The Corinthe

Some Lesgle Meta: On the French Postal Service

mmebahorel — Sun, 29 Jun 2014 17:03:28 GMT

Unlike the rest of the boys, we have concrete information on Lesgle's background, yet for some reason, it appears this has not been fully explored. As I go on, in order to distinguish between father and son, the father will be referred to as M. Lesgle, and the son will referred to by his nickname, Bossuet.

The facts Hugo has set out for us:

1)M. Lesgle was in Calais in 1814 to greet Louis XVIII's return from exile.
2)M. Lesgle delivered a petition to the king asking for the directorship of a post office.
3)M. Lesgle received his post office, in Meaux.
4)Bossuet is said to be from Meaux.
5)M. Lesgle accumulated enough wealth to have owned outright one house and one field.
6)Bossuet entered into a false speculation after his father's death and lost both house and field.
7)All points above happened prior to 1828.
8)Bossuet was most likely born in 1803.
9)Bossuet is enrolled at the law school in 1828.

To start from the beginning, why was M. Lesgle in Calais? Paris capitulated to the allied armies on March 31; Napoleon abdicated on April 6. On April 12, the Comte d'Artois (future Charles X, Louis XVIII's brother) entered Paris as Lieutenant General of the kingdom. Louis XVIII finally arrived at Calais on April 24. Much of the French population of significant market towns in the Paris basin and elsewhere would thus have had ample time to hear the news of Bonaparte's abdication and travel to Calais to welcome back the king. Yet this was a country under occupation: when Germaine de Staël arrived in Calais on May 3, her first sight was of the Prussian soldiers guarding the quays. Louis received a grand welcome from the assembled citizens: they even drew his carriage themselves (and this was a very fat man they were pulling) to the principal church of the town to make devotions. Who were these citizens? Inhabitants of Calais and the surrounding area? Were supporters permitted to come from as far as the Paris basin? The general of the Armée du Nord and a delegation of officers met the King at Calais, but a delegation of high government functionaries met him later at Compiègne, near Paris. In “memoirs” by the King (really by Etienne Léon Baron de Lamothe Langon), the crowd is characterised as “Calaisiens”. It seems unlikely that a man would have come all the way from Meaux under these circumstances, thus M. Lesgle is most likely to have been in the region at the time.

We know something else of M. Lesgle's background, as well, since he did receive his post office: he was a man of some education. Postal directors at this time were generally of bourgeois background, frequently lawyers by trade/education. The very fact that his petition was granted places M. Lesgle firmly in the middle class, though not necessarily doing well economically. A post office is a means of steady income, after all. He is also willing to live outside his pays – government functionaries were frequently recruited as professionals, asked to move around to the government's needs. Hugo states that M. Lesgle “was given the post office at Meaux, either intentionally or inadvertently”. M. Lesgle did not ask for a specific posting, just a post office, and he was given an available one (either intentionally, because he was placed on the list and the postmaster appreciated the pun, or inadvertently, that he ended up on the list without direct imprimateur and/or was given what was available).

Getting the directorship of a post office was much like, under the ancien regime, getting a patent for tax farming. They were controlled in the same way until the Revolution, which attempted a professionalisation of both entities but removed the postal service from the salaried civil service by 1794. The finance law of 28 April 1816 confirms the tax-farming basis for post office directors. Prior to this law, directors had to furnish caution money backed by immovable property (real estate or government bonds, which were treated like real estate for legal purposes) in the value of 1/5 the yearly net income of the post office in question. The 28 April law requires this surety to be paid in cash (en numéraire). The change strongly suggests that the government wanted cash in hand and was willing to give these positions to a rank of men without immovable property. The deposit would earn a return of 3% for the depositor, which again strongly suggests that the government was making decisions to increase their cash on hand after the war. Depending on when M. Lesgle was given his directorship, he may be part of this 1816 cohort.

Bossuet would have been around 11 years old when his father made this petition. From the available evidence, it seems likely that he was not from Meaux and that he was moved there from the Nord-Pas de Calais when his father took over directorship of the post office.

If M. Lesgle was indeed from the Nord, this adds a few cultural aspects worthy of consideration. The Nord was the most business and industry intensive area in France at this time. Families were large. Marriage was predominantly conducted locally – it was rare to marry someone from another town, much less someone from another region, though such marriage did happen. The pace of business was quick and brutal, with frequent bankruptcies. Unlike much of the rest of France, bourgeois families tended to marry under communal property rather than with marriage contracts, thus bringing a girl's dowry firmly under her husband's control. The purpose here appears to be to strengthen enterprise as a higher goal than shielding property in case of distress or failure. A bankrupt would certainly lose everything, including all that his wife brought to the marriage, but his extended family was unlikely to be dependent on his enterprise and he might be given office or sales work in a brother's or cousin's business. Family relations in this sense were based on the nuclear rather than the extended family. Therefore, if M. Lesgle is from the Nord, it is likely that he has run through whatever dowry his wife brought to the marriage if he is in need of a stable income support. She will face significant social difficulty in being asked to move from the region of her birth and upbringing – quite like a social death.

Meaux itself was well-known in this period for hosting a number of girl's schools (pensionnats). It is a market town, primarily in the grain trade. At the time of M. Lesgle's posting, the population stood around 7,000. This is a decent-sized market town, in the Paris basin, about 25 miles from Paris. It would have had a mayor and a commissaire de police, as well as a subprefect, all nominated from Paris like M. Lesgle. The mayor is likely to be local, but the police chief and the subprefect may come from anywhere. All these government professionals would be new in either 1814 or 1815 post-Hundred Days or both – the regime change would have led to entire overhauls of public functionaries so that these men would be supporters of the current regime.

At 7,000 people, Meaux is a good sized market town, but it is considerably smaller than the urbanizations of the Nord-Pas de Calais. Calais itself is over 8100 in 1806, 8800 in 1821; Arras, as the chef-lieu of the department of Pas-de-Calais, is over 19,000. Melun, the chef-lieu of the Seine-et-Marne, is smaller than Meaux. M. Lesgle has at the very least spent some part of his life in a heavily urban milieu, where these towns are built on manufacturing and trade. The Seine-et-Marne is to this day heavily agricultural. It is extremely likely, therefore, that the field was acquired as an investment property, rented out to an actual farmer. Well into the nineteenth century, land remained the primary source of investment. You were considered to have made it socially the moment you were able to convert your money into land. If M. Lesgle were indeed a stranger to Meaux, he would have a strong incentive to put down physical roots in the way best understood by local society. He has also done well enough for himself to invest in two pieces of property less than 15 years after he was begging for a steady income. The post office at Meaux treated him very well.

Precisely how did M. Lesgle benefit from the post office at Meaux?

France was behind the curve on post offices: it was not until 1829 that Charles X decreed that every commune must have postal service, and at that same period, while the US had 74 post offices for every 100,000 in population, and Britain had 17, France had 4. A town thus served the nearby villages as well as the people inside the walls or customs barriers. Mail volume nationally was only 64 million letters and 40 million packages in 1830. This volume was concentrated predominantly in the Paris basin and in the Mediterranean south, and it is estimated that 85% of that volume was business correspondence rather than personal. The postal service was run under the farm system – as tax farming under the ancien régime, postal directors received a portion of the fees they collected, seemingly around 10% on average (though this does not appear to have been directly legislated – none of the postal laws mention specific levels of remuneration for directors).

The postal service itself was thrown into disarray as the allied armies marched across France in 1814, as all government services did. Men loyal to the regime fled from the occupiers; those who were indifferent to regime but frightened of an occupying army suspended service until they could see which way the wind was blowing. This general disarray had hardly been put down with new appointments and direction from Paris when Napoleon escaped Elba and positions shifted. The same men who had given up their jobs or were sacked demanded them back or were able to take them as the royalists fled into hiding. 1814 and 1815 were not good years for administration.

The directorship of a post office, then, was something of a reward: it required the appointee to initially pay a guarantee, but it would secure an income based on mail volume generally for the rest of the appointee's life – or until the regime changed. Moreover, just like the tax farms, the directorship of a post office was a thing to be passed down through the family. When a postal director died, his position was pretty much his son's to lose rather than to earn. Women were also postal directors: most often, this was because the widow took over the position until the eldest son turned 21 and was able to assume it himself, but daughters did occasionally inherit the position and generally handed it to their husbands at marriage. The directorship of a post office would make a nice dowry.

Why? The director was paid a percentage of all the postal revenues he generated. The postal service also collected the stamp taxes on printed goods, so revenues came from certain taxes as well as postage. Income thus rested on mail volume, so that the director of a post office in the Paris basin, like Meaux, would have had a higher income than one based in a similarly sized town in Brittany, like Dinan. Meaux was almost certainly a bureau simple: the director is the sole employee. Once a post office brought in a mail volume of 20,000 francs or more in receipts, it would hire at least an additional clerk and become a bureau composé. The bureaux composés of Normandy, in this era, were towns with at least twice the population of Meaux, though Normandy generally produced less per-capita mail volume than the Paris basin. It seems most reasonable to assume that Meaux is a bureau simple. The director of a bureau simple was expected to take on the post office as a supplemental income: if he was a lawyer or notary, he would simply maintain his business. As mail volumes grew later in the century, the part-time nature declined, but it was not until 1827 that any law considered conflict of interest implications to a postal director's other job. As rural post offices expanded, the position was not infrequently given to a tavern keeper for obvious logistical reasons as well as the ability to read and write. The director of a bureau composé was a true director, a manager, and his yearly income would fall in the range of 2200 to 3200 francs in 1841. It is obvious from even the pay differential that a bureau simple is not a full time job unless it was bumping up against the income limit to transition to the higher level.

