Reflections on Les Miserables
Thoughts on the novel, the original French concept album, and the English musical
The Novel
I thought I had read Les Miserables before, but I probably hadn’t, since my recent read seemed almost entirely new to me, aside from my cultural familiarity with the story and themes. I did read, in tenth-grade French class, a very abridged version of the theft of the Bishop’s silver near the start of the novel, but that doesn’t count for much in the present discussion.
Harold Goddard writes that when we read a piece of imaginative literature for the first time, we should dampen our critical cognitive faculties lest we miss out on the high-level emotional impact of the work, which is strongest upon and unique to the first reading. Searching for detailed understanding deeper meaning should be postponed for subsequent readings. Let the work flow over you that first time, even if it means — which inevitably it will in as fulsome a work as Les Miserables — not catching all the artistic nuance and even some of the basic material.
I mention this because the thoughts presented below are necessarily limited in their depth and insight because this was my first reading. Nevertheless, I believe that communicating such “first impressions” has value in itself. The seasoned or professional literary critic (of which I claim neither status) will usually have read a work of imaginative fiction several times before writing on it. This itself results in the loss of communicating that first impression unadulterated by subsequent readings. I make no argument against re-reading; I’m a firm believer in it. But reporting a fresh take has its own value, too.
Because nearly one-third of this enormous novel consists in lengthy digressions, I began, fairly early on in my reading, to compare this immense and great novel to another one that had been published only eleven years earlier (1851): Moby Dick, by Hermann Melville. My most recent re-reading of The Whale renewed my annoyance at the highly detailed and sometimes quite technical interstitial essays on whales and whaling. I found these to be generally uninteresting, though I confess to a deference to the artist in his craft, even if I don’t quite get what he’s up to. (Certainly, pacing is involved, among other motivations.) It may be that I’ll experience those essays, which comprise about half of Moby Dick, more positively upon my next reading, and I’m sure that there have been all kinds of ideas floated — perhaps even by the author himself — about what he was up to with them. For me, they were mostly boring filler.
As I say, within a quarter, perhaps less, of the way through Les Miserables, I began feeling that same tinge of annoyance I had with Moby Dick. Hugo’s lengthy discourses on a wide variety of subjects, which I’ll list in a moment, certainly did interrupt the flow of the novel’s plot and action. However, whereas Melville’s essays were fixed relentlessly on a single subject and struck me as gratuitous, self-indulgent, and without clear purpose, Hugo’s were for the most part illuminating and relevant, if sometimes overwrought. My annoyance, therefore, was triggered more by the similarity with Moby Dick, and also because the plot of Les Miserables was so exciting that I couldn’t wait to get on with it and so found the interruptions annoying. Until I got over it. In this light, Hugo’s discourses are really an ingenious device for building suspense while at the same time imparting a tremendous amount of both foregrounding and backgrounding to provide depth and nuance to the plot and the characters.
Here is a mostly complete list of the subjects of these digressions on nineteenth century France: The life of rural bishops; the French penal system; the battle of Waterloo; the bourgeoisie; religious orders and convent life; the cultural impact and necessity of slang; the street urchins of Paris; the revolts from 1830-32; the Parisian sewer system; and of course the condition and causes of those living in abject poverty. On average, they were each around fifty pages. These discourses are delivered in a voice of confident knowledge and research. I am unable to fact-check much of this, so I take Hugo at his word, though historians may differ in some cases.
While I was won over to favoring these expiations — abridged versions of the novel that omit them do considerable violence to its spirit and structure — I feel that in some cases, at least, Hugo would have been well advised to edit them down a bit, but I forgive that small criticism for two reasons: First, I again defer in general to the artist’s sensibility, style, and intentions; second, this is a highly subjective preference that probably has more to do with my personal tastes, along with twenty-first century tastes in general that likes to get on with the plot, than with any purposeful literary critique.
This is not a book report or even a review, and I will not go through the plot. Instead, I’d like to give my impressions while still in the heat of the first reading that Goddard refers to as being of such value. Most of them will be of a more global nature than any plot or character commentary would provide, and I assume for brevity’s sake that the reader of this essay has some general familiarity with the plot.
