Enjolras: The rich guy who everyone kinda knows and who is friendly and civil but not out to make friends, and who is a top student because of course his parents got him into this school and of course he got a private tutor to teach him the course material thoroughly. He’s the one who is intimidatingly elegant.
Combeferre: The guy who everybody thinks they know but actually don’t know about. You know he hangs around in the library at 5 o’clock on a wednesday and that’s all you really know about him. He talks but not about himself and you don’t think you even know his first name, but after every time you have to share the workplace with him, you feel incredibly inappropriate.
Courfeyrac: The guy who is loud and popular, who is always somewhere with someone and often he is exhausting to be around. He makes you feel like you belong but it’s superficial because he only follows social conventions. He is impulsive and has almost no patience for senseless noise and negativity and will drop you with no hesitation if you cross him one time too many. You are not sure what he thinks of you or everyone else. He is always civil and treats everyone the same but his true thoughts? You have no idea.
Jean Prouvaire: The kid you make fun of. Maybe not directly to his face and maybe you don’t make fun of him personally but you sure do talk about him. He is gloomy and he is off. He talks strangely and dresses even stranger. You believe he is poor but you saw the name Prouvaire on several lists of sponsors already. He is nice but everyone avoids him. People tease him and it’s all in good fun, so you don’t quite understand why he threw the first punch.
Bahorel: The infuriatingly relaxed guy with a booming laugh and an incredibly obtrusive presence. He offers you the last seat in the lecture hall and leans back in the last row with his feet on the desk and he will argue and disrupt lectures for the ones in his immediate vicinity. He is the guy who did everything once. Every campus story somehow involves him.
Feuilly: The guy who works at the little coffee trolley in front of the main entrance every day. You know his face and you know his voice, for some reason you remember all his shirts, you know the people he talks to, you know his music preference and that his favourite season is Autumn but for some reason you never get to learn his name.
Joly: Your class project partner who does everything twice. You are sure that he is one of those people who honestly love mondays judging by the way his grin seems to be stuck on his face forever. He talks fast with chipper voice and shining eyes and gestures even faster. He is the guy who has everything in his bag from tissues to spare socks and for some reason also hair ties. Always in the company of Bossuet.
Bossuet: The guy in class who never hands in his assignments and has an excuse for everything. The one who should be a nervous wrack but isn’t, who misses most of his classes but somehow still passes all of them. “He is a liar” is the common agreement and you don’t question it. He is always with Joly.
Grantaire: The first time you see him, you think he grew up in the wilderness. Unkempt hair and rude manners coupled with obnoxious loud behaviour. He is the guy who hits on and catcalls everyone he meets and who runs around with sunglasses even in winter. For reasons completely incomprehensible to you, Joly and Bossuet like him.
Because this has been on my mind a lot, and we won’t reach the barricade chapters until next summer.
Characters as symbols. Normally, I’m very much against this, preferring to think of characters are people, with motivations and backstory and development and other, human, traits. But ever since that post about Jehan and Bahorel standing in for Hugo’s Romantic friends, and being the first members of their circle to die…I’ve come to accept how very elaborately symbolic these chapters are?
Anyway:
Grantaire: Cynicism was passed out to begin with. Everyone’s fighting for ideals at this barricade, so poor Grantaire is just unconscious in the corner from the start. He wasn’t invited, anyway.
Bahorel: The very first casualty [of our named group] is the one eager for fighting. Like, if this wasn’t obviously a meta-commentary on the experience of being in combat, it just became that. The first thing to go is joy in fighting.
Prouvaire: Gentleness and appreciation for beauty dies next. Innocence, in a way? Also, this makes 2/3 of our resident Romantics gone, sacrificing themselves for the future [which our third brooding Romantic hero will actually get to realize].
[Mabeuf, Eponine & Gavroche have their own things going on.]
Bossuet: Bossuet’s optimistic and very unlucky. In quick succession, we lose ‘good humor’…
Feuilly: …international brotherhood/looking at the big picture…
Courfeyrac: …friendship and joi de vivre…
Joly:..and the rest of our optimism. I sort of see Joly & Bossuet as different forms of optimism: liveliness facing fear (at least, fear of disease) and facing ill-fortune.
Combeferrre: Philosophy helps others to the end, and is also the last casualty of the street battle. From here (having lost all these characters/the good things they represent), Hugo makes it explicit that any sense of nobility is gone, and it’s all just awful, gory, and horrible–the descriptions of the fighting degrade into diabolical comparisons.
Marius: Our last romantic, and ‘the soul’ of the barricade, continues fighting while wounded. He’s incapacitated, but not killed, and lives to see the future.
