Author of Les Misérables, leader of French Romantic literature
The standard-bearer of French Romantic literature, at once poet, novelist, and fighter. Les Misérables, through the story of Jean Valjean, hunted all his life for stealing a loaf of bread, writes to the full the suffering of the lowly, the coldness of the law, and the redemption of human nature; The Hunchback of Notre-Dame lets the tragedy of Quasimodo and the gypsy girl throw into relief the mismatch of beauty and goodness. He wielded literature as a weapon to cry out for the poor and for justice — the conscience of nineteenth-century France.
Jean Valjean, for stealing a loaf to feed a starving nephew, is sentenced to hard labor and hunted all his life. Hugo asks with this story: when a society drives the man who stole bread into a lifelong criminal, whose is the crime? Les Misérables endures precisely because it always stands on the side of the insulted and the injured.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.