Les Misérables: a work that exposes Jansenist rigorism
The France in which Victor Hugo writes Les Misérables is a nation still marked by an old spiritual wound: Jansenist rigorism. Although Jansenism had been officially condemned and the celebrated Abbey of Port-Royal destroyed in the seventeenth century by order of Louis XIV, its ideas and its moral atmosphere continued to permeate French culture for a long time.
