At the end of time, all living things, even Satan, would be saved, and reabsorbed into the bosom of God, from which they had emerged at the Creation. This theological system is close to the Pelagian heresy of early Christianity. As Hugo put it in the final lines of his collection of visionary poetry, Les Contemplations, at the end of time Jesus will lead his brother Satan by the hand up the stairs of heaven, and God will no longer be able to tell them apart. Les Misérables explicitly states this view: “The book which the reader has now before his eyes is, from one end to the other, in its whole and in its details, whatever may be the intermissions, the exceptions, or the defaults, the march from evil to good, ... from nothingness to God. Starting point: matter; goal: the soul. Hydra at the beginning, angel at the end (p. 698).” Not only did Hugo sketch and expound this vision throughout the last half-century of his career, but also he reserved many visionary poems that he planned to have published at five-year intervals after his death—and thanks to his faithful executors, they were. The posterity of his religious ideas, although unexpected, would have gratified him. The cult of Cao Dai Buddhism, which numbers several million adherents and several thousand temples throughout the world, believes that several of its priests are reincarnations of Hugo and his sons.

Hugo’s election to the Académie Française in 1841 consecrated the militant romantic movement. In 1845 he was appointed as a pair de France, equivalent to a member of the British House of Lords. Becoming increasingly liberal in politics, he became a member of the Constitutional Convention (Assemblée Constituante) of the Second French Republic in 1848. He presided over the International Peace Conference in Paris in 1849, and there gave the first known speech advocating the creation of a “United States of Europe,” a vision partially anticipated by Immanuel Kant, Thomas Jefferson, and Madame de Staël, but fully realized only recently with the formation of the European Union, followed by the adoption of a common currency, the Euro.

Starting in 1848, Hugo and his son Charles founded and coedited the liberal newspaper L’ Événement, which strongly supported the return from exile, and the candidacy for President of the Republic, of Louis Napoleon, Emperor Napoléon I’s nephew, who had established his credentials as a liberal with a term in prison. Hugo proved to have been “a useful idiot,” for Louis Napoleon craved absolute power, and eventually managed a combination of elections and a coup d‘état to become Emperor for Life on December 2,1851. Hugo had already broken with the Right and formally declared himself a Republican on July 18,1851. Hunted by the police, with his sons already jailed, he fled France to take refuge on the English Channel Islands of Jersey (1852—1855) and Guernsey (1855—1870). Unlike all his prominent contemporaries, he refused amnesty, and published vehement satires of the new regime, Napoléon le petit (1852) and Les Châtiments (1853). When he had vented his rage against the ruler who betrayed him, he turned inward to meditate on Providence and human spiritual destiny in the great poem cycles Les Contemplations (1856, mainly composed 1853—1855), La Légende des Siècles (1859, with sequels published in 1877 and 1883), La Fin de Satan (composed 1854, published 1886), and Dieu (composed 1855, published 1891). Only then, after nearly a decade in exile, did he synthesize the individual, the historical, and the cosmic in Les Misérables.

Motivated is not determined: many people have experienced family situations similar to Hugo‘s, but there is only one author of Les Misérables. Nevertheless, numerous factors in Hugo’s life converged to reinforce his proclivity to become a savior, particularly by advocating compromise. His parents became estranged, lived apart, and each took a lover when he was only one year old. In response, he later elaborated the myth that his mother was a monarchist and his father a republican; the compromise of a constitutional monarchy such as Louis Philippe’s (1830—1848) was therefore attractive to him, and under it he began his political career, symbolically finding a middle ground between his two parents’ supposed positions. In fact, however, his mother’s family was closely associated with the Jacobins (rabid egalitarians), who massacred rebellious monarchists in the Vendee region. She later became a monarchist of convenience, while her lover was conspiring against the Emperor Napoleon.

Hugo opposed the death penalty (the uncompromising solution par excellence for crime), not only because of the influence of his older friend Charles Nodier, but also because, as a small child, he had seen the severed heads of freedom fighters in Spain and Italy nailed to church doors by the troops commanded by his father, General Hugo, charged with suppressing independence movements in those countries. The violent insanity of his older brother, Eugène, which first became obvious at Victor’s wedding with Adèle, the woman Eugène also loved, inflicted survivor guilt on Hugo, as did the premature death of his beloved younger daughter Léopoldine, who drowned with her husband and her unborn child in a boating accident shortly after her marriage, and the insanity of his older daughter Adèle, to say nothing of the early death of his two sons before him. Under the circumstances, the possibility of finding Léopoldine again after death was a comforting thought, and Les Contemplations is framed with hopes for their reunion.

His enforced sojourn on an island left a strong imprint on that work. First of all, it reflects a powerful nostalgia for Paris, where he had lived—all the more so because Napoleon III’s assistant for urban renewal, Baron Haussmann, tore up many old neighborhoods to open wide avenues down which it was easy to fire grapeshot from cannons to disperse rebellious crowds. The constant presence of the sea makes itself felt continually in the visionary poetry, but it probably also inspired several scenes in Les Misérables, such as the galleys at Toulon, and metaphors such as the depiction of Jean Valjean, released from prison but abandoned and cursed by society, as a man overboard who slowly, agonizingly despairs and drowns. Unable to exercise his keen visual sensitivity on medieval monuments, as he had done in Paris (in several poems and essays as well as in Notre-Dame de Paris), Hugo turned to botany, gardening, and agriculture. Signs of this new interest pervade Les Misérables, but it culminates only in the rich, lovingly detailed descriptions of the flora in the introductory section of the great regional novel Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866). Surrounded by the poor, who had to make their living from the sea, Hugo found many occasions—like Monseigneur Myriel and Jean Valjean in his novel—to exercise charity.