"To Love is to Act: ‘Les Misérables’ and Victor Hugo’s vision for leading lives of conscience." Modern & Contemporary France, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2

History has tended to hear the death knell sound for Hugo’s career as a playwright (and for French Romantic drama) in early 1843, but the debut of Les Burgraves has too often been wrongly characterized as a categorical flop rather than as a relative disappointment. As Stéphane Desvignes clarifies in this weighty study of Hugo’s exile theatre, the fallacy surrounding Les Burgraves must be dismantled if the full scope of Hugo’s writing as a dramatist is to be widely acknowledged. The fact that Hugo never again brought a new work to the stage in his lifetime cannot simply be read as a bruised ego’s adieu to stagecraft. Previous scholarship has identified various contexts for Hugo’s decision, especially the tragic association in his mind of the year 1843 with the death of his eldest daughter Léopoldine. Desvignes casts further — and extensive — light on Hugo’s relationship with the theatre as it evolved during his exile from the Second Empire, all the while acknowledging the debt to critics such as Anne Ubersfeld, Arnaud Laster, and Florence Naugrette (the latter of whom recently offered a salient reminder of how the clichés of failure surrounding Les Burgraves were later hammered in place by a Third Republic that was unsurprisingly keen to relegate German-influenced Romanticism to the past). In this respect, the book’s title could be misleading. Le Théâtre en liberté is the name given to the collection of plays Hugo wrote in exile, but which was only published posthumously in 1886. Notwithstanding the astute analyses of those works in the third and final part of his monograph, Desvignes looks beyond that collection, however, and prises open greater space for the relevance of Hugo’s theatre alongside his far more familiar achievements in fiction and poetry between 1852 and 1870. In turn, he opens a broader perspective on the stage’s importance to Hugo’s exile as a catalyst for freeing the imagination. Such breadth stretches from the Second Empire’s instrumentalization of theatre as an entertainment industry, to Hugo’s carefully considered critique of such bourgeois values in his 1864 essay on Shakespeare, in line with his enduring beliefs in theatre’s sociability and inclusive reach. This vantage point recognizes that, unlike Musset’s Un spectacle dans un fauteuil (1832), Le Théâtre en liberté was never destined only to be encountered on the page, in spite of imperial censorship. Far from being an unperformable series, Hugo always wanted it to question the concepts of genre and theatricality in practice as much as in theory, thereby endorsing Romantic dramaturgy over materialist trends. The experimental diversity of the collection’s eleven plays (their varying lengths, the shifts from verse to prose, the blend of history and myth, and the mix of genres from vaudeville to melodrama) emphasizes a telling line of continuity between the bataille d’Hernani of 1830 and the toils of exile. Given the density of Desvignes’s study, the overall pace could have been quickened with more judicious editing to lend greater momentum to the argument: many of the longer extracts and résumés would indeed have been better suited to the appendices alongside the useful data regarding Second Empire theatre production (and before a helpful index), while the excessive footnotes risk becoming languid in their effect. Such re-organization could also have allowed for further development of some tantalizing if slightly tacit moments of discussion, not least ‘une utopie du grotesque’. Perseverant readers will nonetheless be rewarded.

This article opens a new dialogue between French literature, gender studies, and adaptation studies by examining the conception and reception of the character of Cosette from Victor Hugo’s bestseller Les Misérables (1862). Adaptation studies has increasingly theorized the comparative rather than simply evaluative use of fidelity, in part encouraged by the ongoing push beyond the customary adaptive media of film. However, there has been little development of this methodology to ask how the relationship between literary works and their adaptations might help to nuance – if not revise – the masculinist notoriety of canonical male writers such as Hugo. Cosette provides an apt test case. She is the modern face of Les Misérables thanks to the hugely popular Boublil and Schönberg musical version (1985) and its trademark logo, which is based on Émile Bayard’s wistful 1879 illustration of her. Cosette’s poster-child status is deeply problematic but has never been explored. Her objectification as the ingenuous alouette (‘lark’) and her rags-to-riches tale tout a conservatism that is at once in line with Hugo’s patriarchal renown as a grand homme and yet at odds with Les Misérables’s reputation for progressive ideals. I argue that both these clichéd contexts of understanding Hugo’s work are unsettled by Cosette’s changing faces in the novel and across its adaptations. My approach is twofold: it draws on Hugo’s non-categorical poetics to rethink the construction of femininity in his novel as equivocal rather than patriarchal; and it emphasizes the relevance of applying a hermeneutical and intermedial analysis to the source/adaptation relationship by considering a range of different adaptive forms (literary sequels, film, video-gaming, and animation) and contexts (book illustrations, advertising, and fandom) since the musical’s debut. Understood together, these representations of Hugo’s lark cast much-needed light on one of western literature’s most recognizable faces.

