Les Miserables: Jean Valjean's Real Sin

So, that little detour out of the way, I want to get back my old question about Les Miserables.  What is it that accounts for the hero's excess of humility.  Or, as the New Yorker puts it:

Jean Valjean becomes a convict slave for nineteen years after stealing some bread for his sister’s child. He has done nothing wrong, yet he spends the rest of his life redeeming himself by committing one noble act after another.

Jean Valjean, for all his saintliness, does seem to think he has something to make up for, something that accounts for his emphasis on his unworthiness, and his tendency toward excess humility.  Presumably it is not the crime of stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister's starving children, nor even for his repeated escapes.  What is the real sin (as opposed to crime) that he is never quite able to atone for?

The answer, I think is given in Chapter VII of Book Two of the first section.  After getting five years for stealing a loaf of bread, Valjean considers how wronged he has been, and "[H]e judged society and condemned it.  He condemned it to his hatred.  He made it responsible for the fate which he was suffering, and he said to himself that it might be that one day he should not hesitate to call it to account."  And furthermore:

Jean Valjean was not, as we have seen, born evil.  He was still good when he arrived at the prison.  There, he condemned society and felt himself becoming wicked; he condemned Providence and felt himself becoming impious.

And in nineteen years of imprisonment, he never once cried.

In short, he was brutalized by the system.  That is the sin he never forgives in himself, the sin he spends the rest of the novel trying to atone for.   He makes the point clear when he addresses the court after giving himself up:

[T]hey were right in telling you that Jean Valjean was wicked. But all the blame may not belong to him. Please listen, your honors; a man as unworthy as I has no protest to make to Providence, nor any advice to give to society; but, you see, the infamy from which I have sought to rise is pernicious. The prison makes the convict.  Make of this what you like.  Before prison, I was a poor peasant, unintelligent, a sort of idiot; prison changed me. I was stupid; I became wicked: I was a log; I became a firebrand. Later, I was saved by indulgence and kindness, as I had been lost by severity.

As his comments here make clear, he unequivocally blames the system for brutalizing him.  He condemns it in no uncertain terms for what it did to him and what it does to so many others like him.

But he does not stop at that.  While he blames the system for brutalizing him, he does not excuse himself either.  Though it was the system that brutalized him, nonetheless he was brutalized and cannot forgive himself for what he became.  To say that only the system and not he is to blame is to take a crudely mechanical view of human nature and deny his moral agency.  Or, as Stowe's hero says with simple eloquence, "If I get to be as hard-hearted as that . . . and as wicked, it won't make much odds to me how I come so; it's the bein' so, -- that ar's what I'm a dreadin'."* Valjean, it seems safe to assume, would agree.

The point is easy to miss because we don't really see Valjean in his brutalized condition. When we first meet him, Valjean seems very much a victim of society. He arrives in town after traveling a dozen leagues on foot without food, understandably exhausted and famished, only to find every door closed against him. No inn will give him food or lodging although he offers to pay; the prison will not let him stay unless he is arrested; peasants will not let him stay in their shed; dogs will not let him sleep in their kennel. He is resigned to sleep in the street on October with no food when someone directs him to the bishop's house. We get the description of him brutalized by society, quoted above. But all we see of him brutalized is Jean Valjean repaying his host's kindness by stealing his silver spoons, and Jean Valjean stealing two francs from a chimney sweep. Maybe if Hugo had let us see more of the brutalized Valjean, we would better understand why he so constantly felt the need to redeem himself from what he had become.

And perhaps now it becomes clear why I keep making the comparison to Uncle Tom's Cabin. Both books seek to condemn an unjust order by showing us a saintly victim of it. But what of the victims who are not so saintly? What of people brutalized and degraded by a system that is, after all, designed to brutalize and degrade? Both authors grapple with the issue, but fail to offer a very satisfactory answer. Stowe's hero had his religious conversion before the novel begins. Faced with relentless pressure to be brutalized and the out that the system, not he, will be to blame, he will not surrender his moral agency. Given the choice between letting the system morally and spiritually destroy him and letting it physically destroy him, he chooses the latter course -- martyrdom. Hugo's hero, by contrast, is brutalized before the novel begins and then has his religious conversion and spends the rest of the novel vainly trying to undo what he once became. Neither answer looks very satisfactory!

And it is in the ultimate failure of Valjean to escape his past that I see Hugo's ultimate failure. (Those final 100 pages, again). Hugo walks a fine tight rope, seeking to blame the system for his hero's brutalization, while never absolving him of moral responsibility for it. It is a difficulty balancing act to maintain, but Hugo ultimately maintains it, never letter his hero off the hook. But he fails to recognize the danger of falling in the opposite direction -- that by refusing to let the hero off the hook for what he became, he runs the risk of endorsing society's judgment. And, indeed, in those final, damnable 100 pages, Valjean does seem to endorse society's judgment, after denouncing it for the rest of the book, and to treat the social stigma of being a convict as equivalent to the moral stigma of being brutalized by the system. But, once again, that is a subject I will give a more extended treatment in a later post.

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*Tom speaks dialect, but light dialect, so that his delivery will not detract from the content of what he is saying.  Stowe's lower class and less sympathetic characters -- black and white -- use considerably heavier dialect.