A rerun from 2019, but one that is worth revisiting. My next two novels focus on antagonists, after several with clear villains. It can give the story a different flavor, especially if you are skilled enough to create a sympathetic – but still clearly in the wrong – character for the antagonist. The environment is also an antagonist, or can be.
Last month, PBS wrapped up a costume drama based on Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. It was very well done, although I got impatient with some of the characters for the same reason I got impatient with them when I read the novel. Hugo wrote for a different time and different readers.
But the character of Inspector Javert remained one of the most intriguing. In part, this is because he was the first antagonist I ever encountered in screen, as opposed to a villain. I was probably 6 or 7 when I first saw Les Miserables. It was on TV, on a Saturday afternoon, when they ran Dumas and Hugo dramatizations. Javert’s actions didn’t make sense, and my poor parents had a lot of difficulty trying to explain them in language a child would understand. Later, after the musical came out and I read the entire novel, he made sense.
Javert is virtue turned to vice. Which makes him such a fascinating antagonist. He came up through the streets, having been born in prison, and eventually becoming a policeman, prison guard, and detective. He is a child of the French Revolution, rational, and determined to see to the needs of the state. At the time the novel was set, if someone was convicted of a crime (felony in US terms) and served his sentence, he still had to report to the police every time he went somewhere. All had to be informed that he was a convicted criminal. If he stopped doing this, it cancelled his parole and back to prison he’d go.
Javert knows the law inside and out, and has sworn to uphold it. No matter how good the former prisoner might become (Jean Valjean), Javert knows that the man is still a convict with broken parole. Once a criminal, always a criminal, and that’s that. In the musical Les Mis, Javert’s aria “Stars” neatly sums up his understanding of the world.
Javert is justice without mercy. Valjean is justice tempered with mercy, sometimes to the point of excess. Javert is relentless as a Fury for the good of the State. Valjean has doubts and wants to be left alone with the child he rescued and is raising as his own. If Javert were just an automaton, he wouldn’t be so sympathetic. But he really is sympathetic. As a reader, I can understand how he came to be the way he is, and why he is motivated to be pure justice as he understands it. Hugo did a magnificent job.
In the end, Javert breaks. He acts against his training and shows mercy. In so doing, he breaks himself mentally, and can no longer reconcile his understanding of the world with what he has done. Again, he is a sympathetic character, and you mourn for him. He was an antagonist, and made live miserable for Jean Valjean and others. He also lived as a good man as best he thought he should, and you feel a little sorry for him. Javert is complicated, as all really good, memorable characters are. He’s very human.
The contrast is Monsieur Thenardier. He’s low class and never rises above his roots, a swindler, thief, crook, philanderer, robber, murderer, and basically bad person. He and his wife (in the novel) are perfect foils for each other, and the reader gets the sense that its a good thing they are married to each other, because otherwise they’d be making even more people miserable. In the book there is nothing even vaguely amusing about them, unlike the musical. And in the book, he survives, prospers from the rebellion of 1830, and ends up becoming a slave trader. He’s more of the classic villain than is Javert.
How do we, as writers, create characters like these? Read a lot. Watch people. And think about virtues taken to extremes. Javert is justice unleavened by mercy. Mercy without justice becomes license and can lead to just as bad ends. Pride, wrath, gluttony, covetousness… the familiar seven “deadly sins” serve as starting places. Excess and false humility, passivity in the face of moral evils… Their inverses are also useful, and add depth to characters.
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Mad Genius Club 
23 responses to “Javert and Antagonists: A Blast from the Past”
I just don’t do villains per se sympathetically at all (and don’t use them therefore very much in my stories). What I’m hung up on is Treebeard’s accusation about Saruman’s destruction in the Lord of the Rings: “A wizard should know better!”
I can portray someone who is an antagonist in his own self-interests, or even someone damaged who gets his kicks from opposition, predation, and power. But I can’t get past the notion of “humans make judgments” being better than “laws make judgments”. Laws may be expedient for the functioning of society on a large scale, but when they conflict with small scale justice, I know which side I vote for.
So I find the Javerts of the world to be revolting, and can only look at them clinically as automatons. It’s a skill to write about them credibly, certainly, but I don’t want to spend time with them.
It all comes down to personal morality, I suppose. I may be an atheist on logical grounds, but I do value the Western Civ inheritance of Judeo-Christian morality — justice with mercy, and the recognition of the limits of perfect human justice that should temper the pretensions of the state.
