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Reflections on Victor Hugo's Les Miserables Submitted by younkins on Mon, 2013-02-18 15:55
This essay is not a review of Tom Hooper’s recently released film of the tremendously popular 1980s stage musical. However, the release of this film has given me the occasion to read and to reflect upon the original text of Victor Hugo’s 1862 classic, Les Misérables, a mosaic of social indictment, history, social philosophy, sentimentality, and spirituality. Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862) is the great prose epic of the nineteenth century. Interweaving the social and spiritual threads of human life, the novel has been influential in making people desire a more just world. In Les Misérables the author condemns the unjust class-based social structure in nineteenth century France for turning good people into criminals and beggars. He makes a case that crime and poverty can be eliminated through universal education, a criminal justice system that is flexible and focused on rehabilitation rather than punishment, and the more equal and humane treatment of women. Despite these broad recommendations, Hugo offered no practical solutions for reforming schools, the police, the courts, and the prisons. Les Misérables is a call for a wiser and nobler civilization. When it was released, it inspired a great deal of sympathy for hapless people oppressed by the state. It was also viewed as a celebration of revolution against tyranny. Les Misérables is an epic novel focused on characters fighting against their exploitation and oppression. We see the injustices and disproportionate sentences piled upon Jean Valjean, the abuses suffered by Fantine, the brutality foisted on Cosette, the maltreatment of Enjolras and his fellow revolutionaries, the plight of homeless children, and so on. All of these are examples of society’s injustice toward the lower classes. Through these stories, the novel exudes sympathy from the reader for the most wretched in society. The message is that, if men murder and steal and women fall from grace out of desperation, it is not their fault because they can find no honorable path to sustainability within the constructs of society. Rather, it is the fault of society and its creations, the state and the law. The state and its legal system are shown to be disinterested in the conditions of the dangerous classes. Society is thus culpable for dehumanizing the poor and for the crimes committed by the dregs of society. Les Misérables chronicles the corruption of police power, shows that society gives the convict no chance for redemption, and illustrates how France’s prison system not only continues, but also accelerates, the downward spiral of criminals. On the one hand, Valjean represents suppressed and destitute people whose place in life is determined by positive laws created by society’s elite in order to perpetuate their own superiority. On the other hand, Valjean illustrates that it is possible for men to rise above their circumstances. Bishop Myriel is not a typical bishop or even a conventional Christian. He operates on his own innate sense of morality—it is not provided by Christianity. True morality is higher than, and separate from, any particular religion. Religions pass away but God remains. Myriel acts out of genuine sympathy and caring for the weak and the downtrodden. The Bishop has chosen a consistent belief system and life path and has dedicated his life to the active service of humanity by performing good deeds and engaging in heartfelt charity. Myriel believes that it is each man’s duty to perform good acts despite the fact that he may never know if the good acts he has performed for people will lead them to change their lives for the good. His religious humanism is far from orthodox Christianity. When Myriel, the Bishop of Digne, forgives Jean Valjean for the theft of the silver, he offers him his initial opportunity for redemption. After this incident, Valjean has a choice to make. He could either continue on a path of crime or he could follow the example set by the Bishop. Having learned from his past, Valjean goes on to help the poor and the wretched. He adopts a new life, identity, and mentality. His new life includes honesty, love of neighbor, love of enemy, and love of God. Throughout his life, the Bishop is always with him as symbolized by the candlesticks. Myriel acts as a model and an inspiration for Valjean for the rest of his life. Throughout the novel, Valjean imitates more and more the Bishop’s asceticism, renunciation of worldly pleasures, and emphasis on sacrifice. The moral duty to help the poor that Valjean accepts does not come from any social institutions. Rather, it flows from an expansive notion of God. Valjean illustrates that reason is inadequate in the resolution of moral problems. However, thought does direct Valjean toward the consideration of a dilemma, but at every decision point his emotions serve as the guide to right behavior. The hero performs good deeds intuitively as if he is acting in response to an inner voice. This Kantian perspective is that each person has an inner voice (perhaps his conscience), the source of moral laws, that tells him what his duties (i.e., moral obligations) are. The message seems to be that faith can transform one’s life. For Valjean, merely believing in God is