Les Miserables

Les Misérables depicts the fight for social justice in many ways. There are explicit challenges to socially unjust institutions, such as the riots, and the depiction of poverty challenges society's idea of morality and its relationship to material wealth. Characters such as Valjean and Fantine illustrate the fine line between desperation and immorality. For the crime of stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister's starving family, Valjean is sent to prison. Consequently, society demands that he spend the rest of his life as a social pariah. Similarly, Fantine is abandoned by the father of her child, and she does everything she can to pay the ever-increasing fees necessary to keep Cosette alive. Fantine's fall from social grace is a tragedy; she becomes a prostitute not because of some innate badness or penchant for immorality, but because of her infinite love for her daughter and the cruel exploitation of the world she inhabits. The fight for social justice as depicted in the novel is often a subtle rebuke of the dominant idea that the economically disadvantaged somehow deserve their poverty while the rich deserve their good fortune.

The narrator drills deeper into this fight for social justice by focusing on three areas which contribute most to the suffering in society. A mix of the legal institutions, the educational system, and the inherent misogyny of society leads to the suffering depicted in the novel. Valjean is punished unduly by legal institutions, embodied by Javert’s dogged pursuit. Fantine is victimized by a misogynistic society, particularly in the scene where Javert witnesses a man harass her and then arrests her, rather than the man. In this society, the men who solicit sex workers are tolerated while the sex workers, often forced into this occupation under economic duress, are criminalized. Fantine is further punished for her lack of education, as her illiteracy—working class women were denied an education—forces her to rely on a professional letter writer, who in turn reveals her secret to the rest of the town. In a society built on education, equality, and social justice, neither Fantine nor Valjean would have been punished as severely as they were. Their suffering reveals the inherent flaws of the class system which privileges the rich and powerful over the working class.

The riot emerges as the desperate expression of the frustration with social injustice. The revolutionaries behind the barricades come from many different backgrounds. The students such as Marius are privileged members of the middle class who view the fight for justice as an intellectual exercise. Gavroche has no such intellectual pretensions but is willing to fight back against the social institutions which target him and offer him no help. Even men like Mabeuf, a former church warden who wants nothing more than to settle gracefully into old age with his book collection, is forced to take up arms because society has given him no other option. The riot is portrayed as a desperate shout of the marginalized and the ignored. The fight for social justice in Les Misérables becomes increasingly desperate until the characters feel they have no other option than to turn to violence. The sheer extent of the social injustice validates the rioters' behavior as a critique of a society that permits these characters to become this desperate. In the narrator’s view, violence is a justifiable tool in the hands of those who have been terribly mistreated by the same institutions they oppose. That the revolution fails illustrates the pernicious and ongoing nature of social injustice, as the fight for justice can never end. Somewhere, there is always someone who is mistreated, and the novel provides those marginalized people with hope.