Les Misérables: A Novel

By Victor Hugo

Les Miserables is the great epic masterpiece of the mid-nineteenth century. Begun in 1845, the year Louis Philippe conferred a peerage and a lifetime seat in the Senate upon Victor Hugo, it was completed when the author was living in exile in the Channel Islands. Les Miserables is a product as well as a document of the political, social, and religious upheaval that followed the Napoleonic Wars and Europe's great democratic revolutions. The story is centered on Jean Valjean, a peasant who enters the novel a hardened criminal after nineteen years spent in prison for stealing a loaf of bread for the starving children of his sister. The path of Valjean's last twenty-five years, leading from the French provinces to the battlefield of Waterloo and the ramparts of Paris during the Uprising of 1832, introduces us to secret societies of revolutionaries and the vast world of the French lower classes. Jean Valjean's flight from the police agent Javert--the prototype of over a hundred years of fictional detectives--culminates in one of the most famous scenes in all literature, the chase through the sewers of Paris. Les Miserables sold out its large first printing in twenty-four hours and has remained enormously popular. This edition is the classic English translation of Hugo's friend Charles Wilbour, which appeared the same year the novel was published in France.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Oct 31, 2000
• ISBN: 9780679641551

Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo (1802-1885) was a French poet and novelist. Born in Besançon, Hugo was the son of a general who served in the Napoleonic army. Raised on the move, Hugo was taken with his family from one outpost to the next, eventually setting with his mother in Paris in 1803. In 1823, he published his first novel, launching a career that would earn him a reputation as a leading figure of French Romanticism. His Gothic novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) was a bestseller throughout Europe, inspiring the French government to restore the legendary cathedral to its former glory. During the reign of King Louis-Philippe, Hugo was elected to the National Assembly of the French Second Republic, where he spoke out against the death penalty and poverty while calling for public education and universal suffrage. Exiled during the rise of Napoleon III, Hugo lived in Guernsey from 1855 to 1870. During this time, he published his literary masterpiece Les Misérables (1862), a historical novel which has been adapted countless times for theater, film, and television. Towards the end of his life, he advocated for republicanism around Europe and across the globe, cementing his reputation as a defender of the people and earning a place at Paris’ Panthéon, where his remains were interred following his death from pneumonia. His final words, written on a note only days before his death, capture the depth of his belief in humanity: “To love is to act.”