You may find Charles Walton’s review of the new film version of Les Misérables interesting:

Victor Hugo was no Karl Marx, but he did believe in progress through revolution — a fact that viewres of Tom Hooper’s new film Les Misérables, would never guess.  Adapted from the immensely popular musical version of Hugo’s classic (first performed in Paris in 1980), Hooper’s cinematic rendering is stunningly staged and brilliantly performed, but it cuts the author in half: it gives us the religious Hugo, not the revolutionary one.  It tells the story of individual redemption through an odyssey of Catholic conscience, not of France’s collective redemption through political violence.

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Why does the movie-musical present revolution as pointlessly utopian rather than as a venerable, if tragic vehicle of change, as Hugo saw it?  The reason, perhaps, has to do with our own pessimistic view of revolution.  In recent decades, cynicism has replaced idealism, and revolution has come to be seen as the high road to totalitarianism.  Utopianism leads only to guillotines, gulags, and killing fields, not to freedom.  Today, we tend to see revolution not through Hugo’s optimistic lenses but through those of his pessimistic contemporary, Alexis de Tocqueville.

Please read this review for class on Monday.  Now that we’ve read a bit of Tocqueville ourselves  we’ll discuss whether you agree or disagree with Professor Walton.