kainosite

[kainosite]

run.

Bonus Thumbnail

[kainosite]

Oh, and the Compagnie Générale des Sépultures was a private burial company based in Paris which still exists today in a certain form.  They had a catalogue; you’d write to them and they’d send you a brochure so you could pick out what kind of headstone or mausoleum you wanted.  Designing tombs – what a fitting job for a Romantic!  Although actually, while they did put up monumental masonry their main line of business seems to have been mediating with the Parisian cemeteries on behalf of families in the provinces.

Basically, cemetery plots were by default temporary: the city would bury people for free or you could rent a plot for a relatively modest fee, but permanent concessions cost 250 fr/meter for the standard two meters and even more for additional space.  (This is why even quite wealthy families are stacked on top of each other ten deep in Parisian cemeteries instead of having individual graves.)  Since 70% of dead Parisians left no estate at all and only 15% had estates worth more than 2000 fr, shelling out 500 francs to purchase a permanent plot at the time of death was out of reach for most families.  So if you didn’t want the city to dig up Granny five years on, you either had to keep paying rent to the cemetery or save up enough money to convert her temporary concession into a permanent one.

All this bureaucracy was annoying to deal with especially if you didn’t live in town, so you could contract with the Compagnie Générale des Sépultures to handle it for you and also to maintain the graves.

Letter from the police on the Jeunes-France, April 5, 1832

Aaah I’ve been looking to find this somewhere for ages 

this is a follow-up to a rougher police note from March!

2e Division 2e Bureau 2e Service  

5 avril 1832  De soi-disant républicains dont les noms suivent parmi lesquels : Wabre (pierre, jules) rue fontaine au Roi-4, Borel (Petrus) même adresse, Borel (francisque) employé à la compagnie générale des sépultures, rue St Marc feydeau - 18, Bouchardy, graveur sur métaux, Delabrunie (Gérard) élève en médecine, Duseigneur frères, l’un sculpteur et l’autre architecte, Broclet (Léon) vérificateur en bâtiment et Sully, anglais, relieur en livre et décoré de juillet font tous partie d’une société particulière ont fondé une réunion nommée le club des cochons dont le nombre s’élèvent [sic] environ à 30 qui se comporte d’environ 30 individus ([illisible] tous jeunes et on les dit déterminés et tous armés de poignards. 

Ils ont adopté des sobriquets depuis une échauffourée qui est arrivée au qu’ils ont faite passage Choiseul, et sont tous signalés comme sodomistes. Le chef de la 2e Division prie son collègue chef de la police Male de faire surveiller ces individus afin de connaître découvrir le lieu où il se réunissent et de faire connaître le résultat de ces points [?]  

M. le chef de la police Male  [illisible et rayé, débauche et avoir les nom de tous les membres de cette société] qui ont tous été consignés dans un opuscule de l’un d’eux Petrus Borel, intitulé Rapsodies.

Le chef de la 2e Division 

Attempted translation and notes under the cut!

Keep reading

[kainosite]

Ah, a question about obscure police functionaries in 1830s Paris!  Just my métier.

The chef de la police municipale is one of the six billion Prefecture officials.  Because the Paris police is weirdly structured, with most of its agents attached directly to the Prefecture of Police instead of to the individual commissaires of the arrondissements, you need a guy to handle the day-to-day management of all those policemen.  He’s that guy.  Importantly, he’s technically a commissaire, which means he’s a magistrate with the judicial authority to order investigations, something the ordinary police agents and civil servants at the Prefecture don’t have.  In 1832 the office was filled by a fellow named Carlier, who had a bad habit of just issuing whatever orders he liked without consulting the Prefect, or even telling him what was going on.  (His successor, amusingly, was a guy named Joly – presumably not our Joly.)

The Second Bureau of the Second Division is (at this point in time) the interrogation branch of the Sûreté.

So basically what’s happened here is that some friend or enemy of the Daring Romantic Nickname Club has ratted them all out to the cops while under interrogation, and the Head of the Sûreté wants the Head of the Municipal Police to order someone to look into it.

Side note on the sodomy thing: while it’s not technically illegal the police do have a habit of chucking people into administrative detention for it (although to be fair to them, more for soliciting or public indecency* than for being sodomists in the privacy of their own apartment).  So it’s not a totally irrelevant prurient detail, although it’s not one the police are likely to act on in this case unless the échauffourée in the Passage Choiseul involved actual buttsex.

* A category that includes things like “being really camp in public” as well as things like dogging.

Letter from the police on the Jeunes-France, April 5, 1832

Aaah I’ve been looking to find this somewhere for ages 

this is a follow-up to a rougher police note from March!

