Part I, Book 2, Chapter 6
Jean Valjean
With the last chapter, Plot was so close I could smell it, which means Hugo has to yank us back for a second and drop some backstory on us. I don’t mind, though, because this is basically the Jean Valjean origin story, and it’s damn good. It tells us who Valjean is and how he ended up in the bagne, which Donougher translates as “the prison hulks.” (This edition of Les Misérables comes with a helpful explanation of what the bagne was—it’s a brutal form of penal servitude, like a combination of incarceration and slavery, which sadly is not that distant from the system of legalized slavery by way of mass incarceration that the US still uses today.)
Hugo takes us to the very beginning (a very good place to start) of Valjean’s life by painting a picture of his family, and at this point I had to go, “Hugo, are you messing with us???”
Jean Valjean’s father, Hugo explains, was also named Jean Valjean, and the “Valjean” likely came from people saying “Voila Jean!” (“There’s Jean!”) when they saw him, which got shortened over time into “Valjean,” meaning that Valjean’s dad’s name was basically French “John There’s John.”
But that’s not all! Valjean’s mother, the wife of Jean Valjean senior, was named…Jeanne! Which as far as I understand, is pronounced exactly the same as “Jean.”
And they had a daughter, older sister to our Valjean, who was named…also Jeanne!
So to recap, this is the Valjean family:
Dad: Jean Valjean
Mom: Jeanne Valjean
Daughter: Jeanne Valjean
Son: Jean Valjean
How is this considered a serious book.
The Valjeans, who desperately needed to be given a baby naming book, were a very poor peasant family. Papa Valjean was a tree-pruner and died falling from a tree, and Mama Valjean died of “milk fever” (I did some cursory Googling and could not find what this would have been) when our Valjean was very young. So his older sister, Jeanne, who was married, took Valjean in and raised him…along with the 7 children that she had in a span of 8 years.
I uh, don’t want to make assumptions or judgments. I also don’t want to get hung up on this particular subject when we’ve got a lot of backstory to cover, but lord I think rural 18th century France needed sex education and birth control real bad. Seven kids! In eight years!!! I just squeezed my legs shut thinking about it.
Anyway. Then Jeanne’s husband (who is unnamed, but at the rate we’re going he was also probably named Jean) dies suddenly, and at age 25 Valjean takes over as breadwinner for this family of him, his sister, and seven children. I thought back to where I was in life at age 25, and while I was pretty responsible, I could barely take care of myself, much less SEVEN CHILDREN.
There is a pretty heartbreaking detail (Hugo is very good at that, I realize) that some of the children, who are always hungry, keep hustling a neighbor for milk, and Valjean secretly pays her back and keeps it a secret from his sister.
Valjean works all the odd jobs he can, and his sister Jeanne works as well, but as you can imagine for two illiterate peasants with seven children in a system with no social safety net, keeping their heads above water is near impossible, and they “were, little by little engulfed, crushed, by poverty. Then came one hard winter. […] The family had no bread.”
(The “one hard winter” part reminds me of the bit from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn when the Nolan family doesn’t have food and Katie teaches the children to pretend they are explorers looking for the North Pole, trapped in a snowstorm and waiting for aid to come.)
So Valjean, out of desperation, commits one of the most famous fictional crimes in all of literature: he breaks a baker’s shop window and makes off with a loaf of bread. The baker’s name is Maubert, which I think is a pretty great cat name.
Valjean, who throws the loaf of bread aside when Maubert chases him (sorry, it kills me that his family didn’t even get to eat the bread!!), is caught, taken to court, and sentenced to five years of hard labor, which is frankly an insane sentence for stealing a single loaf of bread. “What a fateful moment it is when society distances itself and irredeemably casts adrift a thinking being!” Hugo writes.
On the day Valjean is put in chains—a great iron collar hammered into place around his neck—he says, “I was a tree-pruner” repeatedly (shades of Bodhi repeating “I’m the pilot” in Rogue One) and while sobbing, raises his hand to pat the heads of seven invisible children. Jesus Christ, Victor Hugo, I kind of hate how heavy you are with the pathos and I really hate how it works.
And so Valjean’s life is “obliterated,” down to his name; he is no longer Jean Valjean, but 24601, and I must take a break from all this heaviness to saddle you with the knowledge that Hugo chose the number 24601 because it’s the date he believed he was conceived. As for his family—”What became of the seven children? […] What becomes of the handful of leaves on the young tree sawn off at the base?”—Jean Valjean never sees them again, and they are never heard from by anyone who knows them. This story is brutal.
While Valjean was originally sentenced to five years’ labor, he made several escape attempts; the prisoners, Hugo explains, have a system where they take turns helping each other escape, and Valjean takes his chance each time, but is caught each time and sentenced to more years of labor. It reminds me indelibly of Season 1 of Andor, particularly the gut-punching revelation about the true nature of the prisoners’ sentences.
All the additional sentences add up and Valjean ends up serving 19 years, as we all know, before he’s finally released. He stole the loaf of bread in 1796 and didn’t come back out until 1815.
After hitting us with all of this, Hugo shares the sobering statistic that it’s estimated that four out of five thefts in London are committed out of hunger. Having spun a gutting tale full of agonizing details, Hugo wants us to know that this story isn’t necessarily that fictional, and wants us to consider the many unnamed Jean Valjeans out there in the world, incarcerated for acts of desperation.
He finishes by saying that Jean Valjean went into his prison sentence “sobbing and trembling. He came out emotionless. […] What had happened inside that soul?”
Don’t worry, I’m sure we’re going to get around to that.
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