Until recently, I was completely unfamiliar with Les Misérables. Based on a very strong recommendation from a friend, I got the 60 hour long audiobook.^[1]Translated by Julie Rose. Narrated by George Guidall. When I finally finished it, I watched the musical for the first time. The difference is stunning. My friend, who had done something similar, said that “he felt the rest of the audience that night was being cheated”. And it’s not a bad musical. It’s just completely different from the book.

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Prerequisites: Knowing the basic story line of either version would be helpful, but is not required. I’m guessing that more of you have watched the musical (play or movie version) than have read the book.

Originally Written: July 2022.

Confidence Level: Not my ideas.

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The Missing Middle

Les Misérables is a very long book. Any stage or film production would have to cut out a lot of material. As entertaining as it was to listen to a five hour long description of Waterloo or Hugo’s thoughts on the role of slang, these things won’t be in the play.

What is weird is how it was cut. The entire middle half of the book is missing. Les Misérables is divided into 5 volumes, each of which is divided into books and chapters. The musical skips from the beginning of Volume 2 to the end of Volume 4, or from the death of Fantine to the death of General Lamarck.^[2]The scene where the Thénaldier’s gang accosts Jean Valjean is in the gap, but it’s moved in time, is completely different, and mostly serves to explain why the characters are even aware … Continue reading Instead, there’s a screen that reads: “Nine years later.” Important things happened in those nine years !

Before the gap, the musical is about what I’d expect from a movie adaptation. There are some important changes, but the story line is mostly the same. After the gap, the story is wildly different. Most of the characters’ motivations are different and the themes of the novel are fundamentally altered.

Symbols

One amusing feature of the compressed length of the musical is that symbols from the book appear without explanation. They become quirks of the set, instead of powerful symbols.

The worst offender here is the elephant. Why is there a wood and plaster elephant in the square?

That square is the site of the Bastille, a prison that the Old Monarchy had used for political prisoners. The Storming of the Bastille was a key event of the French Revolution, and the prison was torn to the ground.

After Napoleon came to power, he decided that this would be a perfect location for a monument to his greatness. The monument would be a 24 m (78 ft)^[3]Twice as tall as the replica for the movie. bronze elephant made from the cannons of his enemies. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia began before it was built, and afterwards the supply of cannons for making elephants never materialized. The bronze elephant was never made. A full sized plaster and wood model was made before Napoleon’s reign ended. It stood in the square, under a wooden roof, for decades.

As the years wore on, the plaster decayed and holes opened up in the elephant. Rats and all manner of vermin moved in – even homeless children. The elephant became a symbol of the failure of the promises of the French Revolution and Napoleon. What was supposed to be grand had instead become decrepit.

Victor Hugo has an unpopular opinion about the elephant. He claims that the decrepit plaster elephant was better than the bronze elephant would have been. Why? Because it’s more important to house homeless children than it is to honor Napoleon.

Characters

In the second half of the musical, almost all of the characters’ motivations were different. Let’s go through the main characters and see what changed, to see just how different these two stories are.

Before the Gap

• Javert. The most accurate portrayal of the movie. Javert believes that morality is exactly following the law. He is completely unyielding because he knows he is right.
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• Jean Valjean. The story of his redemption is mostly true to the book. I was pleasantly surprised that they kept Christianity at the heart of his redemption instead of secularizing it. There were a few important changes:
  • In the book, Jean stops all violence after his redemption. There is no stick vs sword fight with Javert and he does not shoot at the army in the barricade.^[4]When the army posts a sentry on the roof, Jean shoots the sentry’s helmet off, clearly showing that he has the ability to kill but not the desire. The corresponding scene in the musical has the … Continue reading
  • In the musical, Jean resents that he had to go to prison. In the book, Jean thinks that this was just. He knows that he is a repeat thief. Jean goes back to the galleys a second time after turning himself in at the trial. He escapes (by saving someone’s life) because he thinks that his duty to Fantine & Cosette is more important than his duty to the law. Once that duty is fulfilled, he tells Javert his address (at the barricade) so he can come arrest him.
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• Fantine. The story of her suffering closely follows the book, but her most important scene is very different – her dismissal from the factory. She enjoyed her work. Her supervisor did not sexually harass her because the supervisor was a good, but firm, old woman. Jean was not there when she was dismissed and did not even know about it. Fantine explicitly considered her dismissal just, because she had been hiding an illegitimate child in a very Catholic society, and chose not to appeal to Jean about the decision.
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This is about what I expect from a film or stage adaptation. The director has a somewhat different vision than the author, makes a few major changes and condenses the material, but mostly respects the story the author wanted to tell. But after the gap, everything changes.

