{"id":109161,"date":"2017-03-23T13:58:48","date_gmt":"2017-03-23T17:58:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=109161"},"modified":"2017-04-10T12:04:45","modified_gmt":"2017-04-10T16:04:45","slug":"hugo-inc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/23\/hugo-inc\/","title":{"rendered":"Hugo, Inc."},"content":{"rendered":"

Les Mis\u00e9rables was born of one of the riskiest\u2014and shrewdest\u2014deals in publishing history.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>

An 1878 caricature of Hugo from La Petite Lune<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Earlier this month, Penguin Random House bid more than sixty-five million dollars<\/a>\u00a0for the global rights to books by Barack and Michelle Obama, breaking the record for U.S. presidential memoirs. Despite the stratospheric price tag and the international headlines, the transaction lacked a certain excitement\u2014it was a fantastic deal, but without frisson. After all, a behemoth publisher signing an iconic political couple, brokered by a top litigation firm \u2026 it\u2019s merely another example of the establishment in lockstep.<\/p>\n

Compare this cozy corporate pact\u2014one that epitomizes big publishing today\u2014with the romance and risk associated with another record-shattering deal widely regarded as the publishing coup of all time. Signed in 1861 on a sunny Atlantic island, it tied an exiled French genius to an upstart Belgian house, resulting in the printing of that perennial masterwork, Les Mis\u00e9rables<\/em>. In a new book, The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of \u2018Les Mis\u00e9rables\u2019<\/em><\/a>, the professor and translator David Bellos condenses tranches of research into a gripping tale about Victor Hugo\u2019s masterpiece.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The deal, Bellos points out, was pathbreaking on several levels. First, Hugo earned an unprecedented sum: 300,000\u00a0francs (roughly $3.8 million in today\u2019s money) for an eight-year license. \u201cIt was a tremendous amount of money, and since it entitled the publisher to own the work for only eight years, it remains the highest figure ever paid for a work of literature,\u201d Bellos writes:\u00a0\u201cIn terms of gold it would have weighed around ninety-seven kilos [213 pounds]. It was enough money to build a small railway or endow a chair at the Sorbonne.\u201d<\/p>\n

Second, the neophyte Belgian publisher Albert Lacroix was the antithesis of a Penguin Random House. At the time, the twenty-eight-year-old Lacroix had cut his teeth at his uncle\u2019s printing press, and he didn\u2019t have so much as a sou to his name. Determined to sign Hugo on, he set up his own firm\u2014Lacroix, Verboeckhoven & Co\u2014and borrowed the entire amount for Hugo\u2019s advance from the Oppenheim bank in Brussels, where he had contacts. Bellos marks it as \u201cprobably the first loan ever made by a bank to finance a book,\u201d which means \u201cLes Mis\u00e9rables<\/em> stands at the vanguard of the use of venture capital to fund the arts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Third, Lacroix signed on knowing full well that his client was a political outcast: in 1851, his trenchant criticism of the dictatorial Louis-Napol\u00e9on Bonaparte met with such opprobrium that he fled France in a top hat and false beard, settling on Guernsey\u2014a tiny British outpost off the Normandy coast. Louis-Napol\u00e9on, could have, if he so chose, impounded the book in France, thus ruining Lacroix for life. And yet, infected by what we might call the audacity of hope, the \u201ccarrot-haired\u201d publisher swaggered on.<\/p>\n

Les Mis\u00e9rables <\/em>was published in 1862, but Hugo had started writing his fifteen-hundred-page \u201cmonster\u201d seventeen years earlier, in 1845. Forced to abandon it by his political misfortune, he left the fledgling manuscript, which was almost destroyed by rioters, with his devoted mistress, who ushered it to safety. From there, Hugo wrote the bulk of the novel on Guernsey, only traveling to Belgium for the last pages, which he wrote in a hotel room overlooking the battlefield of Waterloo.<\/p>\n

By 1861, the publishing grapevine had begun to drip with the news that the exiled French poet had a big novel to sell. Naturally, there was plenty of interest. Hugo had inherited Goethe\u2019s mantle of Europe\u2019s preeminent literary seer, and he was a proven crowd-pleaser, with the blockbuster Notre Dame de Paris<\/em> under his belt. But there was also unease at the dangling guillotine of censorship. Nevertheless, when Hugo was offered a handsome 150,000 francs by an established publisher-friend, he declined. How much did he want? It was quite simple, writes Bellos: \u201cHe wanted more than had ever been paid for a book.\u201d<\/p>\n

Enter the \u201csmall, slim, agitated\u201d Lacroix, a zealous Hugophile and hard-nosed businessman with a seemingly bottomless appetite for risk. After securing the Oppenheim bank loan, he bypassed Hugo\u2019s agent and wrote directly and sycophantically to his hero, making it clear that if the Master accepted his price, he would pay in cash, up front. When Hugo indicated interest, Lacroix sailed to Guernsey, where he got immediately down to brass tacks. \u201cHis conversational style,\u201d quips Bellos, \u201cseemed modeled on the charge of the Light Brigade.\u201d Negotiations were wrapped up in a day. On October 4, 1861, the two men signed their historic deal.<\/p>\n

