Writing in Foreign Affairs, Yale history professor Charles Walton charges that the new film version of Victor Hugo’s novel inaccurately neglects politics in favor of the religious message:
Hooper’s cinematic rendering is stunningly staged and brilliantly performed, but it cuts the author in half: it gives us the religious Hugo, not the revolutionary one. It tells the story of individual redemption through an odyssey of Catholic conscience, not of France’s collective redemption through political violence.
Religion runs throughout the film, from an early scene in which a priest saves the ex-convict Jean Valjean from being arrested for having stolen his silverware (the priest lies, telling the police that it had been a gift) to Valjean’s lifelong commitment to paying off this moral debt through acts of charity and self-sacrifice (he saves his one-time employee, Fantine, from a life of prostitution and offers to raise her daughter, Cosette, as his own when she dies). Toward the end of the film, when Valjean confesses his past as a convict to his future son-in-law, Marius, whom he rescued at the barricade, we see Valjean backgrounded by a conspicuous crucifix. When Valjean dies — in a convent, no less — the ghost of Fantine descends like an angel to take him “somewhere beyond the barricade,” to “the garden of the Lord,” as the chorus assures us.
To be sure, religion is a central theme in Hugo’s original novel — but so, too, is revolution.
A valid point: Hugo “aimed to reconcile France’s revolutionary and Catholic traditions,” and wrote the novel partially against the regime of Napoleon III that emerged out of the chaos of the brief Second Republic. He was no Marxist, but rather:
Wanted to stir the comfortable classes from their shameful complacency [. . .] “A desired peace without [democratic] principles is more onerous than war,” the narrator of the novel insists. But Hooper’s film, like the staged version before it, conveys a different view: it presents revolutionary idealism as misguided and futile. Viewers are led to believe, for example, that Marius’s insurrectionary friends die in vain, because their deaths do not lead to any clear progress. Wandering around the empty chairs and tables where the insurgents had held their “last communion” the evening before the fight, Marius sings, “Here they talked of revolution / Here it was they lit the flame / Here they sang about tomorrow / And tomorrow never came.”
Walton goes on to contrast Hugo with Alexis de Tocqueville, noting their somewhat-similar biographies while explaining their divergence of views over the ultimate effects of revolutionary fervor. No doubt an even longer discussion could be had on this point: Tocqueville isn’t exactly Burkean in his analysis of the Revolution of 1789 (on balance, he believes it to have been a necessary development, and one that was most deeply marked not by rupture but by continuity, though he deplores the excesses of the Terror). While he certainly doesn’t agree with Hugo’s theory of human advancement through revolution, his skepticism arises partially because he believes the effects of democracy simply drain people of their passion and ability to initiate such events; that our growing attachment to a “circle of small domestic interests” and pleasures narrows our focus, not necessarily because we get smarter and learn to attenuate our temptation to abstraction. On that point, he and Hugo would both commend the kind of concrete works of charity chronicled in the film as a way of overcoming our inbuilt selfishness.
Still, this is a rather funny place to be in: a mass-market film generating complaints for being too religious and insufficiently political. And revealing: the Christian narrative of suffering and redemption still proves to be more enticing and affecting (not to mention lucrative) than all the other quite worthy elements of the story.
January 4th, 2013 | 3:06 pm
Unless I am reading too much into it, the film’s finale, with Valjean, Fantine, and all those who died in the streets singing triumphantly on the heavenly barricade, seems to be quite a significant nod to the politics of the novel. Not only, it seems, do all dogs go to heaven, but also all revoluntionaries.
January 4th, 2013 | 3:07 pm
There’s a lot to be said for the fact that the musical (and, I presume, the film) waters down some very anti-religious sentiment in Hugo’s novel. But I’m not sure if all that’s included in the abridged form of the novel that most people read.
January 4th, 2013 | 3:14 pm
When I saw the film this Sunday, I was disoriented by the dates and times. The film wasn’t about the 1789 Revolution at all as I had assumed from the trailers. It wasn’t about “The Three Glorious Days” of 1830, which I learned about in Wikipedia. Both of those rebellions “succeeded”. I quote to wonder why two were needed. Instead it was about the June Rebellion of 1832 which failed (that’s three). To an American audience, 1830/1832 are times of little significance, so I have to wonder also why Charles Walton thinks political issues of that time or of the time of Napoleon III when the book was written, would affect the audience as much as the still current theme of redemption, accepted (Valjean) or not (Javert).
In any event, I was startled by the film, enough so to download the book, free for Kindle on Amazon, for reading. Maybe I’ll find out what Walton means.
