Appropriately expressing his tidy sense of structure, Hugo frames his epic novel with nesting layers of inversions. At the beginning and the end, we learn that humility can exalt the soul (in Bishop Myriel, whose last name is a near-anagram of “lumière” or light, and in Jean Valjean). In the middle, Javert’s bad excess of goodness yields to his shocked awareness of the possible goodness of badness, as he learns of Jean Valjean’s moral sublimity.

Near the end, Jean Valjean thematizes Inversion as he wins his final spiritual battle by confessing his past to Marius. Speaking for the author, who unlike all his contemporaries accepted two decades of exile rather than make any compromise with Napoleon III, he explains, “In order that I may respect myself, I must be despised. Then I hold myself erect. I am a galley slave who obeys his conscience. I know well that is improbable [ressemblant]. But what would you have me do? it is so” (p. 779). The word ressemblant echoes Hugo’s pirouette at the beginning of the novel, as he concludes his idealized moral portrait of Bishop Myriel—“We do not claim that the portrait which we present here is plausible [ressemblant]; we say only that it resembles him” (p. 15). This subtle, nearly subliminal association of the two men reminds us of Myriel’s enduring moral influence on Valjean. Switching from the narrator’s voice to the hero’s voice in the second of these mirroring scenes makes the novel’s moral impact more immediate at the climax.

Hugo’s historical and cultural digressions set the stage for the characters, explain the limits of their possibilities, and often hint at, foreshadow, or symbolize what he sees as an overarching spiritual odyssey of Fall and Redemption. Unless we sin in thought or deed, we cannot benefit from grace and ascend nearer God. William Blake’s scandalous slogan “Damn braces; bless relaxes,” like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s concept of Faustian striving with its inevitable errors as essential to spiritual progress, are earlier, condensed versions of Hugo’s theme that godliness requires us to reject society’s image of a God who demands self-righteousness and conformity.

Hugo’s five main pairs of digressions are:

1) “The Year 1817” (p. 73) and ”The Story of an Improvement in Jet-Work” (p. 99), which contrast social irresponsibility and responsibility; 2) ”Waterloo“ (p. 205) and the Convent of the Perpetual Adoration (described in part II, books six and seven, which do not appear in this unabridged edition), which contrast self-aggrandizement and material pomp with self-effacing service and spiritual grandeur; 3) the street urchin (p. 341) and the underworld (part III, book seven, chapters 1 and 2), contrasting social dysfunction in the idealistic child and the corrupt adult; 4) King Louis Philippe (part IV, book one) and slang (part IV, book six, chapter 3), contrasting the summit and the underside of society; and 5) the origins of the insurrection of June 5—6,1832, (see the unabridged edition) and the sewers of Paris (part V, book two), offering political and metaphorical analyses of social corruption. The brutal treatment of the workers who provide the foundations of prosperity causes rebellion; similarly, unless the sewers are studied, rebuilt, and cleaned out, he argues, they will overflow onto the streets above as they have done before. Flushing fecal matter into rivers poisons our environment and wastes a precious potential resource, Hugo argues, as does locking the poor into prisons. Hugo skewers the euphemistic pseudo-progress that claims to be making humanitarian advances while merely changing the words or their order, which refer to our instruments of control. ”Formerly these grim cells, in which prison discipline delivers the condemned to himself, were composed of four stone walls, a stone ceiling, a floor of paving stones, a camp bed, a grated air-hole, a door reinforced with iron, and were called dungeons; but the dungeon came to be thought too horrible: today it is composed of an iron door, a grated air-hole, a camp bed, a floor of paving stones, a stone ceiling, four stone walls, and it is called a punitive detention cell” (p. 566).

The Writer’s Role

Hugo believed that the culture hero must also enter politics to ensure social justice, as he did before and after his exile, during the 1840s and 1870s. There he preached international understanding, imagining (like Thomas Paine, Immanuel Kant, and Madame de Staël before him) a united Europe led by France together with the German states. The genius must reveal God’s purposes to humans. When unable to act directly—Hugo’s situation during his two decades of exile on the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey—he can write; and writing always supplements personal contacts. Thus, Les Misérables.

Les Misérables focuses on the work of class reconciliation. The title, a syllepsis (a supersegmental pun, a word used with two different meanings depending on its context), seems to confuse material poverty (la misère; les misérables are the impoverished underclass) with moral degradation (un misérable can mean a wretch or morally reprehensible person), but Hugo’s plot of fall and redemption works precisely to dissociate the two notions through the protagonist Jean Valjean’s progressive regeneration. Poverty dehumanizes the poor, Hugo demonstrates, leading to prostitution, child abuse, and other crimes that subject the underclass to a purely punitive prison system that offers no hope of rehabilitation. Hugo wants us not to prejudge the poor, but to separate their unsavory reputation from their varying reality and its extenuating circumstances.

Historical and Political Dimensions

In part I, the chapter entitled “The Year 1817,” Hugo characterizes the immoral frivolity of the early Restoration period (1814—1830).