Lessons In Parenting From Les Misérables

Late last year, I finished reading Victor Hugo’s brick, Les Misérables.

Most of you know how I have been on a classic literature kick the past few years. I basically realized that I hadn’t read many “famous” books (the books that everyone knows but not many have actually read) and decided I wanted to read them. In that time, I’ve conquered Paradise Lost, War and Peace, Anna Karenina (if you want some excellent lessons in menswear from this book, go here), and Moby-Dick, among many others. Right now, I’m in the midst of The Brothers Karamazov.

Out of all the books I’ve read recently, Les Misérables is definitely one of my favorites. Yes, there are some long passages that seem like pretty hard left-turns from the story, but now I know a lot more about the Paris sewer system than I ever thought I would!

One of the things that helped me navigate the more tedious aspects of the book was that I was already pretty familiar with the story, given the musical adaptation’s tremendous popularity. Already knowing the general direction of where the story was going helped me a great deal while reading the book.

I found Les Misérables to be incredibly moving. Probably more so than any book I’ve ever read. Much of that has to do with its treatment of the children in the story.

If you are not already familiar with the plot, it goes like this…

Jean Valjean is a recently-paroled convict in France in the early 1800s. He was in jail for stealing bread to help feed his sister’s family. During his time in the clink he tried (and failed) to escape a bunch of times which only added years to his original sentence. All in all, he spends nineteen long years behind bars.

He finally gets out but realizes that he is shunned by society for being an ex-con. The only person who shows him grace is a local bishop who touches Valjean’s heart so profoundly that Valjean vows to turn over a new leaf and live life as an honest man. In order to do this, though, he needs to break his parole and assume a new identity, which is illegal, obviously, and attracts the attention of the singularly-focused policeman, Javert, who relentlessly pursues him for the rest of the story.

Along the way, Valjean adopts Cosette, who is the daughter of one of Valjean’s factory employees (after Valjean adopts a new name and becomes a respected member of society). That employee’s name is Fantine. Fantine sent Cosette (as a baby) to temporarily live with an innkeeper and his wife (the Thénardiers) because Fantine was poor and didn’t feel like she could adequately care for the child. Fantine plans to return for the child shortly, once she has made a little bit of money in another town. Unfortunately, the Thénardiers are the worst people ever and mistreat Cosette severely.

Fantine ends up dying and Valjean feels like it’s his fault (more on that later), so he assures Fantine that he will find Cosette, raise her as his own, and give her a comfortable life.

Cosette grows up in Valjean’s care all while Valjean hides from the law. Eventually, their simple, secretive life is thrown into tumult when Cosette falls in love with a young revolutionary named Marius.

Oh, one more important thing to remember about Valjean… he’s strong. Like, really, really strong. We’re talking borderline-silverback-gorilla strong.

A major theme of Les Misérables is how the most vulnerable among us (like children and poor people) are treated by society. Basically, society flourishes when we show each other love and grace. We need to take care of each other.

So, on that note, I’d like to relay to you the most important lessons in parenting I gleaned from Les Misérables. Here are three examples, starting with the worst parents and working our way up to the top…

The Thénardiers

I already said that the innkeeper and his wife are pretty much the worst people ever. Fantine meets them by chance as she is traveling and hands Cosette off to Madame Thénardier not realizing how terrible the Thénardiers are.

The Thénardiers, at that time, have two daughters already whom they spoil. Unfortunately, they abuse Cosette severely (starving her, beating her, neglecting her, not clothing her properly in the winter, forcing her to do manual labor, etc). They also extort Fantine for as much money as they can squeeze from her, none of which goes to actually caring for Cosette.

Eventually, the Thénardiers have three more kids (bringing the total to five biological children and Cosette).

Now, the fact that the Thénardiers abuse Cosette would make them bad enough parents, but their sh*tty parenting actually goes far beyond that!

After Valjean comes and essentially buys Cosette from the Thénardiers, the Thénardiers fall on hard times, eventually losing their inn and resorting to more overt forms of criminal and all-around treacherous behavior to stay financially afloat.

Naturally, they enlist their children in these schemes, primarily their two daughters, Éponine and Azelma. Forcing your kids to commit crimes on your behalf is bad enough, but Thénardier even forces Azelma to punch her hand through a window which causes a serious wound (sorry, Azelma, antibiotics don’t exist yet!).

