Now I Hate Victor Hugo

5,717 words

In which Nicholas R. Jeelvy demonstrates the insidiousness of 19th-century political leftism and its tendency to subvert culture and morality by tugging on the heartstrings of the impressionable and kind.

My own personal journey through Victor Hugo’s epic began at a very young age. My grandparents had in their house a short children’s book, Cosette and Gavroche. A distillation of what’s affectionately known as ‘The Brick’ for children, it focuses on two episodes of the story. The first, the rescue of Cosette from the Thenardiers’ inn by Jean Valjean, the second, a collation of Gavroche’s life as a Parisian gamin culminating in his, eh… heroic death at the barricades, singing cleverly irreverent songs as he collects cartridge boxes to help the revolutionaries. This tiny book is a masterpiece of editing—neatly divided into a part describing the ultimate little girl’s fantasy—rescue from a life of drudgery by an immeasurably strong father figure and the ultimate little boy’s fantasy—freedom to roam the streets with no parents, curfew, or rules, crowned with a heroic death. All this unencumbered by descriptions of Paris’ sewer system or the history of Gorbeau House, though we do get a peek into the story of The Elephant of the Bastille. Our tiny lark and indomitable street urchin are pure childhood fantasy as they are presented. Much like a drug, one hit of stuff of this purity is enough to get you hooked for life. And hooked I was, on books in general and Les Miserables in particular.

A greater mind than mine, one Gregory Hood, has already gone into the cultural and political implications of the work, while reviewing the 2012 musical film. Now, in this here article, I’m going to focus on the personal, the sexual, the familial, and the various mucky, slimy, sweat-stained aspects of human life as pertain to this work of fiction.

As far as leftoid confabulations of the 19th century go, let’s first say that Hugo is a far superior craftsman to that bore supreme Charles Dickens. Bigger brains than mine have noted the stark contrast between dour and dew-eyed Oliver Twist and jovially triumphalist Gavroche. Furthermore, Dickens is clinical in his descriptions. Les Miserables is a wet and slimy work, claustrophobically cold and inhumanely hot. The teeming masses of Paris and the foreboding forest near Montfermeil, the parochial idyll of M.-sur-M. and the revolutionary fervor of the ABC revolt, the frailty of Fantine and strength of Valjean, they all feel very real, very immediate and above all, relevant. The reason why Hugo can sell a book containing a description of Paris’ sewer system or life in a Catholic convent of the age is because he has the skill to make these and other locations come to life in an immediate fashion. His characters are very faithful facsimiles of people. I’ve known many women who were more or less Fantine, one more than most. I’ve met, been friends with and sparred with many Mariuses. I’ve known Javerts, and one who ended in an appropriately dramatic nervous breakdown, which thankfully didn’t kill him. I see these characters in people around me in ways in which Dickens’ shallow caricatures can never appear. The world is full of Thenardiers, but there’s scarcely a single Uriah Heep to be found.

And it’s precisely this humanity which sets Hugo apart from Dickens and why Les Miserables is far more effective as propaganda than Dickensian tree genocides. Human, all too human, the poison drips in our ears and works by glorifying what ought be condemned, by using misery as a weapon and our own compassion as a cudgel. The tender muttonheads of Europe cannot withstand such an assault, not in the age of mass demotism, if not outright democracy. They’ll shed rivers of earnest tears for the poor reprobate convicts, the pitiful single mothers, the disinherited aristocratic student radicals, and all the various walking sob stories of days past, present, and future. Even we evil Nazis in the evil dissident Right can barely stem the gushes of evil blood from our evil hearts for the plight of the white working class, forgetting all the while that these people might genuinely hate us for noticing racial differences, raining on their civ-nat parade, and eagerly awaiting the collapse of their materialist Schelling-topia.

