Every army has it’s camp-followers and it is to these that we must look, to the bat-like creatures, half-ruffian, half-servant, engendered by the twilight of war, wearers of uniform who do no fighting, malingerers, venomous cripples, sutlers riding in small carts, sometimes with their women, who steal what later they sell, beggars offering their service as guides, rogues and vagabonds of all kinds.
I’ll have to wait and see where Hugo takes this, but I don’t love the way he has tried to setup the Thenardier’s back-story here. Earlier in the novel we saw Hugo go to great lengths to show that often those he terms here as “ruffians” and “vagabonds” were made that way by the failures of a society that was not built for them, but was built to extract wealth and concentrate it in the hands of the powerful. Jean Valjean was one such man - driven to steal to feed the family of his sister, we were moved to see him in a sympathetic light. By contrast we saw Javert who was similarly “outside of society” but postured himself as a protector of those inside from all the “vile elements” that were on the outside.
To me, this description of camp followers smacks more of Javert and his judgmental eye than what I have come to expect from Hugo. We have been taught by earlier sections of the novel how important it is to ask the why and how behind these things. Because of that I feel compelled to ask how the Thenardiers found themselves in a position where creeping around a battlefield at night and stealing from bodies seemed like a good choice. I don’t think “they were evil” cuts it. How had the system harmed them? What had happened that led to these choices?
The language used in the quote from the chapter is dehumanizing and othering. We know that the Thenardiers had become exploiters themselves. We saw it with Cosette and it was loathsome. I don’t find this caricatured picture of them as inhuman monsters bent on leaching from others in the worst way compelling. It feels cheap. I’m hoping it evolves.