Scattered thoughts on Les Misérables

21 October 2026

After about 30 years of meaning to get round to it, I’ve been reading Les Misérables. Inevitably I think of it in contrast to the musical. TLDR: it is a great poem but not a great novel. The musical is better.

I’ve been reading Norman Denny’s translation. In his introduction, he states his priority in how he interprets Victor Hugo: “he was above all things, and at all times, a poet”. Hugo is wonderful at capturing how things strike him but rarely considers how they would strike God. He is an aesthete not an ethicist, a poet not a novelist.

Is Hugo really all that interested in the Misérables of the title, the poor? The book itself begins on page 19 and ends on page 1201. We meet Jean Valjean on page 71, then the story wanders away from him for a while and when we meet him again on page 155 he is rich. For almost all of the rest of the book, he has effectively as much money as he can use and never has to work except to maintain his cover. Marius’s penny-pinching life as a student is described, but it’s clear that he could earn money if he wanted to work, or could live without having to earn it if he reconciled with his grandfather. Cosette is completely in the care of Valjean for most of the book. Javert works as a police officer. They’re not poor, and they wouldn’t be more interesting to Hugo if they were. Who is actually poor in this book? Fantine, the walking cliche, who is written to be so beautiful and vulnerable that she can only ever have been intended to become a prostitute and die. Thénardier, a pure villain with no subtlety about him, no real character, a one-dimensional figure straight out of Dickens. Gavroche and Eponine are the two poor characters with whom Hugo has any actual sympathy, and the book is best as a novel when it is nearest to them - of course, their stories can only be resolved by catching a stray bullet.

The book is for the most part a series of incidents and digressions; nobody develops as a character or shows a realistic response to an unexpected situation except Javert, the hero. Valjean is introduced in order to be transformed, like Ebenezer Scrooge, and, like Scrooge, is transformed so quickly and wholly as to leave little room for further development.

The book is hard to understand in places because of the political concerns. It is set over 30 years in the past, and the central political incidents, the uprising of 1832, weren’t in fact of great historical significance. Why exactly are this group of young men setting up barricades in the streets? What are they trying to achieve and why do they think this is the way to achieve it? These questions aren’t really addressed: they are idealists and they are the sympathetic characters, with Thénardier’s gang of criminals the unsympathetic ones, although their actions seem hardly more reasonable. France in 1832 was ruled by a re-established constitutional monarchy, having briefly been a republic after the revolution of 1789, then an Empire under Napoleon, then a different constitutional monarchy that was forcibly overthrown. Hugo’s politically aware characters have strong opinions about the merits of all of those things, but there’s nothing in the book to give the modern reader any very good idea of why. All of that is correctly dropped for the musical, condensed into the single idea that the death of General Lamarque is a suitable trigger for a half-arsed attempted revolution.

I hope it doesn’t sound like I didn’t like the book. It’s a wonderful book and everyone should read it. Hugo’s world is infinitely detailed: whenever he introduces a minor character, he pauses to characterise them and bring them to life. The Bishop’s sister, Fantine’s friends, the waitresses at the Corinth café, Marius’s grandfather, the prioress of the convent, the confused and wrongly accused Champmathieu, are all unforgettable characters who don’t make it into the musical at all. So why is the musical so completely successful?

Hugo loves a metaphor and he especially loves two metaphors for the soul’s journey and specifically for Valjean’s: the movement from low to high and the movement from dark to light. He never lets go of these two ideas and that central thread is equally central to the musical, which begins with “look down” and ends with a people who are climbing to the light. The fundamental spirit of the book is in those two metaphors and in Valjean’s redemption, ending in his death of sheer plot necessity. By keeping them, the musical preserves what is essential.

Some of the changes you would have to make to write this musical are obvious: of course the complete digressions (the battle of Waterloo, life in the convent, the history of the Paris sewer system) have to go, and naturally the back-stories of the Bishop and of Fantine have to go, and even that of Marius. Similarly, we can easily do without details like all of the names Valjean goes by at different times. There are three that particularly interested me, though.

One is the huge cut in the middle: the musical goes straight from Valjean leaving the inn at Montfermeil with Cosette to the point where Marius is about to see Cosette for the first time, leaving out how Valjean and Cosette have spend the intervening years and a huge chunk of story in which Valjean nearly gets caught by Javert twice and Marius lives the other side of a wall from the Thénardiers. You could imagine trying to keep Valjean’s escape to the convent and how he establishes his and Cosette’s life there, but nobody who saw the musical would feel there is anything missing: good decision. And you could easily imagine keeping the scenes in the Gorbeau house, where Marius, Valjean, Javert and the Thenardiers are all within a few metres of each other, but again, you don’t miss them when they’re gone.

The other two big decisions are in the characters and their relationships. In the book, the character most placed in opposition to Valjean is Thénardier, who is presented as someone who started out like Valjean, poor and uneducated, and basically chose evil instead of good. It is consistent with Hugo’s general attitude that Thénardier also married and Valjean never did. Javert is not of that world. The musical reframes Thénardier as fundamentally comic relief and keeps Javert as the explicit contrast to Valjean. Something is lost here; the parallels between Valjean and Thénardier and the repeated coincidental meetings between them are just as illuminating as those between Valjean and Javert. The key thing here is that the Thénardiers can successfully be flattened into basically comic characters, but no flattening is possible with Javert: of all the characters, he is the one whose scenes are most completely preserved and in the musical as in the book he is ultimately the realest and most sympathetic character.

Third, Valjean’s relationship to Marius. In the book, Valjean is suspicious of Marius and distrusts his intentions towards Cosette; his efforts to save Marius’s life are an example of his unselfishness because he knows that Cosette likes Marius even though he himself doesn’t. This carries on after Marius is rescued and has married Cosette - it is only in the last scene of the book that they actually start liking each other. In the musical, Valjean sees Marius as a surrogate son more or less all along, and this is a good decision: Bring Him Home is a better song than a hypothetical one called I Don’t Trust Him With My Pseudo-Daughter. Again, something is lost here: the flattened Marius of the musical is almost as much of a drip as Cosette, whereas the Marius of the book at least has some conflict in his background, some reason for joining the rebellion and some more narrative connection to the Thénardiers. But it’s worth draining this away from Marius to heighten Valjean: the book and the musical alike are fundamentally about Valjean, and everything else has to serve that.

This is just some scattered thoughts. You should definitely be familiar with both the book and the musical. I like the Denny translation, and my favourite recorded Les Mis is the 10th Anniversary Concert. Go and read and listen and make your own mind up.