Les Miserables

What It's About

Jean Valjean is released from nearly two decades in the French prison system for stealing bread. Branded an ex-convict, he finds every door closed to him, until an act of unexpected mercy from a bishop changes the course of his life. He builds a new identity and a respectable position, but he is relentlessly pursued by the police inspector Javert, who believes that the law admits no change in a man. Along the way, Valjean takes responsibility for Cosette, the daughter of the desperate Fantine, and the story widens to take in the students, street children and swindlers of Paris, culminating in the turbulent political unrest of the early 1830s. The novel is famous for its vast scope and its long digressions on subjects such as the Battle of Waterloo, the Paris sewers and convent life, which some readers relish and others find slow.

Key Concepts

At its heart is the question of whether a person can be redeemed, and whether society's laws help or prevent it. Hugo sets rigid legal justice against mercy and conscience, and shows how poverty, ignorance and a punitive system produce the very criminals they condemn. Love, sacrifice and moral duty run through the personal stories, while the wider narrative examines social reform and the struggle for human dignity. The book was hugely popular but divided critics: some of Hugo's contemporaries found it sentimental and overlong, and the Catholic Church placed it on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1864. Its reputation as one of the great novels of the nineteenth century has long since been secured.

About the Author

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) was a French novelist, poet and dramatist, and the leading figure of the French Romantic movement. A committed republican and outspoken critic of Napoleon III, he spent nearly two decades in exile in the Channel Islands, where much of this novel was completed. He returned to France as a national hero and received a state funeral attended by huge crowds.

About This Edition

This is an 1887 translation by Isabel F. Hapgood.