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Volume 1, Book 2: The Fall
Explanation and Analysis—Number 24601:
Even though the plot of Jean Valjean's story begins chronologically with his arrival at the Bishop's home, it is necessary to provide context for his character. With a flashback, the story depicts Jean Valjean's suffering and hardening through his 19 years in prison:
Then still sobbing, he raised his right hand and lowered it gradually seven times, as though he were touching in succession seven heads of unequal heights, and from this gesture it was divined that the thing which he had done, whatever it was, he had done for the sake of clothing and nourishing seven little children. He set out for Toulon. He arrived there, after a journey of twenty-seven days, on a cart, with a chain on his neck. At Toulon he was clothed in the red cassock. All that had constituted his life, even to his name, was effaced; he was no longer even Jean Valjean; he was number 24601.
Jean Valjean is welcomed into the Bishop’s home, given a good meal, and offered his first bed in 19 years. The narrator uses a flashback to Jean Valjean's life before and during prison to give context to and provide understanding for what comes next: the theft of the Bishop's silver candlesticks. In order to set up the story and establish Jean Valjean as a redeemable convict with a good heart, the narrative details his arrest and subsequent 19 years spent in the galleys. Jean Valjean was referred to only by a number as he toiled for those long years, all for the crime of stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family. This flashback frames Jean Valjean a sympathetic character in the reader’s eyes and establishes him as a trustworthy protagonist of the story.
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Volume 2, Book 1: Waterloo
Explanation and Analysis—The Battle of Waterloo:
In the first book of Volume 2, the narrator takes a reprieve from Jean Valjean's adventure. Using a flashback, the story follows Napoleon Bonaparte's defeat and contextualizes the current fate of Europe:
Let us turn back, that is one of the storyteller’s rights, and put ourselves once more in the year 1815, and even a little earlier than the epoch when the action narrated in the first part of this book took place. If it had not rained in the night between the 17th and the 18th of June, 1815, the fate of Europe would have been different. A few drops of water, more or less, decided the downfall of Napoleon. All that Providence required in order to make Waterloo the end of Austerlitz was a little more rain, and a cloud traversing the sky out of season sufficed to make a world crumble.
For a significant portion of the novel, the narrator jumps back in time to the notorious Battle of Waterloo, known as the fall of Napoleon. Though the purpose that this long historical digression serves in the book is largely debated, it does offer contextualization. The battle story explains the different dictators, leaders, and kings that the French have endured in their fight for liberty. This scene also helps explain Marius’s obsession with Napoleon and therefore the distance he puts between himself and his royalist grandfather.
The Waterloo scene is fueled by the idea of hypotheticals—that if one trivial thing did not happen that day, everything would be different today. Such hypotheticals demonstrate the importance of providence in history, and therefore, in the novel. When it is revealed that Thenardier is the same man who abused Cosette and robbed Pontmercy, the string of fate strengthens. Apparent coincidences like these further establish the importance of fate in the story.
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