Les misérables — Preface
Les misérables
Preface[1]
As long as there shall exist, as the result of laws and customs, a social damnation artificially creating hell in the midst of civilization, and complicating with human fate the destiny that is divine; as long as the age's three great problems are not resolved: the degradation of man through systematic destitution[2], the debasement of woman through hunger, and the atrophy of childhood through darkness; as long as social asphyxia is possible in certain regions; in other words, and from a still broader point of view, as long as there shall be ignorance and misery on the earth, books of this nature may not be without purpose.
Hauteville-House,
January 1, 1862
Footnotes
[1] This preface is the one Hugo chose to publish. He wrote several other short prefaces and one very long Préface philosophique, but he set them all aside in favor of this one. They were preserved in his manuscripts and have been published in French scholarly editions of Hugo’s works. The appendices to this edition include them in English translation.
[2] Hugo uses the term prolétariat here, but he probably did not mean what “proletariat” has come to mean in the wake of Marxist thought. In both French and English these words have two additional meanings, related but distinct, which predate Marxism: 1) The ancient Roman proletariat was a social class legally defined as having little or no taxable property; the only value a member of that class offered to the state was to provide children to fuel the state’s expansion. (The word comes from the Latin proli, meaning “progeny.”) 2) In early 19th socialist thought, the proletariat was the wage-earning class, also without significant property; in this sense, the proletariat’s economic value lay in their labor.
Although Hugo was politically liberal at this point in his life, he was not an advocate of socialism, let alone communism. He believed in the institutions of private enterprise and private property. Later in this very book Hugo will present us with his fictional model of a benevolent capitalist, a manufacturer whose ideas generate good fortune for an entire town. And in IV.i.4 (that is, in Part IV, Book I, Chapter 4), his narration explicitly rejects what he called “communism” (meaning the abolition of private property) for failing to solve what he termed the “problem of distribution”:
Communism and agrarian reform believe they’ve resolved [this] problem. They are mistaken. Their allocation kills production. Equal division puts an end to competition. And in consequence, labor. This is a division made by a butcher, which kills what it divides. So it’s impossible to respect these so-called solutions. To kill wealth is not to distribute it.
It would also have verged on anachronism for Hugo to have used “proletariat” in a Marxist sense. Marx’s and Engels’s call for the workers to rise up in the Communist Manifesto (1848) was of relatively recent vintage when Hugo published Les misérables in 1862, and Marx’s Das Kapital was still another five years in the future. A French translation of the Manifesto had been prepared in 1848, but was not widely circulated, and the Manifesto fell into relative obscurity across Europe until the 1870’s.
However, the terms prolétaire and prolétariat do appear in the writings of French utopian socialists like Saint-Simon as early as 1825, and figure strongly in an 1839 essay by Lamennais, De l’esclavage moderne (“Modern Slavery”). Félicité Robert de La Mennais (1782-1854) was a French priest and socialist philosopher who broke with the Catholic church in 1833. He had been young Victor Hugo’s confessor and a mentoring figure to him in the early 1820’s (Hugo once whimsically wrote of their friendship: “which of us ‘perverted’ the other?”) In Lamennais’s view, the modern proletarian, like his Roman counterpart, was not merely poor, but locked into poverty—as Hugo expresses it at the beginning of this preface, “as the result of laws and customs.”
Because modern readers are likely to interpret “proletariat” in a Marxist sense, it is clearer to use a descriptive phrase like systematic or systematized destitution.
© 2023 Steve Wright