Les Miserables read-a-long 2026 | Deuxième Partie (2)

[Pashazade]

Welcome to the second thread of the Les Miserables Read-a-long.

I've taken over from AgualusasL0ver in trying to keep us all reading together, but have copied the below over from the first thread.

I'll also be using the Christine Donougher translation (on Kindle) for posting in the main, but it doesn't matter which translation you have, they seem to follow the same breakdown.
It's a bit sprawly in places, some people have entire sections in the appendices, so I've started adding the first line of the chapter to try and lock in exactly where we are for that day, hopefully it helps us all keep together!

The only rules
The plan is to read ONE chapter a day and contribute/follow the thread as you see fit. There are c. 365 chapters, so we plan to take the year to read slowly and really get under the skin. Sometimes we have clustered chapters in past read-a-longs, and people do sometimes read ahead. All fine - but No spoilers until the relevant day.
Notes from previous read-a-longs

• How you manage one a day is entirely up to you, some people prefer to store them and read all the chapters for the week at once, some read each day.
• Sometimes these books can go off on a tangent all their own (looking at Mr Tolstoy), stick with it :-)
• All formats and translations welcome. Sometimes the translation discussions are some of the most interesting conversations.
• You WILL get behind at some point, but don't worry, just catch up when you can.
• Tangents, things you discovered down a rabbit hole, articles, pod casts, clips of epic scenes when we get to them all very welcome on the thread.

Spoiler free summary , courtesy of Chat GPT below. Schmoop has book summaries so I will post those at the relevant points. ** Les Misérables is a classic novel by Victor Hugo that explores justice, compassion, and the struggle for dignity in 19th-century France. At its core, the book follows the lives of several interconnected characters from different social classes as they navigate poverty, law, love, and moral choice. Rather than focusing on a single hero or plotline, the novel paints a wide picture of society—showing how personal decisions are shaped by systems like the legal system, economic inequality, and social expectations. Key themes include:

• Justice vs. mercy — how laws affect people differently, and whether strict punishment leads to fairness
• Redemption and moral growth — the possibility of change, even after hardship
• Poverty and inequality — the daily realities of people living on the margins
• Love and sacrifice — care for others as a powerful force for good
• Social responsibility — how individual actions impact the wider community

The novel is known for:

• Deep character development
• Emotional intensity
• Philosophical reflections on society and humanity
• Detailed descriptions of history and everyday life

Overall, Les Misérables is less about a single storyline and more about asking big questions: What does it mean to be a good person? How should society treat its most vulnerable? And can compassion change lives?

I've never seen a film of Les Mis, but I could totally "see" JVJ's entrance in a cinematic way as I was reading

Yes @Waawo
Just brilliant.

Yesterday’s chapter brilliant (again Hugo is so weird about women!) today’s, for the love of god can we please just got on with it. The other diversion about the later barricades fascinating and some amazing description. Today’s just so dull! 🤣

While reading today's, I imagined it spoken by Macron. On and on and on.

I do wish Enjolras would talk in paragraphs.

I found today’s chapter so meaningful and so poignant. The looking forward to the twentieth century as a time of peace and harmony once universal enfranchisement had been achieved, when we know in fact what was to come…the trenches…the Holocaust…nuclear weapons. Dp and I have literally spent an hour talking about the tragic irony.

I imagine Enjolras as being like a fairhaired and less broad young Che Guevara in the Motorcycle Diaries. Charismatic, young, blond. Like an avenging angel

After reading, I was wondering, did anyone actually think that at the time? Did Hugo? Whilst the sentiment is noble, in the nineteenth century anyone with even a vaguely historical perspective could have perhaps worked out that statistically it was unlikely?

We have conquered fire: the glorious future awaits!
We have conquered fixed agriculture: the glorious future awaits!
We have conquered the air: the glorious future awaits!
...
...
We have conquered AI: the glorious future awaits?

[Edited to add: future historians I'm sure won't have any impression that people in the first half of the twenty-first century universally feel that way about AI!]

I think it is definitely meant to show the idealism of a group of young people who are about to lay down their lives for a doomed “revolution” that fizzles out. I also think people believed that with universal suffrage many problems would be solved.

I have gone down a warren here, never mind a rabbit hole! So it seems Victor Hugo deeply believed that the twentieth century promised deliverance. This is from a speech he made:

”In the twentieth century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, animosity will be dead, royalty will be dead, and dogmas will be dead; but Man will live. For all there will be but one country—that country the whole earth; for all there will be but one hope—that hope the whole heaven.
All hail, then, to that noble twentieth century which shall own our children, and which our children shall inherit!”

Having done a bit of reading around it looks as though a belief in the continuing march of progress was very common in the nineteenth century, so maybe this chapter of the book is just a passage that looks very different to our cynical modern eyes.

The quotation is from a translation of Victor Hugo's Address to the Workman's Congress at Marseille in 1879

I wonder if also in France there was a desperation for this. They saw so much upheaval and bloodshed internally over 50 years that hoping for a brighter more settled future might have felt like a way of staying sane or at least being able to carry on.