Let us begin with the primus inter pauperem, Jean Valjean: a.k.a. Monsieur Madeleine, a.k.a. Ultime Fauchlevent, a.k.a. Monsieur Leblanc, a.k.a. Urbain Fabre, a.k.a. 24601, a.k.a. 9430. The story, in many ways, maps well to his character arc (the stodgy formalist in me wants to write ‘fabula’). The tales of Fantine, Cosette, Marius, and Gavroche are fractal branches of the tree of Valjean, the villains Javert and Thenardier his antipodes and their stories dependent on his. We know the book nears its end when Marius inherits the position of Valjean along with Cosette, shooing the grubbing Thenardier away with prodigious sums of money in a Valjeanic fashion we’ve become accustomed to in the novel, becoming, in fact, the very first person in history or fiction to get rid of a Dane by paying the Danegeld. The reader is the constant companion of the large convict throughout the novel and not once is dear Jean away from the serious action. It all begins when he steals a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving seven children. Why who could fault him for such a noble transgression! The children, the starving children, will starve, donchaknow?!

But I hear we rightist fellows like peaceful, high-trust societies. Well, you know how you get those, right? What Giuliani did in NYC, but over a thousand years and with executions. If you want to eliminate crime, you need to eliminate criminals, which is to say, those persons who in their internal status calculations are likelier than random to decide that breaking the laws of society brings possible benefits that outweigh the costs, no matter how likely. The high time preference, the low-IQ, impulsive, violent types disrespectful of propriety and property.

And you gotta get ‘em young before they spread their rotten genes out, especially given that their dark triad characteristics are a good mimicry of the characteristics of leaders. A suave, fast-talking crook can swindle a young ingénue into having his sociopathic babies, unleashing yet another generation of thieves and whores onto the world. So, you hang ‘em high at age six for the crime of stealing items with the cumulative price of a tuppence or higher, before they graduate to murder, rape, grand larceny, and trespassing on the baron’s land.

He who steals a loaf of bread is one step removed from he who steals a horse. And he who steals a horse is one step removed from a highwayman, who is himself well equipped to murder (and eventually will). And every form of organized banditry is committed by a gang of armed and violent men, who in the long term pose a credible threat to the gang of armed and violent men formally known as the state.

It doesn’t take too many flights of fancy to go from stealing bread to high treason. And if you don’t believe me, ask any Sicilian who truly ran the island in the 1980s. Was it the local government? Was it the Church? Was it the stuffed shirts in Rome? Or was it the pig-ignorant, cruel and animalistic Toto “the Beast” Riina? Look him up sometime. You want that mug lording over you, holding your city hostage, setting your curfew at 8 p.m.? No? That’s why we hang bread thieves.

But our intrepid criminal isn’t hanged, but rather, sentenced to five years of hard labor. Numerous escape attempts lead to a sentence of 19 years. God in heaven, what cruelty, that we punish those who, having once broken the law, now attempt to buck their punishment for their original crime. I question the wisdom of not hanging a repeat offender. Maybe that’s one reason why France went tits up in the late 18th century.

But no, he’s paroled after these long years and turned into “a beast.” That’s Hugo’s way of subtly injecting guilt into you. This poor boy from a poor family would have been a good boy, if not for your wretched laws and morals. Valjean dindu nuffin.

But he is rescued by the good Christian virtue and charity of Myriel, bishop of Digne, who gives him silver. In another first of history, the problem of poverty is solved by giving the poor money, and the problem of crime is solved by forgiving the criminal, which is accomplished by lying to the gendarmes. We begin to understand, just for a moment, why the French dissident Right has an apoplectic revulsion towards the Church. What but contempt could be felt for false prophets who turn the message of Christ into a gospel of antinomianism?

Redeemed by such time-honored traditions of the Christian faith as silver and deception, our reprobate penitent walks into M.-sur-M., an idyllic town where he purchases the local factory and becomes fabulously wealthy, eventually getting himself elected Mayor, despite his own wishes. And here we would see the morality play of Leftism and weakness in its zenith—the thief, given money, becomes a successful industrialist and Mayor, because there’s a brown Carnegie squatting in every thuggish Trayvon Martin, donchaknowit, you harrumphing reactionary old fools—if only the old fox Hugo were merely a talentless propagandist hack. But no, no, a thousand times no. Masterful strokes of the word-brush give birth to a whore Madonna, to complement our thief-Christ. Enter Fantine.

