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suicide associated with renunciation recurs throughout Hugo’s career, from Bug-Jargal (1818 and 1826) to Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866), and Quatrevingt-treize (1874), not to mention the hero’s suicide in order to join his beloved in the afterlife, in L‘Homme qui rit (1869). One could interpret this obsessive plot element variously: as a symptom of the weakness of the idealistic romantic hero who cannot bear to live in an imperfect world; as inspiring examples of the temporal sublime, of the choice to sacrifice one’s life to a transcendent value; or as a means by which the historical Hugo purged himself of any lingering traces of a desire to sacrifice himself for others—as opposed to treating them with benevolence. But his texts provide no clear answers.
    When wisely used in critical discourse, all categories represent not ways of establishing Truth, but of raising questions. On the borderline between the conventional critical categories of literary Character and Theme we find what could be called “moral themes”: generalizations about human nature that are illustrated by the characters’ discourse (by representations of their thoughts, writings, and words) and dramatized by their actions. Hugo’s central “moral theme” is that even the best of us is tempted—if not by rebellion against human laws, then by pride and complacency—and that such temptations are spiritual ordeals that test and strengthen us in the way of virtue. Unlike Milton, Goethe, Flaubert, or Thomas Mann, Hugo does not create personified seductive devils, but depicts characters at risk of being seduced by their own selfish desires and hypocrisy. Mistaken for Jean Valjean, alias the venerated mayor M. Madeleine, the obscure old tree pruner Champmathieu seems to Valjean expendable, whereas M. Madeleine’s arrest and imprisonment would end the prosperity of the village that depends on him, and doom Cosette to the streets. The accidental delays Valjean encounters while rushing to Champmathieu’s trial at Arras further tempt the ex-convict to abandon the attempt to exonerate his unfortunate substitute. (To heighten the urgency of this melodramatic situation, Hugo never raises the possibility that Valjean could still denounce himself after Champmathieu had been sentenced. Even idealistic love can deteriorate into possessiveness. Eventually, it must be refined into altruistic self-sacrifice—a theme also prominent in the novels of Hugo’s contemporaries Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Themes
    So far we have discussed the prominent topics of self-sacrifice and supererogation in Les Misérables and throughout Hugo’s career, but we have not identified any themes. As the pun in Hugo’s title suggests, the theme he foregrounds in this novel is that we should not judge a book by its cover, or a person by appearances and social condition. Les Misérables can refer either to the underclass, people who are wretchedly poor, or to people who are morally depraved, or both. At one point, Jean Valjean calls himself un misérable in the second, moral sense. Hugo not only distinguishes between wealth and virtue, but also between premeditation and impulse (Jean Valjean acts impulsively when he steals the loaf of bread, or the chimneysweep’s coin), and between acts (Fantine’s prostitution) and their motives (her altruistic desire to support her daughter).
    The initial inspiration for the creation of Jean Valjean, the protagonist of Les Misérables, probably came from Hugo’s work on Le Dernier Jour d‘un condamné a mort (The Last Day of a Condemned Man, 1829). He was a lifelong opponent of the death penalty, much in the spirit of the recent American films The Green Mile and Dead Man Walking. He dramatized the plight of prisoners in the galleys at Toulon, especially one who, like Jean Valjean, had initially been sentenced to five years at hard labor for stealing a loaf of bread. “There but for the grace of God