This dissertation examines the moral, historical, and political philosophy in Alessandro Manzoni’s novel I Promessi Sposi and Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. To analyze Manzoni’s and Hugo’s portrayal of the human and governance, I turn to the ordinary language philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and Stanley Cavell. The key to investigating the complexity of the characters, philosophies, and politics in the novels lies in both authors’ turns to ordinary life, people, and language: the lower classes and ordinary language build the worlds of their narratives. Both authors seek to counter the philosophical skepticism that began with Descartes and continued well into the nineteenth-century under the Restoration. The two chapters on I Promessi Sposi examine how the novel stages the disaggregation and reaggregation of community through instances of skepticism and the opposing ethic of acknowledgment as they manifest through scenes of ordinary living. I then attend to Manzoni’s vision of history as a concatenation of events produced by specific ancien régime actors. Next, I lay out the sources of republican thought that Manzoni read, and the glimpses of republics that dramatize what a republic and post-ancien régime church would look like in an independent Italy. In the two chapters on Les Misérables, I introduce Hugo’s philosophy of skepticism and the human in Restoration France while drawing from Cavell’s notion that we cannot dismiss skepticism but instead must learn to cope with its constant threat of erasure. I also elaborate on Hugo’s philosophy of history as a sea change in governance, the self, and poetry since the advent of Jesus Christ. Finally, I establish the historical background of the novel’s 1815-1832 events and Hugo’s political engagement and republican theory in key scenes on pluralism and self-rule. My research thus focuses on how these two novels serve as littérature engagée and create the imaginary of republican life for their nineteenth-century readers who knew little about what this form of government could do for society.