Les Miserables -- Episode 10 (4 of 8). The meaning of the book.

Thanks almost entirely to his mistress, Victor Hugo escaped France with his life and an early manuscript of Les Miserables.  While living in exile and on an island close to the coast but under British control, he finishes the book 10 years later.  It’s an immediate international smash hit, with an appeal so broad that even soldiers on BOTH sides of the US civil war love it.  

From there it’s a roller coaster…hugely popular between 1860 and 1900 it falls out of favor as France turns conservative between 1900 and 1940.  Its popularity re-energizes starting with the second world war, and then by 1980 it becomes one of the first big musicals in France, then takes over the London stage, and finally explodes on Broadway to become what many would call the most successful musical of all time.

So what has made this story so powerful?  Is it the love story, the redemption of the main character, or the call to a revolution?  Is it the intricate plot or the famous digressions, on topics from raw sewage to criminal slang, that run on for hundreds of pages?  We’ll consider all of these possibilities in this episode of THM.

Report on Homelessness in Orange County; interviews with unhoused people

Transcript

Thanks almost entirely to his mistress, Victor Hugo has escaped France with his life and an early manuscript of Les Miserables. While living in exile and on an island close to the coast but under British control, he finishes the book ten years later. It's an immediate international smash hit with an appeal so broad that even soldiers on both sides of the US Civil War love it. 

But from there, it's a roller coaster. It's hugely popular between 1860 and 1900 but then it falls out of favor as France turns conservative between 1900 and 1940. It's popularity re-energized starting with the Second World War and then by 1980 it becomes one of the first big French musicals. And then it takes over the London stage and finally explodes on Broadway to become what many would call the most successful musical of all time. So what has made this story so powerful? 

Is it the love story, the redemption of the main character, the call to revolution, is the intricate plot for the famous digressions, and topics from raw sewage to criminal slang that run on for hundreds of pages? We'll consider all these possibilities 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 musical theater production, go 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 suggestion along the way because in the words of Dirk Gently, it is all connected. 

Okay, a little bit of bookkeeping. If you are just entering this series on Les Mis, you might want to go back to the start. I think that's episode seven, the last three episodes have covered the history of France at the time, the history of the life of Victor Hugo, and a full plot summary. There are 1500 pages in the book and that's a lot of ground. 

If you're up to speed on the full plot and your French history is pretty good, you are good to go and if not, episode seven is a pretty good place to start. If you could please spread the word about this podcast, Theater People, we are a community. I am so happy that you're part of this one and that you're listening to stuff about theater, but if you've done theater at any point in your life, you know what it's like to be in a production. You have immediate and intimate relationships with good friends and as soon as the production's over, it feels like you've lost a part of yourself and some really important friendships. That I think is part of what hooks us all to theater. We're a community and we stick together and if you could be part of this community, I would be forever grateful if you enjoyed the show and can post it on your social media, hit the follow button on whatever player you use that will help me immensely. 

I will be forever in your debt if you can help get the word out about the show. Finally, pardon my French. I am going to mispronounce a whole bunch of words. I am going to spell them when I get to them and I'll put them in the show notes. So I hope that is enough to let you know what I'm talking about, but the plan for today is we're going to look at some important questions, see how they play out in the book and then sort through the various interpretations that have been offered about this novel over the course of history. And as always, I can promise an accurate but scattershot treatment of the text. That is, I can't possibly cover everything that has ever been written about Les Mis, so I'm going to pick out the parts and the connections that are, I think, are especially interesting and I'm following the edict of Dirk gently who says that it's all connected and I can promise an accurate treatment on those topics that I do dive into. We aren't going to cover everything, but we will stay true to reality on those topics that we do cover and it should be a fun, interesting and different take than you would get on Les Mis, than what you would get in other places. 

So let's get to the meat. What issues does Les Mis wade into that we can take and run with? Before I recap the story and get to the various interpretations, there are two major intellectual questions that I want to put out there. And at first, it may not seem like there's anything to do with the book, but I promise you they are dead center of what Hugo is talking about. Issue number one, critical legal studies. 

