Les Misérables

About this book

Les Misérables is Victor Hugo’s novel of crime, poverty, conscience and revolution in France between 1815 and 1832. It was published in 1862, when Hugo was living in political exile on Guernsey, and it was an immediate commercial success across Europe. It is one of the longest novels in the Western canon, divided into five parts, each part into books, each book into short chapters, and it contains long essays on Waterloo, convents, Paris slang and the city’s sewers alongside the story.

The book has lasted because its central situation is simple and strong: a man who has served nineteen years for stealing bread tries to become good, and the law, in the person of one determined policeman, will not let him forget what he was. Around that core Hugo built a panorama of French society from bishops to street children. The stage musical of 1980 and its many productions and films have kept the characters in circulation, but the novel is a very different experience from the show.

The story

Jean Valjean is released from the galleys in 1815 after nineteen years, having been sentenced for stealing a loaf and repeatedly punished for trying to escape. No one will take him in except a bishop, and an act of mercy from that bishop turns Valjean’s life around. He takes a new name, builds a business and becomes a respected mayor in a northern town, where he meets Fantine, a young woman who has been abandoned with a child and is sliding into destitution.

The police inspector Javert, who knew Valjean in the galleys, begins to suspect the mayor. From that point the novel follows Valjean, Fantine’s daughter Cosette, the student Marius, the Thénardier family of innkeepers and thieves, and the street boy Gavroche through Paris to the June Rebellion of 1832 and its barricades.

Themes and historical context

Hugo began the novel in the 1840s, set it aside during the revolution of 1848 and his subsequent exile after Louis-Napoléon’s coup of 1851, and finished it in the early 1860s. His preface states its purpose plainly: so long as law and custom produce social damnation, and so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books like this one cannot be useless. The novel is an argument for reform of the penal system, for education, and for charity, dressed as a melodrama.

The central moral question is whether justice means enforcing the law or doing right by the person in front of you. Javert believes the two are the same; Valjean learns that they are not. Hugo also gives full attention to the position of women without protection, through Fantine, and to the political ferment of the Restoration and July Monarchy, through Marius and his republican friends. The historical digressions, on Waterloo especially, are part of this scheme, placing private lives inside public history.

The novel was criticized at the time from both right and left, and some French critics disliked its sentiment and length. Its popularity with readers was never in doubt, and it has been translated into many languages and adapted for film, radio, television and stage more often than almost any other novel.

Who should read it

The Hapgood translation runs to well over 500,000 words. Readers should expect a long commitment and should know that the digressions can be skimmed on a first reading without losing the plot; many readers skip the fifty pages on Waterloo and return to them later. The prose is nineteenth-century and rhetorical, full of apostrophes and lists, but the story chapters move quickly. People who come from the musical will find that the novel gives far more space to Fantine’s decline, to Marius’s family, and to the barricade, and that several favorite characters are treated quite differently.

Edition notes

The Project Gutenberg text is the English translation by Isabel Florence Hapgood, an American translator who also rendered Tolstoy and Turgenev; it first appeared in 1887. The edition was prepared by Judith Boss and David Widger. Hapgood’s version is complete and unabridged but uses some Victorian phrasing that later translators have modernized.