A few notes on the organization of the National Guard in Paris at the time of the June Rebellion.
The National Guard is organized into legions, which are subdivided into battalions. (Any time you see Hugo mention a legion in the Paris chapters, he’s talking about a National Guard unit rather than a Municipal Guard unit or an army unit – the army is organized into regiments in this era.) There are thirteen Parisian legions, one for each arrondissement* plus a cavalry unit. In addition, there are four legions from the suburbs.
Parisian legions, quite sensibly, take the number of their arrondissement. Each legion is comprised of four battalions, one for each quartier. The Thirteenth Legion is the cavalry unit and covers the whole of the city.
The banlieue legions each correspond to two of the cantons surrounding Paris. The First Legion covers Saint-Denis and Pantin, the Second covers Courbevoie and Neuilly, the Third covers Sceaux and Villejuif, and the Fourth covers Vincennes and Charenton. Within the legions, each battalion corresponds to a different commune or handful of communes. I’ve put the full list up here.
This means that if you know anyone’s home address, you can figure out which National Guard unit they’d be assigned to, and likewise you can trace people’s address (or at least their arrondissement) from their legion number.
Some Points of Interest
Jean Valjean/Fauchelevent is registered for guard duty at his Rue Plumet address, so he’s in the Tenth Legion.
The Sixth Legion whose standard Enjolras spots on his dawn reconnaissance is the legion that corresponds, to a first approximation**, to the neighborhood of the barricade. It’s interesting that they even mustered, as the 6th arrondissement is not particularly wealthy and it’s right at the center of the fighting. During the June Days some of the National Guard units from the rebellious arrondissements stayed home or defected to the side of the insurgents, but that clearly isn’t happening here. It indicates to a certain degree the lack of popular support for the rebellion – it’s not just legions from the richer neighborhoods in the western half of the city and the outlying suburbs that are being marched in to knock down barricades in the slums; the local unit has also turned out to fight against the insurgents.
Of course, the National Guard isn’t exactly an unbiased sample of the neighborhood, since Louis-Philippe had purged it of everyone who couldn’t pay for their own weapons and uniform, but I think the choice of legion was very deliberate on Hugo’s part. This is the point at which Enjolras realizes the rest of Paris is not going to join the revolt and the barricade is doomed, because he’s seen the banner of the local National Guard unit arrayed alongside the rest of the forces of order. The people have risen, but they’re fighting on the wrong side.
* Under the the old twelve arrondissement system in place at the time
** The barricade itself is actually on the border of the 4th and 5th arrondissements, because the layout of the old arrondissement system was ridiculous. But the 6th arrondissement covers the neighborhood on the other side of the Rue Saint-Denis, which is the main thoroughfare the barricade is theoretically guarding (to the extent it’s guarding anything besides Grantaire’s wine supply).