She’s a young grisette from Paris, who is left barefoot and pregnant after having fallen in love with a rich law student who considers her nothing more than a sexual conquest. Her fertile field is plowed over with his seed, and out pops Euphrasie, or as everyone calls her, Cosette. Foreshadowing the sexual anarchy of our wicked time, our innocent ingénue is accompanied by Favourite, Zéphine, and Dahlia, three strang, independant wahmen who don’t need no man, but are nevertheless sexual playthings of three law students, friends of Tholomyés. We might as well name them Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte, three strang, independant wahmen fed to a Babylon over the water, one even more fallen than old Gay Paree.

And there, in Hugo’s masterpiece we see a bug in amber, the ember that started the firestorm we call modern sexuality. The beginnings of F. Roger Devlin’s dystopia. Strang, independant wahmen roaming a hellish industrial, or post-industrial cityscape, hopping from cock to indifferent cock until the inevitable consequences of such behavior smack them across the gobs. In the olden days, they’d end up with bawling brats hanging from their bosoms. Today, the pill saddles them with barren wombs, crow’s feet, and a tolerance for alcohol that’d shame a stevedore of the Hibernian race. In many ways, the bastards in tow were less cruel a fate.

And lo, here we sense the finger wagged at us by the author and the whole stinking edifice of the gauche libertine—why is this woman so wicked that we must punish her for a single transgression, which isn’t even a transgression. She was, as it bears repeating, the autocorrect be damned, strang independant wahmaning in the big city. This is, as we know, good because muh economy, equal rights, and other noises our friends on the other side like to make when our guys call for restraint on the part of women.

Now, first and foremost, a child isn’t a punishment. In calling children, even bastard children, punishments, the Left reveals their insidious hedonism, their desire to—to quote a video game character—live life as one uninterrupted orgasm. With their diction, they demonstrate that they have the morality of a rave party. It’s all drugs, booze, bathroom sex, and mind-numbingly repetitive electronic dance music—and tomorrow is a conspiracy theory perpetrated by evil old reactionaries.

Secondly, even though they’re not a punishment, bastard children are a mark of something bad in a woman. Impulsiveness, high time preference, low IQ. Remember these characteristics? Three out of four describe a criminal, absent is merely violence, which is loath to overtly manifest in a woman. And we know now, scientifically, what our forefathers knew through experience and tradition, that characteristics are inherited, that the apple doesn’t far fall from the tree, and that whatever makes a man a criminal, turns a woman into a slattern. The two are related in ways they didn’t understand and we call genes.

Every time society allows a woman of loose morals to reproduce, it suffers a 50% risk of being exposed to a criminal, with an equal chance of burdening itself with another serial fornicatrix. For this reason, we alot to single mothers and their spawn the worst of what we have: the worst houses, the worst food, the worst sexual partners, and those that step out of line get the rope. We rightfully discourage the reproduction of bastards, short of actively hunting them down and killing them. Apply this over a 1000+ years and we’ve selected for men and women who practice sexual restraint and pair-bond, in other words: white people.

After getting herself merrily dumped by Tholomyés, Fantine finds herself prematurely aged, dressed not as a strang, independant wahman of the age, but almost as a nun, carrying her baby girl, her little Cosette, the prima facie evidence of her impetuousness, as she travels through Montfermeil. She leaves Cosette with the Thenardiers, a couple of innkeepers who are so portrayed that we have to dislike them. And honestly, who wouldn’t.

The author seethes with hatred towards these odious hostellers, with the lividness of a man raging against a mirror. The uppity bourgeois who believes himself elevated for his transfusions of illicitly spilled blue blood has nothing but murderous hatred for the petit bourgeois, something which we today see in the mercantile Macron’s conduct towards the gilets jaunes. For this reason, Hugo gives the innkeeper Thenardier the temperament of the lumpenproletariat and his wife the grace of a lifelong seamstress, though impugning her with the faux-sophistication of a housewife reading silly romances.

The next few chapters are spent describing just what horrible people the Thenardiers are and how—gasp—they treat a child left to them by a stranger more harshly than their own daughters. Cosette is relegated to drudgery, clothed in rags, and fed “a little worse than the dog, a little better than the cat.” What tragedy, dear friends, when she could have just as easily starved and frozen to death with her mama in M.-sur-M. It beggars belief in the mind of a Leftist that in many ways, poor is better than dead, that drudgery is better than prostitution, to which Fantine eventually resorts.

