... a thousand apologies. I've just realised I literally forgot a paragraph in this reply. Which explains why the whole suddenly fit into two! The following was supposed to follow after the parenthesis that begins this here second part (and explains what "Les Misérables" is supposedly a good example of):

Historical fiction would be unreadable without 'the human touch' (if there could even be 'fiction' without it - if a book contains only hard facts or argument-based theories, it's non-fiction, isn't it?), but I think that from the point on where there is more romance, more psychology, or more decidedly out-of-time-and-place politics/philosophy (e.g. Marxism in the eighteenth century) than accurate history, it should step away from involving real people as characters. Not from choosing real events as the setting, necessarily, unless it distorts them absolutely ... in which case (as both Sibylla and I have said a few times now), why pick them in the first place (unless you have absolutely no other way of getting your word out)?

(... all right, maybe it didn't add anything. Ah well!)