Les Miserables read-a-long 2026 | Deuxième Partie (2)

[Pashazade]

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

I've taken over from AgualusasL0ver in trying to keep us all reading together, but have copied the below over from the first thread.

I'll also be using the Christine Donougher translation (on Kindle) for posting in the main, but it doesn't matter which translation you have, they seem to follow the same breakdown.
It's a bit sprawly in places, some people have entire sections in the appendices, so I've started adding the first line of the chapter to try and lock in exactly where we are for that day, hopefully it helps us all keep together!

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 loved the garden chapter. The wildness and beauty of nature made me think of Romanticism. Cosette's maturity mirrors the growth of the flowers in the garden. Beauty is natural but can be exploited as it was with Fantine I guess.

I had fallen a few weeks behind on my reading so was avoiding the thread to avoid spoilers as I don't know the plot having not seen the musical/film. I have caught up again over the last few days having raced through the action in the garret, slowed down as Hugo diverted into politics and history and sped up again as he refocused on JVJ and Cosette. Slightly disappointed with Cosette's vanity and expenditure on her fashionable wardrobe as it is the antithesis of the way in which JVJ has lived his life. Will try to stay on track now.

I’m enjoying these long descriptive chapters this week - they are difficult and I ve had to use the dictionary a lot, but the pictures Hugo paints are magnificent, the writing is very poetic in places. It’s a bit frustrating that we’ve gone back in time a little, but I’m starting to have more patience with the build up.

Today’s chapter with the chain gang was very dramatic and clearly written from a campaigning point of view, but also gives us insight into how destabilising it is for JVJ to see his past (and a possible future he still fears).

Trulu, this book is magisterial, magnificent (and annoying!).

Does anyone know of any literary criticism on it that I could read further? Or any online Uni lectures, that sort of thing?

Whoops I’ve got myself a chapter ahead, was just reading and knew I had a way to go to catch up! I am very much loving Hugo’s descriptions of falling in love and how it makes girls bold and boys shy.
Plus that knowledge of the power of attraction, Hugo captures it very well, I had boobs early and knew by the time I was 14 that they exerted a certain power.
It’s just such a shame he finished that chapter by labelling Cosette a flirt in such a judgemental way. (Or I may be reading too much into it, but Hugo judges his women a lot for someone who describes the inner life so well). But it’s the idea that she is manipulating with her innocence even if she doesn’t know it and then pushing the reader to view it as a negative.
I really disliked JVJ being so possessive of her, I understand why but he has no great understanding of himself at this point, does he really expect her to live with him forever?
Then the shock for him of today’s chapter so then I feel for him again, although most of these stories would come to nothing if people actually had open and honest conversations with each other!

@Benvenuto I'm sure you're right in saying that Hugo is better than some (most?) other 19th c male writers when it comes to representing women. His sympathetic portrayal of Fantine is impressive. I don't think he's challenging any gender stereotypes with his portrait of Cosette, however! I agree with your comments about her,@pashazade.

@TimeforaGandT, you said Slightly disappointed with Cosette's vanity and expenditure on her fashionable wardrobe as it is the antithesis of the way in which JVJ has lived his life. True, but then again Valjean has encouraged that personality trait in her perhaps, by lavishing as many luxuries on her as he can, and depriving himself of as many as he can...

@MotherOfCatBoy I also found the chain gang chapter very powerful (although it isn't subtle). I'm very impressed that you're reading the French without an English translation on hand! About literary criticism on Hugo, that's a good question. I don't think Hugo's novels are usually taught at universities; they're just too long and unwieldy, and as a prose novelist Hugo doesn't have the same cachet as 19th c. French writers like Balzac and Flaubert. In the case of many French writers, there's the Cambridge Companion series which is very good - lots of short articles about one writer (or one period or genre) brought together in one volume and usually written by leading scholars. But there's no Cambridge Companion to Hugo; I checked!

