by David Bellos
White was the field colour of the flag of the French monarchy before 1789. Because of that, the use of white was always associated with the royalist cause. Until 1830, white was also the colour of military uniforms in France, in contrast to the red worn by Wellington’s troops at Waterloo.
Blue was also a royal colour, used in the insignia of the Bourbon monarchy when it was restored to the throne in 1815. Because there is no source for it in the flora of northern Europe, it was extracted from an oriental shrub, indigofera tinctoria, which had to be imported at great cost. In Les Misérables, the botanist-cum-bookseller Mabeuf pins his hopes on experiments to naturalize the plant. If he had succeeded, he would have solved his money problems at a stroke, because ‘blue’ signalled wealth and high standing all on its own. Alongside white and gold, blue meant ‘regal’, ‘rich’ and ‘rare’.
At the other end of the code-spectrum was yellow, associated with poverty and shame. That’s why it was used for the internal passport issued to Jean Valjean on his release from jail. Later on, he persists in wearing a yellow greatcoat even when he is able to afford a more expensive hue. To keep under cover, he needs to be seen as a common man.
Green was a colour of social distinction, just below aristocratic or regal rank. Members of the Académie française wore it, as did politicians and bankers in formal attire. Victor Hugo had a green going-out suit for grand occasions, but he usually wore grey.
In the twentieth century red became the symbolic colour of the political left, which is why it was used on the flag of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China and by trades unions and socialist parties all over the world. That wasn’t yet true in 1862. The story of how red came to mean what it does hangs in no small part on how Hugo used it in Les Misérables.
Red is cheap. Extracted from the madder flower, which grows easily in southern Europe, it has been used for millennia for colouring clothes. In Ancient Greece, slaves wore a red cap (known as the ‘Phrygian bonnet’) to distinguish them from citizens, and red continued to be used to mean ‘submission’ down to the days of Les Misérables. In jail in Toulon Valjean has to wear a ‘red blouse’, a slight that he never forgets. ‘Humiliation’ was the primary meaning of the most widespread of all dyestuffs.43
In military signalling, however, red had a more specific function. Waving a red flag in battle on land or at sea told the other side that ‘no prisoners will be taken’, that the engagement would be a fight to the death. After the Bastille was stormed in July 1789, for example, royal troops waved the red flag at rioters to warn them to disperse or be shot on sight. The raucous mob seized the signal and turned it around, using it to provoke troops into confronting them. In a flash, red ceased to be a sign of order and became the symbol of the revolutionary crowd. In a similarly ironical reversal of meaning, the mob also adopted the red cap of Greek slaves to proclaim that the oppressed were now in charge. Red switched its meaning to become the banner of the revolution itself.
That is why the red flag never became the flag of France. The First Republic proclaimed national unity in the blue, white and red tricolour, which was retained by Napoleon down to 1815. On his fall, it was replaced by the blue and white colours of the Bourbon monarchy, and the tricolour became the icon of the republican movement, which was of course banned. The Goddess in Delacroix’s Liberty Guiding the People, for example, holds the tricolour aloft to show not that she is a French patriot, but the herald of a republic that did not come about. To placate disappointed republicans, the new king, Louis-Philippe, restored the tricolour as the flag of France in August 1830. It was dropped by Louis-Napoléon when he made himself emperor in 1852, of course, but was reinstated as the flag of France when it became a republic once again in the 1870s.
From around 1794, the red flag disappeared outside of military signalling, but it re-emerged as a violent provocation in the events of June 1832 as they are portrayed in Les Misérables. Hugo reports in the novel on the funeral of the republican general Lamarque on 5 June:
This was a touching and solemn moment … Suddenly, in the middle of the group a man on horseback dressed in black appeared with a red flag – others say, with a pike and red liberty cap on top of it. Lafayette turned away … This red flag raised a storm, and was swallowed up by it. (IV.10.iii, 953)
The German poet Heinrich Heine kept a detailed record of what he saw and heard during his stay in Paris that year. He wasn’t at the funeral himself, but informants assured him that it wasn’t a red flag that was waved a moment before the riot erupted, but the red-gold-black emblem of a visiting German student group.44 Right or wrong as his information may be, it’s clear from his account and from Hugo’s mention of it that raising a red flag was tantamount to a declaration of civil war. Hugo has a couple more red flags waved in Rue du Temple and in Cour Batave, because he does see the uprising as a ‘war within four walls’ (IV.10.v, 956, 958).