M. Lesgle would have had an additional source of income, but the prospect of a steady 400-1500 was compelling to him and his family in 1814, when he made his petition. He had a son of an age to start school, and perhaps there were other children. We do not know what his trade was, but he was an educated man willing to up stakes for the prospect of a supplemental income from an untried government. Yet he had enough money (or his family or his wife's family did) to pay the caution money to secure that position. This supplemental income must have enabled him to invest in the real estate he left behind at his death.

Bossuet promptly lost the house and field in a false speculation. And he is not a postal director in Meaux, though the position would bring in somewhere between 400-1500 francs per year, money he distinctly needs. What could have happened here?

Options: Bossuet was under 21 when his father died, and his mother is the postal director in Meaux until he finishes his education. Bossuet has siblings; one of them (or a brother in law) is postal director in Meaux. Bossuet mortgaged the position as well as the house and the field. Bossuet sold the position outright, and mortgaged the house and the field. Victor Hugo did less research than I did into postal directors.

Whoever is the postal director in Meaux may end up screwed in 1830, as the change in regime is an ideal opportunity to reward supporters. Not all these positions changed hands every time the regime changed, so it remains only a strong possibility. This gives writers a number of options for ongoing considerations as time progresses toward 1830 – does Bossuet's luck carry over to whoever now has the job that was plausibly to be his?

In addition, there's family money somewhere if Bossuet is indeed having his school fees paid. Does it come from the same source as the caution money put up for M. Lesgle? Is Bossuet having his school fees paid but not his exam fees (which are the bulk of the cost of a legal education)? They must be paid by someone else rather than by dint of his own labour as he's thrilled Marius got him kicked out of class – if he were paying those fees himself, surely he'd just quit paying.

Hugo doesn't quite give us enough to go on here, but if his extended family is in the Nord, he statistically has more aunts and uncles to draw on than if his extended family is in the Seine-et-Marne, and these uncles are more likely to have ready cash to send, as they are involved in manufacturing rather than the agricultural seasons. The more family members Bossuet can touch, the easier life will be for him.

Bossuet's personal history is likely to be more complicated than fandom seems to credit, and I think it's time he's given a bit of attention on this historical front. If we can speculate on the vaguest possibility of Prouvaire coming from a Protestant background, we should spill some ink on what lies behind the concrete facts of Bossuet's life. With the way Hugo has thrown so many elements of his own history into the details of this novel, I submit that it is not just plausible but probable that Bossuet was not born in Meaux and one aspect of his character is the geographic dislocation in an era when hardly any families of this rank, unconnected with the military, moved around the country. It has been suggested that all the students have elements of Hugo. While Meaux in the Restoration can hardly compare to occupied Spain, this is an important element of Hugo's life and formation of his character that is not so clearly implied for any of the other student characters. This is not proof, of course, but I think it makes Bossuet more interesting than he has generally been given credit for.

Sources:
1)Melius, Louis. The American Postal Service, History of the Postal Service from the Earliest Times. Washington: National Capital Press, 1917.
2)Lyons, Martyn. Reading Culture and Writing Practices in Nineteenth-century France. Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2008.
3)Noam, Eli. Telecommunications in Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Chapter 9, France.
4)Keller, Morton. America's Three Regimes: A New Political History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
5)Martin, Henri-Jean. The History and Power of Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
6)Bachrach, Susan. Dames Employées: The Feminization of Postal Work in Nineteenth-century France. The Haworth Press, 1984.
7)Delamont, Ernest. Notice historique sur la Poste aux lettres dans l'antiquité et en France. Bordeaux: Imprimerie-typographique A. Perey, 1870.
8)de Rothschild, Arthur. Histoire de la poste aux lettres: depuis ses origines les plus anciennes jusqu'à nos jours. Paris: Librarie Hachette & Cie, 1873.
9)Smith, Bonnie G. Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.

Faculty of Law basics during the July Monarchy

mmebahorel — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 19:18:55 GMT

Hello, nerd fandom! I've needed to do this for ages, and I've finally got it typed up in translation for those who haven't been able to utilise the resources in French.

Since fic writing requires more detail than Hugo gave, and he likely did not feel that his countrymen required more details about student life and finances (though his foreign readers might have found it useful), it's been necessary to a) dig into Balzac, who loved detail and b) do some serious digging in extant documents of the period.

I'll go into the medical school another time, since there's already good info out there in English. The current focus is on the law school and the financial burdens on students without obvious family support: in Les Mis, that's Marius and Lesgle. I'll start by explaining the law school degree structure, then go into the costs, then I'll have a bit attempting to draw conclusions for Lesgle based on the details Hugo gives. My sources are unfortunately July Monarchy rather than Restoration: some changes undoubted happened over the years. However, these sources should enable some conclusions to be drawn.

Rendu, Ambroise, ed. “Code universitaire, ou lois, statuts, règlemens de l'université royale de France”. Paris: Hachette, 1835. This covers just what it says – the laws and regulations governing the university system.

De Girardin, Emile. “De l'instruction publique en France: ouvrage utile à familles”. Third Edition. Paris: Mairet et Fournier, 1842.

A basic reminder of the university system at this period: the only degree granting institutions were the professional schools, and all were controlled by the government (as were the collèges royales – a renaming of the lycées organised under the empire, which would return to the name lycée during the Second Republic). The faculty of letters and faculty of sciences did exist at this time, but they were not in the business of granting degrees in the sense we would now consider. The faculty of letters basically controlled the baccalauréat exam; the faculty of sciences did something similar on the math and science side. After 1823, medical school admission required that students have their bac and their baccalauréat ès-sciences. These faculties are generally not useful to fic writers. The major schools are the faculty of law and the faculty of medicine, followed by the faculty of theology. There are also special schools: the Polytechnique (engineering – feeds directly into the army), the Normal school (teacher training), a pharmacy school. Polytechniciens are up for every revolution going, but they are housed in particular barracks and can end up locked in for public safety under the guise of discipline. Higher education in France was designed to be career driven, unlike the male finishing schools of Oxford and Cambridge.

Paris does not hold the only law school in France. It holds the most popular law school in France. Law faculties exist in Dijon, Grenoble, Aix, Toulouse, Rennes, Poitiers, Caen, and Strasbourg. These old regional university towns were maintained by Bonaparte's educational reforms, though the available faculties in each town varies. (Medical faculties exist only in Paris, Montpellier, and Strasbourg.) Paris offers a slightly expanded mode of study, but this will take effect at the level of the doctorate: if one is unambitious and seeks only to be a lawyer in one's hometown for the rest of one's life, one of the regional faculties will do very well for a much lower cost of living. If one is ambitious and wants to make Paris connections or at least wide connections in hopes of getting a judicial nomination or perhaps making political contacts, one has to go to Paris. And if one can afford it, one might as well go to Paris just to be in Paris.

Law is fairly easy to enter. The bac is not necessary – one merely must prove that one has taken courses in rhetoric or philosophy at a collège royal or collège communal or at any other authorised institution of learning. The minimum age of matriculation is 16. Students are supposed to have a chaperone: everyone knows that 17 year olds unsupervised in Paris is not the world's best idea. In law, this is to be an adult male relative or someone carefully delegated with the task by an adult male relative. In practice, these guardians are frequently absolute strangers or even a student's landlord who have agreed to nothing more than to have their name listed as the local guardian. It's a fig leaf of security.

At some point after 1835 and before 1842, the baccalauréat ès-lettres (bac) became a prequisite.

The Paris law faculty of 17 (in 1842) teaches courses in:
Roman law
French civil code
Criminal legislation and civil and criminal code of procedure (one course annually)
Comparative penal legislation
Commercial code
Administrative law
History of law (doctoral only)
Droit des gens (“law of people”? I have no idea what this is. Doctoral only.)
French constitutional law (doctoral only)

Three professors cover Roman law; six cover Civil law. The remaining eight divide the other subjects between them.

The regional law faculties cover:
Roman law
Civil Code
Code of Procedure
Commercial code
Administrative law.

Strasbourg also has one chair in “droit des gens”.

A law degree will take two, three, or four years, depending on the level of degree. The first year is fairly heavy on theory (here's where you'll get some “natural rights of man” kind of stuff along with lots of Roman law); the second and third years focus on the civil code. The fourth year is for doctoral candidates and focuses on the special subjects of history of law, droit des gens, and constitutional law. The most common degree takes three years.

Emile de Girardin gives a good quick explanation of the three degree levels available; I'm translating these wholesale.
Baccalauréat – Students who aspire to the rank of bachelor must make two years of studies. At thee nd of the first year, they take a first exam; after the second year, they take a second exam, after which they are given a diploma of bachelor.

Licence (the rank of licensed suffices for all judicial functions and for the profession of lawyer) – Bachelors in law who aspire to a licensed diploma must make a third year of studies, after which they take two exams for the license; administrative law is part of the fourth exam. When the result of these exams is favourable to aspirants, they undertake a thesis or public act (acte publique), and they obtain the licensed diploma.

Doctorate (the rank of doctor is necessary to become a professor in the law faculty) – Licensed men who aspire to the doctorate are obliged to follow courses for a fourth year. They must submit to two other exams and an acte publique. Droit des gens, history of law, and constitutional law enter into the requirements of the second exam: the thesis encompasses all the materials of the teaching of law, of legislation, and of procedure.

One need not decide straight off how far one wishes to go – one can drop out at any point. There is also an option for a 1 year certificate program in criminal legislation and civil and criminal procedure.

