Theater History and Mysteries
I take a musical theater production and do a deep dive to find a richer understanding about the lessons the show has for theater and life. And, I’ll never miss an opportunity to pursue any mystery, bizarre coincidence, improbable event, or supernatural suggestion along the way because, in the words of Dirk Gentley, it is all connected.
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Music by Jon Bruschke and Andrew Howat, arranged, performed, and recorded by Andrew Howat.
Theater History and Mysteries
Les Miserables -- Episode 8 (2 of 8). The completion of the book..
It's 1860, and Victor Hugo, having taken to the barricades against the hated Louis Napoleon, has escaped Paris with a price on his head. And his mistress, not his wife, has successfully smuggled both he and his unfinished manuscripts out of France. But now he's in exile, living in an island off the French coast but under British control. How is he going to get his masterwork published? And as the text comes to be finished, it will be rightly remembered as a definitive statement on the French Revolution. But where in the book is the Revolution? The text is 1,500 pages long, and one of the five volumes is entirely dedicated to a revolt that happened over two days in 1832. But in that skirmish, the revolutionaries lost, and all historians agree that the fight had almost no military or political significance. In fact, the most significant outcome of the battle is the painting Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix was banned from being shown in public because it might inspire people to revolt. H m, that's interesting. A piece of art is taken down from display to its possible political consequences. But back to our question. Surely that skirmish is not what Hugo's central theme is. Where is the revolution? In the most famous novel about the French Revolution? We will go down those winding, narrow Parisian back alleys trying to find it in this episode of Theater History and Mysteries.
It's 1860, and Victor Hugo, having taken to the barricades against the hated Louis Napoleon, has escaped Paris with a price on his head. And his mistress, not his wife, has successfully smuggled both he and his unfinished manuscripts out of France. But now he's in exile, living in an island off the French coast but under British control. How is he going to get his masterwork published? And as the text comes to be finished, it will be rightly remembered as a definitive statement on the French Revolution. But where in the book is the Revolution? The text is 1,500 pages long, and one of the five volumes is entirely dedicated to a revolt that happened over two days in 1832. But in that skirmish, the revolutionaries lost, and all historians agree that the fight had almost no military or political significance. In fact, the most significant outcome of the battle is the painting Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix was banned from being shown in public because it might inspire people to revolt. H m, that's interesting. A piece of art is taken down from display to its possible political consequences. But back to our question. Surely that skirmish is not what Hugo's central theme is. Where is the revolution? In the most famous novel about the French Revolution, we will go down those winding, narrow Parisian back alleys trying to find it in this episode of Theater History and Mysteries.
I'm Jon Bruschke, and you are listening to Theater History and Mysteries, where I take on, um, musical theater production, going into a deep dive on the questions it raises and the answers it provides. I hope that this approach will give a deeper understanding about the lessons that the musical has for theater and for life. And I will never miss an opportunity to pursue any mystery, bizarre coincidence, improbable event, or supernatural suggestions along the way, because, in the words of Dirk Gently, it is all connected.
Okay, before we jump into our narrative, here's a little bit of bookkeeping. The main plan is that in the last episode, we talked about what the French Revolution was. And if you haven't listened to that, I'll encourage you to do that, since it will make some sense of what I'm about to talk about. In the coming episodes, we'll talk about the text, the meaning of the book, and dedicate an entire episode to the seances that Hugo held while he was on the isisle of Jersey in exile. Yes, seances. Finally, we'll go over how all of that helps us understand the musical better and go over some interesting things about the musical itself.
If you did miss that last episode, then the nutshell of The French Revolution is there was a great big one between 1789 and 1794, about for five years, and then for the next 60 years or so, about every decade, there was either a new king taking power or a new Napoleon taking power or a, uh, new republic taking power. And that entire period is what Hugo is addressing in Les Mis.
Good news, our podcast is getting some traction there. Our listenership is going up. People seem to like this. Oh, man, you could help me out so much just by posting this to your social media. How to subscribe to it. If you're enjoying the podcast, I could use all the help I can get to get a couple more people listening to this. If you can follow the podcast, that's great. If you can click the subscribe button, that's even better, but way more than your money wWhat I hope you can do is just lend me a couple minutes of your time to, uh, put this out there so that other people might get their hands on it. And thank you so much for listening. It means a lot to me.
