Les Miserables, "Is it a book of charity"?

This paper focuses on the issue of charity as formulated and developed in LesMiserables, in order first of all to relocate it within a dynamic system of critical thought - of non-dogmatic thinking - that tries to define and evaluate charitable acts and the moral philosophy that inspires them as no longer simply logically following from virtue but as the product of historical action developing within a specific socio-economic anthropology. The author endeavoured to reassert discursively a right he tried to redefine away from the churches and from theology. This implies that a specific relationship to the reader - as well as a specific function of literature - is reinforced through the double invention of a requirement for freedom and a duty of brotherhood attributed to humanity understood as the possibility of progress and of transcending History.