Les Miserables ends with fighting at a Paris barricade. Which real uprising does Victor Hugo place his characters inside?

Volume 2 of Les Miserables opens with a long account of a battle that Napoleon lost. Which battle is it?

Les Miserables was first published in 1862, but its street fighting takes place in 1832. How long after the uprising did the novel reach readers?

Jean Valjean is condemned to the galleys for breaking a pane of glass and taking a loaf of bread. How long was the sentence he was first given?

Hugo's preface ends: "so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Miserables cannot fail to be of use." What does this claim about the novel?

Hugo signed the preface of Les Miserables "Hauteville House, 1862." Where was he living when he signed it, and why?

Napoleon III offered an amnesty to exiled opponents in 1859, three years before Les Miserables appeared. What did Victor Hugo do?

Volume 2 opens: "Last year (1861), on a beautiful May morning, a traveler, the person who is telling this story, was coming from Nivelles..." Who is this traveler best understood to be?

Hugo's daughter Leopoldine drowned in the Seine at Villequier in September 1843. Which use of that fact is a fair biographical reading of Les Miserables?

Hugo's father, Joseph Leopold Sigisbert Hugo, was a general in Napoleon's armies. Which part of Les Miserables does that biographical fact most directly help explain?

Hugo's preface opens: "So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the civilization of earth..." What is characteristic of the style?

Hugo halts the plot for whole books on Waterloo, on the Paris sewers and on street slang. What does this habit show about his style?

Les Miserables opens by dating itself to 1815 and introducing Bishop Myriel rather than Jean Valjean. What does that opening choice do?

The bishop tells Valjean: "Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you." What is characteristic of Hugo's writing here?

Fantine sells her hair, and then two of her front teeth, to send money for her daughter's keep. What is Hugo using this to show?

Which French government was in power during the 1832 uprising that Hugo writes into the novel?

Hugo went into hiding in Paris, then fled on a false passport in December 1851, after Napoleon III's coup. How does that fact shape a reading of Les Miserables?

Victor Hugo finished and published Les Miserables while living outside France.

Again and again the narrator of Les Miserables steps forward to judge what he has just described. What does that habit make the narrator?

The French title Les Miserables names the group the novel is written about. Which group is that, as Hugo presents them?