Les Miserables: Volume 5, Book 2 Summary & Analysis

Chapter 1 The narrator calls Paris’s sewer system its intestine—heaps of filth and mud that could directly contribute to flowery meadows and nourished earth, were they not to be deposited through France’s rivers into the Atlantic. If only a drainage system could conduct pure water from fields into the cities, and send human waste back to the fields, production would increase and the problem of misery would be lightened. Instead, there is waste and disease. Beneath one Paris is another Paris of sewers, with its own streets, squares, alleys, and circulation of filth.

Chapter 2 If Paris were to be lifted off like a cover, the sewers would look like a large tree grafted onto the river, with branches and twigs stemming out of it. The sewer of Paris is ancient and impressive, notes the narrator. It has served as a tomb and an asylum, a hiding place for thieves. The narrator calls it the “conscience of the city,” with shadows but no longer secrets. All civilization’s filth is laid bare, rather than concealed as above ground. The social observer, then, should enter the sewers so as to better understand society, and reconstruct the city from the cesspool.

Chapter 3 At some times in Paris’s history the sewer has been flooded, sending filth back into the city and spreading mud across the plazas and streets. Even at the beginning of the 19th century the sewer was a mysterious place, where few people ventured or cared to think about trying to clear. The sewer was considered the lower world. Nevertheless, one day in 1805, the Minister of the Interior told Napoleon that an intrepid man had declared he wanted to visit the sewers of Paris. This man’s name was Bruneseau.

Chapter 4 Once Bruneseau had crossed the threshold of the sewers, eight out of twenty laborers refused to follow him further. The job necessitated cleaning, counting grates and vents, mapping the branches, and tracking the currents. They found vaults from the 17th and 18th centuries and the hollows of ancient dungeons. The visit took seven years, from 1805 to 1812, and during this time the entire sewer was disinfected, tamed to some extent, so that it was no longer the terrifying, wild cavern of the past.

Chapter 5 Today the sewer is clean and cold. It’s been transformed by a man the world forgets: Bruneseau.

Chapter 6 However, Paris’s underground labyrinth is now ten times as large as it was at the start of the century. The ground upon which the city is built is inhospitable to the construction of sewers, difficult to dig into but quick to crumble. In 1832, the cholera epidemic—which led to a vast sewer reconstruction—had not yet arrived. So in some places it was still the same sewer of antiquity, with enormous ditches and uneven terrain, a cesspool of disease.