“There are two kinds of righteousness.” This phrase from Martin Luther identifies a motif in Victor Hugo’s, Les Misérables. The story of Jean Valjean is at once a literary masterpiece and a thunderbolt of social commentary. The massacre of the students involved in the June Rebellion and the agonizing existence Hugo portrays as the life of the poor function as a narrative unveiling of the injustice of Restoration France. The book is, in Hugo’s description, a “sad story” and the title tells the truth: it is about Les Misérables – the sufferers, the “wretched of the earth” as the musical […]

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