2e Division 2e Bureau 2e Service  

5 avril 1832  De soi-disant républicains dont les noms suivent parmi lesquels : Wabre (pierre, jules) rue fontaine au Roi-4, Borel (Petrus) même adresse, Borel (francisque) employé à la compagnie générale des sépultures, rue St Marc feydeau - 18, Bouchardy, graveur sur métaux, Delabrunie (Gérard) élève en médecine, Duseigneur frères, l’un sculpteur et l’autre architecte, Broclet (Léon) vérificateur en bâtiment et Sully, anglais, relieur en livre et décoré de juillet font tous partie d’une société particulière ont fondé une réunion nommée le club des cochons dont le nombre s’élèvent [sic] environ à 30 qui se comporte d’environ 30 individus ([illisible] tous jeunes et on les dit déterminés et tous armés de poignards. 

Ils ont adopté des sobriquets depuis une échauffourée qui est arrivée au qu’ils ont faite passage Choiseul, et sont tous signalés comme sodomistes. Le chef de la 2e Division prie son collègue chef de la police Male de faire surveiller ces individus afin de connaître découvrir le lieu où il se réunissent et de faire connaître le résultat de ces points [?]  

M. le chef de la police Male  [illisible et rayé, débauche et avoir les nom de tous les membres de cette société] qui ont tous été consignés dans un opuscule de l’un d’eux Petrus Borel, intitulé Rapsodies.

Le chef de la 2e Division 

Attempted translation and notes under the cut!

Keep reading

[kainosite]

me: oh who’s this person referenced in the tags of this jean valjean/javert fanfiction, is it a real life police person from the era i don’t know about

the person referenced in the tags of this jean valjean/javert fanfiction: *existed on screen for .58239 seconds in the 1950 tamil adaptation of les misérables but during that time he looked into javert’s eyes intently* 

[kainosite]

Chouan Noms de Guerre

Most Chouans took a nom de guerre, mainly to hide their identities and spare their families from retaliation, but also because it was creepier for the Blues to have to fight a guy calling himself “Stab-Everyone” than some peasant named Jan Valjan.

Chouan noms de guerre fell into eight main categories:

Physical Descriptions: Le Blond, Belle-Jambe, Frisé, La Gaieté, Jambe-d'Argent, Brûle-Moustache

Geography: Flaire-Andouille, Montfort-la-Canne, La France, l'Empire

Military Vocabulary: La Giberne, Carabine, Mousqueton, Le Canonnier, Mitraille, Housard, Le Chasseur, Rochambeau

Useful Qualities: Rapide, Vif-Argent, Fend-l'Air, Vol-au-Vent, Frappe-d'Abord, Sans-Peur, Le-Petit-Sans-Peur, Va-Sans-Peur, Cœur-de-Lion, Carpar, l'Intrépide, Vaillant, Bon-Conseil, Franc-Coeur, La Volonté, La Victoire, l'Invincible, Sans-Pareil

Committed: Cœur-de-Roi, Sans-Regret, Sans-Chagrin, Bénédicité, Chambort

Tryhard: Danse-à-l'Ombre, Tranche-Montagne, Frappe-à-Mort, Placenette, Sabre-Tout, Brise-Bleu, Court-Bleu, Le Vengeu, Sans-Quartier, Sans-Pitié, Sans-Rémission

WTF:  Bas-d'Argent, Petit-Profit, Brin-d'Amour, Blanc-d'Amour, La Musette, Chante-en-Hiver, Cadet-Roussel, Beau-Séjour, Beau-Soleil, Gobe-Soleil, Gueule-d'Empeigne

Vegetation: La Violette, La Giroflée, La Rose, Fleur-de-Rose, Branche-d'Or, Pomme-d'Or, L’Épine, Fleur-d'épine, Belle-Vigne, La Ramée

Sources: 

Lettres sur l'origine de la Chouannerie et sur les Chouans die Bas-Maine, Jacques Duchemin Descepeaux, Paris, 1825:  Volume 1  Volume 2

“Histoire de la Ville de Saint-James-de-Beuvron”, Mémoires de la Société Académique du Contentin, Volume 10, Victor-Jacques-François Ménard, Avranches,1894

Notes from the 1924 edition of Quatrevingt-Treize, edited by Gustave Simon

[kainosite]

Looks like Bouchet’s just giving their department of origin, so Giroud might be Parisian by birth.

But it’s not surprising that so many of them were born elsewhere – public health was such that Paris was below its demographic replacement rate.  It only managed to grow because it was constantly bringing in more new people from the provinces than were dying of disease in the city.

AAAAAAAA I FOUND THE THING I FOUND THE THING I FOUND THE THING!

These are the dead insurgents from the Saint-Merry barricades who were recognized! 14 bodies were brought to the same morgue and twelve of them were recognized and their information was written down.

