reading the brick (part ii)
on Les Mis as a mirror, violence leading to progress, and rich people enjoying The Hunger Games
One of the most compelling things about Les Miserables is that while the book was written almost two hundred years ago, it still remains painfully relevant in modern times. The introduction to this novel highlights Hugo’s point that as long as poverty exists, his story will remain pertinent to the lives of the people. And while that exudes a sorrowful truth, it makes his novel that much more important.
If you have avoided Les Mis like most people, I’m sure it’s for any or all of these reasons: its length, its age, or its miserable content. Anytime I tell people I’m currently reading this monster, those are the usual fallbacks. That book is huge! Wow, I could never read a classic for fun. Isn’t that book so sad though?
I think in the modern era (of reading especially), we have become so affected by the horrors of the world that we’ve conditioned ourselves to avoid books just like this. We pick up fast books, easy books, books with happy endings because we are so tired of living in the exact world that terrorized Victor Hugo. In order to maintain our sanity and survive our daily lives, we have shrunk our attention spans and blocked out any violence so that we might convince ourselves that things are going to be okay. If we doom-scroll enough or watch enough TikToks or buy enough trinkets or listen to enough music, we can pretend that people aren’t dying or starving or suffering. We have to, or else we won’t be able to get up in the morning and do our jobs.
We avoid books like Les Miserables because this book is a mirror and we cannot bear to face ourselves or our world.
I’d argue that a major reason why Victor Hugo wrote this book was to force the people of his time to take a good hard look at themselves and to reflect on the lives of those who they might otherwise overlook. While reading this book, you have no choice but to understand the poor, the revolutionaries, the thieves of the world. If you read this book as a poor person, you’ll find many passages that you relate to. If you read this book as a rich person, it’s difficult not to be moved by the intense sorrow that comes with poverty. (And yet, just like in the novel itself, many rich people will miss the point entirely.)
I often wonder how rich people can go on without being moved by stories such as this. If you had/have the privilege to see this musical on broadway, to pay for orchestra seats, to cry to “Do You Hear the People Sing?” in the comfort of a cozy theater, how can you pass an unhoused person on your way home in the big city and not feel an ounce of pity? How does this story not compel you to stand up and fight for justice? And yet, oftentimes I count myself among those unaffected.
The truth is easily summed up in The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. These stories go hand in hand, and I could probably write a whole essay on their parallelism, but to prove my point above, you need only bear witness to a pivotal scene in Catching Fire. I’m talking about the “If it weren’t for…the baby…” scene.
Before the games, our tributes are being interviewed as usual by Caesar Flickerman, and when Peeta steps forward, he impishly implies to the crowd (and the world at large) that Katniss is pregnant. Obviously this is a lie, but its purpose is to both humanize Katniss and garner sympathy from the Capitol. By (seemingly) putting a fetus in the Games, the Capitol at large is devastated. These rich people don’t mind watching poor kids kill each other for sport, but all of a sudden if you bring an unborn baby into the ring, that’s too far.
(Believe it or not, this is oddly similar to modern politics, but I’m sure you’ve realized that on your own.)
Poor people exist either as entertainment or else they are an inconvenience. Rich people use poor people to feel better about themselves, or else they cannot be bothered to pay attention to them, lest the poor remind the rich that there is an injustice being committed. And while there are nice rich people and evil poor people, the world caters itself to the rich man, which automatically creates an imbalance between the two.
Yes, it is bad that a poor person stole a loaf of bread. But it is worse that the system is set up so that he does not make enough money to be able to buy that loaf of bread. And it is worse still that he is punished severely for stealing when you could argue that the system itself is stealing from him in the first place. How is it evil to steal for survival and yet it is good to steal “ethically” by withholding the proper wages from your workers?
Victor Hugo’s novel explores this over and over again. His large cast of characters uses an assortment of archetypes to show the reader that there is a lot of gray area in the world…but at the end of the day, the rich man is still rich and the poor man is still poor. And we should be looking to shrink the gap between them.
Modern events plays an important role in Les Miserables, although now those events are viewed as history. Hugo spends a lot of time explaining the history of France to the reader, taking us on all kinds of seemingly irrelevant tangents in order to set the stage for the novel. And when I first read these passages ten years ago, I didn’t understand why they were so relevant. (Granted, this time I still did not have the heart to read the sections on Waterloo or the Paris sewer system, but I digress.) Since these sections are so long, and they’re often started by Hugo stating something like, “I know this seems boring and irrelevant, but we absolutely must spend a few chapters talking about Paris slang. It’s important, I promise,” it can feel daunting to continue.
Digressions make up close to one-third of the novel, but these digressions are actually crucial, as they frame the narrative and provide the historical backdrop of the story. They emphasize that these characters—albeit fictional—are part of a history that is very real. In a chapter on l’argot, or French slang, Hugo argues that slang is a language that expresses the misery of the masses. Written primarily during Hugo’s eighteen years of exile, these digressions also attempt to preserve a history in danger of being lost or erased. The pain of exile oozes from some of the passages describing Paris. In one famous section, Hugo details the twists and turns of the roads Valjean takes through Paris as he attempts to escape Javert. As Hugo wrote, many of the street names memorialized in the novel were being erased as the entire map of Paris was transformed. Haussman, an official under Napoleon III, was creating the Paris we now know with its grands boulevards, in part to make it harder for workers to raise barricades and to make it easier to move troops to suppress revolts.