After the Gap

• Cosette. She is (unfortunately) a simple character, defined mostly by her relationships with Jean and Marius. The musical’s portrayal is decent, although it chooses some atypical scenes to show. Marius’s relationship to her is much more developed in the book. Instead of only having met once, they had eyed each other from a distance in the Luxembourg Gardens for months, then met every night to talk in her private garden for weeks. When Jean abruptly decides to move the day before the barricades, Cosette resists because she wants to keep secretly meeting with Marius. The musical shows this conflict, but skips the previous decade of them loving and caring for each other as adopted father & daughter.
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• Marius. In the musical, Marius, is a young idealist who is willing to die for liberty and democracy in France. In the book, Marius is a Bonapartist. He had believed in the Republic earlier in the book, but after discovering his father’s legacy in the armies of Napoleon, Marius rejected both government by the traditional monarchy and government by the people. He supports government by the great, future-looking emperor. He is friends with the other revolutionaries, but not politically allied.
  
  If Marius did not support the revolution ideologically, why did he go to the barricade?
  
  Despair. Marius had told Cosette that he would die without her. Then she vanished and he thought that he would never see her again. All that was left was for him to die. All of his friends were going to the barricade and would probably die there, so he might as well die with them.
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• Other Revolutionaries. Even though Marius didn’t support the Republic, his friends did. The musical neglects to mention the name of their revolutionary society or the main policy goal they had for the new republic.
  
  The society’s name is the Friends of the A B C. This is a pun in French with ‘Friends of the Abased’ and it suggests their main policy goal: all children should learn to read. Hugo makes a lot of suggestions about how to improve society, but the only one he repeatedly comes back to is universal literacy.
  
  The musical instead shows the revolutionaries passing out pamphlets to the poor. No wonder the entire city didn’t join the revolution: They couldn’t read your pamphlets !
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• Gavroche. The musical portrays Gavroche as a radial Eat-The-Rich leftist. “Here’s the thing about equality – Everyone’s equal when they’re dead.” He pushes the revolutionaries forward.
  
  The book’s Gavroche is much less political. He doesn’t want to miss the excitement. He does help the morale in the barricade, but it’s by being cheerful and free-spirited, rather than being politically radical. Gavroche makes fun of everyone and everything, including the revolution.
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• Éponine. The musical’s Éponine is Marius’s friend and fellow revolutionary, although she comes from a poorer background than Marius. The book’s Éponine is so different that she’s almost unrecognizable. She deserves her own section.
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• The Thénardiers. The Thénardiers are evil. In the musical, they’re often evil in a funny way. Their over-the-top robberies provide comic relief. They are definitely not comic relief in the book. They do try to cheat and steal and swindle whenever they can. They associate with the worst criminals in Paris and are in-and-out of jail. The father doesn’t flinch at the thought of murder. The mother’s one redeeming feature is that she loves her daughters – but not her sons. They abuse Gavroche so much that he prefers to live on the street than with his parents.
  
  They are a lot poorer in the book than in the musical. When we see them in Paris, they should be filthy and in rags – including Éponine and Gavroche. Instead, the musical shows Gavroche with two shirts and shoes. Only Fantine and young Cosette are shown in rags.
  
  The Thénardiers suffer and cause everyone else around them to suffer. It’s really not funny.
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At some point, when you’ve made this many changes to the characters, you might as well give them different names and write a new story.

