Les Miserables by Victor Hugo w/Jesan Sorrells & Libby Unger

0:00 My name is Jesan Sorrells and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode number 194. So I'm going to read a little bit of the introduction to the edition of the book we are going to read today. And. Well, I wanna. I wanna make some points that are from this particular introduction that I think are relevant for our conversation today.

0:37 This book that we're going to cover today is the culminating work of the author's long career. It was published in 1862, when the author was 60. An instant success with the public, the book has stood since then as a masterpiece of fiction, both for the emotional intensity of its dramatic story and for a richness that defies any simple description. Undoubtedly, readers come to the book for the deeply engrossing characters and stay on, as the author himself predicted, for the wider social and historic panorama.

1:09 The political timing of the publication of this book was auspicious. Isolated by exile from the empire of Napoleon iii, whose authoritarianism was relaxing as his effectiveness and popularity were waning, the author found a ready audience for his progressive, politically progressive fervor. Despite his long list of works in poetry, fiction and drama, the author had been most widely known before this novel as a public figure, defender of the national conscience. And now homesick for his home country, but unwilling to accept the amnesty offered by the emperor he despised, he was eager for a chance to remind his home country of.

1:48 Of his presence.

1:52 A friend reported to him that all of the major. All of the people in the major city that this book is focused on were raving about the book during its publication. As for the critics, the author clearly took it as a compliment that his liberal views had enraged the reactionary, the conservative, Catholic and the Bonapartist journals. The gratifying enthusiasm of the younger critics, however, was not unanimously sustained. For the book had appeared outside of its time when he began writing it in 1845.

2:23 The romantic traditions of intense sentiment and crusading idealism were prevalent. And I'm going to down a little bit. And yet, rising above the fluctuations of literary criticism, the book has always retained a powerful hold on the public. And writers have continued to turn to this author and. And this book for inspiration. Diverse authors such as Arthur Rambaud, Stephane Mallarme and Paul Claudel were influenced by this giant of romanticism. Andre Gaday called him the greatest master of images and sonorities, of symbols and language forms in all of French literature.

3:06 Close quote.

3:10 As for me today on the show, my interaction with this book is very interesting. My engagement with this book is very interesting. And you know, the reality is that my engagement with the books and the topics that we cover on this show covers, ranges, covers and ranges all over the place, right. Sometimes I've seen the movie, right, that the books that we are covering come from. Sometimes I've been to the theater show and sometimes I've even watched a trailer for the movie based on the book before even reading the book.

3:45 And sometimes I come to some books virginally. I have no previous knowledge of the author, the book, or even any derivative works generated from the book. And this is how most people are these days and how most people have approached books through the long 20th century,

4:01 from movies to musicals. The book we are covering today has never been out of print since it was Originally published in 1862, which it stands alongside another book that we covered, last Episode, Ben Hur, as never being out of print. It has inspired people to act in ways that they never would have before. And it meets criteria in that it activates readers, it inspires conversations, and it generates a need for action from folks. And the author, who we'll talk about in a little bit and who was just mentioned there in the introduction, I think I suspect probably did all of this intentionally.

4:42 Today we are going to begin our conversation about a massive book and we are going to try to glean what we can from it and apply it to our real lives. This book lies at the headwaters of the most popular and highest grossing stage musicals of all time. It has been turned into movies, it has been turned into a television show. It's been everywhere. And again, this book has never been out of print. It's original publication in 1862. Today we're going to be covering. Whoop, there we go. Victor Hugo's Les Miserable.

5:25 Leaders, let us take to the barricades. The only thing we have to lose is our cowardice.

5:36 And joining me on this journey today and back for the first time this season is our co host who's a little jet lagged and she's joining us from her vacation at an undisclosed location, which will remain undisclosed, but she is. Jet lag folks. Libby Unger. How are you doing today, Libby? Good. Bonjour.

6:00 Well, let's lay out. Okay, yeah, let's go ahead. Let's get into it. So talk to us, I about this book. Talk to us about the impact of this book. Talk to us about what this book means for you. It means to you. You have a lot of familiarity with this book. You go to France, you, you are native, you're not native, but you're a French speaker. Talk to me about, talk to us about this book. What does this book mean to Libby Unger?

6:31 Your introduction and discussing, you know, how you come about, you know, books in particular, you know, intel like re. Re rereading this and preparing for

6:48 was more the. The stage version of Les Miserable Miserables and the soundtrack to it and going back to the revolutionary times, you know, of France and. And such.

7:05 That appeal, the artistic appeal was. Was embedded young around this book and the value in it and then

7:16 semi awareness of the French history. But it wasn't until I started preparing for this in. In detail and the questions you teed up around made me really think more about like the history of France, you know, from you know, their, their revolution to their final, you know, to the current republic. I mean I really was unaware of the detail and how fraught with wars, you know, France was. You have the two different monarchs that this, that Hugo dealt with plus the two different Napoleonic regimes. I, you know, honestly I just had broad strokes of a French Revolution and Napoleon and a king and you know, know a few of those but not the details and the, and that each generation, you know that was born, you know, 1790 on.

8:22 Was fought with. Was fraught with a war. Yeah. For the monarch to ret you to get back in power. Napoleon back monarch Napoleon. And then you finally get the republic that was somewhat modeled after the US but yeah, I'm actually looking forward to the topics that you've teed up to start to start talking about the heroism and the moral. The characters that bring up different moral.

8:59 Issues for us to be concerned about as well as models for us to think about. So yeah, I'm excited for it. I do have the same. Did you have the same. Aha. With respect to history? I know you're more of a history buff. Yeah, no, that's. Yeah, that's a great question. Yes, I did. So one of the big things that kind of jumps out to you at the beginning of Les Mis is. And I'm going to kind of shorten it here when I refer to the book. But the big thing, one of the big things that jumps out to you about this book right from the get go is how much of a handle Victor Hugo has on to your point, French history.

9:40 Like he has a handle on exactly the path of development. Right. Because he, he's surrounded by it. Right. He's surrounded by people who remembered, you know, Napoleon who remembered that history. And so the. Those stories in that lived history from probably would have been parents and grandparents for Hugo and people in his, in his neighborhoods and in his communities. That's one of the very first things that jumps off to you, jumps off the page to you as you read Les Mis. The other thing is you begin to realize and, and this is really what came home for me just how,

10:26 just how scared everybody else of the European continent was of France at that time.

10:35 And it's easy to kind of not easy as an American. And, and this is, you know, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. This year we will be talking about the Declaration and the independent Declaration of Independence in the Constitution with our De Rolo Nixon. That's going to be coming out on, on July 1st, ahead of July 4th. And I will very specific things to say about, about our Constitution, our Declaration of independence at 250. But it's easy to be sort of as an American to kind of look at the French Revolution kind of like Thomas Jefferson did and either fall in love with it and then wonder at its excesses at the end, the Reign of terror and all of that, or to take the view that the British did, which is, which was at the time.

11:24 You keep that crap over there. We don't want to hear you keep it across the Channel. And don't you dare go come over here. We'll come, we'll come over there and do with you. Right. That's how. Right. Which we. Which they did. Exactly. But don't you dare bring that garbage over here. Don't you run that up here. And so it's easy to take either the American perspective or the British perspective, but to absolutely understand from a European continental perspective how powerful that revolution was and how much it rattled the cages of everybody on that continent.

11:57 That jumps off to you. That jumps off the pages to you of Les Mis, Rob, because Hugo knew, he understood all of this. And it's fascinating to sort of realize that

12:10 the, the, the potential, I think the potential in the next 25 years for the French to run that continent again is, is right there. It's right there. The English aren't going to do it. The Germans have been denied and who else is there? The Spanish are in, are never. They've never been interested in running the continent. They've just never been interested in being in charge. And the Italians, God bless them, they don't have it in them. So who's left? Well, it's the French. And so it's going to be interesting to watch I think over the next 25 years some of that, that not fear, but Some of that, yeah.

12:58 Well, I guess maybe fear is a good word. Some of that fear will I think begin to drip back into, into folks on the continent. I don't know if I have a good hold on this, but it was something that definitely jogged in my brain reading Les Mis, reading this book. It

13:18 as you see some of the European trends, you know, they've been trying to infiltrate the US over the last, you know, couple of decades or more. But I never had a full appreciation

13:34 for the empiric nature of the French until you see, until just going into greater detail about, you know, those 100 years, you know, 1780s to 1880s

13:54 and then seeing your, the history over the last couple decades, you know, the more liberal progressive thinking that's coming from, you know, you, Europe entering, you know, entering our ways and.

14:14 Does make me think that they, you know, they're almost like the Chinese to some degree, that they have a long term perspective of where they sit in history,

14:28 you know, so it, it, it'll be if it, it is interesting. Economic security is one of the key, key themes that I see as to how you gain power or you fight off, you fight off invading resources through economic security and that when there's economic instability, that's when these, the monarchs and dictatorships, you'll come in. And someone who has a long view of history knows that if they create insecurity, that creates room for that new leadership to come in. And now that it sounds, you know, if you were living back in the times of the mid Middle Ages and the revolution and the enlightenment, etc. That's not far fetched to think about because poverty and economic insecurity was the way of the world.