not enough. He does not just contemplate the divine. Having learned from his experiences, he goes on to act to help people by his own initiative. For him, God, fulfillment, and salvation are attainable without the help of any organized religion. Choice is difficult for Valjean who has a double nature—he has the experience of a convict and the instincts of a saint. He is a product of the social conditions that led him to steal a loaf of bread for his sister’s family and his prison time for punishment of that crime. Despite that, he still has the potential for good in him. Over and over he has to choose between doing what is right and doing what is safe and secure. At virtually every turn Valjean doubts and questions himself before making the morally correct choice. Les Misérables is very much a story of a man’s conscience at war with itself. After meeting the radiantly spiritual Bishop Myriel, Valjean’s life becomes a continuing struggle between his activated moral sense and his life-long criminal tendencies. As Monsieur Madeleine, Jean Valjean redeems himself by becoming an innovative entrepreneur who creates a successful manufacturing business that brings about progress and prosperity for an entire region. This successful and kind person voluntarily does good deeds to help the less fortunate. Valjean’s actions exhibit justice to individual people rather than observance of the requirements of some abstract legal order. In addition to providing a reasonable standard of living for his employees, he builds schools and hospitals with his own money and distributes a large share of his wealth to the poor. Then, of course, he takes care of Fantine and rescues, raises, and protects Cosette. Ironically, the tolerant Valjean sympathizes with others but is unable to sympathize with himself. He understands that, although a person can repent of a crime, he can never escape the dishonor from committing it. Inspector Javert cannot accept transgressions of the law regardless of circumstances. He represents the idea of punitive secular justice and is solely concerned with detection and retribution. Javert is absolutely committed to rules and to their administration. As a defender of France’s legal system, he is dedicated to following the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law. The well-intentioned, rigid, and dogmatic Javert wants to protect society from the criminal element and has total faith in the system of laws that he represents. Javert, the personification of public authority, contends that theft is wrong regardless of mitigating factors. Myriel, representing morality, would say that theft should be forgiven in the case when one acted to keep people from starving. Of course, our hero, Valjean, is caught between these two worldviews. Toward the end of the novel, Javert comes to understand that Valjean is concerned with a moral law higher than positive state law. At the end he empathizes with Valjean and comprehends that divine law has supremacy. Javert commits suicide because this realization disaffirms everything in his life that he believed in. The story of Javert provides a lesson about the limitations of the law of men. At the end of his life, Javert understands that Jean Valjean’s resistance to Javert’s tyranny is rooted in a belief in a higher power and law than the laws of men. Enjolras and his diverse band of revolutionaries have a dream of a better world and do all they can to make that world a reality. They love man, tend to reject organized religions (including Christianity), and attempt to overturn the existing social order. Enjolras, the leader of the ABC (the Abaissé or the abased) Society wants to elevate men. The ABC’s 1832 revolt demanded legislation that would make possible liberty, justice, equal education, equal opportunity, and so on. Enjolras is a devoted, purposeful, political idealist who inspires others with his utopian vision of future progress. The other revolutionaries turn to Enjolras for the meanings behind their actions. The novel teaches that individual men are dignified, honorable, and benevolent, but that social institutions are not, the result being the corruption of individual human beings. Like Rousseau and Turgot, Hugo subscribes to the idea of the natural goodness of man. All three believed in progress and in the perfectibility of man. They viewed progress as a basic law of the universe. Created by God, man has the capacity to become a civilized moral person if he is not corrupted by society. It is the corrupting influence of society that is responsible for the misconduct of the individual. If individuals are properly educated then they would not want to do evil. Hugo maintains that society must be changed, but also that it is individuals who must first be transformed. It is these transformed individuals who can then foster the advancement of society. Accepting the Platonic idea that the individual’s soul is noble but the body is degraded, the author of Les Misérables teaches that one must achieve spiritual grandeur and a virtuous character in order to battle for justice in the here and now. Some individuals have the ability to triumph over evil both in themselves and in society and its institutions if they are willing to actively respond to the divine. In Les Misérables the life of each character influences others. It follows that, if each individual comprehends