The France in which Victor Hugo writes Les Misérables is a nation still marked by an old spiritual wound: Jansenist rigorism. Although Jansenism had been officially condemned and the celebrated Abbey of Port-Royal destroyed in the seventeenth century by order of Louis XIV, its ideas and its moral atmosphere continued to permeate French culture for a long time. It is on this hardened spiritual ground, where guilt outweighs hope and where law rises above mercy, that the moral universe of the novel is born.
Jansenism had left deep scars on the religious heart of the country. Even far from Port-Royal, a sombre view lingered of human nature as corrupted, powerless, and almost always inclined towards evil. This perspective filtered into preaching, confession and popular mentality. The pastoral life inherited a severe tone: sinners were regarded with suspicion, spiritual joy appeared dubious, communion became a privilege reserved for the few considered “worthy”, and the notion that many were probably “reprobate” before God echoed throughout different communities. This harsh moralism also poisoned the legal system, which punished small offences disproportionately, as though society were divided between the elect and the damned with no possibility of return.
From this atmosphere emerges Jean Valjean. A man who steals a loaf of bread to feed a starving child receives not understanding, but nineteen years of imprisonment. Society seems eager to seal his condemnation, as if a minor wrongdoing were enough to reveal an irrevocably lost soul. This France that punishes Valjean is the same France that, for centuries, absorbed a spirituality incapable of welcoming the sinner. If Jansenism claimed that few receive grace, the French penal system of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries behaved as if that thesis were indisputable.
Victor Hugo, however, constructs a luminous counterpoint. Bishop Myriel, Monsignor Bienvenu, appears as the embodiment of Christian mercy, almost as a living answer to Jansenist rigorism. He does not interrogate Valjean’s past, does not reduce him to his fall, does not confuse justice with vengeance. His hospitality, his act of defending Valjean before the gendarmes and, above all, the gift of the silver candlesticks—symbols of a new life—represent a break with centuries of spirituality shaped by fear. In Myriel, Hugo restores to French Christianity the gentle face of the Gospel: a Christ who calls, restores and trusts.
This contrast becomes even clearer in the figure of Javert. The inspector embodies the mentality of law without compassion, of order that admits no flaw, of the unyielding belief that anyone who once fell is condemned forever. For him, Valjean cannot have changed; conversion is impossible. Javert is more than an agent of the State: he is the literary personification of a hardened moralism, a distant heir to the Jansenist spirit. In contrast, Valjean—transformed and purified by mercy—represents grace that renews and heals.
Thus, Les Misérables may be read as a poetic and forceful denunciation of the cultural effects of centuries of religious rigorism. Hugo does not reopen theological debates, but answers them through the power of narrative, which proclaims that no one is definitively lost. Law without mercy does not save; grace does, for it transforms. It is as though, through his characters, Hugo restores to French Christianity what Port-Royal, with its severity, had obscured: the certainty that God does not reserve His grace for a select few, but pours it out upon all who allow themselves to be reached by it.
The novel does not arise directly from Jansenism, but from a society still breathing its shadow. Victor Hugo’s brilliance lies in showing that even within social, political and spiritual darkness, mercy can rekindle human dignity. And in recounting Valjean’s story, the author offers a literary response to an entire nation that needed to relearn the Gospel of compassion.
The passages in which Éponine and Azelma are entrusted to the care of religious sisters reflect this same background. In them appears a pedagogical atmosphere marked by harshness, by almost mechanical discipline, and by a moral framework founded more on control than on care. The education they receive is rigid, cold, devoid of tenderness—a Christianity reduced to rules, punishments and humiliations. Although Hugo does not explicitly mention Jansenism, the spirituality depicted in these episodes clearly echoes its legacy: the belief that severe discipline purifies, that the will must be bent, that constant vigilance is necessary because sin lurks in every human fragility.
This environment mirrors educational practices spread throughout post–Port-Royal France, when boarding schools, orphanages and convents absorbed a pedagogy deeply influenced by Jansenist austerity. Instead of promoting human flourishing or fostering a personal encounter with God, such institutions concerned themselves with correcting deviations, imposing renunciations and demanding an unattainable ideal of holiness. It is in this sort of place that Éponine grows up: surrounded by rigid precepts, by a morality of fear, and by a persistent sense of unworthiness. Nothing there recalls the welcome offered by Myriel; everything reflects the severity that Hugo denounces quietly throughout the novel.
The bitter irony of these scenes lies precisely in the contrast between the religious intention and the effect produced. Institutions meant to offer refuge become, in the narrative, spaces of moral oppression. There is no room for joy, spontaneity or affection; only suffocating discipline that shapes resigned souls rather than hopeful hearts. This spiritual emptiness portrays, almost satirically, the criticism Hugo directs at French moralism: a Christianity that has lost the merciful heart of the Gospel and preserved only its austere shell.
It is in this barren soil that Éponine is shaped. Her childhood, marked by rigid education and parental abandonment, explains part of her hardness, her low self-esteem and her desperate search for affection. Hugo seems to suggest that when religion renounces mercy and becomes mere discipline, the result is not holiness but suffering; not conversion but dehumanisation. Thus, the abbey scenes in Les Misérables reveal the lingering remnants of a severe spirituality that France carried for centuries, a long shadow cast by Port-Royal and which Victor Hugo, with subtlety, makes a point of exposing as both critique and warning.