Feuilly writing "Vivent Les Peuples" on the Wall (The Brick)
Voting ended onNov 13, 2024
Bahorel's Law School Drama can be found in the Brick at: 3.4.1
Feuilly writing "Vivent Les Peuples" on the Wall can be found in the Brick, at: 5.1.2
PROPAGANDA:
(Full submission for Bahorel's Law School Drama, submitted by @theatrehearts )
Bahorel firmly buttoning up his coat every time he so much as walks past the law school, taking «hygenic precautions»
On his own, [Grantaire] was actually composed of two apparently incompatible elements. He was ironic and cordial. His indifference was loving. His mind dispensed with belief, yet his heart could not dispense with friendship. A thorough contradiction; for an affection is conviction. This was his nature.
Literally every single word about Grantaire makes me feral but since this passage is a little less quoted than “No one loves the day like a blind man”, I’m going to shamelessly rant about it.
One of the reasons that I love Grantaire so much is that he represents the way that being constantly ground down can turn anybody and anyone cynical - even nihilistic. Very few people are born believing in nothing.
The way Hugo defines being a “miserable one” through Grantaire is by showing not simply the poverty and abuse that the poor suffer under. But also the way living in those situations can slowly rob people of any outward want to act upon anything. Though we know little of R’s life before, we can see through this a glimpse of it. He is still a loving character. But that has comingled with a cynicism - sometimes bordering on despair - that robs Grantaire of any want to action.
Hugo says “Besides Enjolras Grantaire became somebody again”. This alludes to a Grantaire who was once someone who believed in something. Who did have hopes and dreams. What happened? What happened was that he lived in a world hostile to the humanity of anyone but the people on top.
Grantaire shows the way that misery can rob people even of their ability to care, to take action. A shift so fundamental it becomes part of their nature. It’s so easy to ignore the ways that poverty and misery can internally change someone, instead of the external ravages of being miserable. And that’s one of the reasons that love his character so much.
At that time, there was a somewhat unconscious revolutionary spirit moving amongst the people, especially the youth.
“Other groups of minds were more serious. In that direction, they sounded principles, they attached themselves to the right. They grew enthusiastic for the absolute, they caught glimpses of infinite realizations; the absolute, by its very rigidity, urges spirits towards the sky and causes them to float in illimitable space. There is nothing like dogma for bringing forth dreams. And there is nothing like dreams for engendering the future. Utopia to-day, flesh and blood to-morrow.”
The revolution wasn’t anything very organized, but there were little pockets of people who banded together. One such group in Paris called itself the Society of the Friends of the A B C. They supported education and the elevation of man. They usually met either in the Corinthe, a wine shop, or a cafe, the Musain.
The core group of the A B C was made up of nine students.
Enjolras. “a charming young man, who was capable of being terrible.” Very handsome, with the appearance that he had perhaps already survived the revolution before. He appears to be very youthful even though he’s actually 22. He is so focused on the cause that he doesn’t seem to realize that women (or anything else) exist. “He was the marble lover of liberty.”
Combeferre. The philosopher. While Enjolras’s ideology leads to war, Combeferre’s leads to peace. He is very well-educated. “affirmed nothing, not even miracles; denied nothing, not even ghosts.” A guide. Combeferre is not completely opposed to physical fighting, but he prefers to change the world through education.
Jean Prouvaire. So soft. A musician, gardener, poet. He normally speaks very softly, but his voice can grow manly at times. Constantly studying and contemplating. “He spoke softly, bowed his head, lowered his eyes, smiled with embarrassment, dressed badly, had an awkward air, blushed at a mere nothing, and was very timid. Yet he was intrepid.”
Feuilly. A workingman and an orphan who educated himself. “The range of his embrace was immense. This orphan had adopted the peoples.” He is the one in the group to bring up other nations besides France.
Courfeyrac. See Tholomyès. He is filled with playful, youthful energy. He is honorable, unlike Tholomyès. Courfeyrac is the light and center of the group.
Bahorel. “loving nothing so much as a quarrel, unless it were an uprising; and nothing so much as an uprising, unless it were a revolution; always ready to smash a window-pane, then to tear up the pavement, then to demolish a government, just to see the effect of it.” He has been in school for 11 years and swears he will never become a lawyer. Even though his parents are poor, he spends his time in college wasting money and wandering around, although this does help connect the A B C to other similar groups around Paris.
