#brick talk

The first Cats of the Republic get a mention pretty early, during 1817, in Bombarda’s (1.3.5).  And it gets a lot  of Mention! (all bolding mine):

"It was a time of undisputed peace and profound royalist security; it was the epoch when a special and private report of Chief of Police Anglès to the King, on the subject of the suburbs of Paris, terminated with these lines:—

“Taking all things into consideration, Sire, there is nothing to be feared from these people. They are as heedless and as indolent as cats. The populace is restless in the provinces; it is not in Paris. (Non-Cat comments snipped) ...In short, it is an amiable rabble.”

Prefects of the police do not deem it possible that a cat can transform itself into a lion; that does happen, however, and in that lies the miracle wrought by the populace of Paris. Moreover, the cat so despised by Count Anglès possessed the esteem of the republics of old. In their eyes it was liberty incarnate; and as though to serve as pendant to the Minerva Aptera of the Piræus, there stood on the public square in Corinth the colossal bronze figure of a cat. The ingenuous police of the Restoration beheld the populace of Paris in too “rose-colored” a light; it is not so much of “an amiable rabble” as it is thought. The Parisian is to the Frenchman what the Athenian was to the Greek: no one sleeps more soundly than he, no one is more frankly frivolous and lazy than he, no one can better assume the air of forgetfulness; let him not be trusted nevertheless; he is ready for any sort of cool deed; but when there is glory at the end of it, he is worthy of admiration in every sort of fury... He is Napoleon’s stay and Danton’s resource. Is it a question of country, he enlists; is it a question of liberty, he tears up the pavements. Beware! his hair filled with wrath, is epic; his blouse drapes itself like the folds of a chlamys...It is thanks to the suburban man of Paris, that the Revolution, mixed with arms, conquers Europe. He sings; it is his delight. Proportion his song to his nature, and you will see! As long as he has for refrain nothing but la Carmagnole, he only overthrows Louis XVI.; make him sing the Marseillaise, and he will free the world.

I’ve included most of this long passage here because it ties into some pretty obvious other imagery later!

I’m not gonna try to myth- or history- check Hugo here because it’s not the point of this post; the point is, look at all this imagery and cat-association he’s giving us!  Cats the animal of Minerva, “the very image of liberty”!  The power of a Parisian’s song to  drive a revolution!  Epic rage hair!  The Parisian, says Hugo, is like the cat, it is “heedless”,“indolent” , “frivolous”,”lazy” -but it can transform into a lion, and even as a cat ,is a symbol of Liberty in a Republic. 

Then we move on , and our next Revolutionary Cat Mention of course shows up in 3.4.1, when one lands right in the center  of our actual revolutionaries:

Courfeyrac had, in fact, that animation of youth which may be called the beauté du diable of the mind. Later on, this disappears like the playfulness of the kitten, and all this grace ends, with the bourgeois, on two legs, and with the tomcat, on four paws.

Courfeyrac is a kitten! And he’ll grow up to be a  good Parisian Cat, no doubt, ready to turn into a lion at a moment’s notice. 

Oh, here’s a moment for a Fans of LM Animal Symbolism!  From 4.11.2, Gavroche On The March:

The gossips of the Rue de Thorigny busied themselves only with their own concerns. Three of them were portresses, and the fourth was a rag-picker with her basket on her back.

All four of them seemed to be standing at the four corners of old age, which are decrepitude, decay, ruin, and sadness...Things of this nature were said:—

“Ah, by the way, is your cat still cross?”

“Good gracious, cats are naturally the enemies of dogs, you know. It’s the dogs who complain.”

“And people also.”

“But the fleas from a cat don’t go after people.”

“That’s not the trouble, dogs are dangerous. I remember one year when there were so many dogs that it was necessary to put it in the newspapers. That was at the time when there were at the Tuileries great sheep that drew the little carriage of the King of Rome. 

The opinion on the street, from the poor women who really know things at this level:  dogs are dangerous, and cats are the enemies of dogs.  What a statement, given the most prominent dog in the book! 

