Les Misérables

Les Misérables stands alongside Tolstoy’s War and Peace and George Eliot’s Middlemarch as one of the most comprehensive, world-building novels that the world’s ever known. In the style of the romanticism of the age, the threads of fate drive the main characters: Jean, Fantine, Cosette, and Marius toward love, death, sacrifice, and redemption. Next to those romantic ideals of pursuing love and redemption, the novel lays bare the misère (that untranslatable wretchedness, to be both deserving of pity as well as hatred; and the ones burdened with misère, les misérables) behind the characters, and describes the three greatest problems that Hugo thought society faced with each represented by a character’s source of misère: Jean, the dehumanization of the worker and laborer; Fantine, the tragedy of women forced into prostitution; and Cosette, the spread of ignorance in children deprived of education and a loving family. Hugo is first a poet, then a novelist – with all the sweeping majesties of romanticism comes the unrealistic glorifications of battle and revolution. I wasn’t sold on the book in making its political and philosophical message that revolutions, no matter how violent, always tends toward progress, since Hugo seems more fixated on portraying the poetic beauty of revolutions than their consequentialist efficacy. But taken primarily as a work of theatrical poetry, it’s enjoyable and dazzlingly beautiful in so many parts.

Of all the misérables in the novel, the ones that truly fit the definition from beginning to the end are the antagonists Thénardiers. They seem to embody the worst of the destitute: hardened, unkind, predatory, so inhumanly depraved with no redeeming virtue at all. They could be written off as your classic vanilla villains, deserving of hate and only hate, allowing the reader an easy time painting the world in black and white absolutes. But the husband Thénardier broke that characterization in one memorable episode and let the reader have a glimpse at his depth, a depth that elicited pity; and only with said pity does he truly qualify as a misérable. During the epic robbery sequence when the Thénardiers lured Jean into their den of armed bandits and Jean calls Thénardier a villain, Thénardier explodes in indignation saying, “when you want to know whether it’s cold you look in the newspaper to see what the thermometer says. We’re our own thermometers, we are! We feel the blood freezing in our veins and the ice reaching into our hearts, and we say: ‘There is no God!’ And you come into our dens, yes, our dens, and call us villains! But we shall eat you, poor things! Monsieur the millionaire, I’ll have you know this: I had my own business, I was licensed, I was entitled to vote, I’m a respectable citizen, I am! And you may very well not be!” In that cry of despairing envy, Thénardier revealed his past hope: to be a respectable citizen, as well as his present despair: the ice in the form of social apathy and neglect that’s already frozen his heart. A victim of his environment and his upbringing, he lived on to become the enemy which had made him into his present state. I saw the 2012 movie adaptation of Les Mis the musical right after finishing the book, and in the movie, the Thénardiers were cast as buffoonish comic relief which, compared to the book, does massive injustice to the characters because buffoonish villains evoke no sense of depth nor sympathy from the audience. Evil consists of shades of gray, and has its depth and its poignance, even beauty; in Thénardier, evil evokes deep pity. It’s a side that’s so easy to gloss, revealed in so few words and so fleetingly; but without the bishop’s intervention, likely Jean would have been led by the same misère and ended up living the same dismal destiny as the Thénardiers.