#my hatred of Gillenormand bringing me back to posting Les mis

[secretmellowblog]

It’s really interesting how in Les mis, the conservative royalist rants against protestors sound a lot like conservative rants you hear today?

After Gillenormand reads his conservative newspaper (the Fox News of the 19th century) describing an upcoming protest by young students, he goes on this whole furious rant about how “they’re idiot young people who clearly are to stupid to understand what they’re doing! They don’t respect law and order of the national guard. The world is going to collapse now because of these idiot kids who don’t respect law and tradition! And the young men these days aren’t REAL men any more, they’ve become weak and feminized!”

Also, I don’t know why my left wing grandson doesn’t speak to me anymore!”

“That pack of brats! they convene on the Place du Panthéon! by my life! urchins who were with their nurses but yesterday! If one were to squeeze their noses, milk would burst out. And they deliberate to-morrow, at midday. What are we coming to? What are we coming to? It is clear that we are making for the abyss. (…) And all this awkward batch of brats has political opinions, if you please. Political opinions should be strictly forbidden. They fabricate systems, they recast society, they demolish the monarchy, they fling all laws to the earth, they put the attic in the cellar’s place and my porter in the place of the King, they turn Europe topsy-turvy, they reconstruct the world, and all their love affairs consist in staring slily at the ankles of the laundresses as these women climb into their carts.(…) The end of the world is come! This is plainly the end of this miserable terraqueous globe!”