What was victor hugos religion

Soldiers of a tyrant. The best of France is on our side. You have Napoleon. We have Victor Hugo. God grant the battle may do as much harm to the Rebels as Waterloo did to the French. He is imprisoned for nineteen years: five years for the crime and an additional fourteen for trying to escape.

The revolution transformed the novel, prompting Hugo to explore the question of revolution and class struggle. Fully one-fifth of the novel is set on June 5 and 6, , the dates of an armed insurrection against the regime of Louis Philippe. For Hugo, this insurrection had become a symbol for all the revolutions of the nineteenth century, particularly In the post world, revolution had essentially become one of the major characters of the novel.

Notably, the barricades are one of only two places in the novel where the lives of all the characters intersect—all but Cosette, who though physically missing provides the crucial link between the young revolutionaries and Valjean.

Critics note that Hugo is extremely vague about the reasons for the insurrection at the center of the novel.

The uprising occurred at the funeral of General Lamarque. In part, this is because Hugo uses the minor uprising of to symbolize revolution more generally. It stands in for the revolution of , the revolutions of February and June , and the future revolution that Hugo hopes will overthrow Napoleon. The novel, as well as its modern musical adaptation, continues to inspire because modern audiences continue to see their own aspirations represented in this revolution.

What the depiction lacks in historical specificity, it makes up in broad appeal and inspiration. The novel contains a heavy religious and spiritual bent, which is emphasized in the movie version of the musical. The novel itself begins with the Bishop Myriel, a saintly man who through an act of charity redeems Valjean when prison and parole have almost completely robbed him of his humanity.

Even this section, however, was changed after In a notable addition, Hugo included an incredible scene in which the bishop talks to a revolutionary from , a member of the convention who would vote to execute Louis the XVI. On his deathbed, the conventionnel gives an impassioned defense of revolutionary violence and in a reversal of roles, the scene ends with the bishop asking for his blessing.

Such scenes earned the novel condemnation from the Catholic Church. Despite his own belief in God, Hugo had a well-known aversion to the Catholic Church and religious institutions in general. He notably refused religious rites at his deathbed and his funeral. He was proud of the more than attacks on the novel found in Catholic publications of the time.

Rational reform of institutions should take precedence over the punishment of individuals. Written for the masses, Hugo wrote history from the point of view of the poor, the oppressed, the exploited, and the forgotten. The collective immiseration of the majority of people is the crime the novel exposes.

It is notable for containing the longest sentence in French literature. Digressions make up close to one-third of the novel, but these digressions are actually crucial, as they frame the narrative and provide the historical backdrop of the story. They emphasize that these characters—albeit fictional—are part of a history that is very real.

The pain of exile oozes from some of the passages describing Paris. In one famous section, Hugo details the twists and turns of the roads Valjean takes through Paris as he attempts to escape Javert.

As Hugo wrote, many of the street names memorialized in the novel were being erased as the entire map of Paris was transformed. Haussman, an official under Napoleon III, was creating the Paris we now know with its grands boulevards , in part to make it harder for workers to raise barricades and to make it easier to move troops to suppress revolts.

The lengthy digression on the sewage system toward the end of the novel is also a tribute to an old Paris that is rapidly disappearing. The section on Waterloo is perhaps the most notorious and least justified digression of the novel. But here too Hugo rewrites history from the perspective of its victims, not the victors whose tales we already know.

They are the disenfranchised, the criminalized, the wretched of the earth who give the novel its title. A working-class woman, she becomes pregnant with the child of a student who abandons her. There she is eventually fired when it is discovered she had had a child out of wedlock. To support her child, she works as a seamstress earning virtually nothing despite intense labor almost twenty-four hours a day.

She sells first her hair, then her teeth. Left with nothing else, she is forced to sell her body. After being assaulted by a wealthy, vile man, she fights back and is thrown in prison for defending herself. There she meets Valjean—living under the name of M. Madeleine—who defends her, takes her in, and on her deathbed vows to take care of her child Cosette. Madeleine and helped to set a woman free.

