This chapter is full of fascinating historical details:

“At the epoch, nearly contemporary by the way, when the action of this book takes place, there was not, as there is to-day, a policeman at the corner of every street”

The book was published in the 1860s and largely took place in the 1820s-1830s, so the police force grew quite dramatically in 30-40 years. This point helps demonstrate that the statistics about children on the street were probably undercounts, but it also illustrates the extent to which the image of authority (in that police officers on every corner are very visible) changed just within Hugo’s lifetime.

The growth and transformation of Paris is similarly visible. Gamins hide in houses “in the process of construction,” and “unenclosed lands” imply the existence of enclosed ones that bring land under private ownership.

Hugo still insists that Parisian gamins are different and better than gamins elsewhere, although he concedes that it's awful that there are so many children on the streets.

The comparison to the ancien régime is fascinating. While it's possible that 18th-century and 19th-century France were similarly bad for children, I wonder if Hugo's intent was to stress the evils of the old monarchy more than to portray the 19th century as an improvement (given the criticism of monarchical systems throughout the novel and his distaste for the idea of a return to the monarchy under the Restoration). Since he idealizes the gamins so much, there's a good chance it's the latter, but it still was an effective way of illustrating the horrors of the ancien régime. The last example genuinely seems like a horror story:

"Under Louis XV. children disappeared in Paris; the police carried them off, for what mysterious purpose no one knew. People whispered with terror monstrous conjectures as to the king’s baths of purple. Barbier speaks ingenuously of these things. It sometimes happened that the exempts of the guard, when they ran short of children, took those who had fathers. The fathers, in despair, attacked the exempts. In that case, the parliament intervened and had some one hung. Who? The exempts? No, the fathers."

If anything, though, these examples seem like a continuity. Louis XIV's use of trivial charges (being Protestant was seen as a political threat by the monarchy, but focusing on hats specifically makes it seem trivial) to gain convicts to work in the galleys is similar to Jean Valjean's imprisonment in the same structure for stealing bread. Although they focus on different matters, both instances suggest a continuing injustice around convicts and the criminal justice system that needed to be addressed.

I find it symbolic that we're reading the chapter about abandoned, abducted, and vanishing children on International Children's Day. And as for today, I am already quite depressed with the news about children being killed and abducted in the real world to fully appreciate the chapter.

It's interesting how Hugo contrasts the presence of "a policeman at the corner of every street" as a perceived benefit at the beginning of the chapter with the villainous guards (who are essentially policemen) of the ancien régime who snatch children and turn against their fathers in the end.

Finally, Hugo is getting realistic about the gamins, “the most disastrous of social symptoms”, and he recognizes that “All crimes of the man begin in the vagabondage of the child.” However, he still views the situation in Paris as exceptional and relatively positive. For some reason (I don’t get this point) Paris makes the street children intact inside (remember the “pearl” of innocence in their heart from one of the previous chapters?) In a peculiar way he connects this incorruptibility with propensity to popular revolutions and some idea “which exists in the air of Paris, as salt exists in the water of the ocean.” But at least, he acknowledges that this incorruptibility does not make the life of these children less miserable.

There is the whole section on how much worse the life of these children was under the ancien régime! I absolutely get it why it is important for Hugo to show the rotten and inhuman nature of the monarchy, but retrospectively, I know that the plight of the street children in the nineteenth century was not much better than in the eighteenth.

I know the story about the vanishing children of Paris (1750) very well: all the conspiracy theories behind them, the grim role played by the police (they were paid per arrested kid), and the ensuing series of riots (involving four to five thousand people, including many women) with furious people lynching the guards – this event is often interpreted as a precursor of 1789. However, the main theme of this story contradicts Hugo's main idea in this chapter, as there the children are a matter of their parents' care and concern.

Brickclub 3.1.6 ‘A bit of history’

@fremedon already did a good writeup of this chapter, and I don’t have much to add.

It’s so angry, and for such good reason. Reading the brick like this, you really see how each chapter has a slightly different thesis, and by breaking them up this small, Hugo carefully builds up this mosaic of different tones into his larger point.

And this one is furious.

It expands upon what is essentially the point the Conventionist made many chapters ago: if you’re going to weep for the mistreated child Louis XVII, weep also for all the children the ancien régime mistreated and kidnapped and killed.

The brick is about an era where the people are exhausted by decades of upheaval and the government is trying to paper over the disruption. This chapter reminds us, more clearly than most, why there had to be that disruption. The state ruined Valjean’s life over a loaf of bread, but that was the new, improved state; the old one ruined lives for far less.

Brickclub 3.1.6, “A Bit of History”

I have really never appreciated properly what complete control Hugo has over the tone and unfolding of these digressions, but it’s all on display here. The anger--sarcastic, specific--that started slipping out in the last chapter is on full display here, clearly topical but shunted into a historical aside so he can set it down, but the next few chapters will continue to take it up again at shorter and shorter intervals.

The chapter begins: “At the time, though it is almost contemporary, in which the action of this story is laid, there was not, as there now is, a police officer at every street corner (an advantage we have no time to discuss); truant children abounded.” Is the scope of that parenthetical as ambiguous in the French as it is in the English? It can be sarcastic in any case, but at least in FMA and in Donougher, it’s really not clear whether the advantage is meant to be in the presence of the police or their absence.

And he launches immediately into statistics on the number of children picked up in police sweeps during the book’s time period, before moving back to anecdotes from the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV--if Paris has fewer homeless children now that it’s more heavily policed, the stories make clear, that’s far from a good thing. Hugo doesn’t say anything about what happens to children arrested for vagrancy in the book’s time period or his present day, but the children taken up under the ancien regime-- “the monarchy sometimes needed children, and then it swept the streets”--became galley slaves, or possibly worse: “With horror, people whispered monstrous conjectures about the king’s crimson baths.” To ensure a steady supply, the ancien regime discourages the education of poor children, but not their abandonment.

Hugo is very careful to only attribute these motives to dead kings, but when he circles back to the lack of universal education in his present day, this is the context he wants you to have in mind.

But he insists that, despite the pernicious effect of childhood vagrancy everywhere else--the “atrophy of childhood” of the preface--the Parisian gamin is still honest and innocent: “A marvelous thing to note, and one that shines forth in the glorious probity of our popular revolutions; a certain incorruptibility results from the mental tone that is to the air of Paris what salt is to the water of the ocean. To breathe the air of Paris preserves the soul.”

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