Every law, good and bad, have their roots steeped in blood, if you dig deep enough. This is a part of the Javerts of the world I understand.
In one of my places of employment we had a saying: “the safety rules are writ in blood.” Not literally, mind, but the very next thing to it. There rules were there because somebody died. Or a LOT of somebodies. Amputations, eviscerations, the whole bloody nine yards.
Take that mentality and carry it onwards. Take it to space, my favorite playground. There, you have rules because the universe does not give one shiny shit about human life. Always check your atmo pressure. Always check your suit. Checklist, checklist, checklist.
That’s where you get the death penalty for petty theft. Because, like many a frontier society, human life hangs on a thread. Very little separates a surviving population from a ghost station.
And that’s where you get rules absolutists.
You can also find them in totalitarian and socialist societies, with a more evil twist. Rules are there to enforce the will of those in power. Rather, it isn’t the rules that matter, but the punishments.
A rules absolutist there is quite useful to the powerful all the way up unto the point he very much isn’t. But then, such societies have a way of using humans as tools in every part of that society.
I have more sympathy for the rule-bound than most, I expect. Rules provide structure. Unstructured chaos leads to death, or so the rules absolutist would tell you.
I see something slightly different. “Rational and determined to see to the needs of the state” As a child of the Revolution, Javert thinks reason is the be all and end all. But rationality always has a starting point, and from there it follows logic. BUT the starting point determines where it will end. In this case, the starting point is the ‘needs of the state’ as determined by the state. The French Revolution supposedly enthroned Reason, forgetting that it is a servant not a master. This is why Javert can’t quite get Justice right although he tries desperately. Wonderful stuff to think about. Not so easy to write.
It is, and it is. An author has to know human nature within a culture very, very well, and how to walk the fine line between understandable and wrong on one hand, and sympathetic villain. The Revolution’s over-emphasis on Reason and hatred of Christianity makes a Javert easier to create and understand.
Granted, the sympathetic villain was less common back in Victor Hugo’s day. Readers wanted good heroes and bad antagonists/ villains, and didn’t put up with the modern “dingy protagonist anti-hero whatever.” That Javert remains so well known is another sign of Hugo’s skills.
There are specific cases where the story leads you to this type of antagonist/anti-villain, and Les Miz is a good example, but in general my default reaction to such characters is that if the author is that interested in the character’s inner life the story would benefit from the character being promoted to co-protagonist or something. Generally, when you find a somewhat nuanced guy on the baddies’ side in my books, they’re going to defect.
It takes a very unusual environment to create a Javert who doesn’t shift one way (become good) or the other (toss justice for pure revenge and slide into evil in the name of “Good.”)
Agreed!
Walternate from the first three seasons of Fringe is my go-to example. Also an example of a multiverse done right.
It’s interesting how much the alternate timeline there is coded as weird and “Fae” initially and then we find out that it’s a person from the main-setting timeline who inflicted a classic fae-style crime on a person of the alternate timeline.
Also the best description I’ve seen of the Alliance from Firefly: a government that’s not so much actively evil and malicious as much ad it’s “too big for it’s own good” (and everyone else’s).
It’s an excellent description of any gov’t more organized and effective than saga-era Iceland, honestly 🙂
I suspect part of the reason antagonists can be so compelling is many real world conflicts are not necessarily about absolute monsters vs the world, but about people who believe things that are fundamentally in conflict and are unable to reconcile the difference.
The honorable Knight sworn to the wrong side
The mentor who would burn the world for their mentee, even when it’s not necessary
The opposition who is fundamentally right about what comes after, but has no other solution for the current problem*
*In one of the Megaman games, the catastrophic war between humans and reploids got started because humans were building a thing that could do a mass code edit of all reploids, as a response to maverick attacks, and the rest of the reploids (rightly) feared it would be used to just enslave all of them. War ensued and it was used to do a mass edit of all reploids, just like had been feared.
This guy makes some interesting points about antagonists and setting up conflicts in how Lady Eboshi and San were portrayed in Princess Mononoke, compared to the more simplistic portrayal of conflict in Avatar.
Avatar vs Princess Mononoke: How to have a message (youtube.com)
In the Star Wars EU, Grand Admiral Thrawn was an interesting example. Not the pudgy Elon Musk-like version today or the version in the animated series that simplified the character.
