of the bedroom: “Can I?” [“Je peux?”]. Without even waiting for a response, she devours the food. Lifted directly from Hugo’s novel, she continues, “It’s good! It’s hard! It breaks your teeth!” [“C’est bon! c’est dur! ça casse les dents!”; 177]. The soft and poignant tune of a cello accompanies these words as if to reflect Marius’s feelings when his facial expression changes. He then looks at the girl with sympathy, with emotion even. In a soliloquy borrowed nearly word for word from the novel (176), she depicts their sorry state without self-pity, almost in the tone of banal conversation: “Still … we mustn’t complain. … Last winter we slept under bridges. We huddled together so we wouldn’t freeze. My sister cried. Sometimes I wanted to drown myself. I looked at the water and said to myself: ‘No, it’s too cold’” [“Encore … il faut pas se plaindre. … L’hiver dernier on couchait sous les ponts. On se serrait pour ne pas geler. Ma sœur pleurait. Moi, des fois, j’avais envie de me noyer. Je regardais l’eau puis je me disais: ‘Non, c’est trop froid’”]. Le Chanois, known for his communism (see Gallinari) makes Éponine an embodiment of the people’s suffering. That is exactly what Éponine represents for the young Marius, a member of the revolutionary ABC Society. He immediately shows solidarity with her: “I have been through bad patches myself. For nights, I tended to all the work that I had to write out. I unloaded bags at Les Halles” [“Moi aussi j’ai eu de mauvais moments. J’ai fait de la copie pendant des nuits. Je déchargeais les sacs aux Halles”].

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Éponine is happy that socially they are less distant than she had thought and moves toward him smiling—a physical gesture that reflects their social proximity. “You?” [“Vous?”], she asks him; “yet you have nice hands. They are white” [“Pourtant vous avez de jolies mains. Elles sont blanches”]. She grows bold: “You know, Monsieur Marius, you are a good-looking guy?” [“Vous savez, Monsieur Marius, que vous êtes joli garçon?”]. Though his back is to the camera, Marius is heard laughing too, diverging from François Rozet’s laugh in Fescourt’s film. Marius attempts to make her understand that things can change and launches into a political sermon, resembling an orator or a schoolteacher. He uses two collective pronouns (the first-person plural “nous,” then the indefinite subject pronoun “on”) to include Éponine and his companions-in-arms: “But poverty, that’s what we want to eradicate” [“Mais la misère, nous, c’est ça qu’on veut détruire”]—an allusion to Hugo’s famous speech on poverty (see OCL—Politique 199–206). Marius continues: “Each according to their needs. What we want is work and bread for everyone” [“À chacun selon ses besoins. Ce qu’on voudrait c’est du travail et du pain pour tout le monde”]. An attentive, astonished Éponine, seated like a pupil, lets out her surprise. Marius asks whether she knows that General Lamarque is dead, to which Éponine replies, “Who is that?” [“Qui c’est?”], and is told, “He was our last supporter” [“C’est notre dernier défenseur”]. “So we’re done for?” [“Alors on est perdus?”], she inquires, but Marius insists: “No, since we’re here. We’re preparing the Revolution … the Republic …” [“Non puisqu’on est là. La Révolution on la prépare … la République …”]. When he gives her the five sous, the overjoyed girl looks at the coin’s effigy. Leaving, she gleefully says, “Ah! Louis XVIII! Ah! Long live the king in spite of everything! [“Ah! Louis XVIII ! Ah! Vive le roi quand même!”]. A smiling Marius looks at her, viewing her not as a woman but as a representative of the people for whom he wants to fight. Despite being 35, Monfort successfully portrays the character’s youthfulness. In Hooper’s film musical, Éponine is played by the pretty Barks, who, at 22, could pass for “a young girl” [“une toute jeune fille”] of 15. Her performance, however, is different from the others. She does not knock to enter Marius’s room but half-appears in the doorframe, her voice gentle and fragile. A close-up of her face reveals her full cheeks, her slightly disheveled long chestnut hair, and her sparkling white teeth, before a full-length shot shows a low-cut, long-skirted brown dress that, belted, delineates her slight waist. Gradually, we notice that one of her sleeves is longer than the other, and that it is ripped, but the whole outfit highlights her balanced silhouette. Marius appears amused by this girl who comes to see how he is doing. Éponine seems intimidated and awed by him: unlike the other Éponines, she does not even attempt to enter the room. Éponine tells Marius that she knows he is rich since he has a wealthy grandfather, but he protests: “I won’t take a franc that I’ve not earned; all of those bridges have been burned.” He passes in front of her to leave, barely making eye contact, and goes down the stairs. “I like the way you talk, Monsieur,” she calls out, and he smilingly turns around to respond: “I like the way you always tease.” He then leaves, and Éponine laments, “Little he knows; little he sees.” It seems clear, in fact, that he barely notices her, and the look that he later gives to Cosette, doing charity work for

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the poor with her presumed father, is very different. During the main duet where Éponine takes Marius to Cosette, he calls her “my friend” and, making her his confidante, tells her how much he is in love with the other girl. In Hugo’s novel, Éponine above all seems to evoke vagueness—the indefinable and the ghostly, if not the monstrous—in, a mixing of genres and genders. Marius first hears “a dull, broken, hoarse, rasping voice; an old man’s voice, husky from brandy and liquor” [“une voix sourde, cassée, étranglée, éraillée, une voix de vieux homme enroué d’eau-de-vie et de rogome”; 171], but turns around to see “a girl” [“une jeune fille”]. A little later, this girl’s voice is described as the “voice of a drunken galley slave” [“voix de galérien ivre” 172]. Éponine combines youth and old age, male and female elements, and innocence with cunning. She is both man and woman not only because of a voice that contrasts with her physical appearance but in the way she acts as well. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when women are required to embody an accepted femininity and remain in the paternal or marital home,5 this mixture is explosive and far from the norm. Fictional heroines who broke with this feminine ideal were not well received. Barbey d’Aurevilly distinctly preferred Cosette who, according to him, exemplified the “best women to love” [“meilleures femmes à aimer”]: “like impressionable blank sheets of paper on which we can write anything we wish” [“espèces de feuilles de papier blanc sensibles sur lesquelles nous pouvons écrire tout ce qui nous plaît”]. For him, Éponine is a “hussy in a blouse” [“drôlesse en blouse”], “a bandit’s vile daughter” [“fille immonde d’escarpe”; qtd. in LMPc II, 348–9], yet the actresses portraying Éponine in the non-silent films analyzed here were not selected for their hoarse masculine voices. Even if Monfort has a rather mezzo tone, she succeeds in making it gentler when addressing Marius. Fescourt’s Éponine, her nudity and blondness aside, is closest to the original: the same boldness in a stranger’s room, the same pallid and phantom-like quality, the same confidence, and also that intermittent beauty that sometimes emerges from her disturbing ghostly appearance, and those strange laughs that seem forced. The Impossibility of Being Loved—is Éponine Another Quasimodo? In the first two films, the social differences analyzed seem insurmountable. In accordance with the novel, Éponine boasts about her ability to read and write, opposing the norm for a girl of her social status. The character had benefited from the Thénardiers’ more affluent period at the Montfermeil inn, when her mother spoilt her. Naturally, she flaunts this exceptional learning. The appearance and manners of Fescourt’s Éponine, however, are too marginal to please Marius, who, while a revolutionary, was raised as a young bourgeois. In Bernard’s adaptation, 5  The demands of the Ligue française pour le Droit des femmes, which was founded in 1882 and had Hugo as its honorary president, give some idea of the situation of women in the nineteenth century: they had to fight to obtain civic and political rights, to no longer be subject to the authority of their husbands, and to have the right to education and a career. See Danièle Gasiglia-Laster, “Le droit des femmes,” and Veronique Henck.

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Éponine subtly tries to use her status as a maid to her advantage. This function allows her to get away with a number of things, since she is almost part of the household. Incapable of being seen as a mistress, she tries to be mother-like and scolds “Monsieur Marius” like a child who misbehaves: “What time did you get home? It was after two-thirty! Have you no shame?” [“C’est à cette heure-ci que vous rentrez? Il est plus de 2h 1/2! Vous n’avez pas honte?”]—or who doesn’t do his homework: “You’re always on the same page. You didn’t study yesterday. Poor effort” [“Vous êtes toujours à la même page. Vous n’avez pas étudié, hier. C’est mal.”]. As she attempts to develop her relationship with Marius, her role as a maternal servant allows her to compliment the young man without appearing inappropriate: “Your tousled hair really suits you” [“Ça vous va très bien vos cheveux ébouriffés!”]. While dusting the furniture, she then says, “You know Monsieur Marius, … you are quite a good-looking guy” [“Vous savez, M. Marius, … vous êtes plutôt joli garçon”]. She even suggests that she could very well be the student’s assistant: “You take notes! I’d love to work with you. … You could dictate to me. … Oh! You know, I know how to write too!” [“Vous prenez des notes! J’aimerais bien travailler avec vous. … Vous me dicteriez. … Oh! je sais écrire aussi, vous savez!”], but her attempts to get close to Marius are useless. Bernard’s Marius sees Éponine only as a kind person who cleans his room. Monfort’s Éponine moves Marius with her poverty but does not excite him as a woman. Wearing a dress donated by Cosette, she hopes to inspire more interest, as if she were desperately trying to supplant her rival by offering Marius an alternative for the young bourgeois girl. The attempt fails completely, as Marius, frustrated by losing the trail of the girl he loves, does not even see that Éponine has changed into a fine dress. Barks, Hooper’s Éponine, has no more luck. The girl constantly lives in a fantasy world, fleeing reality. When Marius talks to her about Cosette, she imagines he is talking about her. She gives Marius Cosette’s address because she wants to see him happy and because, still immersed in her imaginary world, she shares in his joy. This impossibility of being loved draws parallels between Éponine and another Hugolian character, the famous hunchbacked bell-ringer of Notre Dame Cathedral. When Monfort’s Éponine replies to Marius, “You have been kind to me. It’s my turn. Can I help you?” [“Vous avez été gentil avec moi. Chacun son tour. Je peux pas vous aider?”], Quasimodo’s words to Esmeralda are brought to mind: “You have forgotten a wretch who tried to abduct you one night, a wretch whom you protected from their vile pillory the very next day. You have forgotten that poor man. But he remembers” [“Vous avez oublié un misérable qui a tenté de vous enlever une nuit, un misérable à qui le lendemain même vous avez porté secours sur leur infâme pilori. Vous avez oublié ce misérable. Lui il s’est souvenu”; OCL— Roman I, 521].6 And as she lies dying, Éponine tells Marius, “You thought me ugly, 6

 The recycling of isolated phrases from the novel in two of the adaptations reveals the “intertextual traces” [“traces intertextuelles”] that Michael Riffaterre discusses (see “La trace” 5). However, these are arguably instances of intratextuality, when one text echoes another from the same author. Kareen Martel has noted the extent to which “intratextuality

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didn’t you?” [“Vous me trouviez laide, n’est-ce pas?”; LMPc II, 586]—a question that Bernard reformulates. Similarly, Quasimodo confides to Esmeralda: “I’m quite ugly, aren’t I?” [“Je suis bien laid, n’est-ce pas?”; OCL—Roman I, 759]. He is already this “misérable” whom no one could love because he is on the margins of society, barely human: “half-man, half-animal” [“mi-homme, mi-animal”; Ibid. 761]. Even if Hugo mentions that Éponine sometimes appears beautiful, she personifies the same rejected misery as the hunchback, since wretchedness often provokes disgust, being disagreeable to see. These adaptations reinforce this impression each in its own way. They show that if Cinderella does not meet a fairy godmother who can transform her and give her a horse-drawn carriage, she will not seduce the prince. Éponine and Paternal Authority The importance of paternal authority in Éponine’s characterization cannot be underestimated. In the nineteenth century, the father legally had complete power over his children, as he did over his wife. Éponine was taught to read, but not to lower her eyes, to be modest and discreet, as was the expectation of a girl at the time. Moreover, she does not have enough money to dress decently, and the degradation of poverty has taken away her innocence, virtue, and attractiveness. Far from protecting her and molding her into the social ideal of femininity (see Fraisse and Perrot), Thénardier employs Éponine in his schemes, thereby endangering her. Thénardier throws out his sons, perhaps because they do not command the same level of capital, and in these films Éponine submits more or less voluntarily to his tyrannical and depraved parental authority. In Fescourt’s film, Éponine seems to regret obeying her father, and it is only grudgingly, after his coercion, that she takes to the church exit the letter designed to draw Jean Valjean into a trap. The passage in the novel where Éponine stands up to Thénardier and his associates attempting to enter the house on the Rue Plumet is one of the most indicative of her character, yet it is rarely adapted. Fescourt, however, includes it to great success, thanks to strong imagery and a rather extensive use of title cards that give the sequence great intensity. Seeing Thénardier and his accomplices advancing toward the house, Éponine approaches them: “There’s a dog … there is nothing to do here, I told you so” [“Il y a un chien … il n’y a rien à faire ici, je l’avais dit”]. She adopts a threatening pose but the men still want to enter. She stops them, fierce and determined: “I don’t want you to!” [“Je ne veux pas, moi!”]. Montparnasse seizes her violently. She fights back, clinging to Thénardier’s trousers and threatening to raise the alarm: “If you touch that gate, I’ll cry out, I’ll knock on doors, I’ll wake everyone up! I’ll get all six of you arrested!” [“Si vous touchez à cette grille, je crie, je cogne, je réveille tout is neglected as much within reception theory as by the broader range of theoretical approaches” [“l’intratextualité est négligée tant par les théories de la réception que par l’ensemble des approches théoriques”; 93–102].

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le monde, je vous fais empoigner tous les six!”], to which Thénardier responds, “Bitch!” [“Chienne!”]. Looking ferocious, Éponine gets up again and retakes her position in front of the gate: “What does it matter to me if they find me tomorrow, stabbed to death by my own father” [“Qu’est-ce que ça me fait à moi qu’on me ramène demain, tuée à coups de surin par mon père!”]. She then bares her teeth like a dog ready to bite. Thénardier tries to appease her but she violently rebukes him. Leaning forward like a beast on the defensive, she cries, “Die!” [“Crevez!”]. Angry, they glare at her menacingly, but back off fearing that she will wake up the whole neighborhood. It would be difficult, especially in a silent film, to be more faithful to the original. The insult “bitch” [“chienne”] on the title card is in Hugo’s dialogue in a passage where the comparison of Éponine to an enraged animal, a dog who can if necessary transform into a she-wolf, also appears: I am not the daughter of a dog because I am the daughter of a wolf. There are six of you, what is that to me? You’re men. Well, I’m a woman. Go on, I’m not scared of you. I’m telling you: you will not enter that house, because I don’t want you to. If you approach, I’ll bark. I warned you, I’m the dog. I don’t care at all about you. On your way! You’re annoying me! … You have your knives, I can kick. It’s the same to me. Come on then! [“Je ne suis pas la fille au chien, puisque je suis la fille au loup. Vous êtes six, qu’est-ce que cela me fait? Vous êtes des hommes. Eh bien, je suis une femme. Vous ne me faites pas peur, allez. Je vous dis que vous n’entrerez pas dans cette maison, parce que cela ne me plaît pas. Si vous approchez, j’aboie. Je vous l’ai dit, le cab, c’est moi. Je me fiche pas mal de vous. Passez votre chemin, vous m’ennuyez! … Vous à coups de couteau, moi à coups de savate, ça m’est égal, avancez donc!”; 461]

The moment Éponine reveals a courage that is usually attributed to men, she claims it for herself as a woman, and as a woman who fears nothing. Defenseless, she can defeat six heavily armed men. Here Hugo clearly reverses the stereotypes. Ready to die for the one that she loves—a sense of sacrifice allotted to women—Éponine demonstrates a strength that makes her a hero in the masculine sense. She bares her teeth and her claws like a threatened beast. She stands by those at risk like an avenging swashbuckling hero. Disobeying her father to protect the man she loves, she inverts the sexes’ traditional roles. Éponine becomes the ultimate incarnation of the mix of genres that Hugo fully advocates as a Romantic.7 In doing so, she transcends the image of an abject people lacking individuality, which Hugo often designates as the “crowd” [“foule”]. In Bernard’s film, Éponine goes along with Thénardier’s schemes more voluntarily. When he knocks on the wall to call her, she regretfully leaves “Monsieur Marius” and complies. “So now what? I have to go looking for you?” 7  “Genre” in French designates both “genre” and “gender,” lending considerable scope to Hugo’s use of the term.

