Les Misérables Tome I: Fantine

The first movement of Victor Hugo's epic begins with grace and ends with tragedy. In a France still healing from revolution, Jean Valjean emerges from nineteen years of hard labor with nothing but rage, until a bishop shows him a mercy that should be impossible. But Hugo's true heart belongs to Fantine: a working woman whose virtue is destroyed not by vice, but by the machinery of poverty and social cruelty. She loses her job, her dignity, her body, one piece at a time, to feed a child she cannot keep. Hugo's furious indictment of a society that manufactures victims then punishes them for existing builds toward an act of sacrifice that will echo through the entire novel. This is a book that argues compassion is irrational, and that this irrationality might be the only thing worth believing in.