Jean Valjean from Les Misérables is the male hero the left has been looking for

The left’s version of masculine heroism is, at its best, supposed to be the vigilante who protects innocents from victimization at the hands of oppressive laws and customs.

Another summer, another preschooler constantly requesting to hear the Les Misérables soundtrack (from the 2012 film) on long car rides.

Four or five years ago, it was Boy #2. Now, it’s Boy #3. I plan to write at more length soon about the stories that can help form boys in virtue, as a follow-up to my recent piece on the stories girls need. But in the meantime, some thoughts (originally published in an earlier form at Patheos) on Les Mis and how it provides such a useful (and Catholic) framework for an accurate understanding of mercy and of justice.

And one further thought, which I’ll get to in more detail in my forthcoming essay: The left today is constantly asking: What do we have to offer young men that can prevent them from drifting endlessly rightward into an ever crazier “manosphere?” Who are the heroes? What is the model?

Is there a version of “left masculinity?”

Sure, there is. Only, today’s left won’t necessarily like it very much. Because there is no productive, effective, other-regarding left masculinity without Christianity. Which is where the real dissonance with today’s secular progressives might lie.

The right’s version of masculine heroism is, at its best, the vigilante who protects innocents from victimization at the hands of malevolent outlaws by wielding Old Testament justice. The depictions of that hero in American media and popular imagination are many.

Meanwhile, the left’s version of masculine heroism is, at its best, supposed to be the vigilante who saves innocents from victimization at the hands of oppressive laws themselves by imitating Christ—that is, by embodying New Testament mercy.

In short: it’s Jean Valjean. That’s the male hero the left has been looking for. If they’ll have him.

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At risk of oversimplification, I share these four Catholic lessons from Les Misérables about faith and reason (and about today’s excesses of each unto a rejection of both).

Reason without faith is cruel—so beware the excesses of the right.

Inspector Javert, who is a detective following the letter of the law, shows no mercy toward others, and offers no understanding for the humanity of anyone that does not follow the law in full. This means that true justice—for which he ostensibly labors in vain to capture the do-gooding Valjean, who was imprisoned for 19 years after stealing a loaf of bread to keep his sister and her child from starvation—is beyond him as well. Yes, the letter of the law is on Javert’s side. But laws that imprison the starving unto death are not laws that any truly God-fearing person should abide, much less enforce.

Javert is the original “just pull yourself up by the bootstraps” conservative, made all the more zealous by the feeling that what he is demanding of others is no more than he has done himself. Javert is “from the gutter, too,” just like many of those he pursues. But, of course, some people do not have the resources—health, intelligence, and so on—that he clearly must possess to “choose his way” into respectable society. There can be, after all, no bootstraps without boots.

Ultimately, of course, Javert is self-loathing. When Valjean shows him mercy instead of killing him, he commits suicide. He cannot abide a world with any liminal space between right and wrong. He would rather die himself than have to consider anything so subjective as context. And in committing suicide for that reason, Javert also reveals that he is, underneath his elaborate pretenses, less concerned with his continued service to the law than with the law’s supposed failure to serve him.

Faith without reason is equally cruel (and more seductive)—so, beware the excesses of the left.

The idealistic, educated, upper-class young men that seek to liberate French peasants from the established order that elevates the merciless Javert—and to do so in one swift revolution, with as little consideration of the broader context as Javert himself brings to bear—are the conservative detective’s progressive counterparts. They will not accept change that is iterative and incremental, rather than sudden and totalizing (ostensibly because any remnant of the old order, with its vast and deep inequalities, would be immoral).

The fact that the peasants, on whose behalf these young men allegedly labor, are not themselves willing to upend everything at once, such that “we [the young men] are abandoned by those [the peasants] who still live in fear”—in part because the peasants are not a monolith, but have specific interests, livelihoods, and fears that their would-be saviors have made no attempt to understand (much less share)—is immaterial to the young men. Yes, Christian mercy necessitates changing the status quo, as the young men seek to do. But alleged mercy that flouts law and order with presumptive violence—such that it makes potential cannon fodder of even the helpless women and children it seeks to liberate—is not a kind of mercy that any thoughtful person should abide, much less instigate.

