victor hugo: yeah the enjolras and grantaire dynamic is the same as achilles and patroclus, orestes and pylades and alexander the great and hephaestion
I’m glad you like my blog! And I’ve been learning French since I was 13, but I’m not fluent in it (yet) haha.
I can’t say that enjoltaire was real, because the only person who could really say that was Victor Hugo haha. I do ship them together but all I can tell you is which parts of Les Miserables show that there could have been something.
Actually I already talked about it a while ago in THIS ASK. But I’ll give you some more details!!!
Just, about the gay rights in the 19th century France – after 1791 gay sex was no more a capital crime in France. It still wouldn’t really let two gay men to be out and be in a relationship, but it’s important to remember that it was completely normal for two men/two women to live together, “just as friends” back then. It was normal for them to cuddle and sleep in the same bed. LGBT history is more complex than most people think it is!
But now back to Les Mis – when describing Enjolras, Hugo compares him to many maaaaany well known gay characters/people.
“He was a savage Antinous.” – Antinous was a lover of the Roman emperor Hadrian. He died when he was in his early twenties and in the 19th century he replaced Ganymede as a western gay icon. Oscar Wilde often talked about him.
“the bare throat of Evadne would have moved him no more than it would have moved Aristogeiton; he, like Harmodius, thought flowers good for nothing except to conceal the sword” – both Aristogeiton and Harmodius were lovers who killed the tyrant of Athens.
And while talking about Grantaire and Enjolras’ relationship he mentions not only gay people but gay people who were in relationships.
“They are Pollux, Patrocles, Nisus, Eudamidas, Ephestion, Pechmeja.”
Patroclus – a character from Homer’s Iliad. He was a close friend and probably a lover of Achilles.
Nisus – Nisus and Euryalus were lovers from Virgil’s Aeneid.
Ephestion, Hephaestion – was a very close friend of Alexander the Great. They both compared themselves to Achilles and Patroclus and many believe that they were lovers.
Pechmeja – Pechmeja was a writer in the 18th century. He was a friend of
Dubrueil, a doctor. When the writer got sick, his friend stayed with him until he was healthy again, but even then he didn’t move out and soon both men started living together. A few years later it was
Dubrueil
who fell sick and this time the illness was both contagious and terminal, but his friend refused to leave him alone.
Dubrueil
died in April 1785 and Pechmeja died a month later.
“In the series O and P are inseparable. You can, at will, pronounce O and P or Orestes and Pylades.” – Orestes and Pylades avenged Orestes’ father, Agamemnon after the man had been killed by his wife. Their relationship is sometimes interpreted as romantic.
I hope it helps just a bit with understanding their relationship and I totally encourage everyone to study all comparisons etc Hugo made because they are very interesting!
They both freeze, Grantaire because holy shit Enjolras has his actual head on his shoulder and Enjolras because “I fucked up I fucked up I fucked up”. And they stay like that for the rest of the movie, screaming internally for an hour and when the screen turns to black, Enjolras’s neck is all stiff
Jehan: Are you in love with Enjolras?
Grantaire: …no.
Jehan: Then why do you draw ‘R+E’ in hearts everywhere?
Grantaire: It stands for regret and eroticism.
So at the beginning I’d like to say that even though I’ve read the book multiple times, those are just my personal thoughts! And I’d also like to mention that I see Enjolras as a heavily gay coded character (in a way that Victor Hugo would still be able to publish the book in 1860s, of course) (and Grantaire as a bi character but I have less sources for that than for Enjolras being gay).
So.. I believe that there was no secret relationship between Grantaire and Enjolras. As much as I think they’d be able to keep their relationship secret in the 19th century Paris, I don’t think anything in the book indicates that there could be something.
But! I do believe that there could have been something. We are only given a few chapters in which we see them interacting but even from the description of Grantaire Hugo is trying to tell us something? “Grantaire admired, loved and venerated Enjolras’’, “He had a need of Enjolras. That chaste, healthy, firm, upright, hard, candid nature charmed him, without his being clearly aware of it, and without the idea of explaining it to himself having occurded to him.’’. Then Hugo compares Grantaire and his relationship with Enjolras to, for example, Hephaestion (close friend and probably a lover of Alexander the Great), Patroclus (again.. close friend and probably a lover of Achilles from Homer’s Iliad), Pechmeja and Pylades (I spoke about them in THIS post which is very old and I’m gonna redo it one day because I haven’t mentioned of some things in it).