How interesting @Onceuponatimethen ! That bit did stand out to me in today’s chapter as poignant and tragic, how awful to have such hope for the future and for things to turn out so differently. There must have been plenty of people who were young in the turbulent (for France) 19th century and despaired of humanity when they lived to see the First World War, the Spanish flu, and so on…a very different experience for the British, who were shaken out of their Victorian comfort into the chaos of the first half of the 20th century.

Loved JVJ’s arrival yesterday, great bit of storytelling! I’m afraid I skim-read today’s chapter slightly…

Does Enjolras get great big long philosophical singing bits with no paragraphs in the musical?

Having asked Google (because I wasn’t sure which character he was in the musical!), he’s in a lot of the big group numbers on the barricades and does have “red and black” as his big number. It also looks like someone’s done the work! Search “All Enljolras singingparts” on YouTube, but it does contain major spoilers, surprisingly quite a lot of the main thrust of his speeches are in there, I have a tendency to forget the less interesting bits in the musical, it’s a bit like the book there’s a lot of it. 😁

I think Enjolras is a menace, I’m not even sure Hugo intends him to be a hero, the reference to Saint Just isn’t that flattering. He reminds me of Robespierre and Hugo keeps mentioning ‘93 ominously, so even though I don’t know what happens, there’s a lot of foreshadowing going on and I won’t be surprised if Enjolras bites the dust and takes most of his comrades with him.

The speech about progress did get me though. You’d like to think it does come true but it takes a lot lot longer than anyone thinks at the time. The “trentes glorieuses” after WW2 is more the world they’re thinking of, and it’s 130 years or so away from them. And as we know, the 21st ain’t all that when we get there…

History is weird. To them, in 1832, they’d hardly had democracy for 5 minutes. Imagine if it was now - well, we can maybe imagine 2032 from 2026, but, imagine if we’d had a huge revolution in 1989 (some of Europe did), bloodshed in 1993 (some of Europe did..), a dictatorship til 2015, a reactionary government, a small improvement in 2030… you would probably still be fighting. Yet to us the French Republic seems so normal, so much part of the values of the modern world. To them it was new and fragile. It took them until 1871 to really get to a government without a monarch or an authoritarian in charge (3rd Republic). The events keep coming but the “arc of history” is actually quite slow.

Depressing to think what the rest of this century might bring. I was optimistic when I was young, much less so now.

Thanks for the discussion around yesterday's chapter! I reread it today with more patience and understanding. (But as Piggy says, paragraphs?!).

The ending of today's chapter is good. Another cinematic moment with the these two coming face to face. What next?

He gets "Do You Hear the People Sing?" doesn't he?

Yes he has chunks of that too. 🙂

I am really keen to go and see it now

@MotherOfCatBoy thanks for sharing your interesting musings. @FuzzyCaoraDhubh i had to read it at least twice to get my head around it as well!

I keep thinking of La Marseillaise and the lyrics which we already know Gavroche was singing on his way up to the barricade. (”Brandishing a hammerless pistol in the middle of the street is such a public undertaking that Gavroche felt his ardour increase with every step. In between snatches of the ‘Marseillaise’…”)

Specifically the chorus:

“Aux armes, citoyens,
Formez vos bataillons,
Marchons, marchons !
Qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons”

(To arms, citizens,
Form your battalions
Let's march, let's march!
May impure blood
Water our furrows!)

Until today I didn’t realise there was a children’s verse in the eighteenth century. In case anyone else like me had no idea:

“Couplet des enfants
Nous entrerons dans la carrière
Quand nos aînés n'y seront plus,
Nous y trouverons leur poussière
𝄆 Et la trace de leurs vertus 𝄇
Bien moins jaloux de leur survivre
Que de partager leur cercueil,
Nous aurons le sublime orgueil
De les venger ou de les suivre.”

(We will start our career
When our elders are no more,
We will find their dust there
𝄆 And the trace of their virtues 𝄇
Much less jealous to survive them
Than to share their coffin,
We will have the sublime pride
To avenge them or follow them)

Apparently they don’t sing this verse nowadays when they sing their national anthem in France which seems good!

I assume La Marseillaise gets into the musical!

Do you here the people sing is probably the closest song to the La Marseillaise in sentiment but the anthem isn’t actually sung.

Book One cont’d…
Mon 2nd Nov - Ch7 - The Situation Worsens (It was rapidly growing lighter.)
Tues 3rd - Ch8 - The Gunners Have to Be Taken Seriously (Gavroche was the centre of attention.)
Weds 4th - Ch9 - Using Those Old Poaching Skills and the Infallible Shot That Had Some Bearing on a Conviction in 1796 (An exchange of opinion took place inside the barricade.)
Thurs 5th - Ch10 - Dawn (At that moment Cosette woke up.)
Fri 6th - Ch11 - The Shot That Never Misses and Kills No One (The assailants’ onslaught continued.)
Sat 7th - Ch12 - Disorder Upholds Order (Bossuet muttered in Combeferre’s ear,)
Sun 8th - Ch13 - Fleeting Glimmers (In the chaos of sentiments and passions)

I am so grateful to be reading this on the readalong. I would miss so much without all the chat.