How Les Misérables Was the Biggest Deal in Book History

March 24, 2017 8:45 AM

Hugo, Inc. For only an eight-year license to publish political exile Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, a Belgian upstart entrepreneur paid an unprecedented and unmatched sum of 300,000 francs (~$3.8 million). Relying upon the first ever bank loan to finance a book, translation rights, and an extraordinary embargo and publicity campaign, the risky venture was a triumphant success.
posted by mixedmetaphors (14 comments total)

My favorite story about Les Misérables (along with Marx's Capital one of two books I feel proudest to have read) is its prevalence in the US Civil War.
posted by graymouser at 9:09 AM on March 24, 2017 [6 favorites]

I read the full-length Les Miserables back in the late 80s after I encountered the musical. Not the streamlined version, but the version where Valjean leaps over a wall into a convent garden and then the book takes 150 pages to explain the entire history of the convent. I think there's a history of the Paris sewer system also in that novel. It's like all the passages about whaling and how ships work in Moby Dick. It was a deeply satisfying read full of depth and texture that aren't found in modern novels as much.

I didn't know that it was such a giant in publishing at the time. Honestly, I thought it had been published like Dickens, serialized in a periodical before being assembled into a published book.

This was an interesting read. Thanks for posting!
posted by hippybear at 9:19 AM on March 24, 2017 [5 favorites]

"...then the book takes 150 pages to explain the entire history of the convent."

And that is what prevented my high school sophomore English class from getting anywhere close to finishing the book. We were assigned the full-length version and even the most hardcore readers and grade conscious gave up. I remember the convent section was particularly tough going. I think I got to around page six hundred of the 1300 pages in the tiny print version we lugged around for weeks.

Our overly ambitious teacher asked a week before the test date who was still reading and not one student raised her hand. He yelled at us for ten minutes about the beauty of the writing and the grandeur of the story. We were not inspired. The best student in our grade told him that there was just not enough time to read that and complete the assignments for our other classes. I got a B on the test because I'd read enough to answer his essay questions. (I was relieved.)

I still have the book and one day plan to try it again. (Maybe.)
posted by narancia at 11:10 AM on March 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

I had a similar problem when I read The Hunchback of Notre Dame. My memory is fuzzy, but there was definitely at least one chapter of pace-destroying musings on the history of Parisian architecture. I can't remember now if I read the chapter in a 'just keep scanning the words' half-distracted way or actually skipped some of it, but for a long time afterwards it became my 'classic book I will mention merely to berate'.

For a long time it felt like cheating to skip chapters or even give up on a book. Now, a few years down the line and with a few hundred books glaring at me from the unread shelf, I'm much more sanguine. Vita brevis.
posted by mushhushshu at 11:19 AM on March 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

In my opinion, Les Misérables suffers much less from abridgment than Moby Dick. At its heart, Hugo's book is a gripping adventure tale with a great deal of melodrama and suspense. The digressions, while informative and poignant, are mostly incidental. Whereas with Melville, the weird detours, dense allegory, and long technical excursions are what makes it special as a work of art. The story itself, simply in terms of plot, is pretty thin soup.
posted by Atom Eyes at 11:36 AM on March 24, 2017 [3 favorites]

The extensive forays into historical and architectural detail in large part reflect Hugo's commitment to what we would now call heritage work: he was deeply invested in conservation, especially of medieval architecture. (If you want something really mind-boggling in this vein, you can try Huysmans' The Cathedral, which is almost entirely a symbolic analysis of Notre-Dame de Chartres. Even the novel admits at one point that things are getting a bit out of hand.) So the emphasis on architecture is a way of getting at the historical "rootedness" of a particular space. Which doesn't stop it from being tiresome if the reader is not in the mood...
posted by thomas j wise at 12:02 PM on March 24, 2017 [7 favorites]

"I can't stand Victor Hugo. I tried reading The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but I couldn't get through it. It was so melodramatic, and his heroines are so two-dimensional." --Jadzia Dax
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:41 PM on March 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

Les (éditeurs) heureux...
posted by Segundus at 3:29 PM on March 24, 2017

Let Them Eat Bread: The Theft That Helped Inspire Les Miserables
posted by Pallas Athena at 4:23 PM on March 24, 2017 [2 favorites]

He still never saw a dime for the musical.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 8:28 PM on March 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

I had the opposite problem in high school -- we were assigned the abridged version, but by that point I'd read the unabridged so many times, I could almost quote chapter/verse... which I covered for the most part, but it became painfully evident when I wrote a glowing review of that 15-page digression about the Paris sewer system...
posted by Seeba at 2:47 PM on March 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

I had recently finished the unabridged book when the film version of the musical came out a few years ago. Which was good because it meant I picked up on several things added in the movie that the stage version leaves out. For example Gavroche's Elephant, which was a real thing at the time. Also, while the book centers on an uprising in 1832, it ends with a flash forward to 1848, with a long description of the much larger barricade that crossed the Place de la Bastille during February Revolution. The movie uses that for the final reprise of "Do You Hear the People Sing." I really enjoyed spotting those things.

I was a bit iffy about the long digressions when I read it. I think I did end up skimming the convent one because it seemed more unrelated than the others. But in the end I did kind of like them.

There's a shelf in my building's laundry room where people leave books to give away. Someone recently left a copy of Dumas' Count of Monte Cristo. It's absurdly huge. At 1200 pages it's technically shorter than my copy of Les Miz which has 1463, but this Monte Cristo is a larger trade paper format so it almost dwarfs it. So of course I grabbed it immediately. Someday I might actually read it.
posted by dnash at 10:00 AM on March 26, 2017

(dnash, there's a group readalong of Count of Monte Cristo about to start here, if you want some company.)
posted by Pallas Athena at 1:01 PM on March 26, 2017

The most extra room in the most extra house of the most extra man: Victor Hugo's deathbed room
posted by Pallas Athena at 5:33 PM on March 26, 2017 [2 favorites]