What Trump Missed at the Kennedy Center Production of “Les Mis”

On Wednesday evening, when the new Czar of All the Arts, Donald Trump, went to see “Les Misérables”—which is, we are told, along with “Cats,” and “Evita,” a favored musical of his—at the newly politicized Kennedy Center, in the company of his wife and his Vice-President and his wife, events proceeded about as expected. Some brave folks booed, some others cheered, and the Trumps and Vances made it through the show. (A delightfully audacious group of self-identified “drag queens” obtained a bloc of tickets and were heartily applauded as they took their seats. Victor Hugo, it might be mentioned, was legendary for championing sexual freedom; he even liked to write in the nude. No priest or prude, he doubtless would have enjoyed that little show.)

Several of the performers seem, bravely as well, to have skipped the performance—though that in itself is not a very effective gesture, since, as players who have performed in it assure us, the leads and the ensemble mingle in the piece, with many of the leads doubling as lesser characters. (Trump’s response: “I couldn’t care less.”) Creating a strong company, capable of recovering from any one absence, is, meaningfully, the point. Nonetheless, the missing performers were lectured by Richard Grenell, Trump’s new president of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—a man with, inevitably, no experience in any of them—that performers must perform for people of all political parties. This truth, of course, is blurred when the people invoking the genuine universalism of theatre have, by seizing ideological control of what was once a genuinely bipartisan institution, moved so ruthlessly to end the pluralism they pretend to preach.

The ironies of Trump’s embrace of “Les Mis” have been rehearsed often—a sign of the general fatigue about Trump’s outrages—but here goes again: “Les Mis” is a work by the master liberal and democratic spirit of the nineteenth century, Victor Hugo, seizing on an obscure Parisian revolt to dramatize the perpetual war between the people and the powers that be, particularly the struggle of dispossessed people against the arbitrary power of oligarchs and dictators combined. Even though one of the show’s numbers, “Do You Hear the People Sing?,” obviously intended to be a challenge to plutocratic power, has been taken up as a populist anthem by various Trumpite factions, the intended politics of Hugo’s book could not be more clear or less reactionary and authoritarian.

To make a lesser but a not entirely irrelevant point (to those of us who are passionate about the genre), “Les Mis,” written by the fine French team of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, is not a “musical” at all in our national sense. It is, rather, the kind of operetta that American musicals began in rebellion against back at the beginning of the twentieth century—the sneaking back of the operetta onto Broadway being one of the more despoiling and dispiriting cultural phenomenons of the same nineteen-eighties that saw the rise of Donald Trump. (And, conceivably, pitched on the same shaky ground: spectacle winning out over meaning.) “Les Mis,” let it be said, is much the best of the bunch, in part because of its artisanal excellence but mostly because of the eternal character of Victor Hugo, who is another level of writer from Gaston Leroux, who inspired Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rival “Phantom of the Opera.”

What might be worth underlining now is exactly who and what Hugo was in rebellion against when he wrote “Les Misérables.” Though the specific subject is the June Rebellion of 1832, Hugo’s larger subject, and particularly passionate target, was the “imperial” government of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte—Napoleon’s nephew, who’d been legitimately 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 the shocked Hugo into a self-imposed (if fearful) exile on the British island of Guernsey. The many poems and novels he wrote there, including “Les Misérables,” were all directed at the government. What appalled and obsessed Hugo most was its seemingly “normal nature,” even as it committed acts of unprecedented authoritarian menace and cruelty; it was a regime, he said, impossible not to greet at once with a grimace and a laugh.

Hugo’s now obscure book “Napoléon Le Petit,” from 1852, is still a masterpiece of political polemic, addressed to the French people, intending to rid them of the illusion that there was anything normal or acceptable about the new and eventually “imperial” government. It had destroyed the Second Republic and replaced it with the authoritarian rule of one man and his despots. Yet Hugo had to struggle to make his compatriots see Louis as he was, apart from the inherited glamour he had on loan from his still illustrious uncle—to see him as “a vulgar, commonplace personage, puerile, theatrical, and vain.” One who “loves finery, display, feathers, embroidery, tinsel and spangles, big words, and grand titles—everything that makes a noise and glitter, all the glassware of power.” (The glassware of power! What a phrase, implying the table setting, not the table.) Elsewhere, he concluded, in a memorable and still resonant aphorism, that “This man would tarnish the background of history; he absolutely sullies its foreground.”

Hugo outlined Louis Napoleon’s countless offenses—he had, in a wildly anti-republican spirit, ordered government troops to fire on protesters, Hugo among them, in the course of his coup. But Hugo was also tellingly aware, in exile, that his imprecations would likely fall on unlistening ears, since it was exactly Louis Napoleon’s peculiar gift to continue a sense of normalcy in one realm—that of daily Parisian life and commerce—even while destroying the norms of republican government that had unwittingly helped him to power. Caricatured by Honoré Daumier and his lesser followers always as a mountebank, a charlatan, a circus clown, Louis Napoleon could normalize the extent of his outrages by the seeming harmlessness of his absurdities.

And so, in this work of protest, it was not the song of the outraged citizens that Hugo bore witness to, as he would later in the decade in “Les Misérables.” It was the silence of his compatriots and fellow-citizens, many once seemingly so devoted to republican ideals, that shocked Hugo most. “It is painful to say it, but there is silence concerning this crime; it is there, men see it, touch it, and pass on to their business; shops are opened, the stock jobbers job, Commerce, seated on her packages, rubs her hands, and the moment is close at hand when everybody will regard all that has taken place as a matter of course,” he wrote. “A strange order of things surely, that has for its base supreme disorder, the negation of all law! Equilibrium resting on iniquity!”

Elsewhere in “Napoléon Le Petit,” Hugo’s sense of the futility of seeing things as they were had left him telling those who opposed the dictatorship to “Hope for nothing. You are poets and dreamers if you hope. Why, look about you: the tribune, the press, intelligence, speech, thought, all that was liberty, has vanished. Yesterday, these things were in motion, alive; today, they are petrified. Well, people are satisfied with this petrification, they accommodate themselves to it, make the most of it, conduct business on it, and live as usual. Society goes on, and plenty of worthy folk are well pleased with this state of things. Why do you want to change it, to put an end to it? Don’t deceive yourselves, it is all solid, all firm; it is the present and the future.”

No, we are not there yet. But we are told much the same thing—that what is happening, however at once farcical and horrible, is solid, and represents the present and future. But it is surely worth recalling that the sense of indignation which remains the bones and sinews of “Les Misérables” even in—especially in—its operetta form derives not from some abstract stand on human equality but from the exasperating offenses of a specific government in power, which Hugo was courageously determined to oppose, using his pen as the one instrument of protest, as, in that day, it still could be.