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[“Eh ben quoi ! Il faut aller te chercher?”], Thénardier says to her. She responds, slightly irritated all the same: “It’s fine. Have I ever messed up a deal for you?” [“Ça va! Est-ce que je t’ai jamais fait rater une affaire?”]. Her father tells her about the job concerning the philanthropist bourgeois (Valjean). “Right, if I bring him, what’s your price?” [“Ben, si je l’emmène qu’est-ce que tu payes?”], she asks, to which Thénardier replies: “You’ll have a dress if you do it. He only has to cough up” [“T’as une robe, si tu fais ça; seulement faut qu’il crache”]. Éponine’s response, “That’s your job …” [“Ça, c’est ton travail …”], shows that she turns a blind eye to Thénardier’s crimes. Afterward, she obeys orders without discussion. This portrayal aligns with Hugo’s character, but Bernard does not reproduce the all-important scene where Éponine confronts her father and the Patron-Minette gang. In Le Chanois’s version, Éponine refuses, like her brother in the film, to participate in Thénardier’s schemes. Indeed, two parallel scenes show their resistance to Thénardier’s orders, which infuriates him. Le Chanois distances Éponine from her monstrous parents’ crimes: she remains the exemplar of the people, much like Gavroche in the novel. However, like Bernard, Le Chanois does not adapt the scene where she resists Thénardier in front of Valjean’s house. As in Fescourt’s film, Hooper’s Éponine seems to obey her father’s orders reluctantly. The adaptation retains the passage where she acts as a guard dog against her father and his gang. In contrast to the novel, however, Marius gets away and is absent when Thénardier’s gang comes to burgle the house. Éponine therefore does not act as protector for the object of her affection, and so does not occupy the traditionally masculine role. Instead, she protects his happiness. Spotting Éponine far off, Thénardier asks “Who is this hussy?” “Don’t you know your own kid?” asks one of his fellow crooks. “Éponine, get on home, you’re not needed in this; we’re enough here without you,” he tells his daughter, to which she responds, “I know this house, I tell you: there’s nothing here for you. Just the old man and the girl; they live ordinary lives.” A furious Thénardier tells her not to interfere: “You’ve got some gall. Take care, young miss: you’ve got a lot to say,” but she persists, threatening to scream in spite of her fear. In rage, Thénardier warns her, “One little scream and you’ll regret it for a year!” While her threat to shout suffices to stop the gang in Fescourt’s film, here Éponine goes through with it, awakening Valjean and Cosette. Thénardier is livid: “You wait, my girl: you’ll rue this night! I’ll make you scream: you’ll scream alright!” and he violently hits her twice before leaving with the others. Although short, the scene is again powerful, all the more so given Barks’s exceptionally youthful looks, since her young age and fragility contrast perfectly with her courage. Thénardier’s brutal actions and threat of more violence suggest expeditiously what she bears on a daily basis and counterbalance the apparently idealized vision up to now of Éponine and her situation. As with Fescourt’s version, but to greater effect here, the strength of the scene lies in the disparity and mismatch between father and daughter. It is understandable why Le Chanois did not adapt this scene. His Éponine never obeys her father’s orders, her rebellion against paternal authority being demonstrated in other ways. In contrast, Bernard’s exclusion is less easily

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explained. Perhaps he distanced himself from this audacious scene, which reveals Thénardier’s absolute cynicism in being willing to have his associates silence his daughter by killing her. After all, Hugo himself goes a long way to show Thénardier’s lack of love for his children: he sold his two youngest daughters and threw Gavroche out onto the street, and Marius catches sight of the sordid life that Éponine and her sister must lead. Another Gavroche Éponine is not only Gavroche’s biological sister; she is also his double through her rebellious and generous qualities, the boyish clothes she occasionally wears, her use of slang, and, of course, her poverty. In Fescourt’s film, the actress’s slight frame aids her disguise. The reasons for her disguise are clear: a girl took risks walking the streets alone in the first half of the nineteenth century. This transformation allows her to avoid any looks drawn to her as a young woman to make herself less conspicuous. In contrast, Bernard and his scriptwriter decided not to disguise Éponine as a boy until she has to—and they still felt obliged to explain why. Éponine attempts to climb the barricade in women’s clothing, but a rebel protests and firmly pushes her back: “No, no women here! The leader doesn’t want it. We’re going to get ourselves killed” [“Mais non, pas de femme ici ! Le chef ne veut pas. On va se faire tuer.”]. In Hugo’s novel, aside from the women described as preparing the wound dressings, notably the landlady of the Corinth tavern and two servants, blocked in by the barricade but who escape under the cover of darkness, there do not seem to be any female rebels. Demazis’s Éponine returns to the barricade as Gavroche’s double, permitting her entry. Bernard’s film stresses an important part of the novel: the revolution is not a woman’s affair, and Éponine is all the more heroic as she is an exception. Wearing a man’s shirt, trousers, and cap, Monfort’s Éponine admits to Marius that she is in disguise because “the cops are looking for her” [“les cognes la recherchent”]. When Marius leaves to join his rebel friends on the barricade, persuaded that Cosette has left Paris with Valjean, he allows Éponine, still dressed as a boy, to accompany him and affectionately places a hand on her shoulder like a good comrade. Marius accepts Éponine as a revolutionary. She will fight like him for a better world, regardless of her sex. Dressed similarly, there is no difference between this man and woman: both have the right to aspire to heroism. Éponine’s participation in the battle helps give Le Chanois’s film a feminist tone, which is later confirmed when the girl’s body, which the rebels place alongside Mabeuf’s, appears under a banner with the inscription: “Equality of Men and Women” [“Égalité de l’homme et de la femme”]. In Hooper’s film, Éponine still tries to follow her dream of love during her signature number “On My Own”; however, she cannot live forever in an imaginary world: her dream ends. She returns home and binds her breasts with bandages. She joins in singing with the others leaving for the barricade: “One more day all on my own; one more day with him not caring; what a life I might have known,

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but he never saw me there.” Putting on a cap, she gets ready to join Marius and the revolutionaries. As she says goodbye to her dream of love, Éponine also bids farewell to her femininity. Only Bernard seems to have considered Éponine’s cross-dressing in 1934 as a provocative transgression. The publication of Victor Margueritte’s La Garçonne [The Bachelor Girl] in 1922 caused a scandal, and the author’s Legion of Honor was rescinded. The character, however, inspired some imitators. In the following years, women wishing to emancipate themselves adopted a slender androgynous figure and wore trousers to be provocative. After the 1929 crisis and the rise in unemployment, the State intervened and encouraged women to stay at home to boost the birthrate. Women were confined to an idea of feminine “nature” which offered little emancipation and from which few freed themselves: they were expected to conform to traditional feminine norms, morally but also physically. Viro Major?8 This Latin formula that Hugo would later apply to the Communard Louise Michel seems particularly apt to describe Éponine. As Sylviane Agacinski rightly reminds us, women were not to appear “manly” [“virile”]: “in the age of Aristotle, the gentleness of femininity contrasted with male firmness, like weakness with courage, sentimentality with intelligence, docility with authority, and these allocations would be tirelessly reworked throughout history” [“à l’époque [d’Aristote], la mollesse féminine s’opposait à la fermeté mâle, comme la faiblesse au courage, la sensibilité à l’intelligence, la docilité à l’autorité, et cette distribution sera reconduite inlassablement dans l’histoire”; 11]. In the nineteenth century, these oppositions—which do not apply to the socially marginal Éponine—were highly influential. All of the films analyzed here depict Éponine’s sublime death (see Plate 13). She is a worthy daughter of the heroine whose name she shares: the wife of the Gaul Julius Sabinus, who wanted to die alongside him after Vespasian condemned him to death.9 In Fescourt’s film, seeing a soldier about to stab Marius with his bayonet, Éponine throws herself between the two men and takes the blow herself. Marius places the girl’s head on his chest, undoing the tight scarf around her neck. After a wince of pain, she takes out Cosette’s letter and hands it to him, before her head falls slightly backward and Marius removes her cap. Her long black hair 8  This title was given to a poem from Toute la lyre, dedicated to Louise Michel (OCL—Poésie IV, 198). 9  René Journet and Guy Robert (Le Manuscrit 45) reaffirm Jacques Seebacher’s suggestion (“En marge” 578) that Hugo’s choice of name recalls both Delisle de Sales’s 1793 Éponine ou de la République, and the mention of Éponine, highlighted by Claude Gély (594), in Baudelaire’s “Les Petites Vieilles.” Baudelaire sent Hugo the manuscript in 1859, dedicating it to him. Plutarch’s and Tacticus’ story of Eponina and Sabinus was very well known in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hugo himself made reference to it in Le Rhin of 1842 (OCL—Voyages 29).

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tumbles out, and she appears prettier. Almost quoting the text, she says: “Now, for my troubles, promise me … when I’m gone … to give me a kiss on my forehead. I’ll feel it” [“Maintenant, pour ma peine, promettez-moi … quand je serai morte … de me donner un baiser sur le front. Je le sentirai”]. The kiss, however, is given immediately. Seeing Gavroche, Éponine shouts, “My brother!” [“Mon frère!”]. She turns back to Marius and pronounces the same line that Hugo gives her: “And now listen, Monsieur Marius, I do believe I was a little in love with you” [“Et puis tenez, Monsieur Marius, je crois bien que j’étais un peu amoureuse de vous”]. She dies in his arms. Marius caresses her hair, looks at her, and once more kisses her forehead. As a sign of respect, instead of reading Cosette’s letter, he carries Éponine’s body and places her in front of one of the houses, straightens her out, and crosses her hands on her chest. He goes to find a coat to cover her like a shroud, kneels in front of her, and crosses himself. Only then does he read Cosette’s letter and go to join the others. In Bernard’s adaptation, Éponine, as in the novel, puts her hand in front of the barrel aimed at Marius: she falls. Marius and another man transport her away from the barricade. As in Fescourt’s film, Marius only recognizes her after he removes her cap. Éponine gives him the intercepted letter: “Take this … and for my troubles, promise me …” [“Prenez … et pour ma peine, promettez-moi …”]. “What?” [“Quoi?”], asks Marius. Éponine tries again: “Promise me …” [“Promettez-moi …”]. Marius acquiesces. Finally, she manages: “Promise to give me a kiss on the forehead when I’m gone. I’ll feel it” [“Promettez-moi de me donner un baiser sur le front quand je serai morte. Je le sentirai”]. Éponine closes her eyes and reopens them to say, “You know, … Monsieur Marius, I think I was a little in love with you …” [“Puis tenez, … Monsieur Marius, je crois que j’étais un peu amoureuse de vous …”]. She convulses twice and is gone. Marius closes her eyes and kisses her forehead, then moves away to read his letter. With its dialogue directly drawn from the text, this scene is very close to Hugo’s novel. In Le Chanois’s version, a soldier aims at Marius, but this time Éponine takes off her cap and throws it at his face, stopping his fire for a few seconds. She then seizes the barrel, points it toward herself, and is gravely wounded in the chest. This Éponine seems more skeptical about being reunited with Marius in death, asking, “Is it true that we’ll see each other again afterward?” [“C’est vrai qu’on se retrouvera après?”]. Marius responds with a “yes” [“oui”]. “Yet,” Éponine replies, “if everyone will be up there, the same dramas must unfold as down here” [“Pourtant si tout le monde se retrouve là-haut, ça doit faire les mêmes drames qu’en bas”]. Before dying, Éponine gives Marius the letter and Cosette’s address, telling him, “Oh! I didn’t want to give it to you. But it’s funny. … I can’t see you unhappy” [“Oh! je voulais pas vous la donner. Mais c’est drôle. … Je peux pas vous voir malheureux”]. Éponine makes him promise to kiss her when she is gone, but Marius kisses her while she is still alive, making her smile faintly. She rests her head on his chest and, before dying, repeats the words from the novel: “I believe I was a little in love with you” [“Je crois que j’étais un peu amoureuse de vous”]. Like Fescourt’s Marius, Le Chanois’s kisses Éponine before she dies, but, diverging even more from the novel, this kiss is placed on the lips.

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Through Éponine, the materialist Marxist Le Chanois ridicules the hypothetical resurrection and gives the girl the satisfaction of experiencing Marius’s kiss before dying. The film narrator’s voice intervenes: “He lay Éponine beside père Mabeuf, and Gavroche understood what family could be” [“Il coucha Éponine auprès du père Mabeuf, et Gavroche comprit ce que pouvait être la famille”]. Éponine is not part of his family simply because she is his sister but because she belongs to the proud and worthy people, ready to fight for freedom. Hooper’s Éponine, like Le Chanois’s, gives Marius a gun and follows him to the barricade. Marius takes a powder keg and mounts the barricade. A soldier aims and fires at him, but Éponine, as in Le Chanois’s version, grabs the gun’s barrel and points it toward herself: she falls. When Marius reaches her, she immediately gives him Cosette’s letter, telling him, “I’m sorry.” “What have you done?” asks Marius. “Don’t you fret, M’sieur Marius, I don’t feel any pain,” Éponine replies, looking at him; “a little fall of rain can hardly hurt me now.” During her final moments, she seems to be dreaming again that they are in love with each other, that he loves her back. “You’re here. … And you will keep me safe,” Éponine declares, still smiling, “and you will keep me close, and rain will make the flowers grow.” She rests her head on Marius’s shoulder and closes her eyes. His proclamation, “If I could close your wounds with words of love,” stirs her a little. Éponine takes Marius’s hand, places it on her neck, and tells him: “Just hold me now, and let it be. Shelter me; comfort me.” She moves Marius’s hand to her cheek; their duet continues like that of a couple in love, and without having been asked he kisses her forehead. The shot turns to a crying Gavroche. Éponine dies with her head on Marius’s shoulder. Enjolras signals, and her body is carried away as Marius laments, then reads the letter and sends Gavroche away with a message for Cosette. This is the only version out of the four in which Éponine does not tell Marius that she saved him, evidently not wanting him to feel responsible for her death. *** All four directors shot Éponine’s death like a love scene, as if Éponine and Marius finally were together, a little like Quasimodo embracing Esmeralda’s corpse and dying beside her. Yet each adaptation offers a different interpretation and reading of the character. Very close to the novel, Fescourt characterizes Éponine as the victim of a cruel society. Skulking along the walls, tiptoeing around, aware of her unattractiveness for a man like Marius, she embodies what the social system rejects, breaks down, and erases. In Bernard’s version, she seems almost resigned to her fate, obeying her father to survive. She would like another life; she even once imagined herself writing copy for Marius. Like the character played by Nivette, no one sees her: she does not exist, up until the moment she is looked on as a heroine. Le Chanois presents an Éponine void of ambiguities, as generous as her brother Gavroche, uncorrupted by her crooked father’s evil deeds: a girl of the people and the incarnation of a Republican ideal. Hooper focuses on the universalizing aspect

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of the character: he depicts Éponine as a girl barely out of childhood, mistreated by her parents, dreaming of another life, and inventing a non-existent love story. Tellingly, Hugo’s heroine encompasses all these variants, but the novelist goes even further in terms of audacity and realism than the directors he inspires. On several occasions, he describes Éponine as almost naked. When she arrives at Marius’s room: “She rushed around unaware her nudity. Occasionally, her undone and ripped blouse fell almost to her waist” [“Elle se démenait sans se préoccuper de sa nudité. Par instants, sa chemise défaite et déchirée lui tombait presque à la ceinture”; 173–4]. When she dies on the barricade, “her ripped blouse revealed her naked breast” [“Sa blouse déchirée montrait sa gorge nue”; 587]. Moreover, her death scene in the novel is more terrifying than any of these cinematic adaptations: “While talking, she pressed her injured hand against her chest where there was another hole from which blood was streaming out like the spurt of wine from an opened cask” [“Elle appuyait en parlant sa main percée sur sa poitrine où il y avait un autre trou, et d’où il sortait par instants un flot de sang comme le jet de vin d’une bonde ouverte”; 587]. No director has dared cast Éponine as she is: barely out of childhood, yet already withered by debauchery, in a state of advanced degradation. Hugo describes her “lacking teeth, her downcast, colorless eyes bold, the figure of a failed girl and the look of an old, broken-down woman” [“des dents de moins, l’œil terne, hardi et bas, les formes d’une jeune fille avortée et le regard d’une vieille femme corrompue”; 171]—a description counter-balanced by a beauty that sometimes emerges from the dark. The outpouring of slang when Marius gives her a five-franc coin appears only in Fescourt’s title cards. This street language, scandalous in the nineteenth century, seems to have also embarrassed certain adapters. Anticipating critical interest in gender studies, Hugo contributes to the destruction of a traditional cultural image of femininity through the character of Éponine. Éponine protects the man whom she loves as a man protects a weak woman. She is daring, courageous, and headstrong. The rebellion that Hugo describes is an insurrection led by men; but Éponine, disguised as a boy so she can fight, reveals that she is more heroic than many of the male revolutionaries. The character breaks the alienating stereotypes of conventional femininity, and all of these adaptations cannot fail to showcase her feminine virility as a result.

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Chapter 11

A New Creation: Histoire de Gavroche in Words and Song Arnaud Laster (Translated by Stacie Allan, with Kathryn M. Grossman and Bradley Stephens)

With Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s musical wowing audiences almost the world over (see Plate 8), why would a musician today want to draw inspiration from Les Misérables? Did the successes of Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia (1833) and Verdi’s Rigoletto (1851) not also discourage other composers from adapting Hugo’s Lucrèce Borgia (1833) and Le Roi s’amuse (1832) into operas? Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), in contrast, has continually inspired musicians with varying degrees of success.1 Despite momentarily tempting Puccini, Les Misérables has not attracted a distinguished composer to turn it into a world-class opera. The novel has, however, been adapted for the screen at least 60 times, resulting in some universally acclaimed films. Raymond Bernard’s 1934 version is often considered the best (see Plates 15 and 17), yet its success has not dissuaded directors from offering new adaptations (see Gleizes, “Filmographie” 245–52). There is thus no reason why composers should not draw on the source of inspiration that the novel offers. But how would they adapt Les Misérables? How would such a work distinguish itself from its predecessors? And what would inspire the decision to embark on such a project? These are the types of questions that should be asked about new works that are based on an existing source. Having contributed to the composition of Histoire de Gavroche or Gavroche’s Story (2011), I thought that it could be useful in a volume like this one to offer an overview of the creative process involved. I shall attempt to retrace the steps to creating an original work inspired by Hugo’s Les Misérables that centered on the character of Gavroche and his journey and that included a major musical component. Gavroche is far more interesting than the character most often presented on stage and screen in distorted portrayals that are generally reductive and sometimes caricatured. I have already explained elsewhere the circumstances in which I, as elected director of the Cultural Outreach Service at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3), met Fernando Albinarrate, who was the musical director of the Paris Inter-University Choir at the time. I learned that he was also a pianist, conductor, 1

 For a catalogue of operatic adaptations, see my “Hugo à l’Opéra” (88–94).

