Victor Hugo’s resumption in 1861 under the title “Les Misérables” of the project of “Les Misères” started in 1845 characterized two steps of enunciation. Nevertheless, we have chosen to consider this work like a homogeneous discourse – in the linguistic sense of the term – i.e. like a series of utterances in order to analyze its political and social vocabulary considering that the publishing guaranteed the expression. The expression makes of it a discourse in the frame of communication; a discourse directed to a recipient more concerned than anyone else : the people. The project of the work gives it the part of a will. The political factor is most important for the writer and the reminder of republican principles leads him to study the roots of the French Revolution, particularly in the years 1792-1793 when Robespierre and the committee of Public safety led France. The inheritors of the Republic of An I, in the work, are the insurrectionists of the barricade of the street of La Chanvrerie in June 1832 inspired to Victor Hugo by the historical barricade of Saint Merry. The importance given to history as a structuring element of the narrative led us to extend the lexical corpus to the places and characters of the narrative and to the historical veracity. The inventory of the political vocabulary of the systems, events, forms of government, institutions, categories and social phenomena, and ideological and philosophical values is the matter of the second part. The methods of distributional and transformational linguistics, the notion of “linguistic function” borrowed from Roman Jakobson and “multivocal speech” inherited from Julien Greimas, permit the analysis of the words in their restrictive context. This is the topic of the third part entitled “What words mean”.
Words and evils, extracts of a discourse to the people with the political and social abstract vocabulary in Victor Hugo’s novel “Les Misérables”