IT'S HERE IT'S HERE THE YEAR 1817 when it was 1817 , in 1817 that year

Please go check out The Siecle's excellent breakdown of the references in this chapter! The episode is David Montgomery reading the whole chapter aloud, so you can follow along with the references in the posted transcript if you want--or just use the transcript along with your own reading. Go! Read! Find the needlessly elaborate Hugo Puns!XD

While reading this tableau of everything and everyone in Paris around 1817, a feeling stirred within me, reminding me of something. Then it hit me—I teach a course on the theory of history, and when discussing postmodern or deconstructionist history, we explore Gumbrecht’s “In 1926,” an example of experimental history writing. Gumbrecht crafted a book that allows readers to start from any part, lacking a conventional beginning and end. His aim was to immerse the reader in 1926, presenting short chapters about various aspects of life during that year.

It appears that Hugo was innovative and postmodernist even before postmodernism was coined. Although his portrayal of 1817 focuses more on political and cultural life than on social and economic aspects, it serves the purpose of conveying an impression of what was happening around that time. The challenge lies in the fact that many of the names mentioned may fly over the heads of modern readers. Even I had to consult some of Donougher’s notes. I can imagine the difficulties faced by those without a historical background.

I love how the “Year 1817” chapter opens by repeating that it is 1817 three times. Just to make completely Sure you know it’s 1817. It’s the most 1817 to ever 1817

LES MIS LETTERS IN ADAPTATION - The Year 1817, LM 1.3.1 (Les Miserables 1934)

This is what floats up confusedly, pell-mell, for the year 1817, and is now forgotten. History neglects nearly all these particulars, and cannot do otherwise; the infinity would overwhelm it. Nevertheless, these details, which are wrongly called trivial,—there are no trivial facts in humanity, nor little leaves in vegetation,—are useful. It is of the physiognomy of the years that the physiognomy of the centuries is composed. In this year of 1817 four young Parisians arranged “a fine farce.”

Overall I am enjoying Les Mis so far but god, when Victor Hugo goes off on his "We Didn't Start the Fire: 1817 edition"... I have absolutely no goddamn clue what you're talking about, sir

My favourite thing about today's chapter is that according to the note in my book most of the things mentioned didn't happen in 1817.

I’m still trying to comprehend the last paragraph of today’s chapter:

“This is what floats up confusedly, pell-mell, for the year 1817, and is now forgotten. History neglects nearly all these particulars, and cannot do otherwise; the infinity would overwhelm it. Nevertheless, these details, which are wrongly called trivial,—there are no trivial facts in humanity, nor little leaves in vegetation,—are useful. It is of the physiognomy of the years that the physiognomy of the centuries is composed. In this year of 1817 four young Parisians arranged “a fine farce.””

Aside from the more blatant transition/foreshadowing of the last sentence, this whole chapter seems to purely be context for 1817. And to an extent, it is. These are the kinds of events the characters would have been thinking about. At the same time, I’m interested in Hugo’s assertion that while “ History neglects nearly all these particulars,” they are not “trivial.” So much of this book is based on that philosophy: Hugo rarely spares any details about characters’ lives (we know so much about the bishop’s finances); he concentrates on those neglected by history (the poor, the outcast); he stresses the value of small moments (one man’s kindness transforming Valjean). 

The positioning of this chapter in light of this, then, seems crucial. After reading about Valjean’s crisis, the reader may suspect that we’re concentrating on his story because he’s somehow exceptional. But in emphasizing that nothing is “trivial” and that all details are “useful,” he’s reminding us that his intent isn’t to show us a unique story, but to rather illuminate the lives of ordinary people. Perhaps their stories are extraordinary in some ways, but only because each person is capable of extraordinary acts of compassion.

I’m also curious about the pass Hugo seems to give history when saying that it neglects these specifics because “the infinity would overwhelm it.” Although he says this, he’s just presented us with the exact opposite of that philosophy: he’s overwhelmed us with the variety of “headlines” present in a single year. 

