Work Text:
17 August 1830
Meaux
My very dear Jolllly,
In this package you will find a curiosity. A guaranteed curiosity: it was purchased in a Curiosity Shop. [In English. --Ed. note] I found it the day of the total eclipse of the sun. I was seeing the sights of Meaux--there aren’t many--and I found a new shop, a jumble of old furniture and art and taxidermy--just the thing to eat up an hour or two of a man’s time. As I was admiring a pair of stuffed frogs, the skies went dark. Terrible calamity and fright! Omens from the gods! --et cetera. So to reassure the shopkeeper that the natural order of merchant and customer had not been upset--trade continued, gold still ruled us all--I bought the first thing my eye fell on once there was light again to see.
I trust that by the time I return you will have worked out what it is, or what its various parts might once have been. I tried to haggle, with a bit of learned vocabulary--’Look here, my good man, the sacrococcygeal symphysis and the os lacrimale barely connect! And what kind of bumpkin do you take me for, trying to sell me a skeleton with only one pair of carpometacarpus!’--and instead of calling me a fraud and a rogue with a mouth full of nonsense, the man just frowned at the thing as if he’d never seen it before and gave it to me for a few sous.
Don’t mind the smell. I had to keep it in my pocket.
A thousand kisses for you to share with Mlle Musichetta--
Lègle (de Meaux)
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When Nîmes resident Charlotte Diawara donated a handful of 19th-century family letters to the French national library, the event made very little noise outside of academic circles. But the Bibliothèque Nationale de France worked admirably fast to make the first set of high-quality scans of the collection’s highlights available to the public, and suddenly the noise got much louder. Would the documents finally answer one of the great questions of history and literature? Would we know, finally, the truth behind the famous revolution of June 6, 1832? A few of the big popular news sites ran with it: “Victor Hugo’s Skeleton Revolution” rated number one in Buzzfeed’s Eight Crazy Myths That Just Might Be True.
“Victor Hugo’s Skeleton Revolution:” not “France’s Skeleton Revolution.” Because--whether we read the novel, watch one of stage productions of the hit musical, or settle down with some popcorn to watch the successful 2012 film--for many of us, the dead are the real stars of Victor Hugo’s monumental 1862 novel, Les Misérables. I mentioned the newly-available letters to a friend of mine, who said what any reasonable person might expect: “Oh, isn’t that the one with the musical? It’s the French revolution or something. Anyway, that guy that stole the bread, and the cop, and like that barricade with all the skeletons?”
“The French revolution...with all the skeletons.” if you remember your history textbooks better than my friend--better than me before I fell down the rabbit-hole of the Les Misérables fandom--you’ll recall that the revolution “with all the skeletons” was not the 1789 revolution with the Bastille and the beheadings, the one commonly called the French Revolution, but the 1832 revolution. It’s the one where they finished the work of the half-successful 1830 revolution, this time founding a second French Republic. And--according to some sources--it’s the one with all the skeletons.
There’s always a footnote after the skeletons show up in any serious historical account. Sometimes they’re “legendary” skeletons, sometimes “alleged.” Sometimes an author is feeling bold enough to call them just plain “apocryphal.” But they’ve never quite vanished from history, these skeletons, no matter how many qualifiers historians shroud them in. So where did they come from? (...and what does it have to do with a curiosity-shop in Meaux?)
The best-known account comes from Victor Hugo’s novel. Readers may be excused if they skim the typical Hugo digression into the histories of the catacombs, the famous and less-famous cemeteries of Paris, the hasty disposal of guillotined corpses during the height of revolutionary executions. But don’t be too quick to dismiss it as irrelevant. Hugo imagines a society of the dead as full of simmering revolutionary anger as the society in the streets above. The neighborhood of Saint-Antoine, Hugo says, “is a reservoir of people. Revolutionary agitations create fissures there, through which trickles the popular sovereignty.” The uprising of the dead, he takes as that metaphor made physical, the dead bursting up from literal fissures in the ground.