15:36 Correct? Right. It wasn't until industrialization and the US kind of dominated around, you know, and creating economically independent and viable industries and countries that we stopped seeing more being so prominent. So it's very interesting that over the last 15 or 20 years divisiveness and ins and trying to create economic instability is being introduced into what was a stable system. And you have to wonder if it's being done intentionally because that's the only way the empires can take back their power.

16:25 Well, and you, you. Well, let's. Let me. There's several things you brought up there and I want to hit on all of them and I think Les Mis hits on all of them. Let me do, let me go back and start. Oh my gosh, this book hits on all of it. And the poverty piece is one of the other things that really jumped out to me. But I want to, I want to keep my powder dry on that for just a second because that's, I think, critical to understanding this book. So. Yeah, so Victor Hugo, right? Let's talk a little about him.

16:53 So he was a. Just like the author of Ben Hur, Lou Wallace. He was a romantic writer, capital R romanticist. And there was something that occurred to me actually on Saturday, which I'll tell talk about a little bit, but he was. We, we in our Post World War II consensus, we don't understand what the power of romanticism and we don't understand anymore sort of how that, that deeply impacted authors such as Hugo and Lew Wallace. He was born in 1802, so talk about, you know, the revolution literally occurred like the French Revolution literally occurred like what, 10, 15 years before he was born.

17:44 So he was born in 1802. He died in 1885. He was a giant of French letters. Not only did he write Les Mis, he also wrote the Hunchback of Notre Dame, which, you know, the, the publication of that book actually encouraged the French to, to restore that cathedral because it became such a, such, such a tourist magnet. He wrote poetry, he wrote essays, he was a playwright, he was a journalist, he was a politician, and he was a human rights activist. Now when we talk about human rights activism, I don't want, I don't want the listeners to think of this in terms of the kind of human rights activism that we see in our time.

18:33 This wasn't cynical activism on, on, on Hugo's part. He wasn't trying to grift or hustle. He actually believed that just like folks coming out of the French Revolution believed that you could remake the world, you could actually have utopia on earth, and that it was within human beings hands in the 18th, sorry, in the 19th century to be able to do that. He genuinely believed that. And that came about because of his romanticism. He wrote plays like Cromwell and dramas Hernani. He produced more than.

19:12 I didn't know this until I went and looked at his Wikipedia profile, but he produced more than 4,000 drawings in his lifetime and was an abolitionist around slavery and around capital punishment. There have been accusations of racism thrown at Hugo, but they don't stick because he actually like moved his position around on a lot of things, in particular in relation to the French shenanigans in Algeria. Algeria and in, in Northern Africa during his time. And I'm just going to quote directly from here.

19:49 His opposition to absolutism and his literary stature established him as a national hero. Hugo died on 22 May, in 1885, aged 83, he was given a state funeral in the Pantheon of Paris, which was attended by over 2 million people. That's ridiculous. 2 million people showed up for a writer.

20:11 Hemingway, eat your heart out. At that time, which 2 million people? Yeah, the population was what? Yeah, like Paris, right? Yeah, you know, significant. Significant. The dude was just. He breathed hard and, like, the French moved. You'll never see a guy like that ever again in letters. That won't ever happen again. Like, the twilight of the writer started occurring at the end of the 20th century and. And the sun. I won't say the sun is set on the writer, but. But the kind of discussions we're having right now around writing and around the art of writing.

20:51 One of the things I've postulated on the show about the death of the novel, I do actually think the novel's dead. I actually do. I don't think writing's dead. I don't think the book is dead. But I think the novel as a thing that a book delivers is dead. I think that's DOA now, because you can do so many other different things. You can go watch the book or see the streaming show or nowadays, dump the thing into the AI and generate something that looks just as good. And so the novel, the fictionalized account of.

21:24 The fictionalized account that draws emotions from people and drives them to action, the kind of thing that Hugo loved and was romantic about.

21:38 I kept thinking about Hegel reading about Hugo. And it's similar from both. From a writing perspective. I know Hegel was not a fiction writer, but, you know, poet, you know, political. They both recognized what motivates humanity and what demoralizes humanity. And that was what was coming through from a Hugo perspective is his own ability to evolve and then sacrifice for what he knew was right. You know, that's what Les Mis is all about with the different characters, is about the power of redemption and doing what's right.

22:34 Just at a human level, even if it may cost you power. I'm. Power and prestige. Yeah, yeah. But it just about. But what I really loved is the whole story is about redemption. And if you believe in someone and you tell them that they can redeem, like the bishop did, right, that the right soul, the right person will receive that and say, I need to do the. I need to pay it forward and do the right thing. And that is a reflection, I think, of the. Of Hugo's belief in the redempt, you know, in the evolution and redemption.

23:15 Redemption, redemptive ability of a Human. Hegel's kind of that way too from a self evolution perspective. And we like to see people or I know I'm inspired by those who choose the do the hard thing because it's the right thing. And that is what movements will. Populist movements will come behind.

23:46 Yeah. And that his characters, the characters in Les Mis are fully formed people. They're not even, even Javert, even the villain. Right. Is a fully formed human being. Yes. Not a, he's not a one dimensional avatar standing in for something else. And this is another reason I say the novel is probably not. Probably is. Is. Is. Is is. If not dead on life support. Because we don't have writers who see people as fully formed multi dimensional individuals running around in the world. Instead writers.

24:27 Now that's why we have to go back to historical. The Mark Andreessen philosophy is. I don't read anything recent. I, I read what's endured. But the, the piece I, I hit, I, I finally realized like what it was about both Hagel and Hugo that resonated with me in particular is they kept trying to find, they kept trying to meant what they said. Right. Like first believed in the monarch and you know, and was willing to take compensation for his riding with the monarch. And then the monarch disappoints and so then he's pro Napoleon and believes Napoleon is going to do the right thing for their French.

25:13 And then he's disappointed, you know, and he tries to put his, you know, belief again into those big institutions. They all fail him, you know, which we all, you know, if you're awake at all, you realize the institutions are for the betterment of the institutions and not the individual. And so you ultimately need to go within and say what is the right thing to do from a moral perspective and live that way. That's what Hagel did. That's what Hugo's message was. And you know, and you know me, that's my message from a leadership perspective as well.

25:52 Well, and I think so to your point, like I said, I was, I was having a conversation today with somebody else, business conversation. And one of the points that I made to him is that we used to have people. That applies here. We used to have people who, who spoke with and led with moral authority. Right. We talked a little bit about this on our Malcolm X episode probably a year and a half ago, maybe two years ago. Now one of the fascinating things about Malcolm X is you could disagree with where his morals came from, but he had moral authority.

26:26 He spoke with moral authority. Matty Ross, the Character in the Charles Porter's book True Grit.

26:36 If you watch the Joel and Ethan Cohen remake of True Grit, the way that character is portrayed in there is a lot closer to the Matty Ross of the book than in the John Wayne movie. Right, The John Wayne Matty Ross, but the girl in the John Wayne version and the, and the girl in the Joel and Ethan Cohen version, Maddie, both of them have rock ribbed morality. They speak from. They speak with moral authority. Right, they act with moral authority. Malcolm X acted. Exactly, exactly. Malcolm X, you know, spoke with moral authority.

27:13 Matty Ross speaks with and was written as a character with moral authority. And Victor Hugo, to your point here, Victor Hugo wrote as a romanticist who was in love with, to your point, institutions. And I love how you frame this. The institutions meant what they said, but someone had to be the moral authority behind that. And so he turned his pen to basically, basically forcing the institutions to be the thing they said they were going to be. And you see this also in Ben Hur. So Lou Wallace, when Lou Wallace writes about Masala and he writes about Judah Ben Hur, the reason why Judah Ben Hur is on a mission of revenge that winds up in a chariot race to kill Messala, to kill the Roman.

28:01 The reason why he's on that mission is because he believes that the Roman Empire did him wrong and someone should tell them no and, and someone should draw a line. Now, what's interesting about Ben Hur, which you don't see in this book, because Victor Hugo, and we're going to talk about the bishop here in a minute. I'm glad you brought that up. We're going to talk about the bishop here in a minute. But in Ben Hur,

28:29 there ex. The. The characters experience what in biblical terms is called a theophany. That's when God basically, or the divine reaches into history and says, hey, I'm here, and then steps back out. Right? And so Lou Wallace structured the interactions with Jesus as this theophany that was happening, happening about four or five times in, in the book. Hugo does exactly the same thing, but he does it with, and this is the key difference. He does it with social reform. And he believes that social reform is the way in which romantically held social reform, by the way, is the way in which you will establish moral authority and to your point, get the institutions to what they.

29:13 To live up to what they say.

29:17 And I think this is hugely important for leaders to understand. And it runs across numerous books that we've covered on this show. And there's also A sense of heroism here, which I want to revisit sort of at the end that goes along with this and I think is missing from a lot of human rights activism in our time. There's no heroism involved in it. It's more like trolling or gaslighting or just, you know, throwing grease in. Or not. Sorry, grease. Throwing sand in gears to. To make a problem. Not because you actually want to see things change.

