#colonialism!

caerdroia replied to your link: A Sense for the Comic: Still pissed off at lesmisremiders

I’d be curious to hear more on how colonialism factors into LM, seeing as the empire was in its infancy in 32. Was your objection more a comment that the Amis couldn’t have peacefully worked for justice in the worsening system had they survived?

It doesn't-- unless you want to break out the Edward Said on the throwaway reference to Thenardier going to become a slave trader in America, drag Les Orientales into it and talk in a postmodern way about Hugo's love of seemingly dichotomous things being reconciled into a luminescent whole on mankind's eternally upward progress towards perfection. As it is, Les Miserables does not really deal with colonialism because the 19th century French colonial system in Africa/ the West and East Indes was still being built. Napoleon did his best to hold onto Haiti (and sold Louisiana), but I think most (certainly not all) of the major French colonial possessions had, during the time period covered in LM, been taken by Britain, had been sold, or had won their freedom (Haiti! The world's only successful slave revolt!). 

My objection had nothing to do with the text of Les Miserables itself-- I apologize if that was unclear? I thought I was being unusually direct for me by saying that I was annoyed with that specific blog-- but in the assertion that if the Amis had lived and become law students, they could have peacefully achieved their objectives within the system. No. That's not how nineteenth century revolutions worked. Nonviolent protests and revolutions only became effective in the 1950s (and by effective I mean, Britain gave up India type effective). During the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and even the twentieth and twenty-first, revolutions were and are violent. I give you the Arab Spring as an example. When a system is too broken to fix, as it was in nineteenth century France and as it was in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, etc., and said system becomes too painful to bear any longer, people protest. And those protests frequently become violent, whether through governmental response with firehoses and bullets, or through outraged protesters storming important buildings. That's the only way the broken system, fighting to maintain its power through all means available, can be dismantled and something more equitable can be built. 

My main issue-- which I thought I'd made clear, so I apologize for not having done so-- is the assumption that the Amis could peacefully work for "the elevation of man," which includes equality under the law for all people, in a system that gained its power through institutionalized inequality, and went to other countries to enforce that ideology. In a colonialist system, as Said points out, equality does not exist. There is always a lesser, a subaltern. A Frenchman will be automatically assumed to be superior to an Algerian one, to the point where that ideology is not even questioned. It's just accepted as a fact of life. And if along with, "the sky is blue," one just assumes everyday, "wow, we white men are so great for teaching these savages culture," how can you peacefully work for justice when "keeping the peace" means "accepting these brown people as your eternal inferiors?"