Monday
I recently came across someone mentioning Civil War soldiers carrying around copies of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. This sent me to google, where I found a scholarly article by one Vanessa Steinroetter entitled “Soldiers, Readers, and the Reception of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables in Civil War America” (in the journal Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History). Apparently, the novel was a tremendous hit amongst both Yankee and Confederate troops. Copies were passed around, both in the field and in prison camps. Often there were group readings.
I was intrigued that Confederate soldiers liked the novel given that Hugo was a slavery opponent, but Steinroetter explains that readers just slid around that inconvenient dimension of the novel, focusing on passages more to their liking. It turns out that people feeling oppressed will respond to narratives about oppression, even if they’re also in the business of oppressing others.
The Hugo passage I had most in mind is what happens to Thénardier, one of literature’s most unscrupulous villains. Attempting to blackmail Marius towards the end of novel with news that his father-in-law, Jean Valjean, is a murderer, Thénardier inadvertently reveals that Valjean is actually Marius’s savior. The “murder victim” that Thénardier saw Jean Valjean carry through the sewers was actually Marius himself, unconscious after being wounded from a street battle. In the interchange, Marius learns that Valjean is also innocent of other crimes he had suspected him of, which leads him to reconcile with the old man.
Grateful to the blackmailer for revealing the truth about his father-in-law, Marius rewards him handsomely. And what does the villain do with his new-found wealth? He traffics in slaves:
Two days after the events which we are at this moment narrating, he set out, thanks to Marius’ care, for America under a false name, with his daughter Azelma, furnished with a draft on New York for twenty thousand francs.
The moral wretchedness of Thénardier, the bourgeois who had missed his vocation, was irremediable. He was in America what he had been in Europe. Contact with an evil man sometimes suffices to corrupt a good action and to cause evil things to spring from it. With Marius’ money, Thénardier set up as a slave-dealer.
According to Steinroetter, a few southerners care enough to register objections. In one edition of the novel, she says, the southern publisher excised the passage, along with two mentions of John Brown:
“A few scattered sentences, reflecting on slavery—which the author, with strange inconsistency, has thought fit to introduce into a work written mainly to denounce the European systems of labor as gigantic instruments of tyranny and oppression.” These passages, the editor added, had “not the remotest connection with the characters or the incidents of the novel, and the absence of a few antislavery paragraphs will hardly be complained of by Southern readers.”
The only European system of labor I can recall from the novel is the factory in which Fantine works and which, because it is run by Jean Valjean, is benign. (Fantine is fired, unbeknownst to him, because it is discovered she has had a child out of wedlock.) In other words, it’s a stretch that Hugo is going after European systems of labor. From a slavery apologist, however, the chattel slavery of the south is more humane than the “wage slavery” of the north. When Hugo doesn’t agree, he is accused of a “strange inconsistency.”
Hugo’s other two allusions to the American slave system can’t be explained away any better. Contra the publisher, they are deeply connected to the characters and incidents of the novel. Les Misérables is about tyrannical systems, and the first mention of Brown is in connection with the glorious heritage that the French Revolution, which has inspired fights against tyranny around the world. John Brown’s battle at Harper’s Ferry is included in the list:
[Paris] is superb; it has a prodigious 14th of July, which delivers the globe; it forces all nations to take the oath of tennis; its night of the 4th of August dissolves in three hours a thousand years of feudalism; it makes of its logic the muscle of unanimous will; it multiplies itself under all sorts of forms of the sublime; it fills with its light Washington, Kosciusko, Bolivar, Bozzaris, Riego, Bem, Manin, Lopez, John Brown, Garibaldi; it is everywhere where the future is being lighted up, at Boston in 1779, at the Isle de Léon in 1820, at Pesth in 1848, at Palermo in 1860, it whispers the mighty countersign: Liberty, in the ear of the American abolitionists grouped about the boat at Harper’s Ferry…
To be fair, Washington and “Boston in 1779” occurred before the French Revolution. But otherwise, yes, the French Revolution did have an outsized influence on world history.
The other reference occurs when Marius and his fellow revolutionaries are fighting a doomed street battle against federal troops. Hugo compares them to Brown and calls them sublime:
Even when [such idealists] miscarry, they are worthy of veneration; and it is, perhaps, in failure, that they possess the most majesty. Victory, when it is in accord with progress, merits the applause of the people; but a heroic defeat merits their tender compassion. The one is magnificent, the other sublime. For our own part, we prefer martyrdom to success. John Brown is greater than Washington, and Pisacane is greater than Garibaldi.
