Les Miserables read-a-long 2026 | Première Partie (1)

[AgualusasL0ver]

Welcome to the first thread of the Les Miserables Read-a-long.

I'll be using the Christine Donougher translation for posting in the main, but it doesn't matter which translation you have, they seem to follow the same breakdown. I have not seen the film, the musical, and have very little knowledge about the book, but suspect I will be doing all of these Christmas 2026.

The only rules
The plan is to read ONE chapter a day and contribute/follow the thread as you see fit. There are c. 365 chapters, so we plan to take the year to read slowly and really get under the skin. Sometimes we have clustered chapters in past read-a-longs, and people do sometimes read ahead. All fine - but No spoilers until the relevant day.

Notes from previous read-a-longs

• How you manage one a day is entirely up to you, some people prefer to store them and read all the chapters for the week at once, some read each day.
• Sometimes these books can go off on a tangent all their own (looking at Mr Tolstoy), stick with it :-)
• All formats and translations welcome. Sometimes the translation discussions are some of the most interesting conversations.
• You WILL get behind at some point, but don't worry, just catch up when you can.
• Tangents, things you discovered down a rabbit hole, articles, pod casts, clips of epic scenes when we get to them all very welcome on the thread.

Spoiler free summary , courtesy of Chat GPT below. Schmoop has book summaries so I will post those at the relevant points.

**

Les Misérables is a classic novel by Victor Hugo that explores justice, compassion, and the struggle for dignity in 19th-century France.
At its core, the book follows the lives of several interconnected characters from different social classes as they navigate poverty, law, love, and moral choice. Rather than focusing on a single hero or plotline, the novel paints a wide picture of society—showing how personal decisions are shaped by systems like the legal system, economic inequality, and social expectations.
Key themes include:

• Justice vs. mercy — how laws affect people differently, and whether strict punishment leads to fairness
• Redemption and moral growth — the possibility of change, even after hardship
• Poverty and inequality — the daily realities of people living on the margins
• Love and sacrifice — care for others as a powerful force for good
• Social responsibility — how individual actions impact the wider community

The novel is known for:

• Deep character development
• Emotional intensity
• Philosophical reflections on society and humanity
• Detailed descriptions of history and everyday life

Overall, Les Misérables is less about a single storyline and more about asking big questions:
What does it mean to be a good person? How should society treat its most vulnerable? And can compassion change lives?

I’m trying to be good and read properly but I’m catching my self skimming the text……although some of the descriptive stuff is interesting I’m not really fussed about who was doing what, where and when!

It feels like the French 'War and Peace' at the moment!

Urgh, this is a very dull section of the book for me. It really does read like two books, and as so many others have mentioned, that does make it feel very like W&P. Not my cup of tea at all. Maybe I am particularly noticing this because I'm spending most of my time this year reading twentieth century women writers like Stella Gibbons and Barbara Pym: books in which (people wrongly say) nothing much happens. But that level, of the minutiae of what happens in your home, in your street, is where people's lives are actually played out. Even soldiers and armies: there's a poem, I can't remember who it's by just now, about a fly alighting on a wounded horse on a battle field, that expresses this same idea. And in Pride and Prejudice, the backdrop is a country at war - same war as LesMis in fact - but apart from garrisons of soldiers, one wouldn't know it.

The last couple of chapters in particular just feel like bolt-ons to me, the story of the war re-told from history books. Hugo badly needs an editor! 😉If not for the readalong, I probably would have put this book back on the shelf. Oh, and wanting to know what comes of Cosette. So maybe Hugo does know what he's doing after all lol

[ETA: The poem is The Fly by Miroslav Holub]

The fly

She sat on a willow-trunk
watching
part of the battle of Crecy,
the shouts,
the gasps,
the groans,
the tramping and the tumbling.

During the fourteenth charge
of the French cavalry
she mated
with a brown-eyed male fly
from Vadincourt.

She rubbed her legs together
as she sat on a disembowelled horse
meditating
on the immortality of flies.

With relief she alighted
on the blue tongue
of the Duke of Clervaux.

When silence settled
and only the whisper of decay
softly circled the bodies

and only
a few arms and legs
still twitched jerkily under the trees,

she began to lay her eggs
on the single eye
of Johann Uhr,
the Royal Armourer.

And thus it was
that she was eaten by a swift
fleeing
from the fires of Estrees.

@fatcat2007 same! I am using the dictionary a lot here.. it makes it hard going. But ok.
I think it helps that we are only doing a chapter a day, it’s very manageable, and though the battle section is long, I have some patience we’ll pop out the other end. I couldn’t do 50 pages at once, it’s only 3 or 4 so it’s ok.

@Waawo thanks for sharing the poem I’ve never come across it before. I really like it (albeit a bit grim 😁) It’s an interesting take on life moving on relentlessly whilst the humans think they’re doing something important!

I'm finding it hard going both in French and in English.

I think in 'War and Peace', the war was happening at the time that the story was unfolding; it was running parallel with the 'peace' sections and it was relevant. One of the characters, Pierre, even gets caught up in the war unexpectedly. This feels like we've been dropped into a history book.

We have gone back in time to talk about a war that is over for some reason (hopefully a good reason). I'm looking forward to seeing what became of Cosette.

I’ve not posted for a while, but I have been reading along.

Apologies once again for the spoiler a while back. What an idiot I am…

Yes, this Waterloo section is heavy going and we are having to trust Hugo, whilst at the same time not understanding why we are off on this digression.

I am very admiring of the people on this thread who are reading this section in French. I am too cowardly to even try!

All this battle detail seems very dry. I suppose before films and TV people did make the mental effort to follow details of long descriptions? There simply weren’t any visuals - description was all that was available.

