#javert

a-pinch-of-nutmeg:

pilferingapples:

secretmellowblog:

Part of the reason I have a complicated emotional relationship with Javert is because— Javert is BAD. He is a BAD person

But adaptations often don’t understandwhyhe’s bad, and make him bad for the wrong reasons.

In the book, Javert is bad because he’s a cop. He is the Best Cop It is Possible to Be, he’s honest and completely obedient to the law, and he’s TERRIBLE, because you can’t be “good” when you’re enforcing a system that is inherently cruel.

But like… in Les Mis 1998 Javert is portrayed as being an unusually evil person who just has a weird obsession with Valjean, unlike other cops, who are Good. Les Mis 1998 even adds a Good Cop side character who lets Valjean go free in Montreuil-sur-Mer, while joking with Valjean about how Javert is unusually evil and none of the other cops like him.

???????

And as I’ve ranted about a lot, BBC Les Mis Javert’s desire to enforce the law is portrayed as a goodhonorable quality, and there’s an entire precinct of “good cop” side characters who help him…..while BBC Javert’s actual “moral failing” is what Andrew Davies calls his “twisted love” for Valjean.

and I’m just like…eh? Javert is bad, yes!! But that’s noT WHY he’s bad. He’s not bad because he’s gay, he’s bad because he’s a cop. He’s not bad because he’s an usually evil cop, he’s actually an unusually “good” cop— and being a “good cop” is why he’s bad!

Anyway….my problem with these adaptations isn’t that they make Javert a bad person, it’s that they completely misunderstand why he’s a bad person. They turn a critique of the police as a whole into “one guy was weirdly mean, and then he died and everything was fine”

One of the things that makes the 98 Javert situation really stand out to me is that …yeah, sure, other cops don’t like Javert in book!canon *because he’s too good a cop*, he’s not corrupt, he doesn’t take bribes or work closely with criminals and he is not comfortable or chill with other cops who do that! They specifically distrust him and shut him out of some things because he’s Too Honest! Flipping it around so that he’s the exceptional Bad Guy is such a wild misreading but it keeps happening! whyyyy

Because society is afraid to say that most cops around the world enforce a system that was built to keep poor people oppressed and the rich and affluent in power. Victor Hugo literally said this about Les Mis, quote for quote:

“So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilisation, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age — the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of woman by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night — are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless”

Society continues to fear admitting to that, so of course Javert is painted as a bad apple.

ok so which les mis character is your fav and why?

Us: We were starving!

Hooper: You’ll starve again. Unless you learn the meaning of the cuts.

Us: Or meaning of those 10 years. A slaaave of director’s cuuut

waiting for the cut scenes to release like:

do you think those will ever be released?

melancholyarchivist:

imo javert never tried hard enough to smoke jean valjean out by getting on his nerves if i was in m sur m i would’ve walked up to the mayor and called bishop myriel a nepotism baby

#pictures i would send to valjeans office to annoy him: never ask a bishop with a family of politicans what his family was advocating 1700

pinene:

License and registration, please.. *looks you up and down* and, uh… pronouns

citizens, if he:

• was recruited in the Rue des Billettes
  
• smiles with a smile than which nothing more disdainful, more energetic, and more resolute can be seen in the world 
  
• replies with haughty gravity
  

he is not a rebel. he is Inspector Javert, an agent of the authorities.