#3.8.8

Hugo also further talks about the destitution which a man reduced to extreme poverty can thrust a woman or a child in. Survival in poverty becomes an almost instinctive reaction where anyone can resort to any vice or crime. 

This is not entirely related, but in Discovery of France, Graham Robb talks about the poor peasants and farmers huddling together for warmth and eating as little as possible just so they can survive the miserable winters and the cold. This is what reminded me when reading the line ‘they squat back to back in the wretchedness of their fate’. Though it might really mean that they share the terrible wretchedness of their existence together and therefore children might be put to work from a very early age to support their families.

Hugo had some words to say about child labour, so it is very likely that he is making a case for all children here who live in miserable wretchedness, after talking about the symbolic young girl through Eponine. 

Where do all these children go of which none of them laugh?

Those pensive soft beings, that fever makes thin?

Those eight-year-old girls we see going all by themselves?

They go to work fifteen hours under laps;

They go, from dawn-to-dusk, and do endlessly

In the same prison the same moves.

Squat down under the teeth of a dark machine

Hideous monster chewing, who knows what in the shadow,

Innocents in a penal colony, angels in a hell,

They work. All is bronze, all is iron.

Never do we stop and never do we play....

Victor Hugo –Melancholia 1856

He then goes on to say that Eponine opened Marius’ eyes to the plight of people living in darkness and now Marius blames himself way too much for not paying attention to his neighbours' poverty whereas someone less dreamy might have noticed the neighbours' plight much sooner. I thought giving up five francs and keeping sixteen sous for himself was pretty charitable of him and very much like Myriel and his model of charity. 

Hugo also emphasises the idea that he raised in the mines chapter, that poverty is often linked with wickedness to turn people into the miserables.

Providential spyhole seems to imply some connotations with God? So, Marius spying on his neighbours was a bad thing, but overall since his intentions were to find out how they were living that it became a good act? There’s a lot more support of Marius’ peeping actions than I’m comfortable with.

3.8.6

Hugo brings his cities and forests comparisons and the poetic descriptions in the first paragraph. He’s done the nature vs. civilisation comparisons before as well in the chapters with Cosette in the forest, where nature was wild and uncivilised but still preferable to the unkindness at the inn. To Hugo, it feels that cities are either towers of civilisation or the holes where wretchedness breeds, Eponine after all is converted into an osprey in a city. Somewhere in the middle are forests. Nature is better than the wretched slums in the cities according to Hugo because there is grotesque and sublime in caves and forests. The slums in the cities are grotesque and ugly without containing anything sublime. 

The whole idea of slums necessarily containing wickedness though is something I feel uncomfortable with, it dismisses all poor people living in the slums as being closer to wickedness and darkness whereas that might not always be the case.

Although maybe Hugo is implying that humans can be worse than the savage beasts in their lairs, that living in slums means that as well as the squalid circumstances you are living in, you are much closer to wickedness i.e. darkness.  

The thing about Marius’ poverty being noble is repeated, which I understand why Hugo is using that again here, to make the comparison to his neighbours’ who are also poor, but Marius seems to not have gone down the dark road which Thenardier led his family onto.

This Hugo reminds us, what Marius sees through the peep hole, this is abject poverty which so often leads to darkness and crime. I still don’t agree with Hugo’s idea of noble poverty especially as he ascribes it to Marius because it feels unearned for Marius, maybe Myriel would have been a better comparison or the nuns. I also am uncomfortable with poverty being described as noble, I don’t think it is something to be romanticised when it concerns Marius and called wretched otherwise.

The furniture is much bare compared to Marius’ room and, even the walls are seeping with moisture which is so much more likely to have an ill effect on health. We have more allusions to darkness and to spiders lurking in the corners and woodlice, a reference to Thenardier and Patron Minette being criminals and catching innocent people in their traps, perhaps.

Thenardier gets compared to a vulture (more bird imagery) as well as to lawyers (and Hugo does not mince words in saying outright that Thenardier is somebody who leeches and exploits people, while also dressing in an eccentric attire and looking grotesque with his cunning cruel look. Hugo is also maybe pointing out that lawyers and Thenardier have much in common by the way they deal and dispense the letter of the law.

Thenardier also lives in wretched conditions, but without making any effort to improve them whereas with Marius at least we learned that he had quickly used his abilities to learn two languages and get a job which paid enough. Thenardier is maybe too lazy or too unwilling to do the work.  

He is also pointing out the injustices in society without actually realising that he is not an innocent bystander since he is fleecing people of their hard-earned money and thinks that is justified because he is poor.

