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In this part of Les Miserables, the book, Hugo goes on a massive digression about the sewer systems of Paris: their history, their present, and the possibility for social progress and hygiene through their cleaning. The “justice” system that puts Jean Valjean, one of the characters at the center of the story, in prison for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family looks uncomfortably like modern America.Īt the end of Les Miserables, Valjean has a confrontation with his former pursuer, the cop Javert, who has no sense of mercy, in the Paris sewers. But this setting looks a lot like many peri-urban areas today. Les Mis is set in 19th-century peri-urban Paris, which is completely removed from the reality of many upper-middle-class Americans, and so is easy to think of as only a musical set piece for romantic and revolutionary songs. But as Victor Hugo, the author, wrote: “The history of men is reflected in the history of sewers.” This doesn’t, at first, seem like it has to do with Les Mis. Every winter, because of the lack of a sewer system, the streets flood, and cholera sweeps through much of peri-urban Lusaka. Every month, they would wait for it to be built, and every month, it was not built. The sewer system was planned for a “ peri-urban” neighborhood located in the space where the city met the countryside.
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I lived in Zambia and interviewed people about a sewer system that was supposed to be built in the next couple of months. My first job out of college was in economics research. The key to not taking the songs of Les Mis for granted is looking more closely at the book the musical is based on. But what gives those songs their gravitas are the themes of Les Mis: It’s fundamentally about misplaced justice and social inequality. The songs in Les Mis are so catchy that they become the be-all and end-all of the piece, something to be sung on road trips and, for many people, completely divorced from the story.
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The musical has, in many ways, overtaken the novel in the cultural imagination. And that’s because it’s one of the few pieces of art that manages to capture basically everything about humanity.
#LES MISERABLES 25TH ANNIVERSARY CONCERT REVIEW MOVIE#
But whether you’re a superfan who wants to fight me about the novel’s 100-page Battle of Waterloo digression or whether Nick Jonas was well-cast as Marius in the 25th anniversary concert (I’m down on Waterloo and up on Nick), or just sort of remember seeing the movie 10 years ago, Les Miserables is something that sticks with you.