Les Miserables (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by Victor Hugo

wealth—as in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol—could not threaten wealthy readers. Regarding social progress in general, Hugo was optimistic. He shows Jean Valjean, alias M. Madeleine, reading at every meal. Hugo once declared that twenty years of good free mandatory education for all would be the last word and bring the dawn. Having become a utopian socialist, as was his creation M. Madeleine, Hugo believed that salaries would increase naturally along with profits, and that the dynamism of capital expansion would naturally resolve the problems of working conditions for the better. In fairness to Hugo, one must recognize that in 1862 an organized proletariat had not yet formed, although it was foreshadowed by a workers’ uprising in Lyons in 1832 and by the medieval guilds, an institution to which he pays his respects in the novel Notre-Dame de Paris (see Porter, Victor Hugo, pp. 20—23). Labor union movements as such had not yet developed. Hugo still thinks that guidance and enlightenment must descend on the people from “above,” from intellectuals. Nevertheless, at times his trenchant political analyses reveal the irresolvable contradictions one encounters by adopting either of two opposing positions—which, as it happens, are those of liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans in the United States today:
    All the problems which the socialists propounded, aside from the cos mogonic visions, dreams, and mysticism, may be reduced to two principal problems.
    First problem:
    To produce wealth.
    Second problem:
    To distribute it....
    England solves the first of these two problems. She creates wealth wonderfully; she distributes it badly.... [she has] a grandeur ill constituted, in which all the material elements are combined, and into which no moral element enters.
    Communism and agarian law think they have solved the second problem. They are mistaken. Their distribution kills production. Equal division abolishes emulation. And consequently labour. It is a distribution made by the butcher, who kills what he divides (pp. 505—506).
    Hugo suggests a balance of these two extreme solutions, egalitarian socialism and mercantilism.
    Thus he characteristically deconstructs naively categorical views that risk blocking compromise and solution. He contests the dichotomies of middle class and lower class, of police and criminals. He argues that the bourgeoisie is simply the materially satisfied portion of “the people,” and that on the other hand the mob can betray the best interest of “the people” through unthinking violence.
    Aside from his steadfast opposition to capital punishment, Hugo offered no practical solutions for reforming the police, the courts, or the prisons. He merely tries to stimulate our moral sensibilities, as Fantine’s misadventures and her selfless love for her child stimulated the moral sensibilities of Jean Valjean. Hugo intends the reformed convict to provide a model for us as Valjean comes to know God, whom Hugo equates with conscience. His message comes from the Gospels: “Inasmuch as you have done unto the least of these my brethren, so you have done unto me” (Matthew 25:40). At length, Hugo explicitly compares the redeemed Valjean to Christ (Grant, pp.158—176, and Brombert, pp. 86—139).
    As a symbolic representative of the working class enslaved by the former monarchy, Jean Valjean had been too debased and brutalized, Hugo believed, to promote historical progress through militant political action. But his destiny prefigures the eventual reconciliation of social classes: the ex-convict presides over the marriage of Cosette—the proletarian daughter of a prostitute—and Marius, the aristocrat adopted and cherished by the bourgeois Gillenormand. Cosette herself does not participate in or even become clearly aware of the insurrection. We must await the next generation that includes Cosette’s and Marius’s children to witness the full embodiment of the spirit of the new France.