what do you mean when you say "exoneration of the conscience"? it's an interesting phrase that can be taken many ways.
i also loved les miserables, and took the story to be an implication of the state: of law & order and it's imperfections and corruptibilities. of how right and wrong aren't forever attached to labels, titles, persons, or any of the other mental shortcuts we take in our daily judgements.
it's really interesting to see how this dichotomy continues to play out in the current political environment. some people believe we are safer when we lock up criminals and thugs, to separate our good selves from those bad selves, to harshly punish in the hopes of instilling order in the world. yet we are each but a single mistake away from crossing that divide into a label we would never apply to ourselves. it goes against our own ego to understand that we are, in the same person, at times lawful and at other times lawless, and the application of justice against that backdrop is often neither fair nor just.
I think that in Les Miserables, the main characters are driven by their consciences, and unfailingly make their decisions based on what they feel is right. Sometimes that has ugly or unforeseen consequences, or is even fatal. Many of the characters are plunged into poverty or despondency because they chose to act according to their conscience. Meanwhile people making choices out of expedience or because of external forces they obey (Javert, Thenardier) prosper at least temporarily.
But ultimately the story and characters who do what they think is right end up on top. Now this is also in a way the case in many a moralistic book (the patient Christian triumphs over the predatory thief or what have you) but in Les Miserables I think it is deeper than that, an indication that it is the strong and principled that buoy those around them and feed the matrix of society, even at times with their own lives.
Naturally it's all a bit artificial but I liked it immensely nevertheless.
> Meanwhile people making choices out of expedience or because of external forces they obey (Javert ...
It's really interesting to me that you include Javert in the group that doesn't act according to conscience since I've always seen him as, perhaps, the most conscious driven character in the book.
It's been over a decade since I read the book and I've seen the musical so many more times, so I might be misremembering the story from the book, but it seems like Javert's character arc is one where he starts from seeing the law as absolutely correct and himself as an instrument of enforcing that correctness. His actions aren't expedient or imposed on him by others, but are the result of that steadfast belief in the correctness of the law. It takes the example of Valjean to show him that the his conscience is distinct from the law and there are times that the law might not be correct. And his suicide is the result of his inability to reconcile that steadfast belief with what he begins to see might actually be right.
Categorizing him along with Thenardier, a character with little-to-no moral compass seems wrong since Javert's actions, while shown to us as bad, come from an intention to do good. He always does what he feels is right. And when he arrives at a situation where either choice will lead him to doing something he feels isn't right, he'd rather die that make that choice.
i also loved les miserables, and took the story to be an implication of the state: of law & order and it's imperfections and corruptibilities. of how right and wrong aren't forever attached to labels, titles, persons, or any of the other mental shortcuts we take in our daily judgements.
it's really interesting to see how this dichotomy continues to play out in the current political environment. some people believe we are safer when we lock up criminals and thugs, to separate our good selves from those bad selves, to harshly punish in the hopes of instilling order in the world. yet we are each but a single mistake away from crossing that divide into a label we would never apply to ourselves. it goes against our own ego to understand that we are, in the same person, at times lawful and at other times lawless, and the application of justice against that backdrop is often neither fair nor just.