L’aigle/Lesgles/Légle/Bossuet. Bald. “Bossuet was a gay but unlucky fellow. His specialty was not to succeed in anything. As an offset, he laughed at everything.” He doesn’t have much money, but he is very resourceful. He is studying law and doesn’t have a permanent place to live, although he often stays with Joly.
Joly. A medical student who is always checking his own tongue in the mirror. Despite his hypochondria, he is the happiest of them all.
Grantaire. The skeptic. “Grantaire was a man who took good care not to believe in anything.” Grantaire is very social and knows where to find good food and good wine. He is homely. “There is but one certainty, my full glass.” But Grantaire loves Enjolras, not for his ideas, but for his character. “Grantaire in the presence of Enjolras became some one once more.” Grantaire himself is full of contradictions: irony and cordiality, indifferent and loving. “He was the obverse of Enjolras.”
The word ‘historical’ ruins the import of this chapter title, Wraxall, you buffoon. LOVE that Enjolras, though.
So much has been said about these chapters already. We do love our barricade boys around here. But I’m not here to give people what they want, I’m here to get excited about political theory. This age of fleeting political ideals and the necessary contradictions of having to juggle a single political philosophy in this rapidly changing atmosphere is fascinating. It’s the sort of thing that I, living where I do and when I do, have no basis of comparison for. The inevitable tensions of an increasingly transparent divide between the interests of those in power and those without is only exacerbated by the knowledge of how tenuous the control of power actually is. Several regimes have risen and fallen in living memory; all but the youngest generation has seen power dramatically shift hands. There is no entrenched political establishment and the foundation of political power is weak indeed.
It’s both a great and terrible time to have a revolution. People are more intimately familiar with the workings of political uprisings and perhaps more easily swayed to collectivize, having seen them succeed(?) before. On the other hand, every movement in recent memory has been short-lived and ultimately crumbled, seemingly as readily as it took power (*cough* because the class system has not been utterly abolished and the wealth of the aristocracy redistributed). Essentially there’s high political turnover. Citizens can’t trust that any political movement represents meaningful, worthwhile change.
This is why the Triumvirate is king. The balance of them is perfectly designed to target any combination of the concerns above. I’m of course talking about Enjolras, Combeferre, and Feuilly, I mean Courfeyrac. Respectively, the logos, ethos, and pathos of the revolution. (Seriously, though, it’s an interesting twist of fate and plot logic that Courfeyrac ended up being so prominent in the Les Mis consciousness and Feuilly is almost always forgotten.)
It’s always important, to me at least, to return to the core of Les Amis. Hugo gives us enough detail that we see them as fully fledged characters that we can relate to, but not so much detail that they become immutable. We don’t spend time in their personal thoughts, we don’t learn their histories as we do with Jean Valjean or even Marius. I don’t think it’s unfair of me to say that we project ourselves onto Les Amis more than anyone else in this book. Hugo does everything but directly ask us to do so, to put Les Amis in our own political contexts, to consider the logic and philosophy of our own revolutions.
The most revealing thing about this chapter for me was how much it says about us, here and now, reading the original, “canon” concepts of the revolutionaries and then looking at how we envision them today, in fanfic, in musicals, in shows. What does being radical look like to any of us? How do we positively or negatively frame their actions? How much do we respect their convictions?
Okay, I had put this off to do a more complete character study post on each of the boys, but I don’t think that’s happening. So we’ll table that for when I get around to it and, for the purposes of brickclub, let’s focus on two things: the general introduction and the light symbolism.
First, despite what Hugo explained a few chapters ago as Marius’ internal contradictions in his new worldview, he here situates him very firmly with the larger trend of public opinion. “People adored both Napoleon and liberty,” he says, which sounds a lot like where Marius is at right now.
We learn also that this rising fervor of change is tied to absolutism. Not in the despotic kind of way, but in the ‘refusing to settle for anything less than the Ideal’ kind of way. So from the start we’re setting up this political moment as one based in hope and dreams, rather than purely anger or cynicism. They’re not just fighting against the existing system, they’re fighting for a better one.
