Victor Hugo's Barricades

In his famous novel, Les Miserables (Jean Valjean, Book I), Victor Hugo gives us a vivid description of the barricades of the Faubourg Saint Antoine:

The barricade Saint Antoine was monstrous; it was three stories high and seven hundred feet (213 meters) long. It barred from one corner to the other the vast mouth of the Faubourg, that is to say, three streets;. . . buttressed with mounds which were themselves bastions, pushing out capes here and there, strongly supported by the two great promontories of houses of the Faubourg, it rose like a cyclopean embankment at the foot of the terrible square . . . Nineteen barricades stood at intervals along the streets in the rear of this mother of barricades.

Merely from seeing it, you felt in the Faubourg an immense agonising suffering which had reached that extreme moment when distress rushes to catastrophe. Of what was the barricade made? Of the ruins of three six-story houses, torn down for the purpose, said some. Of the prodigy of all passions said others. It had the woeful aspect of all the works of hatred: Ruin. You might say: who built that? You might also say: who destroyed that? It was the improvisation of emotion. Here! that door! that grating! that shed! that casement! that broken furnace! that cracked pot! Bring all! throw all on! push, roll, dig, dismantle, overturn, tear down all! It was the collaboration of the pavement, the pebble, the timber, the iron bar, the chip, the broken square, the stripped chair, the cabbage stub, the scrap, the rag, and the malediction.

It was great and it was little. It was the bottomless pit parodied upon the spot by chaos come again . . . Upon the whole, terrible. It was the acropolis of the ragamuffins. Carts overturned, roughened slope; . . . an omnibus, cheerily hoisted by main strength to the very top of the pile, as if the architects of that savagery would add sauciness to terror, presented its unharnessed pole to unknown horses of the air. . . The  fury of the flood was imprinted upon that misshapen obstruction. What flood? The multitude. You would have thought you saw uproar petrified . . . You saw there, in chaos full of despair, rafters from roofs, patches from garrets with their wall paper, window sashes with all their glass planted in the rubbish, awaiting artillery, chimneys torn down, wardrobes, tables, benches, a howling topsy-turvy, and those thousand beggarly things, the refuse even of the mendicant, which contain at once fury and nothingness . . . The barricade of Saint Antoine made a weapon of everything; all that civil war can throw at the head of society came from it . . .

See Les Miserables at Paris' Theatre du Chatelet, now until July 4th!

Images:

Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, Victor Hugo, 1884, http://concise.britannica.com/ebc/art-11798/Victor-Hugo-photograph-by-Nadar.

Barricades of rue St Maur, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.