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).
i wonder if companies that advertise on tumblr realize that i am 300% less likely to buy their product specifically because i saw it advertised on tumblr and i am a creature of spite
I am a social media marketing expert for a living, and I can also 300% confirm this is true.
You should elaborate more on that! Does the spite really influence people’s purchasing habits? I’ve always wondered whether we were tricking ourselves into thinking adverts don’t have their intended effect on us.
Spite absolutely can have an affect on purchasing habits. It’s not that we think we’re ‘above it’ – well, actually, we do, but that’s not what influences whether we’ll purchase something based on an ad on a site like tumblr. It’s invasive advertising that’s the issue. For example, on places like Facebook, ad integration is set up to look the same as a regular Facebook link post. We may not notice it right away, but it will more than likely stick in our subconscious. We’re not assaulted by it.
That’s not what’s happening here. Yahoo is running test advertising platforms to determine what users on tumblr will respond to the best. In case you haven’t noticed, there have been several versions of ads running across here recently, with increased turnover in regards to ads testing. This is tumblr and yahoo working to determine what we’ll respond to.
The problem they’re facing is that, unlike platforms like Facebook and Twitter, where each post looks the same as the next post, tumblr posts have an almost infinite variety, due to the fact that this is essentially supposed to be the back end dashboard to our own completely customizable blogs/websites.
(Truthfully, we probably were never meant to spend so much time on the back end, but that’s what tumblr has evolved into.)
So what that means is tumblr has a problem in that they need to get ads to us that people will respond to, and they need to do it in such a way that’s not assaulting to the end user (us). Yet, advertisers don’t want to have to create hyper-customized ads that will flow better on a platform like this. They want tumblr to create a template that they can fill in with their ad specs, and be done with it (we ad/marketing people are just as fucking lazy as everyone else).
So, what this ends up meaning for us is lots of ads we hate, and ads we won’t respond to, because we want tumblr to stay streamlined the way we like (see: all hate spewed at every update ever), and that can’t happen if yahoo wants to make money off of their gagillion-dollar deal. They will keep testing ad variations on us to figure out what works, which none of them will because every ad they integrate is seen as an ‘interruption’ by us. Oh, and it doesn’t help that tumblr users are some of the most viscous people in social media. You give us an ad that gets in our way, and we’ll tear you four new assholes.
tl;dr Yahoo wants to make money off of us with ads that don’t work because the advertising industry is too lazy to make ones that will. And we’re the ones who suffer for it.
The companies that are winning the tumblr marketing game are the ones like dennys that create their own blogs and manage to make their posts so entertaining that people willingly reblog them. Unfortunately for Yahoo, they haven’t figured out how to monetize that yet.