29:48 Although people mouth the words of wanting to see things change, but they don't actually romantically believe it. And this is the disjuncture that I think, you know, Les Mis lays out so. Lays out so so nakedly. Right. As a book. Yeah. It's not just the vision statement, it's the actual embodiment of the vision. Correct. And you know, it's not just virtue signaling and then patting me on the back because I say the right thing. It's actually demonstrating that what you state is actually going to be the good thing.

30:24 Right, right, right. And do good for society. Right. Well, and the French also, because they had the revolution, they had this idea and this is the part of the other part of it that rocked the continent. They had this idea that. And this is hugely important in the America. America. Sort of. Not sort of. America's Constitution and Declaration of Independence allowed us to avoid the excesses of the French Revolution. Because that could have very easily happened here. Yes. Oh my God. It could have very easily happened here.

30:57 Because our passions are the same as. The same as. French Republic. Yeah, exactly.

31:05 Know what? Do you have a republic if you can keep it. Right. Okay.

31:12 What the French Revolution proved in very naked stark terms was that. And this is where liberty and egalitae and fraternity come from that if the king, who is set up as the avatar of God on earth can be gotten, then everything's open to everybody. If we. The second they beheaded that king like that was it, game on. And that's what all of the rulers of Europe got. They got that viscerally. That was the message that they sent out. And then to top it off, which Victor Hugo talks about this, we're going to talk about Napoleon today.

31:53 Then to top it off, you have Napoleon, which. That's a whole other kind of. I mean that's a. That's the second half back half a conversation. That's a whole other kind of thing. I'm fascinated by Napoleon. That dude was real interesting. But you. That was like a one, two punch to the continent of Europe. And I don't think the European. I don't think European powers have ever really fully recovered from that. They haven't. They're still struggling. Yeah. That America or the US benefited from not having their history, you know, because we did kind of Greenfield what a republic was, you know.

32:32 No kidding, right? Yeah, yeah. Let me, let me go into, let me go into Les Mis here. I want to bring up the point because Libby, we talked about the bishop and this is, this is a good time to sort of bring this up. So the impact of

32:55 religion on the French mindset, specifically Catholicism on the French mindset. And I'm talking the pre. Well, no, even down to today, but the Pre World War II French mindset, the. The 19th century conception of Catholicism, the 19th century conception of religion and the. And religion as an estate in France re. I mean, redounds through this book. And so I want to bring up some ideas here. I want to point out some things about monsignor bienvenue, chapter 12, book one of Les Miserables.

33:40 And I quote, there is almost always a squad of young abbes around a bishop, just as there is a flock of young officers around a general. By the way, one other point just want to make if you read this book, the, the turns of phrase in here are amazing. Victor Hugo, again, amazing writer. It flows really fast. You'll be. You'll be 50 pages in. You won't even realize where the time went back to the book. They are what the charming St. Francis de Saul somewheres calls white billed priests. Every profession has its aspirants who make up the cortege of those who are at the summit.

34:15 No power is without its worshipers, no fortune without its court. The secrets of the future revolve around the splendid present. Every capital, like every general, has its staff. Every influential bishop has his patrol of undergraduates, cherubs who make the rounds and keep ordering the bishop's palace and who stand guard over the monsignor's smile. To please a bishop puts a foot in the stirrup for a sub deacon. Each must make his own way. The apostolate never disdains the cannocate. And as elsewhere, there are top brass in the church.

34:49 There are rich miters, there are bishops who stand well at court, wealthy, well endowed, adroit, accepted in the world. Knowing how to pray, no doubt, but also knowing how to ask favors with few scruples about making themselves the viaduct of advancement for a whole diocese. Hyphens between the sacristy and diplomacy. More abbes than priests, prelates rather than bishops. Lucky are they who get near them. Men of influence as they Are they reign about them, upon their families and favorites. And upon all these young men who please them.

35:17 Fat parishes, sinecures, archdeaconates, chaplaincies and cathedral functions. Steps towards a bishop's dignities. In advancing themselves, they advance their satellites. It is a whole solar system in motion. The rays of their glory, their retinue purple, their prosperity scatters its crumbs to those behind the scenes. In the guise of nice little promotions. The larger the diocese of the patron, the larger the curacy of the favorite. Or for the favorite. And then there is Rome. A bishop who could become an archbishop.

35:46 An archbishop becomes cardinal, leads you to the conclave. You enter into the rota. You have the pallium there you are an auditor, you are a chamberlain, you are a monsignor. And from the grandeur to eminence there is only a step. And between eminence and holiness there is nothing but the smoke of a ballot.

36:05 Every cowl may dream of the tiara. In our day, the priest is the only man who could regularly become a king. And what a king. The supreme king. So what a nursery of aspirations is a seminary. How many blushing choir boys, how many young abbes have the ambitious dairy maids pail of milk on their heads? Who knows how easily ambition disguises itself under the name of calling, possibly in good faith, and deceiving itself in sanctimonious confusion. Monsignor. Beyond venue, a humble, poor private person was not counted among the rich miters.

36:35 This was plain from the complete absence of young priests around him. We have seen in that in Paris he did not fit in. No glorious future dreamed of alighting upon this solitary old man. No budding ambition was foolish enough to ripen in his shadow. His cannons and his grand vicars were good old men, rather common, like himself, and like him, immured in that diocese from which there was no road to promotion. And they resembled their bishop. With this difference that they were finished and he was perfected.

37:02 The impossibility of getting ahead under Monsignor Bienvenue was so plain that, fresh from the seminary, the young man ordained by him procured recommendations to the Archbishop of A or of Auch and left immediately. For after all, we repeat, men like advancement. A saint addicted to abnegation is a dangerous neighbor. He is very likely to infect you with an incurable poverty, a stiffening of the articulations necessary to advancement, and in fact, more renunciation than you would like. And men flee from this contagious virtue.

37:32 Hence the isolation of Monsignor Bienvenue. We live In a sad society, succeed. That is the advice which falls drop by drop from the overhanging corruption.

37:47 Damn.

37:53 Unbelievable. Look,

37:58 I was listening to Orson Welles on the Third man the other day. I love that old radio show. And he was running around trying to be a. Some type of. He's trying to scam some people, of course, because he's hustling. And he was portraying himself not as a religious person, but as a, like a, like an Amir or like a viceroy or some, some sort of royalty. Right. Something with a sir on it. And then like some little kid basically upends his entire scam and it turns out that this little kid is actually an earl, which is great.

38:33 It's a great. It was a great little thing. And, and so we've covered the Third man on this show earlier this, this, this season. You should go check out that episode if you haven't listened to that already. And one of the lines in it at the end when Orson Welles does a little wrap up, he says, as Harry Lime, he says, the wages of sin are not nearly high enough to justify the overhead. And, and as I read that piece, great line that. Oh my God, it's so good. Wells was so good. I think of the bishop here.

39:04 And not because the bishop was sinful, actually, the way Victor Hugo sets up the bishop. He's the only more genuinely moral man in the entire corpus of the book. Yeah.

39:21 Monsignor Bienvenue. Is the. Is he the. How would you frame this, Libby? Is he the pebble that pushes. That pushes Jean Valjean down. Down the, down the. Down the mountain? Or is he. Or is he the. The hand that pushes him? Is he the pebble or the hand? Yeah, it's the hand. It's the slight. Okay. You know, adjustment that's just needed to put you on course. You know, he had two paths to take. Right, right, right. And he just eased him to the right versus Right. Right. Yeah, right. And the soft touch.

39:59 Just a soft touch. And he did it in. But he couldn't have done it without having the moral authority. And he. And he sets up the bishop because this is what I mean. He sets up the monsignor. This is who he starts with. He opens the book with Devon Senior, like you would think the book would open with Jean Valjean and Javert and Fentin and all these characters and their tragedy and da, da, da. No, he starts with the moral authority. He starts with the moral guy. And you know, he, he ab. To his point about abnegation, he totally and completely.

40:31 He makes him not Right for this world. That's what it is. Like he made the bishop. Right. Not right for this. And that's the only way, I think Hugo could

40:45 justify, I guess, that morality.

40:52 Because all these other characters are, to his point, they're ambitious and scheming and grasping. Even Jean Valjean scheming and grasping. Right. Even cassette. Right. Like scheming and grasping. Right. Grabbing for something, whether that's love or attention or whatever their perspective of legal righteousness is. I'm looking at you, Javert. But like all these other characters are grasping and scheming and ambitious. But not the monsignor. He doesn't want anything. And you can't do anything with a man like that.

41:30 No, that's the problem. Yeah, that's. Yeah, that's why they try. Yeah. You know, they don't want someone who believes in, like, life after death, who isn't a fear, who isn't afraid of death, you know, who isn't afraid of having nothing. Right. Because, you know, because you can't control that person. Right. But I think you would have a. Yeah. Without. Without the decision to.

42:02 To get, you know, to give Valjean, you know, the candlesticks and, you know, and all that. You wouldn't have that decision point so clearly demarked. It wasn't even decision point, it was an action. You know, you saw Beljan just starting to, you know, well, you believe I'm a thief. I'm a thief. You know, I have no other choice. You've given me. You've given me no other choice. You know, and we hear about this for, you know, low income, you know, low income, you know, people, when. People when no one has a belief in you and you're told you're a thief and you're not, you know, and just, you know, 20 years for, you know, in prison for taking.

