It is
great and noble, but it is a little optimistic and Rousseau-like.
According to it the individual is always innocent and society always
responsible, and the ideal before us for the twentieth century is a sort
of democratic age of gold, a universal republic from which war, capital
punishment, and pauperism will have disappeared. It is the religion and
the city of progress; in a word, the Utopia of the eighteenth century
revived on a great scale. There is a great deal of generosity in it,
mixed with not a little fanciful extravagance. The fancifulness consists
chiefly in a superficial notion of evil. The author ignores or pretends
to forget the instinct of perversity, the love of evil for evil's sake,
which is contained in the human heart.
The great and salutary idea of the book, is that honesty before the law
is a cruel hypocrisy, in so far as it arrogates to itself the right of
dividing society according to its own standard into elect and
reprobates, and thus confounds the relative with the absolute. The
leading passage is that in which Javert, thrown off the rails, upsets
the whole moral system of the strict Javert, half spy, half priest--of
the irreproachable police-officer. In this chapter the writer shows us
social charity illuminating and transforming a harsh and unrighteous
justice.
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