Les Misérables

A novel about the wretched

Les Misérables by Victor Hugo came out in 1862, while Hugo lived in exile on the island of Guernsey for opposing Napoleon III. The title means "the wretched" or "the poor ones." The book was an immediate international success, and it remains one of the longest novels most readers know by name. It runs to about 1,400 pages in most complete English editions. This summary follows the unabridged novel. The Signet Classics edition uses the Charles Wilbour translation of 1862 as revised by Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee; Christine Donougher and Julie Rose have made newer translations.

Hugo divides the novel into five parts, named after characters or events: Fantine, Cosette, Marius, The Idyll in the Rue Plumet and the Epic of the Rue Saint-Denis, and Jean Valjean. The story runs from 1815 to 1833. Hugo also stops the story for long essays: on the Battle of Waterloo, on convents, on the Paris sewers, on slang and on the politics of the 1830s. Many abridged editions cut these.

Hugo says in his preface that as long as poverty, ignorance and the degradation of men, women and children exist, books like this one will be needed. The main themes are the power of mercy against the law, the injustice of poverty, redemption and the love between parents and children.

Part 1: Fantine

The book opens with a long portrait of Bishop Myriel of Digne, a humble, generous man who gives away most of his income and keeps only his silver plates and two silver candlesticks.

In October 1815, Jean Valjean arrives in Digne. He was a poor tree pruner who stole a loaf of bread to feed his sister's seven children. He was sentenced to five years in the galleys at Toulon, and his escape attempts raised the total to nineteen. He carries a yellow passport that marks him as a former convict, and every inn turns him away. The bishop welcomes him, feeds him and gives him a bed. In the night Valjean steals the silver and runs. Police catch him and bring him back. The bishop tells them the silver was a gift and hands Valjean the candlesticks too, saying he forgot to take them. He tells Valjean to use the silver to become an honest man and that he has bought his soul for God.

Shaken, Valjean leaves. On the road he steps on a coin dropped by a boy, Petit-Gervais, and refuses to give it back. When the boy runs off crying, Valjean is struck by what he has done. He searches for the boy in vain and weeps for the first time in nineteen years. He decides to change.

In Paris, a young working woman, Fantine, is seduced and abandoned by a wealthy student, Tholomyès, with a baby daughter, Cosette. She leaves the child with an innkeeper couple, the Thénardiers, in the village of Montfermeil, and pays them to care for her. They treat Cosette as a servant and keep demanding more money.

Fantine finds work in the town of Montreuil-sur-Mer, in a factory owned by Monsieur Madeleine. Madeleine arrived years before, invented a cheaper way to make black glass beads and made the town rich. He is generous, modest and has been elected mayor. He is Jean Valjean.

The police inspector, Javert, was a guard at Toulon. He is rigid, honest and believes the law is always right. When Madeleine lifts a heavy cart to free a trapped old man, Fauchelevent, Javert remembers only one convict with that strength.

A forewoman learns that Fantine has a child out of wedlock and dismisses her. Fantine sinks into poverty. To pay the Thénardiers, she sells her hair, then her two front teeth, then herself. When a young man pushes snow down her back and she attacks him, Javert arrests her. Madeleine orders her released. She spits in his face, blaming him for her fall. He learns her story and promises to bring Cosette to her. Fantine falls ill.

Javert then tells Madeleine that he wrongly suspected him: the real Jean Valjean has been arrested under the name Champmathieu and will be sent back to the galleys for life. Madeleine spends a night of agony, which Hugo calls a tempest in a skull. If he stays silent, he keeps his good work and an innocent man suffers. He travels to the trial in Arras and declares that he is Jean Valjean. Champmathieu goes free. Javert arrests Valjean at Fantine's bedside, and she dies of the shock. Valjean escapes, is recaptured and is sent back to Toulon. There he saves a sailor from falling from a ship's rigging, then falls into the sea himself. He is reported drowned.

