Les Misérables

by Laura Flanagan

Last week, I reread a favorite work of mine - Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. While a powerful testament to grace, the brilliance of this book is its ability to have you root for the convicted felon.

From said book: “Despair is surrounded by fragile walls, which all open into vice or crime.”

The protagonist, Jean Valjean, begins the story as a hardened criminal recently released from nineteen years in prison. After being expelled from many places of rest under transparent pretexts, his encounter with the local bishop is one of dignity and mercy offered several times over. While confused and overwhelmed by the one man’s kindness, Valjean steals the bishop’s silver and flees, still despairing of kindness from the world at large - and when apprehended, he is forgiven and given the silver. This bishop gives Valjean the means to become an “honest man” when justice would otherwise quickly have returned him to his hellish imprisonment.

Afterwards, Valjean continually does the right thing, forever transformed by his encounter with Christ’s mercy in the person of the bishop at the novel’s beginning. His life becomes one of heroic virtue. The genius of the book is that you would understand if he did the wrong thing.

The world, embodied in the inflexible justice of Javert the police inspector, continues to pursue and stigmatize him despite his practical virtue of making an entire town and region of the country prosperous, and theological virtue of showing mercy and generosity to everyone he encounters. This relentless evasion and pursuit is maddening to Valjean, and might have induced despair in him if not for the joy of giving and receiving love from his adopted daughter, whom he vigorously protects.

When a person commits a crime out of despair, such as illegally crossing a border, what is our response?

I’ve heard, “Well, despair itself is a sin. They should have hope in Christ for [insert desperate situation] rather than turning to crime.”

Hope in Christ and his resurrection - indeed the boon of martyrs.

...Have we told them of that hope?

Have we been Christ’s mercy to them so they can understand its value and impact?

If we have not been prepared to give a reason for our hope while reaching into their despair, or to know and care for them as a person as Christ does, how would they find that hope?

If we personally cannot extend that mercy, do we have reason to believe that those we’ve allowed to be delegates for us will show mercy? Or do we offer only reason for despair?

Is the law making their action a crime even a just law?

Have we removed from them their children, their natural source of joy and hope?

Also from Les Mis: “If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.”

One thing I love about the Church is that it holds us to the highest ideals. Heroic virtue is what is asked of us, supported entirely by the grace of God. But the culpability of those without heroic virtue is lessened if they have not seen heroic mercy out of Christians. The grace to bear suffering without despair lies in that mercy and in the sacraments, to which many do not have access. If you, like me, have not always within yourself the heroic virtue to get off your phone, I beg you not to cast the first stone.

For those who are tempted to hold up “justice” as the ideal, recall at least that disproportionate punishment is not justice. The “deterrent” to stealing bread in 1790s France was that it will get you five years as a galley slave; yet Valjean, in an attempt to save from starvation the sister and her children who had cared for him since youth, steals bread. I can hope one would understand why.

Stealing a loaf of bread does not merit five years of slavery. Fleeing a desperately violent situation in your home country and entering a country illegally does not merit the destruction of your family, or the traumatization (and possibly abuse) of your children. No one flees their home and undertakes a dangerous journey of a thousand miles merely as a general preference not to go through years of paperwork unlikely to succeed at prohibitive cost. President Trump’s “solution” given to reporters last Tuesday -- “Don't come to our country illegally. Come like other people do. Come legally.” -- intentionally belies the difficulty therein. I hope others who would point to those words as a simple and just solution unintentionally belie that difficulty.

Our sense of “justice” cannot be based on our own desires for security and wealth, and without balm for those who have already endured a greater injustice than the inconvenience we might (but probably won’t) face by expanding our country’s bosom to accept refugees and the downtrodden undocumented immigrant. Les Misérables aids us in understanding why said downtrodden might not have the greatest respect for that idea of justice.¹ Jean Valjean lives outside the law throughout the book and evades Javert’s “justice” at every opportunity. Every opportunity, that is, except the first: when another man might be condemned in his place via a case of mistaken identity (a case prejudiced by that man’s poverty and Valjean’s wealth at that moment). At that moment, he enters the courtroom and denounces himself.

Victor Hugo again: “There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.”

While he had bootstrapped his way up to the higher class, Hugo’s protagonist knew he would lose his humanity - truly, his soul - if he directly condemned another man to misery, especially one who had merely endured an impoverished existence. The mercy of Christ begat the mercy of the bishop begat mercy in him. We may need to rediscover our own humanity, redeemed in Christ incarnate.

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1 There are real issues with the state of our immigration system as it stands, and no, I am not advocating that we “have no borders.” Those issues need addressing, but our immigration “quotas” have been out of whack for a long time, and the separation of families, whether immediately upon apprehension or by deportation from a community they have already formed, merely makes plain our pure self-interest.^↩