I think his poetry is more often taught. I read his political collection Les Chatiments in a 19th c. undergraduate class (but I remember virtually nothing about it, except that I found it really hard going at the time, ha!). I've also seen his collection Les Contemplations on university syllabi. But never his novels.

There must be a substantial body of scholarship on his novels though! A quick google suggests that one classic work is Victor Brombert's Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel (Harvard, 1984).

Ooh thanks @cassandre I will look that up and do a little digging of my own.

In fact I do have a translation on hand - I cracked a few weeks ago, I think k it was during the build up to the Jondrette/ Thenardier attic bust and all the descriptions of the gangsters - there was so much slang and idiom that the dictionary wasn’t a great deal of help so I found a basic online version available through Apple Books - it’s Isabel Hapgood, quite clunky prose to be honest, but I only use it when I’ve looked up all the words and I’m still stumped for the sense of a sentence/ paragraph.

It is hard going to be honest and if it was more than a chapter a day I’d have given up by now. But because it’s little chunks I can stick with it.

He does occasionally do quite Dickens like humour. There was quite a funny description of Marius' mooning looks yesterday. Mme Thenardier aside, the women tend to be rather humour free. But JVJ isn't exactly a bundle of laughs.

True but I did think it was funny when JVJ tests Marius by going to the Luxembourg at different times etc and then instantly decides he hates him because he’s sighing over Cosette - that was quite comical.

True. I think that contains the bit I found funny.

Good point about the humour! I think Hugo maybe gets a bad rap because of his reputation for earnestness and sentimentality, but in fact there's quite a lot of humour and wit in his writing.

Back from holiday and slowly catching up. I’ve just finished Book 2 of this section, and feel sad for Eponine with her unrequited love for Marius and her frank awareness of her low social status. I hadn’t expected to like her!

Book 3 next and then I’ll be pretty much caught up.

Yes @cassandre, I too find myself quoting that immortal line of @FuzzyCaoraDhubh's - "Hugo is a waffler"!

Well Book 4 was rather short, I had to double check to make sure I hadn’t missed something!

Part Four, Book Four cont’d…..
Mon 31st Aug - Ch2 - Mère Plutarque at No Loss to Explain an Extraordinary Phenomenon (It was evening)
Book Five, Which Does Not End the Way it Began
Tues 1st September - Ch1 - Loneliness and the Barracks Combined (Cosette’s heartache)
Weds 2nd Sept - Ch2 - Cosette’s Fears (During the first fortnight)
Thurs 3rd Sept - Ch3 - Enhanced by Toussaint’s Comments (In the garden)
Fri 4th Sept - Ch4 - A Heart beneath a Stone (The universe reduced to a single being)
Sat 5th Sept - Ch5 - Cosette after the Letter (Reading this)
Sun 6th Sept - Ch6 - Old Folk Are Designed to Be Out at the Right Time (When evening came)

I'm glad to have brought this useful comment to our discussion 😅

@cassandreI find the question of canon texts an interesting one, as, as you say, I was taught that the big three 19th century novelists were Balzac, Flaubert & Zola. This surprised me as a teenager, as the person I thought was a classic novelist of that era was Dumas. I can see why you wouldn’t teach Hugo as both Les Mis & Notre-Dame are so long & realistically you want a shorter text that most students might actually read, but I’m not always convinced that readers agree with the critics - this thread is an example of this as is the Monte-Cristo one. I also wonder whether readers are more sympathetic to epic texts than critics (Lord of the Rings frequently topping reader polls being an example).

I also think that the charge of sentimentalism is unfair as this was common amongst many authors of the era - Dickens being rather worse in my view. Then again, when I was reading a bit about Dickens’s work for the 2 Cities readalong, some of the criticism of him seemed unfair particularly that some of his characters lacked depth (in my view the exaggerated traits of many of his characters is part of the appeal of his writing).

