#Bouzingots Bousingots Bouszingo

[pilferingapples]

Bousingot Bouzingo Bousingo

@everyonewasabird​  you mention in your post on Les MIs 5.3.2 (and I hope you don’t mind my quoting you out-of-post!, but this got. Long.), 

(If I’d had to guess where in Les Miserables Hugo defined the word bousingot for the reader, I absolutely wouldn’t have put it here, after the rebellion is done, after all our favorite countercultural rebels are dead…. but maybe that’s because I’m too used to Borel reclaiming it, and normal people think of it as a pejorative term. Here, it’s the police’s term for the insurgents.)

Indeed! “ Bouzingo/Bousingot/Bousingo”  was a word with a lot of connotations-- not unlike “ Romantic”  or, if it comes to that, “ Socialist” :P  But I think we’ve got enough versions of it for a sort of general Romantic consensus XD  :

Hugo’s version here is, of course:

From time to time, parties re-sole their old insults. In 1832, the word bousingot formed the interim between the word jacobin, which had become obsolete, and the word demagogue which has since rendered such excellent service.

“ Demagogue”  being something Hugo himself had been called by this point, and , as suggested, right in line with “Jacobin” -- it means, well , “ the reds” , and the cold war US sense of “ the reds” isn’t a bad way of translating it, either-- a term  that can mean either genuine political radicals or just someone a conservative doesn’t like for “ lifestyle”  reasons :/ Either way, fair game for a little police brutality!

More confirmation of them as Favorite Police Targets from George Sand in Horace,  via the novel’s main narrator, who is...left-sympathetic but politically more or less apathetic, like a more self-assured Grantaire, really (translation Zack Rogow, bolding/italics mine):

...They always find themselves naturally carried away by riots.  The youngest go just to observe, others go to take part; in those days almost everyone threw himself into it for a moment and then quickly withdrew, after having delivered and received a good few blows.   This activity didn't change things on the surface, and the only alteration produced by these efforts was a doubling of the fear of the shopkeepers and brutal cruelty on the part of the police. But not a single person who so casually disturbed public order back then need blush at the present hour for having had a few days of youthful warmth.   When youth cannot demonstrate the greatness and courage of its heart except by attacking that  society, that society must be evil indeed! 

They were called Bousingots because of the sailor hats of that name, made of shiny leather, which they adopted as their rallying sign.  Later they wore a scarlet headpiece in the form of a  military stocking cap ,  with a black velvet band all around it.  Pointed out again and again, to the police,  and attacked in the street by stool pigeons, they next adopted a gray  hat, but they were no less frequently rounded up and mistreated.  Their conduct has been much denounced; but I  don't think the  government has been able to  justify that of its own officers,  veritable assasssins who beat to death a good number of Bousingots while shopkeepers looked on, showing not the slightest indignation or pity. 

The name Bousingots stuck.  When le Figaro , which kept up a teasing and caustic opposition under the loyal management of M. Delatouche, changed hands, and little by little changed its stripes, the name Bousingot became an insult; after that there was no mockery too bitter or unjust with which to smear them.  But the true Bousingots remained unmoved...

The narrator’s description of a  “ true Bousingot”, his friend Jean Laraviniere,   seems familiar, as a personality:

...his face was pleasant, his  appearance original, as were his wits.  He was generous as he was brave, and that was no small measure.  His instinctual combativeness, as it's called in phrenology, drew him impetuously into every brawl, and he always brought along a cohort of intrepid friends, fanaticized by his coolheaded heroism and his bellicose joyfulness... He was a blusterer, a carouser, if you will; but what a loyal personality, what magnanimous devotion! He had  all the eccentricities of his role, complete recklessness about his impetuosity, all the swagger of his position.  You might have laughed at him; but you would have been  forced to love him. He was so good, so naive in his convictions, so devoted to his friends!

It doesn't sound too far from 

...a good-natured mortal, who kept bad company, brave, a spendthrift, prodigal, and to the verge of generosity, talkative, and at times eloquent, bold to the verge of effrontery; the best fellow possible; he had daring waistcoats, and scarlet opinions; a wholesale blusterer, that is to say, loving nothing so much as a quarrel, unless it were an uprising; and nothing so much as an uprising, unless it were a revolution; always ready to smash a window-pane, then to tear up the pavement, then to demolish a government, just to see the effect of it...a man of caprice, was scattered over numerous cafes; the others had habits, he had none. He sauntered. To stray is human. To saunter is Parisian. In reality, he had a penetrating mind and was more of a thinker than appeared to view.

He served as a connecting link between the Friends of the A B C and other still unorganized groups...

right? 

So there's an image of A Bouzingo as a character, at least:  loud, leftist to a point that would seem absurd to Reasonable, Moderate types, violent in that cause , a constant target/enemy of the police.  This seems consistent across sympathetic writers; even le Figaro, in the mocking article The Red Bouzingo, gives them the same general assessment, albeit from an unsympathetic POV:

The bousingot is inexhaustible, he will leave his mark like the camaraderie, the piqueurs and the jeunes-frances.  If one were still writing books, one would put him in the books; if one still had theaters, one would drag him over the theaters by his beard and by his hat.  The bousingot belongs to painting, statuary, to trestle-stages, to the Cockaigne pole, to Chinese shadows, to blockades at the intersection, he’s the sea-foam of politics, the flower of the ridiculous, the prototype of all exaggeration.  By nature he’s a being of 93 in politics, honorably refined for his fashion, a royal bird for his habits.  We’re waiting for Poulaine slippers.

Again: dangerously republican, dramatic to absurdity ; yet,even le Figaro concludes “ They’re not evildoers. “ 

And of course Philothee O’Neddy, the only person I’ve got quotes from who can and does actually claim the title for himself, says they were, rather intentionally, “laughable” in their exaggeration,but sincere in their politics.  

..and of course, that above all else, they were  bouzingo, no S, no T.  Ah well, what message is ever perfectly preserved across the ages? XD 

I suspect this is one of those (many) places where Hugo fully expected the audience to need no more than his nod at a term to understand both the reference and the opinion he had on the subject, but here we are now, and it’s an excuse for me to assemble a small run of references instead XD

#Bouzingots Bousingots Bouszingo #Bouzingo #LM 5.3.2 #long post