Hugo’s narrator is not strictly third-person omniscient, though reading a randomly selected ten, twenty, or fifty pages would likely make you think it is. Hugo occasionally inserts himself (e.g., “the present author” or such), sometimes to indicate his particular opinion or perspective, sometimes to hint at an experience he had related to the events described. In fact, he makes it clear several times that the narrator is, in fact, the real-life famous writer Victor Hugo. It’s an unusual and experimental technique that could, in less masterful hands easily degenerate into confusion and slop. As I say, Hugo doesn’t deviate frequently from the omniscient narrator, but in a very long book like this, he does so enough to make an impact. His swerves to himself can be a bit distracting, but they also have their charm. Perhaps his purpose was to offer a little more connection, even intimacy, between the writer and reader, and I can imagine this is what he was going for. He pulls it off in the sense that it’s not so distracting to its being a problem, and the mentioned benefit may well overwhelm any distraction.
Les Miserables was published in 1862, which strictly speaking puts it just past the generally accepted period of Romantic literature spanning roughly the first half of the nineteenth century. However, Hugo worked on it over seventeen years before its publication, and he is generally considered to be a Romantic writer. I would suggest that Les Miserables could be exhibit A in any survey of the genre, though it differs considerably from its English and American Romantic counterparts (which also differ quite a bit from one another). There is nothing gothic here, as in, say, Frankenstein or Wuthering Heights. There is no distant historic or place setting as in the works of Hawthorne, Cooper, Byron and Scott. This is by no means a novel of manners like Jane Austen’s rightly celebrated works. Hugo does, however, adhere to, indeed, epitomizes the most basic principles of Romanticism, where subjective feeling and imagination are elevated above all else. Les Miserables is a triumph of that spirit, in plot, structure, and especially in language, which is very often soaring, the latter not unexpectedly since Hugo was in his lifetime more celebrated as a poet than as a novelist. Beyond language, the action is often thrilling, even swashbuckling. In the culture of 2025 — indeed of all my lifetime (born 1962) — his writing style might be judged by many as over-the-top flowery with exaggerated and windy superlatives. But hey, I kinda dig that.
In Les Miserables, Hugo was not going for realism, which is a hallmark of most post-Romantic literature, even while trying to portray a very real thing: The great suffering of the most impoverished and abused people. His method instead is to portray the conditions and misery of such people simultaneously on the grandest scale as well as with microscopic examination. And it’s enormously effective. It’s difficult to imagine who could remain unmoved toward the plight of those living with extreme privation after reading this novel. And this, I think, is his objective. He has no less lofty aspiration than to change the world in a significant way — he said so explicitly in his famous letter to his Italian publisher — by shining a very bright light on the disparity of fortune between people. It’s not clear that this book has had any less influence on this problem than Karl Marx’s (a close contemporary) Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, though of course the problem remains with us today.
A brief digression on style: I have read no one more fond of commas, semicolons, and lists than Hugo. It’s a deep part of his idiom. And that’s perfectly fine with me, though I’m aware it grates on others. Again, if I were his editor, I might have suggested a certain amount of paring, particularly of those lists of person- and place-names familiar to people in mid-nineteenth century France but not to the rest of us. This is a quibble, though. That’s his style, and he’s entitled to it. It has the virtue of adding considerable emphasis to whatever point he’s making, though one feels at times that he’s showing off his erudition.
I’ve alluded to this already, but the story itself is simply thrilling. There are many places where the action is so exciting that you can’t wait to see what’s going to happen (often interrupted by those lengthy digressions). Those who insist on realism may complain that there are too many coincidences — and there are a lot. For example, Jean Valjean, the Thenardiers (now, Jondretts), and Marius Pontmercy all happen to live, at certain points, in the very same boarding house in Paris, despite their being brought together through other plot elements. To anyone disturbed by this, I’d advise letting go of their attachment to realism to better appreciate the art, by which I mean the picture being painted in words. It simply doesn’t matter that it’s not realistic, and I challenge anyone to say why it does. Van Gogh’s brush didn’t paint realistically, yet he conveyed enormous feeling in his work. That’s what matters, at least for someone aligned with (as I am) or appreciative of the Romantic style.
