In both the novel and the musical, armed revolution is a central backdrop to the entire story (not the French revolution, but an earlier, crushed version). This tended to leave me cold alongside the compelling individual narratives. And the romantic young rebels seemed the closest to cardboard cutouts in Hugo's cast of characters. Yet this part of the tapestry is also testimony to Hugo’s wisdom. By itself, Valjean’s story is one of personal redemption. And Hugo is invested without irony in its truth and nobility. But he is no less clear that the whole premise of that story is a horribly warped world, one that sent his hero to prison for stealing bread to feed hungry children. Whether in extremity violence is the right solution to violence may not be a question we can resolve. But the author forces it upon us with good reason. If we saw nothing but Valjean's personal struggle we could lose ourselves, as Christianity sometimes has, in the foreground of individual sin and miss the larger struggle. It is not Valjean's story alone, but the entire web of stories taken together that represent Hugo's full vision of salvation. Valjean may go to heaven in the end, but it is his relations with others all along that that are its leading edge here. And that web does not stop short of societies themselves. The hope of the Gospel is not only that I and my neighbors might be like Valjean and those he loves. It is the hope for a “world yet to be” that will not crucify its weak.
The novel is famous as an impassioned cry on behalf of the poor and oppressed. Those who pick it up with that in mind are often surprised to find that the cry comes via a story whose one constant character is God and whose hero struggles above all against himself. Those who read it looking solely for the conversion story may be equally put off that it dwells so much on politics and power. In this, as in much else, it is an authentic version of the Christian story. Heaven or justice: choose one. That is not the Gospel. Hugo wants both.
The novel is famous as an impassioned cry on behalf of the poor and oppressed. Those who pick it up with that in mind are often surprised to find that the cry comes via a story whose one constant character is God and whose hero struggles above all against himself. Those who read it looking solely for the conversion story may be equally put off that it dwells so much on politics and power. In this, as in much else, it is an authentic version of the Christian story. Heaven or justice: choose one. That is not the Gospel. Hugo wants both.
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