Javert evokes conflicting emotions. He is an agent of the law and, by extension, the state. His chief traits, as Hugo described, are his respect for authority and his hatred for all crimes, which make him a great detective. To illustrate his effectiveness as a detective, Hugo described the arrests following the ambush of Jean Valjean, where the most notorious criminals in Paris at that time all readily capitulated without daring to put up a fight. The main fault of Javert, as Hugo pointed out, is that he pushed these good traits to the absolute extreme that he became a fanatic. In his words:

“This man was a compound of two sentiments, simple and good in themselves, but he made them almost evil by his exaggeration of them: respect for authority and hatred of rebellion; and in his eyes theft, murder, all crimes were merely forms of rebellion. … He had nothing but disdain, aversion, and disgust for all who had once overstepped the bounds of the law. He was absolute, admitting no exceptions. On the one hand he would say, “A public official cannot be deceived; a magistrate is never wrong!” And on the other, “They are irremediably lost; no good can come of them.” He fully shared the opinion of those extremists who attribute to human laws an indescribable power of making, or, if you will, of determining, demons, and who place a Styx at the bottom of society. He was stoical, serious, austere: a dreamer of stern dreams; humble and haughty, like all fanatics.”

He pursued Jean Valjean out of a sense of duty as much as out of the absolute conviction of his beliefs. The extreme nature of his beliefs is attributed to his birth in prison, which is humiliating to him, and his origin in the gypsy race, for which he felt an “irrepressible” hatred. One can say that he was biased while representing justice. As a result, he was blinded to the good deeds of Jean Valjean as M. Madeleine, the major of Montreuil-sur-mer. Upon Jean Valjean’s confession in the courtroom, Javert felt his conviction rewarded. His bliss was “hideous” and “pitiful”, as Hugo superbly described below.

“Javert, though hideous, was not base.
Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the idea of duty, are things that, when in error, can turn hideous, but—even though hideous—remain great; their majesty, peculiar to the human conscience, persists in horror. They are virtues with a single vice—error. The pitiless, sincere joy of a fanatic in an act of atrocity preserves some mournful radiance that inspires veneration. Without suspecting it, Javert, in his dreadful happiness, was pitiful, like every ignorant man in triumph. Nothing could be more poignant and terrible than this face, which revealed what might be called all the evil of good.”

At last, when saved by Jean Valjean in the barricade, he could no longer ignore the fact that this “criminal” has been “kind” to him and has done good deeds and is an exception to what he believes criminals are. In not arresting Jean Valjean, he was compelled to admit that he has submitted himself to something higher by disobeying his duty as prescribed in the codes of the laws. This admission broke his belief and him, and Hugo considered his suicide inevitable:

“What was happening in Javert was the Fampoux of a rectilinear conscience, the derailment of a soul, the crushing of a probity irresistibly hurled in a straight line and breaking up against God.”

I think Hugo created Javert as a metaphor for the French criminal laws at his time. The severity of the penalty is reflected by the extremity of Javert’s beliefs. Through the suicide of Javert, he suggested that the laws, at the least the severe penal codes, needed change. His reasoning is that the severe punishment, especially for petty crimes such as stealing a loaf of bread, had become a form of repression of the strong against the weak, of the state against the poor, in so much that the justice system has become unjust and that the wrongdoers had been wronged.

If there were not too much weight on one side of the scales— on the side of the expiation. If the excess of the penalty were not the eradication of the crime; and if the result were not a reversal of the situation, replacing the wrong of the delinquent with the wrong of the repression, to make a victim of the guilty, and a creditor of the debtor, and actually to put the right on the side of the one who had violated it.

It reminded me of what Confucious said about laws and punishment: people obey but have no shame. This is the state of the mind Hugo attributed to Jean Valjean before he met the bishop. On this issue of crime and punishment, Hugo and Confucious would agree with each other.

As a note of levity, does Javert have to suicide? An interesting comparison can be made between Javert and Jason Bourne. Both had been effective agents of the state, and both suffered the “traumatic” experience of committing an act of kindness. Javert killed himself while Jason Bourne transformed himself. I guess it all depends on what the author or director wanted to say.

Another interesting comparison: Javert and the Joker. In a sense, Javert is the exact opposite of the joker. Javert, a detective, the strict upholder of the rules of the codes; Joker, an anarchist, who followed absolutely no rules at all. On the spectrum of order and chaos, they are on the polar opposite, (with Batman probably somewhere in the middle). Imagine Javert vs the Joker. OK. Time to stop.