in his novel "les misérables", published thirty years later in 1862, hugo depicts the period leading up to this rebellion, and follows the lives and interactions of several characters over a twenty-year period. the novel begins in 1815, the year of napoleon bonaparte's final defeat and climaxes with the battles of the 1832 june rebellion. an outspoken republican activist, hugo unquestionably favored the revolutionaries, although in "les miserables" he wrote about louis-philippe in sympathetic terms, as well as criticising him.