The Man Who Laughs

The Man Who Laughs Review

Victor Hugo published L’Homme qui rit in 1869, two years before the fall of the Second Empire that had kept him in exile for nearly two decades. He was sixty-seven years old, and the anger driving the novel is the anger of a man who has spent a very long time watching the powerful abuse the powerless with confident indifference. It is his most openly political novel — which is saying something — and its central image is one of the most disturbing in nineteenth-century fiction.

Gwynplaine was abandoned as a child in the snow by the Comprachicos, a gang that specialised in purchasing children and surgically deforming them for the amusement market — producing dwarves, contortionists, and in Gwynplaine’s case, a man whose mouth has been carved into a permanent, rictus grin. He cannot frown, cannot express grief or rage or pain, cannot communicate his inner state through his face. He laughs whether he wants to or not. He is discovered near-frozen in a snowdrift by a wandering mountebank named Ursus, who takes him in along with Dea, a blind infant girl he finds at the same time. The three grow up together as a carnival troupe, Gwynplaine performing his grin for audiences who find it hilarious, Dea loving him without seeing what he looks like.

The discovery, in the novel’s second half, that Gwynplaine is the disinherited son of an English lord sets in motion the machinery of melodrama that Hugo manages with absolute confidence even as it strains credulity. The scene in the House of Lords — where Gwynplaine attempts to make a passionate speech about poverty and injustice while the assembled peers laugh helplessly at his grin — is the novel’s political centrepiece and one of the finest things Hugo ever wrote. The laugh they cannot suppress is the same as his: both involuntary, both expressive of something entirely different from what the face shows.

Hugo’s title character is the ancestor of a long line of figures whose enforced performance conceals their humanity — the clown, the jester, the entertainer who must produce joy regardless of his circumstances. The Joker, the most famous of Gwynplaine’s descendants in popular culture, was directly inspired by this novel. Hugo’s contribution to the tradition of the man whose face has been turned against him is to insist that the mask is a political condition, not merely a personal one: someone made Gwynplaine this way, and that someone had reasons that served their interests.

From Gwynplaine to the Joker

The cultural afterlife of The Man Who Laughs is extraordinary, and it runs largely through one image: the carved, permanent grin. In 1928, Paul Leni directed a celebrated silent-film adaptation starring Conrad Veidt, whose makeup as Gwynplaine — the fixed, ghastly smile — directly inspired the creators of the Joker when they designed Batman’s nemesis a decade later. Through that lineage, Gwynplaine became the ancestor of one of the most recognizable figures in modern popular culture, and Hugo’s central conceit — the face frozen into a smile that mocks its owner’s suffering — has been endlessly reworked in comics, film, and horror. What is often lost in those descendants is Hugo’s specific point: Gwynplaine’s grin is not a personal quirk or a sign of madness but a political mutilation, deliberately inflicted to turn a human being into a commodity for the amusement of the powerful. The novel insists that the mask was imposed, and that someone profited from imposing it.

Hugo’s Neglected Late Masterpiece

The Man Who Laughs has never enjoyed the popularity of Les Misérables or The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, and its reputation has suffered for the same reasons that make it fascinating: it is extreme, melodramatic, structurally unwieldy, and prone to the long historical and philosophical digressions that Hugo could never resist. Set in late-17th-century England rather than France, it is also one of his strangest imaginative excursions. But its best passages — above all the catastrophic scene in the House of Lords, where Gwynplaine’s impassioned plea for the poor is drowned out by the aristocracy’s helpless laughter at his face — rank among the most powerful Hugo ever wrote, fusing his social rage with an unforgettable central symbol. For readers willing to accept the conventions of nineteenth-century melodrama and Hugo’s expansive style, it is a rewarding and unjustly neglected novel, and an essential text for understanding where one of pop culture’s most enduring images was born. It is best approached as what it is: a furious, gothic fable about power, performance, and the human cost of spectacle.

The novel’s emotional core, easy to overlook amid its political fury and gothic machinery, is the relationship between Gwynplaine and Dea — the blind girl who loves him precisely because she cannot see the grin that horrifies everyone else, and who perceives his true nature directly. Their bond is Hugo’s tender counter-argument to the cruelty of the world he depicts: a love founded on inner reality rather than surface, immune to the spectacle that defines and imprisons Gwynplaine in every other context. It is also the source of the novel’s devastating final movement. Readers who persevere through Hugo’s digressions and his elaborate plotting are rewarded with an ending of genuine tragic force, one that fuses the personal and the political in a way only Hugo at full power could achieve. For all its excesses, The Man Who Laughs earns its place among his major works, and its central image and its broken-hearted love story linger long after the historical scaffolding fades.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Hugo’s most extreme novel, and the one whose central image has proved most durable in the century and a half since he created it.