The in toto amount of 300,000 francs that Lacroix agreed to pay in cash included 50,000 francs for translation rights\u2014a new concept in publishing at the time. Lacroix had bought the novel sight unseen, itself something of a rarity; more nail-bitingly still, Hugo had refused to reveal its length. He did, however, assuage Lacroix\u2019s fears by emphasizing that the novel was \u201ca social drama,\u201d not a political work.<\/p>\n

Hugo insisted on a cheap edition (apart from the usual fancy one) for the ordinary public. The recent arrival of the steam-powered steel press, coupled with increasingly inexpensive paper, made this possible when it may not have been in previous years. Even more crucially, as Bellos explains, the problem of rampant piracy was addressed by the first international copyright treaty: Signed in 1852 by France and Belgium, it put an end to the trade in pirated editions of French books, extending French copyright to Belgium and Belgium copyright to France. It also protected Belgian publishers from French censorship. Brussels, therefore, was the safest place to publish a Hugo novel. But knowing that France was the primary market, Lacroix cannily sublet to a French publisher, thus cutting himself off from any potential censorship losses.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Lacroix returned to Brussels with the contract in his pocket and a strut in his step. But the next six months turned out to be sheer hell. The harried publisher had to juggle typesetters, bankers, translators, lawyers, and, back in Guernsey, a querulous divo<\/em> who railed against every incorrect comma change. Every proof had to be dispatched to Hugo and sent back through squalls and rainstorms, leading to anxiety and delay. Lacroix begged Hugo to move temporarily to Brussels; he refused. Through the logistical nightmare, however, both men worked with Javertian fervor to meet the April deadline\u2014Hugo scratching furiously at the proofs with his goose quill, and Lacroix cracking the whip to keep the press clacking. \u201cIt was the greatest rush job his profession would ever know,\u201d writes Bellos.<\/p>\n

Next came the gargantuan publicity campaign\u2014designed to unleash such excitement that even an emperor with an axe to grind would think twice about depriving the masses of the sensational treat promised them. Press releases were distributed six months in advance, and the walls of Paris plastered with illustrations of Jean Valjean, Fantine, Cossette, Marius, and other characters from the novel. In a break with tradition, no advance review copies were sent out. The text was as fiercely embargoed as a Harry Potter novel\u2014probably, Bellos says, \u201cthe first work ever launched under embargo.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the morning of April 4, 1862, part 1\u00a0of Les Mis\u00e9rables<\/em>, called \u201cFantine,\u201d was released simultaneously in Brussels, Paris, Saint\u00a0Petersburg, London, Leipzig, and several other European cities. No book had ever had an international launch on this scale. Within a day, the first Paris printing of six thousand copies sold out to the avid queues that snaked around the bookstores. The critics and literati panned it brutally: Alexandre Dumas, inspired no doubt by Jean Valjean\u2019s sojourn through the sewers, sneered that reading the novel was akin to \u201cwading through mud.\u201d Gustave Flaubert privately mocked it as a \u201cbook written for catholico-socialist shitheads and for the philosophico-evangelical ratpack.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the people absolutely loved it. When forty-eight thousand copies of the \u201cCossette\u201d and \u201cMarius\u201d volumes went on sale a month later, \u201cHugonic fandom\u201d had reached such a fever pitch that shoppers in Paris arrived with handcarts and wheelbarrows to whisk away as many copies as possible. A peeved Flaubert delayed publishing Salammb\u00f4<\/em> by six months: the catholico-socialist shithead novel was monopolizing sales.<\/p>\n

Within a matter of months, a triumphant Lacroix had paid off his loan. His tenuous bond with Hugo had produced a moral and commercial juggernaut, a piece of intellectual property that would launch both social reform as well as a plethora of movies, musicals and video games. But perhaps inevitably, Lacroix tired of worshipping at \u201cdear Master\u2019s\u201d feet, and the two men fell out.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a hugely daring deal,\u201d Bellos told me on the phone. \u201cLacroix has to be congratulated on pulling it off single-handedly, outside the usual routines of publishing conglomerates. The Obama deal for two books is impressive, but it runs for the length of copyright, which could easily exceed a hundred years\u2014it runs for the authors\u2019 lifetimes plus seventy years. And there\u2019s no risk either book will be banned. Even if the Obamas decide to live on an island in the middle of the ocean, they won\u2019t have to have their text copied out by hand and physically transported by two boats, three trains, and a horse-drawn carriage to get it to their publisher.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nina Martyris<\/a> is a freelance journalist who writes on books.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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