The Outcasts

Victor Hugo (1802-1885) is a great French writer, a bright representative of French romanticism. His first full-length and incredibly successful novel, Notre Dame de Paris, contributed to the cathedral's fame and its salvation from destruction. He influenced such writers as A. Camus, C. Dickens and F. Dostoevsky. Les Miserables is a famous epic about the lives of people rejected by society. Among the "outcasts" are Jean Valjean, sentenced to twenty years of hard labor for stealing bread for his starving family, little Cosette, who turned into a charming girl, and the cheerful street urchin Gavroche. The confrontation between the criminal world of Paris and the police, the disputes of political parties and battles on the barricades, the monastic laws and the church system - a brilliant picture of French society at the beginning of the 19th century.