Exploring Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables

Watch our conversation with Graham School instructor Clare Pearson to explore Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, which is often described as one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century. Les Misérables is a sophisticated novel that combines history, philosophy, and literature, crossing genres in a way that influenced Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The book interweaves the story of Jean Valjean with a meta-structure that involves us in French post-revolutionary history, including the Napoleonic wars, class relations, the place of the church, the criminal law code, education, the architecture of Paris, and the situation of women. Our conversation relishes the pleasures of this extraordinary novel, delves into Hugo’s aims and meaning, and previews Pearson’s forthcoming course on the book, see https://graham.uchicago.edu/programs-....