Chapter VII
Legacy
Reception · The Musical · Film Adaptations · Why It Matters
Les Misérables was an immediate sensation. When the novel was published in 1862, the first French edition sold out within hours. It was serialized in newspapers across Europe and translated into English the same year. Critics were divided — many found the digressions excessive and the politics too radical. Readers ignored the critics. The people of Paris knew that Hugo had written their story.
“There is nothing like a dream to create the future.”
— Les Misérables
The Musical
French Premiere
Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg's musical adaptation premieres at the Palais des Sports in Paris. The original production runs for 100 performances.
London Premiere
Produced by Cameron Mackintosh and translated by Herbert Kretzmer, the English-language version opens at the Barbican Centre. It transfers to the Palace Theatre and becomes a phenomenon.
Broadway
The musical opens at the Broadway Theatre. It becomes, at the time, the longest-running musical in Broadway history — a record later surpassed, but its cultural impact is undimmed.
The musical has been seen by over 70 million people in 44 countries and translated into 22 languages. It is one of the most successful theatrical productions in history — and it has introduced generations of audiences to Hugo's story who might never have picked up the novel.
Film Adaptations
There are over fifty film and television adaptations of Les Misérables. The most notable include the 1935 Hollywood version starring Fredric March and Charles Laughton, the 1998 version starring Liam Neeson and Geoffrey Rush, and the 2012 musical film directed by Tom Hooper, which starred Hugh Jackman as Valjean, Russell Crowe as Javert, and Anne Hathaway — who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress — as Fantine. Each generation finds its own way to tell Hugo's story.
“Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.”
— Les Misérables (musical)
Why It Matters
Les Misérablesis the great novel of social justice. It argues — in a story that has moved readers for over a century and a half — that individuals can be redeemed and that society can be changed. It is a novel that looks unflinchingly at poverty, crime, and the failures of the legal system, and insists that mercy is the answer. In an age of inequality, prison overcrowding, and debates about the limits of compassion, it has never been more relevant. Hugo's great theme — that the criminal is not the one who steals the bread but the society that lets children go hungry — remains the most radical sentence in nineteenth-century literature.
“So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation which...creates hells in civilized society, and complicates a destiny that is divine with a human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age — the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of woman by hunger, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night — are not solved...books like this cannot be useless.” — Hugo's preface to Les Misérables.