Okay, the study of the law is basically boring. In the three-star classic day after tomorrow with John Cusack, the story ends in the New York Public Library where they burned books for warmth. This is initially viewed as a tragic loss of knowledge until it is disclosed that they're actually burning the tax code. 

Everyone can exhale nothing of value has been lost. Yes, the tax code doesn't really matter. And after the apocalypse, but more importantly, who would want to read the tax code? Well, the answer is if you're a law school student, you've got to read it. You have to read the tax code and all those other boring things. 

Law school is designed to slam into your head the idea that first, you researched the law, including the law itself, which would include the tax code, and all the cases that have ever existed that have talked about that topic or cited that law. Then you take the facts of the case, and then you take the facts, and the law as it is understood, you put them together, and that should tell you the way the case should be decided. You call that justice. 

And the idea is you want to strip all the emotion out of it. You want to stick to pure logic, and you want to make sure the justice is blind. Everyone has an equal opportunity for the law. All right, you during the course of your life have probably noticed that the legal system doesn't exactly work that way. And there are three or four sources that have moved my thinking on this. 

I'm going to share them with you. Mark Kiliman wrote a book called A Guide to Critical Legal Studies. It's by the Harvard University Press, which gives you some indication of who the people are that's talking about this, and it's published in 1990. 

It's sort of an extended summary of all the work that's going on. Law school professors, legal theorists are writing books and law review articles that are talking about these concepts. And all of them start with the observation that while justice is supposed to be blind, rich people seem to win way more often than poor people. And there are obviously different outcomes in the law based on race and biological sex, and those can be empirically documented. And while justice is supposed to be a political, who the judges are matters a lot. Just think about the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh. 

The massive fight on both sides happened because he had a very clear political stance, and all the judges are supposed to be free from politics. They never really are. And everybody who's ever practiced the law is acutely aware of that. 

They're good judges and bad judges, but to say that they're all perfectly neutral, an objective is just not fair and accurate description of the legal system. Now, once you start with that premise, the critical legal scholarship can get really crazy really fast. But the key point of that movement, the critical legal studies movement, is that these things should also be a part of the study of the law. And of course, an offshoot of critical legal studies is critical race theory, which has become a highly politicized academic concept. I won't say anything more on that other than the fact that if you think anybody is taking the critical race theory, the literature that was used in the Harvard Law School curriculum, and they're putting it into kindergarten curriculum, you are really, really too deep down the wrong part of the internet. So there is an extension of critical legal studies that does focus on the racial component of what's going on, how the legal system focuses. 

It is nothing like what you've probably heard in the popular media. Now, every lawyer that I know, and if you're a debate coach, you know a lot of people who've become lawyers, agrees with the basic premise that the more money means you get more wins in the legal system. And it is generally true that court decisions, what juries do with judges vote on, is in fact based on the law and the evidence. But better lawyers argue for the law better and more money lets you do more research to get better evidence. So setting aside all the various issues at hand and all the baggage that is now surrounding critical legal studies, just about everyone I know involved in the legal system will privately acknowledge that money makes a huge difference. And that is everybody from public defenders to people I know that have argued nine figure cases in the civil arena to negotiating nine digit, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars contracts for corporate mergers, they will all acknowledge that the side that has more money has a huge advantage in the legal system and it's leveraged in all kinds of ways. And as a sidebar, this was actually my dissertation topic, which was completed in 19, but I researched a whole bunch of state Supreme Court decisions and coded all the different things for a whole bunch of different things. But the single best predictor of who would win at the state's Supreme Court level is which side had the most money. Anyway, that is topic number one, critical legal studies, the idea that you should look at how money influences the legal system or non what are called extra legal factors, everything that's not supposed to be entering the legal decisions does. 

The second book is called The Hollow Hope. Can courts bring about social change? It's by Gerald Rosenberg and that was originally published in 1991. This is a study of social movements in the big court cases in history and the basic thesis is that courts don't produce lasting social change, but acting like they are in their neutral place where everyone can get justice, just avert time, energy, and resources that should be spent elsewhere. And if you think about it, the court decisions usually follow social change rather than proceeding. I'll say a lot more about that later in this episode and especially with Victor Hugo had to say about that. But the key question is whether or not the courts are the right venue to fight for social change. And Rosenberg thinks they definitely are not that the possible is unlimited. 

