#but yEAH Valjean's relationship to religion is a whole other weird can of worms

[secretmellowblog]

One aspect of Les Mis that gets lost in adaptations is how critical Hugo is of the Church, and the way Christianity can be used as a tool of oppression. Myriel is not supposed to represent a normal bishop-- he's a bizarre outlier. He's a rebel. No one else in the Church likes him because he's the only one who calls out their hypocrisy. And it's not a coincidence that the Thing that made Myriel go from being a shallow careless aristocratic cad to a gentle compassionate priest was....the French Revolution.

It's fascinating how much Myriel actually ends up agreeing with the atheist rebel Conventionary's attitudes towards the Church--- but it makes complete sense when you look at the way he's been interacting with religion for the past few decades of his life!

In 1.1.12 we're told that Myriel is flat-out shunned by all other bishops and priests, largely because he has no interest in using the Church to gain power and wealth.

He “did not take” in Paris. Not a single future dreamed of engrafting itself on this solitary old man. Not a single sprouting ambition committed the folly of putting forth its foliage in his shadow. (...)The impossibility of growing great under Monseigneur Bienvenu was so well understood, that no sooner had the young men whom he ordained left the seminary than they got themselves recommended to the archbishops of Aix or of Auch, and went off in a great hurry. For, in short, we repeat it, men wish to be pushed. A saint who dwells in a paroxysm of abnegation is a dangerous neighbor; he might communicate to you, by contagion, an incurable poverty, an anchylosis of the joints, which are useful in advancement, and in short, more renunciation than you desire; and this infectious virtue is avoided. Hence the isolation of Monseigneur Bienvenu. We live in the midst of a gloomy society. Success; that is the lesson which falls drop by drop from the slope of corruption.

When he interacts with other bishops, it's with snarky frustrated comments about they waste all their money on luxuries while people are starving:

The fact is that he displeased them. Among other strange things, it is said that he chanced to remark one evening, when he found himself at the house of one of his most notable colleagues: “What beautiful clocks! What beautiful carpets! What beautiful liveries! They must be a great trouble. I would not have all those superfluities, crying incessantly in my ears: ‘There are people who are hungry! There are people who are cold! There are poor people! There are poor people!’”

He describes himself this way: I embarrassed them. The outside air penetrated to them through me. I produced on them the effect of an open door.”

Myriel is not normal! All of his acts of kindness and generosity, and the way he's so willing to shield outcasts and criminals, are explicitly framed as a kind of rebellion against the church. And, more importantly, it's all completely voluntary. He doesn't have to do any of it. His voluntary poverty is, emotionally, completely different from the actual real poverty of the people around him-- he never has to lose more than he can bear. If he doesn't want to give up everything, he can still choose to keep his fancy aristocratic silverware. I think that's part of why he doesn't protest against the Conventionary when he assumes that Myriel is ridiculously wealthy and lives in a palace full of luxuries. Even if the Conventionary was wrong about Myriel specifically....he's voicing the exact same criticisms Myriel has made of the church. He's saying all the things that Myriel has said to his own colleagues, the things that have made him an outcast. The Conventionary's:

You are a bishop; that is to say, a prince of the church, one of those gilded men with heraldic bearings and revenues, who have vast prebends,—the bishopric of D—— fifteen thousand francs settled income, ten thousand in perquisites; total, twenty-five thousand francs,—who have kitchens, who have liveries, who make good cheer, who eat moor-hens on Friday, who strut about, a lackey before, a lackey behind, in a gala coach, and who have palaces, and who roll in their carriages in the name of Jesus Christ who went barefoot!

is very similar to Myriel's:

“What beautiful clocks! What beautiful carpets! What beautiful liveries! They must be a great trouble. I would not have all those superfluities, crying incessantly in my ears: ‘There are people who are hungry!'

(And the Conventionary's comment about Jesus Christ preaching barefoot is very similar to the Bishop's earlier comments about how he is fine with travelling on the back of a donkey because it was good enough for Jesus Christ.) It's like, the Bishop thought the rebel atheist Conventionary was his enemy-- but after talking to him he discovers that he agrees with him far more, and on a far deeper level, than he agrees with any of his peers in the church.

And that's what he's getting at in the last lines of the chapter:

“Monseigneur, people are inquiring when Your Greatness will receive the red cap!”—“Oh! oh! that’s a coarse color,” replied the Bishop. “It is lucky that those who despise it in a cap revere it in a hat.”

People who despise the red hats of rebels revere the red hats of cardinals. But at this point Myriel seems to respect this outcast atheist rebel more than he respects any of the high church officials we've seen him interact with; he snarks at his bishop peers until none of them like him anymore, but he begs the conventionary for his blessing.