The opening of the new movie of “Les Misérables” is complete with a slimmed-down Anne Hathaway—but was there anything for her to slim down from? And has anyone adequately remarked on how odd it is to have a film star who shares a name with the wife of our top bard?—about as likely as to have a Fellini actress named Beatrice Portinari. Anyway, the release of the new film is one of the truly cheering events of the Christmas season. Cheering because it suggests that what the boys in the quarterlies used to call “a continuity of culture” persists, that old stories can still be the best stories. We insist that this is so to our students and our kids often enough, but only when a big entertainment conglomerate is willing to make a box-office bet on it—not in the half-hearted way of an “updated” “Gatsby” but in the whole-hearted, bet-the-barricades manner of an operetta adaptation set in the Paris of the eighteen-thirties—does it seem truly so.

I will confess myself an unashamed, weepy fan of the Schönberg and Boublil adaptation—I use the verb “confess” because it is the kind of European-bombast musical that I normally hate, the kind that pretty much killed off the real, more informal and comic American kind of musical that it spawned. My good friend and colleague Anthony Lane has his usual witty way with the film elsewhere on this site; he lands, unavoidably, too, on that “b”-word. Those of us who were stirred by the stage version have to regret that the ancient Hollywood tradition, in which actors who are amateurs at the musical stage are thrust into roles shaped for professionals (Audrey Hepburn and Natalie Wood vibrate in memory) still reigns. Still, some shows are hard even for amateurs to kill—that’s why they become staples of the amateur stage—and I will continue to love “Les Mis,” in any form, for its scope, its excitement, and the bravado of “Bring Him Home.”

It’s no surprise, then, that “Les Misérables” can still hold an audience. Only the Dickens of “Oliver Twist” and “A Tale of Two Cities” can compete with Hugo as a popular poet who is also a great writer—and Dickens, for all his radicalism, worked more comfortably within the reformist society of Victorian England than Hugo, who wrote in exile in a time of tyranny in France, ever could. Dickens was the storyteller to a nation; Hugo was the conscience of a people. (A possibly apocryphal tale tells that shortly after the heavily hyped publication of “Les Mis,” Hugo, in exile from Louis Napoleon’s second Empire on the tiny island of Jersey, sent his publisher a telegram with a single character: “?” The response came back in perfect symmetry: “!” That exclamation point was meant to suggest the commercial success of the book, but it remains representative of the reader’s response, too.)

I had the nice assignment, a few years ago, of writing the introduction to Julie Rose’s masterly translation of the book, which caused me to reflect at length on why this novel, improbably long and gassy in spots, still mattered so much to so many. (I shall adapt some of my thoughts from that occasion for this one.) What separates the book from the operetta and, thus, the movie? Two things are worth underlining about the true nature of the book, since without them, no matter how moved we may be by Hugo’s vision, we risk missing its point and its purpose. It is not so much the action that is different—though I am always stunned at the number of people who think that the book deals with “the French revolution,” not knowing that it’s really about a long-forgotten revolt from 1832. No, the real absence from novel to musical is rooted in the DNA of the musical theatre, which welcomes big emotions but not always to complicated or ambivalent ones.

Hugo believed in, relished, luxuriated in, contradiction—he thought that we show ourselves most truly when we are seemingly most opposed to our double natures. This kind of characterization is the essence of the classic nineteenth-century novel—sometimes as mere hypocrisy; sometimes as the subtleties of inner scruples—but its sense of pervasive ambivalence is very hard to dramatize, and part of the wisdom of popular drama is to simplify it. (Even Shakespeare cannot quite write double speeches for double men; Hamlet is, on close inspection, more one thing after another than two things at once.) Hugo’s psychology is necessarily reduced by the act of dramatizing it.

And reduced it remains. To take one famous instance: it is, crucially, not Inspector Javert’s personal malice or mercilessness, as legend has it and the musical suggests, that drives him to hunt down Jean Valjean; it is his absolute commitment to justice, which he interprets as a commitment to rules and their administration, to the parallel paper universe of absolute laws. It is the crucial, therefore, that one of the climaxes of the books, Javert’s suicide, is, in a way, as much verbal as dramatic—the drama is driven from inside by the poetry, the language, and is preceded and climaxed by a flurry of Hugo’s antithesis. Thinking, Hugo tells us, in one of his most memorable aphorisms, always involves a certain amount of inner revolt. I think, therefore I doubt. Jean Valjean’s generosity towards Javert is what devastates him. “A benevolent malefactor, a compassionate convict, offering forgiveness in return for hate, favoring pity over revenge, preferring to himself be destroyed to destroying his enemy, saving the one who had brought him down, this loathsome angel, this vile hero, who outraged him almost as much as he amazed him.” Devastating generosity, loathsome angels—what destroys Javert is not his implacable lack of compassion but his absolute certitude, which is inadequate to Hugo’s conviction that life is inexorably two-pathed, even when we struggle for just one.

And this leads to the larger, if perhaps necessary, difference between the book and the show. Les Misérables has highly specific politics that aren’t simply the politics of popular revolt and “sentimental” liberty. Hugo’s whole life as a writer and statesman was devoted to a single vision, the dream of “the Concert of Europe,” which is what we now call the European Union. It was Hugo, who, during the International Peace Congress that was held in Paris in 1849, declared, “A day will come when you France, you Russia, you Italy, you England, you Germany, you all, nations of the continent, without losing your distinct qualities and your glorious individuality, will be merged closely within a superior unit and you will form the European brotherhood.” The idea of the European Union has by now been allowed to seem so narrowly bureaucratic that it is hard for us to recall that it once shone with the light of a romantic vision. Each year, the British historian John Julius Norwich publishes a “Christmas Cracker,” a commonplace book full of fragments of funny reading from the pas twelve months; for 2012, he includes Gerry Hanson pointing out that, while the Lord’s Prayer contains sixty-nine words, and the Declaration of Independence two hundred and ninety-seven, an E.U. directive on duck eggs contains twenty-eight thousand nine hundred and eleven words.

O.K., it has its absurdities. But the dream of European union was for Hugo not just a way of preventing the disasters of war and approaching the problem of poverty; it was a larger way of insisting that cultural pluralism—indeed, pluralism of every kind—was essential to freedom. Hugo kept Republican liberalism from seeming fatuous by insisting that the liberal Republican has a singular, mystic insight into the intrinsic doubleness of life. At the height of the twentieth century’s calamities, Hugo’s Romantic Republicanism could seem fragile and unconvincing; the Javerts then held the floor. There are many things wrong or encumbering or even foolish about the European Union, but when we watch “Les Misérables,” we should save a thought for how much of Hugo’s vision has now been achieved. What Hugo wanted, and what he used all that melodramatic and storytelling power to promote, was a Europe accepting in its pluralism, and widely based in its prosperity. His ghost now has it.