Name | Age | Marital Status | Profession | Domicile | Place of Birth 

Auffroy (F.) | 17 | Single | Baker | Seine-et-Oise | Seine-et-Oise

Barré (A.) | 30 | Single | Joiner | IVth arrond. | Puy-de-Dõme

Biget (J.F.) | 33 | Single | Bootmaker| VIIth arrond. | Jura 

Duchamps (J.) | 29 | Single | Stationer | XIIth arrond. | Rhône 

Florantin (J.) | 19 | Single | Currier | IXth arrond. | Meurthe 

Fournier (M.) | 63 | ? | Mason | ? | Creuse 

Gilbertheau (E.) | 28 | Single | House-painter | Xth arrond. | Allier 

Gilibert (J.) | 21 | Single | Journeyman | Seine-et-Oise | Isère 

Giroud (L.) | 18 | Single | Cabinetmaker | Vth arrond. | Seine  

Gras (V.) | 20 | Single | Wig-maker’s Apprentice | IXth arrond. | North

Paule (?) | 20 | Single | Pharmacy Student | VIth arrond. | Drôme  

Rozel (A.) | 28 | Married | Carriage-painter | VIIth arrond. | Prussia

I hope I didn’t make any mistakes. That’s a lot of lines to keep track of.

Looks like none of these guys were born in Paris? (Although some where born pretty close.) Two of them didn’t even live in Paris (though still nearby). One of them was from Prussia. Six in their twenties, three in their teens (nooo DDD:), two in their thirties and one in his sixties. The youngest was F. Auffroy: baker age 17 from Seine-et-Oise. Most of them workers plus one student.

[source]

[kainosite]

I see that it is June Days week here on Tumblr.com, and the above post and also this one do an excellent job of talking about the class dynamics at work, but there’s a crucial element in all this that no one has mentioned.

One explanation for Hugo’s political stance during the June Days may lie in the fact that the Provisional Government was a dictatorship made up of fifteen random people who happened to be in the Chamber of Deputies or at the Hôtel de Ville on February 24th.  It had no democratic legitimacy and no right to bind its successors to its policies.  Now, I happen to like those fifteen people better than the elected legislatures that succeeded them, but the right to govern cannot be conferred by the policy preferences of twenty-first century Tumblrites.  It can only come from the consent of the governed.  And on the 23rd and 24th of April 1848, the French people voted to have their constitution drafted by a bunch of dicks.

The unelected Provisional Government implemented the National Workshops.  The elected Constituent Assembly decided to get rid of them.  And there were some good reasons for this!  (Though Hugo did not cite any of them in his speech.)

France had just endured the potato blight and two years of bad grain harvests.  People had been starving in the countryside too, people who could quite reasonably object to their labor and their taxes going to pay for a social welfare program in Paris which they were completely unable to access themselves.  They might well have objected to it regardless, the French peasantry being a rather bootstrappy bunch altogether*, and wrecking a pilot program other people are relying on for basic subsistence because it hasn’t been rolled out in your commune yet is some crabs-in-a-barrel shit, but nevertheless, there’s something a little exploitative about the populace of Paris overthrowing one dictatorship and promptly installing another one which starts handing out money to them.  The forty-five centimes tax was super unpopular in the provinces, and all this is tangled up in the debt cycle of the rural economy and the long-term consequences of the original French Revolution and the sale of the biens nationaux for rural land ownership and it’s too complicated to get into here, but the bottom line is that the class interests of the urban proletariat and the peasantry are not the same.  And in 1848 the French electorate was still made up mostly of peasants.

I don’t want to over-emphasize the role of social policy in deciding the April election result.  In the nineteenth century provincial elections in France were often determined by competing patronage networks or sectarian conflict rather than policy issues, and in 1848 the Left were significantly hampered in their campaigning by the prohibitions against organization and the exorbitant expense of newspaper publication which had existed under the July Monarchy.  They were forced to try to get their candidates elected from a standing start, while the Right had their electoral machinery already in place.  The Third Republic was saved from this fate by a combination of Thiers’ machinations and the Bourbons’ congenital dumbassery, which bought the Left enough time to get its act together, but that didn’t happen in 1848, and the result was a right-leaning Constituent Assembly elected largely through name recognition or the old provincial social hierarchies which bore a distinct resemblance to the oligarchic Chamber of Deputies it had replaced.  I’m not claiming it was a perfect manifestation of the popular will.

But however inane or idiotic people’s reasons for voting the way they do, however unjust the intrinsic disparity of resources between the parties of the rich and the parties of the poor, at the end of the day the votes are the votes.  If you want to live in a democracy you have to respect the results of democratic elections even when your side loses.  That is the fundamental principle on which the whole system depends.  You can fulminate in the press, you can petition the government, you can organize, you can demonstrate, you can boycott, you can strike, you can participate in every form of non-violent civil disobedience available to you, but you cannot try to launch a coup d'état and overthrow the government by force of arms every time it implements a policy you don’t like.