They might respond that you need to simplify the story to shorten it into a musical. There is a lot of complexity in the novel. We should focus the musical more narrowly on the central message of the story.

Except the central message is different too.

Who are Les Misérables?

The title of the book is Les Misérables, or The Miserable. Who are these miserable people?

In the musical, the miserable are people unjustly oppressed by society. Jean Valjean is sent to the galleys for stealing a loaf of bread. Fantine is mistreated at her job, then unjustly dismissed, causing her descent to prostitution and death. Cosette is abused by the Thénardiers as a child. All of the poor in Paris are held down compared to the wealthy nobility and bourgeoisie, enforced by the police, the army, and the king. The emphasis on the unjustly oppressed is common to revolutionary movements. It fits well the musical’s decision to emphasize the barricade over most of the rest of the book.

The book does not use the phrase “the miserable” until over halfway through. This is clearly a title drop, so it is important to pay attention:

Marius had lived for five years in poverty, in destitution, even in distress, but he now perceived that he had not known real misery. True misery he had but just had a view of. It was its spectre which had just passed before his eyes. In fact, he who has only beheld the misery of man has seen nothing; the misery of woman is what he must see; he who has seen only the misery of woman has seen nothing; he must see the misery of the child.

When a man has reached his last extremity, he has reached his last resources at the same time. Woe to the defenceless beings who surround him! Work, wages, bread, fire, courage, good will, all fail him simultaneously. The light of day seems extinguished without, the moral light within; in these shadows man encounters the feebleness of the woman and the child, and bends them violently to ignominy.

Then all horrors become possible. Despair is surrounded with fragile partitions which all open on either vice or crime.

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What! only a wall separated him from those abandoned beings who lived gropingly in the dark outside the pale of the rest of the world, he was elbow to elbow with them, he was, in some sort, the last link of the human race which they touched, he heard them live, or rather, rattle in the death agony beside him, and he paid no heed to them! Every day, every instant, he heard them walking on the other side of the wall, he heard them go, and come, and speak, and he did not even lend an ear! And groans lay in those words, and he did not even listen to them, his thoughts were elsewhere, given up to dreams, to impossible radiances, to loves in the air, to follies; and all the while, human creatures, his brothers in Jesus Christ, his brothers in the people, were agonizing in vain beside him! He even formed a part of their misfortune, and he aggravated it. For if they had had another neighbor who was less chimerical and more attentive, any ordinary and charitable man, evidently their indigence would have been noticed, their signals of distress would have been perceived, and they would have been taken hold of and rescued! They appeared very corrupt and very depraved, no doubt, very vile, very odious even; but those who fall without becoming degraded are rare; besides, there is a point where the unfortunate and the infamous unite and are confounded in a single word, a fatal word, the miserable; whose fault is this? And then should not the charity be all the more profound, in proportion as the fall is great?

Who is this referring to in particular? The Thénardiers.

The miserable are poor and they are evil, “the unfortunate and the infamous”. There is sorrow among the noble poor, but the worst misery comes from evil too. Les Misérables wants to show us these people, so we can see them as our brothers (and sisters) in Jesus Christ and in the people.

The musical is a call for liberty for people who are unjustly suffering. The book is a call for compassion for people who are justly suffering.

Sometimes, poor people are evil. They hurt the people around them, including the most innocent. Sometimes, their suffering is entirely their fault. You should feel sorry for them anyway.

This is a much more radical message. It is also hard to get this idea into someone’s head in just a few sentences. To help make it stick, I will summarize the book’s story of Éponine.

Éponine

Éponine is the eldest daughter of the Thénardiers. After losing their inn to debt and the law, the Thénardiers move to the slums of Paris. Most of their income comes from a sophisticated form of begging and lying done by Éponine. She identifies wealthy people who believe in some cause and tells her father. He has her write a letter from him, explaining how he is a starving artist, or a young scientist, or a good Christian man down on his luck (as the case might require), and asking them for help.

