Les Miserables

When Valjean is released from prison, he is given a yellow passport which marks him as a former convict. He travels through France, eventually arriving at the town of Digne. During his travels, he is required to visit a town hall on arriving in a new place and present his yellow passport to the authorities. As soon as he does so, he is turned into a social pariah. No businesses want to serve him, meaning that he cannot stay or even eat at a tavern or inn. Though Valjean has served his time in prison, the yellow passport symbolizes the social condemnation attached to former convicts. Valjean is bureaucratically damned; no one will help him because his paperwork is not correct. In a legal sense, his character is reformed, and, in a moral sense, he is a good man, but this does not matter. The content of a person's character does not matter in an unfair society—only the contents of their paperwork matter. Valjean's paperwork symbolizes the absurd moral foundation on which 19th century French society is built, if a good man like Valjean is forced into a desperate situation because he cannot escape the mistakes of his past. The yellow passport essentially brands him as a pariah and prejudges him before he arrives in any town, further driving him to the fringes of society.

Fantine is similarly betrayed by paperwork. After leaving Cosette with the Thénardier family, she wishes to communicate with them. However, she lacks the ability to write, so she relies on a scribe to write letters to the Thénardier family to check up on Cosette. This scribe then gossips, telling everyone in the town that Fantine has a child born out of wedlock. This rumor leads to Fantine losing her job. Like Valjean being forced into increasingly desperate situations because his paperwork marks him as an ex-convict, Fantine's reliance on others to help her with paperwork and letters exposes her to social scrutiny. Eventually, after selling her teeth and her hair, she is forced to register as a sex worker. Fantine's betrayal by paperwork reveals how working-class people's lack of access to education sets them up to fail. Her relationship to bureaucracy and paperwork symbolizes the inherent unfairness of the society which forces people into criminal behavior then castigates them for doing so.

At the end of the novel, Marius and Cosette get married. The marriage requires paperwork, with many mysteries still surrounding Valjean and Cosette’s pasts. Since Cosette has a large sum of money, this paperwork is not difficult to forge; everyone is willing to make the paperwork available for the rich in a way they would not if she were poor. The willingness of everyone involved to make the situation work, regardless of the technical legality of the paperwork, symbolizes how the rich and the poor live by two very different sets of rules. If Valjean or Fantine were as privileged, then they may not have been forced into their desperate positions. If they were in a privileged position, possessing a large amount of money, their passport or their letters would not have been a problem. Similarly, Marius proposes to deal with Valjean's past by purchasing him a pardon or forging his identity papers. The availability of forged paperwork and the willingness to turn a blind eye demonstrates a fundamental unfairness in society. For rich men like Marius and Monsieur Gillenormand, this approach is a matter of course. For the people from a poor background, however, it is a grim reminder that the world is not fair. The treatment of paperwork symbolizes the way in which wealth and privilege force the poor and helpless into living by a different set of rules.