For light relief from Waterloo I listened to the Les Mis musical in French on Spotify. There seems to be some on YouTube Tube too. I really enjoyed it despite my French being basic. The ´Look Down, look down’ refrain in the song of the prisoners in the Bagne with JVJ becomes Pitié, pitié!’ (‘Have Mercy, have mercy!’). I have that as an earworm now 🤣

I’m a few days behind so have the luxury of a long read today. The description of the impact of the battle on farm is masterly - particularly gruesome that you can no longer draw water from the well because it is full of skeletons.

Pourquoi n’y puise-t-on plus d’eau ? Parce qu’il est plein de squelettes.

Then it gets worse as the legend is that some of the 300 people thrown into the well were still alive and their voices could be heard calling from the well.

On y jeta trois cent morts. Peut-être avec trop d’empressement. Tous étaient-ils morts ? La légende dit non. Il paraît que, la nuit qui suivait l’ensevelissement, on entendit sortir du puits des voix faibles qui appartenait.

[I am wondering how all 300 would fit in the well, but that hasn’t affected the impact of this section.]

I think the Waterloo connection will be M Thenardier as we know he is an old soldier.

It’s all about Naapoleon’s hubris today - and his piles, if that’s what the first line of the chapter is referring to? 😆

I’m also wondering how all this is going to turn out to be relevant…it’s all happening around the same time Valjean is arriving in Digne isn’t it?

I really enjoyed (if that is the right word for something quite horrible to think about) the part about Hougoumont & the farm - but I did notice that there were lots of references to people & dates from French history. I did wonder if the chapter would be less enjoyable if a reader didn’t have much knowledge of French history.

I found the subsequent chapters on Waterloo itself less interesting but still readable. I do think Hugo expects his reader to have a good background knowledge of Waterloo as there was not much detail about who the different characters were and it definitely helped to have read Georgette Heyer and Bernard Cornwell on the subject.

@DuPainDuVinDuFromage- I missed the reference to piles but will definitely look back for that. That’s not what you expect in a 19th century novel!!!

It was a few chapters ago now but didn’t Hugo just say something about Napoleon’s discomfort in the saddle? I guess the details have been filled in by later historians… 😂

I agree the constant switching between the ruined farm « today » (1861) and on the day of battle was practically cinematic - really dramatic flashbacks. Masterly indeed, really atmospheric. I could imagine it on film, which is to say, back before film was invented and people were reading the novel, he painted a really good picture of what the battle was actually like, without sparing some of the bloodier details.

Small aside - the account of the battle mentions the death of Picton, one of Wellington’s generals. I thought the name was familiar and looked him up. He was (Anglo) Welsh and a slave holder in the Carribbean and caused a scandal by torturing a young mixed race girl, which was reported on in Britain and questions were asked in Parliament, but he got away with it. The Wiki mentions that Cardiff Museum changed its representation of him to include this. I went to that exhibition (´21 or ‘22, it was during the post George Floyd reckonings with racism which also saw Colston pitched into the harbour in Bristol) and the details of what he did were horrific. So I’m glad he got a bullet in the head at Waterloo.
Then weirdly I was taking my Dad to a hospital appointment in Newport yesterday and walked past The Picton Arms, complete with pub sign with his portrait on it!

The wording in my translation is “troubled by a local ailment which made riding uncomfortable” - sounds like a euphemism to me, but maybe that’s just the way my mind works? 😂

I thought piles when I read it!

The war stuff is not doing it for me and I have skim read some of it. I have read to end of Sunday as am away for a few days and not prepared to lug Les Mis on the train with me.

I think piles was mentioned in a footnote in the English edition I have. Also, the well detail was a fabrication of Hugo's (footnote again).

I'm skimming it too. I think I could have got along with two or three chapters of Waterloo, but it feels too much and extraneous to the story. The writing seems very dense and heavy-handed. Sorry, Victor. Can we move on to Cosette soon, please?

I’ve read a chapter ahead but I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say I’m not sure what Hugo thinks of Napoleon, on one hand he praises his abilities, on the other he appears to think he is over confident and his vanity leads to his downfall…….(spoiler he didn’t win the battle of Waterloo!) 😁.

I appear to be in the minority but I'm quite enjoying these chapters although am also looking forward to it snapping back to our story.

With reference to "the minutiae of what happens in your home, in your street, is where people's lives are actually played out", there's a great quote that I love (and perhaps ole Victor could maybe have got on board with):

The bigger the issue, the smaller you write - Richard Price

I enjoyed them too @SanFranBear

@Pashazade I agree he seems ambivalent about Napoleon, but he definitely seems to subscribe to the “great men” view of history, and the idea that there are pivotal moments dictated by fate (and/or god) which change the course of history. I suppose that was the fashionable way of looking at history in the 19th century and the approach has changed a lot now.

I am struggling a bit with the Waterloo chapters and thinking they are probably only enjoyable if you have a good knowledge of the history of this period.

It’s heartening however to read about the ‘incorruptable supremacy of natural justice.’ I can’t help hoping that Hugo is right about that!

I think the detail Hugo has gone into in these Waterloo chapters is interesting in the light of his belief in God’s will.

In all of the characters, details and evidence provided in the text, the threads of occurrence at Waterloo have woven together to make a pattern designed by the will of God - not the individuals involved.

I couldn’t help wishing a few more world leaders would hurry up and be ‘denounced in the realms of the infinite’ as I read today’s chapter 🤣

You made me laugh there @FuzzyCaoraDhubh 🤣

That’s horrific 😞

Well, good riddance to him then!