Ten years after it was first published, Jan Baetens’s La Novellisation: du film au roman (Brussels: Les Impressions nouvelles, 2008) has finally been made accessible for anglophone audiences. Mary Feeney’s translation includes a new final chapter in which Baetens reflects on the work undertaken around the genre of novelization over the past decade, which remains an all too easily overlooked form within the ever-growing field of adaptation studies. At a time when Oxford University Press and Routledge have both recently published major companions to adaptation studies — and when Palgrave Macmillan continues to expand its excellent series in ‘Adaptation and Visual Culture’ — this field has notably broadened its sweep beyond the tried-and-tested novel-to-film model of analysis thanks to the development of a more intermedial understanding of adaptation as both an embodied product and a cultural process. Yet the reverse trajectory of that familiar model has found itself taken for granted (if it is even acknowledged) in an area that is increasingly fascinated with new digital media and the various contexts of production and consumption in which adaptations are made. Baetens addresses this oversight by focusing on twentieth-century France to provide a much-needed critical history of novelization. Most strikingly, he insists that novelization is not simply a reverse adaptation and in fact represents a large industry that has produced thousands of titles since the golden age of the ciné-roman of the 1920s. That industry has slipped under the radar of many scholars due to the invisibility of the authors involved and the reputation of novelizations as disposable romans de gare with a limited shelf life. Baetens traces its beginnings back to early twentieth-century serials in print media, which offered complementary descriptions of silent film for audiences and producers alike. What becomes clearer over the subsequent decades of the sound era is a practice which begins not with the film but with some stage of the screenplay, thereby drawing attention to the genre’s textual rather than solely visual origins. Discussions of Pierre Bost’s novelization of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) and Jean-Claude Carrière’s 1950s take on two of Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot films, among others, illustrate how the genre became at once standardized and subtly innovative. Although this book is singular and engaging, its contribution to adaptation studies is somewhat limited in scope by both its organization and its conceptual thinking. The four main sections are unevenly weighted and the coherence between (and within) them is too implicit, in part owing to a written style that is prone to generalized and at times cryptic statements, and to a translation that is sometimes unable to unpack the dense syntax of the original French. These structural concerns are compounded by a number of missed opportunities to develop the key paradigms of film and literary studies, not least questions of how to theorize intermedia cross-pollination and how to combine the methodologies of close reading with the macro-level vantage points of cultural and economic studies. Nevertheless, by opening this research to anglophone audiences, this new edition should certainly help to catalyse fresh thinking and approaches regarding the novel–film relationship.

Orson Welles's adaptation of Victor Hugo's nineteenth-century novel Les Miserables for American radio in the summer of 1937 is an illustrative case in point. This radio drama performs what Lawrence Venuti might call an "interpretive operation" upon Les Miserables that draws attention to the formal, thematic, and biographical contexts not only of Welles's own practice but also of Hugo's source novel. The novel's sizeable digressions had to be removed, however, due to these constraints. Too many character voices risked confusing the audience and losing their attention, so further edits were needed as well. The immediacy of the expressive voices and the pitiless regularity of the bracing pounding oblige the audience's consciousness to undergo this recall of the past with a sense of both proximity and anxiety. Consequently, radio's intimacy as a 'theatre of the mind' requires theoretical strategies that respect its specificity as a narrative mode and therefore do not unquestioningly borrow the grammar of literary or screen analysis.

