#the imagery of there being a ‘rift in the immense blue of the firmament’…chefs kisss

[secretmellowblog]

Javert has always seen himself as a cog in the machine of the law—- but his final realization is that he hasn’t been a “bad cog,” he’s been a perfect cog in a bad machine. Javert hasn’t been a bad cop— he’s been a perfect cop in a system where his job is to enforce laws that are bigoted, evil, unjust, and cruel.

Javert’s entire life and soul was built on authoritarianism, on mindless bootlicking deference to the people above him in the social hierarchy. He had no desires outside of serving authority, and no joy outside of gaining its approval. He literally refused to think because he considered “independent thought’ a form of rebellion against authority!

But now he’s finally forced to realize that the authority he’s destroyed himself to serve is hollow, that the things he worshipped all his life are meaningless.

Derailed begins with Javert furiously interrogating himself for his failure to arrest Jean Valjean, for his failure to perform his duty to to the government….but as he continues thinking he’s eventually forced to come to the realization that the failure is not just coming from below, but also from on high. He’s not just failing to follow orders, he’s been given horrible orders that it would he immoral to follow, and his greatest failure was his lifelong refusal to recognize the hollowness of the higher powers he’s been serving. The authorities he’s been serving are poor arbiters of morality. There is a “gulf on high.”

I especially love these passages towards the end of his emotional breakdown self-reflection:

To be obliged to confess this to oneself: infallibility is not infallible, there may exist error in the dogma, all has not been said when a code speaks, society is not perfect, authority is complicated with vacillation, a crack is possible in the immutable, judges are but men, the law may err, tribunals may make a mistake! to behold a rift in the immense blue pane of the firmament!

(…)

Up to this point, everything above him had been, to his gaze, merely a smooth, limpid and simple surface; there was nothing incomprehensible, nothing obscure; nothing that was not defined, regularly disposed, linked, precise, circumscribed, exact, limited, closed, fully provided for; authority was a plane surface; there was no fall in it, no dizziness in its presence. Javert had never beheld the unknown except from below. The irregular, the unforeseen, the disordered opening of chaos, the possible slip over a precipice—this was the work of the lower regions, of rebels, of the wicked, of wretches. Now Javert threw himself back, and he was suddenly terrified by this unprecedented apparition: a gulf on high.

What! one was dismantled from top to bottom! one was disconcerted, absolutely! In what could one trust! That which had been agreed upon was giving way! What! the defect in society’s armor could be discovered by a magnanimous wretch! What! an honest servitor of the law could suddenly find himself caught between two crimes—the crime of allowing a man to escape and the crime of arresting him! everything was not settled in the orders given by the State to the functionary! There might be blind alleys in duty! What,—all this was real! was it true that an ex-ruffian, weighed down with convictions, could rise erect and end by being in the right? Was this credible? were there cases in which the law should retire before transfigured crime, and stammer its excuses?—Yes, that was the state of the case! and Javert saw it! and Javert had touched it! and not only could he not deny it, but he had taken part in it. These were realities. It was abominable that actual facts could reach such deformity. If facts did their duty, they would confine themselves to being proofs of the law; facts—it is God who sends them. Was anarchy, then, on the point of now descending from on high?

Thus,—and in the exaggeration of anguish, and the optical illusion of consternation, all that might have corrected and restrained this impression was effaced, and society, and the human race, and the universe were, henceforth, summed up in his eyes, in one simple and terrible feature,—thus the penal laws, the thing judged, the force due to legislation, the decrees of the sovereign courts, the magistracy, the government, prevention, repression, official cruelty, wisdom, legal infallibility, the principle of authority, all the dogmas on which rest political and civil security, sovereignty, justice, public truth, all this was rubbish, a shapeless mass, chaos; he himself, Javert, the spy of order, incorruptibility in the service of the police, the bull-dog providence of society, vanquished and hurled to earth; and, erect, at the summit of all that ruin, a man with a green cap on his head and a halo round his brow; this was the astounding confusion to which he had come; this was the fearful vision which he bore within his soul.