#quatrevignt

[suidiome]

huitante (CH) quatre-vingt (FR)

eighty (GB)

#80 #huitante #quatrevignt #illo #illustration #illustrator #number #french #suisse #swiss french #swiss #switzerland #Suisse Romande #romandie #drawing

[amarguerite]

I support your French Necromancer dreams.

Thank you! I wrote a chapter of my undergrad dissertation lo these many years ago on the first chapter of Hugo’s Quatrevignt-Treize, and was really, really struck by the role of vivandière (i.e. the canteen woman) in it. En bref, for those who have not read one of the obscurer of Hugo’s novels:

In 1793, a Parisian battalion is in Bretagne, to help put down the Chouan/ Vendeean royalist uprising. (Though I should point out that the Chouans, mostly peasant smugglers, fishermen, and salt dealers, were rebelling because the abolition of the salt tax ruined their business, and they didn’t like the way the government was enforcing conscription into the army.) The Parisian soldiers are about to shoot at what they think is an enemy when the vivandière tells them to halt and they do– they immediately obey her.

Said enemy turns out to be a terrified Breton woman, Michelle Flechard, and her three children. The dialogue that then follows is a really fascinating examination of the regionalism of France, and how the Republic can/ could possibly unite these disparate places into one nation. The Breton woman has been reduced to a state of almost bestial terror due to the fighting and the generations of injustices visited against her family– and the vivandière and the sergeant of the regiment symbolically give her and her children wine and bread, and baptize them by declaring them part of the regiment of of the Bonnet Rouge. 

The chapter really struck me because not only is this woman obeyed and obviously respected, she’s very clearly a figure of civilization. She even gets the final line of the chapter, hailing Michelle as “citizeness,” and pulling her into the new world of the republic and a new identity as an individual with rights.

And it is one of the rare moments in 19th century literature in general (and in Hugo, to an extent), where two women talk to each other in a realistic way about the impact of politics on their lives, and one helps uplift the other into a better way of life. Here’s the vivandière:

#quatrevignt-treize #vivandiere

[derbesteseemann]

ᴄʜᴀʀᴀᴄᴛᴇʀ ᴍᴏᴏᴅʙᴏᴀʀᴅ﹕ ᴄɪᴍᴏᴜʀᴅᴀɪɴ

#quatrevignt-treize #cimourdain #victor hugo #character moodboard #french revolution #aesthetic #девяносто третий год #симурдэн #виктор гюго