My own view is that Les Mis stands up well compared to the other 19th century French texts that I’ve read & I would far, far rather spend time in Les Mis world than that of Mme Bovary or Proust. I could do without the waffle (waffle for me = fall behind in the readalong), but Hugo is very, very good in the calibre of his waffle. I can still remember his waffling about Gothic architecture & the printing press many years after reading Notre Dame.

Where I do find Hugo superb is just how memorable the key moments (& there are a lot of them) are, from the Bishop meeting Napoleon & Valjean meeting the Bishop through Valjean & Javert, Valjean falling from the ship and many more. It’s a novel that is very easy to picture.

@MotherOfCatBoy- it’s not exactly literary criticism, but the Belmondo film of Les Mis both updates the text & dialogues with it. I am planning to watch it at the end of the readalong.

@Piggywaspushed- re humour & women there was also the Bishop’s maid & Fantine’s friends.

Agree with so much of what you’ve said @Benvenuto. I think you might be right about only assigning shorter texts to courses - though when I did my English Lit we did have Clarissa on the syllabus but I do confess that I skim read it and did not plough my way through the whole lot!

I read Bovary in Uni (for pleasure) and it was very angsty and depressing, maybe even more than Tess tbh… there was a big film out at the time, maybe Isabelle Huppert? That made me read it. Dumas and Hugo are both far more entertaining in many ways - they are good old fashioned story tellers. Like Dickens and Tolstoy, neither of whom I read as a student. They have the ability as you say to present you with what we would now think of as big cinematic set piece moments.

I’ve not yet tackled any Balzac or Zola.. Might need another readalong to get me there.

Besides the characters, the things I’ll remember from Les Mis are the “essays” in the side - Waterloo, le mot de Cambronne, the thinking about convents, etc. A bit like Tolstoy, it’s as if you could have a book of collected essays by Hugo about all these diverse subjects.. I get frustrated that they hold up the story but they are actually fascinating to be fair.

Film sounds good 👍
We could have a watch along after we’ve all finished.

@DuPainDuVinDuFromage I also think Eponine is a great character. She's so funny and feisty. In some ways I wish Marius would fall for her instead of Cosette (but that would be in an alternate Les Miz universe!).

@Tarahumara glad you also recognised the genius of @FuzzyCaoraDhubh's immortal assessment of Hugo 😂That's all the lit crit you really need right there! Seriously I find it rather charming the way some 19th c writers just go off on tangents, and just expect the reader to indulge them. There's something quite intimate about it even if it's occasionally exasperating.

I also agree with your comments @Benvenuto . Very interesting! I still prefer Dickens to Hugo overall (I think we clashed on this issue before, ha), but that's very much a personal preference of mine rather than a grand universal claim. (I'm always suspicious of grand universal claims.) Also, I like Hugo as well! Both/and instead of either/or.

I'm also very sceptical of literary canons in general. Exactly as you say, the books that readers love in a given era are not necessarily the same as the books that are taught in schools and universities centuries later. Canons (in the West anyway) have mostly been constructed by a small group of privileged white male elite. And canons change over time as society's tastes and interests change. (Incidentally, there's one MNer who pops up now and again, who adores Harold Bloom and who has decided to take Harold Bloom's The Western Canon as gospel truth about which books are Great Literature. Obviously this is not a crime but it winds me up no end - how can you take one critic, a clever guy but still just ONE old white guy who was a bit of lech as well and decide that he's the arbiter of great literature??!!)

Anyway, I think Hugo's novels aren't taught much at universities now partly for practical reasons (they're too long) and partly for reasons of sensibility/taste. (I say this as an observation not a value judgement.) Modernist tastes privileged realism over Romanticism. Hugo, like it or not, is a Romantic. Balzac is taught as the most famous author of the realist novel, Flaubert is taught as an innovator of narrative style (impersonality, free indirect discourse), Zola is taught for his theories of naturalism, Stendhal is taught for his 'early' realist prose and the psychology of his characters. In other words, none of them really wore their hearts on their sleeves the way Hugo did. And all of them wrote novels short enough to read in one university term!

Like you @MotherOfCatBoy I admire Flaubert but found Madame Bovary very depressing! Hugo and Dumas are far better for entertainment value as you say. I read Zola a long time ago and don't really want to go back to him. He's even more depressing than Flaubert. Germinal is a novel to slit your wrists to if there ever was one. Stendhal I wouldn't mind tackling. Balzac really appeals to me and I would happily read more of him, but I think it's important to recognise that 'realism' is also just another way of looking at the world. It's not any more neutral or objective than Romanticism is. I've read a couple of short works by Balzac and they were brilliant (eg The Girl with the Golden Eyes).

Sorry for the massive tangent, I love discussions like this.

This Guardian article is rather fun

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/dec/30/party-tricks-and-naked-writing-the-eccentric-life-of-victor-hugo

It reinforces what you say @Benvenuto about how popular Hugo was with readers
When negotiating payment with his publisher for Les Misérables, Hugo famously declared that he wanted to be paid more than anyone else had ever been paid to write a book. Biographer David Bellos claims that the 300,000 francs (around £3m in today’s money) Hugo received still remains the highest figure ever paid for a work of literature. Luckily for the publisher, the investment paid off: Les Misérables was so hotly anticipated that Parisian workers queued up at bookshops with wheelbarrows to fill with newly purchased copies, to later sell to colleagues for profit.

And oh yeah, I'd be totally up for a film watch-along!

Really interesting comments from everyone. I also prefer Hugo to Madame Bovary (which I read for an earlier readalong), but I haven't tried Balzac or Zola. Proust is my only ever DNF as far as I can remember - Ulysses used to be another, but I did eventually go back and finish it!

I did read Le Rouge et le Noir way back when and quite enjoyed all the melodrama - I see it as a kind of anti-Jane Austen where all the drama is right there on the page rather than in the background, set in roughly the same historical moment… You can really see how this would be a sensation, the Netflix of its day when they didn’t have Netflix .. I mean how much entertainment could a normal, poor, provincial person get back then? Travelling players? A local theatre? Early circulating magazines? And you had to be literate.. but they just didn’t have as many stories to choose from so you can see how some are dynamite on first publication .. like Goethe with Werther (never read it).

That is amazing. I listened to a good Radio 4 documentary, I think I linked to it way upthread (warning, spoilers); the narrator annoyed me because she was just so bloody breathless about it all, but they emphasised how much his wife was a good business partner in all this and took part in the marketing for it (despite his many mistresses)..

@MotherOfCatBoy- re shorter texts, I think you have to be realistic about the time that students have & also what might appeal to them. If they are studying a literature based course, then they need to read the text & then reread at least parts of it to engage with the voice & vision of the author - otherwise what is the point of an Arts course?

This was brought home to me when DS1 (not a natural Arts student) sat his GCSEs & had to suffer Frankenstein - inevitably he focused most of his study on the revision guide rather than the text itself (much to my disapproval but completely understandable given the length) nor did he enjoy it much. When we read Two Cities, I remember thinking that he would have got far more out of studying that as it’s quite short for a 19th century text & subject matter (war, alcohol & unrequited love) felt much more interesting for a teenager.

@cassandre- your point re Romanticism was very interesting as I suspect that partly explains why I prefer Hugo, as I’ve always had a weakness for identifying with characters & seeing the novel through their eyes. With Dickens there is more distance between reader & character but as you say it is a personal preference.

What I do find odd re the privileging of realism is that those authors have flaws too. Zola is the one that I know best of the big three, but the naturalism for me is the least interesting part of his work, as there is just too much opining about how characters are formed / doomed by heredity & environment. The more interesting side of his work for me is his fascination with progress in society & how he captures this in his novels (although as you say re Germinal the progress isn’t always positive). I agree with you re Stendhal & Balzac.

I like the sound of a watch-along too!

That's a really good point @Benvenuto about Lord of the Rings and its popularity despite its length. Maybe we can draw the conclusion that the reading public don't mind a bit of waffle as long as it's good waffle.