The real tragedy about the barricade is that we don’t know how much is true. Victor Hugo was there at the June Rebellion, so what is fact and what is fiction? That question gives me chills because we’ll never know.
Charles Jeanne (who I think is probably actual real life Enjolras) wrote an in-detail account of the ACTUAL barricades in a letter to his sister after the fact
I’mso glad somebody asked this, because the answer is: when they finally ran out of ammunition, Charles Jeanne rounded up everyone who was still standing, went, “look, if we’re going to die, we might as well die fighting,” and led a suicidal ten-man charge against an entire flippin’ infantry column, armed with nothing but bayonets. The first few ranks of soldiers were so unprepared for such a spectacularly insane attack that they were too surprised to shoot. They crossed bayonets and tried to hold the insurgents off in hand-to-hand combat, but Jeanne’s swordsmanship was apparently aces, because he held off a bunch of them at once and covered his friends as they tried to breach the ranks. And once they were in, nobody could shoot them for fear of taking out their own guys.
So the last stand that the insurgents had intended as a noble suicide ended in them breaking through the ranks entirely and winding up in the next street over, outside the combat zone, going “well shit, what do we do now?” (I’m guessing the infantry column wasn’t very deep; central Paris at that point was a rabbit warren of narrow twisty streets, and assembling troops en masse for an organized attack was a logistical nightmare.) Unlike the National Guard, the army weren’t total chumps and got themselves turned around to give chase and start shooting once they weren’t at risk of friendly fire any longer… and that’s when all the civilians holed up in their houses went “no way, you’re not getting your hands on these crazy bastards” and started hurling furniture and crockery down on the soldiers’ heads. Jeanne was understandably distracted at the time, but afterwards somebody informed him that the barrage of unlikely projectiles included a piano. A piano. That is some straight-up Looney Tunes slapstick right there. No wonder Hugo went for the heroic death scene instead; if he’d stuck to real life, he probably would’ve gotten complaints that he’d wrecked his readers’ suspension of disbelief.
Anyway, someone opened an alley gate for them to shelter in and take stock of the casualties–most of them survived(!!!), but a few were pretty nastily wounded. Their host then had to lock Charles Jeanne in to keep him from charging right back out and taking on the whole goddamn army singlehanded. He probably would’ve broken down the door if the poor man hadn’t pointed out that going back out would give away his wounded comrades’ hiding place and the identities of the people sheltering them. They sat there listening to the gunfire gradually slow and go silent, and then in the middle of the night the ones who could still walk were allowed to slip away one by one at long intervals from each other. Charles Jeanne went straight home, slept like the dead for a few hours, was woken up at five in the morning with a warning that he’d been denounced and the building was surrounded, and then slipped out in disguise and managed to evade the police for four months before a former comrade ratted him out and he was arrested.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why Charles Jeanne’s letter is an absolute treasure that deserves to be available to anyone in Les Mis fandom who wants to read it. Incidentally, “how Actual Historical Enjolras survived the barricades by being too good at his suicide mission” is also one of the stories I tell when anyone asks me what the hell is so interesting about researching people nobody’s ever heard of from an obscure chapter of French history.
Bringing this back for Barricade Day! To answer a few questions that keep coming up in the reblogs: here’s my translation of Jeanne’s letter, which was my main source. Jeanne stood trial, was imprisoned instead of executed (because can you imagine what a martyr he would’ve made), and died of tuberculosis just a few years later. Despite his improbable survival story, the RL June Rebellion was notan everybody-lives AU–like the revolt in Les Mis, it ended in a hard-fought retreat into one of the buildings on the street, followed by a massacre. The guys who led a suicide charge and accidentally won were, unfortunately, the exception.
Consider this a small part of my response to the people who complain about there being women at the barricade in the musical (specifically about how anachronistic it supposedly is).
Porte Saint-Martin, eight o'clock. They seized the two gates, Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, which they kept despite the arrival of a regiment of lancers, one of the infantry and some companies of the National Guard. The insurgents abandoned the first and made false resistance at the second until ten o'clock to give time for brave friends to meet again at the cloister of Saint-Méry. They saw a platoon fire at inoffensive people after having told them: “Messieurs, go past quickly, there’s no danger;” and immediately a discharge from their side, which was the one opposite to where they were themselves being harassed by some skirmishing shots. The route from Porte Saint-Martin to the Cloister was for many of the brave men such an extraordinary thing that it’s inconceivable that they would have made it there. A woman, rue…….. took a shot herself to avenge a man killed in front of her by bayonet strikes, joining a handful of brave men who forced the post to let them pass. [x]
So if you ever need a primary source to point to which mentions a woman not only participating but actually fighting in the June Uprising, here you go, here’s your quote.
I swear I’m gonna make a post about the women of Saint-Merry at some point… If it seems like I’ve forgotten, remind me. It’s not even gonna be a huge post or anything because I didn’t find that much material (part of why I haven’t done it yet: waiting to see if I can find more) but yeah, that’s a thing I want to do.
I’m super proud to present you the first teaser trailer of the first game of Wolpertinger Constellation - the video game company that I will found with a friend in early 2020 - and our first game will be:
A Les Mis game! “To the Barricades!”
It’s a Tower Defense Game where you have to recruit students to build barricades and fend off the National Guard to protect the Corinthe. :D
Watch the teaser trailer above, share it and follow us on Twitter for updates of even more teaser art and development steps if you like it :D
