Bellos has not written a volume of literary criticism, or at least not a conventional one. Instead he paints in fine lines and great splashes of colour a backdrop to what he calls the novel of the century. Hugo began Les Misérables in 1845 in Paris and completed it seventeen years and 1,500 pages later in Guernsey, where he had found exile, far from the autocratic Napoleon III. Any French schoolchild could recite the book’s list of characters: the ill-starred Fantine, who loses her job and then her life, leaving her daughter Cosette an orphan; the repellent Thénardiers, hucksters both of them, creating and living off the misfortune of others; the ex-con Valjean, who breaks parole and reinvents himself as a virtuous and respected man, hunted by the zealous police inspector Javert, who recognises him when he lifts the cart to rescue Fauchelevent; the rebel and revolutionary Marius, who falls in love with the adult Cosette, whom Valjean raised after her mother’s death. But Hugo sought to do something more ambitious than merely thread together these individual stories (a daunting task in any case). His novel, in essence, is a history of France from the end of Napoleon Bonaparte’s reign to the June Rebellion of 1832, replete with long discourses on philosophy and morality, on water and war, on street urchins and King Louis-Philippe – essays that do not service the plot in any ostensible manner, but which nonetheless illustrate the tectonic shifts in French politics and society in these years.

Taking his cue from Hugo (though more tersely), Bellos writes about the change in meaning of the word misérable – from someone afflicted by ill fortune to someone without money. He explains the etymology of galérien, the word Valjean uses to describe himself to the kindly Bishop Myriel: though galley-slaves had not existed on warships since the 1740s, when new, heavy cannons were invented and needed to be fitted below decks in the space oarsmen traditionally occupied, the word retained its non-literal meaning. He writes beautifully about the drab palette of everyday life in France in the first half of the century – fabrics, paints, and flags coloured from vegetable, mineral, or animal extracts – which would change only in the 1860s when a young English student discovered that aniline, a coal extract, could be used to make a rich purple dye; other colours soon followed, inaugurating a new, technicolor France. He dissects French coinage (‘The sets of words that people used for the coins they exchanged or kept in their purses reflected the class to which they belonged and the kind of transaction they were engaged in’) and the character names Hugo invented with such tender wit. He writes about paper and printing: how the supply of the former was dependent on the amount of silk and cotton clothing cast off by Parisians, which was then pulped and turned into (expensive) paper; and how before 1860 presses were made from wood, capable only of a run of 3,000 copies before the whole book needed to be typeset once more from scratch. (‘Around 1860, steel, stereotype, steam and cheap paper all converged to lower the cost of reading at long last.’) And he lists the obsolete words Hugo rescued and employed with such delight: chiragre (‘suffering gout in the wrist or hand’), cacolet (‘a chair fitted to the back of a mule for carrying travellers in mountainous districts’), maringotte (‘a small horse-drawn vehicle used by travelling clowns and players’).

Victor Hugo, 1875 (photograph by Comte Stanisław Julian Ostroróg dit Walery, via Wikimedia Commons)The effect is a little like the piecework Fantine undertakes as a seamstress in Valjean’s factory: patches of fabric sewn together to form a beautiful object. Bellos is a strikingly modest writer, though his knowledge is immense. (An uncharacteristic slip: France’s first passenger railway ran between Paris and Saint-Germain-en-Laye, not Paris and Versailles as Bellos twice asserts.) Does he (and Les Misérables) live up to his title? It’s impossible to say. Hugo’s novel is breathtakingly far-reaching – simultaneously a taut drama and a careful analysis of the unrest and rebellion that forged modern France. Bellos is grateful (he writes in the preface) to the country that gave us the Rights of Man, photography, cinema, pasteurised milk, the Statue of Liberty, great authors and composers, painters and poets; this genial saunter through the writing, publishing, and reading of Les Misérables is his way of saying thank you.