In , he argued about women:. For her, social laws are rough and stingy. Poor, she is condemned to labor, rich, to constraint. The more adept she is at loving, the more she suffers. And, yet, what a contribution she makes to the total sum of providential acts which result in the continual improvement of the human race! One of his lovers, Leonie Biard, was arrested for adultery after her husband, from whom she was seeking a divorce, had her followed by an investigator.

Meanwhile Hugo faced no consequences and offered little protest outside his literary work because he had immunity as a pair of France. For all his failures in his personal life, his literature gave expression to the early struggle of women against oppression and inequality.

Jean Valjean is of course the most famous character of the novel. As a convict whose humanity is almost destroyed by nineteen years of chain gangs, he is an unlikely hero. At the heart of his battle with Javert is a debate about the criminalization of the poor and human nature. For Valjean, human nature is malleable. Evil is a product not of human nature, but rather of a society that debases humanity. Inspired by several real incidents, the story of Valjean continues to resonate today. After nineteen years in jail, he is released only to find that life on parole is no life at all.

Legally discriminated against everywhere he goes, he tears up his parole papers and assumes a false identity to try to start a new life. By breaking his parole, he once again becomes a fugitive pursued by the intransigent Javert. Gavroche is arguably the most memorable character of the novel. The younger brother of Eponine, son of the Thenardiers, he is essentially cast off by his family and left to fend for himself.

He lives on the Place de la Bastille in the stomach of the plaster cast of a giant elephant—a monument planned but never actually built by Napoleon I.

He thus literally lives in the belly of the decaying beast of empire. He makes the streets his school with humor, defiance, resilience, courage, and generosity. When revolution erupts he rises to the task. Try as he might, Marius cannot get him to leave the barricades. His death is one of the most moving scenes of the novel—and the musical.

Refusing to be cowed by the immense force of the entire state apparatus, he climbs the barricade, and in full view of the troops proceeds to gather the unused ammunition from dead soldiers. As the troops begin to shoot at him, he defiantly continues, singing all the while.

Most certainly Tac had read Chez Victor Hugo: Les Tables Tournantes de Jersey , which was reviewed upon its publication in newspapers at which many of his peers worked, and almost as certainly, the similarities in situation—exile, death of a child—were not lost on Tac. Tac proclaimed that Victor Hugo was actually the reincarnation of 18th-century Vietnamese poet Nguyen Du.

The religion, as it is now, has the feel of an Eastern unitarianism; the headlines are tolerance, pluralism. On the other side of town, at the Anaheim Cao Dai center, two scholars of the faith passed cake around at their book release party. They discussed striking a balance between the esoteric, the exoteric, self-improvement.

Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature. By Abby Walthausen. Close to the Lithub Daily Thank you for subscribing! Just Because You're Paranoid Danielle Evans on Mrs. November 12, by Caitlin Flynn.

Say, do you hear the distant drums? It is the future that they bring When tomorrow comes! The full lyrics of the final chorus can be found Here.

Unfortunately, Victor Hugo has rarely been credited as being a Christian writer - partly because of his lifelong dislike of the Roman Catholic Church of France but also because of inconsistencies within his own life. Hugo certainly rejected religion, yet he firmly embraced belief in God and in the power of prayer throughout his life. He just did not see God's love fully reflected in the religion of Roman Catholicism.

Many others have shared the same sentiment. Do you want to read a powerfully inspiring story of the transforming power of Christian love? If you love reading, my advice is to get the original Victor Hugo novel many, if not most libraries should hold a copy, or be able to locate a copy for you.

Otherwise try to get to the musical version show some great songs or at the very least try to obtain the Les Miserables DVD. Just be warned about a few swear words which do appear in the stage musical and the DVD, especially in the 'Master of the House' publican's song.