Hugo drew a set of characters with astonishing presence and depth in the novel. Foremost among them, with one exception I’ll come to in a moment, are Thenardier, Eponine, and Gavroche. These are highly original and magnificently colored inventions of humans. I use the word “invention” in the same sense that Harold Bloom uses it in his declaration that Shakespeare “invented” the modern human in his representations. The word is hyperbolic, of course; for example, Gavroche has antecedents in the picaresque characters that came out of sixteenth century Spanish literature. Nevertheless, the word is apt; these characters are extraordinary inventions.
But the most extraordinary of all in the novel is Jean Valjean, who must rank among the greatest protagonists in literature. When your protagonist has significant elements in him of Christ and of the patriarch Jacob, along with dashes of Hector, Achilles, Othello, Lear, Brutus, and Antony, he’s going to have a pretty big presence. Valjean, like Walt Whitman, contains multitudes. He is the poor tree-pruner who steals a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s family. He is the prison convict nineteen years at hard labor who escapes three times. He is a man of superhuman physical and mental strength and stamina. He is the bitterest of men following his release from prison. He is a man transfigured by the forgiveness and love of a saintly bishop (himself Christ-like). He reinvents himself into a wealthy, benevolent businessman and community leader. He is a man confronted by a series of moral dilemmas with supernal meditation, determined always to do the morally right thing. He is a man deeply in doubt to the end of his life that he has done so adequately. He is never proud; he always retains the shame of his past wrongs and is humbled by them. He has never known a woman. Until his last moments, he believes he has never been loved by anyone. He is the person in whom you’d place your trust beyond anyone. He is always trying to be good, to make good on the bishop’s admonition to be so. He puts everyone else first. His determination to do the right thing is unflagging. His moral rectitude is in some ways even greater than the bishop’s, because he is more real and has been on the other side of it. He is the first modern superhero. He faces with fierce resolution epic struggles as titanic as Ulysses or any other literary figure. He is greatness personified.
Let’s take a moment to look at the Christ and Jacob aspects, which are about as lofty as can be. With Jesus he shares sustained profound suffering. Jesus’ passion lasted about a week, Valjean’s all his life. I’m reminded of a remark Harold Goddard made in his essay on Hamlet, which Shakespeare wrote directly after Julius Caesar: That in the latter play, Shakespeare was interested in a man who resolved a moral dilemma quickly (Brutus, in the span of a few hours), and so it might be natural for him to want to study another man (Hamlet) who took quite a bit longer. (In fact, Hugo writes in the novel, “Make your choice, Brutus.”) Perhaps Hugo (himself a great Shakespeare scholar) wanted to consider a Christ-like figure whose passion endured his entire life. There are other connections with Jesus, but I’ll set them aside.
As for Jacob, Hugo makes the connection explicit: “Jacob struggled with the angel but one night. Alas! how many times have we beheld Jean Valjean seized bodily by his conscience, in the darkness, and struggling desperately against it!” Again, we have Jacob, who wrestled Yahweh (or an angel) to obtain God’s Blessing during one night, and we have Valjean, who had to wrestle his whole life for it (or for something highly analogous). To me, this is the most poignant and moving part of a story that has many. Valjean received his blessing just moments before his death, in discovering that he was loved after all (by Cosette and Marius). While the immediate comparison is with Jacob, consider, too, Moses, who never received Yahweh’s explicit blessing of the promised land, and in the end was even barred from entering it. Had Cosette and Marius arrived a few short moments later, and Valjean would have been as much Moses as Jacob. Valjean’s entry into his own land of Canaan is Hugo’s native idealism and optimism at work. In this light we can better understand the surname Hugo gave to Marius: Pontmercy, which literally means “bridge to grace.”
There are pages more I could write about my first impressions of the novel, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll leave it here to give space for what may interest more people: The relationships between the novel and its musical descendents.
