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Do You Hear the People Sing?
Do You Hear the People Sing?
Can reality be an adaptation?
This song comes up from time to time, as an anthem for people standing up against the powerful. And it SUPER works, because that’s the role it plays in the show, and especially in the movie that this video comes from, where it’s placed at the literal start of the uprising. If those rebels in 1832 had this song, it’s easy to imagine them using it in this way. So people adapt it for use in their own real-life social movements, from a musical adapted from a book adapted from… real life.
So, let’s talk about it, and what it’s about in its original context: the June Rebellion of 1832.
As a prelude to that, let’s be clear that both parts (the main song and the reprise at the end of the show), are creations of the authors of the musical. Music by Claude-Michel Schönberg, English lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer, after an original (quite different) French version by Alain Boublil. So, as much as I would also love for Hugo to have written “Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise,” he did not. Sorry.
But he COULD have, because of a few things that I think people forget (or don’t know at all) when they’re singing it as they march to hoped-for revolution. 1) June 1832 was a pretty darned unsuccessful attempt at revolution and 2) Hugo sees it as a reason for hope anyway.
First, June 1832 wasn’t much more than a street skirmish, one of many during the July Monarchy in France. It was put down fairly quickly and the fact that they spend only one night at the barricade in the novel and the musical isn’t acceleration for dramatic effect, it’s historical. The fact that we still give it any thought at all today is pretty much down to Les Misérables.
So, you might say, if it’s about such a terribly unsuccessful example of rebellion, why use this song in protests around the world, from Hong Kong to Turkey to the U.S., never mind globally in online discussions of rebellion? The easy answer is because, as I said at first, it works emotionally, especially if people either don’t know or don’t care about that historical context. But I think there’s another reason, too, in context: it means it doesn’t matter if you succeed.
Hugo was very clear in the novel that, even though the June Rebellion failed, it participated in giving birth to the future. Enjolras ensures his friends, as the sun rises on June 6 and the barricade looks doomed, that they are paying a “toll,” contributing to purchasing the future. Not by winning their battle, but by fighting it. Show up, build your barricade, and you’ve already won.
The way things end for Enjolras & co. may be pretty dark, but, well, even the darkest night will end, and the sun will rise.
February 2025: US Army Chorus Performance
February 2025: US Army Chorus Performance
In February 2025, the US Army Chorus performed this song in a way that was really interesting, for its details and its context. I discussed it on social media approximately thus:
I’ve got a former theater kid and a current Les Misérables professor in my head bickering about who gets to comment on that Army Chorus performance. I’m going to see if I can get them to cooperate.
So the obvious thing, about which I share everyone’s 👏✊ is that the ARMY sang THAT SONG with you-know-who in attendance. YEAH. As Bishop Myriel would be proud of Bishop Budde, Enjolras would be proud of these folks.
But I think there’s more to it than that. You see, they didn’t sing the version of “Do You Hear the People Sing” that you’d expect, the one at the start of the uprising. They sang the reprise, from the Finale. The lyrics are different – let’s compare.
What we hear most often is the main song, at the start of the uprising. There, the lyrics are:
Do you hear the people sing?
Singing the song of angry men?
It is the music of the people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!
In the key part that we hear in the video, they sing:
[Do you hear the people sing
Lost in the valley of the night?
It is the music of a people
Who are climbing to the light.
For the wretched of the earth,]
*There is a flame that never dies.
Even the darkest night will end
And the sun will rise.
*(The video circulating starts here.)
In the Finale version, this is then followed by more new lyrics, which we also hear in the Army Choir video:
They will live again in freedom
In the garden of the Lord.
We will walk behind the ploughshare
We will put away the sword.
The chain will be broken
And all men will have their reward!
And after this, it picks up lyrically where the main version left off:
Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
[Somewhere*] Beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?
*(This word appears in the Finale, not the main version.)
And ends with something else new(ish):
Do you hear the people sing?
Say, do you hear the distant drums?
It is the future that they bring
When tomorrow comes!
So why is this SO MUCH MORE INTERESTING? Because in the finale, all the characters singing have died in the course of the plot – most of them, by the numbers, at the barricades that they’re being called to in the main version of the song.
The Finale version borrows heavily from Enjolras in the book, looking out into the future as the barricade is seeming increasingly doomed, and seeing it as bright and hopeful, paid for with the blood that they will spill, even if they lose.
The Finale reaches out from a much more complicated place than the main version of the song, to call for a much more complicated type of resistance.
The original calls us to get angry and rise against oppression, which is GOOD. In the Finale we’re “climbing to the light,” and tending the “flame that never dies,” which is BETTER.
(And isn’t it ironic that the Army Choir chose to sing the part about walking behind ploughshares and putting away swords?)
Essentially, the message in the Finale – sung by the Friends of the ABC, sure, but also, Fantine, Éponine, Jean Valjean…. – is that even if it looks bleak, even if you’ve ALREADY LOST, there is hope, there is the future. The darkest night will end, and so forth.
And they invite you to join them, even then. Especially then.
It’s all of the sympathetic characters in this vast story, who have died trying to do good in an array of different ways, led by Jean Valjean, breaking the fourth wall, calling you from beyond the grave. (Or, alternately, this superb adaptation of the moment to film. Note how Cosette seems to hear the voices too.) That invitation is VERY DIFFERENT than when it’s the Friends of the ABC, in the plot of the show, inviting you to a specific, politically-oriented uprising.
Then, after “Do You Hear the People Sing,” it struck me as odd that the Army Chorus segued to “One Day More”... I initially thought perhaps they chose it because it’s well known (and widely performed in flash mobs, parodies, etc.) and an impressive choral feat, and there wasn’t much more to it. But I think that’s wrong too.
See, they went right from “It is the future that they bring when tomorrow comes,” from the Finale to “The time is now, the day is here” from “One Day More,” and then performed the last section of the song. In that section, all the characters’ themes, representing an array of different concerns converge in counterpoint, such that no one clear set of lyrics is easy to follow for long. Earlier in the song, we would have already heard each one separately – but they didn’t perform that part. Instead, they gave us the chaotic, largely non-cooperative ways in which all the characters – many of the same ones that called us from beyond the grave in the first part of the performance – are moving toward “tomorrow.”
And isn’t that where we are right now? People trying to move toward a future they can live with, in a very dark moment that feels like the precipice of something huge, in what way we can.
Tomorrow we’ll discover where that takes us. Do you hear the people sing? Say, do you hear the distant drums?
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