Profaning Secularism:Translating Language, Medium, and Ideology in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and its 2012 Film Adaptation

The 1862 novel <i>Les Misérables</i> by noted French author Victor Hugo is one of the most significant works of post-revolutionary French nationalism. In this paper, I investigate how this text becomes a quasi-religious document – one that holds at its sacred centre the potential of the reformed and post-revolutionary French nation – through a comparison with the 2012 film adaptation (dir. Tom Hooper) of the musical Les Misérables. Through a comparison of the 2012 film and Hugo’s original novel, this paper demonstrates the intersections of language and medium in shaping portrayals of nationalism and secularism, particularly as they are moulded to fit Anglophone ideals of ‘civil religion’ within a late capitalist milieu. I argue that translation and adaptation decisions made in Tom Hooper’s film highlight the way in which the sacralisation of the French state as depicted in Hugo’s 1862 novel is bound closely within the Francophone French context. In this way, I show how the most recent development of this story continues to highlight significant differences between the French and Anglophone worlds.