Here's the quote from the website that where you would go to buy his book. Quote, it is nearly impossible to generate significant reforms through litigation. American courts are ineffective and relatively weak, far from the uniquely powerful sources of change that they are often portrayed to be end quote. And finally, the third source here is a law professor named Pierre Schlagg. He points out that when you get to law school, one of the first things that happens is you get presented with a case where there are very sympathetic plaintiffs. Think of a mom and pop farm that gets posed by a major corporation that's polluting their land, but they are not sadly on the right side of the law. And the point that you're supposed to learn is that you need to set aside your sympathies and your emotions when deciding the law. 

And Schlagg is absolutely revolted by that idea. He thinks that that attempt to make the law just a discussion of abstract concepts without looking at the very human impacts and elements is what results in more injustice than any other system could possibly have. And just acknowledging subjectivity and embracing that there are real human impacts to these court decisions would make the world a better place. And finally, there's another author named Stephen Bright who writes a lot about public defenders. But if you at this point in your life are doubting that poor people accused of crimes get a fair day in court, it is definitely worth checking out the writings of Stephen Bright. He is somebody who I'm going to put their references to in the footnotes. 

And here's a little sidebar. I wrote my dissertation prior to the turn of the century 2000, where I was interested in state Supreme Court decisions. But my most recent research project was to go and just interview people who are unhoused in my local area. There's a lot. It's not hard to find them. And they have a lot to say. 

These are the modern names of the robbers that dispossess the poor, the people who don't have anywhere to go. And I did like 60 interviews with a whole bunch of different people and almost every one of them had had some encounter with the legal system. Either that's what made them homeless or they had done something legitimately wrong. But the legal system and their criminal record was a major and a massive obstacle for them to get back on their feet. If you had housing trouble and then you go to prison for a felony, getting off the streets is a Herculean task. 

It's just so difficult and almost impossible to do. Now, most of them, most of the people that I talked to would acknowledge they had done something wrong that should have resulted in punishment. But almost all of them, I think, would also acknowledge that once you get branded a felon or that you're encountering with the legal system, you lost your money. That's not a place that you were going to go and get any recompense. You were not going to get your life turned around by the legal system. And the other thing is that almost all of them had been victims of violence, often violence from other unhoused people. But the last thing that they would do is call the police, not because they didn't think the police were bad people or evil or were going to beat them up, although some of them did think that, but just there was no way the police were going to step in and protect homeless from attacks on other homeless people that was not a crime that our legal system is set up to address. 

So I guess I sort of agree with Pierre Schlagg and my own research just on housing resonates very much with what Victor Hugo was writing about 150 years ago. But the bottom line to all of this is that the legal system treats rich and poor people very differently and rigid legalist approaches to the law do more to keep poor people poor. The point is that we should approach the study and practice the law with all of these questions on the table instead of pretending that the legal system is an objective fact driven place where everyone can get treated evil. All right, that is idea number one. 

It is critical legal studies. Idea number two, what makes a revolution worthwhile? I pointed this out in a prior episode, so this is just going to be a quick recap, but history proves that it is entirely possible to have a revolution to throw off a legitimately oppressive regime and end up with something that is no better or maybe worse. The thumbnail sketches like this in 1848, Karl Marx writes the Communist Manifesto, and that's a fascinating year for Les Mis because it's also the year that Victor Hugo is working on behalf of Louis Napoleon to overthrow the sucky King Louis Philippe. It is of course not the last thing that Karl Marx will write, but that's just an interesting moment in history. Marx is very prolific. He's got a whole bunch of other stuff to say, but 1848 is the year the Communist Manifesto comes into being. The basic point of Marx was that the really wealthy elite were oppressing everyone else, and that there needed to be a revolution of the people to take power. 

There's a lot of good that you can say about Marx. He really did his homework. He was very interested in making the world a better place. He had some very good points about the abuses of the Industrial Revolution, and if you've ever doubted the power of ideas and scholarship to alter the course of history, he's your guy. 