42:41 Stealing a slice of bread. And then, yeah, it was a five year sentence that turned into 20 because you kept trying to escape, you know, and then afterwards, you know, you hear this with convicts now, you know, afterwards you have a yellow card that says, I'm a thief. I'm a thief. And everyone just treats you a certain way until that one person doesn't and sees the glimmer in you and sees the hope and gives you the chance to redeem yourself and, you know, and not even with him, but just in life. Yeah, I talk a lot about small moments can change the trajectory and it's in another person's life, and this is an example of that.

43:28 Except my moments are even smaller. It's giving a person, you know, someone who maybe is in line in front of you at the grocery store who's being extremely mean to, to those around them and you just give them a smile, maybe let them go in front of you and you have no idea why that person is the way they are. It could just be they've had a really bad day or they were just fired. But by showing them a moment of grace, you might knock them out of their moment and they return to who they, you know, who they are in their soul for the remainder of the day.

44:09 And that may be that they treat their children that, you know, better at the end of the day than they would have if they come home still angry and feeling like the world is out to get them. But regardless, you know, this is one of those small moments where someone saw him as other than a thief and gave him the grace to show him, you know, that, you know, to show, show him grace. And with that he made the decisions to invest and build a business and then give, you know, help others to prosper as much as you can in those days.

44:47 But it's still that same idea, so small without this moment of grace. And it is interesting that has to be given by someone of the church. But if that, it probably has the most power because you can make the assumption that they had no alternative, you know, agenda. Yeah. To use all of our common vernacular. Right. Yeah. Yeah. In ways that things are being positioned nowadays, like he was giving grace, he did the right thing. And for the rest of his life he did the right thing because that's who, who he was, you know, like he wouldn't let someone hang wrongly for being thought of, of being him, you know.

45:29 Right. Yeah. But, well, that whole tussle that he goes through, that long dark night of the soul, right. Where he's, you know, trying to decide what is he going to do. The way Hugo describes the, that moral not dilemma, that moral wrestling, it put me in mind of,

45:53 put me in mind in the book of Genesis when Jacob wrestles with the angel. Right. Or, or in some cases, you know, depending upon what your, what your translation of the Bible is, you'll see that he wrestled with God or he wrestled with Jesus. Right. You know, it was Jesus. Anyway, so he's wrestling and it, it put me in. Or Jean Valjean's wrestling put me in mind of that moment. And I do think. No, I think I don't. So Hugo, you know, knew the Bible, he knew all the corpus of that and how that impacted and engaged with literature.

46:32 He also knew classic literature. He knew all of the things, right? And so he brought all of that to the table here in Les Mis. But then he turns it into something very specific and very, very French in a, in a, in an environment where. And this is the other thing. Now I want to talk about poverty in an environment where poverty that we can't imagine is just the standard. Exactly. Yeah. Like, so the Thenardines, right? The, the, the, the family that Fentine leaves cassette with.

47:13 Unbelievable to me. Like, I, I'm reading this and I'm going. I mean, I know these things happen today. I'm not naive. But it wasn't, it's not the norm today. It's not the norm today, right? Like if, if you're reading this. And actually it's interesting. So as I was reading this book because it's taken me a few months to sort of go through it. Started reading this back in February, in, in March, I went to a, went to a speech and debate tournament. My daughter is involved in speech, debate. I went to one of her tournaments and one of the parents there is from France and she saw me reading Les Mis and she came over and she was like, oh, yeah, I read that.

47:57 I did the audio version of that book because I couldn't, I couldn't read it. And I was in my car, whatever, and I, and she's like, I'm from France. And then she's like, that book is amazing. And so we had a whole hour long conversation about the book and I asked her this question. I said, as a French speaker and as a person, you know, French native, what does this book mean to you? And she said, this book is the history. It's part of the history of our country. It is the history of our country. And she said, she was, she's in her, she's in her 60s.

48:28 She said that the way that, the way that the poverty and the social climate is, is, is structured. She said, oh yeah, we learned about all this in history. I mean, that's just the way things were, you know. And she said it so casually.

48:47 And I was struck by, as I often am when I talk to people from other countries who are not Americans, who are now, who have now chosen to live in America. And then we wind up talking about French politics. By the way, she's not a fan of the current prime minister and is very desirous of voting against him, but she's like, I have to go back to France. I have to live there for like three months so I could vote. And she's like, it's not worth it. Like, just leave. She's like, she's just trying to get her family out.

49:10 She's just leave. Man's an idiot. Just go. Anyway, point is, I'm struck once again by

49:18 how,

49:24 How the things that, that folks from other countries just casually accept as the way of life. We've basically said we don't have to do that and so we're going to go off and do something different. You're also seeing this with like the Europeans that are coming over and folks from other countries as well that are coming over to the, the World cup venues now with the FIFA World cup going on. Oh my God, this is like the World Cup. Honestly, like this is the best thing that could have happened to America at this time in a while.

49:58 Like not like Europeans and folks from all over other places, all over the world are coming to America and interacting with Americans and, and seeing that it's not all of what you see on TikTok videos and nonsense from the media. Like 80% of the people in America are not what you see online. You know, like I watched, I mean I'm not watching any of the games. I saw a game in a restaurant and one of the venues was Philadelphia and I was sitting there with my wife and I was joking, I was working with my wife.

50:33 I was like, oh yeah, it's Philadelphia. Philly fan gotta like, Philly fan gotta like put on a show now because Philadelphia is the worst sports city. Yes, I did say it. Sorry to all my fans of Philadelphia, but it is the worst sports city on the east coast. Yeah. Bar none. Like it beats Boston by a country mile because intellectual enough to make that this Philly fan don't care. I mean the story. Yeah, yeah. You know, like it's, I think it's one of two. Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Eagle Stadium is one of two stadiums in the NFL where there's an actual like jail.

51:12 What's the other one? I think it's the Raiders. Raiders. I think it's the Raiders. Yeah, I think it's the Raiders. The Raiders is the other one. I might be wrong on this. You can, it can be fact checked on this. But yeah, Philly has a lockup like of course. And nobody, nobody goes, oh no, that's weird. That's out. No, no, that actually that tracks, that tracks with that town. No, that's fine. But, but you know, you see the World cup venues and you see these international players and these international visitors and America is just being America.

51:42 We're just hanging out Doing the thing we've always done. And they are here finding out on a visit

51:52 we're not what their politicians tell you, what the media tells you. But I actually think it's analogy also for the big US cities and people who live in those cities, if they were to actually start participating beyond their, beyond where they live, they might actually see how great America is too. Exactly, exactly, exactly. It is super fabulous. And it's always takes those wake up calls, you know, for people to go, oh my gosh, like if I actually just get out of, you know, the news and the politicians that go travel and talk to people, it's like, wow, the world isn't, you know, isn't even half as bad.

52:35 Or, you know, you could, you could, you could read Les Mis and watch how Hugo describes the grinding poverty that creates the tragedy and go, oh my God, yes, we have poor people in this country, but we would never, I won't say we would never. The level of outcry that there would be if we had a situation like what happened with Fantine, like her entire arc of her life. The level of outcry against that would be unbelievable if that were happening now. And I'm not saying that, that we're better. I'm saying to Libby's point, it's just, it's about, it's about the evolution of civilization.

53:21 Evolution of civilization, yes. Right. But, yes, but what I actually found really interesting when you were conveying what the woman who left her country and came to the US was saying is like, well, that's just the way it is. It also reminds me, you know, that's, you know, the French history is, that's the way it is. But there's a level of kind of acceptance that's okay. And you know, and I want to double click on that from a nuanced perspective because I remember when LA was starting to seek crime rates, you know, rise quite a bit.

53:57 And this was like 2021, 2022. And one of the famous actors is like, it's a city. Like, that's what happens, you know, so when you have extremely low expectations, you start to dismiss, you know, the things that need to be hap. You know, expectations for people. That's what I think about like these, you know, the homeless issue and, you know, and that I bring up a lot in California because to me it's immoral to allow like, you know, people to live like that for their own, you know, for their own being.

54:39 It's not a gift to them because they want to just be Partying and living outside. It's actually

54:48 inhuman to not wish better conditions for them, to not provide better conditions for them and to ignore, you know, that we can actually help them by, you know, by bringing them inside and cleaning them and giving them proper food and helping them with mental issues and that type of thing. So it's just kind of this. It's just kind of the laissez faire taken to a far extreme because you don't have higher expectations of humanity. Well, let me. Okay, let me ask you this question. We just watched the LA mayoral race occur.

55:30 Yes. And I'm not going to get into the race itself. I'm not going to get into any of that. That's not the thing that we do on this show. Going to worry about it. Right. Instead, what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask this question, out of the candidates who won the race for LA Mayor, not the run the race, run the primary to run for LA Mayor, out of the candidates that are in that. That democratically controlled city. Okay. Who is going to have the moral authority to say, as Hugo has done in Les Miz through his characters, that this cannot stand is.

56:16 I don't see Karen Bass doing that. No, you see, you see talking points sure. Don't reflect what would actually help individuals like affordability. Like, I hear affordability. Right. But I don't tell you, I don't hear a recognition of what's causing it to not be affordable. Right. Being addressed. It's more about we'll just tax more so that we can buy versus we have building codes that are extremely expensive. Like, you know. Yeah. There's one famous podcaster, Adam Carolla, who is why it's showing the rebuilding of a home down on the beach.

