LES MISÉRABLES WAR AND PEACE
GIOVAN BATTISTA CARPI
LES MISÉRABLES
Commentary by ALBERTO BECATTINI | Translation by David GersteinTHE ORIGINAL STORY
In the preface of his sweeping historical novel Les Misérables (“The Wretched Ones,” 1862), author Victor Hugo expounds upon the work’s guiding principles: to reveal the “social condemnation” caused by unjust laws and customs, and to outline “three great problems of the age: the degradation of man by the exploitation of his labor, the ruin of women by starvation, and the atrophy of childhood by physical and spiritual darkness.”
Les Misérables focuses on the story of peasant Jean Valjean: sentenced to five years of hard labor for stealing bread, but held in prison for 19 years after various getaway efforts fail. Hardened by life as a convict, Valjean finally escapes and begins turning to serious crime: when the charitable Bishop Myriel of Digne shelters him, Valjean steals Myriel’s silverware and flees. Upon his arrest, however, Valjean is cleared by the kindly Bishop, who pretends to have given him the silverware — and adds two silver candlesticks as a bonus.
Myriel’s gesture of kindness prompts Valjean to rehabilitate himself. Years later he has rebuilt his life, taking the alias Monsieur Madeleine and becoming the owner of a glass factory in Montreuil-sur-Mer, as well as a wealthy benefactor to the poor. Appointed mayor and nominated as a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, “Madeleine” aids Fantine, an impoverished woman who struggles to support her daughter Cosette. He is abruptly reminded of his past, however, when the police arrest an unrelated vagabond, claiming him to be the escaped Valjean. “Madeleine” goes to the courtroom, reveals himself as Valjean, and is imprisoned, entrusted to the police chief Javert, who has been hunting him for years.
Escaping again, Valjean bargains to free Cosette from the keep of the Thénardiers, a criminal married couple running an inn. Javert never ceases his pursuit, eventually locating Valjean amid the Paris Uprising of 1832. At a climactic moment, Valjean has the opportunity to destroy Javert — but instead saves his life. Unable to arrest Valjean after this act of magnanimity, Javert throws himself into the Seine. The story’s final scenes see Valjean peacefully passing away in the arms of Cosette and her beloved, Marius Pontmercy.
An uneven and sometimes disorganized work, Les Misérables — adapted over the years to many film and stage productions — is nonetheless valuable for the social message it carries, as well as for the profound humanity of its players.
THE ORIGINAL AUTHOR
Victor Hugo (1802-1885) was among the most important French Romantic authors. Growing up with his mother in a Paris convent while his father fought in the Peninsular War, Hugo showed literary promise early on. In 1819, with his brothers Abel and Eugène, Hugo founded a fiction magazine, Le Conservateur littèraire. In 1822 Hugo published his first poetry collection, Odes et poesies diverses, and married his childhood friend Adele Foucher.
The following years were full of publications (including Nouvelles Odes, 1824, and the play Cromwell, 1827), for which Hugo was nominated for the rank of Chevalier in the French Legion of Honor. Les Orientales and The Last Day of a Condemned Man (both 1829) cemented Hugo’s fame, and his house at 27 Rue Nòtre-Damedes-Champs became the seat of the Romantic moment. The success of Hugo’s drama Hernani (1830) at the Comédie-Française theatre definitively consecrated him and marked the victory of the new romantic generation.
The next decades for Hugo were marked by further successes with novels (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, 1831), plays (Lucrezia Borgia, 1833; Ruy Blas, 1838) and poems, but also by family misfortunes: extramarital affairs, the death of daughter Léopoldine. Entering the Upper Chamber of Parliament as a Peer of France in 1845, Hugo reduced his literary production and devoted himself to politics. Elected to the National Assembly as a conservative supporter of President Napoleon III (LouisNapoléon Bonaparte), Hugo broke away from the conservative party in 1851, when the president seized dictatorial power. After Hugo openly condemned Napoleon III’s anti-parliamentary rule, Napoleon III attempted to expel him from the country, but Hugo had already fled to Belgium.
In exile, Hugo became a symbol of resistance against autocracy, denouncing Napoleon III with works such as Les Châtiments (“The Punishments,” 1853). In 1862 Hugo published Les Misérables, then other novels including The Man Who Laughs (1868). With the end of Napoleon III’s reign in 1870, Hugo returned to France and was elected again to the National Assembly, but became disenchanted with the new regime and drifted out of political life. Hugo continued to write, but without his past intensity; at his death, he left various manuscripts that were published posthumously.
Portrait of Victor Hugo, ca. 1870–1885. Image courtesy US Library of Congress.reformed convict jean mcjean!
spun from that classic tale
by
ten years old!
tireless inspector javert!
terrible tom and super-stingy innkeepers! trudy thénardier,
punk poet donaldius duckmercy!
daisette, ten years… later!
victor hugo!7
…huvroche, dewvroche, and louvroche, urchins of the paris rooftops! Speaking of whom...
yoicks! a fateful night on ducklake lane finds donald duck’s house torched by tragedy! is it a food shortage? no, more serious -- the tv is busted, and donald’s too flat-busted broke to get it fixed!
[baw! waw! ] we can’t afford TO BUY a new tv, either!
our miserable day is miserable!
[snort!] sure, with you kids whining 24-7!
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there’s a big les misérables tv miniseries starting tonight…
awright, that’s it! get your feathers off the rug and go squawk someplace else!
look who’s squawkin’!
You don’t follow, huh? No can do, unca Donald!
we’ve spent all day being bookworms! now we wanna watch tv!
and we kids are gonna miss it! bah!
so go bug the neighbors!
[growf!] just do what I do… enjoy victor hugo’s moldy original, like the bookworms you are!
BUT THEN… [pant! wheeze!] evening, lads! can you help a fellow duckburgian who’s famished, frazzled, frenzied, and… followed? eh?
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who’s after you, unca scrooge? brigitta macbridge?
worse, boys -- a tax inspector! the little man from the i.r.s., that’s who!
see? I’ve escaped him so far, but he’ll corner me sometime!
he wants to make me pay a new super-tax of five dollars a month! it’s crazy!
yeah! nuts! you’ll go broke in 65,000 years!
oh, I’ll be a miserable old pauper! just like my french ancestor jean mcjean!
[
baw-ww! ]
jean… mcjean? who was he? a heroic forebear of mine, whose life inspired victor hugo…
[sigh!] the very same. 10
the victor hugo? “les misérables” victor hugo?
then you know the story behind the story! c’mon, tell it to us, unca scrooge!
it’ll be better than on tv!
here’s the book, if you want a refresher…
no need for that, lads!
I remember it like it was yesterday… uh, two centuries ago…
[
heh!] uncle scrooge just saved the day! now I can enjoy my paper in peace!
“it all started right after the battle of waterloo… that’s the end of napoleon’s reign, boys! the era was called the restoration, and you might say europe got a new look!... uh… look out! ”
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