and accepts his influences on other persons, then society may become more just, caring, and merciful. Hugo contends that the requisite love of humanity can only come from faith in the divine. Faith in God is thus placed at the heart of this work. For Hugo, belief in God by acting people of good will is necessary to instill the social order with kindness and to make society more humane. Like Pascal, Hugo urges his readers to bet in favor of the existence of God and perhaps even in the possibility of an afterlife for the soul. In Les Misérables there are only a few exceptional virtuous individuals such as Myriel, Jean Valjean, and Enjolras, who can attain this level of existence. It follows that rehabilitation and elevation of the social order is most likely impossible given the above requirement and reality. The novel’s ethic of social service emphasizes the alleviation of poverty. It portrays poor people being helped by the charitable works of a private individual (Valjean) rather than by government. Depicting the abject poverty of the poor, Les Misérables questions the morality of a political and economic system that permits children to be orphaned and homeless, mothers dying in the streets, and good men imprisoned for minor transgressions committed to feed their families. Hugo’s goal was to elicit his readers’ compassion and to stimulate their moral sensibilities by portraying how poverty brutalizes and dehumanizes people and how strict and relentless law enforcement creates the savages that it wants to eliminate. He wanted to educate the bourgeois and to awaken their consciousness and concern for France’s social problems. Hugo wanted people to take action to ease the burden of the less fortunate through good deeds and through changes in the social system. Les Misérables is Hugo’s plea for social change that vacillates between human and institutional reality and his hope for, and vision of, a better world. In Les Misérables Hugo depicts that society is nothing more than the collection of individuals whose lives affect one another. For example, it is clear that Jean Valjean is concerned only with the individuals who make up society. In the novel, the circumstances and conduct of various seemingly randomly introduced characters converge and become intertwined with the struggles of Valjean. From the beginning of the story, there is a web of influence that builds as characters affect one another. Early on we see G______, a representative of the assembly during the French Revolution that dissolved the monarchy, humbling Bishop Myriel who recognizes his moral devotion to humanity and progress prompting the Bishop to redouble his own tenderness and love for the weak and the suffering. The network of interconnections grows as characters such as Valjean, Fantine, Cosette, Javert, Fauchelevant, the Thénardiers, Marius, M. Gillenormand, Colonel Pontmery, Champathieu, Enjolras, and others appear. The author brings many of these characters together toward the climax of the novel. Les Misérables illustrates that in every idea, and that for every person, perspective is partial and, therefore, insufficient by itself alone. Hugo shows that the complexity of life requires that no one philosophy, perspective, emotion, tradition, or behavior is capable of providing a total picture of what it means to be human. Like Kant, Hugo laments the fact that a person can only perceive and comprehend things through his own consciousness. According to Kant, man’s knowledge lacks validity because his consciousness possesses identity. For Kant, knowledge, to be valid, must not be processed in any way by consciousness. Hugo, like Kant, seems to be looking for knowledge that could be called absolute, unqualified, pure, or diaphanous. Kant maintains that identity, which itself is the essence of existence, invalidates consciousness. To know what is true, a man would have to abandon his own nature, which is an absurd impossibility. It follows that for both Hugo and Kant, reason must be forsaken and the emotions must be embraced, if one wants to deal with the fundamental concerns of existence. Hugo does seem to imply that knowledge can be enhanced by dialectically relating each perspective with opposing viewpoints. However, he realizes that, even with this dialectic interaction, one’s knowledge would still be limited. Even when many angles of perspective can be coordinated simultaneously, one’s understanding of a process, experience, or event is still limited. Les Misérables is a fascinating maze of characters, emotions, ideas, paradoxes, and antitheses. The novel co-mingles ever-shifting and blurred shades of criminality, heroism, misery, resilience, good, evil, irony, pathos, poetry, free will, providence, action, the social, the spiritual, and much more. Hugo thus deals with the emotions, hopes, fears, passions, and doubts that are reflective of people’s common humanity. Les Misérables is a detailed reporting of men’s feelings and ideas that transcend time and place. It follows that this great novel is as relevant today as when it was published more than 150 years ago.
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Kyrel
I don't know where you get this idea about Jesus from. Love thy neighbour as thyself and Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, isn't a warrant for looking for ways to commit suicide so another may live!
