Les Miserables (1862) by Victor Hugo


Les Miserables (1862) by Victor Hugo

Les Miserables is, at its core, an exploration of the human conscience - its awakening through undeserved acts of kindness, its weight against conflicting duty, and its projection into the future. Hugo portrays the will of the conscience as in a constant struggle. Marius struggles to defy what he feels is right, in order to repay his father’s misplaced debt to a scoundrel. Jean Valjean struggles to balance honesty under the mark of a criminal, and happiness earned by his amended life. And Javert struggles between duty to the state, and duty to a higher power previously unknown to him. As someone who suffers from my own brand of machine-brain that likes to see the world only in black-and-white, Javert’s situation resonates most with me. And although his resulting action was wrong, I admire the ideology that won him over - particularly as Hugo used it to paint such a clear, decisive picture of the human capacity for moral enlightenment.

The greatest tragedy of Les Miserables is how it unveils the smothering of this capacity for moral enlightenment by the penal system - the overreach and impassibility of punishment without regard to instances of reformation. And unfortunately, unlike the other societal issues Hugo tackles in the novel, he seems to offer no corrective insights. Maybe because the quantitative nature of any legal system can never properly account for contingencies as subjective as “moral reform”. Hugo even seems to think this capacity for reform is not inherent to all people. Jean Valjean rescinds his criminal ways, tragically instilled by his time in the galleys, whereas Thenardier only sinks to lower depths of depravity. In the end, however, I like to think that Les Miserables still promotes selflessness and charity to the corrupt. Whereas Marius’ charity to Thenardier only funded further atrocities of a wicked man, Monseigneur Bienvenu’s charity to Jean Valjean sparked a domino effect of goodwill. I’ve certainly received my fair share of goodwill that I didn’t deserve, and I hope I can resolve to pay it forward selflessly, sympathetically, and free of judgement just as Hugo’s galley-saint did.

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