'Les Miserables' - The Garden of the Lord and the Kingdom of God

I went to see Les Miserables this week with high hopes. It’s critically acclaimed, award-winning, with high hopes at this year’s Oscars and also very popular with audiences. Also, I’m not averse to the occasional musical.

I left the cinema with mixed feelings. I found the earlier parts of the film, focusing on Valjean, Javert and Fantaine (Anne Hathaway was once again the best thing in an otherwise patchy movie) gripping and moving. But once the film jumped forward to the revolution, shifting its focus to Marius and his generation, I felt less and less engaged in the story. I never felt particularly connected to any of the younger characters, who just seemed to get in the way of the more interesting Valjean-Javert plot. But my overriding emotion on leaving the cinema after watching Les Miserables was anger.

The final scene bothered me greatly. Let me explain (spoiler warning): at the end of the film, Valjean dies in a convent. As he dies he sees a vision of Fantaine, who leads him to meet the bishop who saved him from the police at the beginning of the story. The scene then shifts to the centre of Paris, where a barricade has been erected. Standing on the barricade, waving flags and belting out the final song, are all the characters whom we saw killed at the barricades earlier in the film. Valjean and Fantaine are seen singing with them. Below them, a crowd of Parisians start to climb the barricade. As the song reaches its end the camera pans up to show that all the people are now behind the barricade.

So what? Here are the lyrics of the song the dead are singing on the barricades. The tune is a reprise of the call to arms the revolutionaries sing earlier in the film but now it has different words:

Do you hear the people sing?

Lost in the valley of the night
It is the music of a people who are climbing to the light
For the wretched of the earth
There is a flame that never dies
Even the darkest nights will end and the sun will rise


They will live again in freedom in the garden of the Lord
They will walk behind the ploughshare
They will put away the sword
The chain will be broken and all men will have their reward!


Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Somewhere beyond the barricade is there a world you long to see?
Do you hear the people sing?
Say, do you hear the distant drums?
It is the future that they bring when tomorrow comes! 

This is how I read the final scene. Valjean dies. Fantaine, playing the role of guardian angel or the Virgin Mary (it is a very Catholic story), leads him to Christ, in the form of the bishop (the one who saved him). Valjean and Fantaine then take their place in heaven (the space beyond the barricades) with the blessed martyrs (the fallen revolutionaries). The promise of the final song is that, although the earthly revolution failed, everybody will get their just reward in heaven. In the end, the poor of Paris will climb the barricade (i.e. die) and be happy in the afterlife.

You might disagree with this interpretation. I have heard it said that what you bring to a film determines what you get out of it. That’s fine. But I think you would struggle to argue that the final scene represents anything other than the afterlife and, in a film shot through with Christian beliefs, it galls me that the final message was ‘pie in the sky when you die’: don’t worry, everything will be okay in heaven. So what if the students’ revolution was a tragic and pointless waste of life? ‘They will live again in freedom in the garden of the Lord’. So what if the poor of France, so graphically depicted, are no better off for anything that has happened in this story? One day they will die, ‘the chain will be broken and all men will have their reward’.

This is the only version of Les Miserables I have seen: I haven’t seen the stage play or read the book, so I don’t know if this sentiment comes from Hugo, or from the stage play, or if it was a deliberate innovation by the director. But wherever it comes from, it makes me angry. It makes me angry because I am a Christian. It makes me angry because I believe that what Jesus said is true: ‘The kingdom of God is at hand’. It makes me angry because I believe in the New Testament vision of the heavenly city descending to Earth and God dwelling with us here, not in some vague hope of a disembodied afterlife in an alternate dimension. I believe in salvation here and now, from individual sin, yes but also from the consequences of societal sin: poverty, injustice, racism, corruption, war and exploitation.

The film actually has a really good example of this kind of salvation in the story of Jean Valjean. Valjean is saved by the bishop’s selfless love. He in turn goes on to save Fantaine and Cosette from poverty, to save Marius from the violence of the revolution, extending the same love he received from the bishop to those around him. He even extends it to his mortal enemy Javert, who refuses to accept it and ultimately takes his own life rather than continue living because of Valjean’s grace. Now that I mention it, I don’t recall seeing Javert at the barricades in the final scene. Are suicides not allowed into this revolutionaries’ heaven?

Les Miserables is a historical drama. It would unrealistic and naïve to expect it to show the revolutionaries overthrowing the monarchy and growing a utopia in the ashes (God knows their forebears in the eighteenth-century didn’t manage it). But is the best we can expect from such an overtly Christian film, whose message is summed up in the line ‘To love another person is to see the face of God’, is an ending that only seems to promise salvation after death?