#anyway the Important Things to know about Petrus based on Sources are that he was (1) hot (2) revolutionary (3) hot

[pilferingapples]

I remember in a post you once mentioned that Jehan Prouvaire and Bahorel are based on Victor Hugo's fellow Romantic friends. I think you said it was Nerval that he based Prouvaire on, and I have to ask...for Bahorel, is he based on Gautier? His fighting at La Bataille d'Hernani and his red doublet can't help but remind me of him, but I could be completely wrong.

Thank you for the ask, Nonny!

Bahorel is pretty openly a nod to Petrus Borel (the name itself is a bit more of an obvious nod in French pronunciation than in English); like Gerard, he was one of the big organizers in the Hernani showdown--and also like Gerard, died in the 1850s.  

Like Bahorel, Borel was a peasant’s son, and had a reputation for being extremely down to fight; politically, Gautier called him “the only true republican among us”.  As Philothee O’Neddy would point out, that was an exaggeration--but O’Neddy called Borel the Montagnard to his own more moderate “Girondin” republicanism, so the “extremely republican” association is still there.  And the scarlet waistcoats are very much there too; he was painted in one ( for a gallery showing; only the account of the painting seems to survive) and , apparently, arrested for wearing one(...he was arrested a lot, though...) and generally wore a lot of very openly political Fashion Statements. Unlike his fictionalized counterpart, Borel was never a law student (he was practically everything else at some point!); but very much like his fictional counterpart, he hated lawyers so much XD

(As for Gautier, he was avowedly apolitical; of his famous doublet, he said “In order to avoid wearing the infamous red of ‘93, I had admitted the slightest admixture of purple in the dye, for I was very desirous not to be suspected of any political intention. I was not an admirer of Saint-Just and Robespierre, as were some of my comrades...”  (It’s worth noting here that being ‘political’ at the time had a somewhat narrower meaning,and Gautier did a lot that would be considered political activism now, but at the time and in his own context, everyone including himself saw him as apolitical.)  If it weren’t for his noted in faith in art and Romanticism itself, it would be easier to link his general social/political outlook to Grantaire than anything, if that didn’t almost feel like slander against his personality :P  Hugo writing him into a red-hot revolutionary would have been hilarious-- and also almost certainly somewhat dangerous.  Gautier was still alive, still living in NIII’s  France, and there’s reasons Gautier was very anxious to not be suspected  of political intention. )

#...keeping commentary on these two down to a readable tumblr post is a CHALLENGE #anyway the Important Things to know about Petrus based on Sources are that he was (1) hot (2) revolutionary (3) hot #(4) a werewolf possibly #(5) just SO hot We Will Never Even Know #Four People and A Shoelace #Actual Romantics in Fictional Paris #Hey Nonny Nonny #answereds