Les Misérables

Jean Valjean leaves prison after nineteen years and tries to build a new life under the moral pressure of his past. His story draws together Fantine, Cosette, Javert, Marius and the Thénardiers, moving from personal guilt and mercy into the poverty, policing and political unrest of post-Napoleonic France.

The novel ranges across the Bourbon Restoration and July Monarchy, with the June Rebellion of 1832 giving the final Paris sections their historical frame. Hugo uses the lives of fictional characters to examine law, conscience, social exclusion, revolutionary memory and the unfinished consequences of Waterloo and the French Revolution.