Course themselves consist of class periods of about an hour and a half, a portion of which is taken up with dictation from the professor on whatever the day's topic is, generally explicating the “whys” of a law and its interpretation. Students must maintain these notebooks, as this is material that will not necessarily appear in other books but will be key to exam success. (skipping class is thus a really bad idea.)

The vacation between academic years is two months and comes in September and October. The academic year begins November 1. Term dates (trimesters) commence as follows: November 1, January 2, April 1, July 1. In general, you can begin only at the beginning of the academic year November 1, but exceptions may be able to be made.

Every trimester when paying his fee, each student must sign the register, restating his name, age, place of birth, and department of origin. The minimum age for matriculation is 16. Four of these inscriptions must be verified before one can sit the exam on criminal legislation and procedure, 8 inscriptions for the baccalauréat exam, 12 for the licensate exam, and 16 for the doctoral exam. One has to sign in during the first two weeks of the trimester; if you miss this window, or if you don't sign in, any courses you may have attended don't count that trimester because you weren't properly registered. You can still turn up for class, but it doesn't mean anything in your school record. You also must have two letters from two different professors stating that you've been work assiduously and deserve the opportunity to take the exam. Skipping class probably makes it hard to get the requisite letters. When registering, students are expected to select the professor whose course they wish to take, but lecture size is limited to 500 students. Lectures do fill up. But this selection is nonbinding – you can attend either section if there are two (or even three) sections of a course going on during the term, so long as there is room. Each professor is given what are essentially admittance tickets at the start of term; these tickets are given to each registered student, and tickets are required for all future admission to lectures. No card signed by the professor, no entry.

Once you've registered for the term, you show up for class. In detail:

Year 1:
First course in Civil Code
Course in natural law, droit de gens, and general public law

Year 2:
Second course in Civil Code
Course on Roman law

Year 3:
Third course in Civil Code
Course in Civil and Criminal Procedure
Course in Criminal Legislation (option)
Course in Public Administrative Law (option – generally for those who are expected to become public administrative functionaries)

Year 4:
Course in Commercial Code
Course in Philosophic history of French and Roman law
Course in Political Economy (optional, not necessary for degree)

The exam for first year is conducted in both French and Latin for three professors. The second year exam is also conducted by three professors and seems to be done only in French. The third year exams are conducted by four professors; the one covering Roman law is conducted in Latin, while the other covers everything else over all three years and is conducted in French.

Exams themselves are open to the public and are advertised; up to 8 students may be examined at once. The length is dependent on the number of students: at least 1 hour for 1 student, but 5 hours for 8 students. Members of the council of discipline and teaching are welcome to attend and are given pride of place. The inspector of schools and the dean may participate in deliberations. It's a pass/fail system: the professors (and the inspector of schools and the dean if they wish to participate) deliberate privately on the exams and actes publiques and vote with white and black balls, as if for club membership. The result of this vote is then written up and signed.

Exam scheduling is dictated as follows: First year exam, after opening of 4th term of first year; second year exam, after opening of 8th term since matriculation; one third year exam, during the 10th term since matriculation; second third year exam, during 11th term since matriculation; acte publique during 12th term since matriculation.

Fees are fairly low, but they add up quickly. Registration is 15 francs each term. The first year exam fee is 60 fr., as is the second year exam fee. Each third year exam is 90 fr.; the acte publique carries a 120 fr. Fee. Fees must be paid upon registration each term, then again in advance of the exam or acte publique date.

Diplomas are then an additional fee: bachelor's diploma for 50 fr., licensate diploma for 80 fr., doctoral diploma for 100 fr.

So the minimum fee for a person who passes all their exams on the first try and seeks a license de droit would be:

12 x 15 fr. Registration fees
60 fr. First year examination
60 fr. Second year examination
50 fr. Bachelor's diploma
90 fr. Third year examination #1
90 fr. Third year examination #2
120 fr. Acte publique
80 fr. Licensate diploma
-----------------------
730 fr. Total Fees

But the first year is actually pretty cheap: 120 francs total to take classes and sit the exam. Of course, exams are difficult, and it's expected that a student may have to sit an exam again, so the fees can go up considerably.

Competitions for scholarships are available but are rare and very limited in scope. In the third year, students may submit for competition essays in a subject in French law or a subject in Roman law. The first and second place winners in each category are offered a fourth year without fees. This is your only institutional chance (unless your father is a professor) to offset your education expenses.

I've not found anything on costs for books and other materials that may be necessary. The biggest expense will always be cost of living in Paris. Eugène Rastignac, in Le Père Goriot, is paying 45 fr. per month for room, attendance, and dinner in his garni. The majority of students lived in these furnished lodging houses, where the landlady would also proved breakfast and dinner. Many also lived in other cheap apartments and paid for dinner at a garni, which would run about 30 fr. a month, as Rastignac's friend Bianchon, a medical student, does. Rastignac is getting 1200 a year from his family, and about half of that is going to room and board. Bahorel has an allowance of 3000 a year; this is what Rastignac's family domains are bringing in, for the entire family to live on, so you can see the pressures on a lot of the young men who were sent to Paris. Eugène is designed to be fairly ordinary in situation on that score. The other hot guy Vautrin perved over, Lucien Chardon, ended up blowing lots of money, but he was at least able to budget about 60 francs a month for a poverty-stricken existence of doing research at the library and writing his grand masterpiece.

What does this mean in the universe of LM? Hugo goes through Marius' expenses of living, but he leaves out the years in which Marius is still finishing his legal education. The list comes afterwards. If we submit, for the sake of argument, that Marius was at the end of his second year and had already sat his second year exam when he marched out of the house, then we're looking at over 400 francs he has to pay for that law degree Hugo claims he got. If Marius “se fit recevoir avocat”, he has to have gotten his licensate in law. The 60 francs worth of registration fees isn't the issue – he can easily get that from translations. It's the 180 francs in exam fees, the 120 fr. fee for his acte publique, and the 80 fr. for his diploma that Hugo utterly ignores. By the regulations of when fees are due, it seems unlikely that Gillenormand would have paid so much in advance.

So Marius is an absolute plothole. Either Mlle Gillenormand is paying his fees to the law school herself and Marius is somehow letting that go entirely over his head (how did he do his first two years of exams?), or Hugo is writing an alternate universe in which law school is free. Or Marius is able to do all the requisite work for third year and be productive enough to bring home something like 900 francs in translations and similar work, then gave it all up after finishing his degree because he preferred to be lazy. (This may justify why the printer offered him the position that would pay 1500 – he was really effective at one point, limited only by needing to study?) There's some room to work to justify where the 440 francs are going to come from.

Lesgle is a different story. Lesgle, we know nothing about his family except one bit of his father's history. Under the Napoleonic code, inheritance was regulated and required to be split evenly among heirs. When there is a piece of property, that property is divided or, in the case of a house, is effectively divided into equal shares. Lesgle Sr. left one field and one house (“Son père avait fini par avoir une maison et un champ”, his father had finished by having a house and a field); Lesgle Jr. lost both in a false speculation. It's never actually stated that he is an only child. It's perfectly plausible that the speculation was undertaken with the full inheritance on the approval of a sibling or two. There's the possibility that his mother might have brought something to the marriage that she's now living on and is able to occasionally send a bit her son's way. There's the possibility that his mother remarried and her second husband occasionally sends him something because his mother will never shut up about it. There's a strong possibility he has extended family that he can touch from time to time for a hundred francs here, a hundred francs there. It's very unlikely he has no one in the world he can ask for 60 francs for an exam fee. And as we've seen, 15 francs per term to go to class is really a quite small amount, especially for a man who blows money on orgies. I think what we're seeing with Lesgle is a man who has no constant family support but enough extended family that he can get something from someone every couple of months; but then he blows that on fun instead of scrimping by on it. I haven't plotted my Lesgle out entirely yet, but he's not an only child, the speculation was done with permission, and his mother is now living with his very displeased sibling and sibling's spouse. He relies on aunts and uncles for a touch here, a touch there.

Since Lesgle is putting v. little effort into actually getting this degree, I'm not so sure he'll ever need a chunk of 440 francs for those end of third year expenses. He is from time to time paying his 15 francs registration, since he was in class, and enough that he's made it to the end of second year (probably on an extended schedule). He probably gets by on a combination of family handouts, friend handouts, and work: translation, library research, maybe occasional pamphlet or encyclopedia writing. And a lot of credit. He almost certainly owes money all over Paris, constantly, and has more than once had to switch laundresses when he finally just didn't get his clothes back because she was keeping them as collateral after he didn't pay for too long. Never underestimate how long a person could get by only by bilking creditors or paying minimum amounts.

lesmisquote (Zazzle)

secow1 — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 20:31:00 GMT

Hi guys,

I just wanted to let you know about a Zazzle store I set up a while ago selling clothing, accessories and other stuff featuring quotations from Les Mis (the book). Most of the products are available in both the original French and an English translation (usually McAfee/Fahnestock), and the mugs I have designed include both languages.

The designs are entirely a result of my messing around when I had some spare time and I'm certainly no design expert, but hopefully you might enjoy some of what I've put up there. I tried to keep them light on images (with a couple of exceptions) and focus the designs instead on the words. I've used a slightly random selection of quotations - it would take a long time to go through the Brick systematically, after all. Some were ones that have stood out to me at some point in the past and others that I have found through searching particular chapters as well as simply opening the book at random. At the moment there's a relatively high concentration of barricade-related passages. What can I say? There's some good stuff there.

