The revolutionary language of “Les Mis”

By Andrew Hussey

The title of David Bellos’s new book about Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables”, “The Novel of the Century”, is a deliberate provocation – this was, after all, the century of Dickens, Tolstoy and Melville. But Hugo’s is one of the longest and largest. My copy of the Penguin translation weighs in at just under a kilo. Bellos tackled the book whilst he was laid low with a cold during a hike in the Alps, malingering on for a few extra days to get to the end of the tale. If you don’t have a bout of flu or a year to spare, you could instead approach the book like a box-set of DVDs or a Netflix series: binge-reading, interspersed with periods of reflection.

This is pretty much how Hugo got on with the job of writing it: he started work in November 1845 and finally published it in 1862, breaking off along the way for a revolution in 1848 and a coup d’état in 1851. In this sense “Les Misérables” is not just a book about history, a sweeping narrative of 19th-century France built around the life of an escaped convict, Jean Valjean. It is a book made by history.