The Thenardiers also extract greater and greater monthly sums of money from Fantine to pay for Cosette’s upkeep, which in reality is spent to cover their basic needs. Harsh, cruel, and ultimately necessary. Recall what we said earlier about discouraging the reproduction of the impulsive and unintelligent. We needn’t kill them, but rather, divert society’s resources away from them, by means which are best privatized in order to maximize their efficiency.

Hence, we have gambling dens and low-rent alehouses, we have get-rich-quick schemes and payday loans. Society allows certain disreputable types, in the olden days usually Jews, to run these businesses in order to achieve the salubrious and eugenic end of separating the stupid from their money. Every penny which disappears in the croupier’s pocket or in the barmaid’s décolletage is a tiny step towards a brighter future, with more geniuses and fewer morons, more men of character and fewer rakes, more honest women and fewer painted whores. Or, as I used to say in my days as a libertarian, a welfare payment is a subsidy to the distillery.

The bad aspect of this comes much later, when the banksters, ale-barons, and casino tycoons become rich enough to usurp the aristocracy and become the Rothschilds, Soroses, and Adelsons of the world. Could that be the answer? Is George Soros Thenardier reborn, the corpse-looting sergeant of Waterloo, exploiter of child labor, extortionist of single mothers? Perhaps Thenardier, the white Frenchman, would have been less cruel, less subversive. Perhaps he wouldn’t have had the cosmic resentment the Jew feels for his white neighbor. Maybes abound.

While this all transpires, in the idyllic M.-sur-M., we are introduced to Javert, the police inspector who by some incredible trick of fortune is the only one in the region who suspects Monsieur Madeleine, secretly the escaped convict Jean Valjean. We are treated to a lengthy treatise of why Javert is the bad guy of the story and our world by Hugo. Fantine loses her job as a factory worker and is reduced to selling her hair and teeth, as well as becoming a prostitute, an ill one at that, given that her lodgings are inadequate. One snowy night, she is harassed by a dandy who shoves snow down her dress, for which she slaps him. For this, she is arrested by Javert.

Fortuitously, she is rescued by a big strong man in the person of the Mayor, Monsieur Madeleine. He promises to deliver Cosette to her. Mirroring the miracle performed by the bishop of Digne at the start of the novel, M. Madeleine seeks to end poverty by giving money to the poor and to put an end to whoredom by keeping the whore in his house, with a strong subtext of the possibility of marriage to Fantine hanging in the air, although I’m not certain whether wifing her up is worse than merely keeping her and her brat with his own money. To marry a single mother is to become a genetic cuckold—your resources going towards the upkeep of a stranger’s child and not the perpetuation of your own genetics. Access to the single mother’s well-worn fronthole is usually part of the package deal, but dear old Valjean won’t even get that. He’s soon exposed as a convict, and the shock kills Fantine. He is imprisoned, but breaks free after some heroics and appears in the town of Montfermeil to rescue Cosette from the Thenardiers.

We are treated to some of the most visceral scenes in the book, as we witness the abuse Cosette suffers at the hands of the Thenardiers, and then the eeriness of the dark woods as the little one is sent out to fetch water at the well, when Jean Valjean materializes to first help her carry the water pail and then buy her from the clutches of the innkeepers.

We are given an insight into the shortsightedness and greed of Thenardier which I’ve never witnessed in a small businessman. I’ve known a Thenardier or two in my time. They’re either unemployed, scamming the state, or employed bilking a corporation so large that its very existence is a crime against nature, usually in finance, never one owning a small business. Parasitism is not a viable strategy if one is anchored to a single place and owner of his fate, as an innkeeper is. It requires a nomadic temperament and lack of skin in the game. Insidious and clever is our author – he’ll give us a very realistic man in an unrealistic position.