— “The enduring relevance of Victor Hugo” by Megan Behrent
As Megan shares above, I think these are some of the most compelling and vital parts of the novel. Sure, I love hearing about the Barricade Boys, but you cannot understand their perspective if you don’t understand the type of progress they’re fighting for. Yes, you can read about Jean Valjean spending 19 years in prison for stealing, but you have to understand how his sentence became so long to really appreciate his anger and hatred towards the world. As with most literature, context is everything. And Victor Hugo does not shy away from context.
And just like in Hugo’s time, this novel really comes alive when you think of it in the context of modern events.
As I’ve read this novel, I cannot help but draw similarities to where we are now. The past few months we’ve been living through the genocide of Palestine, and in recent years we have witnessed events in the USA such as the violent racism of policing and the crises that have arisen from the COVID-19 pandemic. And all the while, inflation has soared with the price of living and the federal minimum wage has remained at $7.25/hr. Brutal.
One of my favorite digression sections in Les Mis is a section towards the end about the idea of progress. Hugo spends a few pages talking about the revolutionary cause that led to the barricades at the end of the novel, and he expounds on the idea of insurrections. As we read, he makes a point that yes, violence is hardly the answer, but sometimes it is a necessity. That sometimes in order to make the omelette of progress, you have to break a couple eggs. (I’m mixing up my musical metaphors…this isn’t Something Rotten…)
What compelled me about this section is that it sounds a lot like the protests we’ve witnessed surrounding black policing in America. In 2020 especially, when the country was protesting the murder of George Floyd (and the instances before and after since this happens quite frequently over here), it became a hot point of debate that people were looting and rioting and destroying property in the name of progress. Kinda sounds like the barricade boys if you think about it.
Many people smarter than I have written articles in the defense of rioting. There are probably hundreds of posts about violence during protests. Obviously this applies to protesting the police, but we can also zoom out and apply this to Palestine in relation to Hamas. Now, I know even less about the Palestine conflict, and it’s all a delicate situation, but the point remains: you cannot tell an oppressed group the correct way to protest. And even though violence is bad (no shit), a lot of violence that is born out of protest is a result of a violent injustice that has already been committed.
Believe it or not, the world is not black and white. Nothing is simple, especially when it comes to injustice.
The heart of Les Miserables is the idea that sometimes the only path to real progress is violence. We cannot expect to overturn an unjust world through kindness alone. Sometimes you have to break the rules in order to make a real difference, in order to make people understand your distress, in order to change someone’s heart.
If you know the story of Les Mis, you’ll remember Javert’s suicide. This is a major plot point that is brought about by Jean Valjean sparing Javert’s life at the barricade. Valjean time and again gives himself up with the intent that he will go back to prison, and each time, he escapes Javert’s clutches. This final time, he uses his leverage on Javert to make sure Marius arrives home safely. As he goes home to say his final good-bye to Cosette, Javert mysteriously disappears and seemingly lets him go free for the last time.
This suicide deliberation is the partner to Valjean’s “Who Am I?” moments at the beginning of the book. Should he let the man go free or send him to prison? How can he condemn Valjean if Valjean saved his life? Is it possible that the law is wrong? Javert’s perspective on the world dramatically changes as he starts to question the law that he so steadfastly followed for his entire life. It is such a powerful moment because you get to witness someone who seemed heartless develop a conscience in real time. All because of one simple act of mercy.
What the musical leaves out is that right before Javert is washed away by the river, he takes a moment to write a note to his superior officer. The list is only a few items long, but it’s full of criticisms of the police force. Even the first item, that the police should stop forcing prisoners to take off their shoes because they often fall ill as a result, really shines a light on the changes that have started in Javert. The law is the law, but should the law not also consider that prisoners are human?
It’s a masterful section, to watch Javert try to grapple with these new ideas, that maybe the man he’s been chasing for his entire career is actually a Good Person that was taken advantage of by the justice system. And yes, the way he got to that conclusion was through an act of kindness, but Valjean could not have performed that act of kindness without all the violence that led him to that moment.
Now I understand that many people will never read Les Miserables because, well, it’s a challenge. While I do find the prose to be relatively easy to read for a classic, I know it’s difficult book and you really cannot look past the length. 1200 pages is 1200 pages. But I think a lot of people would be surprised at how compelling The Brick can be. I read it as a hybrid - both audiobook and a physical book - and with a little commitment, I got through most of it in just a month’s time. It’s more doable than you think.
In reading Les Mis, you are choosing to fight back against the system that is chaining us. You are taking a look in the mirror and facing the thing that scares you. You’re one step closer to progress. You are choosing light in a world that is drowning in darkness.
Because even though this book is depressing as hell, it’s a book about the goodness of man. It’s about light. It is about finding hope in a world that wants you to remain hopeless.
But hey, I totally understand if you’d rather just listen to the musical.
For those who are interested in reading Les Mis, now is an excellent time to jump on the bandwagon for the annual readalong via email!
will send you a chapter of Les Mis once per day for the whole year and in 12 months you can say you’ve read The Brick!!
Sorry it’s taken me 1000 years to get round to reading this but this was so interesting!!! The intersection you created between the parallels of the hunger games, les mis and what’s happening in Gaza were so good & well explained.