Historical Approach

Les Misérables

Historical Criticism

by Rica Rose M. Alfar

Les Misérables is a French historical novel by Victor Hugo, first published in 1862, that is considered one of the greatest novels of the 19th century. In the English-speaking world, the novel is usually referred to by its original French title. Let us try to criticize this novel by the used of historical approach, since historical approach focuses on the history, of course, critics must be based on facts.

The story of Les Miserables begins in 1815, more than two decades after the start of the French Revolution. The revolution began in 1789; it was "a deep-rooted revolt by many classes against the whole order of society." The impoverished were infuriated by their economic hardships, food shortages, and the callous attitudes upper class.

Romanticism was an intellectual and artistic movement that swept Europe and the United States from the late-18th to mid-19th centuries. This movement was preceded by the Enlightenment, which emphasized reason as the basis of social life. The Enlightenment also promoted universal, formal standards, dating back to Greek and Roman classicism, for greatness in art. The artists, philosophers, writers, and composers of the Romantic Movement rejected these standards and instead valued the individual imagination and experience as the basis of art and source of truth. Nature, the state of childhood, and emotion, rather than logic or scientific investigation, were considered the primary sources of eternal truth.

King Louis XIV prior to his execution

Louis XIV

France in the 19th century was in a constant state of political and social unrest. In 1789 the newly formed National Assembly created a document called the “Declaration of the Rights of Man,” establishing the right to liberty, equality, property, and security, and adding that every citizen had a duty to defend these rights. After King Louis XVI was executed on January 21, 1793, a period of confusion and violence followed. Many people, the innocent along with the guilty, were executed in the aftermath of the Revolution.

With the bloody departure of the monarchy, the legislature appointed a five-man Directory to power in 1795. But conspirators, including Napoleon Bonaparte, staged a coup d’état, or surprise overthrow of the state, in 1799. Napoleon became dictator and remained in power until he was completely defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. This is when Hugo’s novel Les Miserables begins.

Napoleon Bonaparte

The events which we are about to relate belong to that dramatic and living reality which the historian sometimes neglects, for lack of time and space. In them, however, we insist, in them is the life, the palpitation, the quivering of humanity. Little incidents, are, so to speak, the foliage of great events and are lost in the distance of history.” Hugo gives the reader some causes that he thinks started to stir-up a revolt amongst the people. The citizens of France were at unrest and wanted a change in their government long before the massive revolt occurred. They were dissatisfied with how things were run at the time which caused tension to build. Victor Hugo gives a detailed description of the Battle of Waterloo and even ties some of his characters to figures that were present and explains how it affected their lives because of these relations. Hugo inserted information about this conflict into his story, because he had family members that fought in the Battle of Waterloo. The author paints a picture of the scene where the battle took place and describes how the conditions and setting played an important role in the fighting. He gives the reader such minute details as he does to help them experience what he thinks is necessary to truly understand what took place during the Battle of Waterloo. The reader is told how the change of political views in Paris contributed to the revolt. 

The Battle of Waterloo

Victor Hugo was one of the leading writers of the Romantic Movement in France, and Les Miserables was one of its major works. The novel is Romantic in style and theme. It is written in a sweeping, emotional manner, taking the experience of the individual as the starting-point for discovering truths about French society.

The continuing industrialization of France in the 1850s and 1860s created wealth for the country, but it also created unemployment as machines replaced manual laborers in many jobs. This in turn led to an increase in crime. Poor working women also turned to prostitution as a means of survival. They worked under the scrutiny of a Police Morals Bureau, which considered them corrupt. The character of Jean Valjean was drawn from a historical person, a petty thief named Pierre Maurin who spent five years in prison for stealing bread for his sister’s children. Hugo draws a clear distinction in the novel between those who choose crime because they are corrupt and those who are driven to it by poverty and desperation. On the one hand, there is Thenardier, who is by nature “highly susceptible to the encroachments of evil.” On the other, there is Valjean, who stole only to save his family, and Fantine, who suffered for protecting her own child. The narrator blames society’s indifference and injustice for the situation of those who fall in the latter category.

The novel is set during a momentous era of French history, the period from 1815(Waterloo) to 1833, just after the failure of the Paris uprising the previous year. These years featured the fall of Napoleon, the return of the Bourbon monarchy to France, the overthrow of that monarchy 1830 and its replacement by another branch of the royal family, the Orleanists, and the revolution of 1830, followed by an unsuccessful revolt in Paris in 1832, Hugo also uses flashes to the French revolution that began in 1789, the Napoleonic wars of the early 1800 in Europe and flashes forward to the revolution of 1848.

One question that wonders the reader or viewer is that why Catholic Church is being represented in the novel it is because church is the house of God and we worship our Lord Jesus Christ in the church. Noticed that some of the church are formed like crucifix because these two are conjunction with each other.