And really, that’s what this intro is for. It’s for situating the Amis and the political changes within a larger historical and ideological context. Everything that happens related to the insurrection and the revolutionaries is situated in a larger social context. They’re part of a movement, one that has roots in the past and which stretches towards the future. I know that the de-politicization of the story in the BBC show has been a big topic of conversation lately, and this chapter does a great job in showing just why that de-politicization is missing the entire point of the story. The personal is political, in the exact same way that the political is personal. The Amis don’t exist apart from Fantine and Valjean’s oppression, or Marius’ Napoleon fanboying, or even Myriel’s doctrine of royalist compassion. They’re all part of the same moment in history, responding to the same stimuli, and interconnected with each other.
Moving on, light symbolism:
-“At the point we have now reached in this drama it is perhaps worth casting a ray of light on these young individuals before the reader sees them swallowed up into the darkness of a tragic episode.” Self explanatory, and self-aware of its role as symbolism. No subtlety here, only blatant foreshadowing. This is, like, the Greek Chorus or the Shakespearean Prologue of light symbolism. It’s straight up telling us what’s going to happen and why we should care.
-Enjolras: surprisingly, nothing explicit! No fires, no dawn, only some references to the sky, and even then, only as a comparison to explain Hugo’s Forehead Thing. But that’s okay, because after Enjolras we have...
-Combeferre: “And between the two types of brightness he was inclined to favour illumination over conflagration. A fire can certainly create a glow, but why not wait for daybreak? A volcano gives light, but dawn gives even better light. Maybe Combeferre preferred the pure white of the beautiful to the blaze of the sublime. A light obscured by smoke, progress bought by violence, only half satisfied this tender-hearted and serious-minded individual." Not only are we getting Combeferre’s own opinion, we’re getting an implicit understanding of Enjolras’. Combeferre corrects and completes him (’complement and corrective,’ if you’re Donougher) and so because we’ve already learned that Enjolras is fierce and uncompromising in his ideals, we can infer that he trends more towards the fire, or the volcano. He prefers the brighter, less pure light now, whereas Combeferre would rather wait for the purest light to come at some point. (Which is, of course, why they are so perfect for each other. They balance each other out and provide a necessary counterpoint to the other’s flaws. Or, in other words, "...if the greatness of revolution is to gaze steadily on the radiant ideal and fly towards it, thunderbolts notwithstanding, with fire and blood in your grip, the beauty of progress is to be untarnished.")
-Jean Prouvaire: more associated with darkness than light, but not in the sense of being in darkness. Jehan concerns himself with the things that throw mankind into shadow, and at night he contemplates the stars. He, the poet, the Romantic, is willing to embrace the darkness, to study it and to understand it, because he cannot bring light to what he does not understand. (Sidenote: it’s so easy to forget this, and I do it a lot too, but Jean Prouvaire isn’t just an over the top Romantic poet, Jean Prouvaire is a scholar and a nerd. “All day long he delved into social issues: remuneration for work, capital, credit, marriage, religion, freedom of thought, freedom in love, education, penal justice, poverty, the right of association, property, production and distribution, the earthly conundrum that casts in shadow the human ant-hill.") (Sidenote too: Jean Prouvaire almost has a Bishop parallel: “He had two turns of mind, one directed towards man, the other towards God: study or contemplation." This echoes the part where the Bishop had two activities, studying and working on his flowers, and he called them both gardening. But unlike Myriel, Jehan differentiates between the physical and the spiritual, and takes a different approach to dealing with each.)
Feuilly: nothing explicit, not even when we learn that he educated himself. An interesting choice.
Courfeyrac: “The others gave more light, he gave more warmth. The fact is, he had all the qualities of a centre, roundedness and radiance." In a chapter where light is absolutely being associated with capital-P Progress, Courfeyrac, who is being tied textually to the bourgeoisie and to Tholomyes specifically, is characterized by its lack. But, that doesn’t mean he’s actually lacking in anything, or ideologically suspect, it means that he is the human element. Light nourishes the soul, warmth nourishes the body, and Courfeyrac is being set up as someone who focuses on earthly matters. There’s a reason Marius is drawn to him, specifically.
Bahorel: also nothing.
Bossuet: too busy with puns to bother with light symbolism.
Joly: too busy sharing his intro with Bossuet to have any.
Grantaire: like Enjolras, more associated with sky than with light. It makes sense that his intro would echo Enjolras’, and I’m actually wondering if anyone’s done a side-by-side analysis of their two intros. Given that it’s this fandom, I’m sure someone has, but I haven’t come across it. I’m curious just how many symbolic parallels there are.
