Most people think "Les Misérables" is about politics.

But Franklin & Marshall College French professor Lisa Gasbarrone is convinced it's about religion.

"If (Victor Hugo) wanted to emphasize politics, he would not have picked the failed revolution of 1832," said Gasbarrone, who also is F&M's director of international studies.

"He would have picked the successful revolution of 1830 or 1848, when people were very hopeful. And that would have been the end of the story."

Most people also would not get excited about a 1,200-page book that takes about 14 weeks to read.

But "Les Misérables" — both the book and the play — excites Gasbarrone, and she hopes her enthusiasm is infectious.

The native of Maine, who has studied in France, said when she teaches the book, her students love it.

"They enter into it and live inside it," said Gasbarrone, a member of Lancaster's Sacred Heart Catholic Church. "It's an epic, a fairy tale &tstr; historical and biblical. It's a whole experience."

Hugo was raised a Catholic but was not an orthodox Christian. A statesman, human rights activist and passionate supporter of republicanism, he was in favor of religion but not organized religion.

"I don't know if I can even say he was a Christian," Gasbarrone said.

But he definitely wasn't an atheist.

"He said, 'Progress must believe in God. An atheist is an evil leader of the human race,'" she said. "He believed in putting faith before politics."

A graduate of Bowdoin College who earned a master's degree and doctorate at Princeton University, Gasbarrone said she has read the 1862 historical novel six or eight times, in English and in French.

"It's permeated with faith and spirit," she said. "It's a springboard to learn our own faith journey."

Believing that many academics downplay the importance of religion in Hugo's story, Gasbarrone wrote an article, "Restoring the Sacred in 'Les Misérables'," that appeared last summer in "Religion & Literature," a journal of the University of Notre Dame.

It opens with a quote from Hugo: "This book is a drama in which the major character is the Infinite. Man plays a secondary role."

"God is the major character," Gasbarrone said.

And that, she said, explains why people flock to the theater to see it.

It explains why they sit through three hours about the "wretched poor" and feel uplifted.

"It's grim. It's Dickensenian. (But) it's deeply Christian," she said.

"It shows those redeemed (Jean Valjean) and those incapable of redemption (Javert)."

Valjean, the protagonist, has spent 19 years in jail for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving family. He then mindlessly steals some silver from a church and is quickly arrested.

But the church bishop, in an act of mercy, redeems Valjean, allowing him to keep the silver and turn his life around.

"(Valjean's story is) his faith journey, his struggle, his spiritual defining," Gasbarrone said. "Like Jesus, he never hurts anyone."

In the uprising, he fires but does no harm. When he has the chance to kill Javert, the police officer who is his antagonist, he lets him escape.

Javert, who has never experienced the love and sacrifice Valjean has, is so torn between arresting Valjean and letting him go that he commits suicide.

"He cannot distinguish between the letter and the spirit of the law," Gasbarrone said.

The professor participated in "Theology on Stage," a discussion at the Fulton following the matinee of "Les Misérables" on June 21, the day demonstrators took to the streets in Tehran.

She asked those in the audience who were thinking about the demonstrators while watching the play to raise their hands.

"Hands went up in the whole room," she said. "It was touching to watch that play that night.

"Sometimes people have to break the law for a higher law."

• Fulton Theatre's production of "Les Misérables" runs through July 19.