Marius lives next door to them for a while, but hardly interacts with them at all. He is too dreamy to even really notice them as people. Marius’s few interactions with Éponine are entirely transactional. He pays her, or tries to pay her, for helping to find Cosette and for delivering letters to her. They are not friends.

Éponine does secretly love Marius, but the reader doesn’t learn this until she is about to die. Marius loves Cosette and he doesn’t even really see Éponine when they interact. She decides that, since they won’t live together, she wants them to die together.

Jean Valjean is continually paranoid and has been thinking about leaving France altogether with Cosette. Éponine spooks him by slipping a letter to him that says “MOVE AWAY FROM YOUR HOUSE”. Jean & Cosette leave that day, to another part of Paris, where they’ll stay for a week before leaving for England. Cosette tries to send a note to Marius telling him where she’s gone, but Éponine takes the note for herself. When Marius comes to Cosette’s garden that evening, he finds that she has vanished and sinks into despair. Éponine, dressed in men’s clothes, walks by and calls out to him “your friends are waiting for you at the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie.” She vanishes into the city before he can recognize her. They arrive at the barricade separately.

During the army’s first attack on the barricade, Éponine grabs the muzzle of a gun pointed at Marius and pulls it towards herself. The shot goes through her hand, and then her chest. After Marius repels this attack by threatening to suicide-bomb the barricade, he finds Éponine among the wounded. She asks him to kiss her forehead when she dies and tells him, “I believe that I was a little bit in love with you.”

Éponine’s death is entirely her fault. She pulled the gun towards herself, she came to the barricade voluntarily, she dressed as a man so the revolutionaries wouldn’t send her home, and she arranged for Marius to be there too. Her motive was evil. She didn’t care about politics or the cause of the revolution. She was there to commit murder-suicide-by-cop. The appropriate response to having a crush on someone is not to arrange their death.

You still have to feel sorry for her. Her death is a tragedy. This is the central message of Les Misérables. You should have compassion on people even when they are hurting themselves and the people around them. Their suffering is real. The most miserable people are both poor and mean. They need light and love more than anyone else.

Conclusion

There are a lot of superficial similarities between the book and the musical. Most of the scenes in the musical are recognizable from the book. But most of these scenes were changed, in consistent ways, to change the overall meaning of the story.

The characters who best represented the title of the novel, the Thénardiers, were changed into comic relief. The injustice of the characters’ suffering was exaggerated for Jean Valjean and Fantine. Characters which had been apolitical or had different political beliefs were made to support the revolution.

The most egregious example is at the very end, when Jean Valjean dies. In the musical, Fantine appears and leads him to Heaven, where they find the French Revolution ! Because Heaven and the French Revolution are definitely the same thing.

The book describes the complexities of human life. Different characters understand and experience the world in very different ways. There are multiple competing ethical systems, involving justice, mercy, honor, debt, liberty, equality, and fraternity. These ethical systems combine to leave the characters in hard moral dilemmas. Despite all of this moral complexity, it is possible for characters to be unambiguously good – Monseigneur Bienvenu & Jean Valjean – or unambiguously evil – the Thénardiers. Characters who fail to understand the moral complexity – Javert & sometimes Marius – end up being both good and evil in different circumstances. The main recurring theme is compassion for people who are suffering, regardless of why those people are suffering. Les Misérables refers to the evil poor, who are miserable in part because of their own choices, in part because they surround themselves with people like themselves, and in part because of a lack of compassion from other people.

The musical collapses the moral complexity of the story onto a single dichotomy between the monarchy and the republic. Society is unjustly oppressing the poor, so we need to rise up and demand liberty (and bread) for everyone. Les Misérables refers to the oppressed poor, who are miserable because society has been unjust to them. This theme does exist in the novel, but it is far from the most important message.

The result is extremely frustrating to watch if you’ve first read the book. They’re showing scenes like the ones you’re familiar, with characters you know, but everything is different.

If you ignore or haven’t read the book and watch the musical for it’s own sake, it is quite good. The story they tell is compelling. The songs they sing are powerful. If they had written their own story about one of the French revolutions, I would have enjoyed watching it. It’s just not Les Misérables.