After needlessly exposing himself to danger out of short-sighted greed, Thenardier is left with . . . well . . . a lot more money than someone like him deserves, but not all the money he wanted. And Cosette, the little lark, the daughter of a whore, is spirited away from the nightmare of living among the petit bourgeoisie and instead lives with the ascendant convict, first in Gorbeau house and then for years in a convent, where Jean Valjean passes himself off as Ultime Fauchlevent, a gardener.

Many years pass like this, with Cosette growing up, her education and upkeep paid by a man not her father—a cuckold in the purest sense, for if we are to be realistic, penises, vaginas, breasts, and bottoms and all that are ephemera. What is female is a double x chromosome, what is male is an xy chromosome, and all else is incidental, or rather, orthogonal to this meiotic dance the biologists call sexual reproduction. It’s very humbling to learn this. Valjean is not Cosette’s father, Tholomyés is, no matter how hard Hugo tries to have us believe otherwise.

The third tome introduces us to three male personages. After an exposition of what a gamin is, we are introduced to one such boy, Gavroche whom we described in the beginning of this article, if only in passing.

We then move to M. Gillenormand, a nonagenarian leonine bourgeois, the classic alpha, who’d have graced the right part of the famed Virgin vs. Chad meme if that meme had been invented in the 19th (or indeed, the 18th century)—a literary ancestor by a hundred years of Don Fabricio Corbera, il principe di Salina, the main and title character of Giusepe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard.

We are treated in detail to M. Gillenormand’s various eccentricities and habits; we are informed of his financials, his amorous personality, his habit of naming male servants after the region of their birth and female servants “Nicolette,” predating yet another harrumphing, reaction-aligned aging man’s man—Petar Kočić’s first priest of Mračaj, who refers to every woman as Đurđija (Georgia). These patterns of personality emerge, in real life and great literature alike. I know a M. Gillenormand.

The novel is more subtle than the Leftist jetsam of today, but you’re supposed to dislike M. Gillenormand, and for good reason. Although a bourgeois, he carries himself in the dignified manner of an aristocrat (which his aristocrat friends note), while still knowing his place in the world. His is the kind of man who, if born in interbellum Germany, would have been a revolutionary conservative, a compatriot of Schmitt and Spengler, attempting to bring about an organic society, a middle-class lion, stepping onto the stage of history after the disappearance of the aristocracy, whether through outright extermination or mere dereliction of duty by degenerate noblemen.

But let’s not forget that the personal is the political, and that reflexively, the political is the personal—and nothing is more personal than sexual status. Even in his nineties, the Chad M. Gillenormand enrages the virgin Hugo, who contrasts Gillenormand with Marius, the third male personage introduced in the third tome of the book—M. Gillenormand’s grandson, son of Gillenormand’s daughter, law student at the Sorbonne and republican radical. Raised in M. Gillenormand’s home, cut off from his father—a colonel in Napoleon’s Grand Armeé, whose marriage with Marius’ mother is vigorously disapproved of by M. Gillenormand. Little Marius is inculcated with Royalist, reactionary beliefs, until one day he learns that his father would secretly come to mass in the church of Saint-Sulpice, where the Gillenormand household would take communion, to watch his boy.

Demonstrating once more that the personal is the political, and the political the personal, Marius asks his grandfather for three days leave, to ostensibly go hunting with friends. The grandfather knows the little one is lying, though he assumes that his grandson is off to pursue a love affair. But no, Marius shuts himself off with newspapers, letters, and books in which he imbibes the mythos of the Republic and Empire, coming to worship Napoleon in particular. The transformation is complete and now the comparison has reached memetic levels—the virgin Marius vs. the Chad Gillenormand. Or in Hugo’s own words:

We have long ago said, that M. Gillenormand’s temper did not please him. There already existed between them all the dissonances of the grave young man and the frivolous old man. The gayety of Géronte shocks and exasperates the melancholy of Werther.

Now, where have we seen this dichotomy before? The gayety of the alpha, even at age 90, shocks and exasperates the melancholy of the beta. We know people like Marius. He is a dour politico, knowing not the joys of womanizing, good conversations, and merry Spanish ditties. He is the Good man, who is not trifled with such base activities as imposing his masculine will (to power) on the woman-as-a-thing, as would please another Sicilian aristocrat, this time the non-fictional Baron Giulio Cesare Evola.

