Les Misérables
by Victor Hugo
List Price: $5.99
Pages: 240
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0671504398
Publisher: Pocket Books
Victor Hugo died in 1885 as one of the most famous Europeans in history.
The number of people who attended Hugo's funeral ceremony was larger than
the normal population of Paris. On the first of April, Hugo's pauper's
coffin, which he had requested in his will, was carried from the Arc de
Triomphe to his final resting place at the Panthéon. At eighty-three
years old, Hugo had outlived two siblings, his wife, three out of four
of his children, and thousands of admirers and critics who had watched
his career transform and flourish. Prolific and protean as an artist,
a politician, and a man, Hugo was capable of testing the limits of extremes,
having learned the tension of polar opposites from his parents early in
life. Victor-Marie Hugo was born on 26 February 1802 to Sophie Trébuchet
and Joseph-Léopold-Sigisbert Hugo. His father was a decorated General
in Napoléon's army, stationed in Italy and Spain during much of young
Victor's youth. His mother was not only a Monarchist, but was involved
in a plot to overthrow Napoléon. Under the care of his stoic mother,
Hugo grew into a traditionalist, sworn to preserving the neo-Classical
tradition of French literature and the rights of the French monarchy.
Hugo's literary talent was
first publicized when he was seventeen years old. In 1819, he submitted
two poems to the Académie Française, winning the Golden Amaranth
for one poem and the Golden Lily, the Académie's highest honor, for
another. (Hugo was elected to the Académie in 1841.) He published
112 articles and twenty-two poems in Le Conservateur Littéraire,
the magazine founded by his brother Abel. These writings all supported
traditional French literature and castigated early Romanticism, an ideology
that soon thereafter lured Hugo to its camp with its irresistible ideals
of freedom, honesty, and originality.
In 1830, Hugo's play Hernani
put all Paris on its feet. The play opened at the Comédie Française
and was attended by the new and the old aesthetic regimes. Ignoring the
classical unities and their stale dignity of speech, Hernani was cheered
by the Romantics and insulted, booed, and declaimed by the older, more
conservative "kneeheads." Aesthetic disagreements escalated into riots,
and duels were even fought over Hugo's play. Thus began a volatile and
prolific career, each work fresh, surprising, and loaded with that Hugolian
tendency to incite controversy. Hugo's literary output was staggering
and the following is but a brief list of his major works: (poetry) Les
Châtiments, Les Feuilles d'automne, La Légende des siécles,
Les Orientales, Odes et Ballades, Les Rayons et les ombres, L'Art d'^etre
grand-pére, (novels) Bug-Jargal, Notre Dame de Paris, Les Misérables,
Les Travailleurs de la mer, L'Homme qui rit, Ruy Blas. Add to this his
political and cultural commentary, his travelogues, letters, speeches,
and plays, and you have a corpus of work that scholars are still compiling,
publishing, and analyzing.
Hugo made no attempt to separate
his life as a writer from his life as a citizen. In 1845, Hugo was made
a pair de France (life peer and member of the Upper House), a position
which should have endeared him to powerful circles and alienated him from
the people. Yet a comfortable existence acquiescing to unjust powers was
not to be Hugo's destiny, as he often proclaimed, "Not to believe in the
people is to be a political atheist." During the revolutions, riots, and
massacres of 1848 and 1849, Hugo abandoned the regime of Louis-Napoléon,
nephew of Napoléon Bonaparte, because of its increasing authoritarianism;
and when Louis-Napoléon was confirmed the leader of the Republic,
Hugo and thousands of other thinkers, dissenters, and literati went into
exile. For the next twenty years, Hugo disseminated his works from Belgium
and the small islands in the English Channel, smuggling political satires
and polemical verse in sardine tins, walking sticks, and baggy trousers.
It was at this period Hugo produced his magnificent excoriation of Louis-Napoléon,
Napoléon-le-Petit, as well as Les Châtiments (The Punishments),
an explosion of poetic wrath directed at the emperor. Throughout his life,
Hugo worked to further Republican virtues, affirming education and a democratic
distribution of property, denouncing the unbalance of power and capital
punishment.
Hugo's home, however, did not
quite match the utilitarian simplicity of his ascetic ideal Jean Valjean.
He had proven that one could get rich writing books; it was partially
Hugo's love of humanity that had made him a millionaire. The two women
he loved—his wife Adèle and his mistress Juliette— shared
in a large part of the work—answering letters, copying manuscripts,
etc.—and a small part of the glory. Hugo had married his childhood
sweetheart against his parents' wishes in 1822, and they had four children.
This family avoided the actress and ex-prostitute who resided down the
street from them, Juliette. Her affair with Hugo lasted for fifty years,
perhaps the longest extra-marital affair in history. Neither a model of
virtue or simplicity, Hugo nonetheless inspired the people of many nations
and many generations to act with greater regard for others.
Today it is hard to imagine
a playwright whose works young men die defending, a poet whose followers
cry for revolution, a thinker whose thoughts change world history. Hugo
was all of these and his legacy survives through his tremendous literary
bequest. He lived in a time when children were shot in the streets of
Paris and governments were violently overthrown every twenty years. His
presence was a beacon and a pillar, a palpable force to struggle against
or with, a mad blend of courage, genius, and kindness. It is not his godliness
which assures Hugo's place in eternity, but his humanity.
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