Hugo imagines the skeletons climbing up from the sewers, swimming up from the Seine, and surrounding the soldiers at the Rue de la Chanvrerie barricade, the historical scene of street fighting to which Hugo has added a few characters of his own. His fiction has it that the wave of skeletons, blind in the shadow of ignorant resentment, crash almost literally against the barricades, hearing at least some part of Jean-René Enjolras’s famous speech, given when the revolutionary fighters thought their cause lost: “He who dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded with the dawn.” For a moment the French living and the French dead come together illuminated.
It’s a nice image. But is it true?
The 1860s said, overwhelmingly, no. The inclusion of the “skeleton plot” gave critics something to latch onto in their reviews of Hugo’s Les Misérables. Hugo’s 1862 publication fell in the middle of the the Second French Empire, established after the 1851 coup by Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew, a conservative time that suppressed republican rhetoric and history. Many reviewers attacked Hugo’s political implications directly. Said one reviewer, in Le Monde, August 17, 1862, “One cannot read without unconquerable disgust all the details M. Hugo gives of the skillful preparations for the riots in the Rue Transnonain [sic] and the cloître Saint-Merry. For the honor of the human race and...of France, let us believe that the poet has once again given in to his imagination.” Other critics contented themselves with laughing at the skeleton interlude. “It may be that the Romantics and Eccentrics of 1832 took such stories at face value,” writes another critic, “but to expect a modern audience to swallow as literal truth the old myth that the dead rose in the streets of Paris to proclaim an end to monarchy? The only things harder to believe are the apotheosis of Hugo’s convict Valjean and the innocence of the public woman Fantine. Hugo has shown himself a fine fantasist but let us hope he abandons his self-bestowed title of historian.” And in a private letter, after calling Les Misérables “tasteless and inept" ("immonde et inepte"), Baudelaire wrote, “Hugo’s skeletons should have remained in the closet with the unintended humor of his Jersey-island séances.”
(Hugo claims an interview with the then-believed-dead Jehan Prouvaire as his best source for the skeleton subplot of his novel. The conversation, as recorded, dwells more on Victor Hugo’s literary importance than on the 1832 revolution, despite Prouvaire’s active role in the latter. The ghost of Prouvaire tells us that Dante himself wishes he could have met Hugo, and Shakespeare is a major fan. The séance took place in 1853; in 1855 Prouvaire was found to be alive and well on a small Greek island, raising sheep. When a friend wrote him asking about the ethereal meeting with Victor Hugo, Prouvaire answered “I don’t remember it myself but I don’t see why it’s so hard to believe that our spirits conversed.”)
So even from our primary sources we can’t get a straight answer to the question “did your ghost talk to Victor Hugo,” and maybe that’s just typical of the “skeleton revolution” as a whole. The popular imagination of the time ran fast and far with the story, so fast and so far that skeleton stories became almost passé by the end of the decade. An 1844 caricature by Honoré Daumier shows a pair of impeccably-dressed young men passing a sculptured cemetery with urns "To the Republican Dead": “You won’t catch me in anything so old-fashioned,” says one to the other. The famous fickleness of French taste--or a commentary on the increasing conservatism of the republic, dominated by capitalist interests?
...But maybe we’re moving past the scope of this particular bit of writing, which is meant to give the reader a little context for the letters that follow. With many thanks to the Joly family and particularly to Charlotte Diawara, and to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France--let’s have the rest of these documents. These have been arranged in chronological order, as much as possible.
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[undated, but probably autumn of 1830]
Dear Joly,
A thousand thanks for the gift of that little skeleton. I am calling him Theudebald. He has proven resistant to your science and Combeferre’s but I feel sure I will understand him some day.
Combeferre would not say one way or another what he thought the species might be, whether a man-made chimaera of salamander-skulls and rabbits’-feet, or something yet undiscovered, from the high Andes or the ocean depths or from some other Earth altogether. I imagine he has communicated theories to you already, and you to him.
I look into those delicate arches and feel sure that the eyes they held once opened on wonders. But of what nature? I am taking him with me wherever I go; perhaps he will give me some sign.
Prouvaire
----
[Also undated and probably autumn or winter of 1830]
Joly-- thousand regrets--I cannot study with you today. My skeleton--my fully articulated skeleton, you know how I prize it--has gone missing. Those wretched villains down the hall, most likely--if you would like to join me in investigating? --Combeferre
---
14 December, 1863
Paris
My dear citizen Joly,
I am greatly pleased to hear that you are compiling your memoirs of our second republic and its foundation. I share both your doubts and your hopes about its publication. In any case, I’m happy to write out for you my recollections. I will also send you some of the newspaper clippings from the time--you know what a pack-rat I am, I have a box full of that kind of thing, and there’s no one better than you and your family to have them.