We are facing the horrifying specter of Chat GPT taking over all human creativity, but particularly podcasts. It's entirely possible to have Chat GPT both write an entire podcast for you and in addition to that, read the whole podcast for you without a single human intervention or human thought. But this podcast, I promise you, is AI proof. I'm going down the side alleys, taking the weird takes and looking at the side things that make history interesting. I don't think that AIs can do that. So I'm hoping that you will help me come over here to preserve human creativity in this time where machines are about to take over us all. And finally, I will just note that my French is terrible, so I'll consider it a victory if you can figure out what I'm talking about in my Anglicized version of the French words. And finally, as my theater people say, on with the show today, we'll tackle how the book got finished, how it was received, and how it handles the French Revolution.
All right, how the book gets finished and is published in 1860, Victor Hugo is going to pick up Les Mise again. And if you missed the last episode, he has to fFlee Paris in the early 1850s, because he has opposed Louis Napoleon. Now, Louis Napoleon was Napoleon's actual cousin. So Napoleon dominates about the first 10, 15 years of the 1800s. And this is his nephew, who's coming back in the middle 1800s, who's trying to reclaim power in France. Victor Hugo supported Louis Napoleon. He gave speeches in his favor and he campaigned for the guy until he won. And then he became so opposed to Louis Napoleon that he actually joined the Committee of Opposition, the Committee of Resistance. That was going to try to stop Louis Napoleon from taking power. That was not popular with Louis Napoleon. So after Napoleon successfully seized power in a coup, suspending the constitution, and would eventually declare himself emperor, he exiled everybody who had been part of that resistance committee. One of those people was Victor Hugo. They all had a price on their head. And so Hugo had to get out of France. The only way he could do that was that with the help of his mistress, that she actually arranged for him to leave. And she smuggled out a whole bunch of things in a trunk that included the early manuscripts of Les Miserables.
So he is now in exile. He goes to the isle of, uh, Jersey. He's a big pain in the butt, to both the English and the French government. So he has to leave Jersey. He ends up on an island called Guernsey, and he's staying there for five or six years. There's a seance thing in the middle that we'll talk about in the future, but in 1860, so this is about eight or nine years into his exile, and after he's already, uh, been kicked off of one island, he picks up Les Miz again and he starts writing about it. Between 1860 and 1862, that book gets finished and how it gets released is a great story by itself. There's a great entire book by a guy named David Bellos that discusses all of this. But I'm going to create from Nina Marterst. I think that's how you said M A R T Y R S. And of course, I'll put that in the show notes. Nina Marareis is a freeance journalist and she's writing in the Paris Review on their Alan Arts in the Paris Review on their Arts and Culture section. And here is the story, the tale of how it is that Les Mis becomes published. So in 1860, he takes this manuscript that's about two thirds done, and he starts finishing it. And by 1861, there are now rumors that Hugo has a novel that he wants to sell. And he turns down an offer of 150,000 francs because Hugo thinks he could do better than that.
There's a Belgian publisher named Albert LeCroix who has no publishing experience. He's a, uh, guy in his late 20s and he borrowed the entire amount to get the book printed and to buy the rights from a Bank in Brussels where I guess he has some contacts, pretty good friends to loan you that much money. And he goes outside of any established publishing house. So there is a major publishing industry. He's not a part of any of it. He's just a guy who goes into a bank and talks his way into getting a huge loan so he can approach Victor Hugo.
He is a huge fan of Hugo but he bypasses Hugo's agent. So this guy's got a little bit of moxie. He's managed to borrow all the money. I don't even know if he had collateral. But still borrowing a whole bunch of money for a publishing venture when you have no history in publishing going past the agent of the author that you're trying to deal with is his way of getting this project done. But it works. He sits down with Victor Hugo and in a single day they negotiate the deal. On October 4th of 1861 there's now a signed contract. And it's not only more than 150,000 francs, it's 300,000 francs and that is about $3.8 million. It's an eight year license and inflation adjusted that's the highest amount that according to Martyrs is the highest amount that has ever been paid for a book.
But of course it's a uh, kind of risky venture. You knew that Hugo was a political outcast and it might be blocked, it would be hard to sell in France. And that's only one of series of obstacles that they're going to face. He got the translation rights which were new and he bought it sight unseen. And in fact Victor Hugo wouldn't even tell him how long it was. But Hugo, true to form, did insist that there be a cheap edition of the book so that the poor people that the book was about would have an opportunity to buy it and read it.
