"Les Miserables" Analytical Essay by Peter Pen

This paper examines how completed many years after the Romantic period had reached its popular peak, "Les Miserables" by Victor Hugo looks as much backward as forward, loving its past and imagining its future. It looks at how by re-reading both the past and the present, Hugo presents the readers with a new future history and how with Enjolras, he calls for a France dominated by heroic action in which there will be no more fictions or parasites, only the real governed by the true. It also shows how, although "Les Miserables" was written more than a century and half ago the themes of loneliness, alienation, misery, cruelty, progress, and regress within the society are still relevant to today's humanity.