In these two interior dialogues lies the heart of the book, which is a story of pursuit. Jean Valjean’s bodily pursuer is Inspector Javert, who can be evaded and finally done away with; his moral pursuer is the truth, which hunts him down in his last retreat, his conscience, where after many vicissitudes he had good reason to believe himself safe.
That is the Idea of the novel. As Hugo himself formulates it in a characteristic passage, “A man’s conscience is that bit of infinity he harbors in himself and against which he measures the volitions of his brain and the acts of his life.” I say “characteristic” because there we find Hugo performing the big task he imposed on himself of giving a wider view than his misérables are capable of having, placed where they are, near the bottom of society. The Idea of the story has been lived by Jean Valjean; he has wrestled with it and borne it on his strong shoulders like the weight of Marius that he carried through the sewers of Paris. But he would be unable to express it.
From time to time, Hugo evidently felt the need to state magisterially how the book should be understood. For example, toward the beginning of the second volume, “This book is a drama whose chief character is the infinite. Man is the second.” At the beginning of Volume Three, he tells us that the novelist is “the historian of morals and ideas,” which implies a rather different stance, one of non-involvement. And it is true that in this volume, which deals with the 1839 events, he reports on the one hand the ideas of Marius, originally conservative, and on the other those of the embattled young men of the secret societies who will lead the May rising and man the barricades. In the manner of Caesar, he even gives us their pre-battle harangues. It is plain, moreover, that their ideas are being recorded by the author as historian, that they are not his own. Though he shows sympathy for the ardor and courage of an Enjolras, he himself was a believer in Progress. That in fact is the final explanation he offers of the underlying meaning of his novel (Volume Three, page 269): “The real title of this drama is: Progress.”
Actually this assertion is far from borne out by the novel itself, whose real title is its real title: les Misérables. The pursuit theme, illustrated in the smallest cruel particulars of keyhole spying and motiveless delation, points to the hopelessness of trying to throw off the dead hand of the past. However much we reform our ways, grow a new self, we are our past; it lurks behind us, follows us, denounces us, tracks us down. The novel ends with the utter isolation of Jean Valjean. You could say that social advance, an enlightened rehabilitation program for convicted offenders, would have remedied that. But that is not what the story says. By an immense solitary effort Jean Valjean had been able to change. He is a new man, but the new man, at the moment of promised happiness, only encounters a new pursuer, sterner than Javert: “To be happy we must never understand what duty is; once we understand it, it is implacable.” None of this resembles progressive doctrine.
Still, it must have been Hugo’s asserted faith in the deity of Progress—always written with a capital, like God’s name—that let him record without palliation the unhappiness, the mass misery, of the nation. And it was the wretched not of the earth but of France that weighed so heavy on him. How would he have been able to write of their suffering unless at the same time he had been able to offer the reader—and perhaps, above all, himself—the consolation of belief in a gradual improvement through the movement of History? His belief in historical progress was inseparable from his belief in France as the appointed successor to Greece and Rome in the sacred role of leader of nations. “La révolution fran?aise est un geste de Dieu,” he shouts in fierce italics, as if defying any contradiction. The manifest destiny of France to lead and inspire was identified by Hugo with his own mission to the nation as seer and epic novelist.