Part I, Book 5, Chapter 11
Christus Nos Liberavit
Chapter 11 is a short aside of a chapter, featuring what I’m realizing is Hugo’s classic brand of moralizing, just in case you didn’t fully comprehend what he wants your takeaway of this story to be. It’s similar in energy to Book 2, Chapter 8, “The Deep and the Dark.”
The story of Fantine, Hugo says, is the story of “society buying a slave.” It’s a terrible bargain, “a soul for a morsel of bread”—the Fantine/Valjean parallels continue—and is a reminder that it’s the people trapped in wretchedness who end up performing all of society’s hidden distasteful labor. Hugo is unapologetically critical of the society in which Christ’s law “governs” but does not “pervade”—this is very familiar to anyone in the modern day fed up with a certain type of political hypocrisy!
(The title of this chapter, “Christus Nos Liberavit,” means “Christ hath made us free,” and it is yet another example of a scathingly snarky chapter title.)
Hugo goes to point out that anyone saying that Europe doesn’t have slavery anymore (embarrassingly, he does have to specify “Europe,” as when Les Misérables was published the US still hadn’t outlawed slavery) is full of it: “slavery […] still exists, but only women suffer this oppression now, and its name is prostitution.”
I agree with the general sentiment, but I am going to quibble a little bit with the specifics! I would argue that child labor—which Hugo has been railing against this entire book—is also a form of slavery, and Valjean’s punishment in the forced labor prison colonies is most definitely slavery. I also hesitate to sign off on the “prostitution = slavery” line—which is not to say that many women in prostitution are not victims of slavery—but after reading Melissa Gira Grant’s Playing the Whore, I now have a better understanding for the political contexts of sex work and how many of the arguments against prostitution are not also levied against similarly problematic circumstances in the service industry at large.
Anyway. I think you could debate that line alone for days, but Hugo’s main point still stands, so I’ll take it and move on.
“[T]here is nothing left of the Fantine she once was,” Hugo writes, “she has hardened into stone. […] She passes by, enduring you, ignoring you.”
Ah, once again I am struck by the parallels to Valjean—Fantine’s numbness, having been overwhelmed by suffering and dehumanization, reminds me of the line about Valjean emerging from his 19 years of imprisonment “emotionless.”
Oh poor Fantine, how badly you need your own Bishop Myriel to change the course of your fate! Hmm, I wonder if this story has any bishop-like characters just lying around?
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