So yes, I think that both had some feelings for the other one, but due to the times they lived in, their own rather stubborn, sometimes clashing personalities and the lack of time, they never learnt about them and their relationship forever stayed in the ‘maybe’ phase.
And I think that Hugo knew what he was doing (for all those who think that I’m lying – Victor Hugo knew about gay people and he even mentioned the possibility of a man being attracted to another man in Les Miserables! It’s not like they made us all in 1980s.)
I’d be more than happy to discuss everything about enjoltaire and all chapters and comparisons but as you mentioned – you haven’t read the book and I don’t want to make you see some spoilers!
Unless you can list five facts about his character that don’t involve Enjolras or alcoholism
well lol i think the initial wording is a little strong~ but okay let’s go
– grantaire is extraordinarily playful with language, and more specifically tends to use linguistic tricks to throw conversations off course when they start hitting too close to home. fwiw this is like thing #1 i wish was explored more in fic
– unless he’s bullshitting in some way (unreliable orator herf) grantaire has some pretty deep hangups about a failed art studentship under (‘under’) baron antoine-jean gros
– grantaire has canonical daddy issues
– grantaire is super social outside of his amis friendship group, despite taking ”no pleasure anywhere but there”.
– grantaire genuinely cares about injustice and human hardship, he just doesn’t see a workable solution to any of it.
bonus
– grantaire is kind of fixated on metaphors about clothes falling to rags, and holds a particularly disdain for people who deliberately deprive themselves of worldly goods and pleasures (e.g. living in self-imposed poverty) in order to appear more virtuous
super bonus
– grantaire has an extensive background knowledge of the classics and classical references are scattered throughout his speeches
super duper bonus
– grantaire either woke really early on barricade morning or stayed up all night – ‘waiting for the dawn’ (remember this is june). he also spent what is possibly > one hour wandering miserably around paris in the rain before joining joly and bossuet in the corinthe
(lol i could so go on but)
extra super duper bonus
– grantaire has a relatively intimate female friend (possibly named/nicknamed ‘floréal’, possibly not) who is the last non-insurgent he spoke to on barricade morning.
Grantaire is canonically both a dancer and a street fighter
Grantaire knows the geography of Paris intimately, probably from his above-mentioned social activities
Grantaire seriously knows fucking everybody in Paris
Grantaire not only has a ridiculous amount of knowledge of the classics, he also knows all his Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophers (and can philosopher name-drop at the *hur* drop of a hat)
Grantaire is also up on modern politics, not only of France, but also of neighboring countries
Grantaire can play dominoes, although he’s arguably bad at it
Grantaire may or may not be bad at math, but he certainly doesn’t like it (see above: canonical daddy issues)
Grantaire lives near the Musain
Grantaire probably has clinical depression
– grantaire has a bit of a love/hate thing going on with the philosopher diogenes
– grantaire will push and push and push at peoples’ boundaries then get mortally wounded when they finally snap at him, like he does this over and over again and it’s kind of a defining character trait
– grantaire likes brie cheese
– grantaire discovered the corinthe, entering only on the basis of an accidental bad pun on the sign outside
– joly and bossuet care a lot about grantaire and basically blow off lamarque’s funeral in order to “conduct Grantaire back towards cheerfulness” after he miserably pours his heart out to them
Hugo’s headcanon was that Grantaire had a truly walrus-like mustache
Grantaire’s defining philosophy is not the world sucks, so fuck it all, Grantaire’s defining philosophy is the world sucks, but anything we do to try and change it is going to accomplish nothing or make it worse, so we should learn to be happy with how the world actually is
but while he vocally espouses that philosophy and on some level obviously believes it, on some level he doesn’t want to believe it because his ‘only pleasure’ is taken in being part of a group of students who are actively trying to change the world
¯_( ಠ_ಠ)_/¯ 