Thirty years ago a friend introduced my husband Tommy and I to the music of Les Mis. It took us a few months to see the show — a fancy dress outing to the Kennedy Center that Tommy organized as he was planning to propose to me. But for months ahead of time we listened to the music on the many road trips our long distance relationship required. And it is one of the only albums whose songs we have both memorized and will see cheesily at top volume in the car together. It is a song about a revolution and love — and about the failure of both to achieve dreams.
We saw it again last week when a production came through Chattanooga. It really does stand up to the test of time as a story. But in the intervening 30 years, I have completed a PhD in history and taught university students for over 2 decades, and we have all experienced the collective Revolutionary Era-themed phenomenon that is Hamilton. It occurred to me that Les Mis is a very different kind of Revolution story. Many people who watch it assume it is about the French Revolution and that therefore may down the road there was a kind of freedom or “winning” that was achieved. Instead, it is about the abortive uprisings against the monarchy of Louis-Phillippe in 1832. These were failed revolutions.
I love the history of failure. It is vital to study the movements that did not take off, that did not give us the world we have now. We need to see the stories of those who argued for roads not taken in order to expand our own imaginations as well as to honor the lives of those who worked for goals they never saw achieved. Their labor helped create the world we have, even if they didn’t see themselves as effective. They are just as fully human as those who got luckier and whose ideas caught on. Besides, the story is never finished with us humans, as long as we wait for the New Earth, so we don’t actually know for sure who failed and who succeeded. So we need these stories.
Victor Hugo, whose novel is adapted and shortened into the classic musical, wanted those people whose lives were given to extend the ideas of freedom and equality to be remembered. And while no one could have imagined it at the time, more people know about those 1832 barricades than about King Louis-Philippe who so handily suppressed the revolutionaries. Their story, especially with the music by Claude-Michel Schönberg, Alain Boublil, and Jean-Marc Natel, continues to encourage people to think about self-sacrifice, unjust economic and penal systems, and the invisibility and humanity of the poorest. It’s one of those great examples of how art can take something that happened (or failed to happen) in history and change how we remember and value it.
But this time around, watching Les Mis, it occurred to me how much the musical (in contrast to the novel) focuses on individual issues of justice, redemption, and personal love. It’s hard to even know what social and economic issues were that the poor were rallying against. The systems that allowed working women to be at the mercy of a particular foreman, that punished women and children for out of wedlock pregnancies, that governed the prison and parole systems, that created man-made famines, and prevented ordinary folks from impacting their government policies are not addressed and must be observed around the edges of the story.
The story does not skirt the personal consequences, however. The main characters die in alarmingly high numbers, and the consistent theme of the triumph of selfishness and oppression in the lives of the other characters can depress the audience. There seems to be no way for humans to better their lives legally or to find any consistent rules for thriving economically. All the virtuous poor folk in the story die. Only those who somehow got to middle class lived. Political action failed.
In the end, one of the main characters, Marius, remembers his fallen comrades, and the poor women come to mourn the dead, and the lyrics they sing are anything but optimistic about the ability for collective political change to occur: “They talked of revolution. . . they sang about tomorrow and tomorrow never came. . . Oh my friends, my friends, don’t ask me what your sacrifice was for.” Finally: “They were school boys, never held a gun. Fighting for a new world that would rise up like the sun. Where’s that new world, now the fighting’s done?. . . .Nothing changes, nothing ever will.” The musical leaves it open to the audience to decide if the folks who fought actually just wasted their lives. What if Marius had died? He would have missed out on his personal love story and the musical intimates that would have been tragic (and thus in saving his life saves the musical from being an unredeemably sad story). So is there anything worth dying for?
The musical, if not Victor Hugo himself, argues that personal love, that between friends, parents, and romantic partners, is worth dying for. And it is this love that allows for characters to build and grow. It is at this level that justice and forgiveness function. The experience of being forgiven, of being loved unconditionally as a child of God — this is where there is redemption and useful sacrifice. This is one of the most inspiring and encouraging elements of the musical.
But last week, sitting in my backrow seat watching Les Mis again, I worried that this focus on the individual could discourage commitments to self-sacrificing collective action here on earth in the political realm. I found myself concerned my students would watch this musical and decide revolutionary action is useless. And just as I was starting to become genuinely disquieted, the lyrics of the last songs helped me find some resolution (as a good musical should do!).
First, Jean Val Jean admonishes his family that “to love another person is to see the face of God” — a clear reminder that any political action that doesn’t take the imago dei seriously isn’t going to result in a loving and flourishing world. Work for the collective that violates the humanity of the person in front of us will fail.
Second, the audience is invited to join the cast to look for a world beyond the barricades that is based on this love, and possibly not fought for with bloodshed, but with self-sacrificing love of the kind that Eponine, the bishop, and Jean Val Jean all exude. This kind of love can lead people to avoid participation in political action in order to care for their loved ones, but it can also fuel participation in social change, as it seems to do for Marius and even Jean Val Jean in the end.
The call to “join in our crusade” made me cringe a little, based as that concept is on Christian political violence. And yet, the closing anthem, with the failed story of violent revolution as its backdrop, allowed for me to re-commit to a complete rejection of what “crusade” meant historically. In the context of the song, the crusade is now going to be a commitment to greater love of humans who are God’s image-bearers. There is a potential to remember that loving our neighbor does mean working so that there are just systems for the poor, the orphaned, the women on whom the burdens of childcare fall.
I don’t love how being an academic has caused me to be unable to participate in a musical experience without analyzing it to death. But I’m glad that good art can continue to provoke me over the decades to try to be a better citizen, lover of my fellow humans, and reflector of the image of God.
Read more on Patheos – Seek. Understand.