Enjolras: The ideal of republican virtu, ‘the logic of the revolution’,remains completely unharmed even after everyone else is dead. Ideas are bulletproof, etc. At the extreme end, cynicism–Grantaire–finally wakes up, but only to voluntarily die at idealism’s feet. The fighting ends.
But the soul persists. It goes (literally) underground, it hides, it slowly recuperates. But it lives. And it will be happy.
I actually have this head cannon that all of the Amis are from different French speaking parts of the world and thus they all have slightly different dialects that at one point all merge into one dialect. Like give me Haitian Combeferre, French Canadian Joly, Swiss Marius (speaking five languages), Moroccan Bahorel, from New Orleans Cajun French speaking Grantaire, and of course French Enjolras and Courfeyrac (best friends since childhood).
The head cannon also being:
One day Grantaire ticks off Enjolras, so Enjolras thus turns around and screams at Grantaire “Your French is terrible” Grantaire in response says “So is your English but you don’t see me complaining”
*If you have other suggestions for an amis and their dialect of French reblog with the addition*
Bossuet is probably from Acadian Nova Scotia. The accent confuses the hell out of people, or so I hear.
everyone should kiss Grantaire if you are in the same room as Grantaire you have to kiss him I don’t make the rules sorry.
every single amis getting up one after the other to kiss grantaire all over his lil face. joly pecks him on the nose and combeferre presses his lips to the others forehead
and then finally enjolras literally blushes the prettiest pink as their lips touch.
look, i get that people like writing about les amis as a contemporary radical activist group, but i’ve seen a lot of stuff that… doesn’t really reflect the reality of protest in virtually every country in the world, and certainly in basically every western democracy. at a protest today enjolras would have to beg the local institutions of power for permission to march up a public street, and he would be held responsible for any diversion from the plan he submitted. if his friends and followers were kettled and terrorised by riot police, he’d be told in no uncertain terms that this was his fault. les amis would have to hole up in someone’s flat beforehand and duct-tape and stuff cardboard inside of their jackets, in advance preparation for the inevitable police violence to come. they’d have to write the phone numbers of lawyers on their arms in magic marker and combeferre would have to check that everyone knows not to tell the police a single thing, to always ask for a lawyer, and then shut up.
enjolras would have to give his speeches with bahorel and feuilly standing on either side of him with their arms folded and their faces set, would have to march with jehan and courferyac pushing forward as his vanguard. les amis would have to surround enjolras like a tidal wave, in case the police got any bright ideas about cutting off the serpent’s head in order to make the body flail and panic and die. if and when the violence started – violence enjolras probably would not have wanted, because violence is used to re-write the history of contemporary resistance all of the time – courferyac and graintaire would have to pay in bruises to distract the cop bearing down on combeferre so it would be definite that someone would be left in the morning to post bail. joly would have to bring medical supplies in his bag with the full expectation of using them, because kettles can go on for hours and you never guarantee that even someone bleeding enough to lose their life will be allowed to leave.
when the cops come for enjolras, he’d kneel and put his hands behind his head and not say a thing, not when they kicked at the backs of his ankles or slammed him against a cop car or pulled his head back by his hair to hiss his rights into his ear. he’s a leader, and he’d know the value of a slit through his eyebrow in the press tomorrow. he’d know that this beating was coming whatever he did, but bruises in the dock in the morning make his argument for him. courferyac would, again, be the one dragged out of the crowd with his lip split and grantaire gripping tight around his wrist in vain, so combeferre could try and desperately usher away teenagers from riot shields, so joly could try and stem the bleeding of a thirteen year old girl’s head-wound, so bahorel could help jehan carry feuilly away without putting too much pressure on the point where his ribs had cracked. no one would hit a cop. if you hit a cop, a cop can do whatever they like to you, and every single member of les amis would have seen that happen with their own eyes.
the reality remains that there is virtually no such thing as a peaceful protest, because it is to the advantage of those in powerto ensure that there’s not. the reality remains that there is nothing glamorous about a riot, and that enjolras would be taking his friends’ lives in his hands with reckless abandon if he thought there was. in a sense he’d be happy if he was the only person arrested, that combeferre would have to come for him in the cold light of morning and pick him up from the police station steps and drive him to the hospital, dirt under enjolras’s fingernails and blood crusted in his hair.
he’d have spent a night cold and maybe alone and maybe sitting in an interrogation room for hours staring at bare walls and having cops yell questions in his face that he couldn’t risk answering. he’d be exhausted and sore and on the verge of total-shut down. every single protest he led, he’d have to know that this would be how it could end for him– if not something much worse. protest is dangerous. riots aren’t fun. les amis would be covered in battle scars. they would spend weeks showered in bruises and knowing that they would have more to come. in the 21st century, protesters still build barricades. in fact, they do so relatively regularly. it’s just a thought, but you might want to think about why.
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