Cette Verve De Jeunesse

Seriously tho I love this because you can kinda see where the remaining canon era (ish) parts of Paris are, where the old buildings are. (I mean this is up to 1850 so it's a bit past canon era, but close enough)

This one is for only pre-1800 buildings, which might be even more useful in a way

@oldguardians making this answer a separate post because it’s kind of interesting*!

‘‘I cannot bear to hear that mentioned. Pray do not talk of that odious man. I do think it is the hardest thing in the world, that your estate should be entailed away from your own children; and I am sure if I had been you, I should have tried long ago to do something or other about it.’’

Jane and Elizabeth attempted to explain to her the nature of an entail. They had often attempted it before, but it was a subject on which Mrs. Bennet was beyond the reach of reason; and she continued to rail bitterly against the cruelty of settling an estate away from a family of ve daughters, in favour of a man whom nobody cared anything about.”

(In the interest of not getting bogged down in legal minutiae, I’ll keep this pretty general. Please note that I am vastly oversimplifying some legal concepts here for the sake of explaining the issue clearly. If you’re an attorney/barrister/whatever, don’t @ me - I KNOW it’s all much more nuanced than this.)

Pride & Prejudice is set somewhere around 1811. In the novel, the Bennets’ ownership interest in the family estate is famously said to be “entailed” away from the Bennet girls in favor of their cousin, Mr. Collins. This is specifically explained to be because Mr. Bennet has no sons, and thus his estate reverts back to his closest male relative.

In the real world, entailment could (and usually did) work that way. But there is an enormous, glaring issue: English entailments have long been very VERY easy to defeat** through a remedy called Common Recovery. If Longbourn was truly entailed away from the female descendants, as the novel indicates, Mr. Bennet could have hired an attorney (his brother-in-law?) to start the Common Recovery process at any time. Within a few months, the court would render a judgment giving Mr. Bennet the property outright and free from any entailment, allowing him to leave the property to his daughters upon his death*** and make them independently wealthy women. And this wasn’t just a possibility - it was a very common legal mechanism that would have been almost expected of a gentleman interested in preserving his family’s comfort. There are hundreds of cases in the English Chancery records (featuring many families that were much less wealthy than the Bennets!) invoking this very remedy whenever fathers failed to produce sons.

So entailment makes no sense - it had basically no power over landowners by the Regency Period.

Let’s talk alternatives. In 1811, the primary way of keeping property in the male line was through another estate planning technique called strict settlement. To GREATLY simplify a complicated form of ownership, strict settlement had the present possessor of property always hold a life estate interest (they own it only until their death), with their male primogeniture descendants holding a remainder fee tail interest (read: eventual outright ownership upon their father’s death). Each generation of life estate owner would then force their young male descendants (the fee tail owner) upon their coming of age to give the young descendant’s unknown future male sons the remainder interest, retaining a life estate for themselves (which they would receive upon their father’s death). Thus the ownership system perpetuates down a male line of descendants, each generation demanding the same restrictive ownership system of their own children.

If you followed that - and I don’t blame you if you didn’t, as this is all very deliberately obtuse - you might think “wait okay. That kind of sounds like the Bennets’ situation. Austen called it an entailment but maybe it was actually a strict settlement!” Several academics have tried to argue that, but it also fails for several reasons:

(1) With the Bennets’ seemingly comfortable current income, strict settlement would have provided for significant lifetime income + dowries for Mr. Bennet’s female descendants. But in P&P, it’s made very clear that the girls’ only possible inheritance is a tiny amount from their mother’s side and nothing from their father’s. If they do not marry, they will be destitute. That is extremely unlikely and would be very shameful in strict settlement ownership..

(2) It would have been inconceivable for Mr. Bennet’s father to have forced him to benefit a cousin over his own descendants, even if they were women. One of the fundamental points of strict settlement was to avoid this outcome (aka to avoid the entailment system). People did NOT want a distant male cousin to inherit property simply because there wasn’t a primogeniture male descendant - they knew that if anything, their own female descendants could always produce a male heir in their marriages. Plus, Mr. Bennet’s and Mr. Collin’s fathers apparently hated each other (ref Mr. Collins’ initial letter) - why would Mr. Bennet’s father force his son to benefit the son of a man he himself hates?