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and composer. In addition to his classical training, he was versed in popular music, jazz, and tango. Albinarrate’s eclectic background and experiences led him to appropriate works of English literature for the subjects of two operas: a story by Mark Twain for La Manzana Original, directed by China Zorrilla, which won the “Best Musical” award at the 2000 Summer Festival in Mar del Plata, Argentina; and an Oscar Wilde novella for The Canterville Ghost, based on the original text. French works have also provided him with inspiration: Perrault’s Le Chat Botté [“Puss in Boots”], and Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (writing the musical score for a version directed by Norma Aleandro). He returned to work in his native language for an adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s work, translated into Spanish as Taibele y su Deminio, with Kado Kostzer as director, and then produced Dulcinea, a lyrical cantata based on Cervantès’s original text that was specially commissioned to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Don Quixote’s publication in 2005. When Albinarrate was looking for a new project, my recommendation of La Forêt mouillée (a play from Hugo’s Théâtre en liberté collection) resulted in the creation of a comic opera for the 2010 Festival Victor Hugo et Égaux (see my “Genèse du livret d’une comédie lyrique”). We both found this first collaboration highly rewarding, and we planned to work together a second time on something new for the next festival. With the choir wishing to return to a classical repertoire, he suggested that we create a work that would involve, for the initial production at least, only one soprano: Anahi Scharovsky, his wife and main collaborator. He would provide the piano accompaniment, of course. While we were working on La Forêt mouillée, I had noticed that the character of the Sparrow, played by Scharovsky, had traits similar to Gavroche’s. When the Peacock asks the Sparrow who he is, he responds: “I am a street urchin; once I was a page. I romp about … / I am the bird of gaiety, dauber of the Sun’s joy” [“Je suis gamin; autrefois j’étais page. Je m’ébats … / Je suis l’oiseau gaîté, rapin du Soleil joie”; Le Théâtre en liberté 25]. His sense of humor resembles Gavroche’s too: “The thunder should write melodramas. / Just now, it made a load of noise for nothing!” [“Le tonnerre devrait faire des mélodrames. / A-t-il fait tout à l’heure assez de bruit pour rien!”; 29]. Inside the Elephant of the Bastille, Gavroche makes a similar remark: “What fine thunder; … it’s almost as good as at the Ambigu Theater” [“Voilà du beau tonnerre; … c’est presque aussi bien qu’à l’Ambigu”; LMPc II, 403].2 From then onward, having Scharovsky portray Gavroche was a natural step to take. This decision was not self-evident, as it would be expected that a young boy play Gavroche. It would, however, have been hard to find a boy capable of overcoming the difficulties of the demanding score. Moreover, the history of opera is not lacking in illustrious examples of female singers convincingly playing male adolescents: from Chérubin in Mozart’s (and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte’s) The Marriage of Figaro (1786)—a part that Beaumarchais initially gave to an 2  All references to the novel in this chapter will be taken from the Pocket edition (LMPc).

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actress—to Octavian from Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Der Rosenkavalier (1911). Even the Gavroche of Boublil and Schönberg’s musical was played by Florence Davis and Liza Hayden in the original Paris and London productions, respectively. Furthermore, does Hugo not have the Sparrow say in La Forêt mouillée that he had been a “page” before he was an urchin, thereby connecting him to Chérubin, the Comte de Almaviva’s page? And does he not also refer to Gavroche, the Paris street urchin, as “the cherub of the gutter” [“le chérubin du ruisseau”; II, 10]? Several times, Hugo describes his voice as “light and young” [“claire et jeune”; II, 255, 406, 573] and evokes “Gavroche’s young cock’s voice” [“la voix de jeune coq du petit Gavroche”; II, 587]. Finally, he is compared to a “passerine” [“passereau”; II, 28], a “wagtail” [“hochequeue”; II, 601], and a “sparrow” [“moineau”; II, 56]. Having the soprano who played the Sparrow in La Forêt mouillée assume the role of Gavroche forms a connection between these two characters and cleverly suggests that the latter is an avatar of the former. Danièle Gasiglia, whom Albinarrate charged with writing the lyrics for the additional songs, tracked the same transformation from the opening section of the first song, “I fell from the nest …” [“Je suis tombé du nid …”], in which Gavroche introduces himself. A year before the 150th anniversary of Les Misérables in 2012, it seemed to us that basing a new creation on Gavroche’s story would be an excellent way to celebrate the occasion. Reflecting the way that Hugo recounts Gavroche’s narrative, a story punctuated by songs, rather than an opera or a musical, seemed fitting. We decided that an actor—here played by Patrick Versailles—would narrate and that Albinarrate would set Gavroche’s songs from the novel to music. The wider public would easily understand the lyrics of these songs without the need for any historical explanations. I right away suggested supplementing them with the words that Hugo attributes to Gavroche but that were published only in the posthumous collection, Toute la lyre (1888 and 1893). Their popular and powerful character invoked an accompaniment by more than just a piano, so Albinarrate looked to his friend, the percussionist Diana Montoya Lopez. But we still had in all only six songs, and Albinarrate wanted to compose a larger number, so we asked Danièle Gasiglia, my life companion and main artistic collaborator, to write the lyrics for four other songs, which she did by drawing on elements from Hugo’s text as much as possible. The decision to narrate a character’s journey in this way distinguishes Histoire de Gavroche very clearly from traditional operas and musicals. The title brings to mind that of Ramuz and Stravinsky’s 1918 work Histoire du Soldat, in which the spoken text is shared between three voices—the two protagonists, the Soldier and the Devil, and a narrator—with the music sometimes accompanying the speech and sometimes taking the lead. Yet in Histoire de Gavroche, there is only one speaking part, that of the narrator, which periodically gives way to songs from a sole singing voice. This, however, does not rule out the possibility of a bigger production in the future: other voices for the characters mentioned throughout the story could be added or even a second singing voice for the one song out of the 10 that issues from a character other than Gavroche.

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Of course, Histoire de Gavroche was not the first musical adaptation of the novel, and one of its precedents—the musical written by Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel with the score by Schönberg—has undeniably obtained global recognition. All subsequent attempts must situate themselves in relation to it. The musical’s success began in London in 1985, and it owes little to the character of Gavroche, whereas the French predecessor to one of his songs, “Little People”—“La Faute à Voltaire,” from Hugo’s novel—stood out when the musical was originally created in Paris in 1980. In the novel, Gavroche sings the most, so it may well be that a French audience expected more from this character, whose name has entered common French usage to mean street urchin or rascal. In contrast, for an AngloSaxon audience he features little in the collective memory. Was the character not excluded entirely from the 1935 US film directed by Richard Boleslawski, and was Robert Hyatt, who played Gavroche, not left out of the credits for Lewis Milestone’s 1952 adaptation (IMDb)? In the original French version of the musical, Gavroche appears from the first scene set in Paris, among the beggars who ask passers-by for money. “Give” [“donnez”], they sing, which will become “look down” in the English version, and then “pity” [“pitié”] in the French adaptation of the latter. Gavroche introduces himself: penniless but crafty, and inviting the lowly and mighty alike to “follow me” [“suivre l’guide”]. He makes fun of the reigning monarch, Louis-Philippe, and his pear-shaped head and carries himself triumphantly while shouting, “Long live me, not the king. It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine” [“Vive moi, pas le roi, ça ira, ça ira”].3 He points to Thénardier as the leader of a gang preparing for a scam, and as a man who does not hesitate to use his own daughter to set up “the fools” [“les pigeons”; “Les Misérables: Livret” 7]. Nothing indicates that Gavroche is Thénardier’s son. Next, Gavroche appears alongside the Friends of the ABC for the demonstration that accompanies General Lamarque’s funeral procession. He sings the song that, in the novel, he is unable to finish after being shot by the soldier. Here, however, Gavroche begins with the fourth and last couplet. In the novel, this couplet seems an improvisation on his situation—a bullet hits him and causes him to trip—and he is eventually silenced by another bullet that kills him: “I’ve fallen to the ground / It’s the fault of Voltaire / Nose in the gutter / It’s the fault of …” [“Je suis tombé par terre, / C’est la faute à Voltaire, / Le nez dans le ruisseau, / C’est la faute à …”; 57]. In Boublil and Natel’s version, “I’ve fallen to the ground” [“Je suis tombé par terre”] is only sung in a metaphoric sense, and, with no reason to leave the broken refrain incomplete, the lyricists finish it and follow it with the second couplet from the original song, “I’m not a notary …” [“Je ne suis pas notaire …”; 56]. Together, the Friends of the ABC repeat the words of the song, and Gavroche sings a couplet 3  This refrain has a clear revolutionary significance: Ça ira (meaning “It will be fine,” although perhaps more accurately translated in this instance as “We will win”) was a signature song of the French Revolution that was inspired by Benjamin Franklin’s resolve during the American War of Independence. As a work-song it became popular during preparations for the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1790 (Hanson 53).

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added by Boublil and Natel, in which he declares: “I’ve fallen to the ground, / Even God doesn’t know how. / I’ve no father, no mother / Who claim me as their child” [“Je suis tombé sur terre, / Même Dieu ne sait pas comment. / Je n’ai ni père, ni mère / Qui m’reconnaissent leur enfant”; 56]. Although said in passing, the second phrase that the lyricists attribute to Gavroche is not exactly unrepresentative of the actual relationship between the Thénardiers and their son. But one wonders if the phrase might not have concealed the biological link between them for the audience. It is important to note how little Gavroche resembles his parents, considering the significance that naturalists like the novelist Zola will attribute to inheritance. After repeating the refrain, the chorus uses the lyrics of the third couplet to describe the street urchin: “Happy is your nature … / you’re dressed in misery” [“Joie est ton caractère … / misère est ton trousseau”]. Gavroche sings another new couplet in which he presents himself as a “street beggar” [“va-nu-pieds”] who takes what he wants without paying, and, after a brief interlude by the chorus, says that he is “liked by all / apart from the city’s police” [“aimé par tous / sauf par les sergents de ville”]. The first couplet of the original song is then taken up again: “They’re ugly in Nanterre …” [“On est laid à Nanterre …”], followed by a repeat of the second. The chorus reiterates the novel’s fourth and second couplets successively. The arrangement is thus quite complicated and is disconnected from the original context of the barricade. In a scene without any songs, Gavroche unmasks Javert, as in the novel, and warns the rebels about the soldiers’ movement. He reports Javert’s suicide4 before falling to a bullet for having restored the flag to the barricade and for having responded to the question, “Whose side are you on?” [“Qui vive?”], with “The French Revolution” [“Révolution française”]. In the novel, it is Enjolras who gives this response and then Mabeuf who takes up the flag. Gavroche finishes by singing the last couplet that had become the first one of the song in this adaptation. This time, as in the novel, he does not get as far as naming Rousseau. Boublil and Natel were not actually the first to stray from Hugo’s text, even for a scene as famous as Gavroche’s death. In the first theatrical adaptation of Les Misérables, Hugo’s elder son Charles did not keep the song’s second couplet. In the silent film era, Henri Fescourt’s 1925 adaptation—the longest in cinema history, and whose exceptional fidelity to the original work is often cited— portrays Gavroche being shot in the stomach after the second couplet. Fescourt’s Gavroche then sings the third couplet and falls face down after a second bullet halfway through the fourth couplet. Afterward, he lifts his head and adds: “Nose in the gutter / It’s the fault of …” [“Le nez dans le ruisseau / C’est la faute à …”]. With his bloody face, the lyrics, interrupted here by death, could not be more appropriate. In Raymond Bernard’s magnificent 1934 version with André Lang as co-adapter (see Plate 17), Gavroche falls, as in the novel, after the third couplet, but the director gives the moment an emotional touch that Hugo himself did not add. Gavroche is shot only once off screen: we then see him doubled over and 4  Quite unlike in the novel and the 1985 London musical, Javert’s suicide occurs just before Gavroche’s death and the fall of the barricade.

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shaking as he gasps. He gets up slowly, blood trickling from his temple, and sings while crying, “I’ve fallen to the ground …” [“Je suis tombé sur terre …”], and so on before falling back down again. In 1958, Jean-Paul Le Chanois, with René Barjavel and Michel Audiard adapting the screenplay, seemed to get even closer to Hugo’s text. After a rebel signals that they are nearly out of cartridges, a voiceover almost pronounces the narrator’s exact words from the novel: “It appeared that Gavroche heard these words” [“Il paraît que Gavroche entendit cette phrase”; III 54]. But, surprisingly, the lyrics of the song were changed to: “I was born in Nanterre, / It’s the fault of Voltaire / Not at Palaiseau / It’s the fault of Rousseau” [“Je suis né à Nanterre, / C’est la faute à Voltaire / Et non à Palaiseau / C’est la faute à Rousseau”]. The adapters perhaps thought that the audience would not understand the sarcasm aimed at the suburban towns where the National Guard recruited some of its members: “They’re ugly at Nanterre / … / And stupid at Palaiseau” [“On est laid à Nanterre / … / Et bête à Palaiseau”]. It would have sufficed to have this first couplet preceded by a comment from a rebel about the soldier whose shot had just missed Gavroche, like Charles Hugo in his stage adaptation: “It’s the National Guard from the suburbs” [“C’est un garde national de la banlieue”; 195]; or perhaps they even judged the lyrics to be insulting to the inhabitants of these two suburban towns. Whatever the reason, the decision to replace the original lines is hard to understand. The order of the second and third couplets is also inverted and, in another surprise, one word is substituted for another: in place of “I’m not a notary” [“Je ne suis pas notaire”], we hear, “I’m not a landlord” [“J’suis pas propriétaire”]. One wonders here whether the adapters feared offending the sensitivity of members of the legal profession and thought that the position of the landlord constituted a more traditional, and therefore more acceptable, target. Gavroche is hit with a bullet between the third and fourth couplet, as in the novel. He does not finish his song, but it is not because a second bullet hits him. Even before shooting his 1972 TV film, Marcel Bluwal’s screenplay afforded quite a large role to Gavroche, yet it did not retain the third couplet of his song in the sequence leading up to his death. The principal difference with Hugo’s text, however, lies in the way that the scene is produced: hit by a bullet after the second couplet, Gavroche launches into the fourth and is interrupted, in the last verse, after “It’s” [“C’est”], without the second bullet that kills him in the novel having been shot. Robert Hossein’s 1982 film, with Alain Decaux as screenwriter, presents Gavroche singing the last couplet, “I’ve fallen to the ground …” [“Je suis tombé sur terre …”], as the first. He then sings the second couplet, and, after being hit by the first bullet, these lyrics replace the third: “I came into this world / But I don’t know how. / I have no father or mother / Who claim me for their child” [“Je suis venu sur terre / Mais je ne sais pas comment. / Je n’ai ni père ni mère / Qui m’reconnaissent leur enfant”]. The order and lyrics of the couplets are two words away from Boublil and Natel’s musical. Hossein, who had produced the Paris musical two years earlier, alters the line, “even God doesn’t know how” [“même Dieu ne sait pas comment”]. This once again proves that adaptations do not draw

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solely on the original work as a source of inspiration, but that they often also owe something to the adaptations that precede them.5 Gavroche gets up in pain and only has the strength to repeat the song’s first two verses. In the Anglo-American versions of the musical (produced by Cameron Mackintosh), Herbert Kretzmer’s lyrics quite liberally adapted Boublil and Natel’s for Gavroche’s first appearance but differ greatly in his second main appearance. In 1985, he sang: They laugh at me, these fellows, just because I am small. They laugh at me because I’m not a hundred feet tall … A worm can roll a stone. A bee can sting a bear. … A flea can bite the bottom of the pope in Rome. Goliath was a bruiser who was as tall as the sky. But David threw a rock, and gave him one in the eye. I never read the Bible but I know that it’s true. It only goes to show what little people can do. … So listen here, professor with your head in the cloud. It’s often kinda useful to get lost in a crowd. … Be careful as you go 5  See my article, “Waiting for Hugo,” written for the release of Trousdale and Wise’s cartoon, in which I argue that “The Hunchback of Notre Dame … seems much less an adaptation from the Hugo novel than from a cinematic predecessor, the famous American version directed by William Dieterle in 1939.” In another article, “‘Ceci tuera cela’ à l’ecran,” I also remark that the source for Peter Medak’s 1997 TV film was not only Hugo’s novel but also, and perhaps mostly, Dieterle’s film. I conclude: “from version to version, does the process of adaptation itself risk destroying or erasing the original work? Should we see Disney’s 2002 release of The Hunchback of Notre Dame II as proof of the destructive nature of this all-devouring medium? Or, considered alongside other adaptations, is it a sign of the myth-like accessibility of Hugo’s novel? In any case, a superficial judgment on objects of consumer culture as common as adaptations is not enough. It is perhaps more interesting for specialists to compare readings of different adaptations, analyzing them and situating them alongside each other: it is almost the specialist’s duty to provide an understanding of this process” [“de médiation en médiation, l’adaptation ne risque-t-elle pas de tuer ou de faire disparaître l’œuvre adaptée? Faut-il voir dans la sortie, en 2002, du Bossu de Notre-Dame II, nouvelle production des studios Disney, la preuve du caractère destructeur d’un média dévorateur, ou se réjouir des adaptations comme d’autant de signes de l’accès du roman d’Hugo au statut de mythe? En tout cas, que l’on ne se contente pas de jugements expéditifs sur des objets de consommation culturelle aussi répandus que les adaptations! Il peut être du plus vif intérêt pour le connaisseur d’une œuvre de comparer ces adaptations à sa propre ‘lecture,’ de les situer et de les analyser. Il est presque de son devoir d’en rendre compte”]. Between writing these two articles, I also broached the issue of adaptation in the second degree (see “Adapter, est-ce toujours altérer?”).

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Les Misérables and Its Afterlives ‘Cos little people grow … And little people know … When little people fight, We may look easy pickings But we got some bite! So never kick a dog Because it’s just a pup. You’d better run for cover When the pup grows up! And we’ll fight like twenty armies And we won’t give up. (“Little People”)

These lyrics seem to be based on a phrase from the novel, “this little one will grow up” [“ce petit grandira”; II, 13], and perhaps from a more distant memory of a passage in Notre-Dame de Paris: “Small things overcome great ones. … The Nile rat kills the crocodile” [“Les petites choses viennent à bout des grandes. … Le rat du Nil tue le crocodile”; OCL—Roman I, 617]. Kretzmer may have heard the reformulation of this passage in William Dieterle’s 1939 cinema classic, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame: “small things have a way of overmastering the great: the Nile rat kills the crocodile.” The version of Gavroche’s second song that is currently used in Anglo-American shows dates from the 1987 Broadway production. It begins with a cheeky remark to Javert, “Good evening, dear Inspector,” and his subsequent unmasking of the policeman is proof of what “little people” are capable of achieving. The last ten verses of the 1985 version are then sung. During the fight in the street, in the same way that Gavroche is hit by a bullet in the original French musical and repeats, “Je suis tombé par terre … ,” here he sings “Little people know …” again before succumbing to his wounds. In Tom Hooper’s 2012 film, adapted from the AngloAmerican version of the musical after we had created Histoire de Gavroche, the character sings some additional new lines during his first appearance: … There was a time we killed the king. We tried to change the world too fast. Now we’ve got another king And he’s no better than the last. This is the land that fought for liberty. Now when we fight, we fight for bread. Here is the thing about equality: Everyone’s equal when they’re dead. Take your place, Take your chance, Vive la France! Vive la France!

