Les Miserables‘The Wretched’, ‘The Poor Ones’, ‘The Outcasts’

The Epic Tome

•1000 pages•BUT – a quarter of the books is digression from the story. •Battle of Waterloo, street slang, life as a street urchin, convent life and the history of the Parisian sewers.

Historical Context, 1789 - 1832

1789 – The French Revolution (fall of the Bastille, etc)

1789 – 1792 – Constitutional Monarchy (before Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette, are executed)

1792 – 1794 – The Convention. France is governed by terror under a dictatorship.

1795 – 1799 – The Directory. France has elections again, with a parliament and group of five directors who exercised power.

1799 – 1814 – Napoleon is in power. The rise and fall of the French Empire.

1814 – 1830 – The Bourbon Restoration. Louis XVI’s brother becomes Louis XVIII, and is succeeded by their younger brother Charles X

1830 – 1848 – Louis-Philippe I takes power from Charles X, and rules as the last King of the French.

The uprising in Les Miserables

Victor Hugo, 1802 - 1885

• Political activist• Social commentator• Politician• Poet• Novelist

Jean Valjean

‘Jean Valjean, my brother: you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God!’

Fantine

‘Love is a fault; be it so. Fantine was innocence floating upon the surface of this fault.’

Marius Pontmercy and the students

Cosette

The Thenardiers

‘This man and woman were cunning and rage married – a hideous and terrible pair’.

Eponine

‘You know, Monsieur Marius, I think I was a little bit in love with you’.

JavertTo owe life to a malefactor . . . to be, in spite of himself, on a level with a fugitive from justice . . . to betray society in order to be true to his own conscience; that all these absurdities . . . should accumulate on himself—this is what prostrated him.

So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilisation, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age – the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of woman by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night – are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.

Victor Hugo, 1862