To me, Napoleon III calls to mind Maximilian and Carlota Loca, even Cinco de Mayo at Puebla not Paris, but that is a personal context.
January 4th, 2013 | 3:46 pm
RE: Steve Bauer, all dogs going to heaven, etc.: It may be worth mentioning Hugo was not apparently a universalist, or Hooper’s reading of Hugo on mercy does not encompass universality, as Javert was not present in the heavenly flag-waving…
January 4th, 2013 | 4:04 pm
The best description in English of the 19th century French Revolutionary spirit, which Hugo and De Tocqueville both shared, is Chesterton’s.
“The idea of the Citizen is that his individual human nature shall be constantly and creatively active in altering the State. The Germans are right in regarding the idea as dangerously revolutionary. Every Citizen is a revolution. That is, he destroys, devours and adapts his environment to the extent of his own thought and conscience. This is what separates the human social effort from the non-human; the bee creates the honey-comb, but he does not criticise it. … The French not only make up the State, but make the State; not only make it, but remake it…. No state of social good that does not mean the Citizen choosing good, as well as getting it, has the idea of the Citizen at all. “
January 4th, 2013 | 4:48 pm
“…collective redemption through political violence?” Not in Christ’s kingdom.
January 4th, 2013 | 5:11 pm
Victor Hugo was out of the mainstream in both his religious and his political views. It’s been a LONG time since I’ve read the (unabridged) book, and I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I’ve seen the musical twice. It was pretty faithful to what I remember of Hugo’s themes in the book, which was much more complex than the musical, and which were certainly NOT that the revolutionaries were right. They were young, idealistic, and rather dumb in that they thought all it took to help the miserable people of the world was a revolution. But they were noble, too, in that they wanted to. The play says that in a horrible time full of horrible choices, God judges people for what they trying to do rather than what they do — you can disagree with that conclusion, but it isn’t the same as “all revolutionaries go to heaven.” And I think it’s closer to the truth than not.
January 4th, 2013 | 6:09 pm
Several passages in Hugo’s novel point to (1) Hugo’s indignation at injustice (much like Emile Zola in Germinal) and (2) his starry-eyed progressive belief that universal education and other social projects are the key to human and societal perfectibility. I have in mind Enjolras’s stirring but strangely naive pep talks to his comrades.
We should put Enjolras (and Hugo) on the dock. This and that project might be fine, but human and societal perfectibility? The end of poverty? (Enjolras and Jeff Sachs are really made of the same progressive cloth.) Really? It’s no wonder “tomorrow never came,” as Marius sings, alone and dejected. This sort of “tomorrow” will never come, because as Chesterton noted, original sin is the most empirically verifiable of the Christian doctrines.
January 6th, 2013 | 10:22 am
Not having read the book, and my only exposure to Les Miserables being the movie/musical I just watched this weekend, it struck me that this is a very faithful depiction of the human condition. Though compressed and encapsulated, the injustice and suffering, the wasted lives, all these would be horribly oppressive and the story would have left me despondent without the religious themes of redemption and self-sacrificial heroism. That theme which runs through the movie is, not to be cute, the saving grace of a story that would otherwise be devoid of hope. Consequently, the story has a relevant message and is timeless for today we also have suffering and injustice and wasted lives. Lastly, I think there is some comparison to be drawn between the two main protagonists and Peter and Judas in their reaction to finding out the truth about themselves and how they responded to that shattering reality.
January 7th, 2013 | 10:56 am
I do not believe that I said Hugo was a universalist. I was insinuating that the the end of the movie (I presume the musical as well, I have not seen that) is.
And, as misplaced as as it may be to think that universal education and other social efforts to prune the effects of evil in society will lead to human perfectability, at least we do not have cities filled with children trying to survive by the laws of tooth and claw.
I think Mark has captured the essence of the book from the movie.
January 7th, 2013 | 11:16 am
There are those who say that the bishop who takes in Valjean, from whom he steals the silver, and who then “covers” for him was based on Charles Joseph Eugene de Mazenod, the Bishop of Marseilles, who founded the very large men’s order, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate.
January 7th, 2013 | 4:06 pm
John,
In the 25th anniversary concert DVD, both Javert and the lecherous quasi-rapist who wants a slice of Fantine’s “pie” can be seen singing merrily at the end of the musical along with the rest of the cast. Probably more a concert production decision rather than a theological one, but a hilarious detail worth noticing nonetheless.
Fantastic movie, by the way. Very nice touches, including Javert’s pinning of a medal on Gavroche’s dead body. Some might not have liked the close-ups, but it’s as if Hooper wanted us to see and taste and notice the anguish, to enter truly into someone else’s sorrow. It is usually too easy for us to look away.
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