And the other thing that happened business wise was that copyright was just getting protected internationally. So it used to be that if you wrote a book in French, somebody in England, if it was good enough could just translate it, sell it and not pay you any royalties. And there was a new deal that had been signed that made it so that that was no longer true that you negotiate copyright in foreign countries. This is a turning point in the capital venture on art. So it's an um, unprecedented amount that is paid for the book. And there are some changes to the legal structure that makes a decent risk. But it's still going to be the first time something of this scope has been tried and tried out with new copyright laws.
The Last six months before the book is finished totally sucked. Hugo would not leave the island. So all the proofs had to be sent by the ship. If you've never finished a book before, you send, uh, your typewritten manuscript to the publisher, and then the publisher types, uh, up what they call proofs. Those are the final copies before they start mass producing it, and they come back to you and you can make any final changes. So those are kind of important things to deal with. But Hugo would not leave the island of Gurnsey. Would not go to Brussels to do those things in person. So all those proofs had to be sent by ship. And this is in the midst of a huge rush job. They've got to try to get this thing, this book out because there's so much money on the table and there's so much at stake. But it all has to be done with the groups going back and forth by ship.
And what is unusual about that is that when Hugo eventually came from Brussels to the islands, the trunk that had the manuscripts almost got washed overboard and lost forever. So it's not, you know, it's not a treacherous journey. It's not like this is the Bermuda Triangle, but it's also not like it's a super easy way to get the proofs going back and forth from the author. Okay. But it all works out. There is a final text. It's comes to fruition mostly on time, and there's a huge publicity campaign that starts before the book is released. And the text itself ias embargoed, that is They want to make sure that no part of the book gets released early. They're going for, uh, a big splash day of release to be a huge thing on April 4th of 1862. That day arrives in the first part of Fantine, which is the name of the first book and the name of one of the characters that we'll talk about extensively in the next episode, is released simultaneously in a whole bunch of different countries. It's the first ever international release on a global scale.
And in that text, by the way, there is an image by the French illustrator Emile Bayard, who drew that very famous sketch of Cosette Cotte's the Little Girl. Uh, we'll talk about that character a bunch the next episode as well. But that's in the first edition. So that just kind of a cool little historical note is that one image that's become so symbolic of the entire production. Both the musical and the book appears in the very first edition. That image is haunting, and it's so Enduring that it's still a part of the musical.
The book has now been released to great fanfare internationally and the people absolutely love it. The critics do not, including Alexander Dumas and a guy, uh, named Flaubert, who's got, uh, who's also famous novelist at the time. We'll get to that in a sec. But the public absolutely loved it. Here is a quote that is coming from, uh, Martyris.
“On the morning of April 4, 1862, part one of Les Miserables called Fantine, was simultaneously r
eleased in Brussels, Paris, St. Petersburg, London, Leipzig and several other European cities. No book had ever had an international launch on this scale. Within a day, the first pairis printing of 6,000 copies sold out to the avid cues that snaked around the bookstores.” And later, in that same article, there's another quote. “When 48,000 copies of Cosette and the Marius volumes went on sale a month later, Hugonic fandom. Oh, how you not love that phrase. Hunic fandom had reached such a fever pitch that choppers in Paris arrived with handcarts and wheelbarrows to whisk away as many copies as possible.”
Lacroix paid off his loan within months, although after that Laroix and Hugo had a falling out. They are both two very, very large egos and very big movers and shakers. I guess that was too much for one book to unite and they did not part friends. But Lacroix did, single handedly and outside of the publishing establishment, pull off what he had set off to do. He got his literary hero Victor Hugo's book published and he was the publisher of it and made a pile of money in the process and helped put the book out there into public consciousness. It was a pretty good book that is likely to have done quite well on its own, but having that kind of, uh, a publicity push behind it definitely helped.
The critics did not like it. Here's a quote. “Alexandra Dumas, inspired no doubt by John Beljan'sojourn through the Sewers, sneered that reading the novel was akin to walking through the mud.” Gustave Flaubet privately mocked it as “a book written for catholico socialist poop heads and for the philosophical evangelical rat pack.” Only he didn't use the word poop. He used a slang term that rhymes with pit. I am kind of impressed by his ability to speak in hyphen words. Boy, that's some, uh, good 1800 trash talking. I'm going to call you out and I'm going to do it with phrases like Philosophico evangelical, whatever that is.
