a sideblog for les miz content

hi can i interest you in the angel grantaire reveal scene from under my wings you will find refuge by @fivie ?

feat. just-a-guy celestial juggernaut grantaire . truly one of my faves of all time . if you haven’t alr read it,,, pls do 😔🙏 you will learn the true meaning of devotion 😔🙏

I found you, because you made yourself findable, you wonderful thing, you unbelievably fantastic boy.

the patron saint of the lost causes —

Even more touching

(Touching count: 2)

(Some teenager movie au and the plot is about teenager environment protection movement but that’s not the point—the point is that the narrator digresses about Mother Nature every time there’s no dialogue)

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Also in reply of @major-knighton

Hahahahahaha the likeness of Seine Majestat and Enjolras is a concept I love so much!! Headcanon that there’s a fairy-tale-ish ending where Grantaire recognizes Enjolras immediately among the Todsengels because he’s such a big simp.

(If Hugo can write permets-tu I can self-indulge too)

last night, there was a fascinating discussion that floated across my dash about hugo’s depiction of bosuset and joly as frères chapeaux, or bini. [link.]

the gist of this conversation, as i understood it, revolved around two related ideas: first of all, what on earth are “frères chapeaux”/”bini,” and why does hugo use them in reference to joly and bossuet?

obviously, since i am swamped with schoolwork, this was a distraction question i couldn’t pass up. in the end, i found so much interesting material that i’m going to split my analysis into two posts. this is part one, about the phrase “frères chapeaux;” tomorrow i’ll post my thoughts on “bini.”

i’m not sure if anything i’m about to share is new or actually aligns with hugo’s intentions, but i think it’s interesting/compelling and i hope you do, too!

so, here’s the passage in question, in the original french, along with two translations:

“Laigle de Meaux, on le sait, demeurait plutôt chez Joly qu’ailleurs. Il avait un logis comme l’oiseau a une branche. Les deux amis vivaient ensemble, mangeaient ensemble, dormaient ensemble. Tout leur était commun, même un peu Musichetta. Ils étaient ce que chez les frères chapeaux, on appelle bini.”

Wilbour: “Laigle de Meaux, we know, lived more with Joly than elsewhere. He had a lodging as the bird has a branch. The two friends lived together, ate together, slept together. Everything was in common with them, even Musichetta a little. They were what, among the Chapeau Brothers, are called bini.”

Rose: “L’Aigle de Meaux, as we know, lived rather more with Joly than anywhere else. He had a room the way a bird has a branch. The two friends lived together, ate together, slept together. They shared everything, even Musichetta, a little. They were what the hooded friars call bini, a pair.”

my copy of Wilbour, being an old public domain e-version, doesn’t have any explanatory notes, but here’s what the French Gutenberg version and  Rose say:

“Frère chapeau : religieux laïque, portant donc chapeau et non capuchon, attaché au service d’un père de son ordre. C’est pourquoi ils vont par deux : bini.”  [Lay monk, thus wearing a hat and not a cowl, attached in service to a priest of his order. This is why they come in pairs, ie, “bini.”]

Rose: “In certain monastic orders, lay brothers wore a hat instead of a cowel. ‘Bini’ refers to two who share virtually everything.”

so we have this idea of a certain subset of lay monks who wear a different outfit than regular monks. but who were they? and why would they have their own slang? more importantly, why would hugo want us to associate bossuet and joly with them?

the phrase “frères chapeaux” shows up as early as 1741, referring to “lay priests who live with non-income generating nuns and leave the convent to beg for them.” hilarious as it is to think of bossuet and joly as living among a bunch of nuns (sort of like a farcical echo of valjean and cosette), this definition really doesn’t make sense here

the next place i found “frères chapeaux” was, well, in the dictionary — namely, in the larousse grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle. this definition is what the gutenberg french version provides, verbatim: a lay monk in a hat who serves a priest. they also provide two other, more metaphorical definitions:

“Personnage subalterne qui est tout à la dévotion d’une autre personne” [A subaltern figure fully devoted to another person]

“S’est dit d’un vers oiseux et qui n’est là que pour la rime.” [Said to be a pointless verse that is only there to keep the rhyme.]

again, however, none of these definitions (all of which the dictionary indicated were very dated) really satisfied me. i mean, if the chapeaux frères are just a specific type of monks, and not an order of their own, would they really have their own slang? and if their role in the monastic hierarchy was to be subordinate to priests, why would hugo connect them with bossuet and joly?

there is another possibility — a single reference that differs from the above and i think fits much better with the description of bossuet and joly. it appears in the 1825 Dictionnaire historique de Paris: “frères chapeaux” was a popular nickname for the brothers of the christian doctrine:

DOCTRINE CHRÉTIENNE ( pères de la ), vulgairement appelés Ignorantins ou Frères-Chapeaux. Avant la révolution, cette congrégation, qu’on appelait aussi Maison-de-Saint Charles, habitait dans la rue des Fossés-St.-Victor. […] Les Ignorantins doivent, par leur institution, aller prêcher dans les campagnes, y enseigner la religion catholique, apostolique et romaine, le catéchisme aux enfans, et faire des instructions familières aux hommes.

Translation: “Christian Doctrine (Brothers of the), popularly called ‘Ignorantines’ or ‘Frères-Chapeaux.’ Before the Revolution, this congregation, also called ‘House-of-Saint-Charles, lived on the rue des Fossés-St.-Victor. […] The Ignorantines were obligated, by their institution, to go and preach in the countryside, to teach the Roman Catholic apostolic religion and the catechism to children there, and give familiar instruction to men.”

the brothers of the christian doctrine were one of the largest providers of primary education in pre-revolutionary france; victor hugo’s father attended a school run by the order in nancy. during the revolution, there had been a plan to replace religious instruction with secular schools run by the government, but it suffered from lack of funding, and so religious schools persisted in their essential role well into the 19th century. (remember that when monsieur madeleine wants to create a school in montreuil-sur-mer, he has to pay for it out of his own funds.)

the idea that “frères chapeaux” is a reference to the brothers of the christian doctrine appeals to me given hugo’s passion for education. in fact, the brothers of the christian doctrine were often criticized for their willingness to teach the masses; in a famous pre-revolutionary essay on national education, one author wrote:

in fact, the brothers actually appear in the novel — they run the school for convicts at toulon, where valjean learns to read and write at the age of forty.

it is true that as the state later began to step in and provide public education, religious schools were seen as reactionary and even anti-republican. in hugo’s 1877 novel about napoleon iii’s coup, history of a crime, one of his characters who dies atop the barricades is a schoolteacher; here, hugo explicitly equates the church with ignorance:

ouch. still, though, i think it’s important to remember that the status of public education when hugo wrote this passage was very different from when he was writing les mis, and even more different from the status of education in 1832. the aforementioned guizot law, which established primary school education in france, wasn’t even passed until the following year. in 1832, there weren’t schoolmasters in every village; religious orders filled in where the state failed. indeed, the positive depiction of the sisters of petit-picpus and their convent school in les mis shows that hugo understood this.

taken together, i think that hugo would have liked the idea of comparing joly and bossuet to the brothers of the christian doctrine. it fits with his belief in the liberating potential of knowledge, as well as the specific characterization of joly and bossuet as both generous and more “earthly” (to use artificialities’ great word) than some of the other, more exalted or dogmatically concerned amis. plus, there’s the whole central pun of les amis de l’abc: “a society having as its aim, in appearance, the education of children; in reality, the elevation of men.“ 

(also, it is exactly bossuet’s luck to be compared to a religious order promoting education, when he himself is booted out of law school.)

…jesus, this post is about two wordsof canon, and it’s almost 1300 words long. WHY CAN’T I DO THIS FOR MY ACTUAL RESEARCH TOPICS. D: