Javert Part II--The essence of Les Miserables and Hugo's "hidden" meaning

I have confession to make. I've read Les Miserables cover to cover several times and have studied individual sections of the text a number times over the years. I've seen a number of film and TV versions, both foreign and domestic and seen the musical production several times, both in San Francisco and New York (with another near-miss in London last summer). 

Not until I began researching my next book project (Inspector Javert: Darkness to Light) did I come to realize that Victor Hugo wrote the novel as a conversion story! Here it is in the author's own words as written in the Prologue to Les Miserables:

"The book which the reader has under his eye at this moment is, from one end to the other, as a whole and in detail, whatever may be its intermittences, exceptions and faults, the march from evil to good, from the unjust to the just, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from rottenness to life, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God. Point of departure: matter; point of arrival: the soul. The hydra at the beginning, the angel at the end."

There it was, right before my unseeing eyes!

Once I saw the author's underlying purpose in writing the 1,000+ word novel, read the text with a different mindset. I realized that, in addition to the most obvious conversion (Jean Valjean), there were not one but two other characters who underwent a major spiritual change in their lives. 

First, there was Javert. In the time following his release of Valjean, after the episode in the Paris sewers, and the time of his famous leap into the River Seine, the Inspector had gone through a long and painful wrestling match with his conscience. The outcome was realization that his whole life had been built on a terrible misunderstanding of right and wrong. Life, he finally saw, was not black-and-white law and order as he had thought. He understood, for the first time in his life, that what he had considered to be punishable vice might, in some way, be virtue.

Javert's conversion was real, but not mature enough to do the work of rebuilding his life. The only way forward, he concluded, was to die. So, he leapt off the embankment into the swirling whirlpool of the Seine. Or did he? I believe he leapt, much to his surprise, into the loving arms of the  God who had never given up on him.

 This reminds me of Francis Thompson's (d. 1907) famous poem of conversion, "The Hound of Heaven." The first stanza sets the scene:

I FLED Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

(I'll discuss the third and most hidden conversion story in my next blog entry.)  

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P.S.   I'm still searching for the name of the artist who created the image used in this post. 

Don't miss Bishop Myriel: In His Own Words 

"An stunning achievement!" -- Judith Ingram, Forgiving Day by Day