Les Misérables

Themes in Les Miserables by Victor Hugo include poverty and its impact on people, different treatments of people in various socio-economic classes and the lack of social mobility in 19th century...

Jean Valjean does not kill Javert because he knows that whatever Javert has done to him, whatever Javert might wish on him, killing him is the wrong thing to do. Valjean spent years in prison for...

The note refers first to the irony of Jean Valjean's life. He lived through countless struggles. He was arrested for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his seven starving nephews and nieces and was...

Victor Hugo’s book Les Misérables is set in France between the years 1815 and 1832. The events of the story take place in many parts of the country, notably in the capital city of Paris but also in...

General Lamarque was a real historical figure who served under Napoleon and died in 1832. In the novel, he is depicted as a true champion of the people. His death, the narrator explains, is the...

Les Miserables involves numerous plot lines and has many more than fifteen major events. In fact, it is one of the longest novels ever written. Some editions of the book are nearly two thousand...

In the musical play of Les Miserables, the character of Eponine is in love with the young rebel Marius. Marius, however, has just fallen in love with the main character's adopted daughter Cosette....

The play Les Miserables gives an excellent portrayal of the lives of people prior to the French Revolution and showed what led to that uprising. Historically, those are some excellent things to...

Ultimately, Hugo's view of human nature is a contemporary one. Hugo suggests that the change and ability to transform oneself can be a source of great power within the human being. It is this...

Jean Valjean's parole was, in some ways, as harsh as his prison sentence. As a paroled prisoner, Valjean was required to carry papers that identified him as a parolee and to show them to pretty...

In Hugo's Les Miserables, the young Marius Pontmercy has been raised to believe that his father, Colonel Georges Pontmercy, a distinguished officer in Napoleon's Grande Armee, cares nothing for...

Candlesticks usually contain candles, which emit light. Light is often associated with spiritual awakening or understanding. For example, in Genesis, God creates light, separates the "light from...

The first reason why Jean Valjean makes the decision to move out of their rented home on the Rue Plumet is that he had seen M. Thenardier repeatedly and was certain that "Thenardier was prowling in...

Fantine gives birth to Cosette in 1815, and they spend years together, destitute, until she begins to pay Monsieur and Madame Thénardier to care for the girl. This is a mistake, since they treat...

The years following the French Revolution were hardly peaceful. The poor still felt oppressed and many government factions were still fighting for power. Les Misérables is set during the 1800s,...

When Fantine finds herself a single mother with a young child and without a means of support in the world, she has to make a hard choice: Either leave her child with other people, so that she can...

Marius lives with his grandfather, a royalist, who considers the boy's father, George Pontmercy "a leper" because of his having been a heroic soldier, but one who served Napoleon. As a child,...

The theme of Victor Hugo's novel is suggested by its title Les Miserables. If tells about the miserable lives of the poor. The thesis, however, is that one act of Christian kindness can change a...

In Volume I, Book the Sixth, Chapter II of Les Miserables, Javert has traced Jean Valjean for a long time. Having been born in a prison, Javert has spent his life in rigid respect for the law, now...

Each of these three characters have their own unique reasons for arriving at the barricades. Gavroche's life is directly affected by the violence of capitalism, of wealth disparity, and of the...

We first witness Jean Valjean stealing bread through the eyes of the baker. The baker, Maubert Isabeau, sees the bakery window being broken: An arm passed through a hole made by a blow from a...

Javert, a police inspector, is Valjean's enemy who pursues him relentlessly after he escapes. He is not a "good guy" however. His kind of justice is to punish with vengeance. Javert...

The Bishop of Digne represents the height of humility, mercy, compassion, generosity, love, and kindness. If, to Victor Hugo, the French government represents arrogance, suppression, and...

The last thing the Bishop says to Jean Valjean is Do not forget, do not ever forget, that you have promised me to use the money to make yourself an honest man. As we read the rest of Valjean's...

Eponine Thenardier asks this of Marius in volume 4 before she dies. At this dramatic moment, Eponine is cross-dressed as a male soldier. Holding her on his lap as she is dying, Marius learns that...

At the time of Fantine's decision, remember, she is a single mother without a husband in a time when this was socially inappropriate. She was also poor and without means of a direct income. In...

Marius rejects his grandfather and his money because his grandfather allowed him to have a negative opinion of his father and kept them apart by threatening to disinherit Marius otherwise. After...

Though written and directed more than a decade later, the musical, Les Misérables, written and produced in 1985, is very reminiscent of the rock music composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber for Jesus...

In many ways, it is the tension between these two characters that creates much of the conflict of the story and outlines its message about the shortcomings of justice. Valjean is a man who has...

In Les Miserables, Victor Hugo neither ignores human misery nor enters into it in what might be considered a more contemporary approach or spirit (as in the device of deep point of view, or writing...

Valjean and Fantine are cursed by two things: one, situation in life; two, bad decisions. Valjean was forced into a situtation of poverty and starvation by forces outside his control. However,...

There are absolutely parallels that can be drawn between Jesus and Jean Valjean. The most obvious one is the merciful nature with which they both treat other people, particularly those who were...

I sense two components to this question. The first would be why leave would Jean Valjean leave the protection of the convent life and need to rent the house in the first place. If Valjean does...

The cinematography in Les Miserables is quite controversial in the world of film and theater. Danny Cohen, the Cinematographer, and Top Hooper, the Director, made some interesting choices in the...

In Les Misérables, Éponine falls in love with Marius Pontmercy, her neighbor in Paris, and she eventually confesses her love for him with her dying breath. Éponine is initially an unsympathetic...

Les Miserables is a great book to pull some superb quotations that give readers lessons about life that still apply today. Some of my favorites are as follows: "Monsieur to a convict is a glass of...

Another example of the relationship between love and self-sacrifice seen in Les Miserables involves Eponine, Marius, and Cosette. Marius instantly falls in love with Cosette when he sees her;...

By this late stage in the story, Jean Valjean has become a Christ-like figure who's put aside all his bitterness and righteous anger to embrace forgiveness. As he lays dying, he wants to pass on...

Similes are very abundant in Victor Hugo's writing. A simile is a type of analogy made by comparing two things to show a relationship. Similes always contain the words like or as. One simile can be...

Cosette is referred to as a "lark" in "Fantine." It is a nickname she is given by people in the town because she is so small and up before the sun. Sadly, "the lark never sang." In "Cosette,"...

I had to pare down the original question. Hugo's novel is rooted in the idea of exposing injustice and seeking to bring attention to the fact that it is a condition which must change. I think...

The innkeeper in Les Misérables is named Monsieur Thénardier. He is a petty crook who emerges as one of the major antagonists of the novel, and, along with his equally corrupt wife, is perhaps the...

To draw another analogy, Victor Hugo is the French version of the English Charles Dickens. Contemporaries in time, both men perceived the tremendous gap between the upper classes and those in the...

To speak toward the comparison of Eponine to Cosette, I'm afraid there is no comparison. Cosette sacrifices nothing. She is but a "lark" whom Valjean protects so completely that after a few years...

The most common characteristics of a Romantic hero are that he must be strong-willed, charismatic, and handsome, the sort of man that people are drawn to. But not only that, a Romantic hero must...

Two of the central themes in Les Miserables are what one might call redemption, rebirth, or even transformation, and human rights, particularly the lack of human rights found in the social orders...