Poverty in early French Revolution in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables

ABSTRACT

As the social human being cannot avoid that there are so many problems that we must face in this life. Those problems usually cause the human live in stressful condition. There are many researchers who want to analyze this condition through one of literary works, that is, novel. However, the researcher wants to analyze Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables which contains of many social problems. The researcher wants to analyze one of social problems portrayed in this novel, that is, poverty. This research is important because it is very useful not only for the researcher but also for other people to see how Hugo describes the poverty in the novel. It can be taken some experiences how the people face the stressful condition and also solve the problem. The objectives of this research are to find out the kinds of poverty described by Victor Hugo and to find out the extent to which poverty in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables reflects the real condition of French society in early revolution.

This research is a literary criticism and uses the sociological approach to apply the concept of social theory. Poverty becomes an object of sociological research because this research discusses about how the society live in this world. Since this study emphasizes on the analysis of a literary work, it is then, classified as literary criticism. The primary data of this study are collected from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, and the secondary data are gathered from French social phenomena in eighteenth century when the revolution happened

Based on the researcher’s analyses, there are two findings that can be stated to answer the problems of the study. First, Poverty portrayed in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables is kind of absolute poverty. From the beginning of the story, Victor Hugo sends the readers see the characters which are described by Victor Hugo in his Les Miserables have to face the difficult of their life. Hugo describes how the dissability of the characters as French society to fulfill their basic necessities such as food, house and clothes. Second, the researcher found that absolute poverty in Les Miserables reflects the real social condition of French society. In the eighteenth century, poverty existed in French society. Most of the poor society came from peasant family who worked as servant and laborer.