I will never get over the les miserables fandom like… Jean Valjean is the main character and he has like…NOOOO content. At all. Instead everyone lost their minds over the fucking less amis de l’a/b/o or whatever even though each one of them has like literally a one or two sentence personality. It was literally like a once-ler esque treatment where they randomly zoomed in on the most fuckable twink, except theres like 10 of them. Ten fucking oncelers. I literally was never able to remember them or tell them apart despite reading the entire unabridged book several times. Jean Valjean was so good and these ungrateful fucks did THIS to him.
oh no, you’re omitting the worst part: no one was interested on the true personalities and appearances of these ‘fuckable twinks’ [who happened to be cool characters after all], they collectively agreed that the only acceptable way of writing/drawng them would be cutesy modern AU’s where Enjolras was a hypersexual homosexual, Grantaire was a hipster, Romanticism ™ became ‘cutesy flower and female empowerment tumblr aesthetics’ and everyone would be gay, black, disabled, fat and mentally ill.
C L A S S I C 2 0 1 3
This little piece of nastiness from an anti-sjw blog has, ironically, neatly summed up the importance of Les Amis far better than I ever could.
The father turned towards the younger girl who sat on the bed near the window, and shouted to her in a thundering voice:— Quick! get off that bed, you lazy thing! will you never do anything? Break a pane of glass! The little girl jumped off the bed with a shiver. Break a pane! he repeated. The child stood still in bewilderment. Do you hear me? repeated her father, I tell you to break a pane! The child, with a sort of terrified obedience, rose on tiptoe, and struck a pane with her fist. The glass broke and fell with a loud clatter. Good, said the father. In the meantime, a sob became audible in one corner. What’s that? cried the father. The younger daughter exhibited her bleeding fist, without quitting the corner in which she was cowering.
…
You see, my beautiful young lady, pursued Jondrette, her bleeding wrist! It came through an accident while working at a machine to earn six sous a day. It may be necessary to cut off her arm.
cosette, it’s past your bedtime / there is a lady all in white
i mean stylistically this is a bit all over the place but i just had to try and properly do this idea once i’d thought of it (i wanted to do it as a gif between the two but it was too complicated lol)
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).
1988 edition:here you can watch Pinkisevich’s illustrations to Les Misérables, The Man Who Laughs, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Ninety-Three.
I’ve seen just a few Les Misérables illustrations from the 1972 soviet edition of Victor Hugo’s works on the internet. You can hardly find them, but listen, they’re worth sharing!
