LES MISERABLE

LES MISERABLE

The story is about a peasant by the name Jean Valjean who was condemned to nineteen years imprisonment for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his nephew, who was starving. Valjean later commits a property crime against a priest who had sheltered him for a night immediately after getting off prison because he was degraded and embittered by his experience in prison. The priest refused to accuse Valjean hence saving him from reimprisonment. The latter leads Valjean into committing his life to that of service and virtue. Valjean concludes that the only way he can follow the path is by going underground and breaking his parole. The rest of the story shows the success and efforts of Valjean in helping others shadowed by Javert, a police officer obsessed with re-imprisoning and tracking down him down. The battle ensuing between the two protagonists Valjean and Javert, is set against the poor French suffering in the years after Napoleon was defeated and the revolutionary sentiments that stirred in Paris at the moment. However, the moral of the drama comes down to two critical questions. The first question is whether justice always requires absolute adherence to the letter of the law and condemnation to those who break it or instead of showing forgiveness and mercy to others as well as meeting human needs.  The second question on the hand would be, can a peso who has ever committed a crime before the change, or will they always carry some moral failure that consistently tends to reassert itself?.

Valjean only broke the law because he wanted to help a child eat. Alternatively, he is saved by the forgiveness and mercy of the priest who he had committed a property crime towards. The latter symbolizes the ideal of justice as humanity. While the crime confirms his criminal record he committed immediately he was released from the prison, Valjean later devoted the rest of his entire life to hard and honest work as well as in helping others. Javert, on the other hand, embodies the idyllic of justice as being the strict adherence to the law. Despite the surrounding evidence that the uncouth inequalities of French society make the defense of the law a cruel deception, Javert, the policeman, believes that there is no other higher priority in existence that can exceed obedience. Another belief that Javert can barely get rid of is that criminals hardly change and that once a criminal, one will always be a criminal despite the circumstances. In each of the encounters by the two antagonists, Valjean is reminded by Javert that he is a very dangerous criminal who will, by all means, always backslide and commit a series of crimes. The general audience will not have any problem deciding on which side morality and justice is on. According to my observation, I realized that there was absolutely no one rooting for Javert to catch Valjean and bring him back to prison. The majority, if not everybody else, wants Valjean to be declared a free man.

Despite the story being of a French origin, and the musical production British, the audiences who are majorly Americans deeply love the story. The American Audience also tend to recognize with Valjean as a classic example of an American hero. Whatever is meant by an American hero is a character who has been redeemed from the life of crime through the intervention of other good wishers. Through their courage and commitment, they attain both moral virtue and worldly success. However, it is ironic that despite the Americans identifying with Jean Valjean, their justice system, more than any other existing in the world, embodies the philosophy and spirit of Javert. There is no other nation that people are incarcerated routinely for breaking the law no matter how compelling the need or trivial the violation behind it. Furthermore, for all the decades that we have been lining up to see the Les Mis, a legal system has been enacted that is committed to the rigid imposition of harsh justice as well as the impossibility to reform. Today, our federal and state courts are principally in the hands of Javert as well as his disciples.

Javert, on the other hand, gives two exciting hints as to why he is disliked and embraced by Americans despite his harsh representation of justice. First, he refers to Valjean as a dangerous criminal, and there is a clue that his strong emotions and tremendous physical strength contain some menace. Americans during the violent eras that existed in the 1970s and 1980s appeared to accept the fact that the security required people to ignore their intuitions about justice. Secondly, Javert disclosed that he came from an impoverished background and that he became successful without necessarily having to break the law.  The zeal used by Javert in punishing Valjean is masquerading a need to deny that they may have something in common. Similarly, American punitiveness is partially powered by the need to uphold a  moral gulf between the goodness that we imagine in ourselves and the evil it must be cleared against.

Reference

Hugo, V. (1863). Les misérables. A. Larpin.