The young men are the original elite virtue-signalers. They are made all the more self-righteous by the fact that they are willing to die, ostensibly to free their socioeconomic inferiors. But, of course, many of those socioeconomic inferiors are not themselves willing to die for the sake of future peasants’ prospects and/or posterity. Their young would-be liberators would know this if they actually knew any peasants or bothered to listen to them. But they don’t.

After all, to know any peasants would require spending less time sitting around together drinking wine (without, unlike most people of both the peasant and the upper classes, any real familial or societal responsibility) in solipsistic awe of the alleged heroism of their self-imposed martyrdom. Their idealism is not about “doing the work.” It is, as in the case of most idealists that claim to be “doing the work,” ultimately about avoiding work. Because real work involves context and compromise—which, just like Javert, the young men shun in favor of personally satisfying absolutes.

In this fallen world, pure selfishness often prospers—so, beware the liars, criminals, and cheats.

Monsieur and Madame Thenadier are the embodiments of selfishness, criminality, and venality. The inn-keeper and his wife abuse children, steal from unsuspecting guests, and manipulate any person or system that they can for their own gain. They are criminals not by circumstance, but by choice. By victimizing others, they prosper both monetarily and emotionally. They are gleeful in their criminality, not resigned to it. They are not like Valjean (who attempts to steal from the priest that takes him in, before repenting and living a life of service to the less fortunate) or Fantine (the abandoned woman who becomes a prostitute to pay her child’s medical bills).

As his own dealings with them show, the mercy and understanding that Valjean so generously bestows upon others would be wasted on the Thenadiers. Valjean knows better than to cast his pearls before swine, and he is too discerning to expect that these two are or ever will be anything else.

To love well is to honor both faith and reason—so, cultivate love that seeks truth.

Valjean is a hero because he attempts to save Fantine’s life, adopts her child, and tirelessly serves the poor and marginalized that an ungodly, harsh societal order treats as unworthy of justice, let alone of mercy.

“To love another person is to see the face of God,” proclaims Les Misérables. Valjean sees the face of God over and over. He puts Fantine, her daughter, his fellow prisoner, those that are in his employ, his future son-in-law, and even Javert ahead of himself. He shows consistent, persistent love that radiates outward from his faithful and reasonable vision, which is beholden to neither the worldly status quo nor to any equally myopic rejection thereof.

Valjean shows faith, meaning that he trusts in what he cannot see, but knows to be true. That God has a plan, and that others’ love is a manifestation of God’s love. That he is called not just to repent and be forgiven, but to meet others’ needs even when he is both weary and unsure of success. Valjean knows that things are often not as the blunt understandings of a lower world would label them, and that intragroup variance is the moral reality among every group of people—from prisoners, to prostitutes, to policemen.

Valjean also shows reason, meaning that he trusts in what he can see, even if he would rather it not be so. He sees, for example, that his own attempted theft from the kind priest who takes him in is not a justifiable act of desperation like his original theft, but an expression of indiscriminate rage from one that has “come to hate the world.” Later, he sees through the Thenadiers and their elaborate pretenses of love for Fantine’s orphan daughter, which are really shake-downs and lies. Years later, he sees that this orphan, whom he adopted, is in love with one of the young revolutionaries and that the time has thus come for him to be willing to sacrifice his life—not to remain with her and protect her, as he has done for so many years and wishes to do, but to give her away.

In these ways and many others, Les Misérables is ultimately a story about love. Its hero, Valjean, embodies the late Pope Benedict Emeritus’ words: “there can be no love without truth.”

In so extraordinarily exemplifying the faith and reason that, together, find truth, Valjean is a counter-cultural hero for our time. And a Catholic example for all time, for us all—and for men especially.