Balzac's Policemen

Abstract

Prostitution and crime greatly preoccupied French novelists in the Romantic age, including those who were also, and whom we may think of as primarily, poets. Theophile Gautier's poem on the mummified 'hand of glory' of the executed murderer Lacenaire is perhaps sufficiently well known; less so the fact that to the nine volumes of Les Franfais peints par eux-memes he contributed, in I84I, two years before Dumas's Filles, Lorettes et Courtisanes, a pornotypological monograph on Le Rat, the juvenile, or, as we might now say, nymphet appurtenance to noblemen's households. Like everything about him, Victor Hugo's concern with the criminal classes, from the Middle Ages to his own protracted time, was vast. He took, indeed, little enough interest in prostitution, more in murder or, rather, in its consequences. For Hugo was an insistent penal reformer, more especially in respect of capital punishment, which he denounced mightily at intervals over a period of 22 years, from the publication of Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamne in I829 to a curious appearance as defending counsel at assizes only a matter of months before his 20 years' exile began. It was not to be until that exile had already lasted I I years that, from Guernsey, in 1862, Victor Hugo, with Les Miserables, gave the nineteenth century and perhaps all time one of its three or four greatest novels. Apart from Jean Valjean, the unjustly sentenced, heroic, and saintly escaped convict, its two most memorable characters are, to many minds, the street urchin Gavroche and the policeman Javert. This last is not a sympathetic figure. Indeed, in respect of the trouble he causes throughout the whole work, he must be regarded as one of its two principal villains. And yet, as Jean Valjean does, we must respect him, insensitive, hard-hearted and even vindictive as he may be, for his devotion to duty, his dedication to a task we are meant to think misconceived. When Valjean has saved his life and he has let Valjean go, the life