And of course, in chapter 5.1.2,  the final solid Revolutionary Cat of the Republic, sighted at the Corinth, the very image , not of Liberty now, but of the evidence of God’s care in Creation!:

Joly, perceiving a cat prowling on a gutter (a cat in Corinth!), extracted philosophy from it.

“What is the cat?” he exclaimed. “It is a corrective. The good God, having made the mouse, said: ‘Hullo! I have committed a blunder.’ And so he made the cat. The cat is the erratum of the mouse. The mouse, plus the cat, is the proof of creation revised and corrected.”

These are our most obvious links, and they are very clear; the people of Paris--indecisive, fickle, and hedonistic-- are cats. But they are cats who are also lions, and lions and the revolution and the barricade in particular get linked a lot. Just a few mentions:   “(The army) gazed into the dark barricade as one would gaze into a lion’s den.” (4.14.4);  “The barricade once scaled had a mane of lightning flashes. The assault was so furious, that for one moment, it was inundated with assailants; but it shook off the soldiers as the lion shakes off the dogs” (5.1.21)

And, of course;

“All at once (Enjolras) threw back his head, his blond locks fell back like those of an angel on the sombre quadriga made of stars, they were like the mane of a startled lion in the flaming of an halo” 5.1.5

EPIC PARISIAN RAGE HAIR, in its true form as a lion’s mane!:P

I joke, but there really is a nice clear line of Paris As Cat/POTENTIAL REVOLUTIONARY WERELION running through the novel!  It’s about as consistent as Javert’s dog metaphors (and wow someone could probably right a paper on Javert/the cops as dogs and Paris As Cat in Les Mis). 

Her time working at the farm seems to have been fairly good to her. I’m not saying this just because I desperately want her to have had some good years (although WOW I REALLY DO) but because by the time she’s an adult in Paris she seems to have a lot of skills I don’t think her childhood would have allowed her to learn: basic sewing (where would homeless little baby Fantine get the supplies to practice?) , certain manners, how to dress and present herself to get work (which is a SERIOUSLY COMPLICATED thing to learn) , maybe even the small amount she knows how to read. The family she worked for may not have treated her as a daughter or One Of The Family, but they seem to have genuinely treated her a valuable member of the household, one worth teaching and training to useful skills. Not a shabby deal, at all. 

I like the idea of her having a pretty good experience at the farm because it just serves to emphasize the courage and sense of adventure in what came next:  Fantine, at some point, CHOSE to go to Paris. She wasn’t born there; she walked there (and she would have walked, the same way she walked back to M-sur-M)  Now, granted this is a common thing in her time;  people from outlying communities went to Paris for work all the time--seriously, there were enormous, constant migrations of workers into Paris-- but (a) an awful lot of them were just seasonal or temporary from the start and (b) a lot of people went with the expectation of some connection in town--if not a personal friend or family member already set up, then a general community from their region (someone remind me to talk a little bit about the Savoyard chimney sweep kids, sometime).   And oh yeah, people, including men, tended to try to go in groups, because traveling was really dangerous! Fantine, with no connections to look forward to, and probably sacrificing her place at the farm, walked into Paris--almost certainly alone-- to see what she could find. She took herself on a full-out Epic Adventure to see what she could become in the Big City. 

And when I say Epic Adventure, I  MEAN it. This is Epic Adventure stuff!  The orphan child, armed only with courage and wit, no mentors but a humble farming family, walking into the city of danger and dreams to test themselves and learn what the future holds, dreaming of love and adventure? This is CLASSIC Epic Start Mode. 

And for a while, oh gad, it must have all seemed just like an adventure. She found work, she was making friends (if not ...really great friends), she found True Love!  She was on the verge of changing her station and ascending the social ladder with her love and her child and oh it must have seemed just like a fairy tale--

and then her lover turned out to be false, and the whole story changed.  And everyone knows how hard she fought after that (though I really think a lot of adaptations do her an injustice by condensing her timeline so much; she fought the whole world for years,  trying to save her daughter, trying to win a better life for two people now instead of just one.).  

Fantine accepts becoming a martyr, a sacrifice for her own ideal future, which, by then, is Cosette’s future. But Fantine chose to be an adventurer, a hero in her own story,  long before betrayal and cruelty and responsibility for another person pushed her to the extreme.