> Meanwhile people making choices out of expedience or because of external forces they obey (Javert ... It's really interesting to me that you include Javert i

> Meanwhile people making choices out of expedience or because of external forces they obey (Javert ... It's really interesting to me that you include Javert in the group that doesn't act according to conscience since I've always seen him as, perhaps, the most conscious driven character in the book. It's been over a decade since I read the book and I've seen the musical so many more times, so I might be misremembering the story from the book, but it seems like Javert's character arc is one where he starts from seeing the law as absolutely correct and himself as an instrument of enforcing that correctness. His actions aren't expedient or imposed on him by others, but are the result of that steadfast belief in the correctness of the law. It takes the example of Valjean to show him that the his conscience is distinct from the law and there are times that the law might not be correct. And his suicide is the result of his inability to reconcile that steadfast belief with what he begins to see might actually be right. Categorizing him along with Thenardier, a character with little-to-no moral compass seems wrong since Javert's actions, while shown to us as bad, come from an intention to do good. He always does what he feels is right. And when he arrives at a situation where either choice will lead him to doing something he feels isn't right, he'd rather die that make that choice.