Lies in Les Misérables
problematic Bishop Charles-François-Bienvenu Myriel
“You forgot: I gave these also…
Would you leave the best behind?”
In Les Misérables, a bishop feeds and hosts the newly released, destitute criminal Valjean. While the bishop sleeps, Valjean steals his silver and runs away with it. He promptly gets caught (lol) and dragged back.
“Ah! here you are!” he exclaimed, looking at Jean Valjean. “I am glad to see you. Well, but how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too, which are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get two hundred francs. Why did you not carry them away with your forks and spoons?”
Jean Valjean opened his eyes wide, and stared at the venerable Bishop with an expression which no human tongue can render any account of.
“Monseigneur,” said the brigadier of gendarmes, “so what this man said is true, then? We came across him. He was walking like a man who is running away. We stopped him to look into the matter. He had this silver—“
“And he told you,” interposed the Bishop with a smile, “that it had been given to him by a kind old fellow of a priest with whom he had passed the night? I see how the matter stands. And you have brought him back here? It is a mistake.”
“In that case,” replied he brigadier, “we can let him go?”
“Certainly,” replied the Bishop.
“I gave you the candlesticks too”: this is a lie.
What, if anything, makes this lie acceptable?
My first hypothesis is that perhaps this lie is acceptable because it is a selfless lie: the bishop bears all the cost / downside consequences of his actions. All goods transfer directly from the bishop to Valjean; all risk (of the lie being caught / consequences being faced) falls upon the bishop. So it is OK.
Opus initially concurred with me. But then I thought about it some more, and I was no longer so sure.
After all, the silver really belongs to the church, not the bishop. And in most worlds, Valjean would not actually undergo the redemption arc he does in Les Mis. He would continue thieving and hurting others. Altruism disproportionately rewards the ignoble and irresponsible? (Ngo).
The gendarmes released Jean Valjean, who recoiled.
“Is it true that I am to be released?” he said in an almost inarticulate voice, and as though he were talking in his sleep.
“Yes, thou art released; dost thou not understand?” said one of the gendarmes.
“My friend” resumed the Bishop, “before you go, here are your candlesticks. Take them.”…
Jean Valjean was trembling in every limb. He took the two candlesticks mechanically, and with a bewildered air.
“Now,” said the Bishop, “go in peace. By the way, when you return, my friend, it is not necessary to pass through the garden. You can always enter and depart through the street door. It is never fastened with anything but a latch, either by day or by night.”…
The Bishop drew near to him, and said in a low voice:—…
“Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.”
It is possible, that by adhering to a truth-maximalist regime (with exceptions for lying to Nazis?) we just don’t get pretty, Romantic stories like that of the bishop.
I think I stand on the side of discretion, particularly when it comes from moral leaders like bishops. But I also think this brings me into conflict with viewpoints I respect.
A while ago, I was reluctant to tell some friends about how a flood came to be, because I was worried it would put them in a position where they had to choose between lying-by-omission and an expensive, bureaucratic mess.1
You could say “it’s not my place to decide that my friends, not the insurance company, should get the surplus.” (Indeed, I told them everything I knew.)
And in the bishop’s case, you could say “it’s not the bishop’s place to decide that Valjean should get the surplus, rather than broader society getting the surplus of being kept safe from Valjean as he’s locked up again.”
You could say that the bishop has moral license that we laypeople lack, but I don’t think I hold that position.
I’m struggling to draw a line that justifies the bishop’s action, while excluding hypotheticals we don’t want vindicated. And that makes me sad, because I value Les Mis’ Romantic story.
That is: I think we were entitled to a refund of cleanup expenses under insurance policy, but it would definitely complicate things, and the insurance might try to deny us even if we were entitled, just because it’s cheap to issue a denial and expensive to fight.
I appreciate how seriously you take the moral cost of discretionary mercy :) One place I might gently push is that the bishop’s statement must be evaluated as a lie about ownership. In a Christian metaphysical frame, neither the bishop nor the church is the final owner of the silver; both are stewards. If the bishop believed that he was acting in fidelity to God’s will rather than in personal discretion, then the act isn’t simply a redistribution error or a moral overreach. it’s a wager on obedience. From the outside, we can’t verify that wager, because we don’t have access to his interior discernment. Christianity does not naturally align with neoliberal ethics (risk distribution, public safety maximization, institutional ownership), despite its recent and historically contingent associations with Protestant nationalism. Crucially, Christianity does not extend grace because it is efficient, safe, or statistically reformative. Rather grace is the only form of action that mirrors God’s posture toward humanity, even knowing it will often “fail.” The narrow road, as I’ve learned it, reads often like grief over how few will choose restoration when it’s offered. Bonhoeffer is helpful here: he is deeply suspicious of moral clarity that must be secured before mercy. (To clarify, he endorses moral deliberation. But doesnt hold institutional validity as the highest good) Responsible action, for him, often involves accepting guilt before God rather than preserving innocence before systems.
The framing itself imports assumptions that Christian ethics might resist. The question ‘When may an individual override collective safety for discretionary mercy?’ presumes that:
1. Mercy is discretionary rather than obligatory
2. Institutional preservation is the default moral baseline
3. We can adjudicate these acts primarily by their systemic effects.
You’re absolutely right that this doesn’t give us a neat decision procedure. Christian ethics, especially in personalist traditions, resists reduction to procedure precisely because it’s grounded in relationship rather than rule. The bishop’s act can’t be universalized as policy, but Hugo doesn’t present it as policy. He presents it as witness to what Hauerwas calls ‘the peaceable kingdom’: a reality that can’t be secured by proper risk management but only entered through costly grace.
The question isn’t whether such acts are safe to systematize. They aren’t 💀, and that’s partly the point. The question is whether we believe mercy is at the heart of reality, or merely an occasional exception we permit when the costs are manageable.
(Sorry long answer but very cool topic ! I really do adore how many questions you allow the reader to create at preference. And in this case, there are so many !)
I think we can enjoy the story while suspending disbelief with regard to its assumptions about human psychology and redemption, just as we can enjoy a good episode of Star Trek while suspending disbelief about faster than light travel and universal translation.