Whether they were reading the edited version or not, however, Confederate soldiers found much else to identify with. For instance, Steinroetter cites Brian Temple’s account of how prisoners at a notorious Delaware camp were inspired by the novel to escape. (I believe Jean Valjean pulls off five escapes in the course of the novel.):
Many of the imprisoned Confederate soldiers at the Fort Delaware prison also read Les Misérables, as Brian Temple explains. Since “the prisoners were not allowed to have any books that dealt with military strategy, military history, or geography,” they often had to make do with “books on religious topics and novels” instead. And Hugo’s novel was one of those read by many soldiers at this Union prison.32 Ironically, though, such reading material did not always prove as harmless as the guards hoped, as at least one prison break owed its success in part to Hugo’s novel and its “vivid delineations of the wonderful escapes of Jean Valjean, and of the subterranean passages of the city of Paris.” Paralleling Valjean’s strategy, Kentucky cavalry officer Thomas H. Hines, along with a Confederate general and five others, managed to escape by digging holes in their cells and escaping through the “air chambers.”
I also like Steinroetter’s theory that one prisoner, this one a northerner in the notorious Andersonville prison, identified with Hugo’s excruciating description of the Paris sewers. Here are his diary observations:
[Hugo] justly points out and criticises fallacies and foibles of society; the coarseness, licentiousness and materiality of royalty; suggests economy in correcting customary waste in cities, and in disposing of refuse that goes into the sea which should enrich the soil; contends that such methods of sewage disposal is unsanitary and unjust; illustrates good and bad practices in a way proverbial. The work is not sensational, but philosophical; not a “yarn” but a social teacher.
Steinroetter notes,
One could easily speculate that Northrop’s praises of the novel’s suggested improvements to urban sanitation and waste disposal were influenced by the appalling living conditions at Andersonville.
And then there’s the prisoner who identified with the mistreated child Cosette:
James Parks Caldwell, a Northern-born Confederate held prisoner in an Ohio prison on Johnson’s Island, wrote in his diary on January 15, 1864, that “water carrying is a great bore, and has procured me the Soubriquet of Cosette.” Caldwell, who also refers to one of his friends as “Gavroche,” a street urchin from Hugo’s novel, uses the character of Cosette, who is forced to carry water and perform other menial tasks in the book, as a half-serious stand-in for his own status as a prisoner.
One soldier, the brother of novelist Henry James, reports using the novel to prepare himself for battle.
For instance, the brother of Henry James, Garth Wilkinson “Wilky” James, who served in two Massachusetts regiments, including the 54th, during the war, appears to have sought out the novel’s description of the Battle of Waterloo deliberately in preparation for an upcoming military engagement. As James wrote in a letter sent in the spring of 1863, “Today is Sunday and I’ve been reading Hugo’s account of Waterloo in ‘Les Miserables’ and preparing my mind for something of the same sort. God grant the battle may do as much harm to the Rebels as Waterloo did to the French.” Not only did the French novel strike James as immediately relevant to the Civil War, but his comments show that an American soldier could seek and perhaps find comfort and guidance from parts of a novel during the war.
His last comment is important. To cope with the madness of war, soldiers used the novel to frame their experience in a way that gave it meaning. Otherwise, the experience is just too grim.
One other interesting note: Apparently communal readings of the novel increased a sense of troop solidarity:
[C]ommunal novel reading often helped to create a sense of camaraderie among soldiers. In her memoir, Pickett [wife of Major General Pickett] describes that Les Misérables was quickly integrated into the communal reading practices of the soldiers in her husband’s regiment, who formed groups with a designated reader. Many of them also annotated the copy of the book that they passed around, scribbling notes about their own lives and thoughts in the margins and on the flyleaf that visibly linked the book’s action to their own lived experience. The novel, it seems, had the ability to unite them into actual, not just imagined, reading communities.
I don’t begrudge southern soldiers finding comfort where they can. I’m struck, however, that they could not apply this great novel about human tyranny to their own treatment of African Americans. Versions of the Thénardiers’ treatment of Cosette were happening in plantations across the south but readers apparently refused to see it.