pilferingapples:

psqqa:

okay so you know that bit where victor hugo calls combeferre out for being all “maybe don’t die on the barricades today because the women in your life would be sad and also probably end up on the streets or something because 19th century french society sucks for everyone but women especially” while making no plans to do anything but die on the barricades that day?

is that also callback callout for the fact that the song he sings after his beautiful beautiful marius smackdown three years earlier is all about picking his mom over glory and war and all that shit or is that just some kind of bonus hypocrisy/irony?

I think there is a certain amount of Combeferre’s narratively-noted “hypocrisy” in it?  But then again, Combeferre’s not doing this for War and Glory; Combeferre calls their coming deaths sublime, but that’s different than the sort of Glory he’s talking about with Marius.  Combeferre won’t get to attain history, he won’t live to see medals and parades and a rise in his station through valor in combat. His battle is important and that makes it sublime, but I don’t think he’d call it that if it didn’t also strike him as horrible, because….well, Because Romanticism, basically, and that’s what it takes to be Sublime–extremes together, ideal and horror at once. 

And in a way, he’s doing it for his mother, too, at least the metaphorical one he shares with Enjolras–and more broadly for women in general (and I think with Combeferre he IS politically concerned for women particularly, as that chapter shows). 

So…I think  yes and no and also I’m about to start crying about Combeferre again?? 

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