57:03 And that home was on stilts, just like Venice's

57:08 for, you know, for 70. It was on stilts for 70 years. And the only thing that took it out was a fire, but not the water and all that. And now that home has to be built. The foundation for that home costs like a couple million dollars. And it's all pillars that are, you know, pillars that are being steel pillars that have to go into the ground. And then, you know, there's things that they're concerned about from a rain from a water perspective, which I get. But it was good enough from a safety perspective with the pillars with the wood pilings.

57:45 So when you don't hear. When you just hear talking points, which is what. When I watch Hugo's evolution, it's the difference between you Know, the monarch and Napoleon keep saying, this is what we're going to do for you, but not delivering. When you have basins, when you have base needs that need to be met and they keep promising, but they're not who goes, like the government isn't going to be the answer. And when I listen to, and you know, the single government that's controlled, been controlling that state, hasn't addressed all of their solutions, don't actually seem to address the actual problem.

58:27 And then you have another candidate whose solutions actually are getting to the root causes like mental illness, you know, and building codes and, you know, the things that are actually, you know, building codes and not enough people to help with inspections. And, you know, so that's. That to me, is moral authority because, you know, because you're actually getting to the solutions that are going to solve problems. And when you see the person who has solutions that address a root cause and then.

59:10 They're challenged by the power structure, you do have to ask, you know, who has the moral authority? It's the person typically who's getting pushed out. Right. Who's losing everything but still wants to speak. Well, well, you brought it up, you brought it up earlier. And I think it's, it's worth repeating yet again that institutions should do what they say they're going to do. Right, Exactly. And, and someone, not someone. One of the things in democracy, small D democracy, is all of the people are responsible nominally for ensuring that the institutions do well.

59:51 All the institutions do what they say they're going to do. Now, in a republic, which is what we have in the United States, we vote for people,

1:00:05 and then those people are the ones that are supposed to make the institutions do what they say they're going to do. Now, the people that we vote for have to have some kind of moral weight. There also has to be consequences for failure. And the frustrating thing, for many Americans over the last 25 years, regardless of who I talk to, left, right or center, the main frustration, politically left, politically radically considered, doesn't matter. The number one frustration is that there are no seeming consequences for failure.

1:00:47 So if, if your,

1:00:51 if your city has a fire

1:00:55 that could have been prevented if the fire hydrants had water in them, right. There should be a penalty, there should be accountability for that failure. Exactly. I'm going to scale this up even further, actually. I'm going to use another example. If you are a politician and you decide that you're going to comment on something in the culture and Your commentary is 180 degrees, as my mother would say, from sideways,

1:01:34 which means it's not relevant. For those of you in Rio Linda, you, you. There should, there is going to be. There should be a consequence for that. I'm not saying that your right to speak should be abrogated. I'm not saying you should be. Shut up. Yeah, I agree there should be. Right. But there should be consequences for that. I'm going to scale it up a little further. If you go to Congress and you were a $15 an hour barista and after a term in Congress, one term, you come out a millionaire, right?

1:02:09 There should be consequences for. There should be accountability for that. I don't get to start at, at $15 an hour and a year later make a million dollars. That's not how things work. So what the frustrating thing is is that there seems to be no consequences for failure. And Hugo in Les Mis

1:02:33 lays out what the consequences for failure are. He lays out, and we're going to talk about Napoleon now. He lays out what failure actually looks like and what it actually means to experience those consequences and how wide ranging they are for society in our time. I think for leaders, we have to realize that at a certain point

1:02:57 the laws of physics just work like the laws of reality just are what they are. Well, and this is what, you know, and as you were speaking, I was really thinking about this really clearly. Like, you know, when you've scaled up and everything's centralized,

1:03:18 there's op. There's opacity, and it's harder to trace where a breakdown in moral authority is. You know, so there's the. I care about affordability, I care about affordability. Yet we're not seeing affordability right addressed, you know, and that's for the common man, the middle class, you know, lower middle class, middle class and upper class. And you know, we have to. And one of the reasons we haven't seen consequences for actions is because we haven't. You know, in theory, folks are saying our vote matters.

1:03:58 We're told it is. But there's so much opacity to the system that I can't, I can't trust that your moral authority is actually translated, that you actually have deserved moral authority. You're telling me every vote matters and you're counting them all fairly and everything is legal. You know, there's. There's too much opacity in the system and too many places for that trust to break down. And I mean by that with yoke, you know, if let make it very, very simple. Decentralized accountability. Yeah, we all vote the same day.

1:04:44 We show our id. There's two people watching the system, watching people take their votes, take the id. That to me is a demonstration that those who are saying democracy matters and your vote matters. It's visible to me that it does because of what I see, my reality, what I see, not what I hear. And so we've seen now we're, now we're told the system is fair even though you can, in California you can receive votes up to 20 days after the election as long as it has a written post date on it, not even a

1:05:39 UPS or use United States Postal Service stamp on it. If it's believed that that date may be correct, then you can accept it. So you put, started to put too many barriers to my trust in the way and that's why you start to get a populist uprising is because you no longer are deserving of the moral authority that you want were because reality is no longer lined up with your words. Correct? Yes, yes, yes, yes. And, and you know what we,

1:06:19 Populism is a dirty word these days, right. Just like nationalism is a dirty word, you know, but it's only a dirty word to people who in power who have benefited from the opacity, they've skated by on accountability, they've gotten paid and not just paid in money. They get paid in status and in attention and in power and in influence. Money is like the least worrisome thing. Honestly, in tribalism, identity is the number one thing that we can control. Yeah. When you talk about cults, identity is the driver of cult like behavior, Right?

1:07:02 Exactly, exactly, exactly. And, and so, you know, and then when you question the opacity or you question the lack of transparency or you question the accountability, you are then put in the box of, and I'm going to use this term, an election denier or, or, or you're shuffled off to the darker corners of the Internet where all the crazy people hang out. Because who couldn't possibly believe that our, all of our elections are free and fair. But watch what, but watch what is happening. A person who has courage of their convictions and is saying something that will ostracize them for society, right?

1:07:47 Like yeah, yeah, people are saying things that could have them lose their jobs, can have them lose their position in their community. You, that's why a populism resonates is because there's so much sacrifice that comes with like skating things that could get you jailed or lose your job, that type of, that type of thing. The reason why, you know,

1:08:19 the reality star resonated is because he was Actually talking to the things that we saw every day that everyone was telling us doesn't exist. And we're working on it. And this is how wasn't translating where these ephemeral intellectual ideas that weren't translating into reality. And then you had someone who was actually dealing with the things that talking about the things that we saw every day that we'd been hearing for five, 10 years were supposed to be addressed and weren't. And he actually seemed to have solutions that a practical mind said, yeah, that would work.

1:08:57 Right. You know, those who live in reality. And so the moral authority, you know, like the, the religious individual, the bishop, was actually acting in reality because he understood human motivation. Yes. And he understood how shame could turn someone and continued shaming of someone could turn them down a path into a life of crime versus a moment giving someone grace could create the goodwill and the desire to help and do good. That's much more powerful than anything else. You know, so understanding human nature,

1:09:50 authority is really, is very important because it's not the vision statement, it's the actual operating and living by the principles that you purport to be true. You purport to be true. Yep, absolutely. Yeah. My. It. Yeah. And Hugo, and as what I. Hugo learned this and he could speak to it so beautifully because he'd struggled with every stage of this himself. Yes, yes, yes. Well, and he. This is why I, you know, I said this already, but I'll say it again. His characters are fully realized. They are three dimensional.

1:10:35 Even the Thenardines who are, who are sort of sub villains, you know, they are fully realized. Fantine is fully realized. Cossette is fully realized, the Monsignor fully realized. Even the, even the young man who were the group of girls that Fantine was a part of, and then the young men that were their lovers and they're cavorting around or whatever. And then of course, you know, he knocks Fantine up and then disappears into the night. Does the Johnny Appleseed move. Even that guy is fully realized.

1:11:15 Like he gives, he gives him a beginning, a middle and an end. And actually the end is that he became like some low level mayor in some town or whatever. And, and there's no castaway characters in this book. Every one of them is so tightly written and so, so fully realized. And I think they're fully realized because we're going to turn the corner here and talk about Napoleon and then wrap up, at least for today, but they're fully realized because I think Hugo as a romanticist, and I say this on the show as myself or I tagged myself with this.

1:11:52 He was a fan of human beings. He actually liked people. He actually thought people had potential. He did. I, I see. I. He did. And I think that I, I agree with you. Okay, so we have Javert, who believes in the letter of the law. Of the law, yes. Right. We have the, the Thenardier, a criminal. And I'm going to be a criminal, you know, and even though you thought I was a good man, you know, and I benefited from it, I'm still going to be a criminal. Right. And then you have Jean Valjean, who actually, in my mind, he start.

