Introduction

Jean Valjean was sentenced to five years in the galleys for stealing a loaf of bread for his sister's starving children, and for repeated attempts to escape spent nineteen years in prison. Released, he is shunned everywhere; only Bishop Myriel takes him in. He steals the bishop's silver and is brought back by the police, but the bishop says the silver was a gift and gives him the silver candlesticks as well. This act of goodness transforms him. Under a new name he becomes mayor of a town and owner of a factory, rescues Fantine, a working woman driven to ruin by society, and raises her orphaned daughter Cosette. But Inspector Javert, devoted to the letter of the law, never stops pursuing him. With the republican rising in Paris in 1832 as its climax, the novel weaves individual destinies into the history of France. Hugo wrote in his preface that so long as ignorance and poverty remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless. The work is translated in several volumes.