Los miserables

Jean Valjean, an ex-convict who was locked up for twenty years for stealing a piece of bread, becomes an exemplary man who fights against misery and injustice and who pledges his life to take care of the daughter of a woman who has had to prostitute herself to save the girl. Thus, Jean Valjean is forced to change names several times, is arrested, escapes and reappears. At the same time, he must elude Commissioner Javert, an inflexible policeman who pursues him convinced that he has pending accounts with the justice. The confrontation between the two takes place during the revolts of 1832 in Paris, where, at the barricades, a group of idealistic young men stand up to the army in defense of freedom. And, among all this, stories of love, sacrifice, redemption, friendship. Because progress, the law, the soul, God, the French Revolution, prison, the social contract, crime, the sewers of Paris, love affairs, mistreatment, poverty, justice; everything has a place in the most extensive and famous work of Victor Hugo, Les Miserables. A masterful chronicle of the history of France in the first half of the 19th century, from Waterloo to the barricades of 1848, Victor Hugo voluntarily sought with Les Miserables a literary genre tailored to man and the modern world, a total novel. Not in vain, he concludes like this: "... as long as there is ignorance and misery on earth, books like this might not be useless".