What about their three youngest children, you ask? Well, the oldest boy, Gavroche, lives on the streets and only visits his family once in a blue moon. He is so distant that at one point Thénardier doesn’t even recognize him.

The two youngest boys are sent to live with another family (so the Thénardiers can extract money from them) and are later also cast into the streets. There is literally no concern for them by any of the adults in the vicinity.

The two younger boys are even taken in by Gavroche later on and they don’t even know they are brothers! Talk about a broken home.

Eventually, the two youngest boys disappear into the streets of Paris and both Éponine and Gavroche get shot to death.

Neglected, abandoned, abused, shot. The Thénardiers have probably one of the worst track-records of any parents in literature.

Ok, let’s move up the ladder…

Fantine

Fantine is a good person, but not a great parent. She demonstrates how choices matter more than intentions.

Fantine’s intentions are good and pure and loving. She loves Cosette with all her heart and soul, but she consistently makes awful choices.

Fantine’s portrayed in the book as beautiful in mind and body, but naïve and too trusting. Basically, she’s really sweet, but kind of a simpleton.

She ends up shacking up with this insufferable wanker who knocks her up and then abandons her. Actually, the way he does it is unfathomably cruel: he and his friends take Fantine and her friends out to dinner and then casually leave the table… never to return. At least they pay the bill on their way out.

So, Fantine’s first bad choice is trusting that d*ckhead.

Ok, now she has Cosette and she’s on her own. She then realizes she’s poor and can’t afford to support both herself and Cosette. So, she leaves Cosette in the care of the Thénardiers which was probably the WORST place she could have left her baby.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to not feel frustrated by Fantine’s choice here. Sure, even we don’t know the extent of the Thénardiers’ awfulness at this point, but Fantine leaves Cosette with the innkeeper’s wife after chatting with her for all of five minutes! Maybe get to know the people who are going to be caring for your child in your absence a little bit more than that. Maybe, I don’t know, ask to meet the husband, or take a tour of their house, or SOMETHING to get a more solid idea of who these people are.

Fantine agrees to send the Thénardiers money to support Cosette while she works at Valjean’s factory in another town. In a surprise to literally no one, the Thénardiers use that money to spoil their own kids and keep demanding more from Fantine by lying to her that Cosette is sick.

The Thénardiers demand so much from Fantine that she, after losing her job at the factory, ends up selling her hair, her teeth, and eventually herself to cover the costs.

Now, I know that Fantine gets basically screwed over again and again throughout the story (abandoned by her lover, fired from her job) but she does little to help her own, or Cosette’s, situation.

As the Thénardiers demand more and more money, there should have come a point where Fantine thought to herself, “Ok, I clearly can’t keep paying all this money. I’m poor already and this is just making me poorer. This cycle will never end unless I do something different. I should just go get Cosette because this arrangement isn’t working anymore.”

Unfortunately, Fantine never does that. She never thinks ahead. She doesn’t think into the future at all to see how she can make a better life for her child. She just thinks about the immediate moment and “Oh no, how am I going to pay the Thénardiers this month?” instead of making a realistic plan for eventually being able to support Cosette on her own.

Her inability to see that she is being fleeced by the Thénardiers is what drives her to her eventual death.

Fantine is a tragic and heartbreaking example of how someone who is sweet and trusting can be taken advantage of and eventually crushed by society.

Even though Fantine is pure of heart, she is totally ill-equipped to be a good parent because she has no foresight and no decent problem-solving skills.

The Thénardiers have terrible intentions and make terrible choices. Fantine, however, has only the best intentions… but still makes terrible choices.

And caught up in all of this is poor, sweet, little Cosette who is sad proof that children are completely at the mercy of the family they are born into. Cosette never did anything wrong, but is born to an absent father and a simple-minded, in-over-her-head mother with no support and is then handed off to a monstrously abusive family who damn near kill her.

Like many of the other children in the story, Cosette (the “little lark”) would have been devoured by the wolfish world if it had not been for the hand of God (Valjean) who literally appears out of the darkness to whisk her away to a better life.

Jean Valjean

Jean Valjean is, by far, the best parent in Les Misérables, which is ironic, because he doesn’t have any biological kids of his own.

