Enjolras : The ultimate baguette de tradition, all hot and gorgeous and you just want to take a bite out of him but you also don’t want to ruin the perfection
Combeferre : Rye bread, it looks all serious and reliable and it gets all soft and delicious once you butter it up
Grantaire : A pain au chocolat. He looks like a croissant from the outside and you think you have him figured out but NO, he’s got inner layers, hidden depths
Joly : Either a very healthy whole wheat bread or a soft, golden, delicious brioche, like a fluffy cloud
Bossuet : A nutella filled beignet, he’s like those good memories of childhood when you used to eat with your fingers
Musichetta : A cute lemon poppy seed muffin, sweet but just zesty enough
Feuilly : A perfectly cooked and decorated gingerbread man
I wouldn’t say he’s submissive toward Enjolras always. There are key moments where he explicitly sticks up for his own position to Enjolras’ face. The part where he prevails upon Enjolras to get himself sent to the Barriere du Maine, or the “Let me sleep here…until I die here,” bit. But the thing is, those moments? They’re key precisely because they’re exceptions to the rule!
I do think that if they interacted more directly more often, Grantaire’s penchant for quipping would come out more, but yeah, like. y’all. listen. listen. There is nothing in canon to suggest that Grantaire and Enjolras argue during ABC meetings! As far as we know, Grantaire never directly challenges his object of admiration while he’s soapboxing! At best, you can say that in the musical Grantaire adds a few funny comments that fit into the margins of Enjolras’ speech, but he doesn’t pick fights with the man. Doing that kind of shits-and-giggles pigtail-pulling in an actual activist meeting where people are trying to get work done is a surefire way to not get invited back ever.
Grantaire’s depressive rambling happens during backroom downtime, the same time other ABC members use for shooting the shit about plays and setting things on fire and giving each other advice about their respective mistresses.
In my opinion, at least, Grantaire is a lot more interesting when his snarky downer side is visibly at war with his “treat Enjolras with tender deference” side. If you personally want to write a story where Grantaire argues with Enjolras during meetings while Enjolras is actually taking point brainstorming strategy with the others, or while he’s giving presentations about upcoming events, or whatever, you obviously can – it’s not totally implausible, especially if you’re drawing heavily on the musical’s characterization of Grantaire – but please at least be aware that it’s a fandom trope, not explicitly justified by canon, and shouldn’t be taken as a given.
How flattering! While I’m nowhere near the ranks of the most well informed, I am ALWAYS willing to talk about Les Amis and I love Joly and Bossuet a lot, so let’s go!
It seems to be a term that’s fallen out of use; the closest I was able to come when I looked for it myself was binitarianism, which, well, take it away Wikipedia:
“Binitarianism is a Christian theology of two personae, two individuals, or two aspects in one Godhead (or God). Classically, binitarianism is understood as strict monotheism — that is, that God is an absolutely single being; and yet with binitarianism there is a “twoness” in God.“
Which to me says that Joly and Bossuet are operating as an absolute unit, but also as two separate entities. Notice how in that chapter Grantaire tends to speak like he’s addressing one person– and all right, that’s Grantaire, but also notice Enjolras only sends the message about the gathering to Bossuet (who is certainly the more physically distinct of the pair). Grantaire in his sulk assumes it’s because Enjolras was dismissing Joly, but in context it seems more likely that Enjolras just knew/assumed that a message to one was a message to the other.
The Joly/ Lesgles partnership is really underexamined; on the most obvious level, if Joly can be seen as the science of the revolution and Bossuet its optimism, then that’s quite a statement on the link between hope and progress and one I think holds up well. But there’s all sorts of comments on interdependence and social contracts and character studies to be had there too, and DON’T THINK I WON’T TALK ABOUT IT I will but it’s not what you asked! So, uh, there. "Bini” is probably just a short way of saying “one entity but divided” in that religiously allusiony Hugo way.
Marking time until one of fandom’s actually knowledgeable people corrects me. Please…?
¯_( ಠ_ಠ)_/¯ 
