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On Wednesday night, when the new lord of all the arts, Donald Trump, attended a screening of Les Miserables — reportedly along with Cats and Evita, his favorite musical — at the newly politicized Kennedy Center with his wife and the vice president and his wife, things went about as expected. Some brave souls booed, others cheered, and the Trumps and Vances walked calmly through the show. (A remarkable group of drag queens, who had been given a block of tickets, were greeted with warm applause as they took their seats. Victor Hugo, it should be noted, was a legendary champion of sexual liberation; he even liked to write naked. No priest or prude could have enjoyed this little show.)
A couple of performers also seemed to have bravely skipped the performance — though that’s not exactly an effective gesture, since, as the actors argue, the leads and ensemble are intertwined in the play, with many key characters doubling for minor ones. (Trump’s response: “I don’t care.”) Building a strong company that can cope with any absences is, after all, the point. Still, the absent performers were lectured by Richard Grenell, Trump’s new president of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts — a man who certainly has no experience in this area — about how artists should perform for people of all political persuasions. That truth, of course, is eroded when those who call for true universalism in the theater seize ideological control of what was once a genuinely bipartisan organization and take such ruthless steps to destroy the pluralism they claim to defend.
The irony of Trump’s embrace of Les Misérables has often been noted—a testament to the general weariness of Trump’s outrages—but here’s another: Les Misérables is the work of that 19th-century master of the liberal and democratic spirit, Victor Hugo, who seized on an obscure Parisian riot to dramatize the eternal struggle between the people and the powerful, particularly the struggle of the dispossessed against the arbitrary rule of oligarchs and dictators. Even though one of the show’s numbers, “Do You Hear the People Singing?” is clearly intended as a challenge to plutocratic authority, it has been adopted as a populist anthem by various factions of Trumpists; the intended politics of Hugo’s book could not be clearer or less reactionary and authoritarian.
To make a less significant but not entirely inconsequential point (for us who are obsessed with the genre), Les Misérables, written by the brilliant French team of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, is not a “musical” in our national sense. Rather, it is the kind of operetta that American musicals began to rebel against back in the early twentieth century—the operetta’s clandestine return to Broadway was one of the most devastating and depressing cultural phenomena of the very 1980s when Donald Trump began to rise. (And perhaps on the same shaky ground: spectacle over substance.) Les Misérables, it should be noted, is the best of the bunch, partly because of its performances but mostly because of the timeless character of Victor Hugo, a writer on a different level from Gaston Leroux, who inspired Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera.
What is perhaps worth emphasizing here is who and what Hugo was rebelling against when he wrote Les Misérables. Although the specific subject is the June Revolt of 1832, Hugo’s larger theme, and particularly passionate target, was the “imperial” government of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte – Napoleon’s nephew, who had been duly elected president, ironically with Hugo’s support – in 1848. Louis Napoleon seized power in a coup d’état in 1851 and proclaimed himself Napoleon III, sending a shaken Hugo into self-imposed (if horrific) exile on the British island of Guernsey. Many of the poems and novels he wrote there, including Les Misérables, were directed against the government. What horrified and obsessed Hugo most was his seemingly “normal nature,” even when it committed acts of unprecedented authoritarian menace and cruelty; it was, he said, a regime that could not be greeted without grimace and laughter.
Now largely forgotten, Hugo's 1852 Napoleon the Little remains a masterpiece of political polemic, aimed at the French people, intent on disabusing them of the illusion that there was anything normal or acceptable about the new and ultimately “imperial” government. It had destroyed the Second Republic and replaced it with the authoritarian rule of one man and his despots. But Hugo had to fight to get his countrymen to see Louis for what he was, beyond the inherited glamour he had borrowed from his still-illustrious uncle—to see him
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