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Javert ((:ʒavɛʁ)) is a fictional character, the primary antagonist of Victor Hugo's 1862 novel ''Les Misérables''. He is a police inspector who becomes, over the course of the novel, obsessed with the pursuit and punishment of the escaped convict Jean Valjean. == Character == Victor Hugo depicts Javert as a character who is not simply villainous, but rather tragic in his misguided and self-destructive pursuit of justice. "() was a compound," Hugo writes, "of two sentiments, simple and good in themselves, but he made them almost evil by his exaggeration of them: respect for authority and hatred of rebellion." He is "absolute," a "fanatic." This fanatical absolutism allows him to divine a "straight path through all that is most tortuous in the world."〔Hugo, Victor. tr. Lee Fahnestock & Norman MacAfee. ''Les Misérables.'' Signet Classics, New York: 1987.〕 Javert is moderately educated; Hugo observes: "In his leisure moments... although he hated books, he would read." Reflective thought is "an uncommon thing for him, and singularly painful;" this is due to the fact that thought inevitably contains "a certain amount of internal rebellion," which Javert dislikes.〔 He is without vices, but upon occasion will take a pinch of snuff. His life is one "of privations, isolation, self-denial, and chastity— never any amusement."〔 Having been born in a prison (his mother a fortune-teller and his father serving in the prison galley), Javert perceives himself to be excluded from a society that "irrevocably closes its doors on two classes of men, those who attack it and those who guard it." It is on the basis of "an irrepressible hatred for that bohemian race to which he belong()" and a personal foundation of "rectitude, order, and honesty" that he opts to become a law officer.〔 So devoted is he to this choice that, Hugo writes, "()e would have arrested his own father if he escaped from prison and turned in his own mother for breaking parole. And he would have done it with that sort of interior satisfaction that springs from virtue."〔 Following his encounters with Jean Valjean during the June Rebellion, in which he is first spared by Valjean and, later, spares him arrest, Javert experiences a deep torment caused by the compromise of his previous worldview. Where previously he has "never in his life known anything but one straight line," the kind behavior of Valjean compels him to see two: "both equal straight," and "contradictory." The profound confusion caused by this— by the realization that the law is not infallible, that he himself is not irreproachable, and that there exists a superior force (identified by Hugo with God) to what he has known— plunges him into a despair in which he feels himself "demolished." It is to escape this "unnatural state" that he commits suicide.〔 The character of Javert is loosely based on Eugène François Vidocq, a criminal and adventurer who became a police official (though Vidocq wrote that he never arrested anyone who stole out of need).〔E. F. Vidocq, "Mémoires"〕 Hugo also drew on Vidocq's life for the character of Valjean.〔Robin Walz, "Vidocq, Rogue Cop", introduction to François Eugène Vidocq, ''Memoirs of Vidocq: Master of Crime'', AK Press, 1935, xv〕 In the novel, Hugo describes Javert as "a marble informer, Brutus in Vidocq."〔Les Miserables, vol. 1. Cricket House, p.135.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Javert」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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