Inspector Javert

Javert
Les Misérables character
Javert – illustration from original publication of Les Misérables, after a painting by Gustave Brion (1824–1877)
Created by	Victor Hugo
Information
Gender	Male
Occupation	Prison guard Police inspector Detective
Religion	Roman Catholic
Nationality	French

Javert (French pronunciation: ​[ʒavɛʁ]) is a fictional character, the primary antagonist of Victor Hugo's 1862 novel Les Misérables. He was presumably born in 1780 and died on June 7, 1832. He is a police inspector who becomes, over the course of the novel, obsessed with the pursuit and punishment of the escaped convict Jean Valjean.

Victor Hugo depicts Javert as a character who is not simply villainous, but rather tragic in his misguided and self-destructive pursuit of justice. "[Javert] was a compound," Hugo writes, "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." He is "absolute", a "fanatic". This fanatical absolutism allows him to divine a "straight path through all that is most tortuous in the world".

Javert is moderately educated; Hugo observes: "In his leisure moments... although he hated books, he would read." Reflective thought is "an uncommon thing for him, and singularly painful"; this is due to the fact that thought inevitably contains "a certain amount of internal rebellion", which Javert dislikes.

He is without vices, but upon occasion will take a pinch of snuff. His life is one "of privations, isolation, self-denial, and chastity—never any amusement".

Javert has been described as a legalist, in that his "moral foundation ... is built strictly on legalism". He is "one of the most tragic legalists in Western literature" and "the consummate legalist".

Having been born in a prison (his mother a fortune-teller and his father serving in the prison galley), Javert perceives himself to be excluded from a society that "irrevocably closes its doors on two classes of men, those who attack it and those who guard it". It is on the basis of "an irrepressible hatred for that bohemian race to which he belong[s]" and a personal foundation of "rectitude, order, and honesty" that he opts to become a law officer. So devoted is he to this choice that, Hugo writes, "[h]e would have arrested his own father if he escaped from prison and turned in his own mother for breaking parole. And he would have done it with that sort of interior satisfaction that springs from virtue."