Victor Hugo's sprawling 1862 novel is one of the defining works of nineteenth-century French literature, a vast panorama of law, poverty, conscience, and grace set against the political turbulence of post-Napoleonic France. At its center is Jean Valjean, an ex-convict imprisoned for nineteen years for stealing a loaf of bread, who breaks parole and remakes himself into an honest man and benefactor after an act of unexpected mercy from a bishop transforms him. Pursued relentlessly across decades by the rigid police inspector Javert, for whom the law admits no exceptions, Valjean takes on the care of Cosette, the orphaned daughter of the doomed factory worker Fantine, and their fates become entwined with a cast that includes the scheming innkeeper Thénardier, the idealistic young revolutionary Marius, and the students who man the barricades in the failed June Rebellion of 1832. Around this narrative Hugo builds enormous digressions on subjects ranging from the Battle of Waterloo to the sewers of Paris, the argot of the criminal underworld, convent life, and the nature of justice, so that the novel functions simultaneously as gripping melodrama and as a moral and historical treatise. Its abiding themes—the possibility of redemption, the conflict between legal justice and human mercy, and the crushing weight of poverty on the powerless—have made it endure far beyond its era, inspiring countless stage, film, and musical adaptations. Encompassing love, sacrifice, revolution, and the long struggle of a single soul toward goodness, Les Misérables remains one of literature's most expansive and humane epics.