I don't think many here realise that there is so much that is both rational and good in Christianity.
(But, please, don't let that comment hold your fire! Man your weapons! I have my silk blindfold of faith to protect me!
)
I shall even join you to fight my empiricism!
Er...
Shall we return to Les Miserables and the Left?!
Doug
He argues that the Left has stolen Christianity and that most Christians today are really liberals with Christian window dressing. I disagree but I'll wait and try to formulate a good argument...I do think Christianity mandates socialism / welfare statism."
I think the Left attempts to replicate some but not all of the Christian ideals. For a start, looking at the redistribution of wealth and differential tax rates for those who work and the welfare state for those who don't, the Left manipulates work/money/motive/philosophy and destroys the inner human core of being! By this I mean that for those who work, they are forced to agree through compliance that their money which they have earned should be spent to look after those who can not or do not work- and they are imprisoned and/or fined excessive amounts if they disagree with this philosophy and disobey the tax laws; these same people, recognising this, have a choice: (1) vote Libertarianz!!!; (2) organise a revolution; or (3) to crush their natural sense of injustice and stay calm by altering their mindset. Because they have families to feed and they are unaware of the Liberatarian Party since it has poor PR with no method or means of teaching the masses!, the latter choice is made and their spirits are slowly crushed and dominated by Leftist thinking until finally they stop thinking altogether about it. It is too awful for them either way. These same people then cease to give a second thought to "the poor" in the belief that they have already "done quite enough" for them. But "quite enough" here is the giving of money alone for things they do not know via their taxes - i.e., without any relationship or heart or free choice between the giver and receiver.
And so, in fact, the Left have shot themselves in the foot. The poor are now given more opportunity to remain poor because the Left's welfare state has created that new class of isolated inter- and intra-generational welfare living. This class can live in a reasonable sort of way without any need of any connection to "the good kind people" who would otherwise have looked after them and introduced them or shown them a new way - well, some of them anyway. The Left thinks it is doing good but its policies actually chip away at an individual's love or charity - which includes a desire to look after the weak, the sick and the poor. Because really there aren't any truly poor people any longer, the financial connection between these two classes of people is lost and so also the benefactors and good examples to follow and help them are also lost. The working people who mix most with this class now are mainly teachers, legal aid lawyers and social workers; and because these people are being paid also by the tax payer to do whatever they do for them, there is not always the best and loving, well intentioned holistic-minded heart or understanding behind their actions and the relationship is usually patronising and not based on mutual trust, love and affection.
I could talk about this for ages in other ways as well, but do you get the gist of what I am saying? It isn't anything new I am sure. (I just hope it isn't too incoherent and waffly! Lindsay told me I was an empiricist yesterday - inclined to wander off the subject with interesting-only-to-me detail!!!!!! Hahahahaha!!! So now I am paranoid as well!!!!)
Victor Hugo may have had a benevolent soul. But if you go down the road he was going down, you will ultimately wind up with what we have now - ObaMarx, Airhead America and the Left.
Perhaps you are right, Doug. But I have a big imagination and a Pollyanna heart (!) and empiricism too now (!) makes my vision of "what could be" quite, quite different, following Hugo's road, from how it is now with Obamarx, the Left and Airhead America/Western World. Things are as they are, however; I don't think Victor Hugo can be blamed for this!
Destroyers
Marx and Jesus believe we should all Self-sacrifice and utterly Self-destroy, in service and servitude to Others. We all need to find a burning orphanage, so we can run inside and rescue the tots, till we're toast. If that doesn't work we all need to find a foxhole, with a live grenade in it, so as to fall upon. Those who fail this are morally depraved, say Marx and Jesus, and deserve to be mercilessly punished. Marx wants us in front of a firing squad, while Jesus wants us to burn forever in a lake of fire.
Rosie
Incidentally, it is my view is that Libertarianism is the only political system that would work to allow true Christianity by true Christian means.
