Hugo’s ‘Les Misérables’ revisited

(First of two parts)

Words are the mysterious visitors of the soul.—Victor Hugo

CANBERRA—On Sunday, 152 years after the first publication of Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables,” the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne concluded its five-month exhibition celebrating the evolution of “Les Misérables” (1862) from one of the greatest international novels of the 19th century into “arguably the most celebrated and beloved musicales of all time.”

Since it was first published, the novel has gripped the imagination of readers, audiences and artists around the world, and has had a profound effect on society, politics and political culture, according to the catalogue published by the State Library of Victoria. The exhibition, titled “Victor Hugo: Les Misérables—From Page to Stage,” spans two centuries from the start of the story in 1815 to the most recent production of the celebrated Boublil-Schonberg musicale in Melbourne in 2014.

Hugo’s original manuscript, on loan from the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, was the center of attraction of the exhibition “that had never before left Europe.” To tell the story of the influence of the novel on art and music, the library gathered more than 300 exceptionally written, painted, drawn, photographed, filmed, printed, sewn and published works that, the library hopes, would transport the visitors through more than 150 years of “Les Misérables.” The manuscript shows pages of handwritten texts by Hugo, correction marks from meticulous editing, including insertions and shifting of paragraphs and marginal notes. As the heart of the exhibition, it drew the biggest crowds.

The catalogue features Hugo’s letter to the publisher of the Italian translation of the novel in October 1862. “You are right, sir, you tell me that ‘Les Misérables’ is written for all nations,” Hugo wrote the publisher. “I do not know whether it will be read by all, but I write for all.” From June 1862 onward, just two months after its first release, the book was published in nine cities ranging from New York to Petersburg, from London to Rio. By the time Parts II and III appeared in May (1862), writes the catalogue, it was clear that Hugo had achieved the impossible: “selling a serious work for the masses, or for the time being, inspiring the masses with a desire to read it.”

The catalogue also presents an informative and entertaining interpretation of the exhibition. French curators Anais Lellouche and Vincent Gille illuminate the life and times of Victor Hugo—his upbringing, family, and social life, alongside the political circumstances that frame and inform the writing of “Les Misérables.” Rare examples of Hugo’s illustrated prose, poetry and drama, photographs and his own exceptional drawings “illustrate the grace of his moral philosophy, the tumultuous history and politics of France and the redemptive power of spiritual, familial romantic love [that make] Hugo’s literary, political and artistic legacy a unique and compelling event in the 21st century,” says the catalogue.

The era chronicled by “Les Misérables,” however, is the 19th century, and the location is, for the most part, Paris, which is Hugo’s self-declared center of world culture, itself a leading character in the novel.

The novel, according to the exhibition, depicted the “struggles and misery of Paris’ poor and displaced, [in the] journey from night to death to light, played out against the city’s underbelly of repression, class struggle, and violent political revolt.” Hugo finished writing “Les Misérables” during his exile from France (from 1851 to 1870) mainly on Jersey and Guernsey in the English Channel. This period saw Paris undergoing extreme changes wrought by political unrest and social engineering.

Some of the exhibits explain the significance of these images which capture the before, during and after of the 1848 uprising and the urban-planning reforms of Baron Haussmann. The true power of the “Les Misérables” story, says the catalogue, “lies in the universal appeal of its theme: the possibility that the condemned can rise above poverty and degradation to become good and honorable, an aspiration that inspires readers and audiences around the world.”

At the heart of Hugo’s magnum opus pulsates the theme of his pursuit of freedom, progress and social justice. Written and reworked over a period of four years, after an interruption of 13 years, it was influenced by the social milieu and historical events of the time. In the famous preface to the novel, Hugo states his intention: “As long as social damnation exists, through laws and customs, artificially creating hell at the heart of civilization and muddying a destiny that is divine, human calamity; as long as the three problems of the century—man’s debasement through the proletariat, woman’s demoralization through hunger, the wasting of the child through darkness—are not resolved … as long as ignorance and misery exist in this world, books like the one you are about to read are, perhaps, not entirely useless.”

Hugo’s commitment to freedom and social change and the adversity he faced are emphasized in the exhibition. The novel was only completed after he had spent a decade in exile as a political opponent of Napoleon III. The restrictions on his freedom “gave [Hugo] the independence to express his opinions.” (Part 2 on Wednesday, Nov. 19)