Jean Valjean is sometimes spoken of as a "Christ figure," and Hugo, when he compares M. Madeleine's silent inner struggle with that in the Garden of Gethsemane, seems to underline this similarity, but it is not really an accurate comparison. Jean Valjean is a man from beginning to end and nowhere more human than here when he tries to use fate, accident, and his own responsibility to others as arguments to avoid his Calvary. Even when he does go to Arras, it is not so much the result of a conscious decision to sacrifice himself to another as out of the instinctive knowledge, which his dream has brought him, that if he does not go he will have no life left worth living. He will be spiritually dead.
The courtroom scene in which he declares his identity forms a perfect conclusion to Part One and is the exact counterpart of the meeting between Jean Valjean and the bishop early in the novel. Now, however, Champmathieu is the ignorant benighted victim persecuted by society; Jean Valjean's suddenly white hair underlines the fact that he has inherited the saintliness of the Bishop of Digne.