I knew that would be your view. So you would argue that Christian altruism can be isolated to the private realm and does not mandate socialism or a welfare state? That is a very common argument. Auster makes that argument also; very adamantly. He argues that the Left has stolen Christianity and that most Christians today are really liberals with Christian window dressing. I disagree but I'll wait and try to formulate a good argument. But you're making the benevolent Christianity argument Rosie, which you have consistently done your entire time at this forum. I respect you for that even if I disagree. I do think Christianity mandates socialism / welfare statism. Victor Hugo may have had a benevolent soul. But if you go down the road he was going down, you will ultimately wind up with what we have now - ObaMarx, Airhead America and the Left.
Doug
Larry Auster a true Christian Conservative has called modern Liberalism "Christianity without the God of the Bible". That is exactly right. Modern Liberalism removed the altruism of the Bible and the entire context which it existed in and placed it in service of the poor. "Good Acts" were then necessary to prove your virtue. I don't think orthodox Christianity was practiced in such a way.
Correct. Good works alone are not sufficient to enter the kingdom of heaven. Good works are merely one naturally occurring, practical manifestation and consequence of the Spirit working in man. Good works can also occur without having the Spirit though. Which is the point of its (good works) not being the measure.
It has often bee said by knowledgeable Conservatives that modern Liberalism is a Christian heresy. I really thank there is alot of truth in that. Hugo was transforming Christianity. I bet he didn't even know that he was doing it.
The "force of law" in modern liberalism in its attempts to enforce "good works" by law (in particular the forced redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor) is almost comparable to the Spanish inquisition in enforcing people to be Christians so that they will do, and want to do, those same "Christian good works" without law. Although modern liberalism doesn't threaten death if you don't obey, it does threaten prison for disobeying which is a kind of death.
I do not think this was Hugo's intention at all. He demonstrates illustrations of injustice throughout his book and I think he is very understanding of, and sympathetic to, true Christianity as opposed to man's attempts to politicise it.
(Incidentally, it is my view is that Libertarianism is the only political system that would work to allow true Christianity by true Christian means.)
Doug
BTW, tell me you didn't see modern liberalism in that! Fuck. The only thing he was missing was a complaint against Islamaphobia!
LOL
I can see the politics of modern liberalism in the book - the very existence of the rebels wishing to destroy the monarchy would make it hard to miss! - but not so much in the negative way that you see it, perhaps.
What an excellent article. I
What an excellent article. I don't have time to say a lot more other than "thankyou" for publishing this great piece.
I saw Les Miserables the other day with my wife. Best film I have seen in a while, and I don't particularly like musicals.
Toilers of The Sea, one of Hugo's works, would make a great film.
Professor Younkins
Thank you very much for that excellent post. I love Les Miserables and, in particular, what always moved me most was the contrast between Myriel and Javert or divine and worldly justice.
And so it is from this angle that I do take issue with this one part of your commentary.
Bishop Myriel may not typify the behaviour of most Christians but he certainly typifies Christ upon whom Christians seek to model themselves. I.e., Behaving with love, Godly or divine love, and all that divine love means as explained in many ways throughout the Bible. And so I do not agree with you that Myriel is portrayed as one who "operates on his own sense of innate morality" but as one who operates on Godly or divine love and who exemplifies the imitiation of Christ, the aim of every Christian embued with the power of the Holy Spirit and who is obedient to God's will and commandments.
When Jean Valjean spared Javert's life and set him free, and Javert later asked him why he did this, Jean Valjean explained that his soul was bought by a man (Myriel) once and since then he had no more evil thoughts. In other words, he had been embued with the power of the Holy Spirit at that moment having experienced Godly love through Myriel. Having experienced that he knew it to be "right" and, like Myriel, chose too to be always obedient to God's commandments and will.
From a practical point of view, these two characters, Myriel and Jean Valjean, are important for Christians struggling to be always Christ-like. You see, I have thought to myself, "It would be so much easier to be more Christ-like if I didn't have to deal with other people every minute of the day and instead were in a cloister of like minded folk!"
And I have heard other Christians express similar sentiments! Hugo deals with this, and repudiates it, in the characters of Myriel and Jean Valjean when Jean Valjean takes the Spirit of the Christ-like, cloistered Myriel out to the real world and lives that way amongst non-like minded people (especially Javert) and shows what can be done with it - from receiving the high political office of Mayor within a short time because of his love for others and his perfect sense of justice to exposing the inadequacies of "worldly righteousness" to Javert when he shows Javert the experience of divine love and God's grace.
