This past Spring, my son’s school put on a production of Les Miserables (School Version). For a bunch of high schoolers, they did a very very good job. My sons had never heard or watched Les Mis before, so naturally, we had to go to the school musical multiple times and then check out DVDs of more professional productions of Les Mis from the library.

The power of the story cannot be denied. Depending upon where you are in your stages of life, different parts of it hit differently. For me, this time, the part that made me bawl was when Fantine, the dying prostitute, hallucinates that she is taking care of her daughter Cosette. “Cosette, it’s turned so cold.” (Because Fantine is dying, and her body temperature is dropping.) “Cosette, it’s past your bedtime. You’ve played the day away, and soon it will be night.” All that Fantine wants is to be living with her daughter, watching her play, doing a bedtime routine with her and so on, like I was privileged to do with my kids when they were small. As a mom, this really hit me. When I was a teenager, it did not hit me so hard. I was more take by the love triangle later in the play. More later about how different things become salient when you are younger or older.

So, let’s talk about the young people. The way the play is written, it’s impossible not to identify with the students, who want to lead a revolution in the wake of the death of General Le Marc. Their songs (“Red and Black” and “Do You Hear the People Sing”) are certainly stirring. Now that I’m the age of the students’ mothers, one of the many emotions stirred by these songs was trepidation. I wanted to ask Enjolras, “Honey, what is your plan to bring about a better world?”

As far as I can tell, the students’ plan is as follows:

1. Build a barricade in the street
2. Fight police
3. ?
4. Utopia

Much as I sympathize with these young people’s feelings, I worry that this plan is not going to be workable.

Actually, the students did have an additional step in their plan.

1. Build a barricade in the street
2. The people rise
3. Students and the people fight police together
4. ?
5. Utopia

Now, as it happened, “the people” (the lower classes of Paris) did not “rise.” The result was that nearly all the students got killed. However, the people’s failure to rise is not the only weak point in this plan. I have a feeling that, if the people had joined the students in the streets, the result would have been that the people and the students who were fighting got killed. The people had this feeling too, which was why they stayed in their houses.

Either way, you need something in between “fight with the police” and “utopia” in order to build a better society.

You would think the characters in Les Mis would understand this. After all, France had had a bloody revolution just one generation before, when their parents were young.

As street urchin Gavroche sings in this clip, “This is the land that fought for liberty/Now when we fight, we fight for bread./Here is the thing about equality/everyone’s equal when they’re dead.”

The students are telling the people that a violent revolution will solve the problem of their being desperately poor. However, the end result of war (including revolutionary war) is more and worse poverty. When you destroy everything, what you find the next day is that everything is destroyed.

This is what James Lindsay means when he says “Communism doesn’t know how.” The “plan” that Marx presents in his “science of history” is exactly like the students’ plan:

1. Destroy everything, and kill a bunch of people
2. ?
3. Utopia

This is a child’s view of how to solve problems.

Mind you, it’s quite understandable. As portrayed in Les Mis, a great mass of people in France at the time were living under horrible poverty and unjust laws that made it virtually impossible to get out of a bad situation once you had got into it. (Fantine, being abandoned by the father of her child; Valjean, being convicted of a minor crime that turned into a lifetime of parole.) So this desire to fight is not so much a political philosophy, let alone a plan, as it is an instinct. Freeze, flight, or fight.

Now wait a moment, you say. Aren’t the students in the right, here? After all, Valjean, the hero of the story and the representation of Mercy, joins them on the barricade. Doesn’t that prove that a good person would be involved in the revolution?

Not quite. Valjean joined the students on the barricade and even took some shots at the soldiers. But he did not do this because he expected the students’ “plan” to work. He went there to rescue Marius. Valjean had found out that the young student, Marius, was interested in his adopted daughter Cosette, and he was eager to get Cosette safely married to this young man, because he, Valjean, would not be able to take care of her forever. Even having just met Marius, Valjean had paternal feelings towards him, as he sings in the song “Bring Him Home.” (Another theme of Les Mis is how vulnerable a woman is when she does not have a man who is willing to marry her, as we see mostly clearly in Fantine’s dramatic fall into hell-on-earth.)

Valjean, as an older person, has spent his entire life trying to alleviate human suffering … first his own, and then, that of others. The way he has done this is to dedicate himself to God, and to save and protect individuals (especially women) whenever it is in his power to do so. Although willing, in principle, to turn himself in to the law, he eludes Javert for ten years in order to rescue and raise Cosette. This is actually how a better world is built. Men marrying women and raising children with them. Adults making sure that children, like Cosette, have steady, faithful parents to care for them. This is building. It’s the opposite of tearing everything down.

This is how Valjean fights back against the poverty and injustice in France. As an older person, he knows full well that the students, and especially the people, have a legitimate complaint. By his quiet presence in the story, he can show them a better way. He helps people one at a time, as far as his sphere of influence extends. He’s not willing to kill, or even demonize, Javert, representative of the often unjust law. “I have nothing against you. You have only done your duty.” This is very different from the Jacobin spirit of hating and wishing to kill the entire middle class.

Perhaps, if you were a student, you would be unsatisfied with Valjean’s approach to saving the world because it is too modest. Valjean, after all, only saved the child of one dying prostitute. He didn’t stamp out the sex trade in France. He didn’t even put a stop to the nefarious Thenardiers. He didn’t do a big, dramatic deed that brought about Utopia. Furthermore, all of this took him a good ten years to do. He had to strive and suffer all kinds of things in order to give one young couple a good life.

I am sorry, young Jacobines, but that is the way it is. Contrary to dozens of American movies, there is almost never a big, dramatic deed that you can do which will save the world in one fell swoop. I say almost. There is never such a deed. No almost about it.

What if I told you that being quietly faithful over many years and building a stable home for your children is literally the most that any one person can do, to bring about Utopia?

Kind of disappointing, huh?

This is wisdom from an older person. This is the wisdom that Jean Valjean has to offer the students who don’t have a plan, though Valjean himself might not even realize it. And it appears, at the end of the play, that Marius has accepted Valjean’s wisdom. He marries Cosette. Marrying her, instead of abandoning her as Cosette’s father abandoned her mother, is one solid step towards building a better world.