Les Misérables

The Death of Jean Valjean | The Birth of Monsieur Madeleine

Just as history (by Hugo’s understanding) marches towards the end of history, and just as the goal of revolution is to end revolutions,

Les Misérables is a work that hopes for its own irrelevance.  Hugo predicted in the introduction that the story would continue to speak to people around the world for as long as physical and spiritual suffering persist.  History hasn’t yet proven him wrong on that point - but by his own ethic, that’s a bad thing.

Most literary works hope for immortality, but Les Misérables works for its own erasure from society.

The effacement, if it ever comes (from progress and not forgetfulness), will be a fulfillment.

Illustrated by Carlo Chiostri (Italian Edition, 1930)

This is the most heartbreaking illustration of Valjean's death.

Javert:

But also taken literally within the narrative he is so funny

His life long white whale he could never stop chasing was a guy who served his full jail time for stealing one (1) loaf of bread but then didn’t meet with his parole officer. This man lived and died by his obsession with the worlds most boring offender

And then when he as a middle aged man considered for the first time that morality may not be black and white his reaction was to immediately kill himself

Javert possessed in his eye the feline phosphorescence of night birds. He deciphered the few lines written by Marius,

His literal near-burial in the coffin outside Petit-Picpus is the most obvious example of that. But it’s in the sewers chapters as well— he has to face the horror of nearly drowning and being buried alive deep underground in the filth beneath the city.

And that imagery a running motif throughout his entire storyline. His imprisonment is constantly compared to as a burial, a living death; being in prison is like being trapped and drowned underneath an enormous weight, unable to move, unable to escape, with everyone around you refusing to acknowledge you are still a living human being.

In his dream before the Champmatheiu trial, Jean Valjean had a nightmare where he’s surrounded by a faceless crowd of indifferent people, who tell him:

‘Do you not know that you have been dead this long time?’

I opened my mouth to reply, and I perceived that there was no one near me.

*bursts into the room flailing and shouting* HERE IT IS I FINALLY GOT IT UP OFF THE GROUND– *trips, falls on face*

…okay, try again.

The LES MIS ANNOTATION PROJECT is a freely-editable wiki meant to crowdsource all the footnotes and literary/historical references and stuff that fandom can possibly track down. All of them. All that communal nerd knowledge. As obvious or as nit-picky and obscure as you want. All, hopefully, in one place.

THE PRICE OF ADMISSION: …guys. Guys. There are 365 chapters in this book. And even though I love it to death and got frissons of awesome just from the chapter titles while I was setting up the tables of contents, that is more copy/format/paste grunt work than one person should have to do when anyone can edit this thing. So the price of admission is: if you want to add footnotes for a chapter that doesn’t have a page yet, please please please take the time to set up the page properly and copy the chapter text in. There’s a template and formatting instructions and Project Gutenberg links and everything! Let’s get this sucker filled out and kill those pesky red links.

FEEDBACK: Always welcome! The format of the pages is still totally up for revision if it’s not working for people.

“He is a man who does good by gunshots.”

Les Misérables | Marius Comes To The Barricade Illustrated by Jacques Pecnard (Hachette Editions, 1958)