Les Mis Hidden Name Meanings: "Fantine"
Every character's name in Les Mis is either an elaborate pun or has some deeper symbolic thematic meaning — usually both at once.
One example of this is “Fantine.” There’s a wealth of hidden meaning packed into to her name, and some of those meanings are explicitly discussed in the original novel.
The name “Fantine” comes from the french word “enfantine,” meaning “childike, infant-like.” Her name basically means “Baby.” And obviously this speaks to her innocence and naivety. But also “baby” is kind of,.,, well, it sounds more like an informal term of endearment than an actual legal name?
And that’s because– Plot twist– Fantine isn’t her legal name!
What is her legal name? She doesn’t have one.
And the reason she doesn’t have one is directly tied to political turmoil of the era she was born into.
Fantine grew up an orphan living on the streets, without a family without parents. Hugo tells us the origin of her name:
“She bore on her brow the sign of the anonymous and the unknown. (...)She was called Fantine. Why Fantine? She had never borne any other name. At the epoch of her birth the Directory still existed. She had no family name; she had no family; no baptismal name; the Church no longer existed. She bore the name which pleased the first random passer-by, who had encountered her, when a very small child, running bare-legged in the street. She received the name as she received the water from the clouds upon her brow when it rained. “
This moment is adapted beautifully in the Manga adaptation by Takahiro Arai:
But now let’s talk about the Directory.
To wildly oversimplifly a lot of complex history: Before the French Revolution, the Catholic Church’s records of baptismal ceremonies were often used as a registry of people’s legal names. During the French Revolution, the Revolutionary government– including the Directory– put in place a series of policies we now call “dechristianization,” where they attempted to dismantle the power of the Catholic church.
Fantine was born during the age of these dechristianization policies. So she was likely never baptised, her baptismal name was never recorded, and so she has no documented legal or family name. She’s slipped through the cracks of the legal system, and ended up completely anonymous.
This sets Fantine up as this anonymous child of the Revolution– a stand-in for everyone who was left behind when the Revolution was left behind, and kings were restored to the throne.
Fantine’s namelessness is meant to show her isolation. She has NO support system. She has nothing to connect her to other people, nothing to connect her to a support system.
Finally, the way Fantine tends to “slip through the cracks” is something that follows her throughout her life. When she’s fired from her job at a factory, Mayor Madeleine never learns of it– Fantine has this tendency to be overlooked and forgotten in official records. At the end of the story, she is buried in an unmarked grave, with not even the name “Fantine” on her headstone. She is born anonymous and she dies anonymous.
It ties into the novel’s questions about which people we consider worth remembering, whose lives are worth being recorded.
[Thank you for reading! This essay was originally posted as a video here. For more Les Mis talk, you should subscribe to the 2025 @lesmisletters readalong on Substack here, and join the BrickClub Discord server here!]
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