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

2. 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.

3. 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

4. Victor Hugo, 1802 - 1885
• Political activist
• Social commentator
• Politician
• Poet
• Novelist

5. 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!’

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

7. Marius Pontmercy and the students

8. Cosette

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

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

11. Javert
To 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.

12. 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