1:12:26 He did a crime out of love, right. Like for his sister because he wanted to feed her and her family. He did a crime out of love in the. Yeah. And I don't believe you should, but when you're looking at the pyramid of, you know, Maslov pyramid of needs, if you don't have that base level met, like, people have to eat, you know, yes, things are going to happen. But he was like, well, maybe I'm not love. This is, this is Libby's interpretation. You know, when he's told over and over and over again he's a criminal and he's going to have this scarlet letter for the rest of his life.

1:13:02 He's like, they keep telling him, no love, no love, you're a criminal. He's like, well, then I act like one, you know, kind of like, you know, defiantly. But then someone shows grace. He's like, I can see that love. You know, those are my interpretations of the, of the bishop, but I can see that love, and you have it in you, and I'm going to help you by doing the right thing. And so that's what drives him, you know, Valjean, through the rest of the, the rest of the book is, you know, I'm going to do the right thing.

1:13:34 And he does do the right thing, and it's kind of out of love and, you know, getting him out. Out of those base needs by building a business and being able to support himself and to help others so that he's not having to act out of base. Base needs. Base needs. But he's the most human and redemptive character that I think, you know, Hugo's using as a model of even though we've sinned. Even though you've sinned, you can redeem yourself and make the right path. Make the right choice and make the right choice.

1:14:08 Yes. And it's. And it's human beings that have to be involved in relationship with each other in order just realize that we're flawed. But you don't have to accept that moment of flaw. And you know, if small moments are big, you got to continue to move forward and redeem yourself. Yes, absolutely. Okay, let me, let me go to something that was that I just, just absolutely struck me in. Well, one of the many things that struck me in this book. The.

1:14:42 So we go to cassette, the book one. So the chapter on cassette

1:14:49 starts out with a. Probably the, the best description I had ever read of the battle at Waterloo, exactly what happened there. And it opens up with what you see on the way from Nevillier Hugomont, talking about the doors and the orchard. And then June 18, 1815,

1:15:20 I, I, I read these chapters and then he goes into a. The quid obscurum of battles. I'm just reading the chapter titles. 4 o' clock in the Afternoon. Napoleon in a good Mood. The Emperor asks the guide La Costa a question, the Unexpected and the plateau of Mont St. Jean. And then finally wraps up with Bad guide for Napoleon, good for Bulow the Guard and of course the catastrophe. Now these chapters, these 14 chapters in the first book cover about 40 pages and he sums up the entire battle of Waterloo.

1:16:10 And he sums up Napoleon

1:16:15 in the 15th chapter, Cambrone. And I'm going to, I'm going to read from this and then we're going to talk about. About a man. I'm fascinated by Napoleon. Napoleon Bonaparte. Out of respect to the French reader, the finest word perhaps that a Frenchman ever uttered cannot be repeated to him. We are prohibited from applying the sublime to history at our own risk and peril. We violate that prohibition. Among these giants, then there was one titan, Cambrone. To speak that word and then to die. What could be greater?

1:16:50 For to accept death is to die. And it is not this man's fault if in the storm of grapeshot he survived. The man who won the battle of Waterloo is not Napoleon put to route nor Wellington giving way at 4 o', clock, desperate at 5 not blue share who did not fight. The man who won the battle of Waterloo was Kim Roning.

1:17:11 To burst out with such a word at the thunderbolt that kills you is victory. To give this answer to disaster, to say this to destiny, to supply this base for the future lion. To fling down this reply to the reign of the previous night, to the treacherous wall at Hugomont, to the sunken road of Ohain, to Grouchy's delay, to Blucher's arrival to be ironic in the sepulcher, to act so as to remain Upright after falling, down after falling. To drown the European coalition in two syllables privies that the Caesars were already privy to.

1:17:43 To make the last words the first by associating it with the glory of France. To close Waterloo insolently with a Mardi Gras, to complete Leonidas with Rabelier. To sum up this victory in one supreme word that cannot be spoken. To lose the field and to recover history after this carnage, to have the laugh on his side is immense. It is an insult to the thunderbolt. It attains the grandeur of Eschylus. This word of Cambrones, by the way the word was merde has the effect of a fracture. It is the breaking of a heart by scorn.

1:18:18 It is a surplus of agony and explosion. Who conquered Wellington? No, without Blue Share he would have been lost. Blusher. No, if Wellington had not begun, Blucher could not have finished. This Cambrone coming at the final hour, this unknown soldier, this infinitesimal particle of war, senses a lie within a catastrophe doubly bitter. And at the moment when he is bursting with rage, he is offered this mockery life. How could he restrain himself? They are there, all the kings of Europe, the fortunate generals, the thundering jupiters.

1:18:50 They have 100,000 victorious soldiers. And behind the 100,000amillion. Their guns, with matches lit, stand open mouthed. They have the Imperial Guard in the Grand Armee under their feet. They have just crushed Napoleon. And Cambronne alone remains none. But this earthworm is left to protest. He will protest. So he looks for a word as one looks for a sword. Froth comes through his mouth, and this froth is the word. Faced with this prodigious and mediocre victory, this victory without victors, the desperate man draws himself up.

1:19:20 He suffers his enormity, but he recognizes it's nothingness. And he does more than spit on it. Overwhelmed in numbers and material strength, he finds in his soul a means of expression, excrement, we repeat. To say that, to do that, to find that is to be a conqueror, the spirit of great days. Enter this unknown man. At that fatal moment, Cambrone finds the word for Waterloo as Rouge de Isle finds the Marseille. Through an inspiration from above, a breath from the divine maelstrom passes across these men and they tremble.

1:19:55 And the one sings the supreme song, the other utters the terrible cry, this word of titanic scorn. The Cambrone throws out, not merely at Europe in the name of the empire, that would be but little. He throws it out at the past in the name of the revolution. It is heard and men recognize in Camerone the old soul of the giants. It is though Danton was speaking, or Clebert roaring to this word from Cambron. The English voice replied, fire. The batteries flared, the hill trembled. From all those brazen throats went forth a final terrible vomiting of grapeshot.

1:20:32 Vast clouds of smoke, dusky white in the light of the rising moon, rolled away. And when the smoke settled, there was nothing left. That formidable remnant was annihilated. The guard was dead. The four walls of the living redoubt had fallen. Hardly could a quivering be detected here and there among the corpses. And thus the French legions, grander than the Roman legions, expired at Mont St. Jean on ground soaked in rain and blood in the somber wheat fields. In the somber wheat fields at the spot where today, at four in the morning, whistling and gaily whipping up his horse, Joseph drives by with the mail from Neuve.

1:21:15 I am a fan of military history. I've read quite a bit of it. I have never read. I had never read before. I read this, something like that before. If. If the. If. And you know what. And I'll tell my story now about Les Miz, the movie. So this is my story.

1:21:34 When the movie came out with Anne Hathaway a few years ago and Russell Crowe. Pleasure there. And I can't remember who was the guy from the Greatest Showman. What's his name? Wolverine. Wolverine, that guy? Yeah. I can't think of his name. I can't think of his name right now. It doesn't matter. But he was Jean Valjean, right? Okay. Big to do about this movie. My wife was like, oh, we should go see this. Like, okay, I get in there, I get my tickets. I, you know, get into the theater. I, you know, put my seat back and.

1:22:12 And. And Russell Crowe starts singing.

1:22:17 And two hours later I wake up and the whole thing.

1:22:26 And

1:22:30 so when I picked up the book, Les Mis, my wife, remembering this, of course, asks me, how long is it going to take you to get through this book? How long are you going to go in this book before you give up? Like, well, I'll just keep going until, I don't know, until I stop. I don't know, until the book stops or whatever. And it is moments, and this is the reason why I bring this up. It is moments like Waterloo, the description of the Battle of Waterloo, how he breaks that sucker down over 15 chapters.

1:22:58 That's what I wanted to see in the movie. I wanted to. That. That's what I wanted. That's it. That would have. I would have. I Would have stayed awake for that.

1:23:11 Yeah, none of that's in the movie. Instead, we get a whole bunch of other different things, which is fine. I'm gonna get to something else here. At the end of our episode here, which actually, like I said, kind of. Kind of opened a door for me in my head based off of a. Off of a song that was in. That was from the movie that I heard. I heard this weekend at a. At a. At a recital that I was at. So that description, though, of Cambron and the. And the end of Waterloo, he. How he breaks down the battlefield and breaks down what happened there.

1:23:42 It was a stunning, stunning achievement by someone who I don't think ever fired a weapon at anybody in anger, like, ever. Right.

1:23:54 The familiarity that Hugo had with Napoleon and how Waterloo was such a disaster for not just Napoleon, but I think it was a disaster for the French mindset as well, that they didn't really fully recover from. And actually being a person who believes that World War I is the headwaters for all the nonsense that happened in the 20th century, I now understand at a deeper level why the French felt so compelled to continue to throw men into the Western Front during World War I. Just unbelievable, the numbers of Frenchmen that died in the Western Front.

1:24:37 And they wouldn't stop throwing those men in there. They wouldn't. They could have just stopped. They could have just not sent any more men to the front, but they couldn't do it, because they had to. And I think this is not. This is not putting something on the French military mind that wasn't there. They had to erase the shame of Napoleon's defeated Waterloo. And you would think that because Waterloo happened, what, 1815. Yeah, so it's 1815. Right. Battle of Waterloo happened at 1815. You're telling.

