Les Misérables
Victor Hugo
Les Misérables
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Jean Valjean serves nineteen years for stealing a loaf of bread, breaks his parole, and spends the rest of his life becoming someone else while the policeman Javert follows the paperwork. Around him Hugo assembles a dying woman, her daughter, a street boy, a pair of innkeepers and a generation of students who will die behind a barricade in the Paris of 1832.
About the book
Published in 1862 and running to some 1,500 pages, Les Misérables opens with Jean Valjean released after nineteen years in the galleys for stealing bread and breaking parole. A bishop’s unaccountable kindness turns him into a manufacturer and a mayor under another name, and the whole novel is what it costs him to stay one: a dying factory worker whose child he promises to raise, an innkeeper who will sell anything, a police inspector who cannot conceive of a criminal reforming, and a rising in Paris in June 1832 that puts the girl’s young man behind a barricade. Hugo wrote most of it in exile on Guernsey and stopped it repeatedly to explain Waterloo, the Paris sewers, convent life and argot, on the principle that the reader has to know the world before judging anyone in it. Its subject is the law as it falls on the poor, and it is the most durable argument ever made in a novel that punishment and justice are different things.
Characters
Jean Valjean — Protagonist
Nineteen years in the galleys for a loaf of bread, and the rest of his life spent being somebody else.
Javert — Inspector
A police inspector born in a prison who believes the law is the whole of morality, and follows Valjean for decades.
Fantine — Cosette’s mother
A factory worker dismissed for having a child, who sells her hair, her teeth and finally herself to pay for its keep.
Cosette — Valjean’s ward
Fantine’s daughter, a drudge in an inn until Valjean buys her freedom and raises her as his own.
Marius Pontmercy — Student
A young royalist turned republican who falls in love with Cosette and goes to the barricade.
Thénardier — Antagonist
The innkeeper who starves Cosette and spends the rest of the book extorting whoever is nearest.
Éponine — Thénardier’s daughter
Raised petted and ends in rags, in love with Marius and willing to lose him for him.
Gavroche — Street child
A Paris urchin living in an elephant statue, cheerful, ungovernable and fearless under fire.
About the author
Victor Hugo (1802–1885) was a French poet, novelist and dramatist, the leader of French Romanticism, and by the end a national institution. He wrote Notre-Dame de Paris partly as a campaign to stop the demolition of Gothic buildings, and it worked: the cathedral was restored because of the book. A republican who had begun as a royalist, he opposed Napoleon III's coup in 1851 and spent nineteen years in exile on Guernsey rather than accept an amnesty, writing Les Misérables there. Two million people lined the streets of Paris at his funeral.