Starfleet vs. Jean Valjean?

My wife and I recently rewatched all of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and I managed to catch all the episodes I’d missed the first time through. I was surprised to find Les Misérables featuring prominently in a fifth-season episode, “For the Uniform.” Captain Sisko is pursuing a defector from Starfleet who joined the Maquis (an ad-hoc militia of mostly humans from planets that had been disputed between the Federation and the Cardassians, and ceded to Cardassia as part of a treaty). He’s always one step ahead, and at one point sends Sisko a (digital) copy of Les Misérables with a note to pay particular attention to Inspector Javert. Somehow Sisko has time to re-read it between missions. (He says he’d read it before, so maybe he was just skimming this time through?) He zeroes in on: Jean Valjean is the hero, pursued by the authorities for a minor offense despite spending his life sacrificing himself to help people. Javert’s inflexibility is what eventually kills him. For Javert, this…

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