Regret for having tried to change the world too quickly, skepticism toward aspiring for equality, opportunism, as well as patriotic proclamations in the film musical—

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all give readers of Hugo quite a surprise, since only Jean Prouvaire (one of the Friends of the ABC) expresses such patriotism on page, but with a sort of heroic irony. Just before being shot, Prouvaire cries, “Long live France! Long live the future!” [“Vive la France! vive l’avenir!”; II, 584]. Gavroche’s unmasking of Javert conforms to the staging from 1987 onward but with the last ten verses (“Little people know …”) removed. They only reappear, out of order, in the barricade scene where Gavroche, after having stirred hope amongst the rebels by bursting into “Do you hear the people sing … ,” collects some cartridges and is then shot: [He collects ammunition from the dead soldiers and puts the bullets in a pack.] And little people know, When little people fight, We may look easy pickings But we’ve got some bite! [Gunshot. It misses.] So never kick a dog Because he’s just a pup[.] [Gunshot. Gavroche is hit.] We’ll fight like twenty armies And we won’t give up. [In pain, he throws the ammunition to the students.] So you’d better run for cover When the pup grows— [Another gunshot hits Gavroche. He collapses and dies.] (“The Second Attack”)

Gavroche was not completely absent from Rafael Yglesias’s script for Bille August’s 1998 US adaptation, but his death sequence, which omitted his song, only lasts 20 seconds. Two years later, Didier Decoin’s adaptation for Josée Dayan’s TV miniseries offered a more traditional treatment of the character with a singing Gavroche, but, after the first couplet, it introduces a captain’s reaction to Gavroche taking cartridges from the dead soldiers’ pouches: “Robbing dead bodies. Disgusting!” [“Un détrousseur de cadavres. Répugnant!”]. Might Decoin have intended to establish a link with Thénardier’s behavior at Waterloo? We then hear the same captain’s humanitarian scruples: “Shoot near him, just to frighten him—he’s a kid” [“Tirez à côté, juste pour lui faire peur—c’est un gosse”]. Gavroche then goes directly into the third couplet. “He is mocking us, captain!” [“Il se fiche de nous, mon capitaine!”], comments a soldier. He thus induces the captain, who is “ill at ease” [“mal à l’aise”], to order that Gavroche be shot but out of his sight as, “a little like Pontius Pilate on the sidelines” [“quelque peu PoncePilate sur les bords”], he leaves the task to a sergeant. As for Gavroche, after being hit by a bullet, he removes his cap “like a bowing actor” [“comme un acteur qui salue”] and declares: “Another short couplet? Come on, one more!” [“Encore un p’tit couplet ? Allez, encore un”!]. He launches into the last couplet, but the second, fatal bullet cuts him off. Breaking with the adaptations that distance Gavroche from his narrative model and journey, Danièle Gasiglia and I wanted to remain as close as possible to the character that Hugo had conceived. Histoire de Gavroche therefore begins with his first, still anonymous, appearance at the Thénardiers’ Montfermeil inn: the “cry

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of a very young [unwanted] child in the darkness” [“cri d’un très jeune enfant … dans les ténèbres”; I, 408]. We next find him in Paris, aged 11 to 12 years, unloved but “cheerful because he was free” [“joyeux parce qu’il était libre”; II, 28] and singing “at the top of his voice” [“à tue-tête”; 254]. To go with Gasiglia’s lyrics, “Je suis tombé du nid …,” the composer chose an allegretto tempo. At first, a single triangle accompanies the piano, then alternates with a cymbal and a snare drum. Gavroche sings the last words, “but nothing frightens me” [“mais rien ne me fait peur”], forte, supported by timpani (or kettledrums). The narration then recommences, explaining that the Thénardiers had two other sons who, after being abandoned, begin to “wander the streets aimlessly” [“errer au hasard dans les rues”; II, 384]. The two boys meet Gavroche, who takes them with him, then encounters “a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old beggar” [“mendiante de treize ou quatorze ans”; II, 387]. For the second song, her lyrics, “Short-skirted …” [“Court vêtue …”], integrate elements from Hugo’s description of the beggar and imagine Gavroche’s thought processes that led him to undo his shawl-cum-scarf and give it away to her. In addition to the keyboard, the gentle timpani that strengthen at this point to suggest the wind’s aggression accompany the monotonous chant. Against this depiction of poverty, a rebellious tone groans from the piano and timpani before transforming into unpretentious compassion and generosity: pianissimo then pianississimo. The storyline follows Hugo’s novel, punctuated with Gavroche’s outbursts and his conversations with the two lost children, and then with a baker. Along the way, Gavroche takes the boys to his refuge in the Elephant of the Bastille. The children are afraid, but Gavroche wins their trust, which is the function of the third song. Albinarrate employed the novel’s familiar initial address to the “brats” [“moutards”; II, 396] as a recitative and an allegretto giocoso for Gavroche’s encouragements. Faced with the children’s hesitation, he returns to the recitative to shake them up, to give them a few instructions, and to boast about his “palace” [“palais”]. The allegretto giocoso is reprised to evoke the sleep and the outings to the theater that he promises them and, as announced by a tambourine, to the opera. Finally, he issues an invitation, marked by gentleness, to the little one to take his hand. The rats frighten the children, but Gavroche reassures them and they go to sleep. The next scene opens on 5 June 1832, the day of the insurrection. Some bourgeois men meet a singing Gavroche who is carrying a pistol that he has stolen. We substituted the text’s sestet with the words of a song attributed to Gavroche, published not in the novel but in Hugo’s Toute la lyre, that seemed perfectly in keeping with the context: “Ran tan plan! / hit the drum …” [“Ran tan plan! / tape tambour”; OCL—Poésie IV, 504–5]. This snippet of bravado is sung to a marching beat. To match Gavroche’s impertinence, the composer drew upon the Charleston or ragtime, and, in keeping with his mocking of the old world, he twice uses a mixolydian mode. The initial verse, which serves as the refrain, is accompanied, at first discretely, by the piano and a bass drum doubling as a snare drum, then forte after the opening note of daybreak, and even fortissimo with the introduction

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of the bass drum. After the first couplet, the distich that serves as an alternative refrain is taken up to fortissimo on the word “gai” and, with the introduction of the cymbals, up to fortississimo on “le jour.” The entire second couplet, pronounced from the point of view of the street, is maintained at fortississimo. At the end of the final repetition of the first refrain, the piano and the percussion support the evocation of dawn, rising from forte to fortissimo, then to fortississimo, and even up to a quadruple forte. After this song, as in the novel, there is a brief retrospective meditation on the two long-lost Thénardier children; from their abandonment, because of a lack of money, of an apple turnover, to the encounter with a bourgeois man at whom Gavroche hurls “some subversive couplets” [“des couplets subversifs”; II, 515]. These lines are not in Hugo, but here again we had had recourse to one of the caustic songs from Gavroche’s missing verses: “The bourgeoisie is a calf / That’s sick in the head with cold” [“La bourgeoisie est un veau / Qui s’enrhume du cerveau”; OCL— Poésie IV, 506–7]. Perhaps because of the refrain’s call to dance the rigadoon, Albinarrate gave the song a tango rhythm without removing any of its virulence. In fact, it had the opposite effect. From the beginning, the part for the piano is marked con forza and the accompanying timpani forte. As for the singing, it bursts forth furioso. This anger leads to a refrain that appears to mark a contrast: using a jubilatory tempo—an allegro giocoso—it ironically calls for the little song to be set to music (accompanied by a tambourine) or, rather, for the bourgeoisie to be made to dance, as when Da Ponte and Mozart’s Figaro threatens to teach the cabriole to his master, the Comte Almaviva. The military drum that bolsters the tambourine makes “ran tan plan” sound like Ramponneau—a connection not without reason. Aside from being the name of a famed wine merchant, Ramponneau can mean a bogeyman, an upholstery hammer, or a skittles game that is played with one bowl of the ball. One of Gavroche’s later songs in the novel asks: “Anyone want to play skittles? / The old world fell down / When the big ball rolled” [“Quelqu’un veut-il jouer aux quilles? / Tout le vieux monde s’écroula / Quand la grosse boule roula”; II, 610]. Prolonging the refrain, the roll of the tambourine—the composer was inspired by a military rigadoon—increases up to a triple forte. The second couplet maintains the violence of the first: its tempo is barely slower, which only makes it more overwhelming for the bourgeois man. The refrain returns, picking up little by little. In the third couplet, after an almost saddened assessment of how the children of the bourgeoisie learn from it, “how they laugh at our misfortune” [“comment on rit de nos maux”], the composer did not miss the opportunity to top it off by mocking, in the form of a pianissimo, the prestige in the eyes of the bourgeoisie “of a hundred-sous coin” [“d’une pièce de cent sous”] over freedom, humankind, and God. We did not cut, for all that, Gavroche’s soliloquy, shouted between snippets of “La Marseillaise” in the novel. Interrupted by an exclamation of “Long live joy!” [“Vive la joie!”; II, 516], it provided us with a transition to the third of the “Chansons de Gavroche” published in Toute la lyre: “When Delilah, Pamela / Atala, Stella …” [“Quand Dalila, Paméla, / Atala, Stella …”; OCL—Poésie IV,

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505–6]. Using an attacking allegro fortissimo from the piano and tambourine, the couplet runs down the inventory of a social ideal where women will no longer have to look for a rich protector; where lawyers, pedants, and courtesans will stop their never-ending speechifying; where people will know how to revolt and overthrow those who grow fat at their expense; where children will no longer have to beg. The episode of his dialogue with the four chatting busybodies leads up to Gavroche’s meeting with some assembled rebels. The narrator reports that Gavroche “walked ahead, singing at the top of his voice like a sort of bugle [“marchait en avant avec ce chant à tue-tête qui faisait de lui une espèce de clairon”]. At this point we kept in its place the song in tercets inserted by Hugo, “Here’s the moon appearing” [“Voici la lune qui paraît …”; II, 523–4], but streamlined the varied refrain, since a few of the geographical references could well have been lost on most listeners. Already appearing discretely in the previous song, the castanets accompanying the piano add a humorous touch. The wood blocks take over from them and then, perhaps to highlight the morning-time inebriation of the early-bird dew drinkers, the maracas. The narration begins again when Gavroche, having thrown a stone at a lantern, starts “shouting, at the row of sleeping or terrified houses,” [“à semer le long des maisons endormies ou terrifiées”] some “incendiary couplets” [“couplets incendiaries”; II, 606]. We kept the first couplet, “The bird gossips …” [“L’oiseau médit …”], along with a refrain, and joined it with the last four, each followed by the same refrain. In the novel, these couplets are separated from the start of the song by the episode where Gavroche seizes a cart destined for the barricade but that he uses as a projectile to escape the clutches of a sergeant. A tambourine and a snare drum join with the piano, accompanied by the timpani. The composer chose an allegro con fuoco tempo, and the singing exercise on the “i” of “charmille,” “bastilles,” and “grilles,” as well as on the refrain’s “lon la,” and the addition of an accompanying triangle add a Spanish flavor to this ironic song. The provocative question, “Anyone want to play skittles?’ [“Quelqu’un veut-il jouer aux quilles”], is asked adagio. On “le vieux monde,” the piano is menacing, the triangle falls quiet, and the timbales trundle to pianississimo. The people are called allegro to strike with their crutches and the watchword, “cassons” [“let’s attack”], is paced by a quadruple forte from the cymbals and the snare drum, which then beat together fortississimo to denounce the way that the monarchy flaunted itself at the Louvre. A little later, the fall of Charles X is acted out. The last word, or the last sound, belongs to the percussion section. The incident with the cart having been omitted, the sergeant shouts at Gavroche after the song, calling him a “rascal” [“voyou”] and attracting a comeback that we could not leave out: “Citizen, I haven’t yet called you a bourgeois. Why are you insulting me?” [“Citoyen, je ne vous ai pas encore appelé bourgeois. Pourquoi m’insultez-vous?”; II, 609]. Gavroche arrives at the barricade just in time to learn that the rebels might suffer because of a lack of cartridges, so he decides to set out collecting the cartridge pouches from the dead soldiers. Albinarrate decided

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to keep the story as Hugo conceived it, with four interspersed couplets sung by Gavroche (56–7], and to emphasize the second and fourth lines of each verse. “C’est la faute à Voltaire / C’est la faute à Rousseau” constitutes the detached refrain that is repeated after each couplet apart from the last. For the repetitions of the refrain, the composer wanted to change “the initial tempo from a little polka or gallop typical of the nineteenth century to a jazz rhythm” [“le tempo initial de petite polka ou galop typique du dix-neuvième siècle en un rythme de jazz”] in an attempt to show that “Voltaire, Rousseau, and Gavroche,” far from being part of the past, are “still relevant” [“toujours d’actualité”]. The banging of the timpani accompanying the narrator’s spoken words gives the narration the feel of “melodrama,” in the musical sense of the word. However, the main characteristic of the timpani, as the composer used them here, is that they “sing” [“chantent”] the melody of the couplets through “chromatic glissandi” [“glissandi chromatique”]. According to Albinarrate, the use of timpani in melodrama “considers these instruments to be melodic; a double bass, for example, could play their role” [“a été pensée comme si ces instruments étaient mélodiques; une contrebasse, par exemple, pourrait jouer leur partie”]. This combination of rolls in order to support the note values, and of glissandi and changing notes in order “to sing,” is the very basis of Albinarrate’s conception behind the libretto’s score. In creating the work, the composer himself made the bullet noises by cracking a whip. An allegro was chosen for the first couplet’s tempo. On the score, the composer invites the performer to sing “They’re ugly at Nanterre / And stupid at Palaiseau” [“On est laid à Nanterre / Et bête à Palaiseau”] in a cheeky, laughing voice, and in a burlesque way (burlonamente) for “It’s the fault of Voltaire / It’s the fault of Rousseau” [“C’est la faute à Voltaire / C’est la faute à Rousseau”]. The accompanying piano is bolstered by interventions from wood blocks for the first couplet and from a hi-hat and a snare drum for the second. The score was prolonged in the second couplet—Gavroche’s self-portrait as a “small bird” [“petit oiseau”]—by some ad-libbing from the role’s creator. Here, Scharovsky’s full-bodied soprano voice took flight; almost right away slowly repeating, “I’m not a notary” [“Je ne suis pas notaire”], she deliciously outlined in the air the imaginary belly that she imagined the character would associate with the profits of the profession. Gavroche’s line at the start of the third couplet, “Happy my character” [“Joie est mon caractère”], is accompanied by the triangle and tambourine. Similarly, a hi-hat and a snare drum go well with the refrain. As a bullet hits the street urchin, the piano falls silent. Gavroche sings, “I’ve fallen to the ground” [“Je suis tombé par terre”], and, hit by another bullet, cannot pronounce Rousseau’s name. Gavroche’s story could have ended there, but we decided to not finish it with his death. Our idea came from Hugo’s chapter that immediately follows Gavroche’s death scene. This chapter demonstrates that Gavroche’s message has been passed on, that it is relayed by another character: the older of the two children that he saved without realizing they were his brothers. The children were, the narrator tells us, “at that very same moment in the Luxembourg Gardens” [“en ce moment-

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là même dans le jardin du Luxembourg”]. They are hungry, and the elder picks up a piece of brioche that a bourgeois man threw to the swans in the pond. He gives the larger portion to his little brother and says one of Gavroche’s sayings: “Stick that in your barrel” [“Colle-toi ça dans le fusil”; III, 57–65]. The last song with Gasiglia’s lyrics, “To be Swans” [“Être ces cygnes”], is therefore for this brother of Gavroche. He has inherited Gavroche’s outspokenness and cocky slang, but he has also learned to share with those weaker or poorer than himself; in short, he has learned the value of solidarity and will continue the fight: “together we are strong. / … we’ll laugh again / Gavroche showed us the way/ Come little one, take my hand” [“ensemble nous sommes forts. / … nous rirons encor, / Gavroche a montré le chemin. / Viens, mon petit, prends-moi la main”]. By adopting a cantabile molto espressivo, the composer set his music to reflect this tender gesture. To show the distress of two lost children, the voice fades and lowers to a serious tone, but it regains its strength to affirm, in a waltzing movement, that life will win out and that they will have reason to laugh once more. As the older brother instructs the younger, we re-encounter the allegretto tempo that accompanied Gavroche’s open-mindedness when he was living in the Elephant of the Bastille. The piano softly accompanies the renewed invitation to take his hand—an action used previously by Gavroche to reassure them. The guiding role that Gavroche assumed is emphasized fortissimo. Seven times, supported triumphantly by the piano chords and the banging of the timpani, he sings, “Take my hand” [“Prendsmoi la main”], as if trying to overcome their unfortunate fate and break down the walls of indifference, triumphantly supported by piano chords and the roll of timpani. Histoire de Gavroche was first performed on 17 September 2011 at the Opéra de Massy, not far from Palaiseau on the outskirts of Paris, in the Essonne department, with Anahi Scharovsky (soprano) in the title role, Patrick Versailles (narrator), the composer at the piano, and Diana Montoya Lopez (percussion). This first performance of the entire work was preceded on 1 September by a show at the Buenos Aires National Library in Argentina as part of the opening concert of the 43rd meeting of the International Contemporary Music Festival, In Search of Lost Sound [En búsqueda del sonido perdido]. Scharovsky and Albinarrate, with Arauco Yepes on percussion, performed extracts from the score based on Hugo’s songs from Les Misérables and Toute la lyre, with additional lyrics by Danièle Gasiglia. Works by Klaus Ager, Julio De Caro, and Iannis Xenakis were also on the concert program. Four excerpts from Histoire de Gavroche—three songs from Toute la lyre and Gavroche’s death scene—were recorded on the CD Paris-Buenos Aires.6 The complete work has been staged subsequently by performers in France: on 24 February 2012 at the Théâtre Musical in Besançon (Hugo’s birthplace), and on 4 July 2012 at Tolstoy’s home, Yasnaya Polyana, in Russia for the festival The Geniuses’ Garden [Le Jardin des Génies]. The Société des Amis de Victor Hugo 6  Available on CD: Paris-Buenos Aires, “Poésie française / Musique argentine,” Éditions de l’Attrape Science, 2011.