I created this store during a period when I had lots of spare time, and I had intended to create a full set of products for each design. However, unfortunately, real life caught up with me and so many sections are incomplete. I hope to finish this at some point, and perhaps to start on some new designs, but this can't be in the near future due to my time commitments. However, if there is a design you like and you would like to see it on a particular product, do let me know and I will be happy to create it for you.

The store can be found at www.zazzle.com/lesmisquote*, and there are also country-specific sites including:
UK, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, etc

The texts I've used so far are:

"Man has one tyrant, Ignorance."
(1.I.x)

"Hope: The word that the finger of God has written on the brow of everyone."
(Adapted from 1.II.vii)

"There is one spectacle greater than the sea: that is the sky.
There is one spectacle greater than the sky: that is the interior of the soul."
(1.VII.iii)

"To write the poem of the human conscience, if only of one man, even the most insignificant man, would be to swallow up all epics in a superior and definitive epic."
(1.VII.iii)

"Nothing is more dangerous than discontinued labour; it is habit lost."
(4.II.i)

"God, having made the mouse, said, "I've made a blunder.""
(5.I.ii)

"To subdue matter is the first step; to realize the ideal is the second."
(5.I.v)

"Liberty: the sovereignty of myself over myself;
Equality: the concession that each makes to all;
Fraternity: the protection of all over each."
(Adapted from 5.I.v)

"Light! Light! Everything comes from it, and everything returns to it."
(5.I.v)

"Equality is not a society of big blades of grass and little oaks."
(Slightly adapted from 5.I.v)

"Brothers, whoever dies here dies in the radiance of the future and we are entering a grave illuminated by the dawn."
(5.I.v)

"Glory to the mattress that nullifies a cannon."
(5.I.ix)

"There are people who observe the rules of honour as we observe the stars, from far off."
(5.I.xxi)

"Infallibility is not infallible."
(5.IV.i)

"There is scarcely anything else in the world but to love one another."
(5.IX.v)

And these are a sample of the designs (the design for each quote varies from product to product but remains based on the themes shown here):

I'd love it if you'd check it out. :)

Marville-ous photos of pre-Haussmann Paris

silverwhistle — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:22:17 GMT

I can recommend the work of Charles Marville.
There's some excellent examples online on this Paris site and in the Getty.
I was pleased to find a couple of images of the Rue Tirechappe, now vanished under (I think) the Rue de Pont-Neuf (meeting the Rue Saint-Honoré): in the Hugoverse, in the 15C this was the Frollo family home, to which 19-year-old Claude ran from the university, to find his parents dead from plague and baby Jehan crying in his cradle.
(x-post to prouvaire)

Why Disney should have left Victor Hugo alone…

silverwhistle — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 12:58:32 GMT

Read this and laugh (or weep).

(x-post to silverwhistle, prouvaire)

Strange opera production: Schmidt's 'Notre Dame'

silverwhistle — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 20:00:09 GMT

Earlier this year, there was a very odd production in Dresden of Schmidt's Notre Dame, updated to 1930s US, with a Jean Harlow/Roxie Hart-esque Esméralda…
Here's an English-language review and the opera house's own page on it.
There's a trailer for it here.
On the plus side, Claude is (correctly) in his 30s and (as the book demands!) gets his kit off for some self-mortification. ;-D

(x-post to silverwhistle, prouvaire)

Starting to develop weird cross-over fic notions…

silverwhistle — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 18:19:31 GMT

I've started to get into Ninety-Three, and in parts it makes me scream.
Boys, boys… You spend all night in prison debating the philosophy and ethics of revolution, instead of doing something useful like planning an escape?!!!
And Victor, did it never cross your mind that there's a serious "squick" factor in having a girl with a chest/shoulder wound, who happens to be a nursing mother, tended by an old man…? (Clue: it's not just cows that have to be milked…)
Not to mention the usual "the higher the body count, the better" Victor attitude: no, you can't let one of your heroes live on, a sadder and wiser man, can you?
Aargh!

Anyway, I was talking about it in a café today with a friend, who's a Scarlet Pimpernel fan, and we started to develop a slightly mad notion of a crossover fic, using an episode of the BBC SP series (with Richard E Grant) as a jumping-off point… Things may get silly…

Some interesting NDdP ballets

silverwhistle — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 18:50:29 GMT

In the 1950s, the 19C ballet La Esméralda was given a makeover, with additional music and more book-plot. This variant (which is sometimes called Gudule's Daughter, as it reinstates the Pâquette subplot) has been revived in Moscow at the Stanislavskii Music Theatre.
There's also a Royal Swedish Opera Ballet, Ringaren i Notre-Dame, from which pictures may be seen here.

(x-post to prouvaire)

Centre for 19C French Studies online

silverwhistle — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 20:05:05 GMT

Centre d'études du 19e siècle français - Joseph Sablé - Centre for 19th Century French Studies, University of Toronto, has lots of stuff on archive.org! Free!

(x-post to old_french_lit

Brion-illustrated NDdP

silverwhistle — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 11:29:00 GMT

I was lucky enough to pick up a secondhand copy of this fairly cheap (because it was in French, so hard to sell in the UK!), but here it is on line. Enjoy.

Re-plug of my Les Mis website

10littlebullets — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 22:40:03 GMT

Since the last time I plugged it here, there wasn't nearly as much on it. :) Carpe Horas - a site of many things, most of them at least tangentially related to Les Misérables.

Outtakes - scraps of material collected from Hugo's notes and rough drafts, deleted scenes if you will. All the best bits (including an unexpected meeting between Patron-Minette and the Friends of the ABC, and a fanfiction-esque interlude about what happened to Tholomyès) have been translated into English, and the rest (including a strange digression on prostitution) is slowly in the course of being translated.

History - Bits and pieces about 1820s and 30s France. A timeline, modern equivalents of currency and units of measure, excerpts of letters related to the events in the book, a lot on 1830s republicanism (inluding some publications of the Society of the Friends of the People, loosely the model for the Friends of the ABC). Mostly translated into English, except the longer Friends of the People material.

Paris - Digitized maps of pre-Haussmann Paris, some links to websites on Parisian cartography, a few early 20th century photographs of the Rue Mondétour.

The Mizzie Tour Guide - Finding the places in modern-day France (particularly Paris) where the action of the novel took place. Photos of Montreuil-sur-Mer, the site of the barricade, the part of the Seine where Javert drowned himself, etc.

Cast recordings - Cast lists and distribution info for all the major cast recordings of the musical. (Yes, I know it's three years out of date.)

Translations of the French lyrics - An attempt at a literal translation of the lyrics to the 1991 Paris revival version of the musical.

And on the less serious side... fanwork (fanfiction and avatars, might soon contain essays and rants again) and silly games and Javascript doohickies.

Illustrated Hugo on line

silverwhistle — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 22:11:16 GMT

Les Misérables, with Brion illustrations. (800 pages, free PDF)
Notre Dame de Paris, with gorgeous frontispiece.

Couple of questions...

silverwhistle — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 10:43:23 GMT

a) Is this group still breathing?
b) Is it the best place for book-based Victor Hugo fandom?

New fan fiction community

chiana606 — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:45:03 GMT

Hello!

I've just made a new community, for those of us who like to write and read stories based on Victor Hugo's works, as well as other classic novels. I'm hoping that eventually it can be an active community, with prompts, writing contests, and other fun stuff. Click and join! :P

literary_fic

Editions of NDdP that claim to be 'Complete & Unabridged' but aren't

silverwhistle — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:00:45 GMT

jackks has drawn attention to this over at les_sanspapiers. She has the Wordsworth paperback, which uses the HoND title, claims to be "Complete & Unabridged", but completely omits Hugo's preface about the word 'Ananké'.

I've found the same is true of the Penguin Popular Classics and the Airmont editions (both of which use the HoND title) and the 1950s Dent Everyman edition (which uses the real NDdP title). The Airmont edition is also censored, despite claiming to be "complete and unabridged": for example, it reduces the list of Pâquette's named lovers, omits Phœbus urinating on the inscription on the Cardinal's statue, Jehan's remarks about Isabeau's breasts , and La Falourdel's song. One might expect this in 19C editions, but the Airmont translation first appeared in 1968!

However, the Penguin Classics and the Oxford Classics editions (both under the NDdP title) are genuinely uncut. Apart from the Everyman edition, then, I think this is chiefly a problem with editions that use HoND as the title.

(x-post to frollophiles and hond)

Excellent 15C image of Paris with Notre Dame

silverwhistle — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 22:23:21 GMT

Here's a wonderful picture by Jean Fouquet of The Descent of the Holy Spiritin a Parisian setting!

(x-post to hond, les_sanspapiers, frollophiles)

IMDb NDdP reviews (updated)

silverwhistle — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:43:51 GMT

So far, I've reviewed these versions:
1923: A potential epic cruelly deformed by censorship and Chaney's ape-man
1939: For Ham the Bell Tolls
1956: “So come up to the lab…” for some spectacular cinematic alchemy!
1976: 'The Philosopher-Playwright of Notre Dame'? Gringoire steals this show
1996: If you love the book... this is a penance
I'm working on the 1982 one.

(x-post to frollophiles, les_sanspapiers, hond)

NDdP book-fic

silverwhistle — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:27:03 GMT

I've started a fic based on the novel, as an alternative ending: what if everyone lives…?
Last Year's Snows: An Education Sentimentale.

NDdP full cast frontispiece

silverwhistle — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:40:12 GMT

Here's a scan of the gorgeous 1844 de Lemud frontispiece that shows the full main cast:

and for connoisseurs of clerical eye-candy (looking very handsome!):

(x-post to frollophiles, les_sanspapiers, hond)

More on NDdP

silverwhistle — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 10:44:30 GMT

I recently got an interesting secondhand book, a study companion to NDdP by Rachel Killick, published by Glasgow University in 1994 (Glasgow Introductory Guides to French Literature no. 25, ISBN 0 85261 395 4). While one can argue with some of her interpretations of the text, Killick does provide interesting details on where Hugo got some character names.