The title of Didier Philippot’s study is taken from Hugo’s Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866), a novel in which the hero Gilliatt’s struggles with the elements as he battles to salvage a shipwrecked steamer allow Hugo to contemplate the enigmatic design of nature. The ocean’s unfathomable depths and changeable movements, combined with the endless expanse of the sky as it brightens and darkens each day, heightens Gilliatt’s appreciation of an infinite process of creation. For Hugo, this vastness reveals a boundless cosmos that could draw the poetic imagination beyond any limits. Philippot takes this universal dilation as his starting point in order to illustrate the intimate correspondence between Hugo’s work and that of a universe in motion. Such affinity is integral to the poet’s artistry, whereby ‘le possible est une notion dynamique, inséparable de l’immense travail (comme celui, énigmatique, de la mer) d’une Nature en perpétuelle métamorphose’ (p. 231). The frontiers of material being are forever pushed back so as to release the act of writing into the immeasurable flux of creation itself, as composed by what Hugo calls, in Quatrevingt-treize (1874), the ‘rédacteur énorme et sinistre de ces grandes pages’ that is the divine. Philippot extends a line of thinking that runs through much of the most astute scholarship on Hugo’s Romantic world view and that has emphasized how this outlook sees the relationship between the immanent and the transcendent as one of continuity rather than distinction. His argument carefully underscores the significance of works such as Les Travailleurs and Hugo’s essay on Shakespeare (1864) to such perspectives, but its scope is noticeably restricted by its methodology. The attention given to Hugo’s late exile period in the analysis needed a clearer rationale, especially since concepts from his earlier work could have been used to develop a more ambitious understanding of how he decentres the notion of being (for example, the mélange des genres in the preface to Cromwell and the ruinous reality dramatized in Notre-Dame de Paris). In particular, the ‘ontologie de la démesure’ or ‘ontologie douce’ in which Philippot situates Hugo’s poetics might have been more substantially theorized through further critical engagement, both with key sources, such as Bachelard’s discussion of reverie, and with a wider and less francocentric body of research. Insightful work on Hugo’s Romantic sublime by Suzanne Guerlac (The Impersonal Sublime (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990)) and Kathryn Grossman (The Later Novels of Victor Hugo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)), to name but two references, is tellingly absent from the bibliography. Also missing is the breadth of interdisciplinary interest in European Romanticism as a challenge to positivism, as pursued by Richard Eldridge (The Persistence of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)) and Paul Hamilton (Metaromanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)), among others. Notwithstanding these limitations, Philippot brings an intriguing and original parallel into focus by exploring Hugo’s desire to figure the human condition in fluid terms. The surge of publications on Leibniz in the 1850s and the interest in his criticism of Spinoza prompt Philippot to speculate as to whether Hugo was keeping abreast of these contemporary debates, given the similarities between the Leibnizian conception of the possible and Hugo’s slippage between actuality and possibility. It is a resemblance that importantly reiterates the need to track Hugo’s œuvre — as the work of a self-styled poet-philosopher — more readily within the currents of nineteenth-century philosophy.

One of Britain’s most profitable musical exports, Les Misérables has captivated audiences worldwide with its mix of stirring spectacle and high emotion. Critical response has, however, been deeply divided. Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s ‘megamusical’ has often been accused of trivializing the mammoth nineteenth-century novel by Victor Hugo on which it is based, reducing Hugo’s epic of social injustice to populist sentimentalism. To challenge the cliché of the inferiority of adaptations and the bias towards ‘high art’ that such criticism generates, this essay specifies the relationship between Hugo’s global bestseller and the world’s longest-running musical. This connection has received much less scholarly attention than the fame of each work would suggest. By exploring their affiliation within the contexts of both Hugo’s Romanticism and the libretto’s collaborative development from Paris to London, a revealing likeness is identified that clearly underpins the success of the ‘show of shows’.

Victor Hugo's vow as a teenager to become Chateaubriand ultimately surpassed even this audacious ambition. Today, Hugo casts an inescapable shadow across contemporary culture as nineteenth-century France's most iconic writer, as recent political, pedagogical, and popular discussions indicate. This article explores some of these examples so as to confirm Hugo's redoubtable cultural capital before asking: what did it actually mean in Hugo's eyes to equal his childhood idol's standing? By returning to Hugo's own understanding of what it meant to become a 'great man', the cliches of patriarchal authority that so often surround his oeuvre can be contested in order to allow for a more probing understanding of both his work and his enduring influence. A closing overview of this special issue of Dix-Neuf situates each of the diverse contributions along this critical line of thinking as an introduction to the scholarship that Hugo's work increasingly encourages in the twenty-first century.