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used the production to represent France at the festival for the third time. Performed before diverse audiences, the work has been received enthusiastically. By changing his novel’s original title from Jean Tréjean (later Jean Valjean) to Les Misérables, Hugo outlined the multi-faceted nature of poverty: it takes many forms and is embodied by multiple characters. Adaptations of the novel often focus on only one character, the escaped convict Valjean himself, and his attempts to evade Javert, who represents law and order in its most implacable sense. This is the case whether it is explicitly indicated in the title or not: Valjean’s name, or a descriptive periphrasis of it, was used in two Japanese films: Uchida’s 1932 movie and Itami’s 1938 The Life of a Great Man [La Vie d’un grand homme], in addition to the 1961 Korean film by Seung-ha Jong.7 In contrast, by taking another character from the novel as a protagonist, we can show that each character was important for Hugo. Telling the story of Gavroche demonstrates this breadth of scope, if one accepts the challenge of accompanying that story with a great many details. Examples of using Gavroche as a protagonist are rare: Soviet Russian cinema saw Tatyana Lukashevich’s 1937 film, which although of high quality deviates importantly from the novel, and Irina Gurvich’s 1966 17-minute long animated movie. To celebrate the centenary of the novel, Alain Boudet produced three films in 1962 focusing on three characters for French television to mark the centenary of the novel as part of Claude Santelli’s Theater for Youth [Le Théâtre de la Jeunesse] program. Between Cosette and Jean Valjean, the second film was dedicated to Gavroche. However, this choice perhaps owed much to the fact that the program’s target audience was young people. Histoire de Gavroche, composed in collaboration with Albinarrate, lasts about as long as a feature-length film and can thus be looked on as another distinctive event in the history of works adapted from Les Misérables. It has even inspired a new project that will take a similar form: the story of one of the novel’s strongest and most moving female characters— Gavroche’s older sister, Éponine. In short, the ongoing relevance, vast scope, and multiple dimensions of Les Misérables guarantee that Hugo’s story is not nearly done with inspiring screenwriters, directors, animators, painters, librettists, and musicians.

7  Most films produced in the US maintain Hugo’s title, apart from Milestone’s, which was distributed in France as The Life of Jean Valjean [La Vie de Jean Valjean].

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Chapter 12

Les Misérables and the Twenty-First Century Bradley Stephens

The underlying argument of this book has driven forward two key assertions: first, that Les Misérables was consciously and finely crafted by Victor Hugo to be a work of universal appeal and cultural adaptability; and second, that his creation guaranteed itself a far-reaching and widespread afterlife by calling upon those who encountered it to see themselves reflected in its pages and to personalize its meanings. These contentions develop a critical grasp of the history of Les Misérables and, by implication, of the processes of artistic adaptation. In attending to a noticeable blind spot in research within both fields, this volume of essays has sought to initiate discussion that will further our understanding of each as being multimedia in form and transcultural in nature. For scholarship on Les Misérables, the aim has been to unpack some of the novel’s complex workings as sources of its lasting appeal and to trace its afterlives across and beyond the usually dominant medium of sound cinema. While no one study could track all of the novel’s different media trajectories, we have nevertheless flagged those paths and explored some of their directions with an eye to further investigation, not least for radio, animation, and digital media. With regard to adaptation studies, Les Misérables is in the attractive position of energetically engaging with Thomas Leitch’s proposals for how the field should develop. Believing that researchers need to diversify beyond the standard bookto-film analysis, he notes a series of priorities: a move away from categories inherited from literary study, such as fidelity and canonicity; a focus on the production and reception of adaptations, including their interactive character and their play with a source text; and a more probing scrutiny of “intermediality” as a means of developing media literacy among new generations of students (“Adaptation Studies” 69–71). The adaptive legacy of Les Misérables offers promising responses to these demands. As a popular novel that lacks the canonical literary status of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) or Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927), its appropriation may be seen in a creative, even celebratory, context. The book itself thrived on intertextual modes (e.g., the biblical, epic, tragic, folk, and populist), and its multimedia legacy challenges the one-to-one model of comparison with other novels through one of the most illuminating yet overlooked examples in literary history. That legacy is characterized as much by experimentation as by fidelity, in tune with the novel’s powerful appeal to creativity. Finally, its universal popularity and enduring cultural function or “work” raise the question of context for its production and

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its reception, from the commercial and the political to the satirical and the usergenerated, along different social, aesthetic, and economic vectors. Above all, in both a public and private sense Les Misérables has repeatedly lent itself to appropriation by diverse audiences who have sought to define their identities at moments of challenge and change. If Les Misérables can be best characterized by its versatility, then the French adage that “the more things change, the more things stay the same” [“plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”] is a highly appropriate label to apply to its mutability. We may think, for instance, of the Confederate soldiers of the American Civil War, reminded of the sublime nature of sacrifice and defeat when reading the novel, or of the Italian cinemagoers who, in the wake of the birth of the Italian Republic, were roused by the resilient revolutionary spirit of the “Friends of the ABC” in Riccardo Freda’s I Miserabili (1948). From Jawaharlal Nehru’s recognition of the novel’s renown during India’s movement for independence in the first half of the twentieth century to France’s reflections upon her post-war standing to Hugo Chávez’s development of his socialist principles in its closing decades,1 Hugo’s story has established an enduring connection with modern history. That connection can be as intimate as it is political, open to all genders, ages, and backgrounds. Prisoners have identified with Jean Valjean’s frustrations and anxieties in his struggle for reinvention (Cooper), while his feelings of responsibility toward Cosette and later Marius easily resonate with fathers—a capacity not unnoticed by Hugo’s own son Charles in his focus on a paternal Valjean for his 1863 stage version. Similarly, numerous teenage audiences have recognized their own unrequited desires, anxieties, and rebellious streaks in Hugo’s younger characters: the Japanese animated series Shōjo Cosette (2007) even refocused the plot to center on Cosette’s journey, including parental grief with Fantine and Valjean, sibling rivalry with Éponine, and romance with Marius. Put simply, Les Misérables matters. The result has been a century and a half of reappearances and reissues—and adaptive retellings and reimaginings—in which Hugo’s spiritual and social odyssey has proven itself to be a malleable metaphor and a versatile catalyst for a vast range of different narratives, as the contributors to this volume have argued. One improbable example underlines these assertions in several ways. In the penultimate scene of The Amazing Spider-Man (2012), the teenage hero Peter 1  “André Malraux recalled running into Les Misérables everywhere—in India, Africa, Latin America. During their 1930 meeting, [Nehru] told Malraux that in his country France was ‘the Revolution,’ adding that Les Misérables was ‘one of the most celebrated foreign books’ there” (Grossman, Conversion 19). Chávez shared this admiration (see Anderson). The “Comandante’ would often quote and reflect upon Hugo’s novel, arguing that nineteenth-century France was similar to Latin America as a whole. During a Parisian press conference in 2007, he noted: “There are many Jean Valjeans in Latin America. … You want to know little Cosette and all the others, … you want to know Marius? They’re all down there in Latin America” (Denis). Chávez’s government even gave out thousands of free copies of Les Misérables in 2009 as part of the Revolutionary Reading Plan to promote social responsibility.

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Parker resolves his uncertainty over his future thanks to a literature class, of all things. Peter’s teacher explains to her class that, while some might claim there are ten plots or stories in all of fiction, there is in fact only one: “Who am I?” The teacher’s insistence on this question echoes the title of one of the most recognizable songs from the stage musical of Les Misérables, instantly linking the morally conflicted trajectories of Peter Parker and Jean Valjean for numerous audiences. During the commentary for the film’s home entertainment release, the appropriately surnamed director, Marc Webb, overlooks any link and instead credits his former twelfth-grade teacher for this narrative cue to exploring selfhood. However, there is another reference in this scene that confirms the presence of Les Misérables as a telling intertext. As the camera follows Peter’s entrance into the classroom, a quotation is visible on the blackboard: “People do not lack strength: they lack will.” Next to it is a chalk inscription of the source, written in capital letters: “VICTOR HUGO.”2 Given these references in both the screenplay and the mise-en-scène, the film makes an unconscious connection between a comic-book hero’s quest for identity and a literary protagonist’s struggle to find himself.3 The plight of a hero tested by moral choice and forced to interrogate his own identity is, of course, central to Les Misérables, as much in the stage musical as in the novel. This intertextual presence in The Amazing Spider-Man stresses the popular reach of Hugo’s story and at the same time emphasizes the lure of appropriating and retelling works of fiction. For Webb himself, it becomes a quest for selfdefinition, as identified through the question, “Who am I?” I love that idea, and it’s really at the heart of why I felt emboldened and why I felt able to reboot the movie, because we do tell the same stories over and over again, and it’s the inflections and the changes in themes that give it its specificity and power. But really, at the end of the day, we’re always exploring the same thing: “Who am I?”

Webb’s rationale for reimagining a popular franchise whose latest incarnations had only appeared in the previous decade draws on a key tenet in adaptation studies: the ways in which stories and themes are recycled continuously through culture,  The quotation is not referenced but could well come from Les Misérables when Jean Valjean, in his guise as Monsieur Madeleine, pleads with the townsfolk of Montreuilsur-Mer to help rescue Fauchelevant from underneath the wheels of a fallen cart. In this episode, Inspector Javert notes, “It’s not that they don’t want to help. They lack strength” [“Ce n’est pas la bonne volonté qui leur manque … . C’est la force”; LMPl 182–3]. The exact source of the film’s reference ultimately remains unclear, perhaps originating from an inaccurate translated version (although not Isabel Hapgood’s famous 1887 translation, nor the more recent versions since the second half of the twentieth century, all of which maintain the proper sense from Hugo’s French). 3  I have explored elsewhere how explicit connections between Hugo’s oeuvre and another superhero, Batman, might reveal similarly unconscious common ground regarding modern mythologies of heroism. See Stephens, “Dialogue culturel.” 2

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with a desire not for monotony or tedious repetition but for creativity and enduring interest through new forms and contexts. The stories that persist are those which get to the heart of what makes us human without offering simple answers but without alienating us through undue complexity. Similarly, Webb’s logic of how stories repeatedly resurface and come back to us through core concerns underpins the 150-year legacy of adaptations that have taken on Victor Hugo’s epic work, and indeed the popularity of many of those versions. Taken on their own terms, my discussions of plot and approach can only be tentative here, but the clear marking of Hugo’s name on screen underscores the extent to which Les Misérables is today part of a collective consciousness. Asking, “Who am I?”—especially in the same year that Tom Hooper’s film version of the musical was released—teases strong associations with the well-known tale of Jean Valjean and his ethical journey of self-discovery. Much as Hugo’s novel espoused a Romantic philosophy that spoke both to universal experience and human principle, so too has its most successful musical incarnation maintained the story’s sweeping emotionalism and moral awareness. Yet it would be misleading to believe that there was little afterlife for Hugo’s novel before the musical’s rise in the 1980s: three quarters of the book’s various screen adaptations came before its London debut on Tuesday 8 October 1985, for example. However, it would also be enormously short-sighted to ignore the widespread effect that the show has had in familiarizing audiences with his work since that debut and in guaranteeing its ongoing success. Importantly, the afterlife of Les Misérables the novel during the era of Les Misérables the musical invites the flexible models of thinking that have become increasingly prevalent in adaptation studies. Both critically and chronologically, this most recent chapter in the history of Les Misérables marks a suitable case on which to close this volume. Adaptations must be understood as dynamic and multifaceted rather than as easily categorized forms. This approach repeats Linda Hutcheon’s influential theorization of adaptation as a way of engaging with stories that acknowledges a wide context of communication. A work’s meaning does not “ever take place in a vacuum”: an adaptation’s media form and artistic genre always “communicate narrative meaning to someone in some context, and they are created by someone with that intent. There is, in short, a wider communicative context” (Hutcheon 26–8)—a highly active grid of different forces that shape an adaptation’s potential meanings by channeling the “voltage” of a work, to recall André Bazin’s term that was used in this volume’s introduction. In spite of the many generations separating their first appearances, both the novel and the musical were greeted with uncannily similar responses of a dismissive critical orthodoxy and a delighted popular reaction (see Grossman and Stephens, “From Epic Novel”). The pattern only reasserted itself when the film musical was released in late 2012, providing a helpful and illustrative focal point for this concluding chapter. Plus ça change, indeed. But the persistence of these divisive and sometimes passionate responses reveals an integral aspect of how and why Les Misérables has managed to communicate with a broad public for more than a century and a half—and where that relationship might be

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headed in a digital age in which audiences can participate in the construction and transformation of a work more readily than ever before. The “Star Wars of Broadway,” as one of its leads described it (Nikki M. James, qtd. in Chai 2014), has been a particularly potent energy surge in the evergrowing network of Les Misérables adaptations, popularizing Hugo’s work for the new millennium (see Plate 8). Various cast recordings have sold albums by the millions, and the show itself has been seen by more than 70 million people in 44 different countries and 22 languages. It seemed only fitting that the inevitable film adaptation of the musical should have been released in 2012, the year of the novel’s 150th anniversary, grossing more than seven times its budget by taking in some $440 million at the international box office. Even if the musical is now more familiar to audiences than the novel that inspired its creation, Hugo’s essential role behind this commercial juggernaut is in little danger of being forgotten. Either side of the musical’s feted 25th anniversary on 3 October 2010, two of the world’s largest book publishers commissioned new English translations of the novel: in 2008, Random House released a highly praised new translation by Julie Rose through its Modern Library and Vintage Classics divisions; and in 2013, Penguin published another new translation by Christine Donougher.4 Furthermore, the musical’s producer, Cameron Mackintosh, has repeatedly stressed “the wonderful Victor Hugo’s” importance, to recall the qualifier he gave the author during his finale speech at the 25th-anniversary concert. As he had confirmed in an interview several years beforehand: “Victor Hugo wrote such an extraordinary story. I don’t think any other musical is likely to be blessed with such a strong foundation” (qtd. in Vermette 181). It is a debt that was acknowledged yet again for a major exhibition on the novel’s transition to musical theater at the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, to coincide with the musical’s return to the Australian stage in July 2014. Among such artifacts as original costumes, designs, and scores, Hugo’s manuscript of the novel left Europe for the first time to feature in the display collection. Its inclusion signaled “a landmark loan” arranged by the Australian ambassador to France with the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Puvanenthiran). The unprecedented move indicated that the French Ministry of Culture now recognizes the musical’s importance to the afterlife of one of its country’s most famous exports. Hugo would no doubt have been impressed by the musical’s reach as an extension of his own will toward the universal. The show’s songs and characters have entered into a common lexicon and become a familiar shorthand that has been used across popular culture. Highly rated primetime shows such as The Simpsons, Seinfeld, South Park, and Homeland have all referred to and at times

4  This latest version broke with convention and translated the title into English as The Wretched, suggesting a need to distinguish between the novel and the stage musical—and whereby the title Les Misérables now invokes the show rather than the book.

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pastiched elements of the musical,5 while allusions also appear in contemporary fiction, as in best-selling author Karen Joy Fowler’s novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013).6 Famously, charity worker Susan Boyle’s performance of the song “I Dreamed a Dream” on the television competition Britain’s Got Talent in April 2009 catapulted her to international fame when the original upload of her audition was viewed over four million times on YouTube in just one 24-hour period—a tally that six years later stands at more than 170 million hits. Presented as an underdog by way of her plain appearance and awkward manner, Boyle’s emotive rendition of the song that accompanies Fantine’s fall reiterated the track’s status—as with the musical entire—as an anthem for outcasts of all creeds and for an unfailing belief in individual potential. The School Edition of the show, altering the official production to suit the vocal range of younger performers, has enabled children and teenagers around the world to make such songs their own since the Hugo bicentenary in 2002. Just as the musical has inspired unlikely stars on reality television and among high-school students, so has it rallied political parties and protest groups. Indeed, its allegories of social dispossession and human resolve work readily within the political spectrum, especially toward the center and left. The musical’s first-act finale, “One Day More,” was appropriated by America’s Democratic Party, first for the 1992 presidential run of Bill Clinton (whose inauguration banquet included Aretha Franklin’s rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream”), and second by supporters of Barack Obama in his two successful bids for the White House (Stranahan and DeMesquita).7 Another of the show’s signature songs, “Do You Hear the People Sing?” has been used to unite various public demonstrations. To cite but a few examples: on 5 June 1996 The New York Times reported that the song was recited by thousands attending a vigil in Hong Kong on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre (Gargan); on 27 February 2011, a flash mob protesting inside the Wisconsin Capitol building in Madison against Governor Scott Walker’s Budget Repair Bill uploaded a video of protesters singing the lyrics on site (Goodman); on 5  In The Simpsons, Valjean’s prison number, 24601, which is a key lyric in several songs from the show, is the prison number assigned both to the villainous Sideshow Bob (“Black Widower,” 1992) and to Principal Skinner in a reference to his time as a Vietnamese prisoner of war (“Homer’s Barbershop Quartet,” 1993). It is also the number assigned to the character Cartman when he is sent to jail in South Park (“Cartman’s Silly Hate Crime,” 2000). In a 1991 episode of the comedy Seinfeld (“The Jacket”), the character George importantly has Thénardier’s song, “Master of the House,” stuck in his head. In her chapter in this volume, Beaghton notes a similar example in the second-series finale of the drama series Homeland (2012), when one character describes another as Javert. 6  “[Dad] had become a secret drinker. It kept Mom on high alert and I worried sometimes that their marriage had become the sort Inspector Javert might have had with Jean Valjean” (18). 7  The director of “Les Misbarack” reunited his team one month after the video went viral to perform a version of “One Day More” as a token of thanks to all those volunteering for the Obama 2008 campaign (Walsh).

