Les Misérables
by Victor Hugo
Summary
Jean Valjean is released after nineteen years in a French prison, most of it added for repeated escape attempts after an original sentence for stealing a loaf of bread, and finds every door closed to him as a former convict until a bishop, Monseigneur Myriel, catches him stealing silver and, rather than turning him in, tells the police he gave it to him and presses more silver into his hands besides. That single act of mercy remakes Valjean; he breaks his parole, takes a new name, becomes a wealthy factory owner and eventually a mayor under the alias Monsieur Madeleine, and spends the rest of his life trying to live up to what the bishop believed of him, always with the relentless police inspector Javert, who cannot accept that a convict could genuinely reform, somewhere on his trail. Valjean takes responsibility for Cosette, the young daughter of Fantine, a factory worker who has been dismissed, driven into prostitution, and destroyed trying to pay the Thenardiers, corrupt innkeepers, to look after the child she cannot keep herself. Cosette grows up loved and protected by Valjean and, years later in Paris, falls for Marius, a student drawn into the republican uprising of June 1832; when the uprising collapses at the barricades, Valjean carries the badly wounded Marius through the Paris sewers to save him, and even hands Javert the chance to arrest him rather than break his own code. Javert, unable to reconcile the mercy Valjean has just shown him with everything he has believed about justice, drowns himself in the Seine, and Valjean lives to see Cosette married to Marius before he dies, his story finally told to the two of them at the end.
Hugo built the novel as much around the Paris of the June Rebellion, the sewers, the convents, the underworld of the Thenardiers, as around any single character, and long digressive chapters on history, architecture, and moral philosophy interrupt the plot throughout. It is a genuinely long book and asks real commitment, but the digressions are never padding; they are Hugo arguing, alongside the story, for exactly the mercy Valjean is shown at the start.
Historical Context & Significance
Les Misérables was published in Brussels on 31 March 1862 while Hugo was living in political exile on Guernsey, then in Paris three days later, preceded by a massive advertising campaign, and the first Paris printing of six thousand copies reportedly sold out within a day to queues outside the bookshops. Reception split sharply: Gustave Flaubert dismissed it privately as infantile, while the reading public made it an immediate commercial sensation regardless of what serious critics thought.
The novel's reputation has only grown since, cemented for a new global audience by Alain Boublil and Claude Michel Schonberg's 1980 musical adaptation, one of the most performed stage works in the world. It remains one of the most translated and adapted novels ever written, and its portrait of poverty, justice, and revolutionary Paris in the early nineteenth century is still cited by historians writing about the period the novel dramatises.