"Les Miserables"

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how completed many years after the Romantic period had reached its popular peak, "Les Miserables" by Victor Hugo looks as much backward as forward, loving its past and imagining its future. It looks at how by re-reading both the past and the present, Hugo presents the readers with a new future history and how with Enjolras, he calls for a France dominated by heroic action in which there will be no more fictions or parasites, only the real governed by the true. It also shows how, although "Les Miserables" was written more than a century and half ago the themes of loneliness, alienation, misery, cruelty, progress, and regress within the society are still relevant to today's humanity.

From the Paper:

"To explore the vicissitudes of historical evolution, Hugo evaluates such major moments as the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror, Waterloo, the July Monarchy, and the insurrections of 1832 and 1848. But this apparently simple sequence is fraught with complexities. On the one hand, he maintains in "L'Argot," all progress aims to abolish material, moral, and intellectual misery. Yet the advent of this era of universal happiness remains problematic. Both notions are challenged at many points in the text, where history often seems to imitate the Thenardiers, those "crablike souls, continually crawling back toward darkness" (Hugo 156)."

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