The Most Disturbing Line In Les Miserable

Les Miserables isn’t, of course, a horror novel, and the only scary thing about the most recent film adaptation is Russell Crowe’s singing, but there’s one lyric from the musical that I find intensely disturbing. It comes when Fantine is being arrested; she pleads for mercy from Javert, on account of her child who she is afraid will die without the money that Fantine sends to her. Javert responds thus:

I have heard such protestations every day for twenty years

I’ll have no more explanations

Save your breath

Save your tears.

I didn’t notice it the first time I saw the film, but on re-watching it that line stuck out to me. “Every day for twenty years” - how many innocent lives has Javert destroyed? And with him being only one policeman, how much suffering does that equate to across the whole of French society?

    There is a profound message in that lyric about the nature of evil. Javert condemns people to decades-long prison sentences over minor crimes not because he has any personal hatred for those people, because he enjoys making them suffer, or because he stands to gain from their destruction; he does it because those are his orders. Those who break the law must pay the price. Javert is a moral idiot - he bases his morals on an external code that has no relation to any reasonable standard of right and wrong, and in doing so he abandons himself to businesslike evil. 

    It’s become a cliche to say that the order-followers, not the order-givers, are the real threat, but it seems to need restating. We live in a time where the spectre of The Law can be used to justify locking children in concentration camps, so clearly the message isn’t getting through. If you believe that the government’s law is identical to moral law, you are in favour of genocide, slavery, and torture. All those things have been legal, many are still legal in other countries, and any and all of them could be made legal again here. If you treat the law as a moral code, you are on the side of every monster who has ever occupied a position of power, but more so, you are contemptible for your weakness. You are a dog, a child who is incapable of making their own judgements and needs a paternal hand to tell you what to think. Law-worshippers are perhaps the most dangerous people of our time, and there are a worrying number of them.