One More Thing - Christianity
Bishop Myriel is not a typical bishop or even a conventional Christian. He operates on his own innate sense of morality—it is not provided by Christianity. True morality is higher than, and separate from, any particular religion. Religions pass away but God remains. Myriel acts out of genuine sympathy and caring for the weak and the downtrodden. The Bishop has chosen a consistent belief system and life path and has dedicated his life to the active service of humanity by performing good deeds and engaging in heartfelt charity. Myriel believes that it is each man’s duty to perform good acts despite the fact that he may never know if the good acts he has performed for people will lead them to change their lives for the good. His religious humanism is far from orthodox Christianity.
Wow. This is a powerful paragraph. "Religions pass away but God remains." That is exactly what I mean by the "secularization of Christianity". Larry Auster a true Christian Conservative has called modern Liberalism "Christianity without the God of the Bible". That is exactly right. Modern Liberalism removed the altruism of the Bible and the entire context which it existed in and placed it in service of the poor. "Good Acts" were then necessary to prove your virtue. I don't think orthodox Christianity was practiced in such a way.
It has often bee said by knowledgeable Conservatives that modern Liberalism is a Christian heresy. I really thank there is alot of truth in that. Hugo was transforming Christianity. I bet he didn't even know that he was doing it.
Rosie
Your perspective, the way you can interpret almost everything to condemn the left, certainly brings "dialectic interaction" and "opposing viewpoints" to enhance my understanding/knowledge, Doug! But "Even when many angles of perspective can be coordinated simultaneously, one’s understanding of a process, experience, or event is still limited."
I leave myself open for that. But...
I'm still right. If not in totality than in major part.
Christianity was secularized and the poor were sacralized. (It has since become blacks that have been sacralized, poor whites are secondary. Again this is something which the Objectivist community should have taken note of but it didn't and I hate that.) This occurred in increments. But the driving force was Post-Kantian philosophy which would be administered by the academic Left. That academic Left would capture an entire culture; i.e. "The West". We are currently living in that culture. It is no longer Christian although it shares some commonalities with Christianity. Which incidentally is how it was captured.
Victor Hugo was one of the beginning intellectual forces of that emerging philosophy. He was a first wave Left-Liberal. In Le Mis you see the building blocks of both Leftist thought and Leftist morality. They have since been transformed into modern Leftism. Yes, it is entirely possible that Victor Hugo would not have wanted government redistribution programs (but he was French after all so who knows). But he helped to lay down the duty centered ethics that would make such redistribution schemes seem so noble. Of course Kant is the more culpable but Hugo popularized such ethics with great art. Rand would do the opposite in 'AS'.
It was Rand's genius to write a great novel rather than just technical philosophy texts. In a sense, Hugo's art helped to popularize Kant. So you have one of the best novelists ever popularizing altruism in the 19th century. It would take an equally skilled novelist to popularize egoism in the 20th.
Ed's analysis jibes with mine although I go one step further and connect the dots leading to the Left and what they have done over the last 100 years.
He makes a case that crime and poverty can be eliminated through universal education, a criminal justice system that is flexible and focused on rehabilitation rather than punishment, and the more equal and humane treatment of women.
BTW, tell me you didn't see modern liberalism in that! Fuck. The only thing he was missing was a complaint against Islamaphobia!
Doug
Yonkins:
Hugo does seem to imply that knowledge can be enhanced by dialectically relating each perspective with opposing viewpoints. However, he realizes that, even with this dialectic interaction, one’s knowledge would still be limited. Even when many angles of perspective can be coordinated simultaneously, one’s understanding of a process, experience, or event is still limited.
Doug:
Hugo represents the first wave of modern Leftism. Its all there in his book, the distrust of reason, the championing of faith, the secularizing of altruism, the focus on alleviating suffering, the view of the innate nobility of the poor, the duty to help the poor, the importance of educating society to improve it, etc, etc.. All of these have since become Leftist shibboleths and yet they started as good intentions but...
