#lesmiserablesfashion

[pilferingapples]

For @lesmiserablesfashions , a little bit about beards: 

In the late 1820s and through the 1830s, Beards , in Paris especially, were a definite sign of being counterculture. They were famously Romanticist, usually republican, and just generally the sort of thing to make Proper Respectable people clutch their pearls.  The Beard Thing is mentioned pretty much every time people talk about Bouzingos , and as Hugo says 

From time to time parties resole their old terms of insult.  In 1832 , the word  “bousingot”filled the interim between the word “Jacobin”, which was worn out, and the word “demagogue”, then almost unused, but which has since done such excellent service. (Les Mis)

This level of Social Coding only applied to full beards, though-- men wore moustaches and mutton chops the whole time, and a few Only Slightly Daring types might even try out a small chin-tuft. But the more a guy’s facial hair approached the realm of the Actual Beard, the more Scandalous it became. 

Finding all the mentions of Beards As A Sign of Rebellion in the reading I’ve done would be entertaining, but would also take, alas, several hours of time at the least, since I can’t just Ctrl+F my paper books :P But here’s a few quotes from some writers we know to give you an idea of how the whole Beard Issue was still remembered!

From Gautier’s History of Romanticism(talking about Petrus Borel )

A beard, fine, silky, full, scented with benzoin, and cared for as a Sultan’s beard might be, framed in a dark shadow his pale and handsome face. A beard! A very ordinary matter in France nowadays, but at that time there were but two in the country: Eugene Déveria’s and Pétrus Borel’s. It required absolutely heroic self-possession and contempt of the multitude to wear one. And mark that when I say beard, I do not mean mutton-chop or fin-shaped whiskers, or a tip or a tuft, but a genuine, full, complete beard, one to make a man shudder. 

(See, there’s your fashion plate Deveria!:D He and Borel were definitely Revolution Buddies, in fashion and in practice.) 

From Count of Monte Cristo, by Alex Dumas, talking about Edmond fresh out of prison: 

“I am was almost loathe to do it (save Edmond from drowning)-- with your six-inch beard and hair a full foot long, you look more like a brigand than an honest sailor!”

and

The barber looked in astonishment at this man, with his long hair and thick black beard, who resembled one of those fine heads by Titian.At that time it was not yet the fashion to wear one’s beard and hair long; nowadays a barber would rather be surprised that a man who could enjoy such physical attributes would wish to deprive himself of them. 

(As George Sand points out, being visibly a Bouzingo/Bousingot was also legitimately dangerous:

They were called Bousingots because of the sailor hats of that name, made of shiny leather, which they adopted as their rallying sign. Later they wore a scarlet headpiece in the form of a military stocking cap, with a black velvet band all around it.*  Pointed out again and again by the police, and attacked in the streets by stool pigeons, they next adopted a gray hat, but they were no less frequently rounded up and mistreated.Their conduct has been much denounced, but I don’t think the government has been able to justify that of its own officers,veritable assassins who beat to death a good number of Bousingots while shopkeepers looked on, showing not the slightest indignation or pity. *)

But the Bearded Youths were the wave of the Future of 1830-- as Victor Hugo stresses in Les Miserables, by having Gillenormand, the representative of fading full bourgeois monarchism, rail against them: 

The nineteenth century is poison. The first whippersnapper you meet wears his goat’s beard, thinks he is very clever, and tosses out his old relatives. That’s republican, that’s romantic. What does that mean, Romantic? Every possible folly.  A year ago, you went to Hernani (Hugo’s breakout Romanticist play). I ask you, Hernani! Antitheses! Abominations that aren’t even written in French!”

So the Battle Lines re: beards were very clearly drawn in the 1830s, and fondly remembered by the Romantics decades later XD