Okay so Valjean’s father is called Jean and his mother is called Jeanne and his sister is called Jeanne and he himself is called Jean.

M'kay.

|| i know this is supposed to be a funny post but I’m going to hijack it (sorry) because –– this is actually a deliberate thing. Namelessness is one of the characteristics of the miserables in the book. 

You mentioned the ubiquity of Jean/ne as a name; when everyone is named Jean, your own identity is erased in the midst of all the people who share your name, and you become effectively nameless. On top of that, Hugo mentions at one point that the full name Jean Valjean is likely a corruption of Jean, Voilà Jean –> Jean, V’la Jean –> Jean Valjean. As in, his name is literally “Jean, here is Jean”. The man effectively doesn’t even have a real last name. Nameless. 

It’s not just Valjean, though. See Fantine. Did her parents name her Fantine, was there meaning and love attached to this name? Nope. She was a young girl waking alone barefoot in the streets, and some passerby called her Fantine. It stuck, because there wasn’t any other name to call her by. She had no family name, no nom de baptême (roughly, Christian name). Again, nameless. 

I’ll wrap this up with Cosette, although you can go farther with it. What does Cosette mean? It’s a corruption of chosette, or “little thing.” Her name is, literally, “little thing.” Sure, she has a “real” name, Euphrasie, but no one calls her that. Effectively, nameless. 

It’s a form of dehumanization, robbing these people of their names. It makes them nobody, and it makes them everybody. It serves the same purpose as calling Valjean 24061 in the musical –– it says that you, you are not human, you are not worthy of respect and dignity. You are not worthy of even a name. It’s how Hugo illustrates one part of the plight of the misérables. You take away a name, and suddenly it is barely a half-step more to take away dignity, agency, power, humanity.