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Poverty
Is Hugo a socialist? (Would it matter if he were?) You can debate all day about that—although not with us, please—but the hard truth is that you can't have greed on one side of society without having poverty on the other. That's just math. Once some people start having way more than they need, others will have way less than they need, at least until someone invents the replicator. (Um, science folk, please get on that, kthanks.)
In any case, socialism or not, it's safe to say that Les Misérables shows poverty to be one of the greatest evils of the modern world. And, in blaming poverty for people's action rather than actions for people's poverty, he's got a pretty modern take on it, too.
In Les Misérables, Victor Hugo suggests that we can only help people on an individual basis, since it's impossible to end poverty it in the long run.
Les Misérables is nothing more than a 1200-page brick of socialist propaganda.
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