Musical derivatives
I turn now to the musical adaptations of the novel over the past 40 years. I first heard the original French concept album (1980) upon which was built the much more famous English stage musical production of “Les Miz” before I ever heard the latter. I found the music, lyrics, and performances of the French version beautiful, tender, and exciting. Now that I've read the novel, I can confirm the vague sense I had back then that the music was faithful to its spirit. A couple of years after first hearing the original, I went to see the touring English-language musical in San Francisco in 1991. I came away rather unimpressed, but told myself that it’s possible that I was just stuck on the version I was familiar with, and therefore might be unfairly biased. I watched the 2018 cinematic version of the musical soon after it came out, and was even less impressed. I’ll say a bit about why in a moment, but first a few words on how and why these three vehicles of essentially the same music are, and ought to be, different from one another.
I think of the concept album as a series of snapshots of the novel, each song being a set-piece for that moment in the story. Although the performers sing the songs brilliantly and with great emotional intensity, the French original does not try to represent a perfectly continuous and complete story. It’s called a concept album for a reason: To be an outline for a fuller staged show as well as to provide the songs. There’s no narrative that lies outside the songs themselves, and in contrast to the staged musical and film, the album can't provide it visually (the musical and film also provide some narrative through a little recitative). And building out the concept album is exactly what happened, to everyone’s credit. The musical connected the set-pieces in various traditional ways, with greater or lesser effectiveness. The important thing for the present purpose is that the goal of the staged musical to tell a coherent and continuous story places significant constraints on what the musical can and can't do, and this is what I don’t feel was managed as well as might be hoped.
The greatest constraint, then, for the staged musical was the need to insert into the songs themselves more narrative of the story than the originals had. In fact, most of the narrative in the musical is developed through changes in the lyrics of the songs themselves, while a smaller proportion is through visual action and recitative. Since a change in language would inevitably require lots of alterations to the lyrics, why not change them as well to fill in the necessary narrative? I’m not suggesting anything nefarious, only a plausible and natural rationale for the musical lyrics to have departed so dramatically from those of the French concept album. Which they do, sometimes more, sometimes less. For example, the poetic characteristics of the original songs, which they have in abundance, were likely to be lost without great care being taken. It may even be that the preservation of the poetry was irreconcilable with the need to include more narrative, though I doubt that. My claim is simply that more care might have been taken.
Translations of prose are fraught with difficulty; translating poetry — or, since I don’t claim that the lyrics of the concept album constitute poetry, elevated language — is orders more problematic, because there are so many qualities to try to balance and preserve, including meter, rhyme scheme, metaphor, word-play, word color and nuance, and the “language music” — the sound of the words and phrases. Just as a good poem is the only possible complete analysis of itself, the original language is the only way to preserve all aspects of a poem. The best one can hope for is to minimize the damage done, which for me means above all preserving the spirit of the original. By spirit, I chiefly mean two things: That music of the language just mentioned, which as a poet, Hugo was very sensitive to and incorporated lovingly into the novel. More important, and not entirely separate, is the thematic content. In examples below, I will show that a large part of the most important themes in the novel — above all, the suffering of the most unfortunate — was neglected or diminished in the movement from the original French songs to the musical.
An English translation from the French concept album lyrics I have access to exemplifies these hazards. It’s only a bit of an overstatement to say that it’s only a little better than what Google Translate gives you. (In fact, it appears that the translation represents small tweaks to a Google translation.) The English translation is stiff and literal, and most of the poetic elements of the original songs were lost. My point is that it’s difficult to preserve the spirit, and compromises are impossible to eliminate.
To illustrate, let’s compare the two versions of the first verse of “J’avais reve d’une autre vie.” The first is my own translation from the French:
I dreamed a dream of another life
But this life murdered those dreams,
As the hunter extinguishes the cries
Of his prey before she screams.
My goal here was to preserve as much as I could the metaphorical sense of the original French while keeping the meter and rhyme scheme the same, which is particularly important for a song. Here is the equivalent English lyric of the musical:
I dreamed a dream in time gone by,
When hope was high and life, worth living.
I dreamed that love would never die,
I dreamed that God would be forgiving.
