Jan 28 2025 45 mins
It's 1860, and Victor Hugo, having taken to the barricades against the hated Louis Napoleon, has escaped Paris with a price on his head. And his mistress, not his wife, has successfully smuggled both he and his unfinished manuscripts out of France. But now he's in exile, living in an island off the French coast but under British control. How is he going to get his masterwork published? And as the text comes to be finished, it will be rightly remembered as a definitive statement on the French Revolution. But where in the book is the Revolution? The text is 1,500 pages long, and one of the five volumes is entirely dedicated to a revolt that happened over two days in 1832. But in that skirmish, the revolutionaries lost, and all historians agree that the fight had almost no military or political significance. In fact, the most significant outcome of the battle is the painting Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix was banned from being shown in public because it might inspire people to revolt. H m, that's interesting. A piece of art is taken down from display to its possible political consequences. But back to our question. Surely that skirmish is not what Hugo's central theme is. Where is the revolution? In the most famous novel about the French Revolution? We will go down those winding, narrow Parisian back alleys trying to find it in this episode of Theater History and Mysteries.