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3 August 2013, more than 100,000 Taiwanese people took to the streets in Taipei and used the song to protest the government over suspected military violence (FlorCruz); and in late September 2014, pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong’s so-called “Umbrella Revolution” adopted the song as their anthem, draping a giant orange banner with the title outside government headquarters (Moore). Elsewhere, the teaser trailer for the film musical, featuring various images and episodes to the soundtrack of “I Dreamed a Dream,” was reworked as part of a social media campaign run by the City Attorney for San Francisco, Dennis Herrera, early in 2013. Entitled Less Miserable, the video reproduced the trailer shot for shot save for one key difference: the action was transposed into modern-day California so as to publicize significant consumer refunds on interest and finance charges that Herrera had negotiated for borrowers with online loans from a Cincinnati-based payday lender.8 Les Misérables is, it seems, capable of being seen “at work” everywhere and anywhere. Crucially, the 150-year phenomenon of Les Misérables has drawn strength from an irresistible public attraction to Hugo’s story that has fueled the desire for adaptations and applications of his work. In turn, those retellings and reimaginings have maintained the widespread interest in what has become a mutually beneficial relationship, one that has more often than not paid little attention to critical consensus. Reviews of the novel in 1862 would not have predicted Hugo’s triumph (see Bach; Grossman, Conversion 14–17; Malandain; and Stephens, “Finger-Pointing”), any more than the initial reaction to the debut of the London musical could have foreseen the ascendancy of Les Mis (see Sternfeld 186–7). This pattern of critical mistrust and popular adulation was repeated most recently when Tom Hooper’s film version of the musical was released on the dawn of 2013. The production itself of Hooper’s film obliges some key reminders about the creative rather than the derivative or complacent process of how works are adapted from one medium to another. Indeed, it testifies to the kind of adaptive conceptions of art that Hugo’s novel embraced. Cameron Mackintosh had been trying to bring his production to the screen for numerous years, looking for the right team to respect his idea that “I never wanted the film to just record the show, we wanted to reinvent it” (qtd. in Ouzounian). William Nicholson’s script ironed out what he saw as the narrative creases in the musical by returning to Hugo’s novel in order to flesh out key relationships, such as that between Valjean and Cosette. This return allowed him to resolve unanswered questions raised by the stage version, including the pair’s flight to the Petit Picpus convent as a means of explaining where they hide during Cosette’s early adolescence. At the same time, Nicholson re-plotted the script to complement his dramatic focus, notably by positioning Fantine’s crestfallen solo after her descent into prostitution rather than beforehand. “It would have been quite improper to tinker with the show without good reason,” he confirmed to me in a personal interview shortly after the film’s release. Hence many of these 8  The full video is available on the City Attorney’s official YouTube channel: http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=vYACjy4KcuE&list=PLdIoBrSpoYjNEPJ4_Ya3m9Jn_6332i36g.

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changes are designed to enhance rather than transform the musical’s character: new scenes, such as Valjean’s reporting to the parole officer to clarify why his later actions make him a fugitive and Javert’s attempted resignation before Monsieur Madeleine, are so brief and fit in so neatly that the audience would not necessarily notice the departure from the stage original. As the director hired by Mackintosh and his co-producers, Hooper was attracted to the material through its social themes of dispossession and defiance, and especially thanks to the ways in which the story communicated through feeling instead of just observation or exposition. He credited the musical’s success to its passionate connection with audiences: “it mainlines emotion into your body and people go back to it repeatedly because it offers the opportunity to re-experience that emotion with extraordinary consistency and predictability” (qtd. in Nightingale and Palmer 73). Like Nicholson, Hooper was aware that his interpretation had to bring both continuity with the stage production and originality on screen to succeed: “I wanted to give [the fans] a new experience of what they love in a way that would protect what they love, but would also open their eyes to a different way of looking at it” (Hooper). His visuals characteristically take advantage of the screen medium to capture Hugo’s vision of a vibrant but unsettled and transient world as it had been reflected in the musical by the famously revolving stage. With cinematographer Danny Cohen, Hooper enriches his settings with color, such as Fantine’s vivid blue robes in the factory and her dramatic red dress as a prostitute, to signal moral degradation from the purity of the Virgin Mary to the lust of the streetwalker. At the same time, the frame is mobilized through tilted angles and a camera that, like Hugo’s text itself, restlessly navigates both the horizontal and vertical axes: the audience is brought up close to Valjean’s desperation and Fantine’s disbelief, just as easily as it is lifted out of the picturesque valleys of southern France and later into the urban poverty of Paris. The vast scale of nineteenth-century misery is captured further by a willingness to use swift cuts, permitting the film to showcase numerous tableaux of poverty in quick succession and to push ahead through its mammoth narrative. In particular, the film favors various close-up shots for signature songs, sometimes in extreme proximity to the character’s faces, to bring the audience into close contact with the characters. In the absence of Hugo’s narrator plunging us into Jean Valjean’s assailed mind in the famed chapter, “A Storm Inside a Skull” [“Une tempête sous un crane”], Hooper relies on the closeness of the actor Hugh Jackman’s strained face to ensure that his audience is drawn into Valjean’s moral crisis, revealing an intertext with Carl Theodor Dreyer’s expressionist landmark, La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928).9 9

 This intertext is especially apparent in the scenes in which Fantine and Joan of Arc both have their hair cut off, with each film lingering closely on the assaulted women’s faces. Publicity stills for each character also bear a striking resemblance, with both clutching at their necks in a martyred pose. Perhaps by coincidence, Hugo’s great-grandson, Jean Hugo, was one of the two production designers for the film: though his expensive and expressive sets with Hermann Warm figure relatively little on screen, they enabled the cast to inhabit the narrative more readily.

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This proximity is reinforced by the emotive power of not only the lyrics and the score, but also the manner of recording both for the film’s soundtrack. Hooper’s artistic ambition in this respect was heavily influenced by sung-through musicals like Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964). Demy’s film encouraged him to envisage a heightened reality on screen, in which singing would seem a natural means of communication, provided that it was recorded live on set rather than in a studio prior to filming. This world had to be recognizable but different, from the quixotic snowfall in Digne to the Gothic garishness of the docks in Montreuil-sur-Mer, thereby adapting our reality to fit a world of song. Working with Boublil and Schönberg to create a “crisper, more immediate orchestration,” Hooper intensified the more intimate and naturalized feel of his work by obliging his cast to “embrace the concept of the live tempo”: small earpieces for the principal actors connected to an on-set pianist and allowed them to become their own maestros (qtd. in Nightingale and Palmer 60). Whereas on stage the actors and the orchestra would need to project their combined performances to the very rear of the auditorium, the intimacy of this kind of music production brought the audience much more tightly into the action and broke with a tradition of prerecorded soundtracks for screen musicals. Hooper was not just asking audiences to look at the musical differently; he was asking them to listen in new ways, too. Central to this effect was Boublil and Schönberg’s music, spanning the intimate and the immense much as Hugo’s own visions had sought to do. Conscious that Hugo had reached for popular genres in addition to classical and more established modes in creating his hybrid novel, the pair had believed when writing the show that the emergent genre of pop opera or “megamusical” was a well-suited form for telling Hugo’s story anew. Yet for all its differences with its source material—both on stage and in the novel—this adaptation spurred a chorus of criticisms that sounded quite familiar to those voiced in 1862 and 1985. In something of a spectacle in itself, the movie’s appearance reignited the sparks between high and popular culture that the novel and its adaptations had long generated. Although the film found a substantial audience and received more immediate critical acclaim than either the original musical or indeed the novel, it still came under heavy attack for supposedly being caught in its tone somewhere between high-minded seriousness and trivialized flights of escapist fantasy. “The adaptation has been managed with more gusto than grace; at the end of the day, this impassioned epic too often topples beneath the weight of its own grandiosity” claimed Variety’s reviewer (Chang). The Hollywood Reporter went further to note that the focus was less on social dilemmas than on impassioned performances that were waged in “a Sisyphean battle against musical diarrhea” and that “there are large, emotionally susceptible segments of the population ready to swallow this sort of thing, but that doesn’t mean it’s good” (McCarthy). Where some reviewers in the 1980s had dismissed the stage production through unfavorable comparisons with its literary source material (Sternfeld 186), theater critic Charles Isherwood partly established that same musical as a benchmark for measuring the film’s dimensions: “Seeing it on

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stage you can lean into the material and let it seduce you; on screen I felt I was being force-fed misery, cruelty, heroism, panting young love, and blustery, flagwaving emotionalism” (Isherwood). The general lack of composure and subtlety did not sit well with such viewers. France was especially hostile—coldly resistant to welcoming the musical back onto its soil since it had been revamped by the British. French critics arguably reflected a widespread cultural sensitivity regarding its worldwide renown in a country that is notoriously suspicious of the economic and cultural imperialism so often associated with its Anglo-American cousins. Out of 25 press reviews, the film scored less than a 50% approval rating overall, and box office receipts were significantly lower than in comparable markets, recalling memories of the failed 1991 Paris launch of the West End show. Many reviewers now bemoaned what had happened to a novel that had long been a revered classic (whereas ironically Hugo’s novel had suffered in 1862 from comparison with the new realist model of fiction). Première magazine offered one such example: “Where Hugo’s masterpiece was rich and epic, … Les Miz executes its banal religiosity and its emotional throes with the finesse of a drunken convict” [“Là où le chef-d’œuvre de Hugo jouait l’ampleur, l’épique … , Les Miz abat sa bondieuserie et ses affres avec la finesse d’un forçat aviné”; Golhen]. Télérama likewise described the work as a failure, observing that Hugo’s “political message has wisely remained in the dressing room” [“le message politique de Hugo est resté au vestiaire”; Mury]. The national daily Le Monde even ran an article that returned to Raymond Bernard’s 1934 film to demonstrate how Hugo’s mix of social conscience and human drama should be achieved on screen, as if to reassure its readers that Hugo’s national treasure could be polished up once again in the right hands (Sotinel). Such unease toward the film musical’s fervent emotional force at the apparent expense of any measured tone or political impetus was not, however, restricted to the entertainment industry—or to the French. American historian Charles Walton noted the movie’s ambitious staging and accomplished acting but argued that “it cuts the author in half: it gives us the religious Hugo, not the revolutionary one. It tells the story of individual redemption through an odyssey of Catholic conscience, not of France’s collective redemption through political violence.” Half a year after the film was released, noted journalist Simon Jenkins offered a stern warning to British foreign-policymakers and onlookers regarding the aftermath of the Arab Spring, in which he alluded to the film’s romanticized depiction of social revolution: “British public opinion has backed the insurgent mob against the regime, as if sated on Les Misérables. By the time of the Syrian uprising, it assumed that Arab mobs were always in the right and always win.” From the Hollywood Hills through seats of learning to the corridors of power, Hooper’s film had been characterized by numerous voices as an opiate: alluring enough but dangerously dizzying. Had Hooper looked back over the critical responses to Hugo’s novel, he might well have felt a distinct sense of déjà vu. In the absence of writers such as George Sand or Leo Tolstoy to spring to his defense as they had done to Hugo’s,

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the director found support from the same spheres of film criticism, journalism, and academic research that had also criticized his work. Reviewer Philip French praised the film’s grand staging and musical energy, both of which channeled a Romantic spirit reminiscent of French greats like Delacroix, and concluded that he had not picked up three distinct issues that lay at its heart when he saw the stage musical’s opening night nearly 28 years earlier. According to French, the film is about “love, and its ability to transform and transcend”; about “our need to fight for change and social justice”; “and above all, … about holding on to hope in the most desperate conditions, and it ends in the victory of love in a context of political defeat.” Ossama Abdel-Fattah Rezk, an Egyptian journalist, likewise insisted that the film’s depiction of revolution may not have been fully realistic or politically contextualized but that it remained inspirational in its awareness that freedom is an ongoing cause rather than a simply obtained objective. “To sum up the film’s political message,” he declared, “initial success certainly does not mean that the struggle is over and that we must stop moving towards the realization of liberty” [“Pour résumer le message politique du film, un succès initial ne veut absolument pas dire que la lutte est terminée et qu’il faut cesser d’avancer vers l’accomplissement de la liberté”; “Il parle de nous”]. Although Rezk does not offer a close analysis of the film, it is clear that such concerns were in Hooper’s mind, given the film’s timeliness in the wake of the Arab Spring and in its depictions of flag-waving student revolutionaries demanding social change. One noticeable visual cue broadens this political scope. Alongside production designer Eve Stewart, Hooper presents the Café Musain—where the student ABC society meets at the heart of the narrative—in wedge-shaped fashion so as to be explicitly reminiscent of the Flatiron Building in New York City. Just over a year before the film was released, the Occupy Wall Street movement had begun in New York, instigating a global culture of resistance towards neo-capitalism that seems to cast its shadow across the picture in the form of this visual allusion to one of the city’s most recognizable works of architecture. Recalling Hugo, Hooper confirmed: “there is tremendous anger about the system: Les Misérables offers this solace that we can rise up against the system and change it for the better” (qtd. in Dorris). But perhaps the most astute defense of the film musical came from Stanley Fish (“Les Misérables and Irony”), the literary theorist and public intellectual who made highly influential contributions to reader-response theory in the late 1970s. Acutely aware of the culturally constructed nature of how art is interpreted, Fish’s argument helps to clarify why critics could react more positively to the same characteristics of heightened emotion and epic sweep that had elsewhere caused such discomfort. Fish begins by recapping various negative responses to the film, including Dana Stevens’ review that notes: “We’re all familiar with the experience of movies that cram ideas and themes down our throats. Les Misérables may represent the first movie to do so while also cramming us down the throats of its actors.” To respond, Fish cites Hooper himself from an interview in USA Today that while “we live in a postmodern age where a certain amount of irony is expected, [t]his film is made without irony” (qtd. in Wloszczyna). With this declaration in

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mind, Fish establishes the basis of his evaluation: “Les Misérables defeats irony by not allowing the distance it requires. If you’re looking right down the throats of the characters, there is no space between them and you; their perspective is your perspective; their emotions are your emotions; you can’t frame what you are literally inside of.” Comparing Hooper to Color Field painters such as Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler, with their flat yet passionate surfaces, Fish argues that the film trades effect for immediacy: rather than triggering “higherorder thoughts” from the audience, the experience is much more direct. Hence: Those who call the movie flat, shallow, sentimental and emotionally manipulative are not wrong; they just fail to see that what appear to them to be bad cinematic choices (in addition to prosaic lyrics that repel aesthetic appreciation, and multiple reprises of simple musical themes) are designed to achieve exactly the result they lament—an almost unbearable proximity to raw, un-ironized experience.

Fish recalls the novelist David Foster Wallace’s belief that irony can dissuade us from treating human dilemmas and feelings “with reverence and conviction,” at which point he concludes a concise but compelling study of the film’s—and to a lesser extent the musical’s—potential merits. Such qualities may also be found at various junctures throughout the novel’s adaptive history, including Henri Fescourt’s 1925 silent film, which opted for a naturalist aesthetic that resisted the tastes of the contemporary avant-garde to offer a more readily legible artwork. What might Hugo himself have had to say amid these competing voices? Prima facie, Fish’s model leaves no room for the thoughtful, reflective reader (“lecteur pensif”) to whom Hugo wanted to appeal. The New Yorker’s art critic Adam Gopnik indeed implies that Hugo would have been disappointed by how the megamusical genre has constrained the scope of his creation: “Hugo’s psychology is necessarily reduced by the act of dramatizing it.” Not only were the author’s politics more complex than the clichés of “popular revolt and sentimental liberty” that are now associated with the show; the double nature of the human individual, along with all its complicated and ambivalent feelings, is also flattened by the “big emotions” of melodramatic opera, especially on screen. Hooper’s adaptation is certainly not without its shortcomings as a piece of filmmaking: the busy editing and itinerant camerawork give rise to a rushed pace in which it can be difficult to process all the emotive performances (the camera rests on Fantine’s dead body for a matter of seconds before cutting to Cosette’s first solo), and the use of close-ups is repeated to the point of predictability. But Hugo’s own beliefs in how true social change can be achieved suggest that these musical versions on stage and on screen—although necessarily different from the novel in form and artistry—connect directly with the work’s “voltage.” Both the immediacy of the film musical’s emotional grandeur and the critical distancing that it refuses mimic Hugo’s imperative for art to exercise a poignant rather than solely cerebral power. As he argued at the time his novel was published, only once an artwork has reached deep into its audience and stirred their emotions can their

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perspectives begin to be broadened: “Art moves us, hence its civilizing power” [“L’art émeut. De là sa puissance civilisatrice”; OCL—Critique, 560].10 As the Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi noted in a speech during her visit to Paris on 27 June 2012: “I value Victor Hugo so much because he understood that all true revolutions begin inside of us” [“je tiens autant à Victor Hugo car il a compris que toute véritable révolution part de l’intérieur”].11 Moreover, as a playwright, Hugo knew as well as anyone else that the stage was not the place to access the depths of narrative discourse, since it relied more heavily on dramatic gesture and urgent sensation. In this context, his psychology is not so much reduced as it is concentrated and distilled by the genre of pop opera. The audience may be more engulfed in the emotional storm of Les Misérables on stage than on the page, but this does not prevent Hugo’s core moral and social ideas from being conveyed. As Les Misérables makes its way into another century, it is hard to imagine that the musical adaptation will be overtaken in prominence by another version— but it is also difficult to envisage a future in which the expanse of its adaptations comes to a halt. This is especially the case in a digital age in which the creative capacities of an audience are yet more visible thanks to the spread of new technology and software. An industrial divide between producers and consumers has been challenged by the rise of the so-called “pro-sumer” (a portmanteau of the two nouns), who is able to make new content and to publicize private interpretations of a work online. Fish’s “interpretive communities” can today be seen as “participatory cultures,” to borrow the common terminology, in which new meanings are figured not just discursively in private and public dialogue but also through original creations to be shared. Films, literature, and games that have achieved immense popularity, such as Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Minecraft, find themselves appropriated by audiences and users in a myriad of forms and modes, including tribute videos, artwork, fan fiction, music, and new gaming experiences. Henry Jenkins reminds us that “fans have always been early adapters of new media technologies,” pointing back, for example, to the scrapbook and reading cultures of the nineteenth century: “their fascination with fictional universes often inspires new forms of cultural production, ranging from costumes to fanzines and, now, digital cinemas” (Convergence Culture 135). It follows that, in such an environment where public reactions are so influential, Les Misérables will continue to thrive. Mackintosh’s shrewd marketing strategy of celebrating landmark anniversaries in the show’s history can only sharpen its cultural visibility moving forward, while his eagerness to pass on the musical to as many audiences as possible bodes equally well. As he told those in attendance at London’s 02 Arena for the 25th anniversary show, along with those watching live in cinemas in the UK and around the world, “Les Misérables belongs to no one: it  For a detailed account of Hugo’s techniques in this respect, see Stephens, Liability, 97–105. 11  Extracts from her speech can be found on display at the Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris. 10

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belongs to everyone.” For Hugo himself, such dispersed ownership would arguably have been tremendously important to his own sense of purpose and achievement as a writer. From this perspective, his narrator’s description of Monseigneur Myriel’s almost effortless adaptability could be read as a prophetic account of the novel’s afterlives: “Speaking in all tongues, he would find his way into every soul” [“Parlant toutes les langues, il entrait dans toutes les âmes”; LMPl I, 1, iv, 15]. The twenty-first century may well continue to “hear the people sing,” as the famous song from the musical would have it, but in so doing it will also continue to listen to the dialogue between Hugo’s story and an ever-widening audience.

