'Les Misérables,' a story of injustice and brutality that never goes out of style.

In the 19th century, mass entertainment was provided by the great serials, those river novels that sought to simultaneously describe the world and change it. Charles Dickens 's stories aroused such fascination that his biographers recount how readers would wait on the docks of American ports for the arrival of ships carrying magazines offering new releases of his books. But no novel from the golden age of the serial had as much impact as Victor Hugo 's (1802–1885) Les Misérables .

As if it were the international launch of a new Harry Potter adventure, on April 3, 1862, Hugo's novel River began distribution simultaneously in 12 countries, from Brazil to Russia (French was then the lingua franca of culture), reported Le Monde in an article entitled " Les Misérables, a global literary event ." It quoted the writer's daughter a month after its launch: " Les Misérables produced unparalleled enthusiasm in all social classes; the book was in everyone's hands; the characters, who had already become archetypes, were cited on all occasions and in all contexts. Images of these characters are in every printing shop window; monstrous posters advertising Les Misérables are plastered on every corner." The first edition of 100,000 copies, a brutal figure for the time, sold out immediately. The impressive thing is that the impact of that two-thousand-page novel remains more than 150 years later.

On the occasion of the bicentenary of his birth in 2002, maestro Rafael Conte wrote in EL PAÍS about the constant renewal of his success: “Victor Hugo lives on, as demonstrated by the loyalty of his readers and consumers, that of the cultural industry of our times, the growing relevance of his adaptations to film, theater, and television, even in the most central of places: the United States, from where we have frequently seen adaptations of Notre Dame de Paris and Les Misérables in film and theater.” Curiously, although the musical had triumphed worldwide—it has been shown in 53 countries, spent 40 years on the London stage, and had 130 million viewers—it did not return to Paris until 2024, despite being a work originally written in French and premiered in 1980 in the French capital.

And there she goes: Melani García has just won the television competition "Tu cara me suena" with a version of one of the most famous songs from the musical, "I Dreamed a Dream ," for which Anne Hathaway won an Oscar in 2012 for Tom Hooper's film version, a song that has 60 million plays on Spotify. When she came out to collect the award, Hathaway ended her speech by saying: "I hope that in the not too distant future, Fantine's misadventures can only be read about in novels and not in real life." The endless success of Les Misérables has to do with the fact that the injustices described by Hugo in his book, a portrait of the world at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, are still there.

The story, with dozens of characters and spanning 30 years, describes 19th-century French society, but above all, it tells the story of people whose social class and birth forever determine their destiny. The protagonist is Jean Valjean, a man condemned to a terrible sentence in the galleys for stealing a piece of bread to feed his family, who is obsessively pursued throughout his life by a policeman, Javert. The symbolism of a person forever marked by the poverty of his past has enormous relevance today. Hugo also recounted acts of greatness—such as that of the Bishop of Digne who saves Valjean—and of extreme human misery.

In a world where racist rhetoric is on the rise, where those fleeing poverty are stigmatized by the far right, as if their origins were to mark them forever, where migrants are hunted in Torre Pacheco or Los Angeles, Hugo's message retains all its power. Valjean's endless flight, the unfortunate Fantine, her daughter Cosette, the evil Thénardiers, and the obsessive Javert embody an unjust and cruel world that not only refuses to disappear, but seems to be making a strong comeback.