Your perspective, the way you can interpret almost everything to condemn the left, certainly brings "dialectic interaction" and "opposing viewpoints" to enhance my understanding/knowledge, Doug! But "Even when many angles of perspective can be coordinated simultaneously, one’s understanding of a process, experience, or event is still limited."
And my perspective on Les Miserables and Yonkins' post (when I finish it!) will no doubt also paradoxically both enhance and limit this understanding/knowledge again!
This is an excellent analysis
This is an excellent analysis of Hugo's masterpiece. I see in it so many answers to the question of why and how did the Left emerge. Especially this:
The novel teaches that individual men are dignified, honorable, and benevolent, but that social institutions are not, the result being the corruption of individual human beings. Like Rousseau and Turgot, Hugo subscribes to the idea of the natural goodness of man. All three believed in progress and in the perfectibility of man. They viewed progress as a basic law of the universe. Created by God, man has the capacity to become a civilized moral person if he is not corrupted by society. It is the corrupting influence of society that is responsible for the misconduct of the individual. If individuals are properly educated then they would not want to do evil.
Yes, it is as I suspected. Christianity was secularized and politicized and the key figure is none other than our very own Kant. Hugo was a Kantian in spirit even if he wasn't one according to technical philosophy. But Hugo represents the first wave of modern Leftism. Its all there in his book, the distrust of reason, the championing of faith, the secularizing of altruism, the focus on alleviating suffering, the view of the innate nobility of the poor, the duty to help the poor, the importance of educating society to improve it, etc, etc.. All of these have since become Leftist shibboleths and yet they started as good intentions but...
We know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And the Left has taken it upon itself to pave that road. Hugo's philosophy was the building blocks of modern liberalism. It is true that Leftism started with better sentiments and it did have legitimate complaints. European society was rigid in its class structure and it was cruel towards the lower classes. But note how we get the Left v Conservative dynamic coming out of all of this. We would get the Liberals like Hugo, who were Christian in the beginning, and we would get the original Conservatives who wanted to preserve the aristocratic, hierarchical order - a false alternative if ever there was one. Classical Liberalism would partially affect each side but in the end Classical Liberalism would be incapable of offering a viable third alternative despite its success during the American Revolution. Somehow the Left would end up with the title of Liberal (in America anyway) and the Conservatives would become a hodge-podge mix of Conservative and original Liberal ideas. What a mess.
I have always had mixed feelings about Le Miseralbes. Yes, it was great art but it had so many damn philosophical flaws that directly resulted in the rise of Leftism that I always harbored resentment towards it. Victor Hugo was searching for answers to the problems of his time and he did not have the philosophic tools necessary. He did not have access to an Ayn Rand. So he made use with what he had. And it is clear that Kant "was in the air". Heavily in the air. Kant's transformation of both Christianity and altruism was speeding along and Hugo was caught in that current. And 180 years later we have the ObaMarx....
Thanks again for this excellent exegesis.
Class War
Victor Hugo's novel The Miserable Ones makes clear that France, Europe, and the West really were engaged in class warfare in the 1800s. The upper class generally treated the middle class with legal tyranny and social disrespect, which in turn treated the lower class about the same. The rich often committed crimes, but were allowed to bribe or blackmail the police, prosecutors, judges, etc., and thus get away with it. Corn laws, draft laws, and robber barons unequally treated and exploited many of the lesser two socio-economic groups. And sometimes the upper crust committed gross social immoralities and scandals, and were also allowed to hush these up.
Much less so those of lower social status, like Valjean and Fantine.
And the shame, injustice, evil, and misery of it all is that often enough there were people of true quality in the middle and lower classes. These, in fact, were the true elite and aristocrats of the society of the 1800s -- the geniuses and saints who deserved to lead that civilization.
Class distinctions have largely died out today, thank goodness. People of quality are far better recognized. Still, we're a long way from genuine justice and morality in society. Despite remarkable scientific, medical, and financial progress, this is still a Dark Age dominated by the irrational and illiberal. Good people are still heavily abused and made to suffer, as in the novel.
Extremely Well Done
A marvelous philosophical exegesis and literary appreciation, by Professor Ed Younkins, and a pleasure to read! A deep, rich, wonderous commentary and analysis.