Apparently Hugo modeled Marius after his own image and this is Hugo young so this is how I plan to picture Marius
cometomecosette reblogged
Les Misérables | Gavroche Thénardier
Illustrated by Victor Hugo
cometomecosette reblogged
pILF TELL ME MORE ABOUT WATERLOO BEING A DODGE AGAINST THE CENSORS PLEASE
ALLRIGHT:D
Hugo knew, of course, that he was in bad favor with NIII’s regime. And Les Miserables , while overtly about pre-NIII days and thus defensibly not about the current political situation…well, of course it is about the current political situation. There are even a few points where Hugo slips in a Very Pointed Comment. And the whole political point of the novel, as directed at a contemporary audience, was of course a call to arms and a rally for a republican uprising. Some of the reason Les Mis is the way it is is because Hugo was trying to get that rallying call across really clear while also not getting immediately censored and banned and having to go back to smuggling his work across the border. (the political point of the novel is, of course, not the only point, there are like eighty things going on in Les Mis. But it was the part that Hugo was worried about getting censored and so the part he had to work to protect!)
He was unwilling to cut the political argument; he was (rationally!) worried about getting banned. What to do?
WATERLOO TIME !!
Waterloo gave the French the victory back from that big defeat–or at least took it from the English and their allies. It also specifically gave shoutouts to some of the big political families . As Hugo said to Albert Lacroix on the 8th of May (1) :
“If we give quotes, insist on Waterloo, bring out (focus on) what the book has of the national (cause/identity), what stirs the French fibers(/soul), make Persigny ashamed to stop a book in which justice is finally done to Ney, grandfather of his wife, make the seizure impossible by saying it is the battle of Waterloo won by France, etc…”
Still, Hugo worried, as he said in a letter of May 1862:
“ As far as Paris is concerned, it seems to me that the friendly newspapers are silent while the enemy newspapers attack. Where does it come from? Is there any order from somewhere? You know we can go as fast as we want. Brussels has the whole manuscript. Give me some details about what’s happening in Paris. Is there an underside of cards (/something in the cards; basically, are there secret orders or threats going around)?”
(He may well have been right; a government like Napoleon III’s , in a city like Paris was at the time, doesn’t have to print public announcements to let word get out that it would be a bad idea to speak up on this or that issue. But that’s speculation ,so moving on–)
You know how people (including me, hi!) sometimes talk (and complain, again hi) about what a tonal shift it is to move from the barricades to the very limited domestic world of the Pontmercy household ? Yeah Hugo knew he was doing that, he wanted to use it:
M. Lacroix had to talk to you about a big question. Some passages in what will come seem dangerous (I am afraid that M. Lacroix has made some imprudent communication). I am asked for deletions (only for publishing in France)… Another question: would not it be good to also publish the last four volumes en bloc? Less tugging and the effect of the barricade a little dampened by the effect of the denouement which is intimate and in tears. Weigh. Decide.”
Hugo needed the readers to love the Amis, who he wrote to be “the apotheosis and the triumph of the republic”, emotionally invest in them, and rally with them–and he needed the authorities to totally miss that happening. He knew the barricade would get kind of “dampened” by the following chapters–not an effect an author would normally want for their big grand setpiece! But he was counting on it, he needed the plausible deniability.
I don’t at all mean to suggest that Hugo wrote Waterloo as pure censor-chaff, or that he didn’t like the ending he wrote on its own, or anything. He wanted to say what he said! He wanted to write that bit of history himself and his Waterloo Thesis Statement is a repeated theme in his work, he definitely Cared about it for its own sake! And Victor “king of human tears” Hugo could never pass up a Tragic Heartfelt Denouement. But Les Mis was a protest novel that had to convincingly deny its own nature, a call for a revolution that had to time warp 30 years for the call to be allowed through. That affected the way it was written —lines included, names mentioned or dropped, the almost complete silence about national politics post-barricade– and it affected the way the book was published, marketed and sold.
And of course it worked! The book didn’t get made contraband! Very Smart Critics immediately started satisfied huffing about how Hugo didn’t really make any specific political arguments, despite the book explicitly calling for socialist republican revolution. And the popular audience, who Hugo had really wanted to reach, and who he’d trusted to know what he was about, Got It. Enjolras was quoted by people fighting for their own representative governments the way protest movements now use Do You Hear The People Sing.
