Jean Valjean Sacrifice

While each of the thefts of Jean Valjean represented a bad decision in his life, each led to a transforming effect in Jean Valjean’s life. In the classic Les Miserables, Victor Hugo highlights the themes of social injustice, poverty, and redemption in France during this time period while telling the story of the fugitive Jean Valjean. The novel centers on the main character, Jean Valjean, who spends nineteen years in prison due to stealing a loaf of bread and the rest of his life fleeing from police inspector Javert. Throughout the story, Jean Valjean passionately pursues his life goal of servicing the poor and needy about him through genuine philanthropy in the lessons he learned from theft. Jean Valjean’s theft resulted in the personal saturation

During his prison time at Toulon, he concluded, “that there was no equity between the injury he had committed and the injury committed on him”(Hugo 88). In other words, the severe penalty of nineteen years in prison did not match his trivial crime. Because of the inequitable sentence slapped on him, Jean Valjean developed a deep sense of “hatred for human law”(Hugo 93). Similarly, this loathing of law enforcement established in him a “habitual indignation, bitterness, [and] a deep sense of injury . . . even against the good, the innocent, and the upright”(Hugo 93). Not only did the law rob him of the prime of his life, it also robbed him of true liberty for the remainder of his life. Any possibility of a new life for Jean Valjean was impossible, because “a convict may leave prison behind but not his sentence”(Hugo 97). He soon found out that employers would pay him less and that securing lodging would be almost hopeless. Hence, as a result of simply stealing a loaf of bread, he would be labeled as a dangerous, hardened