#3.2.4

Chapter Three, Segment Four

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Restrain

Masterpost

Gillenormand does not enjoy politics, but he love love LOVES aristocrats. Give him a duke or a king over a minister or chairman any day. He quickly disparages a string of names, all of whom were politicians around the time of the July Monarchy, but notably of varying political orientations, so he isn’t singling out liberals or conservatives. This is actually a really interesting disconnect and not all that uncommon or unsurprising. Why does Gillenormand hate the power but love the symbol? There’s a very complicated answer involving national/personal identity, class consciousness, and systems of power.

But to put this question a different way: why are people so obsessed with the British royal family today? We know Gillenormand loves French aristocratic culture, he still dresses like an incroyable for heaven’s sake, and there’s something about having a glorified figure with tons of power representing a nationality/culture that you strongly identify with that is appealing. But he also holds a position of steadily decreasing societal power and hates the idea of a government dictating what he can and can’t do. A toothless monarchal figure is right up his alley.

There’s a fascinating video about this phenomenon, specifically focusing on Britain, by Philosophy Tube, in which he compares the obsession with royal figures to waifuism and ultimately empty prestige which I highly recommend.

Gillenormand also has an essentialist view on the nature of power, social standing, nationality, etc, which we see played out more in chapter 5 in a weird way.

I don’t know much anything about finances, but it seems like Gillenormand’s second wife did pretty well for him, considering his philosophy amounts to “sit back and let women do everything they want and accept your own ruin.” You may have no money, but at least you’ll have a ton of mistresses...? Not entirely certain what Gillenormand’s goals are with this. Regardless, he ends up living exceedingly comfortably. I don’t know anything about annuities, but fifteen thousand francs is what Bienvenu was receiving as a bishop salary and that seemed like a good wage.

3.2.4

Gillenormand seems to remember personal awards given by nobility better than any political event he has witnessed. From the start we have this profile of a man who really does not care about politics going on in his time unless they relate to him somehow. The partition of Poland seems to be a good example here: the annexation of a country is less important to him than a cure for syphilis- he would rather believe in a fake elixir than concern himself about the truths. He consistently values personal interest over actually taking part in politics, his joking about how ridiculous it would be to become a minister proves that.

That is the profile we seem to be building up, he even turns his criticisms of the French Revolution into a charming anecdote about his ‘wit’ in escaping. He turns everything into concerns for himself- by then also adding that he hopes to live to be a hundred. The annoying thing is that he probably will live to be a hundred compared to people like Valjean’s entire family or Gavroche or Eponine, who didn’t really stand a chance living in poverty. 

3.2.5

We do have a direct reason of why he cannot even be bothered to leave legacies for the future, not only in terms of money (for Marius even) and in terms of giving his time to politics. Mostly because he is scared that even the smallest contribution will go towards fixing public debt and he does not want to fix the system and make it better for the poor. 

This is why he alludes to Rue Quincampoix because the street served as a hub of Banking/Finance full of brokers. 

He has very little concern with the Future of Paris/France and would not do a single thing to lift the poor and the gamin from darkness and their plight and he can do that through money because he has that kind of money. 

He’s miserly to the extreme in old age, whereas he let his purse strings free during his youth and marriage. I cannot help but comment on how all his relationships so far with his wives as well as his mistresses have been extremely shallow and money based. He wants to have a wife for respectability but instead of a long, deep lasting commitment- he placates her with money and the poor wife uses his money (The wife seems a much shrewder and more interesting character and I don’t blame her at all for taking all his money especially since he still is rich until he dies for all he cries poverty). 

Even the relationships with mistresses is shallow and temporary- he boasts of having several mistresses. Every relationship with him has that quality of being shallow and of a nature of a transaction to make him feel good about himself.

That nature of transaction also plays out in his interactions with servants. Knowing their names would entail having to know the servants and see them- really acknowledge them as people who exist outside of their function of cleaning his house and that is beneath him.

Further information about Gillenormand. Hugo is, if nothing else, thorough in his character studies. We learn that women have been a constant in his life and that, at least according to this, the desire is mutual. I say ‘according to this’ because it’s always hard to tell with Hugo how much of his character studies are in-universe factual and how much is in-universe pieced together from gossip, hearsay, and authorial opinions. He gives us the details of Gillenormand and the dancers without any of his usual ‘I heard this from the niece of a friend of someone who was there’ qualifiers, but it’s still Hugo, so it’s hard to say for sure.

But the basic image of his personality and history remain the same regardless of the in-universe veracity of the details. He’s old, cranky, set in his ways, and was young once. He hates change, especially change he doesn’t agree with, especially change that uproots his existing opinions. He doesn’t like the politicians in the paper because they’re not what he thinks of as the right sort, and he hates the Revolution because it unseated the natural order and hierarchy as he saw it.

(A sidenote, which I don’t really have brains to explore right now but which would be interesting to poke at: I think there is a qualitative difference between Javert’s adherence to The System and Gillenormand’s loyalty to A System. Javert believes strongly in social order and hierarchy as well, but he seems far more able to weather the political changes to that order. He believes in the concept of order, but seems willing, if possibly begrudgingly so, to adjust his idea of what form that order should take, provided the instructions to do so come from the appropriate source. The amount to which he believes in a natural order as superior to other forms of order is kind of unclear, at least to me right now, but clearly he’s flexible enough to roll with regime change and keep his job and his worldview. If Javert was rigid in the way Gillenormand is, he would have derailed way before Valjean.)

bait

as in “Having baited the horses twice on the way...”

Many sources didn't list a meaning that fit the context, but I think this might be the correct one for today's chapter:

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