For previous updates on my 2026 re-read of Les Miserables, please see Uncertain Grace, Shaped by Time and Trouble, We Live in Times of Terrible Confusion, and Silly Love Songs.
“Multitudes have a tendency to accept the master. Their mass bears witness to apathy. A crowd is easily led as a whole to obedience. Men must be stirred up, pushed on, treated roughly by the very benefit of their deliverance, their eyes must be wounded by the true, light must be hurled at them in terrible handfuls.”
—Les Miserables, Victor Hugo–
If you’re reading headlines in the U.S., you may think that France has been overrun by massive gangs of hooligans reminiscent of The Wild One (1953) on a national scale. Having spent most of the past year in France, I can attest that demonstrations by students and sympathetic labor unions have been 99.99% peaceful and that property damage has primarily been instigated by fringe elements – the IRL equivalent of online trolls – who provoke drama without commitment to any cause or principle. The demonstrations are also, generally, more localized than headlines might indicate: even The New York Times reported that approximately 500,000 people demonstrated across the country during a recent active weekend, which amounts to less than 1% of the population in a nation with over 69 million residents. Nevertheless, these events, and the factors behind them, are of considerable significance to the future of this historic land.
This recent video from the YouTube channel Les Frenchies is a bit long, but shows Paris conditions on a recent weekday and offers a lovely cycling tour of the City of Light. It’s hard to argue with this first-hand answer to the question, “Is Paris safe?” (I do dispute the claim that cyclists are more dangerous than motorists – I believe crash and injury statistics will refute that.) I’ve found Les Frenchies‘ Paris content to be thoughtful and reliable.
Coincidentally, I have reached the long conclusion of Victor Hugo‘s 1862 novel Les Miserables. The novel conveniently contains 365 chapters, so I have made a year-long project of reading one chapter per day. (This is a re-read for me; Les Miserables was on my 2019 list of favorite books.) Much of the final third of Hugo’s story takes place during the June Rebellion, sometimes referred to as the Paris Uprising of 1832. During that event, Paris republicans – here, “republicanism” advocates placing political power in the hands of the people, rather than a monarch or other absolute leader – rebelled against the monarchy of Louis Philippe. Of course, this being France, there was more to it than that: political dynamics were complicated by the resentment of those who missed the reign of Napoleon (they were the Bonapartists), as well as those who wanted a different king, the House of Bourbon‘s Henri, Count of Chambord (they were the self-proclaimed Legitimists).
The Paris republicans believed that the French Revolution of 1830 had settled the matter and that France should no longer be ruled by a monarch. It didn’t help that the country faced a time of widespread illness: an 1832 cholera epidemic killed over 18,000 in Paris alone and over 100,000 throughout France. The country also experienced food shortages and a rising cost of living. Perhaps this sounds familiar? It should not be much of a spoiler that the June Rebellion lasted only one night: during the night of 5-6 June 1832, approximately 3,000 insurgents barricaded the streets and took over neighborhoods in eastern and central Paris. Wikipedia is inconsistent on the actual number of government soldiers and National Guardsmen who responded, but suffice to say the rebellion was crushed by overwhelming forces on June 6. Louis-Philippe remained in power until the French Revolution of 1848.
In the long final act of Les Miserables, Hugo brilliantly unites the novel’s various narrative threads and character arcs with the June Rebellion. The fates of Jean Valjean, Cosette, Marius, Gavroche, Javert, and all the others will be decided here. Victor Hugo was present during part of the rebellion, and while he tends to exaggerate the event’s overall importance in the grand scheme of French history, his descriptive details have considerable authenticity. Hugo opposed the monarchy and, while he mourned the perceived need for a forced takeover, he believed the insurgents were fully justified. “The question is no longer one of sacred territory, but of a holy idea,” he wrote in Les Miserables. “The country wails, that may be, but humanity applauds. But is it true that the country does wail? France bleeds, but liberty smiles; and in the presence of liberty’s smile, France forgets her wound.” The vast majority of the insurgents were working class, people who would be described today as blue collar. They were fighting for themselves, but also for a higher ideal, that the people should not serve a monarchy, but that a fairly-elected government should serve the people. After all, while the June 1832 insurgents barricaded the streets, they did not initiate the violence, but only responded to it.
And if we swap Louis-Philippe’s name with the names of any of our current tech-bro fundamentalists, don’t we face the same choice today? I don’t pretend to have a comprehensive understanding of French culture or economics. However, I understand that in a new global gilded age of billionaire influencers and globe-spanning corporations, power follows the money. Students, impoverished immigrants, and working-class citizens are not the true cause of the world’s problems. The details differ from region to region, but the underlying causes remain consistent: hypercapitalism, extreme concentration of wealth, human-caused climate change, a sold-out judiciary, obliterated free press, and weak-willed governments are strangling the masses. Somehow, those with “kind hearts” never overlap with those who have “fat purses.” Unlike the leaders of the June Rebellion, we far outnumber the sadistic elites, yet we remain passive in the face of our own demise. Except, perhaps, for those who are marching in the streets. And Victor Laszlo facing down Nazis in Rick’s Cafe.
Throughout Les Miserables, Victor Hugo made clear that he believed humanity, inspired in part by France and its revolutionary character, was on an upward trend of wisdom and compassion. We can only guess at what he would make of our current situation. Regardless, his novel remains entirely relevant, so that if we seek inspiration against the looming darkness, we can start by absorbing the message of Les Miserables, and then, be it 1832 or 2026, we can look to our brothers and sisters on the barricades.
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