Opinionator | Disunion: In Camp, Reading ‘Les Miserables’

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" was published in 1862 and English translations of the five parts that constitute the novel began to appear in America by year's end. Hugo had begun the sprawling novel in the 1840s, put it aside, and come back to complete it between 1860 and 1862. He was an opponent of slavery, and in 1859 defended John Brown. "Insurrection," he said, was a "sacred duty." In the novel, Hugo name-checked Brown in a list of celebrated revolutionaries that included Washington, Bolivar and Garibaldi. Hugo's focus was the July Revolution of 1830, but it is possible he had the American conflict in mind when he wrote, "Civil war … What did the words mean? Was there any such thing as 'foreign war?' Was not all warfare between men warfare between brothers?"

Whatever Hugo thought of the battle raging in the United States, the novel was popular in America and received widespread attention in newspapers and journals. The Atlantic Monthly, having finished only "Fantine," the first of five parts, proclaimed that "it is impossible to escape from the fascination it exerts over the mind." Readers could not help being impressed by the grandeur of the work, but the reviews were mixed. The New York Times called the novel "remarkable" and "brilliant," but in the same notice labeled Hugo "a prosy madman."

"There is a great deal of trash mixed with the good: long and worthless episodes, not sufficiently connected with the story," claimed The Christian Advocate. The New Englander was harsher still: "The whole career of Jean Valjean presents a series of impossible cases, of strange incongruities, and stands in continuous antagonism with the principles of truth and honor which ought to be every honest man's line of conduct." By the time The Continental Monthly got to "Marius," Part III, the reviewer concluded that he might well understand if it was the readers who called themselves miserable.

While Hugo may not have had the Civil War in mind, American reviewers certainly did and many viewed the novel through the prism of the war. In March 1863, The Times published "What If Your Uncle Had Been Your Aunt?" The article mocked Hugo the historian, who throughout the novel raises questions of contingency. For example, he states that the Battle of Waterloo would have turned out differently had it not rained in the morning. This focus on "what ifs," the writer lamented, had become the refuge of Northern Democrats, who used it to distract the public mind from what was actually happening. "Supposing Lincoln to have swallowed his tooth-brush on the 3d and to have died of it on the 4th of March, 1861, we are willing, for the sake of quiet, to concede that this country would now be in the enjoyment of profound peace," acknowledged the article. But none of these "impossible or ridiculous premises" are true and it is time, the writer declared, "to secure attention to the real business before us."

If Northern writers had reservations about "Les Miserables," Southern critics embraced the novel, despite Hugo's abolitionist sympathies. In July 1863, The Southern Literary Messenger admitted that "[f]or M. Hugo the abolitionist, we entertain a sincere pity." But the reviewer called the novel the "greatest and most elaborate work of Victor Hugo's fruitful genius." "To us," he said, "it is a Bible in the fictitious literature of the nineteenth century."

The writer went on to apply the novel's Christian principles to the iniquities suffered by Gen. John C. Pemberton, who had recently surrendered Vicksburg to U.S. Grant and was vilified for it. Pemberton's "loyalty, his capacity, his fidelity" were all questioned and he was persecuted because he had been born in Pennsylvania. But "why should any innocent be visited, in a century boasting of its humanity and Christian civilization with the sins of its parents?" Like Fantine, Pemberton had been treated as an illegitimate child and made into a pariah.

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It was not only literary critics who contemplated Hugo's book. Soldiers took the novel with them into battle. James A. Black, an assistant surgeon with the 49th Illinois infantry, wrote on April 1, 1863, "In camp all day reading 'Les-Miserables' by Victor Hugo." An example of how thoroughly Hugo's characters entered the culture emerges from the diary of James Parks Caldwell, a Confederate prisoner held on Johnson's Island in Ohio. In January 1864 he wrote, "water carrying is a great bore, and has procured me the Soubriquet of Cosette," the novel's heroine, who hauls water in the night. One Confederate soldier, John Edward Dooley of the First Virginia, also at Johnson's Island, turned critic: "there is a great deal of absurdity in it altho' the interest of the narrative is pretty well sustained."

Perhaps the most dramatic example of how the novel filtered into the imagination of the soldier came from Wilky James, the younger brother of William and Henry James. Wilky joined the Massachusetts 44th and then the famous black regiment, the 54th. In spring 1863, he wrote, "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." That summer, Wilky was seriously wounded in the assault on Fort Wagner.

The novel attached itself in other ways as well. After the war, the southern writer John Esten Cooke, who had served on J.E.B. Stuart's staff, explained its popularity among Confederate soldiers and how the Army of Northern Virginia came to be called "Lee's Miserables":

The name had a somewhat curious origin. Victor Hugo's work, "Les Miserables" had been translated and published by a house in Richmond; the soldiers, in the great dearth of reading matter, had seized upon it; and thus, by a strange chance the tragic story of the great French writer had become known to the soldiers in the trenches. Everywhere, you might see the gaunt figures in their tattered jackets bending over the dingy pamphlets — "Fantine," or "Cosette," or "Marius," or "St. Denis," and the woes of "Jean Valjean," the old galley-slave, found an echo in the hearts of these brave soldiers, immersed in the trenches and fettered by duty to their muskets or their cannon …. Thus, that history of 'The Wretched,' was the pabulum of the South in 1864; and as the French title had retained on the backs of the pamphlets, the soldiers, little familiar with the Gallic pronunciation, called the book "Lee's Miserables!" Then another step was taken. It was no longer the book, but themselves whom they referred to by that name. The old veterans of the army henceforth laughed at their miseries, and dubbed themselves grimly, "Lee's Miserables!"

The book had worked its way into American popular culture. Just as "Les Miserables" became a part of the Civil War, the end of the war drew Victor Hugo's attention. He joined a French group that raised money to present Lincoln's widow with a memorial medal. Hugo, along with other notables, signed a letter to Mary Todd that stated, "If France had the freedom enjoyed by republican America, not thousands but millions among us would have been counted as admirers." Napoleon III dared not rest comfortably; liberty and conscience were still at work in the world.

Sources: Atlantic Monthly, July 1862; The New York Times, Oct. 27, 1862, and March 25, 1863; Christian Advocate, November 1862; New Englander, July 1864; Continental Monthly, October 1862; Southern Literary Messenger, July and August, 1863; Benita K. Moore, editor, "A Civil War Diary: Written by Dr. James A. Black, First Assistant Surgeon, 49th Illinois Infantry" (2008); George H. Jones, editor, "A Northern Confederate at Johnson's Island Prison: The Civil War Diaries of James Parke Caldwell" (2010); Robert Emmet Curran, editor, "John Dooley's Civil War: An Irish American's Journey in the First Virginia Infantry Regiment" (2012); Henry James, "Notes of a Son and Brother" (1914); John Esten Cooke, "Mohun: Or, the Last Days of Lee and his Paladins" (1869). On the French memorial medal see Jason Emerson, "A Medal for Mrs. Lincoln," Register of the Kentucky Historical Society (2011) and Gabor S. Boritt, Mark E. Neeley Jr. and Harold Holzer, "The European Image of Lincoln," Winterthur Portfolio (1986).

Louis P. Masur is professor of American studies and history at Rutgers University and author of "Lincoln's Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union."

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