I’ve fallen away from my plan to post regular meditations on the Virtues, and I’m trying to return myself to a mindset wherein I can concoct such posts again with some frequency (which is surprisingly hard to do when that thing we all call “real life” forcefully re-asserts itself). Still, I couldn’t help but notice this blog post, by Michael W. Hannon on the Witherspoon Institute’s “Public Discourse” blog, concerning something I mused on near the beginning of the year: Les Misérables, Justice, and the differing attitudes toward the law that the protagonist and antagonist of the piece (Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert, respectively) take.

Hannon goes a bit further, however:

There are three distinct attitudes toward law and authority endorsed by the tale’s characters; one it celebrates, and the other two it scorns as errors. Inspector Javert exemplifies the first mistake: tyrannical legalism. Javert scrupulously venerates the law of his detested French monarchy as man’s summum bonum. He is what theologians would recognize as a Pelagian, thinking that human success depends solely on observance of the legal code.

Thus when Valjean eventually spares Javert’s life and turns himself over to him for his past crimes, this ex-convict demolishes the inspector’s inflexible and unforgiving categories by his act of repentance. With his worldview threatening to collapse, Javert chooses his principles over his life, clinging tightly to his legalism as he throws himself to his death to escape a world incompatible with this fallacious philosophy.

The second erroneous attitude toward law is embraced by Enjolras and his band of revolutionaries, who are likewise willing to die for their false principles. Laying down their own lives on the barricade to overthrow the longstanding kings served by Javert, these young men espouse a breed of antinomianism, a hatred for law that finds its natural end in anarchism. They proclaim a libertine freedom, which refuses to be constrained by any outside authority. The law symbolizes for them the oppression they have experienced at the hands of the ruling elite, and thus their political vision is predominantly negative — a casting off of kings and law, but with no cohesive program to replace this tyranny.

The film’s third philosophy of law, espoused by the bishop and Valjean post-conversion, is what ought to replace it. These protagonists witness to a great love for the law, despite their warranted opposition to legalism. Thus even while he acquits the policemen’s battered captive, the bishop commends the officers for their duty and sends them on their way with God’s blessing.

Similarly, Valjean refuses to prosecute Javert after the latter confesses his crime of false accusation, instead crediting the inspector for doing his job obediently and returning him to his post. And when all masks are off and Valjean has the chance to kill Javert and escape him for good, instead he releases him and dispels any misunderstanding about his longstanding sentiments: “There’s nothing that I blame you for. You’ve done your duty, nothing more.”

“The man of mercy comes again and talks of justice,” laments the conflicted Javert after Valjean spares his life. Such justice-talk drives him to his suicide, for there can be no room for mercy within the heresy of legalism. But mercy finds itself at home in Valjean’s classical attitude toward law. After all, if man is not made for the law but the law for man, then its letter must be subordinated to its end, and the end of the law is human flourishing. Ergo Aristotle: “As man is the best of all animals when he has reached his full development, so he is worst of all when divorced from law and justice.” And it is because the law has so noble a purpose — perfecting man — that the antinomian hatred of Enjolras and the revolutionaries is also so mistaken.

I didn’t comment on the revolutionaries in the story, but Hannon correctly spots the ways in which they too play into things. The story of Les Misérables balances justice and injustice again and again, showing both the injustice of a law too rigidly upheld and the injustice that prevails when the law is ignored or — perhaps worse still — openly defied and called out for overturning. And, much as in real life, bloody ends abound for all and sunrdy where such errors are allowed to manifest.

What makes possible Valjean’s triumph in the law is his mercy (Compassion!), Justice’s leaven. He and Javert desire the same ends, in so many respects, but Javert’s error assures that he and Valjean will ever be at cross purposes until one or the other is destroyed. And one, indeed, is destroyed.