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The use of this term, alluded to in the film Gettysburg, apparently is first mentioned in John Esten Cooke's Mohun: Or, The Last Days of Lee and His Paladins, 1869, p. 325.
"They called themselves, 'Lee's Miserables.'
"That was a grim piece of humor, was it not, reader? And the name had a somewhat curious origin. Victor Hugo's work, Les Misérables had been translated and published by a house in Richmond; the soldiers, in the great dearth of reading matter, had seized upon it; and thus, by a strange chance the tragic story of the great French writer had become known to the soldiers in the trenches. Everywhere, you might see the gaunt figures in their tattered jackets bending over the dingy pamphlets – 'Fantine,' or 'Cosette,' or 'Marius,' or 'St. Denis,' and the woes of 'Jean Valjean,' the old galley-slave, found an echo in the hearts of these brave soldiers, immersed in the trenches and fettered by duty to their muskets or their cannon.
"Singular fortune of a writer! Happy M. Hugo! Your fancies crossed the ocean, and transmitted into a new tongue, whiled away the dreary hours of the old soldiers of Lee, at Petersburg!
"Thus, that history of 'The Wretched,' was the pabulum of the South in 1864; and as the French title had retained on the backs of the pamphlets, the soldiers, little familiar with the Gallic pronunciation, called the book 'Lees Miserables!' Then another step was taken. It was no longer the book, but themselves whom they referred to by that name. The old veterans of the army henceforth laughed at their miseries, and dubbed themselves grimly, 'Lee's Miserables!'
"The sobriquet was gloomy,. And there was something tragic in the employment of it; but it was applicable. Like most popular terms, it expressed the exact thought in the mind of every one – coined the situation into a phrase."
I don't know if the wartime Richmond edition of Les Misérables was abridged or censored in some way, or if readers just tended to skip over the many long, meandering descriptive excursions (as I expect most readers do today), but some of the sympathies expressed by Victor Hugo would surely not endear him to the Confederates.
Speaking of the human Impulse to Liberty, as manifested in the great Revolutionary leaders of the age, he declares:
"it makes of its logic the muscle of unanimous will; it multiplies itself under all sorts of forms of the sublime, it fills with its light Washington, Kosciusko, Bolivar, Bozzaris, Riego, Bem, John Brown, Garibaldi; it is everywhere where the future is being lighted up, at Boston in 1775, at the Isle de Leon in 1820, at Pesht in 1848, at Palermo in 1860, it whispers the mighty countersign: Liberty! In the ear of the American Abolitionists grouped about the boat at Harper's Ferry, and ..."
Later, the pure Romantic sentiment (not to be taken literally): "Victory, when it is in accord with progress, merits the applause of the people; but a heroic defeat merits its tender compassion. The one is magnificent, the other sublime. For our own part, we prefer martyrdom to success. John Brown is greater than Washington, and Pisacane is greater than Garibaldi."
All of this, of course, is in the context of the book. Hugo's personal sentiments can probably best be seen in his 1859 letter to the London News, regarding John Brown.
http://www.gavroche.org/vhugo/londonnews.gav
jno
"They called themselves, 'Lee's Miserables.'
"That was a grim piece of humor, was it not, reader? And the name had a somewhat curious origin. Victor Hugo's work, Les Misérables had been translated and published by a house in Richmond; the soldiers, in the great dearth of reading matter, had seized upon it; and thus, by a strange chance the tragic story of the great French writer had become known to the soldiers in the trenches. Everywhere, you might see the gaunt figures in their tattered jackets bending over the dingy pamphlets – 'Fantine,' or 'Cosette,' or 'Marius,' or 'St. Denis,' and the woes of 'Jean Valjean,' the old galley-slave, found an echo in the hearts of these brave soldiers, immersed in the trenches and fettered by duty to their muskets or their cannon.
"Singular fortune of a writer! Happy M. Hugo! Your fancies crossed the ocean, and transmitted into a new tongue, whiled away the dreary hours of the old soldiers of Lee, at Petersburg!
"Thus, that history of 'The Wretched,' was the pabulum of the South in 1864; and as the French title had retained on the backs of the pamphlets, the soldiers, little familiar with the Gallic pronunciation, called the book 'Lees Miserables!' Then another step was taken. It was no longer the book, but themselves whom they referred to by that name. The old veterans of the army henceforth laughed at their miseries, and dubbed themselves grimly, 'Lee's Miserables!'
"The sobriquet was gloomy,. And there was something tragic in the employment of it; but it was applicable. Like most popular terms, it expressed the exact thought in the mind of every one – coined the situation into a phrase."
I don't know if the wartime Richmond edition of Les Misérables was abridged or censored in some way, or if readers just tended to skip over the many long, meandering descriptive excursions (as I expect most readers do today), but some of the sympathies expressed by Victor Hugo would surely not endear him to the Confederates.
Speaking of the human Impulse to Liberty, as manifested in the great Revolutionary leaders of the age, he declares:
"it makes of its logic the muscle of unanimous will; it multiplies itself under all sorts of forms of the sublime, it fills with its light Washington, Kosciusko, Bolivar, Bozzaris, Riego, Bem, John Brown, Garibaldi; it is everywhere where the future is being lighted up, at Boston in 1775, at the Isle de Leon in 1820, at Pesht in 1848, at Palermo in 1860, it whispers the mighty countersign: Liberty! In the ear of the American Abolitionists grouped about the boat at Harper's Ferry, and ..."
Later, the pure Romantic sentiment (not to be taken literally): "Victory, when it is in accord with progress, merits the applause of the people; but a heroic defeat merits its tender compassion. The one is magnificent, the other sublime. For our own part, we prefer martyrdom to success. John Brown is greater than Washington, and Pisacane is greater than Garibaldi."
All of this, of course, is in the context of the book. Hugo's personal sentiments can probably best be seen in his 1859 letter to the London News, regarding John Brown.
http://www.gavroche.org/vhugo/londonnews.gav
jno
Bringing the