But it's totally weird that he slammed it for being Catholic. Hugo was not Catholic. In fact, the universal consensus is that he didn't even like the Catholic Church. Arguably, the true hero of the book is Myriel. Uh, again, all this stuff will be developed more in the next episode. But he's a hero precisely because he's a renegade within the church, staying true to the message of the gospel and not to the edicts of the church. And if you think about the character Javert, which will do much more later, the whole point of the book is that legalism without compassion is the truly great evil for Hugo. That definitely applies both to the legal system and to the Catholic Church. So you might accuse Victor Hugo of being an idealistic Christian but calling him Catholic. That's a bit of a stretch.
The real clincher in all of this was that the book was not for catholico socialist pitheads is how much the Catholic Church hated this book. According to Barren, who's an author who is writing for a socialist magazine, there were over 740 Catholic publications that denounced the book, including one that speculated that the book's true author must be Satan. Either that Hugo himself was Satan, or that Satan had inspired Hugo, or that Satan had somehow written the book, sent to the publisher and got it printed, but, uh, attributed it to Victor Hugo. But whatever it was, Victor Hugo knew about this accusation that Satan had authored the book and he thought it was funny. Anyway. Weird that he was slammed for it being Catholic. Weird that he was slammed by his fellow authors. By. That was of course not the only place that it was released. The American reviews were better, although one in the Atlantic Monthly panned it and it basically admitted that it was a great read, but it didn't like the themes. They were like, hey, what's up with all this sympathy for the poor? Let's just call the critical review mix. There were some written critics who liked it. There were some who did not.
How did he react to all this critical shade being thrown around? Well, at the seance table, Hugo would channel Shakespeare the greatest English poet. We'll get to that in the next episode. In response to the critics, however, he channeled the greatest American poet and said, and this is exactly how Google Translate says it was pronounced, “Les haineux vont détester la haine la haine la haine la haine la haine.” Which of course translate to haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate. And I'm, uh, gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake this off. As Taylor Swift would write over a century later. Why not? He had the biggest commercial entertainment success in industry. Yes, I did just say that Taylor Swift was the greatest American poet of all time. Or at least the greatest tortured American poet of all time. Oh, I see you. I see you, Edgar Allen Poe. I'm not stepping on your toes, I'm not trying to bypass you, but did you have a tour that had $2 billion in ticket sales? Are there hip hop versions or classic rock versions of your best poem, the Raven? I don't think so. So I'm going to go with the most tortured poet in American history is Taylor Swift. And by God, if you are Victor Hugo and you've got a séance table and you go into the past and channel Shakespeare, please go into the future and channel Taylor Swift. Because what she's saying is exactly how you responded to the critics of your time. Anyway, her response was basically Hugo's response. Haters are goingna hate. I'm going toa shake it off. Why not? He has the biggest commercial entertainment success in all of history to that point. And, uh, he believes in his own book. This guy is not lacking for self confidence. So the short version was the critics were mixed, some panned it, there were some who liked it, but the public absolutely adored the book.
And one group that liked it in particular were soldiers during the Civil War that was happening in the United States. There are a lot of accounts of this, but one of the best is by Vanessa Steinroetter of the Penn State University Press. And now remember Le mees, published in 1862, which is right about the middle of the Civil War. We'll get to more details, but for flavor, let's start with a quote. This quote was written by a general's wife using the royal we to describe the effect the novel had on both herself and her household. And importantly, the troops. “How we wept with Fantine and Cosette. How we loved the good mayor Madeleline. All the dearer to us because he had once been Johnan Valjean. How we hated Javert the cold and stony pillar of authority. How we starved with Marius and waxed indignant in contemplating his frigid grandfather. How we fought over and over the wonderful battle of Waterloo and compared it with the other contests which we knew.”
That quote was from Sally Pickett, the spouse of the Confederate general George Pickett. Yes, that George Pickett, most famous for getting his butt kicked in the most definitive fight of the war. And she had that book because, again, quoting “General Rufus Ingalls of the United States army sent to us across the lines a beautiful copy of Les Miserables.” So yes, this is a book that is so popular, and the U.S. civil War has got this weird thing where brothers can actually fight on opposite sides of it. But Civil War generals had friends across the lines who would actually send each other copies of this book to ease the suffering of war.
Now, of course, the Southern editions had to edit out the parts about slavery and the parts about John Brown, although the Southern Literary Messenger, a literary journal, in case the title didn't give that away, found the book was so good you had to read it and just ignore the misguided stance on those two points. In fact, the members of a Virginia force started calling themselves Lee's Miserables as a direct reference to the book. That's how much it had penetrated the Confederate lines.
