Thénardier

Thénardier is the Patronyme of a “miserable” family that Victor Hugo puts in scene and describes in its novel the Poor wretches (1862).

Biography of the characters

This family occupies a key function in the novel. Indeed, one makes their knowledge rather quickly (in the first part, Livre IV) when Fantine, the mother of Cosette, passes in front of their inn “to the sergeant of Waterloo” to Montfermeil.

The family is made up of the father, the mother, the two girls Éponine and Azelma, of small the Gavroche and two other boys even younger (one will always be unaware of their first names) whose couple “got rid” at the time of a sordid transaction. The father is a former soldier become sergeant and medal-holder with the Bataille of Waterloo, from where the name of his inn.

Fantine cannot keep his/her child any more because it turns over in its birthplace to seek work there and, in 1818, an unmarried mother was rejected by the company. She “thus entrusts” Cosette to Thénardier which swears good to be occupied some but, jealous to see this small Cosette very fresh and pretty, they make of it their maidservant and maltreat it. Cosette becomes unhappy and sad while the Thénardier couple claims increasingly considerable sums with Fantine.

These Thénardier are liars and the cheating ones but one can think that it is due partly to misery (the development of Hugo in “ the Bad poor ”). Their inn goes bankrupt after Jean Valjean found Cosette and took it along to Paris. The Thénardier family also leaves to settle in Paris where it changes name, it becomes the family “Jondrette”.

Victor Hugo makes the Thénardier household antipathetic whereas one goes apitoyer on their children exploited without shame. To survive, the couple does not hesitate to resort to all kinds of average criminals of lightest to crippling (shameless exploitation of poverty, flights, burglings, aggressions even assassination). So the côtoie family various shady mediums (banditism, prostitution), which makes it possible Hugo to consider the social causes of these behaviors and to make us reflect while avoiding condemning systematically certain intrigues.

Throughout the novel, the destinies of Jean Valjean, Cosette, Marius, will not cease crossing those of Thénardier which will play, in good and evil, a crucial role in the life of the three protagonists.

Origin

The name would have been inspired in Victor Hugo by Louis Jacques Thénard.

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