I don’t know how to fully articulate this, but something about this section reminds me of the Conventionist saying that while it is a tragedy that royal/noble children died during the French Revolution, poor children need to be grieved more because they’re more likely to be forgotten. Perhaps it’s simply because that chapter was really memorable and any reference to what’s forgotten or neglected in this book makes me think of that, but it does feel like Hugo’s adopting a similar attitude towards events in 1817. At the same time, all of these events were considered noteworthy in that year. It’s only with distance that they’ve come to be forgotten, unlike the children mentioned by the Conventionist, who were ignored by broader historical narratives from the beginning.

Today's Les Mis Letters, 1.3.1, "The Year 1817," has a full 87 notes in the Rose translation. I'm not sure I have the fortitude for this...

Slowly catching up with Les Mis letters and I officially know way too much about Napoleon and I am angry about it

1.3.1 mentions that Napoleon is at St Helena and I was like... is that when he was exiled?

So now I am annoyed that I knew off the top of my head that St Helena was where Napoleon was exiled to

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I have a Historical Question for my Les Mis collage pieces! I prep which sentences/paragraphs I'm going to use 5 or so pages at a time. For the final page of 1.3.1, I want to use the second to last sentence, "It is the features of the years that makes up the face of the century."

I have an idea about portraying a face of someone actually from history using a couple of types of different collage media. The question is, I'm not sure whose face to try and portray! Do you or your followers have any thoughts/ideas/suggestions?

(I suppose if nothing else, I could attempt to portray Vicky himself!)

ooh! Vicky would certainly be a good pick! Very recognizable!

if you want less recognizable faces, you could always go with some of the people Hugo names in the chapter-- The Siecle has VERY conveniently linked a lot of the names to their wiki pages, or other info pages, and so you could find various portraits easily! It's where I'd start--there's some great faces in that bunch!

Brickclub 1.3.1 ‘The year 1817′

The last time I read ‘The year 1817,’ it was early 2017--I’m in the US, we’d just had a, uh, noteworthy election--and I was struck by the undifferentiated confusion of the chapter: the ways the narratives people thought they were living had all dead-ended, and without a coherent narrative framework it was impossible to pick out the important events from the trifles.

Reading it in 2020, I’m struck by the mass exhaustion and national trauma.

The deluge of facts doesn’t feel undifferentiated to me now. It feels like traumatic upheavals have been going on for nearly 30 years, and there’s massive pressure on the people--from within and from above--to fall back in line and pretend none of it happened. The little arts-culture-and-science events are peppered with equally casual mentions of war, changing political regimes, the ongoing foreign occupation, and violence.

People are retreating desperately into everyday concerns and politically expedient compliance because they’re exhausted and because reprisals for dissent are a looming threat. It’s true that they can’t tell where on the narrative arc of the century they’re standing, but it’s not true that they don’t know how to pick the important from the incidental. It’s more like: what else are they going to do?

Like I said, I’m writing this in 2020. It’s familiar.

I also kept thinking while reading about the idea expressed much later, that dying for a cause is good and right, but that people aren’t wrong for valuing their lives and not doing that. This chapter has a feeling of exhausted people trying to go back to their lives as best they can.

I’m still missing a large majority of the references, but I'm picking up a lot more than last time. Shoutout to the Siècle Podcast, because if hadn’t been listening to it for the last week or two, I’d understand a lot less.

Brick Club 1.3.1 “The Year 1817″

This chapter is just a massive list of a ton of stuff that was happening around 1817. This time, I finally did what I’ve been meaning to do the last 2 times I read the brick. I finally looked up and wrote down a little bit of info for pretty much every reference in this chapter.

What I got out of that is that it’s a lot of Hugo talking about all these people who supported Napoleon when he was emperor, who then suddenly turned around and supported the Bourbons once Napoleon fell. It’s actually really interesting looking in to all these people and seeing just how many of them supported Napoleon until his exile to St Helena and then immediately turned around and supported the Bourbons without seeming to feel much conflict. Hugo’s also just generally mentioning a lot of popular writers/performers/artists/politicians/etc of the time.

