Les Miserables Javert Quotes

A man of marble, with a gaze of ice and opinions of stone. He walks a line to redemption that throughout the book grows increasingly thin until his demise. He is order, and justice, he is Javert, policeman of Paris and villain of the novel Les Miserables. Javert is in constant pursuit of Jean Valjean, a convict who broke parole. His obsessive behavior intertwines him deeply in the story of Jean Valjean and allows Javert to become the main antagonist of the novel. His villainy is in correspondence with the law, his lack of faith and his personal ideals. All of which we see clear demonstrations of throughout the book, first though it is imperative his villainy and motive be understood.

In the novel Javert is a police officer who has become consumed

With codes to follow and rules to be obeyed, Javert found his match at last. Finally content that he could invoke discipline and exert the law on those he deemed inferior or who had lost their way in his eyes. “He heaped contempt, aversion, and disgust on anyone who had crossed the legal divide into wrongdoing, who even once overstepped the bounds of the law.” (Hugo, 144) A quote that shows his passion to conform. His love for the law and desire to respect it comes from an inner hatred of himself, a disdain of the “race of bohemians to whom he belonged.” (Hugo, 144) He feels that human law has or retains “some kind of power to damn.”(144) and is again part of the reason he finds refuge in it, as a means to seek redemption and quell his inner strife with

He feels that in life one must walk a straight line, where leaning from that path, in anyway leads to damnation in terms of the loss of order and dissention into anarchy. He had since he was young, “poured just about all his religion into the police,” (Hugo, 1083) And he fails to realize that a convict such as Valjean could be following a whole other set of laws, those of God, and can be inherently good. The world is not as black and white as he had once imagined it to be, and it takes Javert about a thousand pages to realize that, “He had a superior, one Monsieur Gisquet; til that day he had barely given a thought to that other superior, God.” (Hugo, 1083) Javert completely lacks the laws and ideals presented by God, of kindness, and would have perhaps been a different man had he given them a thought