Contrast with M. Gillenormand, a lion, in many ways a self-owner (he owns his own house), content with his place in the world yet ever expansionary, ever joyous, dare I say, Faustian. His conquest of woman-as-a-thing we see in the beginning of the novel, paralleled in the relationship of Fantine and Tholomyés. M. Gillenormand is that specter of the evil man who leaves the poor woman barefoot and pregnant, here seen victimizing his young, austere charge, who is a political Leftist.

In Marius we see the bitter nerd claiming moral superiority in his somber entombment within the bowels of the library. After breaking with his grandfather, by calling for the fall of the reinstated monarchy, he falls in with a bad crowd, namely, Les Amis de l’ABC, a clever French pun recalling Jean-Paul Marat’s Leftist menstrual rag “L’ Ami du people.” The group is more or less antifa, though less coddled and basement-dwelling, but more adventurous, given that they’re all provincial students romping around the big city.

The great adventure which awaits students in the big city, with too much time on their hands, precious few resources and no parental oversight cannot be communicated earnestly to an American audience, whose higher education centers are whole towns in their own right, with one never having to leave campus, whereas the physical edifices of Europe’s universities are often strewn around the capitals, an archipelago to be explored by the intrepid provincial. If one is, as the ABC bunch and Marius are, a student of a cognitively intensive, but labor non-demanding field such as law, one also has the time required to have great adventures. Studenterie is therefore a more refined and aged form of gaminerie, but whereas Gavroche and his tiny colleagues are childish and innocent, the specter and allure of sexual libertinage, of the wild passions of youth abound in the life of the student.

They stage a revolution, obviously. It fails, miserably, and Marius has to be saved by Jean Valjean, whereas Gavroche is killed while singing a merry, irreverent song. Because you either die a jovial child or live to see yourself become a joyless Leftoid. The worst type is the kind that isn’t aware of his Leftism, such as the New Randian Man described by Murray Rothbard in “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult.” But aren’t we getting a little ahead of ourselves?

Yes, we are. Marius, of course, falls in love with Cosette, who is jealously guarded by Jean Valjean. He meets them in Paris and instantly falls in love. Thenardier reemerges, and his daughter Éponine falls head over heels in love with Marius, who ignores her. He has become a criminal and beggar, but Marius still remembers the debt he owes him, because Thenardier has ostensibly saved Marius’ father during the battle of Waterloo. However, we the readers know that Thenardier was looting corpses and accidentally awakened colonel Pontmercy. Nevertheless, this is Marius’ one legacy from his father, and he sticks to it.

Jean Valjean, while initially reluctant to allow his daughter to Marius, relents. By then Marius is convinced that Valjean will never consent to the union, so he elects to die at the barricades with the Friends of the ABC. With them is Gavroche, who gathers cartridge boxes, but is killed by a marksman in the middle of singing an irreverent song.

In sneaks Javert, as a spy, who is captured, and Jean Valjean, who is there to keep an eye on Marius. Jean Valjean is given the task of executing Javert, but spares him. He also saves Marius, by sneaking him out of the barricade through the sewers, just as the barricade falls. He is arrested by Javert, who allows him to deposit the wounded Marius at the home of M. Gillenormand, and then to get his affairs in order at his own house. Javert is then gone. He’s off to drown himself in the Seine, because his world no longer makes any sense, if a criminal such as Jean Valjean is capable of mercy.

This is one steaming pile of bullshit that has to be deconstructed. Hugo would have us believe that unstinting lawmen believe that the lawful is the good and that the unlawful is the bad and that only someone who is incurably evil would break the law.

As a matter of fact, I’ve known a few Javerts in my time, people who were unstinting in their application and enforcement of the law. Not one of them made the equivocation of evil and lawbreaking. All of them knew of mercy and clemency, both shown to a criminal and shown by a criminal—in fact, those who were judges had developed clemency to an art form, knowing when its application is beneficial to society, when not.