Shortly after the Revolution of February 1848, some members of the provisional government proposed adopting the red flag in memory of the rioters of 1789, but they were overruled by the president, Alphonse de Lamartine. The nation had to stick with the tricolour, he said, or else fall apart. For him, the red flag was a declaration of unending revolt, not an emblem of popular rule.
However, in Les Misérables if not in historical fact, the student group led by Enjolras hoists the red flag over the barricade in Rue de la Chanvrerie.45 Even for them, of course, it is not yet the ‘workers’ flag’. It signals, first of all, that they will fight to the death (as they do), and in the second place, that they are fighting for a republic, since the tricolour, formerly the republicans’ flag, had been adopted as the national flag by the monarchy of Louis-Philippe. However, the aspirations expressed by the student leaders on the eve of their deaths make this the first real appearance in French history of the red flag as the emblem of broader hopes for a better world.
The pole of the red flag flying over the barricade is shattered by a shell fired by the National Guard. Enjolras asks if there is anyone brave enough to raise the flag again. The destitute bookseller Mabeuf volunteers for this suicidal task and he is shot and killed as he puts it up. When his body is recovered and brought to lie in the front room of the café, Enjolras says that Mabeuf’s blood-stained jacket will be hoisted as the revolutionaries’ flag from then on.46 Dried blood doesn’t stay red for very long, and no doubt ceased to be visible from a distance very soon. What could be seen at dawn on 6 June was a flag that looked entirely black – and black meant something far worse than red. From Hugo’s notes on a day in March 1848: ‘Last night four men went through the Saint-Antoine [working-class] area carrying a black flag with these words on it: War on the Rich!… The flag was made from a woman’s skirt.’47
A similar incident occurs in Les Misérables in a passage written twelve years later with its reference backdated to 1832: ‘In Rue St-Pierre-Montmartre, some bare-armed men were carrying a black flag on which these words could be read in white letters: Republic or Death’ (IV.10.iv, 955).
In the context of revolution and war in nineteenth-century France, ‘black’ was not the opposite of white, but a darker shade of red. That’s why the black coat flying over the barricade provokes the impatient commander of the National Guard to commence the assault before he has received orders to go ahead. He is ‘infuriated by the successive appearance of the red flag and the old coat that he mistook for a black one’ (V.1.xii, 1,085). He’s putting down not just republican militants, but terrorists flaunting the colour of death.
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The coinage of Les Misérables also allows us to enter a mental world that is as different from our own as the colour codes of a world without modern dyestuffs – despite the fact that France pioneered a currency system that almost all countries have copied since then. In 1803, Napoleon replaced the confusing multiplicity of coins used under the old monarchy with a decimal system based on a single unit, the franc, divided into one hundred centimes. The new French franc was a silver coin we
ighing 5g, and other silver coins (25 centimes, 50 centimes, 2 francs and 5 francs) were of proportionate weights. The standard of value was gold, fixed at 15.5 times its weight in silver. The new twenty-franc coin, the only gold piece in common circulation, therefore weighed 6.7g, which made it the size of an American dime. Nothing could be simpler in theory, but the practice was something else.
There are around 300 sums of money mentioned in Les Misérables, all of which have a specifiable value in francs and centimes. However, Hugo’s characters rarely use the official names of the coins that they handle. The language of money in nineteenth-century France was vastly more complicated than what it designated in monetary terms.