1:25:10 And 80 years, 90 years later, they're still dealing with the shame of that. And so they just throw people into World War I. They just throw the men into the mall. And it's because of what happened at Waterloo. And that. And that really came home to me with Hugo's description of what happened. And he doesn't go into the psychology of Napoleon, thank God. He doesn't psychologize the trauma. He just says, this is the thing that happened. He dramatizes it and he romanticizes it, of course, because he's a romantic romanticist and a romantic writer, but he doesn't.

1:25:46 He doesn't psychologize it. He doesn't. He doesn't try to. Like. He doesn't try what a modern novelist would try to do. He doesn't try to make. Make Napoleon, what do you call it, acceptable or make his actions understandable. He doesn't judge Napoleon as being problematic. He just says, no. I mean, like, these are the vagaries of history. So we were going to have a battle here, and the thunderbolt's going to fall here. And the beginning of the decline of the French. Not even decline. The end of the French Revolution was at Waterloo.

1:26:20 And this is what he wants you to feel. And so it's amazing. This is just an amazing chapter to me. But what is what happened from a Napoleon perspective? You know, for 10. Yeah, for the, what, 15 years before that, 20 years before that. Yeah. That led to that culmination.

1:26:42 You mean before Napoleon? Well, no, part of his. As part of Napoleon's reign. Why would it end like that? Oh, well, because you have the dynamic of the French people, which Hugo is definitely clearly on board with. You have the dynamic of the institutions, the estates. Right. The first estate, the second state, third estate, the fourth estate. Right. Which is, of course, their class system, which they sought to. To, you know, paper over. But then the. The third leg of that chair is Napoleon himself.

1:27:21 And so one of the reasons I'm fascinated by. By Napoleon is because of the ego on that man. Yeah, that's what I was. I wanted to get. Yeah, the ego on that man was incredible. Like,

1:27:37 I. I will often say that the things that we like about people are also the things that. Or the things that people are good at is the things that often upend them at the end of the day. Right. So, you know, my grandmother warned me years ago, God rest her soul, but she warned me years ago, your mouth's gonna get you in trouble. And she was right. She's exactly right. My mouth gets me in trouble all the time. Grandma was exactly correct. But my mouth is also what makes me money. Yeah. You know, so

1:28:11 you got to take the bitter with the sweet. Right. Napoleon. What made Napoleon able to see how the armies of Europe could be fractured and shattered and could be brought to heel? The thing that made him see that was also the thing that led to the defeat at Waterloo. It's the same thing. It was the thing that led to him making a mistake going into Russia. Like, you don't go into Russia. Everybody knows this. You don't. You don't go to Russia in the winter. Sorry. No, no, never, never. Everybody knows this.

1:28:48 This is. This is not anything unusual. They knew this even then. But his ego, his ego said, I am Napoleon. And Napoleon was the first sort of example of, well, you see it in the picture of his, of his crowning as emperor where he takes the crown from the Pope or from the, from the bishop or whoever it is that's going to crown him and he puts it on his own head himself.

1:29:20 I mean, there you go. That's, that's the guy in a nutshell. Like that's all you need. And then, but there's going. And the thing is the knock on effects from that, it is a thunderbolt. So you're gonna, you're gonna ride the lightning with that guy. And for a while there, for 15. Yeah, for 15 years, it was worth it. It was worth it for the French to ride the lightning like that.

1:29:46 But then. Yeah, it's just, it was hubris ultimately that took them down and then weakened. The result of the people. Yeah, it was hubris. It was a fair bit of narcissism, you know, on Napoleon's part. I also think that the French people fell in love with Napoleon's ego. So it's not Napoleon the man. And, and at this point in, at this point in world history, I mean, 200 years later, he's become a symbol of things. Right? So he's no longer a human. He was no longer fully, he's no longer a fully fleshed out human being.

1:30:22 He's. He's a symbol now. But to get to be a symbol, you have to have an entire group of people. To point about tribalism earlier, you have to have an entire group of people just fall in love with that, with that, that thing. And Hugo was in love with. Hugo was in love with Napoleon too, you know, until he wasn't. Until he wasn't. And then. But he still wasn't able to look at him clear eyed, you know, because it comes with all that. Napoleon came with all that baggage. Right. Yeah. And I get it, you know, was he a military genius or was he a person who took advantage of circumstances?

1:31:03 Well, I can tell you from my study of military history and from sort of what I've looked at over the long course of time. Most people, most commanders who are considered geniuses, quite frankly, it's a combination of, of incredible skill, focus, ego's in there. And, and nobody likes to hear it, but it's true luck, right? Opportunity. It's opportunity. Opportunity favors the prepared mind. Correct? That's right. Right. So it was just the right time in history. Right. And you can't,

1:31:41 I mean, you wouldn't really want to replicate a guy like Napoleon, but you can't. Anyway, Hitler tried. Yeah. And that didn't work because his ego was. Was pushed a different direction. He was being pushed by different. His not being pushed. He was seeking to mold different historical forces.

1:32:00 You know, the.

1:32:05 The. The other piece about this is Waterloo is presented as a tragic event. And the thing that run the line that runs through all of Les Mis is tragedy. And it's not tragic in terms of the way we think of. Like, as I said before, we try to psychologize the tragedy in our time. Hugo's not doing any of that. He's merely presenting it as it is and just saying, yes, this is the tragedy. Here you go. And that's. And that's. And that's why this book will continue to be read for, like, another 200, 300 years.

1:32:45 Because unlike the Greek, he's what. What Hugo is doing in the best way is doing what the Greek classicists do when they present a tragedy. This is just the way life is. And who can you appeal to? There's no one to appeal to. This is just life. And we are consistently, because of our Christianity in America, that's the thread that runs through all of it. We're consistently trying to find someone to appeal to for the tragedies of life. So we talked about homelessness earlier, right, in terms of a political problem.

1:33:25 Now let me talk about it in terms of a human problem. Some people are homeless because of tragic circumstances in their lives. And even if they had different circumstances, which, by the way, we can't make different circumstances for them, but we want to, but wanting isn't enough. Even if they had those different circumstances, there's no guarantee that their life still wouldn't be a tragedy. This is the lottery winner who actually wins the lottery and then a year later is broke. That's because their life is tragic, and there's nothing you can do about it.

1:34:01 It's a series of bad decisions. Yeah, sure, yeah. And those. And those bad decisions create the tragedies. And until that person decides, like Jean Valjean did, decides with grace or not, we would love it to be with grace. But until that person decides to make a different choice,

1:34:27 it's going to continue to be a tragedy. So there's a great character in the great American television show of the last, like, 25 years, the Wire. There's a character in there, a drug addict named. Named Bubs, right? And Bubs is a drug addict. He's an informer to the cops.

1:34:47 And, you know, they. They. Bub's arc is one of redemption. He has a redemptive arc.

1:34:59 But there's A great line he has. I can't remember what season it's in. It might be in season three of the Wire where he says, I believe it's to the female cop, if I remember correctly, who's trying to help him, try to start him, trying to show that grace. Right. Like the monsignor. Yeah. Bubs. Bub says it's a long way from heaven to here.

1:35:21 And that's true for a lot of people. Like, if I'm poor, I live in the same town as people who are rich. So I can go across the tracks to. I can't attend that school, but I can go across the tracks to a school where rich kids are attending and stare through the bars. No one's going to stop me. We. We have that freedom of movement. Now. Are the cops going to come along and rouse me? Sure. Okay. Yeah. Are they going to come along and hassle me? Sure. Yeah. But I can go see it. I can go see the vision of that.

1:35:59 But how many people cross the tracks one way or another to see the vision? They don't. That's. Now, we in our country, in our time, we look at that as the fault of reality, and we are seeking to remake that through all of our politics and our arguments and our culture, because we think that's not fair and that's not nice and that's not right. And our biggest sin these days is to not be fair or nice or right. But that's actually not what Hugo thinks. I don't think. I think. Hugo thinks. Isn't it a tragedy that you don't go across the tracks and that's a period at the end of that sentence.

1:36:41 Well, there's. There's just themes of. About personal accountability, choice and. Yeah, choice and redemption. And, you know, you can grow up in a family of criminals and where that was accepted and say, I'm just a criminal, so that's going to be who I am. Or you say, I don't want to live that life, and I want to live, you know, a more moral, empowered life. You know, it's the same thing as, like, a child who's born to. Yeah. Whose father was an alcoholic. And you have two children who are born to families with abusive, you know, alcoholic fathers.

1:37:20 One says, I have no choice but to be exactly the same way. And the other says, I'm going to do everything in my power to not be that person. And, you know, the person who says, I'm going to do everything in my power not to be that person, you know, tends to have a Better life because they make sets of decisions to not be the same as the. To accept a certain way because it's been pushed on them. And then another. Yeah, that's. That was the story arc that valjang could have taken. He could have said, well, I'm a criminal.

1:37:53 I'm just going to be a criminal. Or he said, no, I know that I have that arc of love. I'm not going to be a criminal. I'm going to do everything in my life to live a virtuous life. You know, so what? Well, this is the other. What our country was founded on was the empowered, accountable individual who could create their own reality. Right. And, you know, and we're trying to be turned into. Well, you can't control it, so we'll turn to others to help you to live a better. A better life as we dictate, as opposed to just giving you a place of personal accountability and choices that can actually help you to live an empowered and thriving life.