You asked if I’ve read Hugo’s novel. No, not the entire thing. Maybe I should make time for it. But I’ve read the portion dealing with our friends and our fight and I’m not impressed. Hugo has skeletons surging up from the ground as if they needed no more encouragement than the offer of taking part in a good metaphor. Well, it’s not a bad metaphor--I’ve heard Enjolras speak very convincingly of volcanoes--but I think you and I know there was a little more work involved than that.
Let’s see. I wasn’t aware of the skeleton business until later than some. I took it for a joke between Bahorel and Prouvaire. You remember their friends back then: everyone had to be more eccentric than his neighbor, and everything was memento mori. So for a long time I thought they were having a bit of amusement at my expense, when Jehan would say he hoped to walk arm in arm with La Fontaine. Then they started teasing me about my prejudice against dead bodies--well, that was another thing to ignore. You know how Bahorel is. You get a lot of practice ignoring things.
So I didn’t pay it any mind until Enjolras sat down at my table in the Musain, all very serious: “Feuilly,” he said, “Can you tell me your objection to speaking with the skeletons? You know how I value your opinion” --vous, lots of vous, absurdly careful of my feelings-- “I would never ask you to do something you thought wrong. But I feel you would be the best man to speak to the dead in the Catacombs.”
The dead in the Catacombs! I think you were mostly in the Errancis and Madeleine Cemeteries, reuniting guillotined Republican skulls with their bodies. The Catacombs were like that, but more so. Hardly any of the bones were near their proper neighbors. Legs here, arms there, head over there, shoulder and ribs nowhere. I think at first we imagined ourselves saviors, the living leading the dead to their full potential. But as more of the walking skeletons gathered there, as if finding their homeland, Combeferre and I felt what strangers we were, even among the most French of the dead. It was the oldest dead who had the least interest in our cause. They had found their own cause: once they had brought their bones together, whole again, they lay down in ranks, at peace. --But you have your own theories about that, and this will be a very long letter if I start putting down all my unscientific thoughts. Let me at least sketch out the events of 1831 and the first half of 1832.
It was Bahorel and Prouvaire who first discovered these newly-animated dead. By the time I joined the work we were well into 1831. Combeferre and I would go there perhaps twice a month, and then more frequently, bringing lamps and talking to bones as they brought themselves together. Though we made some allies--some friends, I would say--among that nation, by the start of 1832 we could see that most wanted to be left alone, and we simply used the catacombs for storage. Lesgle and Courfeyrac had better luck with their plan of finding the dead of 1830--those three “glorious” days that ended in such bitter disappointment for us and for the men who died for a revolution that was stolen to put another king over France. Lesgle will have told you everything about that--I only heard what they told the rest of us.
Then came that spring and summer and we returned fully to the living, where we were needed far more. I’ll never forget the dead that were our allies that June but--it’s for the best that they are gone now. The living can’t spend their years working off debts to the dead.
So, Lamarque’s funeral preparations. We were so busy those days that I doubt I could tell you where I was, when, with any accuracy. I’m convinced I was in two or three places at once sometimes. And we all had work to do--or some of us did, what’s this about you and Lesgle and an all-day breakfast with wine at the Corinthe during the funeral? Oysters, cheese, and ham! (You’ll forgive teasing from an old friend, I’m sure.) The catacombs held many of our guns. Combeferre and I knew them best, so we went with Bahorel; he had roused Grantaire out of somewhere to lend us his strong back if nothing else. “A revolution, what does that prove?” he was grumbling.
But we found that the revolution had already begun underground. The first attack came when we were heavily burdened with crates full of muskets and carbines. It was the Swiss Guard who died defending the king at the Tuileries on 10 August, 1792: they had pieced together an old regimental flag and they had a few hats and fragments of uniform amongst the lot of them. They had no weapons--they needed none. You never saw the skeletons fight, I think? But they were ready to pull our flesh from our bones. --Well. You’ve heard more than enough from Bahorel about the injury to his leg; you and Combeferre were the ones to take off his foot when the wound turned to gangrene. All we could do was drop the cases we were carrying, taking only weapons enough for ourselves, and run.