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Wloszczyna, Susan. “Director Tom Hooper: ‘I Put My Faith and Trust in the Audience.’” USA Today 24 January 2013: ARC. “Wm. Farnum in ‘Les Miserables’ Heads Strand Bill This Week.” Augusta [GA] Chronicle 7 April 1918: 19. Zarifopol-Johnston, Ilinca. “A Bat’s-Eye View of the Republic, or Victor Hugo in Gotham City.” Peripheries of Nineteenth-Century French Studies: Views from the Edge. Ed. Timothy Raser. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2002. 182–96. Filmography Les Misérables. Dir. J. Stuart Blackton. Vitagraph, 1909. Les Misérables. Dir. Edwin S. Porter. Edison Manufacturing Company, 1909. Les Misérables. Dir. Albert Capellani. Pathé, 1912/1913. Les Misérables. Dir. Frank Lloyd. Fox Studios, 1917. Les Misérables. Dir. Henri Fescourt. Société des Cinéromans, 1925. Les Misérables. Dir. Raymond Bernard. Pathé-Natan, 1934. Les Misérables. Dir. Richard Boleslawski. 20th-Century Fox, 1935. Les Misérables (I miserabili). Dir. Riccardo Freda. Lux Film, 1948. Les Misérables. Dir. Lewis Milestone. 20th-Century Fox, 1952. Les Misérables. Dir. Jean-Paul Le Chanois. Deutsche Film (DEFA), 1958. Les Misérables. Dir. Marcel Bluwal. France 2 (and CNC), 1972. Les Misérables. Dir. Glenn Jordan. ITC, 1978. Les Misérables. Dir. Robert Hossein. G.E.F. / Société Française de Production, 1982. Les Misérables. Dir. Claude Lelouch. Canal+ / Les Films 13 / TF1, 1995. Les Misérables. Dir. Bille August. Mandalay Entertainment / Columbia Pictures, 1998. Les Misérables. Dir. Josée Dayan. TF1, 2000. Les Misérables: Shōjo Cosette. Dir. Hiroaki Sakurai. Nippon Animation, 2007. Les Misérables. Dir. Tom Hooper. Working Title / Universal Pictures, 2012.

Index

A la recherche du temps perdu (Proust) 191 Académie Française 6 adaptation 2, 5, 194. see also animated adaptations; film adaptations; musical adaptations; radio adaptations; stage adaptations early 123–7 as interpretation 9–14 intertextuality 10, 120, 145, 165n6, 191, 193 Aeneid (Virgil) 103 Agacinski, Sylviane 170 agency 67–9 Ager, Klaus 188 Albinarrate, Fernando 16, 175–6, 177, 184, 187, 188, 189 Albouy, Pierre 21n3, 82n3 Aleandro, Norma 176 All Quiet on the Western Front 131 Allam, Roger 146 allegory 4, 50, 58, 59, 72 Amazing Spider-Man, The 192–3 America’s Mercury Theater 3 Anderson, Jon Lee 192n1 Andrew, Dudley 5, 11n12 animated adaptations 2, 3, 189, 192 antithesis 55 Anuman Interactive 3n5 Arab Spring 200, 201 arabesque 51n3, 58, 60 ArmJoe 3n5 Arras 137 Audiard, Michel 180 August, Bille 131. see also Misérables, Les (film:August) d’Aurevilly, Barbey 81, 164 Austen, Jane 2 Bachelard, Gaston 75n12 Bakhtin, Mikhail 49, 50, 97n1

Barasch, Frances K. 51 Barjavel, René 180 Barks, Samantha 160, 163–4, 165, 168 Barnier, Martin 131n4 Baroque 51, 64 Barrère, Jean-Bertrand 35, 42n19 Bataille de Pharsale, La (Simon) 106–8 Bate, Jonathan 36n8 Batman, 135, 193n3 Baudelaire, Charles 81, 170n9 Baur, Harry 131 Bazin, André 11, 12, 13, 194 Beaghton, Andrea 16, 143 Bellorini, Jean 14n16 Bellosta, Marie-Christine 134n9 Belmondo, Jean-Paul 3, 132 Ben Hur film 141 Ben Hur (Wallace) 118 Bénichou, Paul 30n16 Berkeley, George 69–70 Bernard, Raymond. see Misérables, Les (film:Bernard) Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jacques-Henri 35–6 Best, Janice 91n15 Biard, Léonie 6 “The Bishop’s Candlesticks” (McKinnel) 124 Blackton, James Stuart 130, 140 Blade Runner 12 Bleskine, Hélène 3 Bluwal, Marcus 12, 138, 180 Boivent, Julien 129 Boleslawski, Richard 131. see also Misérables, Les (film:Boleslawski) Boublil, Alain 199. see also Misérables, Les (musical) Boudet, Alain 189 Boulter, Michael 43n20 Bowie, Malcolm 111 Boyle, Susan 196

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Brenon, Herbert 130 Breughel 51, 57 Brière, Chantal 77n15 Brion, Gustave 1, 132, 144 Britain’s Got Talent 196 Brochu, André 83n6, 88n11 Brombert, Victor 21n3, 72, 92n17, 93, 94n19, 100n8, 102, 103n11 Brothers Karamozov, The (Dostoevsky) 51 Brussels Belgium 2 Buell, Lawrence 35n3, 36n7 Buenos Aires, Argentina 188 Bug-Jargal (Hugo) 51, 63 Burwick, Frederick 69, 71 Butor, Michel 15, 106, 109–10 Caird, John 150 Callot, Jacques 51 Callow, Simon 146 Canterville Ghost, The 176 Capellani, Albert Le Chemineau 130 Les Misérables. see Misérables, Les (film:Capellani) Carcaud-Macaire, Monique 142n15 caricature 49, 175 Carlyle, Thomas 115n7 Carpenter, Earl 152, 153 Carpenter, John 12 Cave, Terence 10 Cérésa, François 3 Cervantès, Miguel de 176 Cham (caricaturist) 2n3 Channel Islands 6, 43 Chat Botté, Le (Perrault) 176 Châtiments (Hugo) 10, 42 Chávez, Hugo 192 Chemineau, Le 130 Chenet-Faugeras, Françoise 25, 89n12 Chéret, Jules 2n4 Chicago Ethical Culture Society 121 child exploitation 27, 54, 58, 166, 168, 169 China 3 Christmas Carol, A (Dickens) 124 cinema adaptations. see film adaptations Civil War, U.S. 15, 113, 117, 138 “Classics for Children” 116 Classics Illustrated 3

Claude Gueux (Hugo) 83–5 Clément, Gilles 44, 46, 47 Clerc, Jeanne-Marie 142n15 Clinton, Bill 196 Cohen, Danny 198 Coleman, John 123 comedy 4, 49 Commedia (Dante) 104 Connelly, Frances S. 41n3 Contemplations, Les (Hugo) 7 Cook, Albert 49 Cooke, John Esten 117 copyright 9–10 Coquelin, Constant 123 Corneille, Pierre 67n3 Cortese, Valentina 3 Cosette 6, 26, 65, 88, 120, 136 Marius, romance with 27–8, 39, 45–6, 61, 65, 71, 73, 86 selfhood of 69, 70–71, 73, 78, 79 Cosette, ou le temps des illusions (Cérésa) 3 Cosette (Kalpakian) 3 Cosette’s Fate 3n5 Courfeyrac 86 Cours familier de littérature (Lamartine) 81–2, 85–6, 87–8 Cousin, Victor 30, 68 Cox, Fiona 15, 76n14, 97, 146 criminality 82, 83n6, 88, 89 Cromwell (Hugo) 6, 29 Crowe, Russell 132, 135, 145, 154–6 Cyrano de Bergerac (Rostand) 176 Da Ponte, Lorenzo 176 Dampier, Alfred 123 Dante (Dante Alighieri) 98n5, 104 Darwin, Charles 43n20, 115n7 David Copperfield (Dickens) 118 Davis, Florence 177 Dayan, Josée 12, 183 Dawkins, Richard 11n12 De Caro, Julio 188 De Forest, Lee 113n3 de la Guillonnière, Camille 14n16 De rerum natura (Lucretius) 34, 42n19 De Sumichrast, F. C. 116, 122 Decaux, Alain 180 Decoin, Didier 183

Index Demazis, Orane 160, 161–2, 169 Demeny, Paul 133 Democratic Party 196 Demy, Jacques 199 Denommé, Robert 85n2 Depardieu, Gérard 132 Der Rosenkavalier (Richard Strauss) 176–7 Deux trouvailles de Gallus, Les (Hugo) 66 Dickens, Charles Christmas Carol, A 124 David Copperfield 118 Great Expectations 2 Dieterle, William 181n5, 182 Digne 13, 19, 26, 87, 199 Divine Épopée (Soumet) 97 Doctorow, E. L. 63 Dolan, Elizabeth 70 Don Quixote 176 Donizetti, Gaetano 175 Donougher, Christine 195 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 51 Dreyer, Carl Theodor 198 Drouet, Guillaume 88 Drouet, Juliette 6 Dubois, Jacques 153 Dulcinea 176 Dumas père, Alexandre 13 Eclectic Film Company 125 Edison Studios 125, 130 Eliot, George 51 Eliot, T. S. 110, 111 Elliott, Kamilla 11n12 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 115n7 Enjolras 23, 32, 60–61, 89, 179 Enter the Story 3n5 epic 4, 15, 97–111 Éponine 16, 23, 57, 60, 65, 159–73 as cross-dresser 169–70 as ghost 75–8, 160–64 as heroine 60, 170–72 Marius, relationship with 28n14, 60, 160–65, 172 paternal authority and 166–9 selfhood of 73–5, 76–9 as unloveable 164–6 Escape from New York 12

225

Espagne, Michael 114, 116n9, 121, 127 Esposito, Giani 162 exile see Victor Hugo: exile of Fantasio (Musset) 51 Fantine 6, 23, 32 fall of 20, 66, 82, 83, 85–6, 122 film portrayal of 136 as grotesque 51, 52, 53, 55 as mother 56, 65, 120 selfhood of 69, 70, 72–3, 78, 79 “Fantine, or the Fate of a Grisette” 123 “Fantine” (Howard) 123 Fantôme de l’Opéra, Le (Leroux) 10 Farnum, William 126 Faubourg Saint-Antoine barricade 91–2, 93 Ferrier, Michaël 4n7 Fescourt, Henri. see Misérables, Les (film:Fescourt) Festival Victor Hugo et Égaux 176 film adaptations 2–3, 124–7, 130, 175. see also television adaptations; specific films animated films 2, 3, 189, 192 Éponine portrayals in 159–73 intercontinental differences in 16, 129–42 Javert portrayals in 143–57 user-made 3n5, 203 Film d’Art, Le 133 Fin de Satan, La (Hugo) 76, 160 Fish, Stanley 10, 201–2, 203 Flaubert, Gustave “La Légende de saint Julien l’hospitalier” 50n1 Madame Bovary 191 Tentation de saint Antoine 51, 57 Flowers, Montaville 123–4 Forêt mouillée, La (Hugo) 176, 177 Fourier, Charles 37n11 Fowler, Karen Joy 196 Fox, William 130 Fox Film Corporation 126 Fox Television 13 France Culture 3 Franciade, La (Ronsard) 97 Franklin, Aretha 196 Franklin, Benjamin 189n3

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Fraser, Hadley 152, 153, 154 fraternity 28 Freda, Riccardo 192 French, Philip 201 French Revolution 66, 138, 178n3 Fugitive, The 13, 144, 147 Gabin, Jean 3 Gamel, Mireille 4n7 Garçonne, La (Margueritte) 170 gardens 33–47 beauty in 23–6 private 39–40 public 38, 46–7 Garvey, Ellen Gruber 126 Gasiglia-Laster, Danièle 16, 66, 159, 164n5, 177, 183, 188 Gaumont 133 Gauthier, Christophe 130 Gautier, Théophile 97–8 Gavroche 16, 23, 26–7, 90, 120, 175 as grotesque 52, 54–5 musical portrayals of 178–9, 181–2. see also Histoire de Gavroche screen portrayals of 179–81, 183 stage portrayals of 179 Gavroche: The Gamin of Paris (Pyle) 3 Gély, Claude 170n9 Geniuses’ Garden, The 188 Georgics (Virgil) 102, 103, 105 Géorgiques, Les (Simon) 108–9 Gillenormand 20, 27, 28, 51, 61 Gladiator 132, 154 Gleizes, Delphine 4n7, 15–16, 129, 130n2, 144 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 10, 97n1, 115n7 Goldstein, Jan 68 Gone With The Wind (Mitchell) 118n10 Gopnik, Adam 202 graphic novel adaptations 3 Great Expectations (Dickens) 2 Grossman, Kathryn M. 1, 15, 20n2, 27n12, 35n2, 40n14, 55n8, 62, 68, 75, 76, 82, 85n7, 98, 113, 123n15, 143, 192n1 grotesque 6, 15, 29, 49–64, 88 Grundmann, Heike 51n2

Gurvich, Irina 189 Guyard, Marius-François 26n11 Hackett, James 124 Halsall, Albert 49 Hamilton, James Shelley 146 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 51 Hapgood, Isabel 193n2 Harris, Arlene C. 3n5, 154n7 Hathaway, Anne 136 Hayden, Liza 177 Henck, Veronique 164n5 Henriade, La (Voltaire) 97 Herrera, Dennis 197 Heston, Charlton 141 Hiddleston, J. A. 143 Histoire de Gavroche 16, 175, 177–8, 182–9 Histoire du Soldat (Ramuz and Stravinsky) 177 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 176 Hogle, Jerrold E. 10 Hollywood Reporter 199 Homeland 144, 195 Homer 98–103, 104, 105 Illiad 99, 100, 102, 103 Odyssey 99 L’Homme qui rit (Hugo) 52, 63, 64, 72n9, 134n9, 135n10 Hong Kong 196, 197 Hooper, Tom 131, 146, 198 King’s Speech, The 131 Misérables, Les. see Misérables, Les (film:Hooper) Hossein, Robert 131–2. see also Misérables, Les (film:Hossein) Houston Daily Post, The 118 Hovasse, Jean-Marc 6n9, 81 Howard, Bronson 123 Huffington Post 33 Hugo, Charles 2, 123, 179, 192 Hugo, François-Victor 97 Hugo, Jean 198n9 Hugo, Léopoldine 73n10 Hugo, Victor 7, 97, 98, 159, 195 exile of 1, 2, 6, 42–3, 59, 104 funeral of 2 as gardener 42–3

Index works. see also Misérables, Les (novel) Bug-Jargal 51, 63 Châtiments 10, 42 Claude Gueux 83–5 Contemplations, Les 7 Cromwell 6, 29 Deux trouvailles de Gallus, Les 66 Fin de Satan, La 76, 160 Forêt mouillée, La 176, 177 L’Homme qui rit 52, 63, 64, 72n9, 134n9, 135n10 Légende des siècles, La 7, 65n2 Lucrèce Borgia 175 Notre-Dame de Paris 6, 9, 51, 52, 55, 57n9, 63, 64, 76n13, 135, 157n9, 165–6, 175, 181n5, 182 Orientales, Les 30 Philosophie. Commencement d’un livre 21–2, 24n6, 29 Préface de Cromwell 51, 88, 89 Quatrevingt-Treize 63, 66 Rhin, Le 35, 57n9, 104, 170n9 Roi s’amuse, Le 175 Théatre en liberté 176 Toute la lyre 177, 184, 188 Travailleurs de la mer, Les 63, 64 Voix intérieures, Les 104 William Shakespeare 30, 43, 98–9, 104 Hunchback of Notre-Dame, The (Dietrle) 181n5, 182 Hunchback of Notre-Dame, The (Disney 1996/2002) 181n5 Hutcheon, Linda 11n12, 194 Hyatt, Robert 178 hypotyposis 51, 52, 54 Illiad (Homer) 99, 100, 102, 103 In Search of Lost Sound 188 Index Expurgatorius 2, 123 injustice 1, 5, 9, 52, 55, 81, 139. see also justice International Literary Congress 10 intertextuality 10, 120, 145, 165n6, 191, 193 irony 105, 183, 201–2 Isherwood, Charles 199–200 Itami 189