A 'Jehan Frollo' appeared in the Comptes de la Prévôté as an executed murderer (a career path which one has a nasty feeling our Jehan might have taken, had he lived, being somewhat Villon-ous, if you'll pardon the expression!). He also took the name 'Claude Frollo' from Du Breul's 1612 Le Théâtre des antiquités de Paris and made them into brothers. He may also have been influenced by the recent (1829-30) scandal of a young priest, the Abbé Louis-Denis Frilay, who was sentenced to hard labour for life for stabbing the husband of a parishioner with whom he was having an affair. (The case also influenced Stendhal.)

There was a real poet called Pierre Gringoire, but his dates were 1475-1538, making him just 7, not 23, at the time of the story.

(x-post to les_sanspapiers, frollophiles and hond)

Bourgeois Daily Life: a little more from the Book of Awesome

mmebahorel — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 02:38:54 GMT

Again, this is predominantly from A History of Private Life, vol. 4: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, ed. Michelle Perrot, translated by Arthur Goldhammer with occasional other comments.

Communications
Paper was subject to a stamp tax and thus was not wholly cheap. The regime of postage stamps was not instituted in France until the Second Republic, so postage may be paid in advance or left for the receiver to pay. (You see that Fantine pays postage in advance to be sure her letters will reach the Thenardiers but they do not pay for their own letters to her.) The little notes you see in novels that are exchanged within the city and are delivered are delivered multiple times a day are under the control of the Petite Poste. Letters distributed in this manner cost 3 sous in Paris or 4 sous for the near suburbs during the 1820s (and currency was quite stable until the 1840s) and were delivered every two hours. Most international mail had to be paid at least to the border, and receiving international mail generally required the payment of postage by the receiver (a letter from the UK at this period would cost around 26 sous or just over a franc).

Family was often dispersed at some point, even if only because children went away to school or boys went to Paris for further education. Schoolchildren were expected to write home once a week – often, these letters were examined by the teaching staff or headmaster and served as a lesson in composition as much as a filial duty and a window on what the students were saying about the institution. When a husband and wife were separated due to business, they would write every two or three days. Long trips, particularly out of the country, would see longer letters exchanged at less frequent intervals. Extended family were expected to write at least at the New Year to exchange basic family news of the past twelve months.

Letters were frequently addressed to the entire family and read aloud or passed from hand to hand. Different families had different tolerance for the gloomier and thus more personal subjects of illness, failure, death. There is no one style in which a bourgeois family would relate because letter writing is intensely personal even as it is composed in some ways for public consumption.

Servants
Nothing very different from what might be expected based on Victorian models. In Paris, a very large number of domestics were, like the rest of the Parisian working class, migrants from the provinces. In the smaller cities, they were largely from the nearby countryside. Girls would go into service in order to earn some money before marriage; boys would enter into service when there were too many boys and not enough land to keep them on the farm.

Most middle class families could expect to keep three servants: a manservant who could serve as valet and coachman, a cook, and a chambermaid. Additional servants would usually mean additional maids and/or a boy before additional adult male staff were added.

Memory
Scrapbooks or “albums” were very popular gifts for children, particularly girls, throughout the nineteenth century, and women in particular were almost expected to have collections. More public than a diary, the scrapbook would contain poems and drawings and memories suitable to be shared with the family. Women might collect, as keepsakes, gloves or even dresses (though one would have to be v. rich to save a ballgown solely as a keepsake). Sketches by the family were of course more common than oil portraits, but every bourgeois family wanted a portrait in oils – these would be displayed prominently, down the generations, in mimicry of aristocratic traditions.

Daily Schedule
The mistress of the house was supposed to be the first up and last to bed, but you can imagine how often that actually happened in a wealthy household in fashionable Paris. Homemakers' manuals advised that she wake at 7 in the summer and 8 in the winter. In fashionable Paris, noon was a perfectly acceptable time for breakfast. It was also expected that the mother see her children off to school, even if they were dressed and breakfasted under the eye of the staff.

A well-bred woman did not go out in the morning. Etiquette required that you avoid her if you saw her in the street at an unsuitable hour because she was obviously engaged in private business that should be kept private. Her mornings were intended to be spent in work or in private pursuits such as correspondence, embroidery, the piano, or reading.

The main meal of the day was called “dinner”, but in the provinces, this was a large noon meal, while in Paris, it was a large evening meal. It was expected that the family, including children, would gather for dinner and the meal would be composed of multiple courses. Sunday dinner was an affair for the extended family. Later in the century (post-Haussman), as apartments grew smaller, these Sunday dinners often took place in cafés.

The afternoon was devoted to social duties, either visiting or receiving visitors or charity work. At the beginning of the season, a woman would send out cards with her at home days and times. A woman receiving guests was expected to be doing some sort of make-work with her hands, though after midcentury, this became seen as rude to the guests.

The men, of course, were expected to be doing some form of work during most of the day, though they did frequently perform afternoon visits. As the number of men engaged in business increased through the century, visiting hours were often set in the evening to maximise male participation.

In the evening, particularly in the cities, there would often be a variety of entertainments. Women were permitted to attend the theatre alone if they sat in a box for privacy. A woman could receive guests in her box, but she was not permitted to wander about visiting or to sit in the orchestra or balcony unaccompanied, as these were public spaces. Amateur musical evenings and theatricals were particularly popular in the provinces, where people had less access to professional entertainment.

The great salons that we generally think of as fashionable Parisian sociability experienced a rapid decline after the fall of the Empire, or at least they did in the eyes of Paris. To quote directly from the Book of Awesome: “The noble ladies who frequented the courts of the Bourbons and of Napoleon I helped to create and perpetuate the myth of an ideal ancien-regime type of sociability. In 1836, the Duchesse d'Abrantès described, in the Gazette des salons, what those soirees of yesteryear had been like. Society in those days consisted of some eighty people who saw one another constantly, and two hundred others who migrated from salon to salon over the course of the week. The men played billiards; the women embroidered or sketched. At two in the morning supper was served – the high point of the evening, during which the conversation turned confidential and even a little naughty.” This society fell apart with the fall of Napoleon and instead, society to reform itself indiscriminately in gatherings called “raouts” - just as large, just as fashionable, but without the sense that it is a closed society where everyone knows everyone. Raouts provided a possibility of entree that the old soirees never did.

Smaller gatherings might include party games or the staging of sketch comedies or informal dancing with women taking turns at the piano. These could easily be scaled up into complicated tableaux vivants (very fashionable in the 1830s), full-on amateur productions of popular stage comedies, or musical evenings with a hired orchestra or professional singers.

Meals
Terminology and mealtimes were different between Paris and the provinces and changed over the course of the century, though Parisian terms eventually became primary.

One began the day with premier déjeuner, or first breakfast: a cup of tea or coffee or chocolate and a bit of toast immediately upon waking. Deuxième déjeuner, or second breakfast, was taken sometime between 10 and noon and consisted of something more substantial but still in terms of munchies rather than a full-on proper meal: hors d'oeuvres, cold meats, that sort of thing.

Dinner kept being pushed later and later. In the eighteenth century, it was a mid-to-late afternoon repast; at the beginning of the nineteenth century, 5 pm was typical but often one would eat earlier. By 1821, five or six was the usual dinner hour, and by the end of the century, guests would be invited for 7:30. Once dinner advanced that late, the English tradition of afternoon tea began to be widely accepted. (Advancing dinner hours of the clientele pushed theatrical start times later.)

If a ball or soiree were happening, a light repast would be served late in the evening, generally a cold standing supper rather than a full dinner.

Holidays
Christmas was an occasion for nostalgia throughout the century. An 1830 newspaper article laments that “the present generation shows little concern for these old customs”, drawing a direct contrast with Germany, particularly in reference to the Christmas tree, which was not actually seen in France until 1840. (except in Strasbourg, where there is documentation as early as 1605 for the presence of Christmas trees in homes.) What we may think of today as the traditional French decoration of the creche is actually newer – not mentioned at all prior to the 1860s – though it is entirely possible that, with the way documentation tends to avoid the Midi, that it was in use in the South earlier. The other seeming tradition, the cake known as the buche de noel (yule log), is also of much more recent vintage than one might expect. The only yule log in the nineteenth century was the literal one in the fireplace.

Catholic families would attend midnight mass then come home to réveillon (midnight supper). Servants were traditionally given the night off, so this supper was a simple affair with the traditional dishes of a vanilla porridge with waffles and grilled sausages supplemented with various cold dishes and pastries made in advance. Local customs varied in determining the pastries. By the latter half of the century, réveillon was decoupled from mass and families would often go to the theatre rather than mass and have their réveillon on their return. The latter quarter of the century saw the introduction of several English customs, including mistletoe and the Christmas pudding.

Children would put their slipper by the fireplace so that Pere Noel would leave them something on Christmas Eve (as you see Cosette and the Thenardier children do). The church tried to adjust this custom to where the giver was the Infant Jesus, but it never caught on – Father Christmas was firmly established by the beginning of the nineteenth century and his influence only grew as the century went on. Gifts on Christmas were predominantly focused on children, while adults were expected to exchange gifts a week later at New Years, but in the natural order of things, everyone got presents twice in a week. Gifts were generally small and personal – books, blank albums and diaries, toys for children, writing paper, sewing boxes, that sort of thing. Newspapers even as early as 1834 were publishing articles that were in some ways thinly veiled advertisements – lists of suitable presents, often lists of book titles.