All those months of creeping like worshipful rats through the catacombs--and how we ran now! There were still many piles of bones not yet assembled, just broken bits and pieces untouched by whatever motive force had brought the other skeletons together. We scrambled up one great heap as if it were nothing but rock and dirt. It was there that they nearly caught Bahorel. But they fell back at the first fire from us. (I know now that there was another, larger portion of their regiment that they meant to rejoin. At the time we had no explanation, only relief.)
Combeferre bound up Bahorel’s leg while I went out from our little shelter to work out where we were. We had become altogether lost in our flight. I didn’t dare to go too far; I had left our last remaining torch with our friends. Maybe you’ll laugh, Joly, but I was almost more furious with the unmoving bones than with the ones that wanted to kill us. Somehow their stillness seemed more unnatural, as if it were some kind of perverse apathy that kept them from rising to help us--or to help our attackers, whichever it would be. Unnatural! That last year had surely begun to turn my wits.
I heard movement and hurried back to join the others at the barricade--for it was a barricade in its way. Grantaire had spared half his bottle to wash the grime off Bahorel’s leg, and I think meant to make a torch of the rest of the alcohol. I joined them--scrambled up the heap of bones with my carbine--Bahorel took up his musket again--a portion of the roof seemed to crumble inwards and something dropped down amid the rubble--
You’d need a better writer than me to name what we felt when we saw that it was Courfeyrac. Blessed Courfeyrac, face shining with sweat, clutching his hat and out of breath! He was at the head of our loyal fighters from 1830, come to finish their revolution.
Not a moment too soon, of course. The Swiss Guard had regrouped and were on us again. I would guess that some three or four of our skeleton allies fell in that fight, but the greatest losses were among our enemy: the Swiss Guard were caught between us and the arrival of another great crowd from the Madeleine Cemetery, men and women of our first great revolution, finishing their war.
We left them to it and joined the uprising above. You know the events from that point as well as I do, how the living soldiers fled from the dead, how we won the day. And how our brave fighters from 1830 lay down again in their graves to rest when the Republic was named. Whether any living skeletons remain, I don’t know. Prouvaire was looking for them. He may have joined them by now: dear good Prouvaire, with his dreams and his courage.
This is a long letter already, and a good spot to break. You asked for recollections of the early days of the Republic. I’ll set to work on that for the next time I write. For now--best of luck in your undertaking. I hope to see it published!
My fondest regards for you and your family, and Lesgle as well,
J.-R. Feuilly
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[Illustration from an unidentified source, c. 1890-1910. The black-and-white illustration shows five 19th-century men in an underground passage, surrounded by--possibly fighting off--skeletons. The signature “Farlander” can be seen in the lower left. On the back of the page, a note in ballpoint pen reads, “Look Mom, I found this book in an old second-hand shop. Not worth the postage to send the whole thing--Adventure Tales for Boys, something from the turn of the century, lots of lions and mummies, pompous old stuff but the illustrations were good. The story doesn’t make much sense but look, doesn’t the picture remind you of something? You’ll have to tell me who’s supposed to be down in the catacombs. I remember it wasn’t our ancestor Joly, but his friends? Anyway, I’m guessing the one with the bottle is Grantaire… hugs and kisses to you and Dad, Maria”]
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The maddening thirty-year gaps there haven’t gone unnoticed by historians and Hugo fans. The Bibliothèque Nationale released a statement last week apologizing for the delay in making the rest of the collection available. “These are very fragile documents,” said their spokesperson. “Much of the collection has been affected by old fire damage. We have to balance access with preservation: this history belongs to the public and we can’t let it be destroyed through rough handling.” And Charlotte Diawara, talking about her donation, says, “Well, family tradition has it that Uncle Lesgle--we still call him that--Uncle Lesgle handled a lot of the family’s correspondence, and you know, he wasn’t the luckiest guy around. I don’t know if I believe the story about the lightning strike, but there were definitely some small house fires back in the day… Things got lost. I just knew, you know, when I inherited the papers, I wanted them to go where they belong. It’s French history.”