PARIS

Which?	Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (1862)
What?	French City of Light, squalor, revolution, égalité and Enlightenment

DO YOU hear the people sing? The angry men, demanding to be heard? Once, before these elegant boulevards ploughed through the congested slums, this city screamed with revolution; tight-packed, disease-festered alleys clogged with barricades and voices yearning for liberté, égalité, fraternité. Now, the avenues are wide, bright, brimming with bonhomie; the noise is of coffee cups chinking on enamel tabletops, breezes rattling the neat plane trees. These streets are elegance and amour incarnate. But once they flowed with blood …

By the 1850s – when Victor Hugo was writing Les Misérables – Paris was quite literally the City of Light. Around 15,000 newly installed gaslights illuminated the French capital. Night-times became safer; citizens were drawn to the streets at all hours – a pavement culture that endures today. But just a few decades before, when Les Misérables is set, the city was a far darker place. Paris may have birthed the 18th-century’s intellectual Enlightenment but, for the impoverished majority, it was still rife with inequality and despair. As Hugo once wrote, ‘He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo. Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic. Nothing is more sublime.’

Les Misérables contains all of those qualities. One of the longest novels ever written, it charts the travails of Jean Valjean, beginning in 1815, as he’s paroled after nearly two decades in prison for stealing a loaf of bread, and finishing in the aftermath of the 1832 Paris Uprising, when Valjean finds redemption on his deathbed.

During this period, the city was still the ‘old Paris’ that Hugo loved, a labyrinth of narrow, intertwining streets, courtyards and crannies where characters could slip easily into the shadows. However, the city was also overcrowded, unhealthy and increasingly disillusioned: despite the world-upending 1789 Revolution, France seemed to be sinking back into aristocratic ways. Hence the Uprising. On 5 June 1832 around 3,000 Republican insurgents briefly controlled eastern and central Paris, an area spanning from the Châtelet to the Île de la Cité and Faubourg Saint-Antoine; barricades rose in the streets off rue Saint-Denis. But by 6 June the reinforced National Guard had stamped out the rebellion. Around 800 people were killed or wounded.

Hugo himself witnessed the riots. He was writing in the Tuileries Garden when he heard gunshots from the direction of Les Halles, the traditional market area with its warren of alleys (now replaced by a shopping mall). He followed the noise north, but was forced to shelter in passage du Saumon (now passage Ben-Aïad – closed to the public), while bullets whizzed past.

The city has changed immeasurably since. Between 1853 and 1870, urban planner Baron Haussmann razed much of the medieval city, replacing its ancient chaos with modern order: broad, straight boulevards, open intersections, public parks, harmonious terraces of mansard-roofed mansions. Avenues were made wide enough for carriages; they were also made too wide for effective barricades. The result was a city more homogenous, more hygienic, arguably more handsome but stripped of centuries of history.

Haussmann has certainly made it more difficult to follow in the footsteps of Valjean, his ward Cosette, her suitor Marius and the rest of Hugo’s revolutionaries, vagabonds, gendarmes and whores. But echoes of his Paris remain. Most evocative is the Marais (the marsh), where there are more intact medieval buildings than anywhere else in the city. This neighbourhood on the Right Bank of the Seine survived Haussmannisation; it’s still a maze of tight-knit cobbled lanes, easy to get lost in, and now jam-packed with bookshops, boutiques, bars and cafés. It’s in the Marais that you’ll find the Places des Vosges, a perfect, tree-lined square framed by arcaded 17th-century houses, one of which is Hugo’s former home (now a museum). At the heart of the Marais is the baroque Jesuit church of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis, where Marius and Cosette are wed; it’s also home to two shell-shaped fonts that Hugo donated to the church after his own daughter married there.

The area to the west, the Latin Quarter, is another remnant of medieval streets. The Sorbonne, France’s first university, was founded here in 1257, establishing this area as a studenty haven of intellectual thought and no-frills bistros. This is where Marius and his fellow revolutionaries would have likely spent their days discussing a new tomorrow over cheap vin rouge.

Nearby is the Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris’s second-largest park, and a leafy setting for love. Amid the Jardin’s sparrow-twittering chestnut trees, Marius and Cosette first catch each other’s eye. You can still walk the gravel paths, among the centuries-old pear trees and the statues of poets and politicians. One sculpture, Le Marchand de Masques (1883), depicts a boy hawking masks of famous people; the mask in his raised hand is the face of Hugo.

However, the best way to sense the plight of Hugo’s misérables is to descend into the sewers. For Hugo, they were ‘another Paris under herself’, a dank, foul-smelling facsimile with its own streets and alleyways. It’s by descending to this abyss that Valjean rescues the wounded Marius – salvation via hell. Haussmann improved the sewage system but still, a visit to Musée des Égouts de Paris (the Paris Sewer Museum), following the raised walkways above the effluent, brings to mind – and nose – the Paris of Valjean.

Valjean dies at peace, and is buried beneath a blank slab in an untended corner of a Paris cemetery. On his deathbed in 1885, Hugo asked to be buried in a pauper’s coffin, but was first processed up the Champs-Élysées and laid in state under the Arc de Triomphe, before being put in the crypt of the Panthéon, alongside Dumas and Zola. In death, raised to hero; on the page, striving with the common man.