the sun's always rising in the sky somewhere

and the roads just keep fucking widening

even beyond the fact that I'm generally not a fan of calling suppressed resistance efforts 'failures' I think a lot of people only passingly familiar with 1832 really don't understand that it was not some ad hoc suicide mission where everyone just decided to go out and die in the street to make a point. insurrections of this type had successful precedent. only 2 years prior there was another one in paris that militarily succeeded (but was politically co-opted, hence why 1832 was necessary at all). paris esp back then was a pretty good city to do this type of thing, lots of narrow roads to blockade and iirc a decently radial structure. plus it's the capitol and largest city, it's not so federated like the US where the nation capitol is small and separate from the large urban population centers where dissent tends to accumulate and escalate. 1832 took a lot of planning and coordination and buy-in from various clandestine groups of various sizes and capacities who were at that point prepped for a flashpoint (i.e. a popular politician dying of a disease wreaking havoc on the working poor population), just because it was to some degree reactive doesn't mean that there wasn't a structure supporting it + reactive flashpoints can in fact be very viable ways of generating political momentum for an uprising. there was momentum from many sectors of the population and it was in fact largely working-class driven (as opposed to being a solely student thing). this is not of course to say that everything happened absolutely perfectly and there was nothing worth criticizing strategically, you can sit and debate all day if going for the hôtel de ville would have been smarter etc. etc. ad nauseum but that doesn't change the fact that it was a planned and prepared for uprising with military precedent and not a) some sort of suicide-by-cop deal or b) "stupid naïve kids who thought they could change things and were wrong". it did not fall short of achieving its long-term goals because of either of those things. the primary reason it is termed a 'failure' today is because the french army and national guard came and fucking massacred people rather than negotiating in good faith or, heavens forbid, conceding to the demands of the working class.

denial of futurity is a form of psychological torture btw

like I've said I don't really post abt les mis rn for various reasons (a big one being the fact that it makes me get really in my head about the 1832 insurrection in ways that are genuinely detrimental to my life) but I do hope that at some point in the near future I will feel able to do so again because I do in fact still have. thoughts on it that I would like to share.