Uh, Steinroetter maintains that the book was not interesting in spite of the war, but because of it, there were communal readings where all the soldiers would get together and they'd read chapters to each other and also solo readings, because a big part of daily life for the soldiers was they could sit down and get bored. You know, during the downtimes, they would read. And at that point, the armies were actually the most literate soldiers in history. There had never been soldiers who were as literate as the, uh, US Soldiers in that Civil War. And so for them to read was kind of not unusual. It is important, I think, however, that they read Les Mis there are accounts of prisoners of war in Andersonville who liked the stories and would note its philosophical bent. I'll just interject here that if you were a POW in Andersonville, which was truly awful, you were among the wretched of the earth. And boy, am I impressed that what struck you about Les Mis was its philosophical content.
But in that article, Martyrs identifies a couple soldiers who were there that were taken by it. Another group that loved the book was the 54th infantry on the Union side. That was the all black regiment. If you've seen the movie Glory with Denzel Washington, Matthew Broderk, and Martin Freeman, that is about the 54th Infantry. And at least three soldiers in there have left written accounts about how they had read Les Mis and how much they loved it.
Now, another interesting thing about this reading of Les Mis during the Civil War is that prisoners were not allowed to read technical things because that might help him escape. You wouldn't want, for example, to let your prisoners read things about explosives. But in one awesome account, reading the book inspired an escape that was paralleled after Jean Valjehnan's strategy of carving holes in the walls of a prison cell. There were POWs in the civil War that were taking his inspiration for their own escape attempts, Jean Valjean's strategies.
And one totally awesome account has that, uh, there was a federal general who got so engrossed in the novel that he lost track of time and hence fell derelict in his military duties. The general, you know, starts reading. He was like, oh, crap, I got to get dressed. Ran out, and was kind of all dishevelled. You know, how many books are good enough that in the middle of a war, you're like, yeah, I'm so wrapped up in this story that the, uh, fact that we're going to a fight outside is kind of secondary to me.
But the best story is about, there's a guy who is in a hotel bed in Charleston, and he's reading the part of Les Miz about the Battle of Waterloo. And just when he got to the action, the bomb started landing outside the city, giving the novel its own soundtrack.
The take home to all of this is that soldiers on both sides of the line could relate to being the Miserables of the Earth. Here's an extended quote from Steinroetter, and I think it's worth it, taking the time to read it. Says “in a letter to the publisher of the Italian translation of les mis from October 18, 1862, Hugo admitted that he wrote the novel with an international audience in mind. ‘it speaks to England as much as Spain.’ The appeal of Les Miserable also transcended the blue and the gray battle lines of the Civil War. Though its content and relevance to the daily lives of the Civil War, the novel captured the attention not only of the American reading public and reviewers, but also of the soldiers on both sides of the conflict to whom the novel, with its themes of suffering and empathy, fighting, duty and honor, offered a language with which to conceptualize some of their own wartime experiences.” And that's a fun side quest.
But the Civil War combatants were not alone. The public at large loved the book. It was a huge smash hit. And even the critics generally admitted that it was a compelling tale that was well told, which is something for a 1,500 page book with a bunch of technical digressions. And as a reminder, Hugo is still in exile while all this is happening, although he can does travel to other parts of Europe. And he's going to stay in exile for eight more years after the book is published.
All right, just to, uh, finish the timeline, uh, of Victor Hugo's life, the aftermath of the publication of Les Mis is equally fascinating. It's published in 1862. In 1870, that is when Louis Napoleon loses the Prussian war and is forced to leave France. Hugo, uh, therefore can return. I won't dwell too much on his later life other than to say two things. He had a return and oh my gosh, what a return. Grossman calls it quote, near legendary end quote. As the biggest opponent of Louis Napoleon, he's one of the most prominent leaders. In the aftermath, he's elected to office with the second highest vote total, arguably making him the second most popular man in France.
He's actually in Paris during the Prussian siege that would get Louis Napoleon out and infamously ends up eating Paris zoo animals because they're suffnign to death because of the siege. And then Louis Napoleon is gone. By 1871, the Paris Commune is now in operation, which is like an attempt at an independent government run by the left wing, as the name would suggest, communists. And Hugo opposes both the Commune and the legislature is too brutal. Eventually the Commune falls. Hugo calls for amnesty. So he is opposed to the Commune, but he doesn't think that there should be a huge punishment inflicted on the people who were members of the Commune. And in response to that, a group of like 50 to 60 people storm him in his house and try to kill him. So he's gone from a national hero to the target of mob violence, to being wealthy and famous on an island, to being so starving you had to eat zoo animals in Paris, all in about a year. Let's just say that although Les Mes done and Louis Napoleon is gone and he's back in Paris, it's not exactly a peaceful retirement.