..And all this so today a casual reader can say “lmao why do we have to read the Waterloo digression” :P
French quotes under the cut :
This is so interesting and worthwhile to know.
It takes me back to that one review of the Dallas production of the musical, where the reviewer talked about the “dark yet relevant” message of the piece that “revolutions always fail and only individual redemption is possible.”
Of course that wasn’t the message Hugo meant to convey. Far from it. But it’s understandable how someone might take away that message. Not only because the musical cuts Hugo’s more optimistic digressions, but because in both the novel and the musical, after the barricade falls, the plot pulls away from politics and from the concept of country-wide or worldwide change in favor of an ending that’s all intimate focus on individuals.
It’s interesting to realize that Hugo needed to do that to save the novel from being banned or censored. He most certainly wasn’t saying that large-scale socio-political change is impossible, but needed plausible deniability that he was actually calling for that change. Context really does matter.
Jean Valjean the Blocking Figure
(This is a 10-page pseudo academic essay I wrote just to process all my feelings about Valjean and Cosette. In the future I might write more in the same vein: e.g. “Javert the Obsessed Pursuer” or “Éponine the...” I’m not sure what, since she’s been reduced to so many things.)
The term “blocking figure” is one often heard in academia to describe a stock character of romantic comedy, both in the classical Roman plays of Plautus and Terence and in Shakespeare. This is the character, typically the father or guardian of one of the principle young lovers, who initially prevents those lovers from marrying, but is doomed to be thwarted in the end. He most often takes the form of the senex iratus – “angry old man” or “angry father.” In the classical Roman plays, he’s usually the father of the male lover, who disapproves of the female lover because she’s beneath their station. But in Shakespeare and in later examples such as Italian commedia dell’arte and opera buffa, he’s usually the girl’s father or guardian, who uses his patriarchal authority to withhold her from the boy. In some examples he knows about their love and actively opposes it; in others the lovers know instinctively that he will oppose it, forcing them to keep their romance a secret. This trope is hardly exclusive to comedy either and not even always male.
I just read @pilferingapples‘s Brick!Club post that discusses the nuns’ initial disdain for Fantine when she’s placed in their care, and the issue of Hugo’s women being judgmental and opposed to each other.
Of course in a way, Hugo makes a good point. There’s valid, important commentary to be made about the ways society pits women against each other. But the problem is that Hugo doesn’t exactly blame society at this point. Instead he implies that disdain for “lesser” women is just a natural female instinct - “one of the most profound instincts of feminine dignity,” no less. Which of course is nonsense, to put it nicely.
Every now and then Hugo does this sort of thing, doesn’t he? Combines valid social commentary with some unfortunate implications.
This reminds me of some meta I remember reading long ago, which argued that one of Hugo’s messages is that love can’t survive in poverty. The poor, evidently, can only abandon or exploit each other (the Thénardier family), be abandoned or snubbed by love objects “out of their league” (Fantine by Tholomyes, Éponine by Marius), love in a selfish, possessive way that harms the loved one (Éponine with Marius and even some of Valjean’s instincts with Cosette), or else destroy their own lives through self-sacrifice (Valjean for his biological family, Fantine for Cosette, ultimately Éponine for Marius, and ultimately Valjean for Cosette). Whereas the only truly healthy, reciprocal love relationships Hugo depicts (Marius and Cosette’s romance, the friendship among the Amis, and Valjean and Cosette’s father/daughter bond - though again, even the latter is complicated and eventually doomed by the shadow of his miserable past) all take place in an upper-class realm.
On the one hand, there’s valid commentary to be made about how poverty and social gaps hurt relationships. But on the other hand, is it really correct or fair to imply that no one in poverty can hope to find healthy, reciprocal love unless they get rich?
So much to love about Hugo’s writing, but so much worth questioning too.
Was anyone else on Facebook in 2012 when the Les Mis movie's official page posted the Hugo quote "To love beauty is to see light," and hundreds of people went ballistic because they thought the movie was replacing "To love another person is to see the face of God" with that quote in order to avoid mentioning religion? Anyone else remember that?