The tendency of Paris to revolt was for hundreds of years an essential safeguard against the excesses of dictatorship.  It was irreconcilable with the needs of a republic.  A government elected by the whole of France cannot be held hostage by the policy preferences of 3%** of the population just because they happen to live in the capital and can more credibly threaten it with violence than the royalists in the Vendée.  This issue would of course come up again and be more definitively resolved with the Paris Commune, but the June Days were an early clash between Parisian workers’ historical sense of themselves as the ultimate guarantors of good governance in France and the necessity of giving the rest of the country some say in how things were run.

Why Victor Hugo decided the best way to resolve this conflict was to mow down the insurgents with a cannon and then get himself shot as self-appointed sin-eater for the Republic is a mystery known only to Victor Hugo.  And nothing can excuse the state of siege, or the Constituent Assembly’s subsequent abandonment of republican principles, natural justice and the basic rule of law.  Hugo’s claim in Les Mis that the proletariat were betraying their own interests by revolting is classist idiocy.  The interest of the proletariat lay in being able to eat; all other considerations were necessarily secondary.  Besides, it’s not like the bourgeoisie would have been happy to share power with them if not for their wicked, scary insurrection.  Some asshole was always going to seize the first available opportunity to disenfranchise them.

But notwithstanding the earnest desperation of the insurgents’ cause and the general shittiness of the Assembly, a republican of good will might well think that he had a duty to defend France’s first elected government in fifty years against an violent coup.  Indeed, this is what virtually every republican who had made a name for himself during the July Monarchy did think.  Had the Amis survived, it seems likely that some of them would have come to the same conclusion themselves, and once again found themselves fighting on the barricades of June, this time alongside the National Guard.

There were two competing principles here: both legitimate, both vitally important, both worth defending.  Whichever side of the conflict we find ourselves on, looking back on it with the benefit of hindsight, for the most part from the privileged platform of stable democracies with entrenched social welfare programs, it really is important to bear that in mind.

* Some exceptions may apply.  Void in the Var.

** It isn’t even 3%, really, because Paris was far from united behind the insurgents.   In the various Parisian elections between 1848 and 1850, the radical republican candidates only ever got 40-50% of the vote, and we have to assume the number of people willing to support a violent revolt was smaller than the number willing to put a slip of paper with a socialist’s name on it into an urn.

Victor Hugo vs the workers’  barricades, 1848

@melle93  mentioned hoping someone would talk more about Hugo’s involvement in 1848?  I will try!

For people interested in this part of Hugo’s bio in particular, I rec Graham Robb’s “ Victor Hugo: A Biography” as the English-language bio that deals with this in the most depth. (Some, though not all , of the main chapter on it is here). Also just…read up on the June Days in particular. It’s a pretty important episode to understand , both for Hugo Studies and Western Political Developments in General and for why the barricades of 1848 aren’t a happily ever after ending, don’t do that in your les mis adaptation,oh, my god, do NOT. 

I feel I should note that there are a lot of wildly varying accounts about Hugo’s involvement in 1848, not least from Hugo himself– if you go looking for primary sources, you’ll find conflicting claims about who did what when all over�� the place.  So I’m definitely not trying to make this be a comprehensive account– this is only about Hugo’s role, and it can’t even be comprehensive about that!   We Do Not Purport Here to Give a History of 1848, etc.  Still, it’s gonna be Long. So!  Under the cut:

Keep reading

[kainosite]

“Those men,” continued Malin, “are Fouché’s two arms. One, that dandy Corentin, whose face is like a glass of lemonade, vinegar on his lips and verjuice in his eyes, put an end to the insurrection at the West in the year VII. in less than fifteen days. The other is a disciple of Lenoir; he is the only one who preserves the great traditions of the police. I had asked for an agent of no great account, backed by some official personage, and they send me those past-masters of the business! Ah, Grevin, Fouché wants to pry into my game. That’s why I left those fellows dining at the chateau; they may look into everything for all I care; they won’t find Louis XVIII. nor any sign of him.”

Une Ténébreuse Affaire, 1975

[kainosite]

Victor Prospert (Jeanne’s “rival”)

Taking a little break from the Saint-Merry guys to talk a little bit about another colourful figure in the aftermath of the June 1832 uprising. I already mentioned Prospert in this earlier post and talked a little bit about him but I really think you need to know more. Although I’ll be focusing on his trial mostly.

There will be translations under the cut and I promise they are worth reading.

Victor Prospert was a 33-year-old tailor (or “tailor worker”… I guess maybe that means he didn’t have his own shop but worked in someone else’s?) He was born around 1800, probably in Maine-et-Loire, and abandoned by his parents at the age of three (which is also when his birth certificate was filed so that’s why his date of birth is a bit vague). Apparently he received a few months worth of school education thanks to public charity but was mostly self-taught and proud of it.

He fought valiantly in the July Revolution and received the July medal (médaille de juillet) for it. In 1832 he lived in Paris at number 11 rue Vieille du Temple with his wife.

There’s no evidence of him belonging to any societies or organisations and he was very adamant about stressing his independence. He also didn’t know his comrades-in-arms before the fighting had already begun.

