Victor Hugo created Javert as the antagonist of Les Miserables, but he also created him as the most logically consistent character in the novel. Javert believes in the law. Not in the spirit of the law, not in the intention behind it, but in the law as an absolute system that does not require interpretation, only enforcement. Jean Valjean stole bread. Jean Valjean broke parole. These are facts. Facts do not expire. And Javert spends twenty years of his life pursuing these facts to their logical conclusion, because to do otherwise would mean the system he has built his identity upon is flawed.

Hugo understood that the most dangerous people are not those who break rules but those who follow them without questioning whether the rules are just. Javert was born in prison, the son of a convict and a fortune-teller, and he responded to that origin by dedicating his life to the system that imprisoned his parents. Dr. Kathryn Grossman of Pennsylvania State University has written that Javert represents the tragedy of the authoritarian personality, a man who substitutes institutional obedience for moral reasoning because moral reasoning requires a self he never developed.

The Stars That Never Move

Javert compares himself to the stars in Hugo's novel, fixed points in a system that does not change. He finds comfort in the idea that the universe operates on principles as rigid as his own, that right and wrong are as calculable as orbits. When Valjean shows him mercy, sparing his life at the barricade, the stars move. The system breaks. And Javert cannot survive in a universe without fixed principles because without those principles, he has no identity at all.

Hugo's genius with Javert is that he never makes him stupid. Javert is intelligent, observant, dedicated, and incorruptible. He cannot be bribed. He cannot be intimidated. He cannot be persuaded by argument, because his arguments are internally flawless. The only thing that can destroy Javert is evidence that his premises are wrong, and Valjean provides that evidence by being a convicted criminal who is also a genuinely good man.

The Bridge

Javert's suicide is one of the most debated moments in French literature. He stands on the bridge over the Seine and realizes that he cannot arrest Valjean, because Valjean saved his life, and he cannot let Valjean go, because the law demands his arrest. The two imperatives are irreconcilable. A more flexible mind would find a compromise. Javert does not have a flexible mind. He has a mind built for certainty, and when certainty fails, the mind fails with it.