Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, Parts IV-V

The Unseen Book Club

We return to Les Miserables after completing the second half of the book, which depicts the Paris Uprising of 1832 against the constitutional July Monarchy. Spoiler alert: The uprising ends in tragic defeat, but romance and hope prevail.

Hugo’s fiery radical liberalism echoes the dreams and ambitions of his antecedent revolutionary generation, which, by the middle of his life, were already being contested by new revolutionary ideologies of class revolution. As a bridge between these eras, Les Miserables retains its potency as a vibrant account of social rupture and the insuppressible human spirit. We talk about it all.

NOTE: This episode was recorded in spring 2021, so there are a couple of references that are about a year out-of-date. Please excuse the poor audio quality of this episode as an artifact of our relative inexperience at the time of recording.

The Unseen Book Club: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub

Music by ex-official: https://exofficialexo.bandcamp.com/

Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/