There's obviously a lot since then that I'm going to talk about. There's also a whole bunch of unfair criticism of Marx, but it is not just the case Marxism equals bad. There's a lot of stuff in his writing that is, I'm going to use the word revolutionary to describe the way we think about society and the poor. But of course, the aftermath of Marx is definitely not a seamless path towards human progress and democracy. The two most significant instances of Marxist ideas put into action are Russia and China, and neither really improved the lives of the most dispossessed Russia, of course, overthrew the royalist czars, but descended into a Stalinist dictatorship, and China threw off a Western oppression and the emperor system, but it became a Maoist dictatorship, and the number of deaths attributable to both are in the tens of millions. I think it's fair to say that something went wrong between when Marx was writing his books in the British Library, and when Joseph Stalin murdered 20 million people. There are many answers to the relationship between Marxism, revolutions, and what happens after revolutions, and I think Victor Hugo had a really good one. 

Okay, so that's enough backstory. We have talked about the critical legal studies movement. We have talked about the writing of Karl Marx and the question of what makes a revolution worthwhile. Let's get back to the book. All right, starting with a quick recap of the plot. The entire thing is reviewed in the last episode. If you are not deep in all 1500 pages, what that book's talking about, that's probably worth listening to. 

But here are the parts from that long description I'm going to take out that I think speak to the questions of what is the core meaning of this. The hero, of course, is Jon Valjean, who once transformed by the Bishop Muriel's act of undeserved mercy. He is a criminal, he is angry, and Muriel gives him silver candlesticks that after Valjean steals from him, some silver candlesticks, Muriel gives him even more silver candlesticks, then that eventually leads to a transformation of Valjean who realizes that, I have been granted mercy by this priest, he has told me to go out and put good in the world, and by God he does. His character is transformed, so he then he goes and he saves the guy under the cart. He tries to save Fantine, although he can't. He does save a fellow galley slave. He saves Cozette, that's the mission of his life. He saves Marius by carrying him out of the barricades and into the sewers, and he gives up his own happiness for Cozette. When Cozette is forced to choose between Marius and Jon Valjean, Valjean willingly gives up his own happiness for their benefit. He is the one who does what's right, especially when it's outside the scope of the law and when he doesn't have to, and when he's not obligated to do so and would be easier for him to not do the right thing. After that initial transformation, Jon Valjean always does the right thing, and often it is not an expense. That's Valjean, he's the hero. 

The bad guy is Javier. He is rigidly legalistic. He pursues legal rules even when they result in immoral ends. He is crushed under the weight of his own flawed beliefs. In the last episode we talked about the true life encounter that Victor Hugo had with the prostitute, where sort of a rich guy came up and threw some snow down the back of her dress, and then she kind of smacked him and the police showed up and arrested her for smacking him, even though really she had kind of been the victim, and Hugo took from that. 

The point of the legal system is not so much to dispense justice, but if a rich person comes into contact with a poor person, you look at the behavior of the poor person, scour it to see if you can find something illegal that they did, and if you can find it, then you say that you have violated the law, the law is sacrosanct, you must go to prison, and the rich people basically get off. Javier is sort of the instrument of that happening in the text. He's the guy who would definitely show up and arrest the prostitute. 

In fact, there is an episode that's almost identical to that that happens in the text. Javier wants to arrest Fantine for prostitution and for attacking somebody who was insulting her because she was a prostitute, and Javier has no problem with that. He's like, all that matters is the law. 

If you violated the law, it's my job to enforce that. He is untroubled by the questions that the critical legal studies folk would bring up and ask, is that really fair? What makes him the bad guy is that he is rigidly legalistic. And then the just evil people are the Thernodiers who seek to advance themselves at the expense of others. They are oppressed by the state and the legal systems themselves, but they don't see communion or commonality with their fellow oppressed. 

