Word: valjean
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...regression in many cases; indeterminate sentencing has given California prison authorities an extraordinary and often unjust discretionary power over their convict charges. Repeatedly, for the next eleven years, Jackson appeared before California parole authorities, and each time he was returned to his cell. There was an aspect of Jean Valjean in the procedure...
...seducers, Joey (Paul Valjean) and Carl (Wayne John Rodda), are portrayed as expatriate sexual conquistadores, but their conversation is self-defeating. Typically, Joey apostrophizes an ideal "woman in whom prudery and lasciviousness battle for supremacy." Thanks to a prudish legal system that forbids the guillotining of people who speak that way, the pair are allowed to continue yapping and fornicating until even Director Jens Jørgen Thorsen wearies of the charade...
...peculiarly Gallic preoccupation with justice miscarried. For years, France has treated men charged with crimes as guilty until proved innocent, and generally looked upon prison as a place that prisoners should either not survive or, failing that, be taught never to risk entering again. Victor Hugo's Jean Valjean -sentenced in perpetuity as the result of a petty theft, remorselessly pursued by the forces of the law, redeeming himself by acts of courage and charity-is a French epic hero. Alfred Dreyfus is his counterpart in the real world of politics and treason. Few American readers will feel Gallic...
...that followed the Civil War, the victorious North tried to wipe out every lingering trace of slavery. But three constitutional amendments and more than half a dozen federal statutes could not put an end to prejudice. As Abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote in 1881: "The colored man is the Jean Valjean of America. He has escaped from the galleys and hence all presumptions are against...
Perverse Sympathy. He never did. In fact, Hoffa's stubborn fight against imprisonment touched a perverse chord of sympathy among his union members. Casting himself in the role of Jean Valjean, Hoffa shouted: "To hell with all our enemies"-and his Teamsters loved it. He played to the hilt the fiction that he was the persecuted Everyman, the scapegoat of the Establishment...