His politics might change in the light of events and as a reflection of his own growth, but his essential position remained unchanged. He was first and foremost, by nature as well as by conviction, a romantic. It was an attitude to life expressing itself in all life’s activities, above all in the arts but also in politics, where it bore the name of liberalism. As time went on and he outgrew the Bonapartism inherited from his father and the royalism inherited from his mother, this liberalism took the form of outspoken republicanism. Universal suffrage and free (compulsory) education were to become the basic tenets of his political creed.

He was greatly afflicted by the death, in 1843, of his daughter, Léopoldine, and for some years there was a pause in the flow of purely literary work; but his political career and his growth as a national figure both continued to progress. Although he was becoming increasingly disenchanted with monarchism he contrived to be on good terms with Louis-Philippe, for whom, as his account in Les Misérables shows, he had both liking and respect. He was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 1837, was elected to the Académie Française in 1841 and created a pair de France (a life peer and member of the Upper House) in 1845.

Three years later, when the revolution of 1848 drove Louis-Philippe from the throne, he became a member of the Constituent Assembly of the newly formed republic; but he could not stomach Louis Napoleon’s Second Empire (1851), and since his condemnation of it was too loud to be overlooked he was forced to leave France. After staying for a time in Brussels, he moved to the Channel Islands, first to Jersey and then to Guernsey, where he lived with his wife and family for fourteen years, with the actress Juliette Drouet, his lifelong mistress, close at hand. It was here that he wrote, among other things, Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866) and completed the novel which is generally considered to be his masterpiece, Les Misérables, published in 1862.

II

The brothers Goncourt, at that time the high priests of literature in France, were not impressed by Les Misérables. ‘The lack of firsthand observation,’ they wrote, ‘is everywhere painfully manifest. Hugo has built his book, situation and characters alike, on the appearance of reality, not on reality itself.’ This was their conclusion after reading the first volume. Having read the whole book they likened the author to ‘those English preachers who harangue strollers in the parks on a Sunday’.

Professor Marius-François Guyard, from whose meticulously edited and annotated text (Garnier Frères, 1963) this translation has been made, and to whom the present translator is immensely indebted, answers the Goncourts by citing some of the novel’s more unforgettable characters – Jean Valjean, the Thénardiers, Fantine, Javert and, above all, the splendid street-urchin Gavroche. He is silent however on the subject of Marius, that singularly lacklustre young man who is supposedly a portrait of the youthful Victor Hugo himself.

The Goncourts were both right and wrong, right in the narrow sense but not in the large one. They were right about the realism which Hugo strove so laboriously and, on the whole, so unsuccessfully to achieve. No one could have worked harder at it. He read and read, he pored endlessly over maps and documents, and the fruits of his researches so encumber his book that many readers beside the Goncourts must have found themselves unequal to the effort of pursuing it. But this factual realism is constantly at war with the poet. Imaginative realism is another matter. Les Misérables, with its depth of vision and underlying truth, its moments of lyrical quality and of moving compassion, is a novel of towering stature, one of the great works of western literature, a melodrama that is also a morality and a social document embracing a wider field than any other novel of its time, conceived on the scale of War and Peace but even more ambitious.

That is the trouble. The defects which the Goncourts saw, and which no one can fail to see, since they are as monumental as the book itself, may be summed up in the single word, extravagance. Hugo, although as the final result shows he was masterly in the construction of his novel, had little or no regard for the discipline of novel-writing. He was wholly unrestrained and unsparing of his reader. He had to say everything and more than everything; he was incapable of leaving anything out. The book is loaded down with digressions, interpolated discourses, passages of moralizing rhetoric and pedagogic disquisitions.

One reason for this is that it was written over a period of nearly twenty years. A first unfinished novel entitled Misères was written during the three years from 1845 to 1848; it was then put aside for twelve years, to be completed in 1860–62 as Les Misérables.(An untranslatable title: the first meaning of the French misère is simply misery; the second meaning is utmost poverty, destitution; but Hugo’s misérables are not merely the poor and wretched, they are the outcasts, the underdogs, the rejected of society and the rebels against society.)

As to the digressions, many of them are in fact interpolations. Much had happened in the world during the twelve years that the book was laid aside and much had happened to Hugo himself. He had moved steadily away from his right-wing bourgeois origins to the point where he was not only an avowed republican but could openly proclaim himself a socialist. It is not surprising that that earlier work required considerable amendment if it was to conform to the changed viewpoint of the Hugo who returned to it in 1860.

But some of the digressions, or interpolations, are still indefensible, the most flagrant being the account of the Battle of Waterloo, which occupies the third book of Part Two. It is subdivided into nineteen chapters filling sixty-nine pages of the closely printed French text, and only the last chapter, seven pages long, has any real bearing on Hugo’s story. The rest is entirely concerned with the battle.