They just see a series of marks that they can go ahead and swindle, and if they can steal money from other people and advance themselves, that's as far as their revolutionary thoughts go. And then all the other characters, even Cosette, even Maris, even Gavrash, are well-rounded characters. I mean, just about everything in the 1500-page novel, everybody who shows up as a well-rounded character, are there, but they are not really driving the central plot, which is Jean Valjean's quest. 

Maris is a young revolutionary with courage but not wisdom. Gavrash is a noble street urchin who's not saved by anyone, because that would be one of the miserable had she not been saved by Jean Valjean, but all of those and what happens to them are characters outside of the central action, which is what Jean Valjean is doing. So the central conflict of this book is between Jean Valjean's approach to justice and that of Haver. The revolution is the backdrop for where this plays out. The revolution is neither good nor bad, but the oppressive presence of the royalty must be thrown off, and the revolution will not be judged for overthrowing anything, but for how well it sorrows the poor. The law and the church are judged by the same measure. 

If the law is not just, it does not matter. If the church is not holy, it does not matter unless they advance the living conditions to the poor. And that scene that is talked about by Lashmet, where there is a former revolutionary politician, encounters a priest, and by the end, the priest asks for the absolution by the revolutionary, is because the revolutionary says, what I did was I fought against ignorance and poverty, and the priest recognizes that that's a higher calling than he is engaged with the church. And so the priest says, you are holier than I, you are attacking poverty, the true evil, and so I need your absolution. That then for Hugo is the measure of all things. 

Are you serving the needs of the poor and Valjean with what he does is and how there with his narrow legalistic interpretations is not. And this interpretation ties up neatly a bunch of questions about revolutions. My question is what happens after the revolution? I had asked that previously, and the answer is the important thing that needs to happen after the revolution is you have to serve the needs of the poor. 

And if you don't, you descend into chaos like France did, or you descend into dictatorship like Russia and China, and arguably, depending on how you read the life of Napoleon, France also turned into a dictatorship. It also ties up the question about why the book that everyone thinks is about the revolution has so many sidebars and so many side quests about so many detailed things, but has so little in the text that actually addresses the revolution. People think that this book is about the revolution of 1789, and it's not. And this interpretation answers why of all the revolutionary moments that he could have picked, Hugo chooses this three-day obscure rebellion that was immediately crushed. It's because that event led him focus on and explore the core moral questions that the revolution raises and center itself on whether or not you are doing the right thing after the revolution, rather than centering itself on the question of did you successfully overthrow the old regime? The last point nicely ties together some of the commentary that we covered in the previous episodes, but Rent is an author who is writing for the International Socialist Review, and not surprisingly, measures Les Mis on how much it advances a concrete revolutionary agenda. There's an author named Berman who starts by noting that many want the book to lay out a clear political program and says he initially did too, but ends up by saying it's really an epic poem that says the key to success is making sense of sadness. But LaShmit and Grossman, those are two other authors. LaShmit is our undergraduate hero. 

Grossman is writing some high-end scholarship for the Twain author series. They have a different take. They say that Hugo's belief is that the core revolutionary question is spiritual and not political. He's calling readers to focus on the true purpose of read and minimize patient, not focus on a military strategy, not focus on a revolutionary tactic. Marx and Lenin Stalin definitely were focused on the revolutionary tactics with the idea that the main thing they think is we've got to make this revolution work. We have to successfully overthrow the oppressive power structure. And what Hugo says is, nope, you've got to focus on how well you serve the poor. And that's going to be more important than whether or not your revolutionary succeeds. 

Okay, I'm going to stop here to make this point because this is the thing that just blows my mind. Hugo is writing, you know, he's finishing the book in 1860. He's sort of talking right after Marx did in 1848. And Marx is saying, we need the people's revolution. Hugo says, okay, you can have your revolution and you can say it's for the workers, but I have watched the revolution come and go and I have seen that it does not serve the needs of the poor. And in fact, he calls out the people in the 1832 revolution. 

He saw it and he's like, okay, well, yes, we need to have the revolution, but we can't have this kind of mindless bloodshed in that 1832 rebellion was spontaneous. It wasn't planned. It didn't have a clear political agenda. 