Thrawn was more or less a straight villain in the original Heir to the Empire trilogy but he gained new depth after Zahn’s Hand of Thrawn duology. That was a follow up to the first three books, where the heroes and the reader learn a little more about who he was, and it’s interesting – Thrawn becomes a tragic character, someone who could have been a hero if not for some fatal flaws – his pride and his ruthlessness. Simply put: Thrawn (rightly) believed there were terrible threats out there, ready to fill the void left over by the Empire’s fall, and he also believed (rightly or wrongly) that the Republic government the heroes were establishing couldn’t protect them.
The heroes also meet Thrawn’s loyal vassals from among his own people and others, and learned a different side of him: if you were under his protection, he’d go to the mat for you. If you opposed him, he’d pull out all the stops to crush you. Ruthlessness such as being complicit in enslaving the Noghri and agreeing to rip Leia’s newborn children away from her and use them as weapons, pride to think he was the only one who could save the universe, and that he could control a dangerously insane dark Force adept.
There’s even fan fiction where the female character ‘tames’ Thrawn, softens his ruthlessness and pride and get’s under his skin so he loses his Vulcan-like control, protects her and even defies the Emperor for her.
Personally I think Zahn went a little too far in terms of cleaning up his character in the prequel-era books. The character we see in Outbound Flight, for example, wouldn’t have done the things Thrawn was doing in Heir to the Empire.
Thrawn is probably the most successful deliberate attempt at this kind of character created in my lifetime. (As opposed to characters who reportedly come off as more nuanced than the creators wanted, like Archie Bunker or Miles Quaritch.) T
he live action version of Thrawn in Ahsoka was played by the voice actor Rebels used for the character, so I think that’s why he’s not as angular and aquiline as the descriptions in the books and Zahn’s basic “Alien Military Sherlock Holmes” label for the character might imply.
Along with Marko Ramius, Thrawn was something of an inspiration for Admiral Khopesh in my own Spider Star.
Spider Star? Sounds interesting. Link?
Book 2 of this duology: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08R1854R7?binding=kindle_edition
Fair warning: Khopesh is only mentioned in Book 1, and when he shows up in Book 2, he’s not as flamboyantly clever as Ramius or Thrawn.
The guy playing Boba Fett in the Disney shows is the one who played Boba’s clone father in the prequels; I don’t think it was unreasonable to pick him over some dude who had like two lines in Empire Strikes Back; but Jeremy Bullock’s Boba is just one of many, many aspects of ESB that I’m less invested than most of the fandom, so my opinion doesn’t count for much 🙂
I’ll check it out, thanks!
And among the many sins of Disney was having a voice actor play a part he wasn’t physically suited for.
Likewise with Boba Fett. If they wanted to use the original actor, they could have had him do the voice while the actor who played the physical role kept the helmet on.
I mean, did anyone expect James Earl Jones to climb into the Vader suit? Would anyone have even wanted that?
I read those books too, and I suspect that Thrawn’s morals were just corroded over the years by the work he did for Palpatine and the Empire. It doesn’t have to be anything big, just one little nasty step at a time. “I’ll violate my principles for the greater good just this once and never again.” And it all ended with Thrawn doing the things we saw him doing in the Heir to the Empire trilogy.
Palpatine does love to corrupt people.
But I still hold that Outbound Flight should have been Thrawn’s “fall,” or at least his first step to indicate how he’d end up. The destruction of Outbound flight should have been Thrawn’s equivalent of Anakin slaughtering all the Tuskans. The point where he went too far and we all know he’ll go further.
But instead, Zahn drifted close to Mary Sue territory in having the very universe conspire to set up a situation to excuse Thrawn of guilt. Chiefly in the portrayal of C’baoth.
I was actually looking forward to seeing the original C’baoth and comparing him to his insane clone. I was expecting someone a little arrogant perhaps, but with his head screwed on right and with some good ideas.
Instead, we get a retread of the insane clone C’baoth, someone so unstable it’s inconceivable the other Jedi wouldn’t have noticed and removed him from authority. But C’baoth HAD to be insane in order to excuse Thrawn for destroying Outbound Flight, and even then, Zahn rewrote history to prevent Thrawn himself from issuing the final order.
Yeah, that’s what I remember most clearly about Outbound Flight; the simplistically nutso Jorus C’Baoth.
The Chairman from Larry Correia’s Grimnoir books was the hero of his age, but he was also a man of his time, and he remained so into our time.