Les Miserables was written by Victor Hugo. Victor-Marie Hugo (1802-1885) is seen as France’s greatest lyric poet and the giant of nineteenth century French letters. Today he is known for The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Les Misérables, and La Légende des Siècle, his masterpiece.

In France in 1815 Jean Valjean is released from prison after nineteen years inside for having stolen bread. But once on the outside, he immediately tries to steal the silverware of the bishop who puts him up for the night. Valjean is caught by the police, but the priest pretends that he had given Valjean the silverware, causing the police to release Valjean. Privately the priest requests that Valjean use the silver to earn an honest life. Two years later, in Paris, a woman named Fantine gives birth to an illegitimate child, Cosette, who is given to neighbors to be raised while Fantine goes to a town nearby to work in a glass factory which is run by the mysterious but kindly Father Madeleine. Everyone loves Madeleine except police inspector Javert, who views him with suspicion and eventually discovers that Madeleine is actually Jean Valjean.

Fantine is forced to become a prostitute to pay for her child’s care, and Javert arrests her. Father Madeleine tries to help her, but Javert tells Valjean that the “real” Jean Valjean has been arrested and is to be tried in Arras. Valjean, unwilling to let an innocent man be jailed, reveals himself at the trial and is jailed, but promptly escapes. Fantine dies. Javert takes Cosette, now eight years old, away from the cruel couple raising her, and they live together happily. Javert pursues them, but they elude him, and Cosette grows up in a convent school. After school Valjean and Cosette live in Paris, where one of their neighbors, the young lawyer Marius, falls in love with Cosette. Javert discovers Valjean, forcing he and Cosette to flee. This takes place during a minor insurrection, and Marius, Javert, and Valjean become entangled in the events of the rebellion. Valjean saves Javert’s life, but Javert later arrests him–but, reluctant to return Valjean to prison but also feeling the call of duty, Javert drowns himself. Marius marries Cosette, and at length Valjean dies, happy.

Modern readers are likely to have one of two reactions to Les Miserables: the love that many readers have historically had for it, or the contempt that many of Hugo’s contemporary critics had for the novel. “Contempt” is perhaps too strong a phrase, but Hugo’s contemporaries really didn’t like Les Miserables, calling it “threadbare stuff…infantile” (Gustave Flaubert [Salammbô])¹ and “tasteless and inept” (poet Charles Baudelaire). Those modern readers who dislike Les Miserables, however, are likely to do so for entirely different reasons that Flaubert and Baudelaire had.

Les Miserables was an immediate bestseller, both domestically and internationally, on a level never seen before, and ever since its first appearance it has held sway over huge numbers of readers, who use phrases like “an epic,” “more an anthem than a novel,” “not just a novel; it is a monument” and “magnificent” to describe it. It is a vast, sprawling, expansive work, bursting at the seams with side-stories and narrative musings and asides. The summary above does Les Miserables’ story scant justice, for the novel is about much more than just Jean Valjean, Cosette, Marius, and Inspector Javert; Hugo spends fifty pages just telling the story of the bishop whose silverware Jean Valjean steals. Like Dickens, Hugo is aiming to create an entire world, and like Dickens, Hugo attempts to do so through the sheer, crowded, over-stuffed bulk of the text. Hugo’s narrative approach is to obey the dictum that “too much is too much, but way too much is just enough.”

And that’s the problem, for those who are not fans of Les Miserables. Taken on a micro level, Hugo’s writing is fine. Modern translators have succeeded in making his prose readable and entertaining on a line-by-line basis. Hugo has an eye for the small, telling detail as well as the momentous scene, and many of the small moments and scenes are memorable. Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert are, in effective ways, larger-than-life.

And yet, and yet...the cumulative effect of so much prose is exhausting. Even if the reader is not inclined to repeatedly scream “GET TO THE POINT” at Les Miserables because of all the diversions, Hugo is not good enough as a writer to make us care for all the characters and stories he throws at the reader. Like Dickens, Hugo indulges himself as a writer to the point of gross excess. But unlike Dickens, Hugo’s taste for sentimentality, melodrama, and coincidence is accompanied by narrative bombast and overstatement, an unwillingness (or inability) to cut anything from the text, and an inability (or unwillingness) to recognize when a detour in the story should be ignored. (Based on Les Miserables Hugo seemingly believed that the detour was the story, or at least that the main plot should be subservient to detours in it). Too, the characterization is flat and one-note, as in Hunchback of Notre Dame: Javert is obsessed with the law, Marius with his love, Jean Valjean with charity towards others.

Of course, much of the preceding is a matter of taste; what one finds deadening about Hugo, many others will find exhilarating. But even Hugo’s greatest fans admit that he is prone to excess as a writer–and that excess is what will repel some or many modern readers. Sometimes a freshman is right to object that a work is too long to be read; sometimes length itself is not a virtue. Sometimes a complex work really is what Kathryn Grossman calls a "chaotic, disjointed, multidimensional hodgepodge.”²

What did Hugo intend with Les Miserables? His intention was a noble one. As he wrote in the book’s preface,

So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of woman by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.³

Written partly in reaction to Eugène Sue's immensely popular roman feuilleton (serial novel) The Mysteries of Paris (1842-1843), Les Miserables shares The Mysteries of Paris’ intention to change how the reader viewed the subject of the novel. The Mysteries of Paris helped change how the public saw Paris and what Paris could ultimately become. Hugo, in Les Miserables, wanted to write a modern myth that would lead to a social and spiritual reform, that would force people to see that the law and justice were not equivalent, nor were crime and evil. Les Miserables is in large part a detective novel, but the tradition in French detective novels, going back to the late 1820s and the fictionalized memoirs of Parisian policeman Eugène François Vidocq (1775-1857) (see: The Great Detective) was of inscrutable, infallible detectives and wicked criminals. Hugo changed this, making the criminal Valjean Les Miserables’ protagonist and the policeman Javert the novel’s antagonist.

Hugo was a serious artist, and his intention with Les Miserables was to produce society-changing art that would be read on every level, from the intelligentsia to the common man and woman. Hugo’s themes–the battle between will and destiny, the possibility of salvation through good works, the question of justice and (and versus) the law–are universal enough but were particularly apposite to Hugo’s French readers. And Hugo threw every mode and approach into the novel, from the lyrical to the dramatic, from the tragic to the comic, from Romantic grandiloquence to near-Naturalist realism. These, combined with Hugo’s positive qualities as a writer, are enough for many critics. But not for this reader, and perhaps not for many modern readers.

Daniel S. Burt, “Les Miserables.” The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Novels of All Time. New York: Checkmark Books, 2010.

Adam Gopnik, “Introduction.” Les Miserables. New York: The Modern Library, 2008.

¹ Letter to Madame Roger des Genettes, in Gustave Flaubert, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1857-1880 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1982), 30.

² Kathryn Grossman, Figuring Transcendence in Les Miserables: Hugo’s Romantic Sublime (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994), 4.

³ Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, transl. Charles E. Wilbou (New York: Modern Library, 1902), iv.