Re-Reading Les Misérables

My wife and I recently rewatched all of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and I managed to catch all the episodes I’d missed the first time through. I was surprised to find Les Misérables featuring prominently in a fifth-season episode, “For the Uniform.”

Captain Sisko is pursuing a defector from Starfleet who joined the Maquis (an ad-hoc militia of mostly humans from planets that had been disputed between the Federation and the Cardassians, and ceded to Cardassia as part of a treaty). He’s always one step ahead, and at one point sends Sisko a (digital) copy of Les Misérables with a note to pay particular attention to Inspector Javert.

Somehow Sisko has time to re-read it between missions. (He says he’d read it before, so maybe he was just skimming this time through?) He zeroes in on:

1. Jean Valjean is the hero, pursued by the authorities for a minor offense despite spending his life sacrificing himself to help people.
2. Javert’s inflexibility is what eventually kills him.
3. For Javert, this one’s personal.
4. Eddington sees himself as Jean Valjean, and Sisko as Inspector Javert.

Rebellion

The Maquis storyline is one of the places Star Trek gets into morally gray territory: Yes, the Federation let these people down and basically gave them to choice to leave their homes or live under Cardassian rule. But is armed rebellion the right solution, or the wrong one? Are the Maquis just protecting their homes, or are they putting a fragile peace at risk?

That makes it odd that someone would latch onto Les Misérables, because there is very little ambiguity as far as Hugo is concerned. Characters make both good and bad choices, and sometimes those choices are hard to make, but the narrative is very clear on which is which.

DS9 also treats the Maquis different from the Bajoran occupation. The disputed worlds mainly had been colonized over a few decades, and were ceded by treaty. Bajor was an established homeworld with thousands of years of culture behind them when the Cardassians invaded and brutally exploited them. Armed rebellion and outright terrorism is more or less universally accepted as what the Bajorans had to do. It’s the specific actions taken by the resistance, the choices made within that rebellion, that were often murky and that the survivors are still reckoning with.

Heroes and Villains

Sisko concedes that perhaps he has let it get too personal. Eddington didn’t just betray Starfleet, he betrayed his captain. But what else can he take from this?

He realizes he needs to look not at what Les Misérables meant to Victor Hugo or to himself, but what it meant to Eddington. Eddington sees the current conflict in simple terms: he’s the hero, and Sisko’s the villain. Sisko decides he needs to act like a villain in order to get Eddington to make a heroic sacrifice.

It’s an unsettling step on the path that leads to (and through) “In the Pale Moonlight.” Sisko takes a drastic action, and even Worf is taken aback. It’s not something Javert would have done, because Javert always follows the rules. But it’s no worse than what Eddington has been doing, convinced he’s the hero, and it does convince him to turn himself in.

Legacy

There is apparently at least one more Les Misérables reference in Star Trek canon: According to Memory Alpha, a later episode of Voyager shows the name of Chakotay’s Maquis ship as…the Val Jean.