In the June uprising he didn’t actually do much except get arrested on the 5th (before he even had a chance to fight, according to his own words) so his reputation and status as a hero of 1832 is mostly thanks to his bravery in court. By which I mean basically being a huge republican troll.

He was arrested as he was trying to negotiate with a few national guards that he and two other revolutionaries ran into. Prospert suggested approaching the guards peacefully and managed to convince the other two of his plan but this backfired on them and he and his companion Laporte were captured. (The third revolutionary managed to escape.)

Prospert immediately got in trouble for openly speaking against the government right in the faces of the police officers and national guards.

He was tried in November, after the Saint-Merry trial, with Marie Laporte (who, despite his name, was a guy) and a German immigrant called Jean Schaef who was arrested by the same guards. His lawyer, btw, was Me* Caron, who was also one of the defence lawyers in the Saint-Merry trial, assuming it’s the same guy which I’m guessing it is.

* (the Me stands for Maître (Master), which is the title for lawyers and some similar professions.)

What made Prospert notable was that he took the Jeanne approach to the trial and dialed it up to eleven. Honestly his “crimes” were so minor that at this point he probably would have gotten away with it, or at least gotten a much lighter sentence, if he hadn’t decided to hijack the trial to use it as a republican advocacy event. Instead he got ten years in prison.

Prospert’s speech had practically nothing to do with the trial, to be honest. And it’s pretty awesome. I’m naturally biased in favour of Jeanne and I do suspect that Jeanne might have been Prospert’s inspiration (although of course neither of them were the first to do something like this and Prospert had already been pretty wordy to the police… but come on, everybody was talking about Jeanne at the time.) But I have to admit that Prospert was awesome too.

Okay, on to translations!

Keep reading

[kainosite]

Thank you for this translation, and for digging up this article from the musty depths of the French library system!

As usual these 1830s newspapers make for some pretty dark reading, so let me interject a little mote of light.

Marrast is quite right to say that France marches towards progress, and that we must believe in the future.

What just five years ago you had to obtain with such difficulty and toil can now be read by anyone, for free, from anywhere in the world.

The entire archive of La Tribune can be viewed online here.

Vive la France!  Vive l’avenir!

From Parisian newspaper La Tribune des Départements (aka La Tribune du Mouvement), ed. Armand Marrast, written 19 June 1832, published 20 June 1832.

English translation:

ON THE SILENCE OF THE TRIBUNE

Our silence in the present circumstances has been interpreted in diverse ways.  We should have expected that—praising and blaming, that is the human experience.  Nevertheless, permit us a word of explanation.

The day after the city was placed under martial law, there was only one cry from all the oppressed newspapers: force had replaced law.  The saber of Monsieur Soult had become the monarchy’s hand of justice.  The most terrifying censure weighed on writers.  All discussion became lies or madness.

We, more than the others, we were reduced to keeping silent, for our presses were under seal, our editors pursued, our manager hunted down.  This situation still persists.

Besides which, we thought—and this reason was decisive—that silence was the most effective protest.  We only understand the enjoyment of a right insomuch as it is exercised fully.  What indeed is it to be reduced to developing one’s thoughts within the tolerance of Monsieur Soult?  Getting muddled in a polemic that is mixed-up, uncertain, without frank sense, where the questions must be approached from far up and away, in order to pass a few more or less lively critiques in place of the profound attacks that all acts of power provoke.  And besides, to coldly discuss when the blood is still boiling, when they’ve packed up to two thousand people into the prisons, when they speak of scouring Paris, when there is neither safety nor protection for the citizens: we wouldn’t have had the courage!  Indignation is burning in our veins!  What could we have said that would speak louder than such acts?

And in what situation do we find ourselves, then?

A ban strikes the opinions that are ours; death threatens them and, while waiting, everything both cruel and absurd that calumny can invent, it throws to the anger of heightened passions.

First it was the alliance of the carlistes and the republicans; then the plot had pillage as its aim; then the insurgents had been paid 250,000 francs.  Then they had wanted to rob the Bank, I’m sure!  You’d need a whole book to bring out all the idiotic or lying things that have been published…Thus they stir up this victorious atmosphere in which they most often give themselves up to an exultation that is almost insane.

As for us, without our having to say it, everyone knows well what have been and what are still our sympathies.  More than anyone, we have shuddered at the misfortunes of all: we also would like, more than anyone, the right to condemn the rashness and madness of those who, in their youth, do such a bad job of distinguishing between the friend who advises them and the provocateur who drags them into trouble and betrays them.  Today guilt is brought out before military tribunals; the press has nothing to say when the sword is about to strike.  Let us recall just a few truths for the future.

A successful insurrection is called a revolution: she has her flatterers, she gives out crowns.

A vanquished insurrection is called a revolt: she meets with nothing but abuses lavished upon her impotence.

Success manages to absolve everything.  Defeat withers everything, sometimes even courage!