In addition to an exchange of gifts at the New Year, servants and tradesmen received bonuses, and family visits were expected. Close relatives exchanged visits, or at the very least sent a servant around to drop off cards. January was a very busy social round. On New Years, immediate family exchanged visits, with the grandparents and other superior relations visiting in the evening. The following week was reserved for cousins and other relations, the next for close friends, and the rest of the month for acquaintances. And if one was distant from family, there was the lengthy New Years letter to write.

However, some children did not have the benefit of what was even then a family holiday: only December 25 and January 1 were school holidays, which meant that many boarding pupils were unable to spend the holiday with family. Easter vacations had priority instead: in the first half of the century, classes were suspended from Maundy Thursday through Easter Sunday.

Easter was still a primary holiday for practising Catholics. The Church's minimum requirement for confession was once a year, at Eastertime. Families attended the Easter mass together, all dressed in new spring clothing. It was also another occasion for gift-giving, often with small gifts given in egg-shaped packages.

Vacation
At the beginning of the century, only a small elite spent the summer in country homes, though there was always a pretense of enjoying the country life, even by the working classes who knew it only from the pleasure gardens beyond the barrières. The lucky aristocrats and wealthy people whose business did not require them to be in one place or another would usually return to town in October or November, after the hunting season. The social season was thus winter and spring, with summer and fall in the country. It is mostly in the latter half of the century that transportation networks permitted the bourgeois to send his family to the country for the summer without having to give up his business in town. Also, some of this is regional – in Rouen, for example, most bourgeois families owned country houses because they had much of their income from land and needed a seat from which to supervise their farms. This is typical of many smaller cities, particularly in less industrialised regions (one would expected different patterns in Lille, for example).

The first of the coastal resorts was Dieppe, beginning in 1822, when the duchesse de Berry was invited sea bathing. The court decamped for Dieppe every July until 1830, at which point the aristocracy continued out of habit. Biarritz began to be talked of in 1835, though it became primary only when the empress Eugenie made a habit of visiting. Trouville took off in the July Monarchy, but it was considered too bourgeois – Dieppe was more chic. In 1840, in good weather, the trip from Paris would take approximately 12 hours. Winter tourism on the Cote d'Azur was really an innovation of the last quarter of the century. Nice did not even become a part of France until 1860.

Children received approximately six weeks of summer vacation, usually beginning at Assumption (August 14) with classes resuming at the beginning of October. The latter month of the school year was often rather skippable late in the century, however, with people pulling their children out in July for a longer summer holiday. Many boarding students, however, remained at school during the summer, unable to go home or with parents unwilling to make the effort of retrieving them for such a short time.

The idea of the honeymoon took off in the 1830s, and for most of the century, the ideal honeymoon was a journey to Italy. Package holidays proliferated.

Some 'Notre Dame de Paris' background

silverwhistle — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 22:09:24 GMT

Some fun historical background material:

Helen Waddell, Mediæval Latin Lyrics
J A Symonds, Wine, Women, and Song: Mediaeval Latin Students' Songs Now First Translated into English Verse
D B Wyndham Lewis, François Villon: A Documented Survey
Jean Marc Bernard, François Villon (1431-1463), sa vie son oeuvre

Villon was a scholar turned truand (burglar, pimp, killed a priest in a brawl over a doxy). His depictions of the Parisian underworld influenced Hugo. His uncle/adoptive father, Father Guillaume de Villon, was one of the tutors in canon law at the University of Paris.

The work of the late 14-early 15C lawyer and alchemist Nicolas Flamel was of great interest to Claude. Flamel's gravestone survives in the Musée de Cluny. Here's a colour photo of it, and here is a black and white rubbing. The upper portion shows Christ between Saints Peter and Paul, with the sun and moon, and below is Flamel's corpse in a winding sheet, saying "Lord God, I hope for thy mercy" (this sort of memento mori was a common type of memorial at the time). The inscription talks about his charitable works. And here is an engraving of the images the Flamels had erected at the Cemetery of Les Innocents, which Claude used to study at when he was visiting his parents' grave there. Some of them use conventional imagery regarding the Massacre of the Innocents, while others were derived from Flamel's more esoteric writings. Here's a detail of the depiction of the couple with Saints Peter and Paul, Christ and a couple of angels. There is nothing unusual in this portion of the work.

There's more useful material here:
Tableau Historique Et Pittoresque de Paris: Depuis Les Gaulois Jusqu'à Nos Jours, several volumes by Jacques-Benjamin Saint-Victor.
The History of Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day (1825)

(edited x-post from frollophiles and lafetedesfous)

Passages of a Bourgeois Life

mmebahorel — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 20:45:03 GMT

Yet another in the occasional series of "I do your research for you!"

This is in many ways more of a list of events rather than a coherent essay. The purpose is to hopefully assist in writing Les Mis backstory or sequels, and thus is going to be roughly relevant from the Empire through to 1848. I've tried to note where there are patterns that I can't break the dates at the moment, but everything should be roughly valid for the first half of the nineteenth century.

My major source is A History of Private Life, vol. 4: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, ed. Michelle Perrot, translated by Arthur Goldhammer. This is available through Limited Preview on Google Books, but many library systems are likely to have a hard copy. It's not a strictly academic title. Other details come from Louis Chevalier, The Labouring and Dangerous Classes in Paris in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century and random other bits of knowledge I've picked up over the years.

Birth
Birth was always conducted in the home. To give birth in a hospital was for the shameful poor. There was enough medicalisation at this point that the wealthy family could choose a male physician or a female midwife. The midwife was cheaper; the physician more scientific. The birth had to be registered at the town hall within three days – this was the legal province of the father – and in theory, baptism was to take place within this period as well. In practice, baptism was put off a month or even two or three to permit the mother enough recovery time to attend. The child was customarily given three names – one by the parents, then one from each of the godparents. The godparents were nearly always family members. Ideally, the first child would have as godfather the father's father and as godmother, the mother's mother. The second child would then have the maternal grandfather as godfather and paternal grandmother as godmother. In the absence of grandparents, the nearest blood relative of each side, preferably in the previous generation, would be chosen. Presents were expected from the godparents, and the godparents were included in family celebrations (selecting the godparents from within the family circle kept the family circle small).

Childhood
Unlike the prototypical English Victorian Bourgeois household, French childhood was more integrated into family life once the child was no longer a baby. Babies, however are a different story. Particularly in Paris, children were often sent out to the country for nursing. This phenomenon was not strictly of the bourgeoisie - when Hugo says that Fantine nursed her own child, he notes this because it is unusual, even for someone of her social class. Paris in the nineteenth century had a very small child population, little affected by the birthrate. Once the child was weaned, however, the child was returned to the family.

At this point, from the age of two years old, perhaps, the experience of Victorian society would dictate that the child would live in the nursery, raised by a nurse, and was visited by his mother but essentially raised in isolation from the rest of the household. This is absolutely not the case in France. Children played freely with their mothers and/or female servants, and the child's bedroom was a development later in the century. Children of all ages were brought out to the café for Sunday dinner – they were a more common sight in bourgeois cafés than in working class cafés.

The distance and respect one might also expect from children to their parents is much looser than an ideal Victorian would perhaps wish. Parents address their children with the familiar “tu” form - “vous” is used for you are utterly pissed off (the modern American equivalent being the invocation of the middle name). Touching – caresses and kisses – was expected. Corporal punishment was on the decline, even in boys' boarding schools. To beat your children was a sign of low birth – labourers and peasants hit their children.

Children were kept at home for as long as possible – families aspired to afford a tutor or governess. English tutors and nannies were preferred (at least after the Empire – you can see this from Charlotte Brontë, but I can't discern at what point the English became fashionable). Stendahl and Sand both wrote of stifling isolation in childhood, but I don't think we ought to consider either of them typical – one has to hope that most French children did not suffer through childhood. (Writers in general seem to have crap childhoods.)

First communion took place around the age of 12 through the nineteenth century. One had to have had two years of instruction in the catechism before taking first communion, though instruction took place only for about four months of the year for an hour on Sundays. Instruction was done by the local priest, in common with other children in the parish of the same age. Girls wore white dresses and veils for their first communion; boys received their first proper suits and wore a white armband. First Communion was considered the passage from childhood into adolescence and was celebrated as such with gifts and a family party after mass. It was also the first really public way to ostentatiously present a girl, in particular.

Adolescence is marked particularly by boarding school. All bourgeois children, boy and girl, were expected to spend some years at school, and most boarded at least part of that time. (Schools did also take day pupils.) With the Restoration, the lycées were renamed collèges royales, and after some years, the Church was permitted to set up collèges of their own. Boys could attend school from roughly the age of 10 to the age of 17, when they were expected to sit the bac. Girls were expected to attend boarding school, usually a convent school, for at least one year between the age of 15 and the age of 18. I'm not going to talk about education here except as a rite of passage.

School was the first opportunity children would have to make friends outside the bosom of the family. The extended family was tremendously important and most children would have had not only their own brothers and sisters but also cousins. Family groups were usually localised and thus it was expected to have extended family available. Families would gather for Sunday dinner, at someone's house or sometimes at a café. Children were thus not wholly isolated, usually, but were kept protected within the circle of the extended family. Once they started school, they would have an opportunity to meet other children, though generally within the same social rank.

