Victor and the Tale of Many Coincidences (and Political Viewpoints)

Part Three opens with an extended description of the life of a Paris urchin (or gamin), in this case, Gavroche, the homeless son of the Jondrette family, who are apparently the much reduced impoverished Thernadiers (although it is not clear at this stage who they are, only that they neglect him in favour of his sisters, as they did when they lived in the tavern).  Hugo portrays the gamin as suffering extreme poverty with a kind of bravery or insolence towards his situation; whereas Cosette is pathetic (in the sense that she inspires pity) in the way that the Thernadiers abuse her, Gavorche doesn’t recognise that what they are doing is abuse and neglect and seems to take poor treatment without complaining. However, it has affected him: “…while the laughter of his years was on his lips, there was only darkness and emptiness in his heart.” (p509). Nevertheless, Gavroche is free, an extremely important concept in the book. 

Again, Hugo seemingly digresses from the plot, and it’s only at the end of book one that we discover that Marius lives next door to the family.  The reader is then introduced to Monsieur Gillenormand, another seemingly unconnected character. If Gavroche represents the children of Paris, the urchins, Gillenormand represents the traditionalists, the bourgeois monarchists. Books two to five of part three explore the conflict between the political ideals of the Monarchists, the supporters of Napoleon and the Republicans. Gillenormand has two daughters, the living one a religiously bigoted spinster who looks after him, the other one dead who was married to a colonel in Waterloo, whom the old man is ashamed of. Marius is the old man’s grandson, the son of the colonel and the dead daughter. Gillenormand is harsh towards Marius and teaches him to hate his father by taking him to pro-monarchist anti-revolution salons, where the visitors revile Bonaparte.

In a third digression Hugo describes the town of Vernon where the old man’s son-in-law Georges Pontmercy lives. In one of a number of coincidences in the novel, Pontmercy is the man Thernadier robbed, who believed that Thernadier saved him. Hugo is criticised for the sometimes implausible coincidences in the plot, but according to Adam Thirwell, in his review in the Guardian (12^th July 2008), the main theme is that of the Infinite, there are no digressions because everything is relevant to the plot, the plot’s coincidences are “exaggerated” deliberately; “Hugo wants a plot that is at once about total randomness, and also predetermination.”  He does this through characters repeatedly failing to recognise each other and through the way that the narrator withholds information from the reader like what the significance of a character or an event is in the plot. The novel is partially naturalistic in the way that the poverty is described in a realistic way, yet the coincidences prevent it from being completely naturalistic in say the way that a modernist or post-modernist novel would be. 

Pontmercy’s final message to his son is to protect Thernad at all costs. Pontmercy’s death affects Marius in that he begins to change his political ideas from those of his grandfather to the ideas of his father, becoming fanatical about Napoleon and changing his name to Baron Marius Pontmercy (a title awarded to his father by Napoleon which is unrecognised by the restored monarchy).  Hugo describes how he falls into a mystical trance contemplating the Battle of Waterloo; it is almost like a Damascene conversion. He worships Napoleon even more than his father did. Through Gillenormand getting his great nephew Theodule to spy on Marius, the old man discovers that Marius has been visiting his father’s grave and throws him out. 

In another apparent digression, we are introduced to the ABC Society, representative of the Republican/Revolutionary viewpoint. The Society’s mission is universal education but it serves as a counterpoint to the kind of salons Marius grew up in, a place where a great many different subjects can be discussed freely. Marius meets Leigle (or Bossuet) at school, and then he becomes friendly with Courfeyrac who introduces him to the society, which causes Marius to change his political views once more.  

Perhaps Hugo tries not to have a bias towards any one political viewpoint in the novel. He believes that Napoleon’s defeat was inevitable, the character who supports the monarchy is portrayed as being rather cruel towards his nephew and here Grantaire represents the ABC Society with a speech he gives when drunk. Hugo dismisses his attitude: “Scepticism, that dry-rot of the intellect, had left him without a whole thought in his head.” (p565). Graintaine is dismissive of everything. 

Marius argues fervently for Napoleon and the idea of the French Empire, but Combferre causes him to check his words by talking succinctly of the ideals of freedom and the sacred mother the Republic. It is telling that Marius himself is motherless; this is true of many of the characters who either have absent (for whatever reason) or abusive mothers.  Hugo uses imagery of the earth being furrowed for the sowing of seed, or a wound to describe how Marius feels. He fears that embracing this philosophy will lead to him losing his father and becoming even more isolated. 

What is worse is that he is penniless, but like Valjean before him he is determined to control his own destiny by working hard and not getting into debt. The poverty he endures then overcomes affects his personality in that he becomes “aloof...withdrawn to the point of surliness.” (p587). He is “inclined a little too much to the side of contemplation.” (p591), and avoids certain financial security for the sake of his freedom. 

During his poverty Marius had searched for the Thernadiers without success, but Hugo drops in another apparently insignificant event where Marius takes pity on the “wretchedly poor” Jondrette family (p598), the reader is still unaware of their identity.

In the final chapter of Book 5 Gillenormand rages against Marius, the Republicans and romanticism, particularly the idiots who attended the play Hernani (by our very own Victor Hugo). “The story is set in 16th-century Spain and extols the Romantic hero in the form of a noble outlaw at war with society, dedicated to a passionate love and driven by inexorable fate.” (Encyclopaedia Britannica), similar to Les Miserables? Gillernormand both fears and derides the young and their philosophy, but doesn’t seem to want Theodule to criticise Marius.