Here's another kind of fun fact in the Phantom of the Opera, the Paris Commune is famous because part of where it was situated was on top of the Paris Opera House. And so when the Phantom of the Opera references the dead bodies that are found in the catacombs beneath the Paris Opera House, they're talking about the members of the Paris Commune. And Victor Hugo actually visited the Paris Commune. He was part and parcel of both, uh, of what was going on there and the government's reaction to it. And that's just an interesting little intersection between Victor Hugo and the Phantom of the Opera.
Okay, so the one thing I was going to say is he had a return and then he had a funeral. What a return he had to Paris and what a funeral. He dies in 1885. So just about five years after returning from exile. And I'm going to turn it over to Megan Behrent to describe that Event Once again, Megan Behrent is writing for the International Socialist Review, so she's got a, uh, left wing read on it, but here's what it is. “The French government was well aware that Hugo's funeral would attract masses of people and feared an uprising. Only a few years earlier, half a million people had shown up to pay respects to him on his 79th birthday. In an attempt to capitalize on his death, the government co opted the service, preparing a massive tribute to the writer. Despite his expressed wish for a simple funeral, I mean he who he was dead. The only request the government honored was that he was buried in a pauper's casket despite all the pomp and circumstances, it was truly a festival of the oppressed as workers, the poor and the exploited arrived en masse to celebrate the life and work of a man who had given voice to the voiceless.”
Graham Rob, the author of one of the best biographies of Hugo, described the scene as a fairground where “drunken bodies litter The Champelise wine shop stayed open and as the night of the wake wore on, the singing became merrier and politically suspect. Brothels closed as prostitutes dressed in mourning to pay their respects behind the bushes in the avenue. Victor Hugo, writes Rob using first hand accounts, quote, abominable outrages were taking place which the police were impotent to repress.” Among those who came to pay their respects were delegations of war veterans, civil servants, artists and writers, animal lovers and schoolchildren. There were major debates about the order of the procession. For example, the militant feminist journal Laion. I'm, um, probably messing that up. C I T O Y E N N e complained that the suffragegette were placed a long way behind the gymnasts and the department stores. According to urban legend, there was even a notable spike in the birth rate nine months later.
There were critics of Victor Hugo and Les Miserable. There were people who stormed his house in hatred. But that funeral kind of seals the deal. Were you the champion of the poor and the oppressed? Well, more than 2 million people showed up for his funeral and that exceeded the known population of the city of Paris at the time. His message resonated. I do love that phrase, that he gave voice to the voiceless. And the voiceless themselves were acutely aware of it. They showed up to celebrate the life of Victor Hugo.
Okay, so this ends his life, but it does not end his legacy. This book, of course, did have some obvious influence. Uh, according to Barrent, Albert Camus cited Les Mis as his direct influence when he was writing the Stranger Grossman says that the novel inspired Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, who of course wrote both Crime and Punishment and War and Peace. So he's the direct influence on the most recognizable two word conjunction books titled ever. And also Albert Cammus the Stranger, which also has two words but doesn't have a conjunction. Anyway, uh, that's quite a trio of books to have inspired.
Paul Berman, writing in the New Republic, summarizes the adaptation pretty well. These are all the things that the, uh, that that book inspired his adaptations “a theater play in the 1860s, a series of parodies mocking the novel from the same era, silent movies and talkies in the 20th century, Frederick March and Charles Lawton among them. A TV miniseries with John Malkovic and Gerard de Perdieu. A musical theater play in France in the 1980s whicholved into a British production which ran on Broadway as Les Mis and has been, or so it is claimed, seen by 60 million people, which has now emerged as a teary eyed movie opera called Les Miserables, the soundtrack to which has reached number one on the Billboard chart, in which will doubtless give way soon enough to distill oddter weepier presentations. Les Miserab is many things, but it has never been dead. That's a little sarcastic, which I guess I'm comfortable with, but it does give a pretty good flavor for all the things that have inspired it.
