ABSTRACT
Few stories have worked their way into our popular consciousness as readily or as extensively as Les Misérables. The convict Jean Valjean’s quest for redemption against the backdrop of social revolution has demonstrated an enduring and widespread popularity that can be traced back to its origins. In the spring of 1862, a carefully orchestrated publicity campaign across more than a dozen international cities from Saint-Petersburg to Rio de Janeiro heralded the arrival of what was billed as the novel of the century. France’s greatest living writer, Victor Hugo, had already procured a colossal 300,000 Francs for his manuscript, including translation rights.1 It was a sum greater than the annual salaries of 120 civil servants at the time and the equivalent today of around $2.2 million, but his Belgian editor Albert Lacroix shared the novelist’s high ambitions. On the day before its release in Paris, and after months of anticipation in the press, critic Jules Janin proclaimed that “the appearance of such a book is an event” [“l’apparition d’un pareil livre est un événement”; 2]. Though the then-exiled Hugo himself would not step foot back in Paris for another eight years when the Second Empire would fall, he managed to become the talk of the French capital on 3 April 1862 when the first two volumes of Les Misérables went on sale. Copies sold out within three days, and the next three volumes were swept up within a matter of hours the following month. The spectacle of large queues of Parisians forming from the early hours of the morning along the Rue de Seine outside the Pagnerre bookshop, with Gustave Brion’s influential sketches postered across store windows (see Plates 1-3), may well be one of the earliest examples of “blockbusting” before the advent of cinema.
