Book summary

Hugo's wrenching story centers on Jean Valjean, an honest peasant sentenced to five years' hard labor for stealing a loaf of bread, then 19 more for trying to escape. Turned into a hardened and ruthless criminal by his experiences, he reforms, becomes mayor of a French town, but is tracked down by the pitiless detective Javert for another obscure crime, and incarcerated. Escaping again from the brutal French prison, he befriends a prostitute named Fantine and her daughter, Cosette. This 1862 novel is remarkable for its sympathetic portrayal of common people: prisoners, the poor, women of the streets--all the down-and-out victims of the gross inequities of class in 19th-century Europe.

Media reviews

"From the bare abstract, the story does not seem to promise much pleasure to novel-readers, yet it is all alive with the fiery genius of Victor Hugo, and the whole representation is so intense and vivid that it is impossible to escape from the fascination it exerts over the mind. Few who take the book up will leave it until they have read it through. It is morbid...but its morbid elements are so combined with sentiments abstractly Christian that it is calculated to wield a...pernicious influence.... Its tendency is to weaken that abhorrence of crime which is the great shield of most of the virtue which society possesses, and it does this by attempting to prove that society itself is responsible for crimes it cannot prevent, but can only punish....Considered as a passionate romance, appealing to the sympathies of the ordinary readers of novels, it will do infinitely more harm than good."