Compare the vividness of the snuffing out of life and the prey’s dying cries with the cliched abstractions and tropes of never-dying love and of God’s forgiveness. The sense and tone of the French original that I’ve tried to capture is a violent one, for good reason. The translation for the musical has none of that, speaking only of the rainbows and unicorns of the dream. And for some reason, the lyricists of the musical decided to lose entirely the lovely symmetry of dreaming of another life than the one that killed those dreams. This is where the two losses cited above of language and theme come together. The violent imagery of the last two lines of the my translation above are important not only for the elevated language for its own sake, but critically for the feeling it conveys that is so important to the novel. Such changes in style, sentiment, theme, and poetic sensibility occur throughout the transformation from the original to the musical, which I feel is a pity, particularly since so many more know the story through the musical than through the novel or the concept album.
Another example involves the chorus of the most rousing song in either the original or the musical, from “A la volonte du peuple” (“To the will of the people”). Here is my translation of the original:
To the will of the people,
And the health of better ends;
Fill your heart with rebel wine
And tomorrow, faithful friend:
We’ll shine a brilliant beacon
Through the darkness of the night
To illuminate our land
And our plight.
Compare with the English from the musical:
Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!
The emotional contrast between these two versions is the same I feel when comparing “America the Beautiful” with “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The former is an emotional appeal to the best of the American people and land, while the latter is a martial anthem. This makes all the difference if one is interested in guarding the spirit of the novel. And again, the version from the musical consists mainly in abstractions with no metaphorical element: Anger, enslavement, a new life tomorrow. The original version contains two rich metaphors: Toasting the will of the people to fight for better lives, and shining a light to reveal the truth of their wretched condition. A few lines here and there of the French lyrics may be a bit awkward or forced, but overall, they are poetic, as suits perfectly a novel written by one of his country’s foremost poets.
I have only tried in my translations to capture a taste of the poetic spirit of the former. At the very least, what is lost in them is what is almost always lost: The music of the words, including alliteration, near-homophones, puns, the precise vividness of metaphors, etc. Again, the French version doesn’t always succeed perfectly, but the sounds of the words and phrases are generally very nicely matched with the musical phrasing (enhanced, naturally, by performance).
For a final example contrasting the lyrics, I turn now to “Demain” (“Tomorrow”) from the original, which becomes “One Day More” in the musical. It’s the last song of the first act, so standard musical theater rules require that it be a big, rousing, dramatic number, and neither version disappoints on that score. Now, one unfamiliar with the original might say, “well, they’re both playing off the suspense and drama of ‘tomorrow,’ so what's the difference?” And yes, what’s to come tomorrow is a big part of both versions. In the original, the first word of almost every verse sung by six of the seven parts of this astonishing septet is “demain,” followed by what tomorrow means to each. In contrast with the musical, where Jean Valjean punctuates these other parts with “one day more,” the original puts into his mouth the words “comment faire?” (“how to do it?). Why does that matter? One of the great through-lines in the novel is Valjean being mired in one moral dilemma after another, and the line “comment faire” stands in for that here — how can he resolve the dilemma facing him while doing right and good as he must do? The musical entirely misses this critical point about his struggles, which form an essential part of the novel, instead using Valjean’s part to simply repeat and underscore the theme of “tomorrow” with “one day more.” Far too much of the spirit of the novel, which rests foundationally on Valjean’s struggling with moral dilemmas, is lost in translation.
But perhaps the single biggest cause of the differences between the French and English musical derivatives has to do with differences between the two cultures themselves, particularly to the ways they attach to the novel. As Hugo correctly asserted, the novel speaks to all peoples, but it is also essentially and quintessentially French. It’s about the universality of poverty and suffering, but it’s also about some important French history. It’s about Paris. It’s about rural and urban France, their customs, attitudes, their greatness and their deficits. Every culture has these, and they’re all both subtly and importantly different. Hugo’s story — along with the beauty of this poet laureate’s writing — is in the bones of the French people. This is sufficient reason to defer trust to them to make and perform their own story, which I believe was conceived and executed brilliantly in the original.
These are, of course, my own highly subjective opinions, and may be controversial. Music is one of the things people can be most attached to, so if you’re a huge fan of the film or the musical it was based on, I mean no offense. I’ve simply done my best to show, with examples, why I find the original French concept album to better reflect the aspirations and spirit of the superb novel that engendered both. I hope these reflections will spur you to read the novel if you haven’t, and to contrast both sets of music.