Hugo is definitely establishing the political and cultural tone of the time here, but it’s hard to get an adequate sense of that as someone who is 200 years out from that point and only really recognizes the Medusa wreck, Moliere, and Jacques-Louis David in terms of familiar references.

I am having fun doing this little bit of research, and it’s making me wish I knew how to get a good starting point for properly learning about French history. Mathurin Bruneau’s whole life sounds like an absolute trip and I want to know more.

There were a number of references I couldn’t find any info on. I assumed Ordy was the Polish city, but I’m not sure. I can’t find any info on Voltaire-Tourquet, and I don’t even know if that’s a person or a place. Also I could find almost nothing on Pleignier etc, and nothing on the des patriotes conspiracy, only that it was a thing that apparently happened, whatever it was (contextually I assume it was a plot against the monarchy but I couldn’t find any details). Nain Jaune into Miroir--I assume those are both newspapers? But all I could find was info on either a card game or a fairy tale story. There’s a whole chunk of names and references that I couldn’t seem to find anything on (Hugo doesn’t help much when he doesn’t supply first names): Piet, Bacol, O’Mahony, Chappedelaine, l’Epingle Noire, Delaverderie, Trogoff, etc.

I think Lafon is Jean Lafon, the priest who undermined Napoleon via propaganda/rumors/etc? I may be wrong. I also definitely don’t understand the “King of Rome” reference at all. I assume this is commentary on monarchy vs republic?

Hugo also specifically mentions a few socialist philosophers/thinkers. He tosses praise for a few of them in among the criticisms and just plain old facts.

I did enjoy Hugo’s particular little bit of sass about Angoulême being given the status of a seaport town, considering it’s 100+ km from the water.

We also have another Hugolian pun here. Forgive any translation mistakes, google translate is not always my friend (and I really need to find a good way to learn French that isn’t duolingo): “Même quand Loyson vole, on sent qu'il a des pattes” is the line. “Loyson” becomes the homophone “l’oison”, which translates (I think) to “Even when the gosling flies; we sense that he has legs.” Or something like that.

Hugo’s description of a steamboat as “a thing that smoked and clacked along on the Seine, making the noise of a swimming dog” is such an evocative image. I’d love to know why he calls the steamboat a “machine of little value” and “a utopia,” especially because just above, he praises Charles Fourier, who was a founder of utopian socialism. I thought for a minute maybe it has to do with his daughter’s death? But she didn’t die on a steamer, I don’t think, so I have no idea.

He does go on to kind of expand on all these people that he’s describing who supported Napoleon and then turned around and supported the Restoration, saying that “Traitors showed themselves openly, stripped even of hypocrisy; men who had gone over to the enemy on the eve of a battle made no secret of their bribes and shamelessly walked abroad in daylight in their cynicism of wealth and honor...” People who had at one point supported the Revolution or Napoleon suddenly and unashamedly ingratiating themselves to the Bourbons and supporting the Restoration. The snark comparing political hypocrites to people ignoring English public toilets with a sign that says “Please adjust your dress before leaving” is too funny.

I love Hugo’s weird propensity for listing off a ton of things that either set the tone of the scene or that are somehow symbolically important and then at the end of the chapter either explaining his metaphors outright or handwaving the entire chapter away with a “this isn’t really that important. Well, it kind of is, but not really.”

I think what’s really interesting about this whole chapter is the way he lists off so many cultural figures and events of the year to set the scene--and yet I don’t think a single one of these people or events have an effect on Fantine’s fate.

The vibe Hugo was going for in “The Year 1817” chapter in Les Mis reminds me of tumblr on November 5th/DestielPutinElection Day….. the hysterical feeling of being Barraged with Too Much News about important world events AND news about goofy inane pop culture stuff, at the same time, until your brain starts to break

Like it’s difficult to explain why Biden’s election and Destiel are completely connected in my mind now; but they Are. And that’s kinda the vibe I get from the 1817 chapter— news about serious world events with massive traumatic implications, sitting right next to other news about which pop culture figures and dancers and tightrope walkers are now getting famous. It’s sad that the chapter is so difficult to read now because most of the references are now obscure or lost. I also imagine that someone reading “DestielPutinElection tumblr on November 5th” a century from now would find it similarly incoherent ASjdjjd.