As Fantine is dying, Valjean promises her that he will raise Cosette as his own. He does this because he feels guilty that Fantine was fired from his factory.

As this is all happening, though, Valjean has to come clean about his true identity, which prompts Javert to attempt to arrest him. Even though allowing himself to be arrested would be the right and just thing to do, his promise to Fantine is more important. So, he eludes Javert, travels to the inn and purchases Cosette from the innkeepers.

Like I said earlier, Valjean then raises Cosette as his own, showering her with love and affection.

But their life isn’t all rosy because Valjean is still on the lam. So, they need to live in secrecy and constantly move around. That would be much easier for Valjean if he didn’t have a child tagging along, but his promise to Fantine is rock-solid, so too is his love for Cosette.

Valjean’s commitment to his word and his love for a helpless child take priority over his own needs. Isn’t that parenting in a nutshell?

Oh, and remember how I said that Valjean was really strong?

In the musical adaptation, we only really get a glimpse of Valjean’s absurd strength when he lifts a runaway cart off a man which causes Javert to question Valjean’s identity (“You make me think of a man from years ago…”) and when Valjean carries Marius to safety after the battle at the barricade.

But in the book, Valjean’s physical fitness plays a much more consequential role.

Yes, Valjean saves the man from underneath the cart. But, later on, who do you think shelters Valjean and Cosette and offers them a place to live in peace and secrecy for years? The very same man Valjean saved!

Also, Valjean is able to escape from Javert numerous times because of his strength. He is able to lift Cosette over a high wall with Javert in pursuit and even rips the bars off his jail cell window at one point. He also scales a ship mast like a monkey to save another man’s life and fights off Thénardier’s thugs.

And yes, he carries Marius to safety through the sewers of Paris.

Essentially, Valjean’s physical strength is his ace-in-the-hole. It’s what gets him out of sticky situation after sticky situation. It’s not just an interesting character trait, it is the glue that holds the entire plot together.

Basically, Valjean CAN’T BE A GOOD FATHER WITHOUT BEING STRONG. Because so much of his care for Cosette relies on his strength. Without it, he wouldn’t have been able to escape Javert in order to go retrieve Cosette from the innkeepers. He wouldn’t have been able to save the man under the cart, which would have meant he and Cosette wouldn’t have had a place to live later on. He wouldn’t have been able to get out of prison again by saving the man on the mast (and faking his own death). He also wouldn’t have been able to save Marius, who eventually marries Cosette.

At the end of the story, when Marius and Cosette are married, Valjean gives his entire fortune to them. After all, it’s every parent’s dream that their children have better lives than they did.

Interestingly, Valjean isn’t perfect, though. He HATES Marius because Marius loves Cosette and eventually takes her away from him. A dad hating his daughter’s boyfriend is a tale as old as time! It shows that Valjean is fiercely protective of Cosette, but it also shows a little bit of Valjean’s selfishness. It’s a selfishness we all have, don’t we? We can relate to him!

Valjean represents the kind of parent we all hope to aspire to. He demonstrates unconditional love for Cosette even though Cosette isn’t his child. He lives a life of sacrifice to her and that’s exactly what parents SHOULD do!

The love that the bishop showed Valjean compounds within him and is poured out to not only Cosette, but to everyone around him, even Javert.

I found it really interesting reading this book and seeing such drastically different examples of parenting. And I think the three examples I cite here show the importance of choices over intentions. Yes, having noble intentions is good, but you need to pair that with good choices for the intentions to matter. Fantine desperately wanted to be a good parent to Cosette, she just didn’t know how.

In the case of Valjean, I look at his physical strength as a metaphor for general health. If Valjean hadn’t been strong, he wouldn’t have been able to care for Cosette as well as he did. He needs to be physically capable to protect her and provide for her.

For us, we need to be around for our kids. We need to take our health seriously. Of course we need to be fit and strong, but we also need to get our check-ups. We need to be there for our kids, just like when Valjean helped Cosette carry the water bucket in the woods. We can’t be there for them the way they need us to if we don’t have our health in order.

Reading Les Misérables was a really special experience. Yes, it was challenging at times, but it was more than worth it.

I always tell my boys that reading makes you smarter. Hopefully, reading Les Misérables made me a better dad.