Les Misérables

Summary

Les Misérables follows the convict Jean Valjean from his release in 1815 to his death in 1833, and through him a whole society of the poor, the lawful and the rebellious in Restoration and July Monarchy France. Valjean has served nineteen years in the galleys at Toulon, five for stealing a loaf of bread for his sister's hungry children and the rest for attempts to escape. Turned away by every inn in Digne, he is received by Bishop Myriel, a humble priest who lives on almost nothing and gives to the poor. Valjean steals the bishop's silver; when gendarmes bring him back, the bishop declares the silver a gift, adds two silver candlesticks, and tells him he has bought his soul for God. After one more theft, from a small Savoyard boy, Valjean breaks down and resolves to change. Under the name Monsieur Madeleine he grows rich making jet beads at Montreuil-sur-Mer, becomes its mayor and spends his fortune on the town. Fantine, a young woman abandoned by her lover, leaves her daughter Cosette with the innkeepers Thénardier at Montfermeil and works in his factory until she is dismissed; she sells her hair and teeth and sinks into misery and illness. Inspector Javert, a policeman who reveres the law, suspects Madeleine. When another man, Champmathieu, is about to be condemned as Valjean, Madeleine spends a sleepless night of conscience, goes to the court at Arras and reveals himself. Fantine dies; Valjean escapes, rescues Cosette from the Thénardiers at Christmas 1823, and hides with her in Paris and then in the convent of the Petit-Picpus. Years later the student Marius Pontmercy, estranged from his royalist grandfather, falls in love with Cosette. The Thénardiers, now Paris criminals, set an ambush for Valjean; their daughter Éponine, who loves Marius, helps him and later dies shielding him. In June 1832 Marius joins Enjolras and the Friends of the ABC at a barricade; the street boy Gavroche is shot gathering cartridges. Valjean comes to the barricade, frees the captured Javert, and carries the wounded Marius through the sewers of Paris. Javert, unable to reconcile mercy with his idea of duty, lets him go and drowns himself in the Seine. Marius marries Cosette; Valjean confesses his past and withdraws, and only too late does Marius learn who saved him. The young couple reach Valjean as he dies, blessing them beside the bishop's candlesticks. Hugo began the novel in the 1840s, completed it in exile on Guernsey, and published it in five parts in 1862.

Top Lessons

• The candlesticks: mercy that creates a debt of love

  Bishop Myriel answers theft with a gift and tells Valjean that he has bought his soul for God. The rest of the novel shows Valjean repaying that mercy by showing it to others: to Fantine, Cosette, Fauchelevent, Champmathieu, Javert and Marius. Hugo presents grace as something that obliges without compelling.

• A tempest in a skull

  When Champmathieu is about to be condemned in his place, Valjean argues with himself through a long night: his town and workers need him, the accused man is no saint, silence would harm no one he can see. Hugo dramatizes conscience as a real struggle, and Valjean chooses truth at the cost of everything he has built.

• Javert: law without mercy

  Javert is honest, brave and incorruptible, and he believes the law cannot be wrong. When Valjean spares his life and he lets Valjean go, his whole idea of the world collapses. Hugo makes him a tragic figure rather than a simple villain, a man whose virtue lacks the one thing needed.

• The poor are neighbors, not a category

  Hugo's preface names the degradation of men by poverty, the ruin of women by hunger and the stunting of children by ignorance. Through Fantine, Cosette, Éponine and Gavroche he gives these problems faces and names, and through the bishop and Valjean he shows personal charity at work beside his call for schools and reforms.

• Fatherhood chosen

  Valjean, who never married, becomes a father by rescuing Cosette from the Thénardiers and spending his life on her. His last sacrifice is to step aside from her happiness. Hugo sets this chosen fatherhood against Thénardier's neglect of his own children and Gillenormand's prickly, devoted love for Marius.

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Medical Lens

Hugo's novel touches several strands of 19th-century medicine. Fantine's decline (a persistent dry cough, night sweats, fever and wasting) follows the period's literary picture of consumption, though the text never gives a formal diagnosis; she is nursed by the Sisters of Charity in Madeleine's infirmary. The digression on the Paris sewers in Volume V, Book 2 is an early literary essay on urban sanitation, with Hugo arguing that the sewage poured into the Seine should be returned to the fields as manure, and noting that the cholera of 1832 spurred the city to rebuild its drains. Marius's gunshot and sabre wounds and his long convalescence under a surgeon show care of the wounded after street fighting. Valjean's final decline is attributed by the attending doctor to the loss of someone dear; this is a classic literary case of death from grief, to be read in the period's understanding of the passions rather than as a modern diagnosis.

• Volume I, Book 5

  Fantine's dry cough, sweats and wasting as she sells her hair and teeth to pay the Thénardiers.

• Volume I, Books 6-8

  Fantine in the infirmary under Sister Simplice, waiting for Cosette, and her death when Javert arrests Madeleine.

• Volume V, Book 2, The Intestine of the Leviathan

  Hugo's history of the Paris sewers, the engineer Bruneseau's survey, the cholera of 1832, and the argument for using sewage as fertilizer.

• Volume V, Book 5

  Marius's wounds, fever and months of recovery at his grandfather's house.

• Volume V, Book 9, Chapter II

  The doctor's judgment that Valjean is dying of the loss of someone dear to him.