June 1832 primary sources roundup
I have tentative plans to post things for Barricade Day that will add to this list, but in the meantime, if you’re interested in reading about the real June 1832 revolt in the participants’ (and witnesses’) own words, here’s your one-stop shopping.
Charles Jeanne’s letter to his sister: THIS IS PROBABLY THE COOLEST ONE. Nobody even knew it existed until it was unearthed a few years ago, but Charles Jeanne, leader of the Saint-Merry barricades in 1832, wrote his sister a detailed fifty-page account of the revolt from prison the following year. (How he wound up in prison instead of dead is a long story involving a suicidal ten-man charge against an entire army that unexpectedly worked. For certain values of ‘worked.’) The letter is incredibly cool and contains a whole bunch of incidents that Hugo included in Les Mis… with certain changes. Along with some incidents, like the final charge, that are so preposterous they wouldn’t have been believable in fiction. I’ve translated the whole thing; you can find it under my “à cinq heures nous serons tous morts“ tag, or if the post-in-French-reblog-in-English format is too awkward for you, it’s also up on my website in 8 parts: One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight
Alexandre Dumas’ memoirs: are up in English on archive.org, and totally worth a read, because Dumas writing about his life is just as flamboyant as Dumas writing about swashbuckling protagonists. The bits that deal with June 1832 are in Vol. 6, Book IV, chapters 5-7.
Excerpt of a letter from George Sand to Laure Decerfz, 13 June 1832. Proto-feminist author and Romantic-era wild woman George Sand was living right across the river from the morgue at the time, and got a pretty gruesome view of the bodies coming in and the massacre of insurgents who weren’t dead yet.
Heinrich Heine’s June 1832 coverage for the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung: in English on archive.org. Heine was living in Paris and acting as their correspondent for French affairs. His analysis of republicanism in Europe starts on page 255, and his account of the insurrection itself starts on page 275. The “liveblogging” section (daily despatches to the newspaper) starts on page 299.
Later writing and non-firsthand accounts of June 1832:
Louis Blanc’s account of the revolt from his History of Ten Years. Hugo relied heavily on this as a source for his Les Mis research.
John Stuart Mill’s June 1832 coverage/analysis from his weekly column in the Examiner.
The London Times’ June 1832 coverage
Translated excerpt from R. Sayre & M. Löwy’s book L’insurrection des Misérables: why June 1832 struck a chord with the artistic world regardless of political affiliation.
Excerpt from Jill Harsin’s Barricades describing the revolt in the context of the wider republican movements of the time.
The most important primary source on June 1832 is probably the trial of the insurgents from Saint-Merry, which is really damn long and alternates between really boring and really fascinating. The whole transcript was published by the radical press (along with reprints of newspaper editorials favorable to the insurgents) to whip up public support for Charles Jeanne and the other defendants. The whole thing is available in PDF in volume 11 of Les Révolutions du XIXe siècle, and I was working on correcting the OCR and making it available in text format before I got sucked headfirst into another fandom and it was put on the back burner.
Hégésippe Moreau on the anniversary of the revolt published a poem called “Les 5 et 6 juin: chant funèbre.”
Among Verlaine’s juvenilia is a poem about early-1830s insurrections entitled “Des Morts.” Probably dates from the late 1850s or early 1860s, so after the June Days and Napoleon III’s coup d’état, but—tragically ironic, given the last line—before the Commune.
Several works published in the immediate(ish) aftermath of June 1832 that were censored by the government are up on Gallica, including Rey-Dussueil’s novel “Le Cloître Saint-Méry” and Noel Parfait’s poem “L’aurore d’un beau jour.”
The back pages of my “à cinq heures nous serons tous morts” tag contain some of Thomas Bouchet’s editorial notes to the Charles Jeanne letter, on the insurrection and how Hugo adapted it.
As for dead-tree sources, I highly recommend Sayre & Löwy’s L’insurrection des Misérables: romantisme et révolution en juin 1832, the Charles Jeanne letter published under the title of À cinq heures nous serons tous morts with extensive, fabulous commentary by Thomas Bouchet, Jill Harsin’s Barricades (English), and Mark Traugott’s The Insurgent Barricade (English).
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