Part 2: Cosette

Hugo pauses for a long account of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. At the end, a looter robbing the dead on the battlefield revives a wounded French officer, Colonel Georges Pontmercy, who thinks the looter saved his life. The looter is Thénardier.

On Christmas Eve 1823, eight-year-old Cosette is sent into the dark woods to fetch water. A stranger takes the heavy bucket from her. It is Valjean, who survived his fall into the sea. At the inn he buys her the expensive doll she has been staring at in a shop window, pays the Thénardiers fifteen hundred francs and takes her away.

In Paris they live in the run-down Gorbeau house. Valjean gives Cosette the love she has never had, and she gives him a reason to live. Javert tracks them down. Valjean flees with Cosette through the night streets and climbs a wall into a convent garden, the Petit-Picpus convent. The gardener there is Fauchelevent, the man he saved from the cart. To enter the convent legally, Valjean has himself carried out in a coffin and nearly buried alive, then returns through the front gate as Fauchelevent's brother. For several years Valjean works as a gardener, and Cosette is educated by the nuns.

Part 3: Marius

The story jumps forward to around 1830. Marius Pontmercy is a young man raised by his rich royalist grandfather, Monsieur Gillenormand. His father, Colonel Pontmercy, was one of Napoleon's officers, and Gillenormand kept them apart. On his father's death Marius learns that he loved him from a distance. Marius becomes an admirer of Napoleon, quarrels with his grandfather and leaves home to live in poverty as a law student. His father's last note asks him to repay a debt of honor to a Sergeant Thénardier who saved his life at Waterloo.

Marius makes friends with a group of republican students, the Friends of the ABC, led by the stern, idealistic Enjolras. Among them are the gentle Combeferre, the cheerful Courfeyrac and the drunken skeptic Grantaire, who believes only in Enjolras.

In the Luxembourg Gardens, Marius sees an old man walking with a young girl. A year later the girl has grown into a beautiful young woman. She is Cosette, and the old man is Valjean. Marius falls in love from a distance.

Marius lives in the Gorbeau house. His neighbors are a poor, scheming family called Jondrette. Through a hole in the wall he sees that they are the Thénardiers, ruined and living on fraud, with their daughter Éponine, who loves Marius in silence. Thénardier recognizes Valjean as a charitable visitor and plans to trap and rob him with a gang of criminals, Patron-Minette. Marius warns Javert, then hesitates to give the signal, because Thénardier is the man his father asked him to repay. Javert raids the room anyway and arrests the gang. Valjean escapes through the window.

Part 4: the Rue Plumet and the Rue Saint-Denis

Valjean and Cosette now live in a quiet house with a wild garden in the Rue Plumet. Éponine finds the address for Marius, out of love for him. Marius and Cosette meet in the garden at night and declare their love. Éponine, in secret, stops her father's gang from robbing the house.

The Thénardiers' neglected son Gavroche, a cheerful street boy, lives in the plaster elephant at the Place de la Bastille and shelters two smaller boys who, unknown to him, are his brothers.

Valjean, troubled by political unrest and a warning note from Éponine, decides to move to England. Cosette leaves a message for Marius. Marius asks his grandfather for permission to marry. Gillenormand suggests he make Cosette his mistress instead. Marius leaves in despair.

In June 1832, the funeral of General Lamarque, a popular opponent of the king, becomes an uprising. The Friends of the ABC build a barricade in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, near a wine shop called the Corinthe. Gavroche joins them and unmasks a spy: Javert. They tie him up to shoot him later. Éponine, dressed as a boy, lures Marius to the barricade because she would rather die with him than see him with Cosette. When soldiers attack, Marius saves the barricade by threatening to blow it up with a keg of gunpowder. Éponine takes a bullet meant for him. Dying, she gives him Cosette's letter and confesses her love. Marius writes a farewell to Cosette, and Gavroche delivers it to Valjean.