Of course you’re entitled to your opinion but what possible value did that long digression about the Battle of Waterloo have to do with anything? It was pure authorial self-indulgence and added nothing to the story at all. I think he just ran out of ideas and trod water for a while just filling the page until he thought up something else.

If you take out all the irrelevant stuff, Les Miserables is probably only about 300 pages. And I mean genuinely irrelevant. Hugo was mad as a hatter and took off in whatever direction he felt like - long digressions about Waterloo, the Parisian sewer system etc - that really add nothing to the book. They aren’t even all that interesting in themselves, as well as having no bearing on the plot, so I think you can read an abridged version and still feel you have read what was important in the novel.