Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory - Analysis, Les Misérables | Les Misérables by Victor Hugo- Summary, Themes & Characters - Novels PDF Download

Justice and Mercy

It's not exactly a symbol, Shmoopers, but this is the big one: you can basically sum up the whole of Les Misérables as a stand-off between justice and mercy. On one side, you have Bishop Myriel (and later Valjean), constantly ready to give people a second chance, to expect and hope for the best, and to treat people according to their individual situations rather than according to some abstract rule.

And then, on the other side, you have Inspector Javert and all the forces of law and justice—which, when you see how it's put into action, doesn't look nearly as just as it should. Justice means rigidity, harshness, and inflexibility. It means applying the same standards to poor innocent Fantine and the unredeemable Thénardier. And it means relentlessly pursuing a good man for a minor crime he committed decades ago.

In the end, of course, mercy wins, at least temporarily. So what's the lesson? Be excellent to each other. But we think there might be something bigger going on, too. It's hard to escape the fact that the absolute best guy in the book is a bishop, or that Valjean attributes his entire transformation to the work of God.

In fact, you could make a pretty good argument that the whole book is a narrative of Christian redemption. Mercy—i.e. New Testament values of forgiving prostitutes and tax collectors and what have you—is ultimately more powerful than Justice, i.e. Old Testament values of stoning prostitutes and sending plagues and so forth. In the end, Mercy destroys Justice, and we all live happily ever after. Except Valjean, of course, who has to sacrifice himself for his children to be happy, just like a certain New Testament figure we could name.

(PSA: You can take your finger off that "send" button, because this is Hugo talking, not us! We also know that saying "Hebrew Bible" is better than saying "Old Testament," but you can bet Hugo didn't.)

THE YELLOW TICKET

When Jean Valjean finally gets out of jail, he's handed a yellow ticket. Woohoo! Ticket to freedom!

Or not. It's more like a ticket to even more misery. That's because the Yellow Ticket is a symbol of social rejection. Jean Valjean is required to carry it with him at all times in order to show people that he is an ex-convict, or else he'll be in violation of his parole and go back to jail. The problem is that this ticket makes people turn him away wherever he goes. As Valjean says to Bishop Myriel, "This is my ticket-of-leave – yellow, as you see. That's why everybody turns me away" (1.2.3.8).

Talk about massively unfair. All he did was steal a loaf of bread to feed his starving family, and he got thrown in jail for nineteen years because of it. Now that he's served his time and is out, the so-called free world seems to be worse than jail—because at least he could sleep and eat in jail. Thanks to that yellow ticket, Valjean sadly finds out "the meaning of liberty when it is accompanied by a yellow ticket" (1.2.9.1), which is not really liberty at all.

The yellow ticket symbolizes the terrible way society treats its outcasts. It shows us that "freedom" doesn't mean a whole lot if what it means is that you're free to starve and die. The thing to remember here is that, while Valjean has a literal yellow ticket, all of the book's outcasts have some sort of "yellow ticket" that keeps them outcast. It could be as obvious as an illegitimate child or as invisible as a pair of miscreant parents, but either way, the world will eventually find it out—and then kick you out to starve and die on the streets.

No wonder people are rising up in the streets.

SILVER CANDLESTICKS

These two candlesticks are two of the only valuable things that Bishop Myriel has in his entire house, apart from his fancy set of silverware. We hear about these candlesticks early on, as the book says that visitors to Myriel's house "found nothing remarkable in it except two candlesticks of an antiquated design on the mantelpiece, which were presumably silver" (1.5.3.11).

In this instance, the candlesticks show just how modestly the Bishop is willing to live in order to give financial help to the poor people of his region. Myriel takes this generosity to new heights when he forgives Jean Valjean for stealing his silverware and gives him the candlesticks as a present, so long as Valjean promises to use the money to start a good, moral life.

By the end of the book, we might have forgotten about the Bishop's candlesticks, but Jean Valjean sure hasn't. In the final scene of the book, Jean Valjean passes away in the light of two candles that are mounted in these candlesticks: "He lay back with his head turned to the sky, and the light from the two candlesticks fell upon his face" (5.9.5.67). The appearance of the candlesticks here suggests that Jean Valjean has succeeded in keeping his promise to Bishop Myriel and has lived a good life.

Set It to Music

We're mostly avoiding the big elephant in the room a.k.a. the smash hit musical based on Les Mis. But there's a reason musicals are so popular: they really know how to get their point across. And in this case, we think we can't do much better than ol' Alain Boublil. In the tear-jerker opening number, Bishop Myriel gives Valjean the candlesticks, telling the ex-con that he has "bought your soul for God."

You can't get much clearer than that. The candlesticks are a symbol of Bishop Myriel's poverty and goodness, but they're also a symbol of Valjean's redemption. They're the literal price on his soul.

COSETTE'S DOLL

When Jean Valjean first visits Cosette in the Thénardier house, he is shocked to find what a terrible life Cosette has been living. One of the first things he does is give her an expensive doll as a present. But Cosette is so used to terrible treatment that the doll takes on an almost religious significance: "Cosette gazed at the miraculous doll with a kind of terror. Her face was still wet with tears, but her eyes, like the sky at dawn, were beginning to glow with a strange new brightness" (2.3.8.128).

The doll in this case symbolizes that transformation that's about to take place in Cosette's life. It's like she's seeing light for the first time, and it's so foreign she's afraid of it. How depressing.

THE LARK

As a child, Cosette becomes known in her neighborhood as "The Lark," but not for the reasons you might think (like freedom and beauty). In Cosette's case, "The Lark" refers to the fact that, like a lark, she always gets up earlier in the morning than everyone else. As the book says:

She was known locally as l'Alouette, the Lark. The village people, with instinctive symbolism, had thought it a suitable name for the apprehensive, trembling little creature, scarcely more than a bird, who was always first up in that house and out of doors before dawn. But this was a lark that never sang. (1.4.3.15)

This last line about how she's a bird that never sings helps symbolize how terribly oppressed she is, even as a young girl.