#lm 5.2.6

[lmchaptertitlebracket]

Round 1, Matchup 200: V.i.5 vs V.ii.6

Which chapter title do you prefer?

What Horizon is Visible from the Top of the Barricade

Future Progress

Voting ended onMay 25, 2025

[the-wraxall-illustrations]

Page 102

[cliozaur]

Hugo’s method of measuring governments’ achievements by the length of sewers they’ve built ­— there is something Freudian in it (Louis Philippe’s sewers were the longest).

We did not ask for this, but Hugo still told us about technical peculiarities and difficulties related to the construction of the sewers. It seems the rosy picture painted in the previous chapter of clean, straightened sewers was an exaggeration. The reality remained foul and hazardous—so, be prepared; it won't be a stroll for Jean Valjean. The popular saying 'to descend into the sewer is to enter the grave' reveals the grim state of these tunnels.  

I am glad that Hugo finally mentioned cholera, although not in the context of the 1832 epidemic and the impending dangers for Valjean and Marius. Frankly, the chapter's title is somewhat misleading: upon reading it, I found nothing about 'future progress.' Instead, I encountered a lot of nineteenth-century nonsense about miasms in the air and healthy water.

[dolphin1812]

I don’t have a lot to say on the geological information here, since I don’t know a lot about the subject, but it’s fascinating to read!

“quicksands are encountered in which one sticks fast, and in which a man sinks visibly. Add suffocation by miasmas, burial by slides, and sudden crumbling of the earth. Add the typhus, with which the workmen become slowly impregnated”

It continues to be a dangerous environment, though, with both immediate physical dangers (quicksand) and the constant threat of disease.

“There are no bulletins for such acts of bravery as these, which are more useful, nevertheless, than the brutal slaughter of the field of battle.”

This feels like a parallel to Waterloo in some ways. Hugo definitely glorified the French troops there, focusing on ordinary men rather than “great” men like Napoleon, but here, he goes even further, showing how a profession that’s either ignored or looked down on (sewer worker) is actually more “glorious” than being a soldier, with its men facing the same risk (death) for a much better cause. 

The details about the 1832 sewer provide useful context for the cholera outbreak and the rebellion, with the spread of disease due to the sewer’s poor conditions driving discontent.

“The sheet of water is healthy, it comes from heaven in the first place and next from the earth; the sheet of air is unhealthy, it comes from the sewer. All the miasms of the cesspool are mingled with the breath of the city; hence this bad breath.”

Hugo pretty clearly subscribes to miasma theory here, blaming the spread of diseases like cholera on the filthy air from the sewer; it’s a fascinating reminder of where he stood as a nineteenth-century writer scientifically, as normally, I feel like his time period is clear from his attitudes and his prose rather than his views on scientific theories.

While miasma theory hasn’t been held up today, he uses it effectively: if the bad smells from the sewer cause disease, then why not redirect that toxic material to fields, where it can be used for crops, instead of letting it poison the city?

[everyonewasabird]

Brickclub 5.2.6 “Future Progress”

You know, hearing about how many sewers in canon era Paris were uncovered open-air canals gives me a lot more sympathy for the old-fashioned concept of miasma. I do see why doctors would feel the need to say, “This seems bad, medically speaking, and I’m pretty sure Health and Hygiene equal being as far from this horrible thing as possible.”

Scientifically, though, Hugo sure does seem to be missing some steps about what it is and isn’t possible to contaminate. He thinks the air over the sewer can be contaminated in dangerous ways... but not the water under it? I have questions, especially since we’re post John Snow (the guy who figured out some time around 1850 that cholera was spread in the drinking water) by the time this is written. I’m not sure what’s up with that.

We learn about how massively the sewer was expanded (tenfold!) over the various regimes following Bruneseau. It sounds like maybe Hugo thinks the improvement of efficiency in wasting the waste will also be an improvement in the efficiency of actual using it: that now that there’s a system, they can move towards using that system to repurpose the sewage as fertilizer?

Which is interesting as a metaphor, because it feels like something that’s true of some things and absolutely not true of other things. The most obvious parallel of sewers is prisons, and do I think prison expansion and expansion of the power of the police is beneficial to a hopeful eventual post-prison world? Fuck no.

But if the sewer’s expansion is worse than useless, why are we applauding Bruneseau for beginning it?

And so I feel a little lost on this metaphor. We end the digression on the horrors of the sewer which echo the horrors of prison and the dawn of a progress that changes that into something more modern-feeling and efficient..... but then what? I feel like I’m not quite getting the final conclusion here.

[fremedon]

Brickclub 5.2.6, “Future Progress”

Nothing to add to Bird’s writeups of the last two chapters except “What he said,” so I’m going to jump in here where I have rather a lot to say.

So, Bruneseaus’s regularizing and straightening and mapping of the sewer under Napoleon is typical of the era--the Restoration and the July Monarchy inherited a lot of Napoleon’s reforms that really couldn’t be undone, because what had preceded them was too complicated a snarl of historical accidents to recreate on purpose.

Like meritocratic promotion in the armed forces, a professional civil service, uniform law codes and weights and measures and taxes across France, it was a good and necessary improvement. But also like those, it is enabling a fundamentally misguided and unjust system to continue working, even more efficiently than before, without suddenly filling the streets with the contents of the sewers or of the lowest human mines.

The list of the lengths of new sewer added by successive regimes is introduced with the aside “--these figures are interesting,” which I think means this actually is important and Hugo is trying to call your attention to it with just enough sarcasm to deflect anyone who hasn’t figured out by now that the digressions are the heart of the book’s moral argument? Something like that?

At any rate, this is one of the only sentences in the book that directly mentions “the present regime” without any deflection. And I think Bruneseau’s work underneath the surface is meant to remind us of Haussmann’s above it, especially in conjunction with Hugo’s digs in the previous chapter at the architecture of the Rue de Rivoli being mirrored in the sewers. Below as above, the streets have been widened, straightened, and prettied up--and the people they used to contain have been displaced, underground and out of sight.

And then we return to the moment where we left Jean Valjean:

Thirty years ago, at the time of the fifth-sixth of June insurrection, there was still in many places more or less the original sewer. A great number of streets, now cambered, then had a gutter running down the middle of them. Very often to be seen in the declivity into which the sides of a street or a crossroads sloped were large square gratings with thick iron bars that gleamed from being polished by the feet of the crowd, dangerous and slippery for vehicles and liable to bring down horses.

The entrance to the ancient sewer is itself a remnant of the ancien regime, something that makes society--the vehicle--swerve and rock but that can be fatal to the individual misérable--the horse.

The chapter ends with Hugo returning his metaphor to its non-symbolic argument: that Paris is sickening and impoverishing itself to throw away a thing--sewage--which has value.

We know that by ‘cleaning the sewer’ we mean returning the muck to the earth, putting dung back in the fields. As a result of this measure there will be a reduction in poverty and an improvement in health for the whole social community.

And I wish, I wish, given 1848, that the symbolism here did not make that proposition work out metaphorically to “deport the urban poor to the countryside.”

But I can’t see any way that it doesn’t.