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"LES MISERABLES" LOCATIONS IN PARIS: AN ILLUSTRATED GUIDE

BY KATIE BARNES

AVAILABLE NOW ON AMAZON

“Among many other things, “Les Misérables” is Victor Hugo's love letter to the Paris of his youth... His descriptions of its streets and buildings, and the routes the characters take, are almost forensically detailed and accurate.”

If you have ever wanted to know more about the locations in Paris where Victor Hugo says that Valjean, Javert and the other characters walked, this will be for you. Using contemporary and modern maps, photographs, engravings and paintings, this book gives detailed written and illustrated histories for 35 locations connected with the novel, the musical and the life of Victor Hugo, including the sites of the Barricade, the Rue Plumet, the quay where Javert commits suicide, the Cafe Musain, the church where Marius and Cosette are married, the street where Valjean dies, the street where Hugo was nearly killed on the night of the barricades, the Pantheon where he is buried, the place on the river bank where Valjean and Marius emerge from the sewers, and many more. And if you visit Paris in person, the book includes information on travel to each location by Metro, bus and bicycle, together with two suggested walking tours on the Right and Left Banks.

All profits are donated to Acting For Others, which provides financial and emotional support to all those working in theatrical professions, through its network of 14 member charities. I will receive no financial benefit whatsoever.

It's available as a Kindle download for £5.99/$7.99; as a paperback with colour illustrations for £21.50/$28.98; and as a paperback with illustrations in black & white for £12.50/$16.79. 

If you like it, please leave a rating and review on Amazon: if I get more than 10 positive reviews and ratings, Amazon will do more to help me publicise it, which would hopefully mean more sales and more funds raised for Acting for Others. 

These are the links to all three editions on Amazon:

Black & white edition:https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0H2WCQTHM

Colour edition: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0H2WCNZRZ

Kindle edition: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0H4DWJ8LP

'25: All right, so you languished with garish battle wounds in the street. You were overrun at the end by the mass of soldiery. Your blood has certainly run into the sewers. What's that matter? Those checked trousers and the way you've got your cravat untied to show your manly breast were on point. You went out in high fashion.

'34: Part of the barricade literally exploded, but the karaoke was even more lit than Marius' idea of a battle plan. Not the worst time you could've had. You still feel guilty that you didn't say anything to Enjolras about his hair, though. Boy needed some leave-in conditioner to tame that mess.

'35: Talk about disorganization. You left before things wrapped up.

IM '48: You're haunted... haunted by the knowledge that if the National Guard had only sunk enough time into classic platformers, they wouldn't have been making pratfalls over those exploding barrels. It's all about the timing on the jump.

'52: You sneezed, and by the time you finished wiping your nose, the whole revolution question seems to have been put to bed.

'58: Must have been a hell of a time. You don't remember a thing.

'72: Between the poetry recitations and opera music, you think this crowd might be a little artsy for you.

'78: Sure, it ticked the boxes—soldiers, furniture piled up, cries of long live the Republic—but it was real hard to pay attention to all that through the haze of homoeroticism.

'98: Say what you will about the rest, we love a party with a tailgate, and this barricade started properly with a funeral.

2000: Fauchelevent party-crashing remains the most awkward moment of wait, did anyone here invite that guy? you've personally experienced, and you'd like to move on.

SC 2007: There's something to be said for a barricade this tidy. Sure, there's bodies, but as for blood, it's as dry as a well-monitored middle school dance.

2012: You are nagged by a sense of unfinished business, like when you turn off a radio in the middle of a song. It seemed like everyone was gearing up for a whole number, you know? Even dying beautifully to the sound of Broadway's best isn't making up for that entirely.

Arai 2016: Hold up. I'll tell the joke in a minute. Crying? Of course not. I've got something in my eye, that's all.

I remember a white butterfly which went and came in the street. Summer does not abdicate.

Old houses in the Rue Mondétour - Adolphe Martial Potémont

Another album of Paris images I just dumped on Photobucket: A.M. Potémont’s engravings of old Paris. He did a lot of them; if you do an image search for Potémont on gallica.bnf.fr you’ll get hundreds of results. I cherry-picked a couple dozen of them for being relevant (however fleetingly) to Les Mis fandom’s interests, but if you like them and want to see more of what old Paris looked like, go check out more of them on Gallica!

(Note: Gallica leaves huge amounts of whitespace around the images, which can make them look tiiiiiny, but as the above cropped version demonstrates, once you download them they’re high-res enough to zoom in on details.)

— Les Misérables, Victor Hugo

I’ve been in the Les Mis tumblr fandom for some years now. It’s a special community, with one very special event. 

The grind.

The adrenaline.

The no-betas-we-die-like-Le Cabuc. 

But the reality on the ground tells a different story. 

Here’s what I’ve observed about Barricade Day—what everyone’s really thinking, but too afraid to say ⬇️

1. June’s not coming earlier—but the online pace is picking up.

June 1st hits. Before you know it, Larmarque is dead, the barricades are up and everyone is posting the art they’ve spent weeks perfecting. And you? You’re frantically scrambling to get something together.

It’s just like a protest in a fanfic that mysteriously goes wrong. One minute everything’s good. You’re on track. The next, there’s smoke in the air, bricks being thrown, and bleeding twinks sheltering in a Starbucks. Or something like that.

The solution? Make time work for you. Barricade Day is whenever you say it is. The real thing already happened, so it’s not like Charles Jeanne cares which day you post your Enjonine fic.

2. People don’t want to fuck Enjolras anymore—and that’s a problem

There was a time when Aaron Tveit ruled this corner of the internet. All you had to do was post a gif of his blond wig and the reblogs would come flooding in. Enjolras thirst was a real source of power.

And now?

A gifset will get 20 reblogs if you’re lucky.

The fandom is only as strong as its horniest soldiers. To survive and thrive in an adapting environment we’ve got to commit. Enjolras porn won’t just happen. You’ve got to make it happen.

3. Migration is natural. Don’t get let behind.

Staying relevant means adapting your approach and going where the change is. Tumblr has had a good run, but it’s not where fresh new fandoms form.

X might just be the answer.

With a younger and more public fanbase, X is where it’s at these days. Now you don’t have to hide behind pseudonyms and keep things within communities—you can tag all the actors when posting your Amis gangbang art. 

Finding all the paragraphs where you used some hyper-specific word more than once

Rearranging paragraphs that you swear you wrote in the right order but turned out to be totally backwards

Going for a walk, coming up with the perfect line, and forgetting it as soon as you get home and open your laptop

Creating a separate document where you can dump all of those nice sentences that no longer fit in anywhere

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