Kainosite

run.

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!

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.

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!

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.

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.

@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:

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.

“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.”

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!

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).

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.

“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.“

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.

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.)