The influence was enormous, but it was not immune from political winds. Grossman notes that the popularity of the book kind of died between 1900 and 1940 as France became more conservative. People at that point would admit that Hugo was still their favorite poet, but in an embarrassed way, kind of like saying Wham Was your favorite 1980s band. Between 1914 and 1933 there were no new French editions of the book. Conservative politics and the horror of World War I turned the tide against Romanticism in general and its optimistic outlook and Hugo in particular.
But by 1944 both the Nazis and the Resistance were now claiming Hugo and by the 1970s of course became the source material for one of the most successful musicals of all time. So there was that period where it had dropped off maybe 30, 40 years, but within the next 34, 40 years it came back with a vengeance.
Which gets us to our last point. Where is the revolution in this book about the revolution we are, uh. Now back to that question. And if you only kind of know about the musical and only kind of know about French history, you're probably thinking, oh yeah, isn't that the story about the French Revolution which Makes it curious that in the words of Lashmet quote, there is no French Revolution digression in Les Miserable. The subject is rarely discussed explicitly within those 1500 pages. End quote. I am putting there becauseette says a concisely, but it's 100% true. There is that one skirmish in 1832, but there's nothing else that's very explicit about the French Revolution.
So where is the revolution in this most famous account of the French Revolution? Action in the book takes place between 1815 and 1833. During that period, Charles had to abdicate to Louis Philippe in the so called July Revolution. But quite frankly, that's not that big a deal. Like you traded one bad king for another bad king. That's not. But that's happened a bunch of times in history. But there's only been one French Revolution. Like if I said, who's Louis the XVI and Marie Antoinette, you'd at least have heard of them. If I were to say who was Charles X or Louis Philippe, you probably would have said, uh, duh. And you would be in the vast majority of people on that question.
There is one event that consumes almost a fifth of the book, but it is of no military consequence and the revolutionaries lost. And it wasn't even like that was a planned revolution. It was the funeral of a popular general that got turned into a riot. And it was against Louis Philippe, who wasn't even Hugo's main antagonist. You know, if you were, say, who did Victor Hugo really hate? You would have said Louis Napoleon, not King Louis Philippe. Hugo was there and he did see that Riot in 1932. But it's not like when he was an active participant in 1848 trying to negotiate with rioters. Or even more centrally, when he himself was on the barricades in 1851 against Louis Napoleon, who was his arch nemesis. Here is Lashmet's commentary. “Les Miserables is indeed a book about the French Revolution. The matter is at the very soul of it, uh, in the question of social issues, of civil war, of God, in all the events in every revolution that followed it. The subject need not be brought up because it permeates every aspect of the book from the bishop to the conventionist to the fall of the barricades.” Yeah, I mean, that's a reason, I guess, why he didn't have to put the revolution in the book about the revolution. That is not implausible. But I, uh, think there's more that can be said.
For our first take on this issue, we’ll turned to Megan Behrent Our socialist author Barrett starts with the observation that the original books, the ones written in Paris before Hugo had to flee and which are either named John Treajean or Les Miseres, included the themes of poverty, the love stories, and a critique of the legal system. But the big change in the final text is that The Revolution of 1832, or rather the Revolt of 1832, is added. In fact, there are five sections in the book, and the only one that's not named after a character is the one called St. Denis, which is the name of the neighborhood where the barricades got erected. And the barricades are one of only two places where all the major characters are in the same place and at the same time. So here is Behrent's takeaway “Critics note that Hugo is extremely vague about the reasons for the 1832 insurrection at the center of the novel. This is because Hugo uses the Minor uprising of 1832 to symbolize the Revolution. More generally, it stands for the Revolution of 1830, the Revolutions of February and June 1848, and the future revolution the Hugo helps will overthrow Napoleon.The novel, as well as its modern musical adaptation, continues to inspire because modern audiences continue to see their own aspirations represented in this revolution. What the depiction lacks in historical specificity, it makes up in broad appeal and inspiration. End quote.
There is something to that, but it doesn't really explain why he didn't just take the thing in 1848 or 1789. If you were, uh, a call to the revolutionary aspirations of the poor everywhere, why wouldn't you pick a battle that they won or had some broader relevance? But he does not pick either of those. So Behrent is talking about something that is not, um, unimportant or not irrelevant, but may not be the full explanation.
So for a second take, we will turn to Grossman, the Penn State scholar. According to Grossman, Jean Valjean is a metaphor for all of France and the entire revolutionary period from 1790 to 1860. With all those changes of power in this read, the key thing is the direction and not the revolution. Jean Valjean represents progression, and Louis Napoleon is definitely a regression. This fits with the other part of the book. In Grossman's view, Hugo is calling for a pure love that's a higher plane solution to the problems of the revolution. Hugo isn't trying to give specific political prescription. He wants to focus on the love that will conquer everything. And that's why he's not going to focus on any specific part of the revolution or a more significant revolution.