We have descriptions of Mme Thenardier and how she is a giant compared to her husband, it’s slightly annoying how her age is dismissed as she could be between forty and a hundred- I don’t like the implication that beyond a certain age, a woman could be however many years in age and would still look really old and ugly. Mme Thenardier still reads romance novels, but also there is very little love left between Thenardier and his wife, and it is only in words that have lost their meanings that we find that they used to care about each other but due to poverty and hardships they have grown apart, which is sad and also very likely. It is interesting that we haven’t yet seen a happy, healthy loving relationship till now.

We also find out that Azelma is actually fifteen but looks eleven or twelve because of poverty, and the way that her life trajectory is described is heartbreaking. It’s the children who suffer because Thenardier is using them and they have to live in poverty through no fault of their own and are denied their childhood. ‘They seem to take life in big strides so as to get through it faster’ is such a heartbreaking sentence.

3.8.7

Thenardier is controlling the operations. He has sent Eponine with the letters and she comes to inform him that the gentleman from the church is coming. He is pleased with that fact and calls her a smart girl. Eponine is smart and her father trusts her with all these jobs, and it is evident why. Although this is so depressing that she is so used to going barefoot on the streets that a pair of bad boots feels worse to her. Thenardier makes an observation on how if you’re barefoot you’re denied admission into the House of God, more of Hugo taking a swipe at Christianity being involved in materialism as he did in the Myriel chapters but through someone who is motivated by only hatred.

Thenardier’s face is suddenly illuminated by light although this seems more sinister than good and he orders his family about and when they complain he talks about censoring the press. He is talking very much like a monarch. Although he could be anyone from Napoleon I to Charles X and NIII because they all did censor the press to some extent. He is however supposed to be a caricature of a dictator/monarch, that seems pretty obvious.  

This also feels like he is directing a theatre play making sure the scene is set for his deception and trickery so that he can take advantage of the philanthropist as much as he can.

3.8.8

Thenardier is not content with complaining about things but even in misery he has to be better as his wife points out. It is also interesting that he feels very little concern for Azelma’s bleeding hand and more impatience at the philanthropist not arriving. He has never cared for his children. They have never been a family but scattered individuals living in close proximity. Thenardier’s talk also feels a lot like him being a hypocrite. He hates the rich but also wants to be one of them. His talk would have been noble in sentiment and almost revolutionary had it not been driven by so much hate compared to the revolutionaries whose work of changing the system is driven by love and compassion.

He also hates the fact that charity is humiliating to the receiver whereas the philanthropist might be pretending to be pious by making a show of giving money- which is a valid critique of charity, and one of the problems why charity is indeed not enough to solve the problems, something that has been a theme from the Myriel chapters.

There are two ways this turns out. Forming a community with others in the same position (collective action) or utilizing the same tactics used to exploit you to exploit those further below. Valjean was saved from making this decision and Thenardier, not so lucky, has chosen the latter. And why shouldn’t he? “And what then are they, and what have they been in their time? Thieves! they would not have got rich without that!” Thenardier displays a clearer understanding of class conflict than maybe any other character in this book, even Valjean. The problem is, he wants what they have, without really understanding what comprises membership in a social class.

Notably, Thenardier hates the very thing he so desperately wants to become: “Oh! how I hate them, and how I would strangle then with joy and rejoicing, enthusiasm and satisfaction, these rich men!” Even in attaining their status, he wouldn’t be satisfied, he won’t ever fit with them. This goes beyond pure financial comfort and delves into a clash of cultures. And this is what Thenardier doesn’t get (because partial penetration) because social capital is just as if not more important than money.

This is actually expressed very nicely in Beggars at the Feast. The Thenardiers show up to Marius and Cosette’s wedding, obviously out of place, with no knowledge of the behaviors of the upper class. They viciously brag about how they’ve managed to game the system, to make it by casting aside the morals that keep everyone else trapped. In the 2012 film, they end up being forcibly thrown out, indicative of their lack of social capital. In the book, Thenardier continues his practice of punching down, becoming a slaver in America. In both, there is an indictment of the persistent cycle of exploitation, all due to the maintenance of class structures which create and enable ‘Thenardiers.’ The revolution is not over.

This is why Thenardier can only ever concretely conceptualize changing his individual circumstances. He says, “somebody ought to take society by the four corners of the sheet and toss it all into the air!” but he just doesn’t know how. He’s talking more along the lines of utter anarchy than a genuine proletariat uprising because he knows he wants them to change, but he doesn’t have a clue how that could happen. But you know who does? Les Amis, a group of (mostly) rich, well-educated students. They are the people the system was designed for, they understand the system because they were taught from birth how to move through it successfully. Luckily, they decided to use their privilege to (there’s no good way to say this) totally penetrate the workings of their society, but, ultimately, nothing but a collective sense of social welfare prompted them to do so.