This is not always the case, however. Particularly in the small towns, there would be a local collège that was attended by the sons of shopkeepers and local farmers and perhaps even a few very intelligent scholarship boys who came from artisanal families but that was not shunned by the great families in the area. Thus the son of the doctor might attend school with the son of a shopkeeper. It was much more difficult for a working class or lower middle class boy to have access to a lycée in one of the cities than to have access to a collège in a small town. Often these collège students would have no desire to sit the bac, and many offered a lower class of degree for these students. It was also possible to begin in a small-town collège but transfer to a boarding lycée in the nearest city. It was very difficult, however, to come out of a collège and achieve admission to any of the grands écoles in Paris. A collège education was controlled by the church with permission of the government and had no access to teachers from the école normale as the secular lycées did.

After one had finished school at the age of 17 or 18, one was considered something of an adult, though one did not achieve this milestone legally until the age of 22.

Young Adulthood
Boys might attend a local university or one of the grands écoles in Paris, or they might enter the family business directly after school. Girls tended to marry young – there was a decline in the age of marriage from before the Revolution. They also were permitted little time to make a choice. Engagements were short, of only a few months duration, and a girl was expected to find a husband the first year she was out in society. If she had not made a match by her third season, she was considered damaged goods – obviously something was wrong with her or her dowry if she did not have a single suitable young man express interest.

Young people tended to mix at balls and charity events, but a great many marriages were made through direct introduction by matchmakers. One could also, of course, meet the friends of siblings and the children of one's parents friends, the latter often directly set up by the parents to achieve family connections for mutual benefit. Romantic love was starting to be accepted as a reason to lobby for a marriage but not as a reason to go through with an otherwise unfavourable match. The economic reasons for marriage were more important than the emotional ones. Romantic love itself was defined in pseudo-scientific terms from approximately 1820 to 1860 – passion was a form of energy, a spark of electricity that created a bond between two people. (if it weren't that atomic there wasn't advanced enough at the time, one could probably talk about molecular formation here and it wouldn't be out of place.)

When a man had made his choice, he might send a friend to float a trial balloon to the parents. If the parents agreed that the match would be suitable, then the man's parents would present a formal proposal to the woman's parents. If the match was not considered suitable, then at least there had been a buffer to prevent complete embarrassment for all parties. Once the parents came to an agreement, the engagement was considered binding. On the man's first visit to his intended, a date for the engagement dinner would be set. At that dinner, hosted by the girls's family but which the parents of both parties would attend, the young man would give an engagement ring to his fiancée. A week later, she would give him a gift – a ring or a locket or something of that nature, often with a portrait or a lock of her hair – at a dinner hosted by the young man's family.

The suitor was expected to visit his intended daily and to send flowers every day if he could afford it. The girl would always be chaperoned by her mother and was expected to behave modestly and without too much excitement – she was to be a calm and idealised presence, though the purpose of the visits was to ensure that the bride and groom had some knowledge of each other before marriage. This period of engagement was expected to last anywhere from three weeks to three months, though two months was the norm. A girl had been working on her trousseau for years, after all, in expectation of receiving a marriage proposal, so only the wedding and the business really had to be planned.

The marriage contract was the key document in a bourgeois marriage. Moreso than the marriage certificate. The contract disposed of the property each brought to the marriage, stating if the wife were to continue possession of her own property or if some portion of it were to become communal property. Only people who could not afford lawyers fees would bind themselves to a marriage regime in which all property devolved to the husband. (This is how you get plots in Balzac revolving around inheritance and who brought what to the marriage – without a marriage contract, the woman's property would devolve entirely to the husband.) This was a matter of more than just protection of the family property – the Napoleonic code did not include a widow's portion until the 1870s, so if a woman allowed her property to devolve to her husband at marriage, she could be left penniless when he died if because it would all pass to her children or, worse, to his relatives if she were childless. A young widow without even her original dowry would find it very difficult to marry again.

The signing of the marriage contract was the central celebration later in the century – by 1900, there was no reception with dancing on the day of the wedding itself, that celebration being held the day the marriage contract was signed. This is a development across the century, starting in Paris and holding mostly to the major cities. On the day the contract was signed, the young man sent his fiancée the “corbeille”, or basket – a series of gifts, often collected into a large wicker basket, worth 5 percent of the girl's dowry or approximately 1 year's income. It was a means of passing on, for display, various family heirlooms, jewels and lace as well as personal gifts of luxury items (the July Monarchy showed a particular passion for cashmere shawls) and the traditional wedding gift of a missal for the wedding mass.

The civil ceremony usually took place a couple days before the religious ceremony in the big cities in order to prevent delays. Only four witnesses and the immediate family, legally required, attended the civil ceremony. The wedding party then dined at the bride's house.

For the religious ceremony, the bare minimum was that the banns must be read three Sundays in a row (thus the minimum three week engagement) and the payment of a sliding fee for use of the church facilities – the main altar vs. one of the side chapels, enough space for all the guests, flowers, music, etc. These fees were theoretically the responsibility of the groom, while the bride's family paid for the lunch, dinner, and reception, but in practice, elaborate wedding expenses were shared.

The wedding supper could be a lavish affair, and may be conducted at home or at a café. The shrinking size of apartments in the middle of the century pushed many of what had been private celebrations into the cafés. The honeymoon did not take off until the 1830s; before that, the bride and groom spent their wedding night at home and the traditional first visitor was the bride's mother on the day after the wedding. A honeymoon was an option in the 1820s, though one that was not entirely common. By the end of the century, honeymooning in Italy had become a cliché.

Old Age and Death
The bourgeois generally had enough money to retire – a professional could make enough money to retire in his 50s without worrying about running out of money. Civil servants did receive pensions, though these were often so small as to be unlivable.

People generally died at home – only the very poor without any money or family went to the hospital and thus only the very poor died there. A declaration of death was filed at the town hall and the coroner would come to the house to issue the burial permit. Only when the family had a burial permit was the death certificate issued.

The aristocracy early in the nineteenth century still kept the women at home rather than permit them to accompany the cortege, but this tradition was already in decline and the bourgeois had abandoned it even then. The procession to the church would be very long, but only the family and closest friends would accompany the body to the cemetery. Mourning lasted longer in the provinces than in Paris. Eighteenth century royal decree set mourning at one year for a husband, six months for a wife, parent or grandparent, and one month for other family members. These periods lengthened somewhat over the course of the nineteenth century – by 1900, it was common in the provinces for a woman to mourn two years for a husband, though only one year and six weeks in Paris. During the Second Empire, people began to wear mourning for children who died in infancy. Mourning followed the common Western stages: a period of all black and seclusion followed by a period of mourning colours (black, grey, lavender, white) and return to the world. Widows were expected to use mourning stationary until they remarried.

Please feel free to ask questions - I would be glad to offer clarifications (and further detail if I know it). This is only the most basic outline of a life.

Press and Public Opinion in Restoration France

mmebahorel — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 04:00:29 GMT

(The first in what will be an occasional series taken from Frederick B. Artz, France Under the Bourbon Restoration, New York: Russell & Russell, Inc., 1963, otherwise known as THE BEST BOOK EVER.)

This is a total TL;DR of shiny. I've tried to pull out the major bits from the 14 pages that are just on press and public opinion - the entire book is this awesome and I want to share with everyone. If you can find it in a library, it is 492 pages of nearly everything you ever needed to know about the politics, economy, and society of the Restoration in an extremely readable style. I'm going to be posting more bits derived from the sections on politics, economics, and society periodically. As in, whenever the hell I get around to it because there is so much shiny.

Press regulation was not new in France, but it received a lot of debate in the Chamber of Deputies, in large part because the Charter of 1814 was extremely vague about the whole thing. The Charter promised, “Frenchmen have the right to publish their opinions in conformity with laws which should suppress all abuses of this liberty.” Well, great. This could lead to freedom of the press or to a huge censorship program, so we get wild swings in policy from 1815 to 1830.

For a quick background, there were roughly two sides to politics in Restoration France. The absolute right wing were the Ultra-Royalists, the men of which it was said they were “plus royalist que le roi”, more Royalist than the King. Louis XVIII was not one of them. His brother, who in 1824 became Charles X, however, was. The most radical of them, including Charles X, wanted a complete restoration of society to pre-1789 forms. They were ostentatious supporters of the church and did everything in their power to limit the franchise and restore the power of the old aristocracy. M. Gillenormand, in my head, is actually more liberal than these guys. The left wing, because of the franchise restrictions, was not any sort of radical group, but the Liberals. The Liberals were generally Bonapartists, an occasional Republican, and a whole bunch of businessmen who objected to Ancien Regime privileges because they got in the way of making money. They were left wing only because the Ultras were so frighteningly right wing. I will get more into the political divisions at another time, but these are your basics. There was also a vast mass in the middle that no one really listened to.

From 1815 to 1819, there was no censorship at all, though attacks on public officials and institutions could be deemed injurious and adjudicated in court. The first major press law was that of 1819, which required the registration of newspapers and censorship of all articles. Any periodical containing political news and appearing more than once a month had to pay a monetary deposit to the government and submit a copy of every article for censorship, in advance of publication, to the local prefect or subprefect. Anything published without meeting this approval was grounds for prosecution of the publisher.

Then, in 1820, there was a new bill passed which required the censor to examine every issue of a journal prior to publication. Punishment for breaking this law was a heavy fine or even the suppression of the newspaper.

