Les Mis Sequel Cleared by Courts

The floodgates are now opened:

Last night, after seven years of legal wrangling, Paris’s court of
appeal finally ruled in favour of the publishers and the two sequels,
saying they did not constitute an attack on Hugo’s rights.

The
verdict, seen as a landmark decision, was hailed as victory by French
publisher Plon and the author, François Cérésa. Several other
publishing houses were said to be standing by to develop sequels to
various classics, including another continuation of that other great
untouchable, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

As the article notes, this would be far from the first time Hugo’s work was maligned by crass commercialism:

Some theorists wondered if [Hugo] would have been more offended by the two
sequel novels or by Disney’s cartoon of his work Notre Dame de Paris,
as the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Others wondered why a film adaptation
of Les Misérables that saw it transposed to the second world war, an
earlier sequel in 1996, or the sale of tacky souvenirs linked to the
novel had not caused a fuss.

In my own opinion, who really cares? Les Mis, Bovary, et al. will live, these tacky sequels will die off in the first freeze of shifting interest, no one will remember their names.

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