But even beyond that, what difference does it make whether a good or evil man has broken the law. Most laws in our society prohibit antisocial, dangerous behavior. Unstinting application of the law is necessary, not only to repress the concrete violation in the specific person, but also to repress future violations by the general population. Recall the progression from bread thief to Toto Riina from earlier in this article. Now imagine a society where bread theft is not punished, or, as is the case today, rewarded with a visit to the crime academy, a.k.a. the prison.

The one Javert I knew who suffered a nervous breakdown, didn’t suffer it because of a contradiction in his inflexible worldview—but rather, because of betrayal from above—from someone who was his superior and broke the law to undermine him personally, and then got away with it. But that’s not the result of a legalistic, inflexible worldview, but a rather normal reaction to betrayal and actual injustice, here understood as an abuse of power which goes unpunished.

Javert, and all the real-life Javerts out there are merely the legalistic manifestations of what the enemies of Western civilization have dubbed “the authoritarian personality,” which is to say, the Rightist personality, the non-agitator personality, the goyish personality. They are what the Left hates. Much like the hated M. Gillenormand, much like Thenardier’s social class (if not the man himself), Javert rounds out this trio of objects of hate. He is the first to appear and the first to be defeated. Javert is that hated enforcer of order which the anarchic Leftist personality despises and casts of as one-dimensional. And they hate him for good reason. The military and police, the enforcers of order, are often conservative (though shouldn’t be relied upon by today’s dissident Right).

Naturally, what happens is that Marius and Cosette are married. After evidence surfaces that Jean Valjean rescued Marius from the barricade, the two are reconciled, and Jean Valjean dies at peace with himself. After the culmination at the barricades, the happy ending constitutes of the union of the revolutionary terrorist and the daughter of a whore, blessed, at last, by the whorespawn’s convict caretaker, a genetic cuckold who’s left no issue of his own.

When push comes to shove, the genetic winners are the tomcattish bad guys – Tholomyés and Gillenormand. Their genes live on. Even Thenardier gets a measure of success. He moves with his second daughter, Azelma, to America, where he becomes a slave trader.

But the moral triumph, that’s important. And Jean Valjean, for all his strength and rectitude, is the loser in the game that matters. Society is an even bigger one. The new power couple, combining the Valjean and Gillenormand fortunes will likely raise a ruckus, and those genes of impulsivity will eventually reassert themselves. History bears this out—France has been undone by its radicalism, and as these words are written, she is swarmed by swarthy invaders, in thrall to masters far crueler than its kings of yore, her destiny no longer her own. The French people have risen up to make their voices heard, and France’s overseers have deigned to ignore them and to brutalize them when they protest.

And it all began with the insidiousness of these ideas, with brilliant men like Hugo who distorted Christian thought, who spouted philosophies of resentment, who empowered the weak, who promoted the emergence of slave morality, who cut the throat of society and poured its blood on the altar of equality. Above all, he enshrined the hatred of the good for being the good, the resentment of the alpha for being the alpha, the scorn of the righteous for being the righteous. He makes a mockery of our institutions, presenting them as evil and capricious. And yet he does it with such art.

This article has not been a labor of love. I am reminded of a stanza of Oscar Wilde—

Each man kills the thing he loves . . .
The kindest use a knife

I have loved this work since a young age. I’ve read through it once more to write this article. It’s the first time I’ve read the novel since awakening to the realities of our world, since stepping into the world of the dissident right. I’ll probably never read it again. It gives me a direct line to Hugo’s subconscious and what I see is an ugliness I’ve purged from my life by casting out many false friends. I hesitate to pick up Notre-Dame de Paris once again, for fear of deepening my disgust with Hugo. God knows how many equivocations between Frenchmen and Gypsies are there that my less astute past self has missed, and let’s not forget that Hugo makes it a spectacle of religious hypocrisy, as if hypocrisy invalidated a religion.

In many ways, being a dissident Rightist is an initiatory experience, every day being an empirical test of resolve and wherewithal. Sometimes gently, sometimes abruptly, the realization sets in that things once beloved are not only wrong, but evil. That’s our lot, living in a world smothered in lies. In many ways, we are the Miserables, who must carve out some sort of goodness for ourselves. Only this time, we do it right and we build it not only for ourselves, but for our progeny as well.