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

The courageous street urchin Gavroche, killed fighting on the barricades, foreshadowed the flowering of this spirit.
    Hugo chose the now-forgotten uprising of 1832 rather than the glorious revolution of 1830 as the historical crux of the novel because he had been struck by the great historian Louis Blanc’s account of the 1832 worker-student insurrection. Hugo was less concerned with creating a practical manual for revolutionaries, or with celebrating any particular liberal, historical triumph than with providing a symbolic illustration of the French people struggling toward the light. Hugo thought that minor events as well as major ones could reveal the intentions of Providence. The self-sacrifice of Enjolras and his friends would serve to inspire and mobilize others. Like Bertolt Brecht a century later, Hugo does not want to serve up a cathartic vision of history: he prefers to imply that much work remains to be done.
    Critics have generally been relatively unaware of how thoroughly realism and idealism in Hugo’s fictions are interconnected. He is not vapidly optimistic; his concept of Providence always represents a dimension of human responsibility that can alter outcomes. Hugo’s moral complexity appears when he describes how Jean Valjean learns how to read and write while in prison. Although Hugo associates education with the light that dispels darkness, he acknowledges that education can empower the evildoer. Jean Valjean “felt that to increase his knowledge was to strengthen his hatred. Under certain circumstances, instruction and enlightenment may serve as rallying-points for evil” (p. 53). But Thénardier, on the contrary,
    was one of those double natures who sometimes appear among us without our knowledge, and disappear without ever being known, because destiny has shown us but one side of them. It is the fate of many men to live thus half submerged. In a quiet ordinary situation, Thénardier had all that is necessary to make—we do not say to be—what passes for an honest tradesman, a good citizen. At the same time, under certain circumstances, under the operation of certain occurrences exciting his baser nature, he had in him all that was necessary to be a villain. He was a shopkeeper in which lay hidden a monster (p. 257).
    Even the arch-villain of the novel might not have had to become irremediably evil, but, as Jean Valjean had within himself the potential for redemption and saintliness, Thénardier’s soul contained seeds of the demonic.
    [He and his wife] were of those dwarfish natures, which, if perchance heated by some sullen fire, easily become monstrous. The woman was at heart a brute; the man a blackguard: both in the highest degree capable of that hideous species of progress which can be made towards evil. There are souls which, crablike, crawl continually towards darkness, going back in life rather than advancing in it; using what experience they have to increase their deformity; growing worse without ceasing, and becoming steeped more and more thoroughly in an intensifying wickedness. Such souls were this man and this woman (p. 93).
    Although many characters in Les Misérables, including Tholomyès (part I, book three) and Monsieur Batambois, who is explicitly characterized as a provincial version of Tholomyès (part I, book five, chapter 12), seem to damn themselves through their fatuous complacency, which as they age hardens into indifferent cruelty, they illustrate a mainly passive or heedless evil, the banality of evil. Hugo demonstrates in his depiction of the Thénardier couple a dramatic evolution toward a calculated evil. By creating such characters, Hugo counteracts whatever tendencies toward vapid optimism one may find in a moral universe where even Satan might be saved (the Pelagian Heresy: in addition to Les Contemplations, see La Fin de Satan).

The Great French Novel
    Why do we still read Les Misérables? Not too many years ago, it was added to the required reading list for the