Even idealistic love can deteriorate into possessiveness. Eventually, it must be refined into altruistic self-sacrifice—a theme also prominent in the novels of Hugo’s contemporaries Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Themes

So far we have discussed the prominent topics of self-sacrifice and supererogation in Les Misérables and throughout Hugo’s career, but we have not identified any themes. As the pun in Hugo’s title suggests, the theme he foregrounds in this novel is that we should not judge a book by its cover, or a person by appearances and social condition. Les Misérables can refer either to the underclass, people who are wretchedly poor, or to people who are morally depraved, or both. At one point, Jean Valjean calls himself un misérable in the second, moral sense. Hugo not only distinguishes between wealth and virtue, but also between premeditation and impulse (Jean Valjean acts impulsively when he steals the loaf of bread, or the chimneysweep’s coin), and between acts (Fantine’s prostitution) and their motives (her altruistic desire to support her daughter).

The initial inspiration for the creation of Jean Valjean, the protagonist of Les Misérables, probably came from Hugo’s work on Le Dernier Jour d‘un condamné a mort (The Last Day of a Condemned Man, 1829). He was a lifelong opponent of the death penalty, much in the spirit of the recent American films The Green Mile and Dead Man Walking. He dramatized the plight of prisoners in the galleys at Toulon, especially one who, like Jean Valjean, had initially been sentenced to five years at hard labor for stealing a loaf of bread. “There but for the grace of God go I” is his message. He emphasizes the brutalization of the poor by society. Like his contemporary Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist or Our Mutual Friend, he deconstructs the simplistic opposition of innocence and crime that allows us to evade social responsibility. Jean Valjean’s only actual crimes are two acts of petty larceny, plus a third of which he is falsely accused (stealing a loaf of bread, a coin, and some apples). Hugo’s attribution of near-Satanic resentment to him seems overblown, but Hugo is making the point he had made in Claude Gueux (Claude the Beggar): harsh law enforcement breeds the monsters it claims to want to eliminate (Grant, The Perilous Quest, pp.157—158; see “For Further Reading”).

But Hugo’s dominant theme, which pervades his novels, poems, and essays (less so his plays) on every level, and which guided his life for decades, is that individuals, the world, and the cosmos all need rescuers. In his personal life, from 1833 until her death decades later, Hugo felt that he was “redeeming” the “fallen woman” Juliette Drouet, his mistress, through his love—although he never seemed to worry about the moral import of his own extraordinary promiscuity. In society, through paternalistic charitable acts and strategies of enlightened self-interest that allow wealth to trickle down to the poor, the wealthy and privileged must act to alleviate suffering and improve the material conditions of humanity, increasing productivity and eliminating crime.

Critics have often spoken of Hugo’s keen visual sensitivity, manifested in the dramatic opposition of light and darkness in many scenes and in his striking visionary drawings, but they have not paid much attention to his use of color. It is important to recognize it, in order to understand the full profundity of his vision. In Les Misérables, bright colors and light accompany scenes of oblivious, shallow happiness. See, for instance, the color notations starting in paragraph five of “Four to Four,” chapter 3 of part I, book three: “long white strings,” “thick blond tresses,” “rosy lips,” “a dress of mauve barege, little reddish-brown buskins,” “sea-green eyes.” The sensuous iridescence of the material world gives way elsewhere to stark contrasts of good and evil, rendered in black and white; but the duality of these two non-colors is itself an illusion, as Hugo underlines in the chapter “Black and White,” in which Javert cannot endure the breakdown of his simplistic, polarized moral vision. Like colors, black and white are mere deceptive manifestations of a world based on a single ground of reality: God. The chapter explaining Napoléon’s defeat at Waterloo (and anticipating General Kutusov’s Providentialist meditations in Tolstoy’s War and Peace) explains this vision clearly in another way, through causality rather than through color.

As this discussion of the symbolism of color versus black and white just above suggests, Hugo often implies themes rather than stating them, by relating two passages of which the second nevertheless invites a new interpretation of the pair through its manifest contrasts with the first: he achieves a dialectical movement of thesis—antithesis—synthesis. In this way he particularly exploits the archetype of Inversion, and pairs of digressions. Inversion refers to a transvaluation of values, whereby that which had seemed bad proves good, or vice versa. Hugo invokes negative inversion to characterize the police agent Javert when the latter learns that M. Madeleine, who had humiliated him earlier, is really the convict Jean Valjean: “A monstrous Saint Michael,” Javert seems both imposing and hideous. “The pitiless, sincere joy of a fanatic in an act of atrocity preserves an indescribably mournful radiance.... Nothing could be more poignant and terrible than this face, which revealed what we may call all the evil of good” (p. 194). The sinister, deformed grandeur of Thénardier’s visionary engraving of Napoléon may also exemplify this archetype, like a spider’s ambition to rival the sun (p. 437; compare the poem in Les Contemplations, “Puissance égale bonté”). Thénardier, by trying to capture the emperor’s image, seems to aspire to appropriate for himself the soul of N apoléon’s genius.

The positive form of Inversion reveals that what seemed bad, proves good. Outstanding examples are the Beatitudes in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:2—12), and the Passion and Resurrection (Matthew 27—28, Mark 15—16, Luke 23—24, John 19—20).