I did try but 150 (well it felt like that anyway) telling us that the Bishop of Digne was truly wonderful was a bit much…

I was hoping the weight of argument would be enough to infer motive.

To Arcadiagt5:

Valjean is a complex case, but Les Miserables starts with him committing a crime. Admittedly it is not a terrible crime (he steals a loaf of bread out of desperation), but he later steals from a man who has just given him food and lodging, and immediately after that steals from a child, even poorer than he, for no reason other than that he can. At that point Valjean has his conversion and chooses a moral path, but before that he is most certainly not a hero in any sense of the word. I think it is one of the strongest points in favour of Victor Hugo’s choices as a novelist that he gave Valjean two crimes to his name that can’t be morally justified by his situation. Admittedly Valjean is not much of an antihero after he reinvents himself, but I still think he counts because of his earlier actions. And in the context of this piece, if Valjean was appearing as a new character in film today, he would meet Bowman’s criteria for the conflicted hero that Hollywood does too much of these days.