It didn't have any idea about what they would do after it. It was a combination of Bono partists who were in favor of an emperor and Republicans who were opposed to an emperor, but also opposed to the king. They both opposed the king. I guess the enemy's enemy is my friend on the barricade. But for Hugo, he was saying, but you guys don't have any idea what you're going to do when this is over and how you're going to help the poor. 

And if all you're doing is throwing rocks at the soldiers, you might win, but that will not accomplish anything. That theme comes screaming out of the life of Victor Hugo and it is definitively present in Les Mis. And what is impressive to me is that while Marx is calling for the revolution and while people like Stalin and Mao are reading Marx's books and planning the revolution, Victor Hugo is correctly calling what is going to happen. He is calling the outcome of the Russian and the Chinese revolution, but he's not doing it retrospectively. He's doing it 50 years before either of them are going to happen. 

50 years is an approximation. Les Mis is a strong warning that the point isn't revolution, but how well the revolution treats the people. He is absolutely right about it. And he got that part of the formula that Marx missed. 

I think Marx thought there was a historical inevitability to it. If you just got rid of the bad guys, then peace and freedom would spring up. And I will say that is a very common political theme, even in American politics today. It's always like, oh my God, the Democrats are the worst thing ever. They're letting immigrants, they're going to kill people. 

If we can just get rid of them, everything will be fine. Or Donald Trump is the devil incarnate. He's dumb and he's mean and he's abusive and his personal life is disaster. 

We just have to get him out. But if you look at, you know, if you were an immigrant trying to get into the United States, your life is frankly not all that different if it is Trump or if it is Biden. And both sides of the political spectrum continually pointed as are the other side is this huge terrible power. We must defeat them. And if we just get rid of them, peace and freedom will reign. The economy will take off because they're the problem that's stopping it. And Victor Hugo was saying 150 years ago, it's not just about getting rid of the tyrant. 

I will agree with you. They might legitimately be a tyrant, but you've got to have a plan on how you are going to focus on the poor people after you win the revolution. And if you don't do that, it's going to be a failure. That's what he said in 1860, the Chinese revolution, the Russian revolution, and more or less demonstrated that he was right. So that's what Victor Hugo, I think it's really all about. He could have written about his time in the legislature or his time on the barricades or his time in hiding or having his house stormed, which happened for any of the revolutions or the counter revolutions of the eight years of his life. In fact, we were just trying to write a good story. 

The time when he was 10 years old and his wife's lover, who was his godfather and was living in his house, was dragged out of the house by the soldiers and killed because he was part of a plot in favor of the king and opposed to Napoleon Bonobart. Now, I mean, that's better than your average lifetime movie plot. That would have been compelling, but that's not what he wrote about. The only military thing he put in was 1832 Revolution or not even Revolution, rebellion, which failed. He's not writing about that. What he is writing about is the conflict between Jean Valjean and Havre, the pursuit of justice regardless of the legal or theological systems in place, versus deference to authorities who claim to represent justice or faith. The quote that the politician has is that the king is a false authority. The only science is a true authority. And so to say that deference to authority, people who will claim to have truth and will claim to have justice, that's not it. 

That is what Havre believes and that is not true. And what impresses me the most is that he's writing about this. He's writing about the themes of critical legal studies, but he's doing so 100 years before Mark Tillman and the Harvard Law School caught up with him. 

Remember that in prior episodes, we've talked about this, but the first version of the text is called Jean Tréjean. And its central theme is a critique of the legal system. Now, the final version would link that back to the revolution, which I just talked about, but he is critiquing the legal system. 

And what is important to me in both cases is that Victor Hugo is talking about both of these things hundreds of years before others have caught up with him. All right. I guess that's sort of one I'll leave as the central theme. If you think of Havre and Jean Valjean as the center of the conflict, it's really just a question of who do you focus on emancipating the poor or do you just focus on rigid legal systems? 

Okay. So this gets to a final point that is sort of present in the hollow hope. The hollow hope author Rosenberg would say, don't go to the courts. There is not justice and revolution to be had there. You're not going to change society by doing that. You're going to change society by engaging in concrete political action. 

Hugo has a slightly different take on that or not a slightly big. A common thought is that politics is where important and powerful things happen. And art is about aesthetics and beauty. 