227

Jackman, Hugh 132, 135, 141, 154, 198 Janin, Jules 1 Japan (fan culture) 3n5 Jardin des Plantes 35 Javert, Inspector 13, 16, 61, 63, 120, 143–57 early portrayals of 145–6 film portrayals of 147–9 musical portrayals of 150–56 suicide of 27, 143, 148, 152 Jean Valjean 3n5 Jenkins, Henry 11, 203 Jenkins, Simon 200 Joan of Arc 198n9 Jones, Tommy Lee 147n4 Journet, René 170n9 justice 83, 87, 137, 145, 150, 157, 201. see also injustice Kaestle, Carl F. 115n6, 122n12 Kalba, Laura Anne 40nn15–16 Kalpakian, Laura 3 Kayser, Wolfgang 49, 51n3, 55n8 Keene, Laura 123 King, Martin Luther 141 King Lear (Shakespeare) 51 King’s Speech, The 131 Knox, Bernard 101 Kostzer, Kado 176 Krauss, Henry 124 Kretzmer, Herbert 150, 151, 152, 181–2 Lacan, Jacques 70 Lackaye,Wilton 124 Lacroix, Albert 1, 2, 7 Laforgue, Pierre 21n3 Lamartine, Alphonse de 81–2, 85–6, 87–8 Lang, André 179–80 Laster, Arnaud 4n7, 16, 130n2, 175, 175n1, 181n5 Laughton, Charles 3, 132, 135, 145, 146, 152, 156 law and order 145, 146, 148, 150 “The Law and the Man” 124 Le Chanois, Jean-Paul. see Misérables, Les (film:Le Chanois) “La Légende de saint Julien l’hospitalier” (Flaubert) 50n1

228

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Légende des siècles, La (Hugo) 7, 65n2 Leigh, Mike 131n6 Leitch, Thomas 11n12, 191 Lelouch, Claude. see Misérables, Les (film:Lelouch) Leroux, Gaston 10 Lewis, Briana 15, 16, 65 Lewis, C. S. 54 Lewis, Norm 153 Life of a Great Man, The (Itami) 189 Limido, Luisa 40n13 literary rewritings 3 Lloyd, Frank 130 Loach, Ken 131n6 Lopez, Diana Montoya 177, 188 Lucrèce Borgia (Hugo) 175 Lucretius 34, 42n19 Lucrezia Borgia (Donizetti) 175 Lukashevich, Tatyana 189 Lumière brothers 2–3 Luxembourg Gardens 27, 38, 39, 71, 86 Mabeuf 20, 23, 25–6, 27, 39, 40–41, 76, 179 McCarthy, Michael 151, 152–3, 154 McKinnel, Norman 124 Machor, James L. 113nn1–2, 114n5 Mackintosh, Cameron 146, 147, 150, 181, 195, 197, 198, 203–4 Mad Max 12 Madame Bovary (Flaubert) 191 Malandain, Pierre 1n2 Malraux, André 192n1 manga adaptations 3, 11 Mann, Terrence 152, 153, 156 Manovich, Lev 3 Manzana Original, La 176 March, Frederic 132, 135, 146 Marcus, Millicent 11n12 Margueritte, Victor 170 Marius 38–9, 51, 53, 61–2, 63, 86–7, 94 Cosette romance 27–8, 39, 45–6, 61, 65, 71, 73, 86 Éponine, relationship with 28n14, 60, 160–65, 172 Marriage of Figaro, The (Mozart) 176 Martel, Kareen 165n6 Martens, Dominique 2

Martindale, Charles 105n18, 120 Marville, Charles 138 Master and Commander: Far Side of the World 155 Masters-Wicks, Karen 55n6 Maurel, Jean 92n16 Mazars, Pierre 133–4 Melbourne, Australia 195 melodrama 62, 123, 142, 148, 187 Merriam-Webster Dictionary of Allusions 144 metaphor 144, 149, 178, 192 and hunger 20 metaphorical function 68 and morality 5, 24, 56, 58 and vision 11–12, 69, 71–2 Meurice, Paul 123, 159 Michel, Louise 170 Michelet, Jules 44n21, 81 Middlemarch (Eliot) 51 Milestone, Lewis 131 All Quiet on the Western Front 131 Les Misérables. see Misérables, Les (film:Milestone) Miller, George 12 Millet Claude 65n2 Mines, Patricia 86n9 “The Mirror Stage” (Lacan) 70 Miserabili, I (Freda) 192 Misérables, Les (film:August) 13, 129, 132, 137, 139 Gavroche portrayal in 183 Javert portrayal in 132, 148–9 Misérables, Les (film:Bernard) 14, 130, 131, 132, 133, 138, 175, 200 Éponine portrayal in 160, 161–2, 164–5, 167–9, 170, 171, 172 Gavroche portrayal in 179–80 Misérables, Les (film:Blackton) 130, 140 Misérables, Les (film:Boleslawski) 130, 132, 133, 134–5, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141 Gavroche portrayal in 178 Javert portrayal in 135, 145–6, 156 Misérables, Les (film:Capellani) 14, 124, 125–6, 130, 134, 138 Misérables, Les (film:Fescourt) 12–13, 130, 132, 133, 138, 163, 202

Index Éponine portrayal in 159–61, 162, 164, 166–7, 168, 169, 170–71, 172, 173 Gavroche portrayal in 179 Misérables, Les (film:Fox) 126–7, 130 Misérables, Les (film:Hooper) 132, 134, 137, 139, 140, 141, 194, 195, 197–202 Éponine portrayal in 160, 163–4, 165, 168, 169–70, 172–3 Fantine portrayal in 136 Gavroche portrayal in 182–3 Javert portrayal in 135, 154–6, 157 production of 197–9 reception of 129, 199–202 Misérables, Les (film:Hossein) 12, 131–2, 133, 180 Misérables, Les (film:Le Chanois) 132, 133, 134, 138 Éponine portrayal in 160, 162–3, 164, 165, 168, 169, 171–2 Gavroche portrayal in 180 Misérables, Les (film:Lelouch) 13–14, 132, 133, 138 Misérables, Les (film:Milestone) 136, 137, 140, 141, 189n7 Gavroche portrayal in 178 Javert portrayal in 135, 147 Jean Valjean portrayal in 132, 136 Misérables, Les (miniseries:Dayan) 12, 132, 183 Misérables, Les (musical) 3, 12, 16, 124, 175, 188, 195–204 film adaptation of. see Misérables, Les (film:Hooper) Gavroche portrayal in 177, 178–9, 181–2 Javert portrayal in 145, 150–54, 157 Misérables, Les (novel) as an epic 4, 15, 97–111 beauty in 23–32 children’s editions of 116–17 evil urges in 87–9 female characters in 15, 65–79 fragmentation in 89–93 grotesque in 15, 49–64 hunger in 19–20, 84, 85–7 natural world in 33–47

229

original title of 189 publicity campaign for 1 reception of 1–2, 81–2, 113–23, 197 translations of 115, 116, 195 universality of 5–9 Misérables, Les (television film:Jordan) 147–8 Misérables, Les (television series:Bluwal) 12, 138, 180 Mitchell, Margaret 118n10 mixture of genres 8, 58, 132–7 Modification, La (Butor) 109–10 Mohun: or the Last Days of Lee and his Paladins (Cooke) 117 Moisan, Philippe 15, 81 Montaigne, Michel de 41n19 Montfort, Silvia 160, 162–3, 164, 165, 169 Montreuil-sur-Mer 2, 13, 36, 87, 88, 93, 199 “Moral and Immoral Literature” 122 Morse, Barry 147 Motion Picture Production Code 136 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 176 musical adaptations 3, 12, 123, 178–9, 181–2. see also Histoire de Gavroche; Misérables, Les (musical); opera adaptations Musset, Paul de 51 Myriel, Bishop 6, 19, 51, 59, 63, 81, 99, 119, 120 as defender of beauty 14, 23–4, 28 as gardener 23–4, 33–4, 40 as savior 7–8, 20, 31, 58, 87 Mystères de Paris, Les (Sue) 4 Napoleon Bonaparte 101, 109 Napoleon III (Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte) 10, 104, 109 Nash, Suzanne 50 Natal, Jean-Marc 178 naturalism 6, 202 Neeson, Liam 3, 132 Nehru, Jawaharlal 192 neoclassicism 6 Newton, Robert 147 Nicholson, William 155, 197 Nivette, Suzanne 160–61, 162, 164, 172 Nordier, Charles 63

230

Les Misérables and Its Afterlives

Notre-Dame de Paris (Hugo) 6, 9, 51, 55, 57n9, 63, 64, 76n13, 135, 157n9, 165–6 adaptations of 175, 181n5, 182 hypotyposis in 52 ruin in 90n14 Nougarède, Isabelle 135n10 nouveau roman 106, 111 Nouvel Observateur 129 Nunley, Charles 66 Nunn, Trevor 147, 150, 153 Obama, Barack 196 Occupy Wall Street 201 Odyssey (Homer) 99 Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck) 11n14, 136 opera adaptations 124, 150, 175, 202, 203 Opéra de Massy 188 Orientales, Les (Hugo) 30 oxymoron 11n13, 135 Parapluies de Cherbourg, Les 199 Paris-Buenos Aires (CD) 188 Paris insurrection (1832) 60 Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, La 198 Pathé 125, 126, 127, 132 Paul et Virginie (Bernadin de Saint-Pierre) 35–6 Perkins, Anthony 147 Perrault, Charles 176 Petit-Picpus convent 37n10, 43, 119 Peyrache-Leborgne, Dominique 51 Philadelphia Girls’ High School 121–2 Philosophie. Commencement d’un livre (Hugo) 21–2, 24n6, 29 picaresque 88, 119 Pimenoff, Serge 138 Pius IX (Pope) 2 Plutarch 170n9 poetry 72 classical 98–100, 103–4 and nature 29, 33, 35, 36, 42 and philosophy 6, 7, 9, 68n5 and politics 10 role of the poet 29 Pontmercy, Georges 24–5, 26, 39–40, 73, 93 Porter, Edwin Stanton 124, 130

Porter, Laurence 15, 49, 69n6 Préface de Cromwell (Hugo) 51, 88, 89 Prendergast, Christopher 104nn14–15, 105n17 Pride and Prejudice (Austen) 2 progress in history 22, 92, 98 social 9, 10, 15, 21, 30–31, 34, 57, 88, 142 toward the divine 21, 22, 29, 31, 32, 50 proletariat 68–9, 162–3 prose 98, 124 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 81 Proust, Marcel 111, 191 Psycho 147 Puccini, Giacomo 175 Pyle, M. C. 3 Quandt, Karen 14, 33 Quast, Philip 152 Quatrevingt-Treize (Hugo) 63, 66 radio adaptations 3, 11 Radway, Janice A. 115n6 Ragtime (Doctorow) 63 Ramuz, C.F. 177 realism 14, 35, 36, 126, 173 reception of novel 81–2 in France 1–2 in United States 113–23 Rennie, Michael 132, 136 Renouvier, Charles 68n5 revolution 1, 6, 12, 50, 55, 57, 60, 68, 192, 200, 201 Revolution of 1848 6, 91, 93 Rezk, Ossama Abdel-Fattah 201 Rhin, Le (Hugo) 35, 57n9, 104, 170n9 Richardson, Joanna 65 Riffaterre, Michel 72, 165n6 Rigoletto (Verdi) 175 Rimbaud, Arthur 133 Roberdey-Eppstein, Sylviane 51n2 Robert, Guy 170n9 Robinson, William 41n17, 45n22 Robb, Graham 6n9, 42, 72, 98n5, 99n7 Roche, Isabel 14, 19, 28n14, 65, 83n5, 87n10, 89n13 Roi s’amuse, Le (Hugo) 175

Index Roman, Myriam 21n3, 30n16, 133, 134n9 Romanticism and aesthetics 51 and the grotesque 6, 15, 29, 49–64, 88 and historical movement 36, 69, 70, 71, 73, 104 and nature 35–6, 37 philosophy/beliefs 6, 7, 14, 156, 157n9, 167, 194 and the sublime 88 Ronsard, Pierre de 97 Rosa, Guy 7, 67, 68, 77n15 Rose, Julie 195 Ross, Trevor 116n8, 119n11 Rostand, Edmond 176 Rozet, François 163 Rue Plumet 27, 43, 44 Rush, Geoffrey 132, 148–9, 148n6, 156 Sabinus, Gaul Julius 170 Sade, Marquis de 86n9 Said, Edward 98n3 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin 36, 104, 110 Sand, George 81 Sanders, Julie 2 Santelli, Claude 189 satire 49, 54 Savy, Nicole 65, 66 SCAGL 133 Scharovsky, Anahi 176, 188 Schiller, Friedrich 97n1 Schindler’s List 132 Schöenberg, Claude-Michel 199. see also Misérables, Les (musical) Scott, Ridley 12 Screwtape Letters, The (Lewis) 54 Seebacher, Jacques 30n16, 170n9 Seinfeld 195 selfhood 67–9, 70 Serceau, Michel 4n7 Seung-ha Jong 189 sewers 61, 88, 92, 117 Shaffer, Elinor 113 Shakespeare, William 98n5 Hamlet 51 King Lear 51 Shōjo Cosette 192

231

Shine 149 Sicherman, Barbara 117–18, 122n14, 127n17 Simon, Claude 15 La Bataille de Pharsale 106–8 Les Géorgiques 108–9 Simpsons, The 195 Singer, Isaac Bashevis 176 Société des Amis de Victor Hugo 188–9 Soumet, Alexandre 97 South Park 195 Spears, Britney 12n15 Spiquel, Agnès 76, 160 stage adaptations 2, 15, 16, 123–4. see also musical adaptations by Charles Hugo 2, 123, 179, 192 Stam, Robert 10, 145 Les Stances du Cid 67, 75 Steinbeck, John 11n14, 136 Steiner, George 104n16 Stephens, Bradley 1, 4n8, 16, 68, 68n5, 72, 90n14, 135n10, 157n9, 191, 193n3, 203n10 Stevens, Dana 201 Stewart, Eve 201 Story of Jean Valjean from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, The 116 Story of the Candlesticks, The 116, 124 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 115n7 Strauss, Richard 176 Stravinsky, Igor 177 sublime death of Éponine as 170 and the grotesque 6, 15, 29, 50, 51, 60, 62, 82, 88 Hugo’s vision of 98 Jean Valgean as 58 Sue, Eugène 4 Summers, David 51n3 Suu Kyi, Aung San 203 Szabo, Fabrice 145n3 Tacitus 104, 170n9 Taibele y su Deminio (Singer) 176 Taipei, Taiwan 197 Tallamy, Douglas 33 Taylor, Frederick Winslow 140 Telemundo Studios 13

232

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television adaptations 2, 12, 13, 132, 138, 147–8, 180, 183 Ten Commandments, The 141 Tentation de saint Antoine (Flaubert) 51, 57 Theater for Youth 189 Théatre en liberté (Hugo) 176 Théâtre Musical 188 Thénardier, M. 62, 87, 93–4 appetite of 20 criminality of 82–3 as grotesque 52, 53–4, 55, 57, 58 parental authority of 166–9 Thénardier, Mme 56 Tholomyès, Félix 20, 22, 56, 58, 85 Tiananmen Square massacre 196 Tolstoy, Leo 5, 188 Toute la lyre (Hugo) 177, 184, 188 tragedy 4, 49, 50, 142, 152, 154, 157 transnationalism 1–2, 3, 5–9, 16 Travailleurs de la mer, Les (Hugo) 63, 64 Treasure Island 147 Twain, Mark 176 Tykociński-Tykociner, Joseph 113n3 Ubersfeld, Anne 68n4 Uchida 189 UDON Entertainment 11 “Umbrella Revolution” 197 utopia 34, 46, 93, 105, 140 Valjean, Jean 1, 6, 8–9, 13, 26, 39, 56, 67–8, 109, 119–20 American portrayals of 132 attack by Thénardier 82, 83 French portrayals of 131–2 as gardener 36–7, 41–2, 43, 44 as grotesque 57 hunger of 14, 19–20 impulsiveness of 87–8, 89 spiritual journey of 8, 20–21, 23, 31–2, 58, 61, 63 Vallée, Jean 155n8 Varela, Andrew 149, 151, 153, 154, 157 Vargas Llosa, Mario 4n6 Velasquez, Diego 51 Vémar, A. 2n3 Ventura, Lino 131 Verdi, Giuseppe 175

Vernier, France 67 Versailles, Patrick 177, 188 Victor Hugo et les principaux personnages des Misérables (Lumière brothers) 2–3 video game adaptations 3 violence against women 148, 167–8 Virgil 104, 105, 109 Aeneid 103 Georgics 102, 103, 105 Vitagraph 125, 130 Voix intérieures, Les (Hugo) 104 Voltaire 97 Walker, Scott 196 Wallace, David Foster 202 Wallace, Lew 118 Walton, Charles 200 War and Peace (Tolstoy) 5 Wasser, Alan 153 Waterloo (Battle) 7, 15, 90–91, 92–3, 94, 97, 100–103, 105, 107, 109, 111, 121 We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (Fowler) 196 Webb, Marc 193, 194 Welles, Orson 3, 11 Whipple, Edwin Percy 114 Wilde, Oscar 176 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Goethe) 10 will.i.am 12n15 William Shakespeare (Hugo) 30, 43, 98–9, 104 Wisconsin 196 Wordsworth, William 36 X-Men 154 Xenakis, Iannis 188 Yasnaya Polyana 188 Yellow Passport, The (Coleman) 123 Yepes, Arauco 188 Yglesias, Rafael 148, 183 Zanuck, Darryl 134 Zarifopol-Johnston, Ilinca 135n10 Zola, Émile 122n12 Zorrilla, China 176