There were four different ways of naming money.48 The sets of words that people used for the coins they exchanged or kept in their purses reflected the class to which they belonged and the kind of transaction they were engaged in. As a result, the way money is counted out in Les Misérables reflects and reinforces the structure of the society it depicts.
Poor people counted in sous, not in francs. The sou was not a coin, but a mental unit inherited from the past. The word sou is used in proverbial expressions in modern French (‘to be penniless’ is to be sans le sou, for example) but only in French-speaking Switzerland does it still mean what it did 200 years ago, which is five centimes.
After leaving Digne with Myriel’s gift, Jean Valjean steals a coin from a mountain lad on his way to earn a living as a chimney-sweep and street entertainer (he has a hurdy-gurdy and a trained marmot with him). Petit-Gervais begs Valjean to give him back his pièce de quarante sous, ‘forty-sou coin’. ‘Forty sous’ wasn’t embossed on the coin, since all currency was denominated in francs, but even though he’d never been to school, Petit-Gervais could multiply two by twenty and divide 200 by five.49 Like all other poor people in France, he never used the proper name of the money he had in his hand, but that did not stop him knowing how much a two-franc coin was worth.
The middle classes used different words. For income received from dividends, interest, rents and stipends and for the capital values of property and land, they spoke in livres. These were exactly equivalent to francs, so they don’t imply the mental agility required to count out small change in sous. All the same, the word livre is a class-distinctive term of the same general kind. Taken together, sou and livre make it clear that the money of the rich and the poor were different kinds of thing.
The largest silver coin in circulation was worth five francs and had ‘5 francs’ embossed on it. For people who reckoned in sous, its name was the pièce de cent sous, the ‘one-hundred-sou coin’. In transactions reckoned in livres – when larger sums of money, or richer people, were involved – the five-franc coin was called an écu. When Thénardier tries to sell Valjean the signboard from his old inn at Montfermeil for an outrageous price, he inflates the tone by asking not for 5,000 francs, but for 1,000 écus.50
Between the ‘low’ language of sous and the ‘high’ speech of livres and écus there was a third set of names based on the image on the head side of the coin. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries coins had been minted with the head of one Louis or another, so louis became the other name of the five-franc piece, which was a pièce de cent sous and an écu as well. Five francs, 100 sous, five livres, one écu, one louis are all the same thing. Hugo makes no effort to explain this confusing multiplicity of names because their meanings were part of the mental equipment all his readers had. What is not said, although it may leave modern readers perplexed, speaks volumes nonetheless. The fact that it went without saying that rich and poor used different words for money is both sign and substance of the social injustices that Les Misérables sought to dramatize and to protest.
The highest-value coin in general circulation was the twenty-franc gold piece, first minted when Napoleon was emperor and showing Napoleon’s head, and therefore called a napoléon. In 1815, Louis XVIII minted new twenty-franc coins showing not the head of ‘The Usurper’, but his own, and they obviously had to be called louis as well. But these new louis were worth four times what an écu, a pièce de cent sous, in other words, a louis was worth. A gold coin of 6.7g can hardly be confused with a silver one weighing 25g when you have it in your hand, but in a novel that gives you words in place of things, you can easily lose the thread. Only context and mental arithmetic can tell you whether what is at stake is a louis d’or, a golden one, or a silver louis worth a quarter of that.
Napoleon Bonaparte also minted a small number of double napoléons with a value of forty francs. They seem to have been treated as collectibles from the start, and were not often used for everyday transactions. All the same, you have to keep your eye on the arithmetic when a character in a novel loses his ‘last napoléon’ in a gambling den.
The official term of ‘franc’ was used to refer to fines, taxes and public expenditure – for anything involving the state, except for sums less than five francs, which were always counted out in sous. For example, Valjean says that the purse he received on his release from Toulon consisted of ‘one hundred and nine francs and fifteen sous’ (I.2.iii, 72), not seventy-five centimes, which is what it was. However, to make a strange system perfectly obscure, the term franc was also used, inconsistently, for everything else.