Poetry is fun, but it's frivolous. And the real changes to society happen in legislatures and corporate boardrooms. They don't happen in opera houses. They don't happen in playhouses. 

They don't happen at music concerts. But there is another thought out there. There was a guy named Chateau Breand, who is the biggest poet in France just before Victor Hugo was there. He actually also got exiled and actually got exiled to the same island that Victor Hugo was. But Chateau Breand truly believed that language and culture were the key to the condition of society. He thought that art could change the world. 

And I've seen people quote to say that nobody believed art could change the world more than Chateau Breand. And so what is Victor Hugo doing? Why is he writing Les Mis and why is he doing that in addition to or instead of all the political things he did? Because he was a high member of many, many different legislatures. He could have just said, I'm a politician. 

That is how I changed the world. I think he is actually writing Les Mis, not because he thinks that art can motivate politics, but because he thinks that art is more powerful than politics. You know, that's a callback to Chateau Breand. If I asked you to name who was the most successful French general after Napoleon, or who was the king of France in 1820, or who was Charles X, what was he said for? How was he different from Charles IX? How long was there between Charles X and Charles IX? Does it even matter that we skip from Louis XVI to Louis XVIII? 

Can you name any politician involved in the Third Republic of the Revolution of 1870? Probably not. And you are totally forgiven for not knowing. Outside some hardcore history buffs, nobody really knows that. It's not common knowledge. 

It's not part of our collective understanding of the way the world works. But when I say Jean Valjean, do you know who that is? And what he stood for, you do. 

And so do the tens of millions of people who read the book, or the 130 million people who have seen the musical. History has forgotten kings. It has forgotten generals. It has forgotten politicians who motivated the French Revolution in its aftermath. It has forgotten the people who are making the on-the-ground difficult political decisions and the consequences that they had, some incredibly consequential things for the history of the world have happened. But they are forgotten. They are not part of the public consciousness. 

They're not how we understand things. What they did is not unimportant. But if you're trying to change the world for the better, would you focus on the machinery of the state and the politics and the details of what makes an effective revolution in revolutionary politics? 

Or would you focus on their art? History has forgotten the kings, the generals, the politicians, and even the philosophers, but it remembers Les Miserables, and it remembers the storytellers, and it remembers Jean-Velge. And I think maybe that is a more lasting and enduring legacy. And I think that Victor Hugo knew that by writing this book, he was trying to put an idea out there that he thought would change the world. The theme of the book more than anything else is that the arc of history is slow, but it moves toward justice. 

I think that was one of the rallying cries of Martin Luther King. And it's definitely there in the work of Victor Hugo. The point of Les Mis, the point of much of what Victor Hugo had to say was, we're going to get it wrong a lot of the time. We are going to make mistakes, but we have to continually push towards emancipation to freedom. 

We have to focus on Les Miserables, the poor, the dispossessed of the earth, and as we stagger towards that, we are making progress. And he knew that it was going to be quick. He knew it wasn't going to be easy, but he knew that it was going to be spiritual. 

And that we had to focus on that and that art was the right way to get that message out. And in fact, if you were to say, hey, you were up here, France, you were elected to two different assemblies, you helped overthrow a king. How did you change the world, Victor Hugo? You would not have said, oh, well, I passed all these laws or I served on this legislature. He would have said, I wrote this book and I do think that's his legacy and I do think that's the ultimate meaning of it. Okay, that will do it for our interpretation of Les Miserables, but up next, there is a ghost story at the heart of this manuscript. I didn't say story at the heart of the manuscript. Victor Hugo was living on the island of Jersey in 1852, 1853, with a lot of things that he could work on. And it's not even clear like you're in exile. 

You can't go back to France anymore. Are you still an author? Not a politician? What are you working on, Victor Hugo? What was it that motivated him to finish that book Les Mis of all the things that he had to work on? Was it a voice from the spirit world accessed through a seance? I don't know that we're going to answer that question with certainty, but we are going to go through all the historical records and we're going to find out in the next episode of Theater, History and Mysteries.