Those who would have been showered with praise if they had been the victors, are now nothing but brigands and wretches!  Those whom we would have praised as heroes are transformed into criminals!  Death and chains await them!  History loudly shouts these reflections, which peoples forget just as much as kings do.  It also warns those who abuse their victory of the frightful retaliation of a reprisal.

Let the government, which wanted to make haste in giving up its enemies to the special tribunals, continue its work: it digs its own grave!

Even when men are killed, principles and opinions live on.  A nation is taken by surprise even more easily than a man—but a nation recovers more quickly.  Ours is on the track of a progress in which all of Europe must follow it.  Despite all appearances, it marches on towards that progress, it will continue to march along towards it.  The stops that we take on a long road revive our strength and assure a free pace for the long run.

Let the government rejoice!  And us, let us shudder at the blood already shed, at the blood that perhaps we will yet shed!  The present has only painful subjects.

But the present will not last.  Let us believe in the reason and the good sense of our people!  Let us believe in the future!

ARMAND MARRAST.

This is the fifth and last of a number of June 1832 newspaper articles that I used to form the core of the epilogue for Virago.  I didn’t really want to directly reiterate anything Hugo had already written about, so I opted to use real documents to show the ending of the story.  Of course in Virago these articles were edited for repetition and length, and interpolated with details about the fictional barricade of the rue de la Chanvrerie, but here I’m giving them to you as “straight up” translations of the original articles.  ;)

But what a research story behind these photos!  It’s always the hard ones you remember…  So, for anyone who’s interested:

When I was researching for Virago, I usually didn’t come up against anything insurmountable in finding the necessary research materials, thanks to the extremely wonderful library system I was very lucky to have access to during the process (thanks again, guys!).  The hardest thing I had to do was probably making PDFs of newspaper articles from microfilm (see: Le National, June 1832), and for a medievalist, that’s, like, an every other day kind of thing.  So usually it was smooth sailing…Until I hit this newspaper.

Now, I knew I was going to absolutely need this thing more than any other account of June 1832, because it was the paper edited by Armand Marrast, who figured pretty prominently as a character in the story, and I had to get his commentary on June 1832 (which he got out of jail just in time to bear witness to).  So I did what I always do when looking for a newspaper: Gallica?  Library catalog?  Microfilm catalog?  Borrow Direct?  Interlibrary loan?  No, no, no, no, and no.  The Tribune des départements had completely vanished into the mists of time.  At last, I got on WorldCat and confirmed with one of the university librarians that yes, there were pretty much only two sets of this paper still existing anywhere in the world.  Surprise, surprise, one at the BnF (the Bibliothèque nationale de France, aka the Unhappiest Place on Earth), and the other at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève.  The latter, also in Paris, is an infinitely less prison-like experience than the BnF, so this research would have to be done there if anywhere.  It so happened (very fortunately!) that I was already set to go to France around that time, and so I had to plan to break away from my family, go over to the BSG, apply for a library card there, go upstairs and order the book, wait for it to get delivered, pick it up at the counter–all of this in an unfamiliar building, on a tight time schedule, with pretty rusty French speaking skills, and with a good heavy dose of social anxiety–and somehow hope that I would find something worth all of this hassle and headache.

So I finally blunder through all these steps, totter over to the study tables with these huge, heavy, dusty old folios, and flip to the June 1832 issues.  And……nothing.  Nothing!  I started from the June 4 issue (which is a safe distance before the actual events), then to June 5, June 6, June 7, June 8, June 9, and so on.  In the newspapers I had gone through before this one, there was at least coverage of the events of the funeral and the barricades by June 7 issues at the latest, even if they didn’t know many facts yet.  Not in this one.  No, just issue after issue of beating around the bush, to the point where I was starting to suspect that they were deliberately not talking about this huge thing that had just happened, that both they and I were completely aware had happened.  So when I had at last slogged through twenty days (!) of June and finally got to the headline of this article, which purported to explain the “silence of the Tribune,” I felt almost personally vindicated, like, “Yes!!  You owe me an explanation, Marrast!”

And the moment I read it, I knew it had to be the final words of Virago.  I can’t really explain how it touched me, sitting in this foreign place in a state of general anxiety and then finally coming across something I was starting to lost hope of ever finding, then reading these searing words from a distance of almost two hundred years and hearing Marrast’s voice behind them.  I might have teared up a little there in the BSG reading room.  Anyone who’s gone researching and suddenly feels like they’ve made a connection with another person across centuries, like a little spark of static electricity when your finger touches someone else’s, that person knows what I’m talking about.  It’s the reason people want to study history–it’s that living connection that drives the urge to research.  That’s the joy I had working on this research project, which went on to become a crucial part of Virago.  :)

Find other 1832 barricade-related newspaper selections here:

Le National, 5 June 1832 (published 6 June).

Le National, 6 June 1832 (published 7 June).

Le Journal des Débats, 6 June 1832 (published 7 June).