Then, this not being strong enough for the Ultras, in 1822 we get another press law. This one codified some new offenses beyond just pissing off the government: “outrages on the religion of the state and on other recognised sects” and “attacks on the hereditary rights of the King”. More importantly, however, was that this law is commonly referred to as the “Law of Tendency” because it gives the government the right to prosecute a publisher for tending to be unfavourable to the government. The two first mentioned aspects alone would have done a great deal to silence the Liberal newspapers, but the Law of Tendency put them out of business almost entirely for a time. In Paris, only two Liberal journals survived, and only after a number of lawsuits. One needs to remember that the Liberals were a growing force in government, though not as any sort of organized party, but in 1822, the ultraconservatives had a majority in the Chamber of Deputies and thus got legislation like this passed. This was the silencing, not of the radical fringe, but of wealthy businessmen who did not always agree with the government and had the right to talk about it and speak against it in the Chamber. Elected representatives could make speeches in the Chamber of Deputies but those speeches could not be reported on favourably outside the Chamber. Some of the Ultra papers were fined for exaggeration, but the law was wholly designed to shut down the Liberal opposition.

Obviously, the law didn't entirely work, because in 1828, it was replaced with a more moderate press law that abolished censorship but maintained liability for slander. So after 1828, it was legal to publish anything but you could also get prosecuted if you were a little too virulent in your criticisms.

So we've got a legal basis for publication of news in which anyone wishing to found a newspaper has to be able to make a very large deposit to the government and for nine of fifteen years of this regime has to submit to government censorship (and for six of those cannot criticise the government in any way). Moreover, newspapers were not allowed to be sold on the street – they were available by subscription only – and had a stamp tax of two centimes per copy and a postage charge of one centime per copy in addition to the cover price. In 1826, it was estimated that there was one subscription to every 427 individuals.

There were no provincial papers of any note. The expense was too great, the trouble was too great, and at times, the government required that any articles reprinted had to pass the censor a second time, even though they had passed to get into print in the first place. Therefore, it was extremely difficult for provincial papers to carry news from the capital, and the Paris papers were not permitted to reprint articles from the provinces. Each province had an official paper, subsidised by the government, printed perhaps three times a week, mostly carrying local news and market reports with an article or two from one of the approved Royalist papers. Only the biggest cities had opposition papers: Lyon, Nantes, Bordeaux, Clermont-Ferrand, and Marseille were the only ones of any note, and even they were small affairs, predominantly cribbed from the Paris dailies when possible and never read outside of the region. The Paris papers were the only papers of note.

Circulation figures for 1823: Constitutionnel, 16,250; Journal des Débats, 13,000; Quotidienne, 5800; Moniteur, 2250; Drapeau Blanc, 1900. Ridiculously small figures for papers that were the most popular throughout France, not just in Paris.

All this sounds as if the press were completely stifled during the period, as the Ultras wanted, and there was no news and thus little public opinion since there was no public information. To the contrary. Everyone who could read read the newspapers, generally the most radical ones on each side. Because there's no fun in it if you aren't making fun of those idiots on the other side (otherwise even today, Keith Olbermann wouldn't have a TV show). Everybody read the papers; nobody subscribed. Most people who did subscribe passed their copies around to friends, but more importantly, every café had at least one subscription, one on each side of the political aisle if they could afford it. Newspapers were also available at the reading rooms and circulating libraries

The major Royalist papers were the Moniteur, which was the official organ of the government, the Quotidienne, the Journal des Débats (but only until 1824), the Drapeau Blanc (founded in 1819 and shuttered in 1830), and the Conservateur, which was published only from 1817 to 1820 but counted Chateaubriand and Lammenais among its contributors. All these papers received some monetary support at some time from the government, and their major function was to ridicule the bourgeoisie and attack anything connected with the revolution. Chateaubriand pulled out all support after 1824, leading to a marked decline in the quality of the attacks.

The major Liberal papers were the Minerve Française (1818-1820), the Indépendant (which later became the Constitutionnel), the Courrier français, and after 1824, the Journal des Débats. All the Liberal papers were strongly anticlerical, and the Constitutionnel was renowned for a column called “The Ecclesiastical Gazette”, in which the most ridiculous stories of priestly ignorance and greed were published with glee. Several of the Liberal papers enjoyed annoying the government by leaving big blank spaces when articles did not pass the censor, so the reader could make his own conclusion about what might have been cut.

In the provinces, the major Liberal papers were the Précurseur in Lyon, the Ami de la Charte (Friend of the Charter) in Nantes and Clermont-Ferrand (no connection between them except that somebody really liked the name), the Indicateur in Bordeaux, and the Phocéen in Marseille. The major Royalist papers were the Gazette Universelle in Lyon and the Echo du Midi in Toulouse.

Pamphlets were nearly as important as newspapers. Because they held up better than newspapers and were cheaper than books, they were easily found in cafés and readings rooms and were re-read for years and thus provided a major means of increasing support for Liberalism in the later years of the Restoration.

Public opinion is hard to quantify during this period because suffrage was so restricted and so much at the mercy of various laws to expand and restrict and change the voting structures as the Ultras and Liberals tried to pass whatever system would get them the most seats in the Chamber of Deputies. However, one can start to identify some regional generalities.

The extreme north, such as Lille, avoided politics because they were too busy making money. This was the most industrialised portion of France, and thus was almost entirely in the hands of the Liberals, though they weren't very active. The church had lost nearly any influence it had had before the Revolution, and the middle class was firmly in control and strongly egalitarian. This is also where you'll find Montreuil-sur-Mer.

In the East (Alsace, Lorainne, and the Ardennes), you again get strong Liberalism with a strong middle class. Education is more valued here than anywhere else as well, possibly related to the much larger number of Protestants than elsewhere in France, and little place for the Catholic Church as a result. The old nobility was almost entirely gone, with lands in smallholdings.

Burgundy, Dijon, and Franche-Comté were considered entirely in the hands of the Liberals, again with a strong middle class. The Church was not wholly marginalised, but in Burgundy, a prefect publicly declared himself a follower of Rousseau in the early part of the Restoration, when the church was calling for the burning of Rousseau's works. Of 49 cafés in Besançon, 31 only bothered with a single newspaper subscription: the Constitutionnel.

Lyon was considered by the Royalists to be faithful, but as a major industrial city (the second largest city in France after Paris in this period), only a few old families supported the king and the rest of the population was fervantly leftist. Lyon was famous as the source of seditious emblems and prints and for the seditious songs sung openly the cafés.

Moving to the South, however, we run into the traditional North/South divide. Provence was on the whole less educated and better supplied with priests than any of the Northern districts, and in Languedoc, battles still raged between Protestants and Catholics. The towns still had significant Liberal elements, however, and after 1824, Liberalism gained strength even in towns that just a couple years before had been strongly Royalist. Bordeaux, as well, started out strongly Royalist but faded into Liberalism by the end of the period.

The Loire valley was strongly Liberal when it cared, but like the extreme North, it was mostly more interested in prosperity than in politics. Nantes was a strong Liberal centre despite the surrounding apathy.

Brittany, Normandy, and Seine valley were a patchwork: the country districts were strongly Royalist while the major towns were almost entirely Liberal. Brest was a centre for the distribution of Liberal literature throughout the Northwest, and Cherbourg was considered equally dangerous. But by contrast, Morbihan was heavily Royalist. Through most of the countryside of the region around Paris, no one class was actually strong enough to dominate, though Paris was of course heavily Liberal and only became moreso as the period progressed.

Not that public opinion meant much until people in Paris finally got fed up with Charles X – with the heavy restrictions on suffrage and the centralisation of government, local opinion meant nothing in terms of governance. All it really meant was that many people welcomed the change in regime in 1830 and Charles was never going to get any kind of support from the provinces that might have allowed him to hold onto his throne. But there was public opinion, and there was a lot of political talk in Paris, and in many of the larger, Liberal towns, among people who could never even aspire to suffrage. There was active political discourse, particularly in Paris, from the highest Salons to the fruit seller on the curb. And the general flow was against the monarchy as conceived by Charles X. In some ways, Hugo has to avoid 1830 because the opinions there aren't actually radical. He wants the students to be radical, and when their fathers in the South are fed up with the regime, that's not terribly helpful to the picture he's trying to paint. It's extremely telling that shifts in opinion seem to date from 1824 – Louis XVIII was initially a moderate and I think that kept a lot of the opinion of the government as a whole focused on the actions of the Ultras in the Chamber of Deputies rather than on the idea of monarchy because Louis was trying to do his best and balance everything. It's when Charles comes in that much stronger defections to the Liberal idea of less monarchical control and more control by the Chamber really take hold in districts like Marseille and Bordeaux.

10littlebullets — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 20:13:01 GMT

So I am in Paris again, for two whole weeks at that, and I have a camera with a gigantic memory card. And you know what that means.

Pictures of most locations that could conceivably be related to Les Mis are already up at Chanvrerie.net, but I intend to make some additions and corrections this year, and this year I also have time to take requests. It can be anything within reason--the Rue de Villette or the street sign of the Rue du Bac, for the musically inclined, or the church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, or the Tour Montparnasse, or whatever you want.

By "within reason," I mean reachable by the Paris Métro or in Montfermeil, not illegal or expensive to photograph, not something I already have photos of, and not impossible to find. The last one really, really depends on location--I could probably find where the Thénardiers' inn was, but not the Convent of the Petit-Picpus. If you're not sure, just ask and I'll tell you if it's not workable.

Related requests are okay too. For example, last year I visited Victor Hugo's tomb in the Panthéon, the museum they made out of his apartments, some museums relating to the original French Revolution, and Saint-Merry, where the real-life barricade of 1832 was built. So if you've got, like, a Vidocq pilgrimage site or something, just let me know. ;)

...and no, I am not going to Digne or Montreuil-sur-Mer this year, so don't even ask. XD

(x-posted to lesmiz, corinthe, prouvaire, and a couple of forums)