For Paul Berman, Another author and a critic. The book is one in the epic poem tradition of Virgil and Chateaubriand. Chateaubriand is a poet who proceeded Victor Hugo, who was also incidentally exiled to the Isle of Jersey. And Hugo loved Chateaubriand and also was aware that Chateaubriand had been on the same island that he had. Berman sees a clear parallel between the descent into hell that Orpheus takes in Virgil's work and Jean Valjean's trip to the sewers in Les Mise. And it is a very conscious attempt that the key human task is to come to grips with sadness. Is what Berman's theory that you have to confront death, confront suffering, confront loss, go to hell, come back to be redeemed. This is of course a thumbnail sketch of what Berman's talking about, but I do think that he's explaining why Hugo would focus on a losing battle. He needs Marius to be willing to die for a hopeless cause so that Jean Valjean can save him for Cosette's benefit. If that was more plot detailed than you remember off the top of your head, don't worry, we'll get to all of that in the next episode. But that is definitely Berman's day.
Interesting sidebar on Berman. Berman and Michael Moore actually work together at the same newspaper at the same time. And Michael Moore left bitterly and sued Berman and won. And he took that money and used it as part of his financing to start Roger and Me, which was of course a movie that uh, launched Moore's career. Probably not super relevant to Les Mise, but kind of a funny thing about Verman. Anyway, Berman is definitely the guy who sings the Les Mise as an epic poem that is kind of like the ones Virgil Road and that its real truth comes from the theme about coming to grips with sadness. So Berent sees the book as a call to ongoing revolution. Grossman thinks it's about finding a higher truth that gives meaning to the revolution. And Berman thinks that the losing battle is a good vehicle for walking the characters through hell so that they can come to grips with sadness.
I like all these ideas, they're fun to think about. But when I get back to the question, what's up with the French Revolution in Les Mis? I am most drawn to what Lashmet has to say. And Lashmet I don't know that I've properly introduced in this episode, but is from what I can tell, a student at DuPage Community College, which is located in Illinois, wrote an essay that won first place and got put in their digital commons. It's called the Origins of Les Mis. And oh my God, it does this old professor's heart good to see undergraduates who do this kind of research and write it this well. And I'm just thrilled that I can come to the end of what I'm talking about and say my ideas were inspired by brilliant undergraduate writing. That always makes me happy.
Lashmet points to a conversation toward the end of the book between a priest and an old member of the original French Revolution. And the revolutionary says, this is the, uh, it's not really super plot relevant other than the priest, Myriel, is talking to this old revolution on the dying bed. And the revolutionary says, “if the balance must be tilt, let it be tilt on the side of the people. They have suffered longer. End quote. And Lashmemed says, quote, this is perhaps the most definitive answer to the question of the French Revolution in Les Miseble. End quote.
And I do think that this is the central point that Hugo is making. For a revolution to be any good, it has to help the most oppressed members of society. And if it doesn't do that, it's just changing a new boss for an old boss, or rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, or changing the political configurations at the top as the people at the bottom continue to suffer. Hugo was writing at a time when there was, of course, the French Revolution of 1789, but there were also a bunch of violent power changes, coups and systems of government. And I think what Hugo was doing was giving credit to the revolutionary spirit of trying to fight oppression and throw off the tyrants, but landing hard on the idea that the real measure of any political system is how well it treated the most dispossessed.
And so in the end, Les Mis is a book whose original text was almost destroyed in an ongoing series of revolutions, was saved by the lover of its author, overcame an incredible series of near disasters. It was released as the most successful book of its time. And it had a message about not the French Revolution per se, but about the endpoint of any revolution. That's super prescient, I think, and we'll talk about that in coming episodes.
And that's the 50,000 foot view of the book. Next time we'll dive into the text, the plot, and the more specific historical circumstances that surround the action of the book. Was there a real priest named Myriel? Was there a real Jean Valjean? And hidden in the text are some tantalizing Easter eggs Hugo put in as references to key parts of his own life that even the most ardent Les Miz fan might Miss, where can you find them? We'll figure all of that out together. On the next episode of Theater History and Mysteries.
FOOTNOTES AND REFERENCES IN EPISODE 7