Le National, 8 June 1832 (published 9 June).

Find Virago here!

[kainosite]

Si tu me le demandais

[kainosite]

“The immense gleam of the whole combat which he had missed, and in which he had had no part, appeared in the brilliant glance of the transfigured drunken man.“

I did nothing but coloring the scene from Takahiro Arai sensei’s manga.

[kainosite]

Jules-Stanislas Forthom

A common theme in the June Rebellion trials is that almost everyone tries to pretend that they were somewhere else during the insurrection, they never saw a barricade, they wouldn’t recognize a barricade if they did see one, they’re not sure which end of a gun the bullets come out of, they have no idea how their mouth became covered in gunpowder, they have no designs against the government and they love the king.  In the face of long prison sentences and the looming threat of the guillotine, very few had the courage to stand by their beliefs.

Jules-Stanislas Forthom is one of the rare exceptions.  He claims his place among the Lesser-Known Badasses not so much for what he did during the rebellion itself as for what he said afterwards.

On the morning of the 6th, a barricade was erected at the corner of the Rue Beaubourg and the Rue Petits-Champs-Saint-Martin so that insurgents could fire on troops passing along the Rue Saint-Martin, at the time a major thoroughfare through the city.  Forthom, a twenty-two-year-old fruit vendor who lived in the neighborhood, went to the houses of the local National Guardsmen and demanded they give up their weapons.  They all said ‘Lol no,” but he did manage to get a gun from somewhere, and he succeeded in forcing a nearby house and a wineshop to keep their doors open.  “If you don’t hold the door open I’ll fuck you in the stomach with my rifle,” he told the porter of the house.

Everyone in the neighborhood saw him casting bullets, loading his rifle and going over to the barricade to shoot at the troops, and he was captured still armed and with his face blackened with gunpowder.  He claimed he’d been drunk and the other insurgents forced him to do it, but the jury was not impressed.  They convicted him of attempted murder with premeditation and without extenuating circumstances, and he was sentenced to death.

In a strange way Forthom dodged a bullet with his death sentence, because he had a previous criminal conviction for theft.  If he’d been sentenced to the lesser penalty of forced labor he would probably have been sent to the bagne as a common criminal without being granted the usual commutation to imprisonment that was offered for political crimes.  But because it was a death sentence, it was commuted to life imprisonment like all the other June Rebellion death sentences, and he ended up at Mont-Saint-Michel with the other political prisoners.

In October of 1834 there was a terrible fire at Mont-Saint-Michel, and the political prisoners showed “the most commendable zeal and courage” in helping to put it out, thereby saving many of the prison buildings and the private homes on the island.  The Minister of the Interior (Adolphe Thiers, ironically) and the Minister of Justice wrote to the king and asked him to pardon the prisoners as a reward for their bravery.  Twenty-five of the prisoners who helped to fight the fire were immediately released.

Forthom and a guy named Pierre-Nicolas Vallot who’d been imprisoned for trying to bust political prisoners out of Sainte-Pélagie back in April 1832 could not be released because “the exaltation of their opinions does not allow us to ask for a full pardon”.  Instead Forthom’s life sentence was commuted to four years of imprisonment.  He was only released in October of 1836 after a second round of pardon applications, and he was placed under continuing police surveillance.

There’s no record of exactly what opinion he “exalted” to condemn himself to another two years in prison, but I’m assuming the conversation went something like this:

Monsieur le Directeur: “You’ve been locked up in this hellish island prison for over a year now, and thanks to the horrible fire in which we all nearly died you may finally have a chance to get out.   Do you think you can be civil about the king for like five minutes so that we can get you a pardon?”

Forthom: “Fuck that guy in the stomach with a rifle.”

Sources:

The Journal des débats (January 13 1833)

The Gazette des tribunaux (January 13 1833)

The Journal des débats (December 29 1834)

Le Censeur, (October 11 1836)

[kainosite]

Yeah, it was common in political cases.  Article 22 of the Code Pénal automatically attaches exposition to any forced labor or felony imprisonment sentence, but judges could override that by issuing explicit instructions at sentencing.  Most (perhaps all?) of the sentences for the June Rebellion insurgents were given “sans exposition”.

The official reasoning was that since the prisoner committed a political rather than a criminal offense, they didn’t deserve the degradation of exposition, although it was regrettably necessary to lock them up to stop them building any more barricades.  (This was also the logic by which everyone but Boutin had their forced labor sentences commuted to imprisonment.)

There might be a slight ulterior motive here, since the whole point of exposition was to shame the criminal before their community and discourage anyone who might be inclined to follow in their footsteps, and those goals would be pretty badly undermined if the onlookers started cheering their name or took up a collection for them.  Since the government couldn’t rely on the insurgents to be unpopular with a Parisian crowd, it was better to just quietly whisk them off to prison and avoid the potential embarrassment.

