Les Misérables is made by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg and is based on the book with the same title by Victor Hugo.

Jean Valjean decides, after years of being unfaithful to the law, to start a new life. He changes his name to Monsieur Madeleine and becomes a factory owner. One of his workers, Fantine has an illegitimate daughter Cosette who lives with the Thernardiers. When the other women in the factory discover this, they want her to dismiss and the foreman throws her out.

Fantine needs money to buy medicine for her daughter and has to sell her locket, her hair and even herself as a whore. She gets into a fight with a customer and is about to be taken to prison by Javert when Monsieur Madeleine arrives and demands she be taken to a hospital instead.

Madeleine then rescues a man from a runaway cart and when Javert sees this he is reminded of the abnormal strength of convict 24601 Jean Valjean, a parole-breaker whom he has been tracking for years but now, he says, has just been recaptured. Valjean can't let an innocent man go to prison in his place. He confesses to the court that he is prisoner 24601. At the hospital, Valjean promise the dying Fantine to look after Cosette. Javert comes to arrest him but Valjean escapes.

At the Thernardiers who runs an inn, young Cosette has been abused as a skivvy while indulging their own daughter Eponine. Jean Valjean finds Cosette and pays the Thenardiers to let him take her with him and to Paris. But Javert is still after him.

In Paris nine years later 1832 there is a great unrest in the city because of the demise of the popular leader General Lamarque, the only one left in the Government who cares about the poor. Thernardier and his wife are leading a street gang and they set upon Jean Valjean and Cosette. Javert, who doesn't recognize Valjean, rescues them.

At a political meeting a group of students prepare for a revolution and when the boy Gavroche brings the news of General Lamarque's death, the students stream out into the streets to get popular support. But the student Marius is distracted by thoughts of Cosette with whom he has fallen in love. Despite her own feelings for Marius, Eponine brings him to Cosette, who also is in love with him. Valjean thinks it is Javert who was lurking outside his house, when it was the Thernardier's gang, and tells Cosette that they must leave the country.

The students prepare to build the barricade. Marius sends Eponine with a letter to Cosette but when she tries to return to the barricade she is shot and killed. Valjean arrives at the barricade to search for Marius and is given a chance to kill Javert but instead lets him go. The next day all the rebels are killed except for Marius but who is unconscious. Valjean finds him and takes him to the sewers. He meets Javert once more but pleads for time to deliver the young man to the hospital. Javert decides to let him go and then kills himself by throwing himself in the river. Unaware of the identity of his rescuer, Marius recovers in Cosette's care.

Valjean confesses the truth of his past for Marius and tells him that after he and Cosette are married, he must go away. At the wedding Thernardier says that Cosette's father is a murderer and shows a ring he stole from a corpse in the sewers. It is Marius own ring and he realizes it was Valjean who rescued him that night.