1817: Parisian Everyday Life in Vaudeville and in the Novel

Abstract

The article deals with two reflections of the everyday life of Paris in 1817: in the vaudevilles “Living Calendar” and “Battle of the Mountains,” composed and staged exactly in this year, and in Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables, which was published in 1862. The whole chapter of the novel is devoted to listing the heterogeneous and petty facts of the daily life of Paris in 1817. It turns out that the optics of direct observers (half-forgotten vaudeville artists) and the famous novelist, who described events after four decades, differ very much. The everyday life of vaudeville and the everyday life of the novel present two different images, although they are dated by the same 1817. Hugo tries to simulate everyday trivia of 1817, but in fact he paints an extremely subjective and biased picture by increasing dates and facts blunders and diligently looking for such details that can compromise the Bourbon Restoration era as much as possible. We can hardly judge what trivia really interested the people of 1817 from the chapter “1817.” We could learn much more about it from the ephemeral vaudevilles, since they had captured a picture of everyday life in 1817 on fresh tracks. Hugo does not say a word about the clever dog Munito, the opening of the special storage chambers for canes in theatres, the appearing of new social type clerks-“calicos” etc., but forgotten vaudevilles remind of that.

Keywords

• victor hugo
• les misérables
• paris
• everyday life
• vaudeville
• theatrical life
• scribe
• russian mountains