Napoleon in Les Misérables

Major character

Emperor of the French whose presence and defeat at Waterloo shape Hugo’s meditation on history, chance, and decline.

Who is Napoleon?

Napoleon appears primarily through the narrator’s sustained historical and battlefield portraits centered on June 18, 1815. He is the returning Emperor at the head of the French armies at Waterloo: a brilliant, charismatic strategist who arrives in good humor, inspects the field, issues orders, and seeks a decisive victory that will restore his political fate. In Hugo’s account Napoleon wants mastery of the battle and, more broadly, the maintenance of the imperial project; he marshals columns, dispatches cavalry, and interprets reconnaissance in pursuit of that end. The chapters show him both commanding—dictating movements, encouraging marshals, resolving to crush the enemy—and subject to material conditions, bad guides, and accidents (rain, mud, the hidden hollow road) that undermine his plans. Ultimately his conduct at Waterloo, from confident inspection to the catastrophe of failed charges and the collapse of the Imperial Guard, provides the concrete action by which Hugo explores larger questions of genius, contingency, and political eclipse.

Personality

Charismatic: He rides the lines with confidence and quips, rallying generals and observing the army at Rossomme in a buoyant mood (Volume 2, Chapter 7).
Strategic: He composes orders, selects observation posts, and plans concentrated artillery and cavalry actions to break Wellington’s center (Volume 2, Chapters 4 and 8).
Imperial certainty: He abstracts individual losses into a single tally toward victory, maintaining composure and a sense of destiny even as the battle turns (Volume 2, Chapter 8).
Vulnerable to contingency: His plan is foiled by rain-delayed artillery, a faulty guide, and the hidden hollow road that destroys a cuirassier column (Volume 2, Chapters 3, 8–9).
Symbolic decline: Hugo frames Waterloo as the eclipse of Napoleon’s era and a cosmic reversal that marks the end of an imperial ascendancy (Volume 2, Chapters 16 and 18).

Character arc

Napoleon’s arc in the chapters moves from commanding optimism to catastrophic reversal and symbolic eclipse. He first appears as the decisive, upbeat leader who, despite illness and weather, inspects the battlefield with jokes, clear orders, and the appetite for a final, decisive victory (Volume 2, Chapter 7). As the day progresses he reads the field, commits massed cavalry and artillery, and interprets reconnaissance in ways that aim for crushing results (Chapters 8–10). Yet a chain of material accidents—rain-soaked ground delaying artillery, a perfidious or mistaken guide, and the unforeseen hollow road—turn tactical maneuvers into disaster (Chapters 3, 8–9). The catastrophic cavalry losses and the destruction of elite formations culminate in the rout of the Guard and the collapse of the imperial hope (Chapter 15). By later chapters Hugo treats Waterloo as the moment of Napoleon’s historical eclipse: the Empire yields to Restoration politics and Napoleon becomes the emblem of a vanished order rather than the continuing master of Europe (Chapter 18). The arc is therefore less a personal conversion than a historical fall from dominance into the status of a vanished colossus.

Relationships

Wellington Napoleon’s principal tactical opponent at Waterloo; Hugo contrasts Napoleon’s bold genius with Wellington’s steadier, more calculating method.
Marius Pontmercy Marius idealizes and rehabilitates Napoleon in his personal political conversion, making the Emperor an object of youthful admiration.
M. Gillenormand Gillenormand represents the conservative domestic opposition to Napoleonic sympathy; his conflict with Marius is intensified by Marius’s devotion to Napoleon.

Quotes by Napoleon

““Who is this good man who is staring at me?””
Volume 1, Chapter 1Napoleon’s sudden question in the anteroom initiates the anecdote that leads to Myriel’s episcopal appointment.

“We are in accord.”
Volume 2, Chapter 7Said while observing the English camp-fires at night, revealing his confident fatalism before the battle.

“We have ninety chances out of a hundred.”
Volume 2, Chapter 7Spoken to Ney despite poor weather and fatigued troops, showing his buoyant optimism and confidence in victory.

“It is a pity.”
Volume 2, Chapter 7A brief phrase of haughty pity when he sees the massing Scotch Grays, the only note of pity amid his cheerfulness.

“I see yonder a cloud, which seems to me to be troops.”
Volume 2, Chapter 11Napoleon’s field observation introduces the ambiguous sighting that confuses the staff and delays clear action.

Why Napoleon matters

Napoleon functions less as a conventional novel protagonist and more as a fulcrum for Hugo’s historical and philosophical inquiry: his presence concentrates questions about genius, fate, contingency, and moral magnitude. The emperor’s bold tactics and eventual defeat dramatize Hugo’s claim that grand human wills encounter material chance and broader moral-historical forces. Waterloo becomes a parable of the limits of personal mastery: greatness can be dazzling and decisive yet still be unseated by weather, guides, and the moral direction of an age. Through Napoleon Hugo probes the tension between heroic agency and the impersonal mechanics of history.

More Les Misérables characters

Jean ValjeanProtagonist
CosetteMajor character
Marius PontmercyMajor character
CourfeyracMajor character
JavertAntagonist
ThénardierAntagonist
EnjolrasMajor character
MMariusMajor character

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