The social and political weight of the way money is named is taken to a comical extreme by Marius’s aged grandfather, Luc-Esprit Gillenormand. When he asks his daughter to give the young man an allowance to save him from starvation, he tells her to take him ‘sixty pistoles’ (III.3.viii, 582).51 The pistole was an obsolete Spanish coin no more current in 1829 than the ducats and doubloons of Alexandre Dumas’s musketeers. What Gillenormand means to say by using the term is that he has no truck with revolutions or empires and new-fangled decimal nonsense. However, he is using the term not to name a coin (any real pistole found in a cupboard or tip was worth either nothing as legal tender or quite a lot to collectors) but as an antiquated equivalent for ten francs. Marius finds the sum in a casket on his desk but as he is too proud to accept a hand-out he returns it to sender. He can’t send back ‘sixty pistoles’ in any literal sense, of course, but puts thirty louis in a roll to have delivered to his grandfather. But which kind of louis were they? The answer makes a difference to the plot. Was Marius playing fair or short-changing the old man? As the computation was already arcane in 1862, Hugo steps down to explain the sum.52 This comical juggling of alternative names for 600 francs makes a general point that readers of Les Misérables need to grasp: that the meaning of money in nineteenth-century France lay in the way it was named, and that the names that individuals used for the coins that they handled always revealed something about their social positions, their attitudes, assets and needs.
The way money was named also tells us that people of all classes could multiply and divide by five and twenty in their heads. That doesn’t put them on the level of their British contemporaries, who handled twelve pennies to the shilling and twenty shillings to the pound, counted out in coins as ten florins or eight half-crowns, and it leaves them far behind Guernsey folk who counted in doubles worth one-eighth of a penny whilst using coins minted in Jersey worth one-thirteenth and one-twenty-sixth of a shilling. Our forebears must have been rather good at doing sums in their heads.
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France’s first railway, from Paris to Versailles, opened in 1837, so Les Misérables, set in 1815–35, portrays a world without steam (except for the memory of an experimental river craft that made a noise like a dog paddling and was dismissed as ‘a plaything, the fantasy of an impractical inventor’ (I.3.i, 111) in 1817). The various means that people used to get from place to place were even greater markers of difference in wealth and rank than cars and buses are today.
Rich people owned their own horse-drawn transport. ‘Having a carriage’ meant having a coach house, a stable, a coachman and a groom – in other words, you had to be not just a millionaire, but a rich one too. The grandest such vehicle was the four-wheeled c
arrosse with an enclosed cabin and rudimentary suspension. Louis XVIII is glimpsed in the royal carriage on his way back from his daily hunting expedition, but no others are seen in Les Misérables until Gillenormand hires two to take Marius and Cosette to get married in church. It was the equivalent of renting a Rolls-Royce for a wedding party nowadays.53
The calèche was a lighter version, and the niftiest of all carriages was the two-wheeled tilbury. Like the carrosse, these vehicles required housing, staff and maintenance, and were therefore restricted to people of substantial means (or to outrageous borrowers like Honoré de Balzac, who ran a tilbury for a few months until his creditors closed in). Hugo never owned any kind of carriage, even when he was a pair de France. He walked, or else he took a cab.
Cabs, called fiacres, waited for hire on street corners in Paris round the clock. They were four-wheeled, half-covered, one-horse conveyances driven by a coachman sitting in front of the passengers. There were also two-wheeled cabriolets, driven by a coachman standing on an open platform at the back. These were more manoeuvrable and therefore more expensive, but like fiacres, they all had identification numbers and charged fixed rates.
Taking a cab did not imply the great wealth required to have a carrosse, calèche or tilbury, but it was not something common folk could afford. When Éponine tells her father that a charitable old man she’d approached in church had taken the bait and was about to come to their hovel in a cab, Thénardier is so delighted that he exaggerates what it means far beyond its real significance: ‘In a cab! He must be Rothschild!’ (III.8.vii, 676)
