Last year, I talked about how fans depict race in Les Misérables fanworks. This year, the man himself. In over 150 years of scholarship, adaptation and fandom, people remain surprised that Hugo uses racialised language for his characters, and so this paper begins the process of cataloguing how Victor Hugo use the language of race and racism to describe the characters of Les Mis. I consider the misappropriation of the vocabulary of enslavement, the Goodness of white female beauty, English translations that minimise links to Blackness, the three canonical Black characters of the novel, and the use of criminal psyiogomy as descriptors. I conclude that while no named protagonist is explicitly a person of colour, it is vital to understand who is racialised as white, and who is not, to further our contemporary conceptions of Classic novels.

Nemo Martin