1:38:38 Well, and, and, and Hugo, he as a more Christian right, as a. Well, and as a romantic. He.

1:38:50 Is a romantic. That is the classical liberal view of life. It is the classic. Yes, it is the classic. Yes. No, you're right. It is the classical liberal view of life. And a. A romantic who is in love with human beings, things exactly as people, knows what they're capable of, that you can thrive no matter what has happened to you. Cosette could have also, you know, said, you know, I'm just going to be a hooker. I'm going to be a criminal. I'm going to eop. No, she didn't accept. Yeah, well, she was given opportunities and she took advantage of those opportunities.

1:39:23 Right, Correct. Right. A full life. Well, and let me be very clear here. Hugo believed in changing the changing of economic. I agree. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That the economy had to be better. I mean, this is the other theme with the poverty piece that runs through Les Mis is the grinding poverty that is causing people to make these decisions has to change. And that's in the best sort of line of thinking from the French Revolution on through Hugo's life. Now, on the one hand, he did see tragedies as being periods at the end of the sentence.

1:40:02 He also held intention. This idea that you're talking about, Libby, of the ability of human beings, if they've ever are given different economic circumstances, to actually triumph. Now, he didn't have a solution as to where those economic circumstances or those economic changes are going to come from. He wasn't a socialist in the way we Think of a socialist today. He wasn't that person. No, he was a cat. It was, it was capitalism. Right. Purest form. Right, Right. Is to do trade. And you know, you can start at small trade candlesticks for your machinery.

1:40:36 Right. Or build a, or build a factory in a town that pays people more than like 3 cents. Okay. But you do have to, like, you do have to start with that. Maslow's pyramid of needs is. You have to first start with just giving people the basics, you know, food, housing, clean water. Right, exactly, exactly. Oh, my God. Yeah. The, the filth of these that is described in here again, shocking conditions. Right. To someone reading this book in, in our time, Hugo, though, while he healthy's intention, ultimately was an optimist.

1:41:08 I love the line that he said on August 3 in his last public address talking about the 20th century. He says, in the 20th century, war will be dead. The scaffold will be dead. Hatred will be dead. Frontier boundaries will be dead. Dogmas will be dead. Man will live.

1:41:28 That's optimistic. Yeah, that's optimistic. Now he was, he was. If we look, if we look at the 20th century, just in aggregate, he was not correct. Dogmas did survive because they're going to. Because you can't kill an idea. The scaffold not only is not dead, the scaffold is used for a whole variety of different things that Hugo would find abominable. I think hatred will be dead. Well, there's a few million, there's 100 million dead people in, you know, from communism that would probably have something to say about that.

1:41:59 Frontier boundaries will be dead. He's absolutely true about that. We, with the Internet, we have, we have pushed the frontier boundaries. Who's absolutely correct about that? Um, war will be dead. No, war is a condition of the human heart. And as long as there are human beings who want to take stuff that other human beings have, we're going to have all this, but staying with all that. But Hugo was optimistic. That's what romanticism gives you. He was. Well, but if you compare, but on a relative basis, like it's been periods of less war and less death.

1:42:39 Yes. As we had more economic prosperity move throughout, across the globe. Yes. You know, so there's a pregnant. And there's also some sort of expectation that it's been set somewhere that there isn't going to be tragedy in life. Like life isn't going to be easy. And that's that false promise that people give. Like it's, it's about your ability to weather downturns. And still be positive and look at the how to turn them into something that you can work with as opposed to allowing it to bring you down.

1:43:20 Yeah, there's always going to be tragedy, but there's also going to be love. And there's also going to be, you know, happiness and goodness, too. It's your choice if you're going to allow the tragedy to weigh too down or to just find a way to move through it. Right, exactly. And that's where Cassette really becomes an interesting character. Right. As we. As we turn on this. So we're not going to cover the whole. The whole book today. We're not going to get anywhere close. So I want to. I want to pause there on that thought because I was going to do another section, but I think I want to summarize here and wrap up.

1:44:03 Livy's been very gracious to us with her time, and she's, like I said before at the beginning, she's a little jet lag. So I want to give her the opportunity to go catch some Z's. And I think we've covered a lot of waterfront here with what Hugo is doing and what the book is doing. Strongly recommend you go out. You pick up. You pick up Les Miserable. The Signet Classics unabridged version, which is the version I have, is 1459 pages long. That's 1459 pages. So it will take you a year probably, if, depending upon how fast a reader you are to go through it, but it will not be a waste of your time.

1:44:42 It will be amazing. And by the way, then you'll go and see the musical and you'll go watch the movie, and these things will be a lot more resonant for you as it was for me. So I'm going to wrap this up by saying this. I was at a kid's recital. Well, not kids recital. I was at a recital. So my children go to music school, Right. Because we homeschool our kids and we want to give them music. We send them to a local music school and we have one in our town. It's great. I'm glad we have it. And I'm more than happy to give them my $300 a month for my two kids to go learn music.

1:45:14 And every so often they'll have recitals. So they have one in the spring, they have one in the summer, and they have one in the fall. Okay. And most recitals are okay. They're fine. It's like going to think of, think of every kid's recital you've ever been to at a public school. It's kind of like that. If you have nieces or nephews or cousins or you've ever been invited to one, you'll know what I'm talking about. And there are people at all kinds of different talent levels at this school doing all kinds of different instruments, playing all kinds of different instruments.

1:45:42 And, and they, they teach everybody. They teach. They even have like a baby toddler class, right? Like a little Beethoven class all the way up to 70, 80, 90 year old people going and taking guitar lessons and learning how to play Smoke on the water and stuff because they always wanted to do it. Okay, so at this recital, there were about, oh, 25 people that were performing at the recital and again, kind of all over the map, right? And the last lady, the second to the last lady who performed, this woman was probably in her 60s and she came up and she did a.

1:46:17 Her instrument is her voice. So she came up and she's saying she sang the song from Les Mis, I have dreamed a dream. And I was not expecting this at all. This was totally like, oh, this is out of the blue. And so I was listening to her song and I want to, I want to. I sent myself an email because I made a note about this because it opened up a door in my head as she was singing and having read the book and having, you know, knowing I was going to come on the podcast with Libby today and knowing we're going to be talking about this, it kind of opened up a door in my head and, and the, the epiphany that I had was this.

1:47:00 I'm going to just, just read it directly.

1:47:04 Unlike contemporary social reformers, I want to close with this idea. Hugo saw the ability to be heroic despite your circumstances, whether that was poverty or gender or ethnicity. Wallace and Ben Hur observed the same thing in people. This is the spot where Ben Hur and Les Mis cross over. And it is a real shame. I think, that the theophany that overwhelms that point in Ben Hur and the social reform message that overwhelms the point in Les Miserables have blinded people to those larger. That larger idea, the idea that you can be heroic despite your circumstances.

1:47:44 The theater and film adaptations of Les Miserables, I think, miss this point as well. But we as leaders cannot miss this point. Coming out of the chaos of the fourth, turning into the next social, cultural, an economic high in the west, we are looking for heroes. We are entering an age of heroes, I think. But we must defeat the forces of vulgarity and Commonness and banality. We have to overcome our circumstances. And those forces do have a head start. They really do, and they insist on themselves.

1:48:21 I mean, we saw this in the mayoral election in la. We see this in our public life all the time. But we must be heroic. And I think this is the larger message from Les Mis and the larger message from the books we covered this month on the show. We must be heroic in spite of our circumstances. Not because of them and not in opposition to them, but in spite of them. And this is the thing that unlocked in my head when I saw that woman heroically belt out. I have dreamed a dream. And it. It absolutely blew me away.

1:48:54 I mean, my wife was gonna cry when she was sitting there. The woman hit. The woman hit. And then. And then. Here's the end of that story. Here's the close of that. She walked off the stage, got the. Gave him all little medals for performing. She got her little medal. She walked off the stage. She walked out. I didn't even see that woman in the parking lot. I didn't see that woman in. In the. In the lobby afterward. That woman dropped the mic and beat the street. She was out. Stunning performance.

1:49:21 Absolutely amazing and heroic. Was she real? If she wasn't real, I would have had to make her up.

1:49:32 Great. Final thoughts, Libby, as we close. Oh, yeah. I think you. I can't be anything that you've just said. It's just beautiful, right? Just. It's. It's. Yeah, it was heroism. This is what we need. We need more heroism. And everybody has the opportunity to be a hero. Everybody does. Just everyone has the opportunity to continue to evolve and to grow into better versions of themselves. And as you do that, you're modeling, you know, virtuousness to the rest of the world. So it's in our small moments every single day that we give hope to others, whether it's acknowledged or not.

1:50:13 That's right. Yeah. That's the story. That's the story. Well, we will. We will have Libby back. We will. We will. I want to talk about cassette. I want to talk about what happens with the barricades in the back end of Les Mis. We will revisit this. This is going to be one of those books,

1:50:35 Monte Cristo, not probably a little bit later on this year. So once again, I would like to thank Libby Unger for coming on our show today. Thank you. With that. Well, thank you. You're welcome. That. Well, we're out

1:50:51 and.