Jean-François-Elysée Boutin

Jean-François-Elysée Boutin enters the ranks of the Lesser-Known Badasses because he’s a black guy.

Lest the more conservative members of our fandom think this a case of affirmative action and start screaming about political correctness (I see you there, Ayn Rand), allow me to refer you to the Journal des débats:

“The color of the accused was the most remarkable circumstance of the case judged today by the Court of Assizes.”

Yeeeeah.

In fact, the papers cannot shut up about it.  Even the briefest articles about the case feel compelled to mention Boutin’s race, often in contexts where it has no relevance whatsoever.  But as you’ll see in a moment, it probably did have a material impact on the case.  Indeed, it may be the whole reason why Boutin is here.

Keep reading

[kainosite]

Jean-François-Elysée Boutin

Jean-François-Elysée Boutin enters the ranks of the Lesser-Known Badasses because he’s a black guy.

Lest the more conservative members of our fandom think this a case of affirmative action and start screaming about political correctness (I see you there, Ayn Rand), allow me to refer you to the Journal des débats:

“The color of the accused was the most remarkable circumstance of the case judged today by the Court of Assizes.”

Yeeeeah.

In fact, the papers cannot shut up about it.  Even the briefest articles about the case feel compelled to mention Boutin’s race, often in contexts where it has no relevance whatsoever.  But as you’ll see in a moment, it probably did have a material impact on the case.  Indeed, it may be the whole reason why Boutin is here.

Boutin was born to a pair of African immigrants (or, considering the era and the fact that slaves were free the moment they stepped onto French soil, quite possibly a pair of African refugees) in Marseille.  He moved to Paris with his dad, where he got a job as a bouncer in a brothel and lived peacefully enough until the events of June.

On June 5th at around five o’clock, some municipal guards saw nineteen-year-old Boutin near the Law School, marching at the head of a group of young men crying “To arms! To arms!” next to a guy trying to beat the muster on a wooden crate.  The revolutionaries loudly proclaimed their intention to meet up at the Place du Palais-Royal, looting whatever weapons they could find along the way. Boutin was easy to recognize because he was black – or was he?  The witnesses were very certain in their written depositions, less so when they saw him in court.

Well, never mind.  Boutin – or some black guy, anyway – was seen in a crowd of two or three hundred insurgents outside the Montaigu barracks, led by three students from the École Polytechnique and shouting “Long live the Republic! Down with Louis Philippe!”  They threatened to attack the Montaigu guard post, and then proceeded to the Rue des Carmes where they looted the shop of M. Demorny, a gunsmith.  They broke eleven panes of glass and stole seventy-seven muskets, along with half the tools of Demorny’s trade.  Boutin was notable by his exasperation.  He’d been carrying a big stick over his shoulder, and when he took a musket he threw the stick down in the street. 

But were the witnesses sure it was Boutin they saw breaking into the gun shop?

M. Demorny: “Yes, he has a remarkable color that is not natural to our country.”

Mme. Danel, proprietor of a neighboring shop: “Oh yes, Monsieur le Président!  I remember saying to my husband ‘Tiens!  Even the blacks are getting mixed up in it!’”

So to sum up: a black guy did it, this guy is black, therefore this guy did it.

Sounds like an airtight case to me!

According to Boutin, he hadn’t taken part in any revolutionary activities whatsoever.  At four o'clock he went to his father's house in the Rue de la Verrerie to persuade him not to go out because of the unrest.  Later he was indeed in the Rue des Carmes, but nowhere near Demorny’s gun shop.  He’d gone to work like usual and he was standing in the door of the brothel.

The first charge of provoking an attempt to destroy or overthrow the government by shouting “To arms!” in a public place was so badly supported by the witnesses that the public prosector withdrew it, but he pressed the charge of looting weapons as part of an armed band.  The jury found Boutin guilty without extenuating circumstances, and the court sentenced him to five years of forced labor and a two hundred franc fine.  The Court of Cassation turned down his appeal.

By a COMPLETE AND MYSTERIOUS COINCIDENCE, Boutin was one of only two June Rebellion insurgents without a previous criminal record who didn’t have his degrading sentence of forced labor commuted to imprisonment.  It’s not even that they decided to treat the theft from the gun shop as a criminal rather than a political offense, because he was sentenced without exposition.  They just... didn’t commute the sentence.

He was sent to the bagne of Toulon, where he died before completing his sentence.

Elysée Boutin: a revolutionary leader of color or the tragic victim of his neighbors’ inability to tell black people apart?  We’ll never know, but either way he deserves to be commemorated among the the Lesser-Known Badasses.

Sources:

The Journal des débats (October 3 1832)

The Gazette des tribunaux (October 3 1832)

[kainosite]

don’t forget to leave out sewage and candlesticks tonight for Victor Hugo

[kainosite]

While we’re on the subject of Le Grelot cartoons, can we take a moment to appreciate this superb piece of Thiers fanart?