Les Miserables (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free

the other, in its whole and in its details, whatever may be the intermissions, the exceptions, or the defaults, the march from evil to good, ... from nothingness to God. Starting point: matter; goal: the soul. Hydra at the beginning, angel at the end (p. 698).” Not only did Hugo sketch and expound this vision throughout the last half-century of his career, but also he reserved many visionary poems that he planned to have published at five-year intervals after his death—and thanks to his faithful executors, they were. The posterity of his religious ideas, although unexpected, would have gratified him. The cult of Cao Dai Buddhism, which numbers several million adherents and several thousand temples throughout the world, believes that several of its priests are reincarnations of Hugo and his sons.
    Hugo’s election to the Académie Française in 1841 consecrated the militant romantic movement. In 1845 he was appointed as a pair de France, equivalent to a member of the British House of Lords. Becoming increasingly liberal in politics, he became a member of the Constitutional Convention (Assemblée Constituante) of the Second French Republic in 1848. He presided over the International Peace Conference in Paris in 1849, and there gave the first known speech advocating the creation of a “United States of Europe,” a vision partially anticipated by Immanuel Kant, Thomas Jefferson, and Madame de Staël, but fully realized only recently with the formation of the European Union, followed by the adoption of a common currency, the Euro.
    Starting in 1848, Hugo and his son Charles founded and coedited the liberal newspaper L’ Événement, which strongly supported the return from exile, and the candidacy for President of the Republic, of Louis Napoleon, Emperor Napoléon I’s nephew, who had established his credentials as a liberal with a term in prison. Hugo proved to have been “a useful idiot,” for Louis Napoleon craved absolute power, and eventually managed a combination of elections and a coup d‘état to become Emperor for Life on December 2,1851. Hugo had already broken with the Right and formally declared himself a Republican on July 18,1851. Hunted by the police, with his sons already jailed, he fled France to take refuge on the English Channel Islands of Jersey (1852—1855) and Guernsey (1855—1870). Unlike all his prominent contemporaries, he refused amnesty, and published vehement satires of the new regime, Napoléon le petit (1852) and Les Châtiments (1853). When he had vented his rage against the ruler who betrayed him, he turned inward to meditate on Providence and human spiritual destiny in the great poem cycles Les Contemplations (1856, mainly composed 1853—1855), La Légende des Siècles (1859, with sequels published in 1877 and 1883), La Fin de Satan (composed 1854, published 1886), and Dieu (composed 1855, published 1891). Only then, after nearly a decade in exile, did he synthesize the individual, the historical, and the cosmic in Les Misérables.
    Motivated is not determined: many people have experienced family situations similar to Hugo‘s, but there is only one author of Les Misérables. Nevertheless, numerous factors in Hugo’s life converged to reinforce his proclivity to become a savior, particularly by advocating compromise. His parents became estranged, lived apart, and each took a lover when he was only one year old. In response, he later elaborated the myth that his mother was a monarchist and his father a republican; the compromise of a constitutional monarchy such as Louis Philippe’s (1830—1848) was therefore attractive to him, and under it he began his political career, symbolically finding a middle ground between his two parents’ supposed positions. In fact, however, his mother’s family was closely associated with the Jacobins (rabid egalitarians), who massacred rebellious monarchists in the Vendee region. She later became a monarchist of convenience, while her lover was