(3) For many many other reasons, a strict settlement does not match how the family talks about/treats the estate in the novel. There’s literally a whole law review article on this topic (cited below), and I’ll defer to that for a full discussion.

So we’re left with two possibilities: the land is entailed, and for some reason Mr. Bennet isn’t willing to pay a small amount in attorney’s fees to undo the entailment for the enormous benefit of his daughters (extremely unlikely, robs the story of all its tension), or the land is subject to a bizarre + shameful strict settlement that goes directly against everything that would have been normal at the time, and none of the characters know that (makes no sense in the story).

And then, of course, there’s the truth: the “entailment” is simply a narrative device that does not reflect actual law or historical transfer of property at death, which is perfectly fine. Jane Austen was not writing a law textbook or even a legal drama. And her underlying point remains clear: Regency-era women were often in economically precarious positions and forced to marry to maintain their social and economic standings.

((If you do want a version in your head that works under the law, maybe we imagine that Mr. Collin’s father actually owned the home but was in debt to Mr. Bennet so he gave him some kind of strange lifelong leasehold interest with income from the property included. And then we ignore the passage saying Mr. Bennet having a son would have “avoided” the home passing to Mr. Collins + pretend that the family lied to everybody about the home being entailed to save face))

For additional reading, I highly recommend A FUNHOUSE MIRROR OF LAW: THE ENTAILMENT IN JANE AUSTEN’S PRIDE AND PREJUDICE by Peter A. Appel (linked). His analysis reflects my own reading of Regency inheritance law, and I think his conclusions are generally sound. There is significant other scholarship on this subject, but I find Appel’s work the most persuasive.

—-

* At least to me, who admittedly studies this for a living

** For fun War of the Roses reasons!

When Marius re-entered the redoubt with Gavroche in his arms, his face, like the child, was inundated with blood.

At the moment when he had stooped to lift Gavroche, a bullet had grazed his head; he had not noticed it.

Actual quote was like, "He should have been dancing at the Chaumière, as young people have a moral obligation to do."

A Catalogue of Knees:

Enjolras, ??/10. Genua Incognita. Virgin knees, untouched by defiling eyes. All observations must therefore be speculative, yet we may conclude from inference that they exist, and from induction that they are fine. No man grows so tall as Enjolras nor strides so boldly without the usual joints, and not even nature is so capricious as to build a thing like Enjolras and give him wobbly knees.

Feuilly, 9/10. Exemplary knees. I have no complaint against them, save that they may be too sturdy. The rest suffer by comparison; a cloud falls over the company.

Prouvaire, 8/10. Jehan can leap from a sprawl to a sprint faster than any man I have known. His knees may appear frail, but they have earned our accolades. Do not underestimate them.

Couferayc and Bahorel, 7/10. Well-formed, I will grant you, and well-toned, but through what activity? Dancing for the one. Brawling for the other. Beware, friend Courfeyrac! Beware, friend Bahorel! Such sinful living will make its mark even on the finest of knees!

Combeferre, 5/10. Rendered entirely unremarkable by a deficit of sinful living. Dancing and brawling recommended.

Joly, 4/10. Perhaps the more charming for being almost entirely ornamental. However, he refuses tell me what substances caused the ominous and shifting series of splotches that recently appeared on them, and so I am deducting points from fear of the unknown. I only pray it is neither poisonous not contagious, and that our company of knees may survive.

Please comment or repost If you like it TT

"Love, the future is thine."

[Part one with the maps is here] It might be a good idea to read it first. I’m not really planning on repeating my explanations for this stuff here.

So I know many of you have seen this Charles Marville photo of the Les Mis barricade location. But the thing is, this picture was taken over thirty years later and Rue Rambuteau (which absorbed Rue de la Chanverrerie) was one of the first big rebuilding projects of the 19th century in the historical centre of Paris. Actually I think it was THE first, and it happened even before the whole Haussmann thing started, during Louis-Philippe’s reign.

So my point is, as amazing and cool as this picture is… it doesn’t actually give you a good idea of the location. At least in terms of it’s dimensions, and it doesn’t fit Hugo’s descriptions either. I wanted to comment on that but in the end I realised that the easiest way to explain this would be to draw it myself.

