Les Miserables is based on a true story. At that time, a poor farmer was sentenced to five years' hard labor for stealing a piece of bread, and after he was released from prison, he was unable to find a job because of his yellow ID card. This deeply touched Hugo, and it took him seventeen years to complete this masterpiece. In the preface to the author, Hugo pointed out the purpose of creation: to expose the oppression caused by laws and customs, and to expose how the world makes men down and out because of poverty, women down because of hunger, and children weak because of darkness, in an attempt to make novels beneficial to the solution of social problems. This work has a huge structure and complicated branches and leaves. The whole book has five parts: Fantine, Cosette, Marius, Children's Love in Rue Boulogne and Heroic Blood in Rue Saint-Denis and Jean Valjean. The central issue is the tragic fate and situation of the poor people, which can be said to describe the tragic life history of the protagonist Jean Valjean.
This novel embodies Hugo's humanitarianism. Hugo believes that there are two kinds of laws in the world: the high-level law is kindness and love, which can put an end to evil and arouse conscience, and then reform society and save mankind, and the low-level law is punishment, which can only deepen crime by relying on punishment. The former is embodied by Bishop Miriam, who awakened Jean Valjean's conscience with moral influence and fraternity and made him a real man. On the other hand, Javert, the representative police officer of the latter, followed Jean Valjean like an eagle dog and persecuted orphans and widows. Like a cold-blooded animal, he finally had a nervous breakdown and threw himself into the river, showing the smallness, weakness and bankruptcy of the existing law in the face of lofty morality. The author's attempt to use abstract humanitarianism as a weapon to eliminate social ills has its limitations.
Les Miserables has made great achievements in reflecting real life. There are thrilling historical events, slums, monasteries, courts, prisons, salons of bourgeois and Latin quarter where college students live, which constitute a broad and typical social picture of 19th century France. The characters in the novel are also typical. However, the dominant style is romanticism, and the principle of contrast between beauty and ugliness advocated by Hugo is widely used in characterization, scene description and so on. The author is good at creating unusual characters by exaggeration and promoting the development of the plot by fictional accidental factors; At the same time, the novel is full of lyrical atmosphere, and the whole novel is filled with romantic atmosphere.
This is a magnificent epic, a personal epic, but it is not limited to personal significance. The protagonist Jean Valjean's life is so bumpy that he has almost all kinds of extraordinary vitality. He is a legendary hero with strong romanticism. The romanticism of this character is more important in his moral spirit, and his spiritual journey is as touching as an epic. He was originally a kind-hearted laborer. The cruelty of society, the punishment of law and the ruthlessness of reality made him "gradually become a beast" and blindly retaliated against the society, so that he made a mistake that he really regretted for life. This regret led to a deeper consciousness, which became the starting point of his spiritual development and promoted his spiritual personality to a lofty realm.
Jean Valjean is not an abstract person. From birth, experience, morality and habits, he is a laborer. He embodies all kinds of excellent qualities of the working people, and he is the representative of the oppressed, damaged and insulted working people. All his experiences and fates have a lofty pathos, which is of social representative significance, making Les Miserables a tragic epic of the struggling masses in the dark society.
In terms of its richness, profundity and complexity, Les Miserables undoubtedly ranks first among Hugo's numerous literary works. Even in the literature of the 9th century, only Balzac's masterpiece "Human Comedy" can compare with it. For its thick artistic volume, perhaps only with the help of metaphors such as huge forests and vast oceans can we provide a general concept.
It has been more than a century since Les Miserables came out. It stands proudly on the sea of time. It is an art resort visited by millions of people from different times and countries in Qian Qian, and it will always be an immortal resort in the history of human literature.