Part I, Book 5, Chapter 9
Success for Madame Victurnien
We are now on the second of this string of ironically titled chapters, and here we see Fantine being engulfed by poverty thanks to Madame Victurnien’s inability to leave a thing alone.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, Fantine was sacked on behalf of the mayor, but as it turns out, Madeleine has no clue that any of this went down. Hugo explains that he put a respectable spinster in charge of the women’s workroom of the factory and entrusted her with the responsibility of managing everything. Said spinster is, according to Hugo, “full of the charity that consists in donating but not so much of the charity that consists in understanding and forgiving.”
I thought that was a significant distinction for Hugo to make; so many of Madeleine’s good deeds—and in fact so much of what we praise rich philanthropists for today—involves giving people money, but Hugo wants us to know that donating is not enough. You have to actually understand what people are going through. Having the willingness to donate but not empathize is a pretty brutal summary of so many people.
Ironically, the 50 francs that the supervisor gave Fantine as, essentially, severance pay came out of a fund Madeleine set up for her to help the working women. Fantine’s judgment of 50 francs and a firing is a far cry from the 1000 francs and a job that Madeleine set up for Fauchey, which is extra galling. I think Madeleine should have trained up this supervisor a bit more, who seems to not have gotten the memo on the mayor’s whole deal. At the very least his supervisors should, idk, write reports for him so he knows what they’re up to!
Fantine is unable to find any other work—which is a major downside of a one-industry town (Mayor Madeleine, time to diversify?)—so she uses her 50 francs severance to pay the landlord and the furniture dealer, to whom she returns all her furniture other than her bed, and she’s still in debt afterwards. I do not want to shame Fantine for her financial decisions, especially with the knowledge that those in poverty are often forced to spend the most money on living expenses, and that financial stress/being in extended crisis mode literally lowers one’s IQ, but still! Girl, you keep being in debt!!! I want to give Fantine a modest savings account and a financial planner.
Fantine eventually finds really shitty work sewing soldiers’ shirts for 12 sous a day, and starts falling behind on paying the Thénardiers, as what they’re demanding comes out to 10 sous per day. I’m reminded of how, in Valjean’s origin story, the Valjean siblings were “little by little engulfed, crushed, by poverty.” The same thing is happening here to Fantine.
Fantine becomes best buds with an elderly spinster neighbor named Marguerite, who teaches Fantine the art of living in poverty. This sounds like the most depressing buddy sitcom ever. Fantine gets used to freezing in winter and having no candle for light in the evenings, and has a cough that gets progressively worse. This is very ominous because it’s never a good sign in a fictional story when a character starts coughing.
Fantine is also shamed by everyone in town—all of you, get a freaking life—and Madame Victurnien is proud of herself when she sees poor broken-down Fantine trudging by. PROUD. Madame V congratulates herself (!) on Fantine being “put in her rightful place.” Hell is not hot enough for this woman.
Hugo doesn’t make this connection overtly, but I do think there’s a character parallel here to Javert; you would think that a woman who considers herself morally good would feel guilt about directly consigning another person to suffering and poverty, but Madame Victurnien is filled with righteous satisfaction. It speaks to her moral worldview being based on the idea that order is the same thing as justice, and that a just world requires everyone to be in their proper place in a hierarchy.
She sees Fantine not as a good person who has made mistakes, but as someone whose decisions in life have identified her as an inherently bad person, who thus deserves any suffering she has coming to her. (It’s a little strange that Hugo illustrates this, and then turns right around and declares that people are inherently wicked or good based on the shape of their face, but hypocrisy in an intrinsic part of being human, I suppose.)
It’s not only Javert-like thinking, it’s the same type of thinking that you see today driving judgmental beliefs and punishing policies. There is no shortage of people today who claim they’re good people but also wholeheartedly believe that undocumented immigrants should be deported, that poor and disabled people should get fewer benefits, that women who cannot afford to have babies they don’t want should be forced to have said babies and then receive no support for them. There’s always some tortured reasoning around this that basically boils down to the Madame Victurnien mindset.
“Success for Madame Victurnien” is an absolutely brutal chapter title, not only because it highlights what a real piece of shit Madame V is, but also because it points out what “success” looks like for small-minded people like her. For those who subscribe to purity politics, “success” in society isn’t one where most people regardless of class are thriving and have their needs met; “success” is where those people who don’t fit their personal definition of goodness are ground down into abject misery. It may seem a little weird that Hugo (and, myself, by extension), makes Madame V the locus of these chapters, but it makes total sense when you realize he is calling attention to all the Madame Vs around us.
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