I used the photo as my model and this was the result:

Okay, it’s not very pretty (especially everything that’s not Corinthe) but it’s not supposed to be. This isn’t fanart, this is a demonstration. :p

So this is basically the same view but reconstructed to look more like how Hugo describes it. (Which is not necessarily perfectly historically accurate but we’re talking about fiction here anyway.) I also tried to add details from the book but obviously there’s some room for interpretation there too… Like for example Hugo mentions that the upper floor of the wineshop only had one window but there’s nothing about WHERE that window was. (Aside from that it was definitely on the Rue de la Chanvrerie side of the house.) He also doesn’t say much about the windows of the apartment of the Hucheloups that was above it. Also I don’t know where on the wall the “Carpe Horas” text was exactly or how the signs were positioned etc.

Also Corinthe is green just to make it stand out. :P There’s no other reason for that.

So mostly this is about the general look of the place, not the details. I could have drawn the houses as featureless blocks just as well. The details are just more fun.

Things to note:

1: The Rue de la Chanverrerie was much, MUCH shorter than the Rue Rambuteau. This is where it ended. Hugo describes a tall house at the end of the street with a small but sturdy door. Le Cabuc shot the portier of this house. (In real life there were two houses at the end of the street, both only half exposed to the Rue de la Chanverrerie. But again: fiction!) It was also way narrower!

2: The gutters used to be in the middle of the street and the streets would be more or less sloped towards the middle.

3: The Corinthe house is described by Hugo as shorter than the house in the photo. This isn’t super clear in my drawing but it’s supposed to be just ground floor + two floors and attic.

4: The streetlamps used to hang by ropes.

5: The thing at the street corner is a “borne” which translates either as bollard or milestone. I don’t know which is accurate in this case but I just googled “borne” in canon era and this is what I got so I went with that. My reference for this comes from here, here and here and also somewhat here. I was vague about the number since I have no idea what it would have been, if there even would have been a number. Hugo describes the bollards as “encircled with iron hoops” which I couldn’t find visual reference for. There were multiple on the street but I only know the exact location of this one because Valjean is mentioned sitting on it at one point.

6: I didn’t colour the street sign since I didn’t colour anything else in real colours either but in case you want to know, the street signs were ochre with either black or red text. Red text was for streets that were parallel to the river, black for every other street. The Rue de la Chanvrerie was parallel to the river so it had red text (and numbers), while the Rue Mondétour had black text (and numbers). I think this system was relatively new. It probably dates back to 1805 but I’m not entirely sure. Here’s my source. Also you can see one of the signs (badly) in this painting. I didn’t add the numbers since I’m not so sure about where they would have been… but in any case the address of the Corinthe building would have been number 28 Rue de la Chanverrerie and the number would have been marked with red.

7: Obviously there should be all sorts of clutter on the streets but I couldn’t be bothered to draw any of it. And it’s not the point here anyway.

I had to extend the picture a bit so I could include the barricades! Note that the street widens here towards the right… not that you can tell in the picture… There might have also been a bit of a slope?

And here we have the barricades. The bars have been removed from the windows of the wineshop too. Otherwise I didn’t really change much. I didn’t draw the tables and chairs that would have been taken outside, or the barrels of powder or other stuff that the revolutionaries needed, or the general destruction that happened during the building of the barricade. This is very very simplified. There should also be a lamp on the small barricade and a torch on the big one but I left them out.

I know the big barricade looks like it’s just made of paving stones but that’s just because I couldn’t be bothered to extend the picture to include it completely. The random stuff is on the outside. The inside is arranged into steps so the fighters can easily climb it. You can see similar constructions in pictures of real barricades. I mean mine is a bit simple but still. (Obviously the reason people tend to draw the barricades as full of clutter on both sides is because it looks more dramatic but it actually makes way more sense to build the inside tidily out of bricks and the outside out of random stuff that makes it difficult to climb.)

I think the paving stones inside the barricades hadn’t been torn up yet on the 5th? I think they tore them up when they started raising the height of the big barricade and building the third barricade to close the last way out.

Here’s the close-up map again for quick reference.