All the human and animal manure which the world wastes, if returned to the land, instead of being thrown into the sea, would suffice to nourish the world.

This remark is associated with Victor Hugo’s extended critique of urban sanitation and social neglect in mid-19th-century Paris, written in the context of the modernization of sewers and the city’s habit of flushing waste away rather than returning nutrients to agriculture. In *Les Misérables*, Hugo uses a long digression on the Paris sewers to argue that what society treats as filth is also a resource, and that mismanagement of waste is both an economic error and a moral symbol of how the poor and the useful are discarded. The line reflects contemporary debates about “night soil,” fertilizer, and the nutrient cycle between city and countryside.

Hugo’s point is simultaneously practical and emblematic. On the surface, he argues that human and animal excrement contains fertility that could replenish soils and sustain food production; dumping it into rivers or the sea is a self-imposed scarcity. At a deeper level, the sentence fits Hugo’s recurring theme that modern society creates misery by wasting what it already possesses—whether material resources or human lives. The “manure” becomes a metaphor for the rejected and the overlooked: what is deemed worthless may be precisely what could “nourish the world” if reintegrated rather than expelled.