According to its author, Les Misérables was to show "the progress from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsehood to truth, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from corruption to life". Centring on the adventures and the tortuous path to redemption of former convict Jean Valjean during the tumultuous years leading to the Paris uprising of June 1832, Hugo's 1862 masterpiece presents the universal story of a man struggling to regain his dignity, to make up for his past mistakes and to find a place in society and in the ethical cosmos of his time.

Originally published during Hugo's self-imposed exile in Guernsey and featuring a complex web of characters, with the masses of the Parisian dispossessed in the background, Les Misérables is not only one of world literature's greatest feats of storytelling, but an unsurpassed exploration of human morality.