The message of this chapter is best summed up by this paragraph:
“This crowd may be rendered sublime. Let us learn how to make use of that vast conflagration of principles and virtues, which sparkles, bursts forth and quivers at certain hours. These bare feet, these bare arms, these rags, these ignorances, these abjectnesses, these darknesses, may be employed in the conquest of the ideal. Gaze past the people, and you will perceive truth. Let that vile sand which you trample under foot be cast into the furnace, let it melt and seethe there, it will become a splendid crystal, and it is thanks to it that Galileo and Newton will discover stars.”
@everyonewasabird and @halogenwarrior have written wonderful posts about all of the problems with this, both in terms of its classism (assuming that we and Hugo, the educated reader and the writer, need to “shape” the “masses” for a purpose so that they’ll be “bettered”) and its colonialist undertones, especially in relation to the convent digression (that there’s a “superior” culture that should be enforced on everyone through education; it’s made worse by his language of “race” and “physiognomy”).
He does try to sympathize, and he contrasts himself with writers who don’t do that, like Burke and Cicero. He notes that they look down on the poor with their cries of “mob” and “rabble” and argues that we should ignore those labels and not “abandon” them. However, as @everyonewasabird so eloquently put it, there’s a big difference between “sympathy” and “solidarity,” and Hugo’s definitely stuck in the former. He believes that the poor need to be guided in a specific way to “improve,” and his language of “abandonment” suggests that they would be helpless on their own. There’s a responsibility to the poor embedded in his call, but it’s a paternalistic one. Moreover, although Hugo’s trying to be sympathetic, he also slips into dehumanizing language. For instance, he says they “swarm,” as if they were insects rather than people.
It’s also rather troubling that Hugo decides to defend his focus on the common people of Paris in this language:
“It is in the faubourgs, above all, we maintain, that the Parisian race appears; there is the pure blood; there is the true physiognomy; there this people toils and suffers, and suffering and toil are the two faces of man.”
“Purity” here is terrifying to read. While it’s understandable that Hugo would want to justify why the people of the faubourgs are the “true” people of Paris (in contrast to the stereotype of the bourgeoisie or the wealthy), “purity” suggests something unchangeable and fixed (especially when combined with “blood,” which adds a racializing element).
Although Hugo’s views aren’t surprising, they’re also disappointing in light of the rest of the novel? Although many of the characters in this book are united by the common experience of poverty, the specifics of their experiences and identities are fairly diverse. They’re from many parts of France (city and countryside, etc) and face different, if overlapping, issues. Fantine is distinct from Valjean, who’s also distinct from Fauchelevent, and so on. Their statuses may be precarious, as we saw with the financial fall of Fauchelevent and Gribier and with Fantine, or they may have always lived in poverty, like Jean Valjean and Champmathieu. Having all of this boiled down to a “pure” identity once we reach Paris is upsetting not only because of the racial language but because the variety of experiences shown is one of this book’s strengths.
This section is so sad compared to the rest of the novel, too. There’s definitely a lot of misery - the title is earned - but it’s such a hopeful story as well. Here, though, there are lines like “suffering and toil are the two faces of man,” which feels so resigned in comparison to the rest of the book. It really feels like this chapter is both the worst of Hugo and the antithesis of Hugo’s best, but also written by Hugo.
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