Nothing Like a Dream

Victor Hugo was a French writer. His most famous novel, Les Misérables, came out in 1862. It is a very long book in five parts. In the third part, Hugo writes about a group of young students in Paris. They have a big dream: a France with no king, and a better life for poor people.

The students call their club “the Friends of the A B C”. It is a joke: in French, A B C sounds like abaissé — “the people at the bottom”. Their leader in the book is a young man called Enjolras.

Here, Hugo writes the famous sentence. In French it is: « Rien n'est tel que le rêve pour engendrer l'avenir. » Today people usually say it in English like this: “There is nothing like a dream to create the future.” But old English translations of the book use a more difficult word: engender. It means “to make something be born”. And in the book, the sentence doesn't stop there. Hugo adds: “Utopia to-day, flesh and blood to-morrow.” — a perfect world that is only a dream today can be real tomorrow.

Victor Hugo was born in 1802 in Besançon, in the east of France. On 5 June 1832, when he was thirty, he was writing in a park in Paris, the Tuileries Gardens. Suddenly he heard guns. He didn't go home — he walked towards the noise. In a narrow street, the gates at both ends closed, and he was trapped. He hid between some columns while bullets flew for fifteen minutes.

In 1851 a new ruler, Louis Napoleon, took all the power in France. Hugo said he was a traitor, and he left the country. He lived in Brussels, then on the island of Jersey, and from 1855 on the island of Guernsey, in a big house called Hauteville House. In 1859 he could go home — but he said no. He didn't want to stop criticising the ruler.

He finished Les Misérables while he was in exile. When it came out in 1862, many critics didn't like it. But ordinary readers loved it, and the first part sold out very fast.

The fight in the book really happened. Many people think Les Misérables is about the French Revolution of 1789 — but it isn't. In 1832 France had a king, Louis-Philippe. That spring, a terrible illness, cholera, killed more than 18,000 people in Paris. On 1 June it killed General Lamarque, a general who was popular with poor people.

At his funeral on 5 June, there was a huge crowd. Someone held up a red flag with the words “Liberty or Death”, and the shooting started. About 3,000 rebels built barricades — walls across the streets. But there were many more soldiers. By the evening of 6 June, the fight was over. About 800 people were killed or hurt. In the book, Enjolras and his friends die on their barricade. Their dream failed.

Or did it? In 1848, the king lost his power. In 1870, France became a republic again, and Hugo came home after almost nineteen years. When he died in 1885, more than two million people came to his funeral. The students in the book never see the future they dreamed of — but in the end, France had no king.