Other people have compared this chapter to that song “We Didn’t Start the Fire” (which also does the thing of listing a barrage of information about random different Things that are all happening in the same time period) and YEE. As much as this chapter is full of broken references I don’t get and occasional factual errors on Hugo’s part, I do really love its last line. It captures a Vibe about what it’s like to live through major historical events.

Such was the confused mass of events that floated pell-mell on the surface of the year 1817, and is now forgotten. History neglects almost all these peculiarities, nor can it do otherwise; it is under the dominion of infinity. Nevertheless, these details, which are wrongly called little — there are neither little facts in humanity nor little leaves in vegetation — are useful. The features of the years make up the face of the century.

Brickclub I.3.1 - I.3.3

In this readthrough, the big thing I’m focusing on in I.3.1, “The Year 1817,” is what it’s even doing here: why is this the framing for Fantine’s introduction? 
 So, jumping straight into the next two chapters, “Double Quartet” and “Four for Four" (otherwise known as exhibits A and B in Briana Lewis’s theory that fours and eights are unlucky in Hugo’s numerology):

The tone of “The Year 1817,″ of characterizing a time through lists of things--mostly ephemeral, insignificant things--associated with it persists through both chapters: the Oscars/Arthurs digression, the paragraph on how railroads have changed Paris’s conception of the countryside, the descriptions of fashions and hairstyles. The tonal similarity sets us up right away to look for more significant things in these catalogs--possibly for things whose significance is downplayed or unrecognized.

I think we get one of these in the aside that Fantine has no baptismal name, because she was born under the Directory--which, in 1817, puts her age between 18 and 22. Favourite, the Old One at 23, is definitely older than the Directory but the other two aren’t necessarily; and it’s implied that they don’t have much more family than Favourite, either. But Fantine is the one who is “brought forth from the heart of the people”—a child of France, and of no one else.

I think we can pretty safely assume that, just as Cosette appears to have been conceived around Waterloo, Fantine appears to have been born around the time Valjean went to prison—she’s the child of France under Napoleon’s ascendency. And looked at that way, “The Year 1817” makes a lot more sense. It’s France’s abandonment of Napoleon and the last vestiges of the revolution, seen through fashions and daily life and personal hypocrisy.

Of course Fantine is about to get jilted, and in the pettiest way possible.

Stray Observations:

—Courfeyrac is the character who is canonically compared to Tholomyès, but in his introduction he comes off as the anti-Lesgle: balding, ironic, unlucky (in his health) but cheerful about it, and—though we don’t know it yet—willing to go to great lengths for a joke. The difference being that Lesgle’s jokes are (1) funny, and (2) not at anyone’s expense but his own.

—“Listolier and Fameuil, discussing their professors, explained to Fantine the difference between M. Delvincourt and M. Blondeau.” Both of whom will still be there eleven years from now when we meet our next set of law students. —Fantine’s initial description echoes Enjolras’s very strongly, down to the marble/statue descriptors. And the repeated stress on modesty and chastity. Which I think has just broken down the last of my resistance to considering canon-era Enjolras ship fic as canon compliant. If Fantine can be canonically praised for some inherent quality of virginity, regardless of how much actual sex she is having, then so can Enjolras, dammit. 

--There’s a lot to say about Fantine’s wisdom and simplicity, and I’m going to come back to it after the next couple of chapters. But right from the start, her lack of artifice—or of the ability to expect or understand it in others—is shown as the source of her wisdom, or at least as inextricable from it. I feel like this is another thing that links her with Enjolras: two characters who meet the world with radical transparency, and expect the same, and are righteously angry not to get it.