#lm inspired

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For some brief period of time the New York Evening Republic titled their crime section Les Miserables. Here is a selection of what they reported on (these are not all from a single day):

Seven lodgers rested their weary frames at the station houses last night

Casper Agin and Adam Heinacle were fined $2 each in the eighth precinct this morning for corner lounging

Barney Neary was taken to No. 1 station in an insane condition last night. He was given in charge of Dr. Halbert.

The examination in the case of James McKee, chaged with embezzling over $1,100 from Ald. Hefford will begin in the police court to-morrow

Eleven vagrants were disposed of at station 7 this morning

The police reported forty arrests for the twenty-four hours ending at 6 o'clock this morning

John Fox, aged twenty-nine, an Irish laborer, was found in an insane cindition at the corner of Carroll and Chicago streets by Officer Quinn yesterday. He was taken to station 1 this morning and given in charge of Dr. Halbert.

Valentine Olton was arrested in the Tenth precincy by Officer O'Laughlin last night for paddling without a license.

Caroline Jones told Justice King to-day that John Mauer had beaten her cruelly yesterday. Mauer was fined $5.

Patrick Madigan stole two pairs of mittens from Frederick Webber. Justice King sent him to the workhouse for thirty days this morning.

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The [Prisoners' Aid] Association was founded in 1888 through the reading by Sir William Sowden of Victor Hugo's immortal "Les Miserable.'' The dog-like manner in which Jean Valjean was hounded from place to place after his escape from prison reminded him of what then occurred in South Australia. The object of the association, as its first manifesto stated, was "the aiding of discharged prisoners to make a new start in life."

The Adelaide Mail, 7 July 1923

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By V. R. Gosch, published in the Mudgee Guardian and North-Western Representative, June 1905

In Victor Hugo's well-known book "Les Miserables" there are two lines which impressed themselves upon my memory, "God bless you, you are an angel, since you take care of flowers.' These were Father Mabeuf's words to Eponine, the unfortunate little waif of Paris. "No," she replied, "I am the devil." [. . .] A frail human flower, eking out a stunted existence in the social cesspit, and amidst the mephetic atmosphere of moral degradation and of vice in a great city, until prematurely fading, in the bloom of her youth, owing to neglect and cruelty. Yet, with all the privations she endured, and the treatment she received, the consciousness of right and wrong never left her, while the good seed, implanted in us, sprouted and grew in spite of adverse circumstances, because of the flowers she loved so well, and the gentle influence they exerted over her. Languishing after the milk of human kindness, she felt for those flowers, which the old savant, by reason of his age, could tend no longer himself as he did in the days of his youth. In all cities there are many such children pining away for want of that sympathy without which we cannot exist. To the shame of our much boasted civilization, they lack even the most ordinary necessaries of life, and growing up in the gutters of crime, become a blur on our social picture and a burden to the state. The lives of children and flowers seem to me so closely interwoven, that it is difficult to think of them apart, or to love one without the other. In both of them there is infinite pathos, and either of them can teach us a fund of philosophy would we but allow ourselves to be instructed.

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Letter to the editor concerning the harshness of laws in Delaware, published 29 May 1873 in the New National Era (if you click through to the full article, be warned that it discusses anti-blackness in the criminal justice system)

Whoever has read "Les Miserables" remembers the horrible machinery of the Court of Arras, when the public prosecutor had so well nigh precipitated the sentence of the galleys upon old Champmathieu, and will realize how the advocate deems his own personal honor involved in the contest. Jean Valjean saved the prisoner there, but it is not always the poor victim escapes. The remedy lies with the people. Everyone will recognize how easy it is to make unjust laws, but how inconceivably hard to abrogate them. . . . I am sure the intelligent class of the people of my state deplore these blots upon her fair fame, but they are well-nigh powerless for the nonce. Reforms progress slowly, and the prestige of even a merciless law hedges it about with delays, so that it thrives in the very breath of obloquy.

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The earthquake makes its record upon the seismograph, but where is the record of the trembling that seizes souls, such as bleached the heart of Jean Valjean? . . . There are more mysteries in the mind of man than in all heaven and hell; there are further distances than Arcturus, snowier peaks than the Himalayas, and stiller, stranger deeps than the underseas.

Frank Crane, The Baffling Soul, published in the Evening Star, April 1913

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Read the whole article in The Australian Worker, 27 April 1916

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So apparently in 2019 this skatewear brand called Isla made Les Miserables themed merch? That is so random but kind of charming and based on instagram comments at least some of their audience liked it.

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The Tacoma Times, 2 January 1940

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The face of ages is composed of the physiognomy of years.

Source: the Indianapolis News, 3 January 1902

This is not a sentence I would expect to be used as an ad.

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Apparently in the 1920's there was such an act as "Jean & Valjean," self-described "aerial novelty pantomimists," described vaguely in one ad as "something new in juggling and hoop rolling." They performed in Los Angeles, San Diego, Washington D.C., and Indianapolis. There's not much else out there about them. A notice appeared in the Vaudeville News in 1929 saying that they had mail waiting to be picked up at the National Vaudeville Artists headquarters.

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Do not, I repeat, do not take advice from Tholomyes you fool

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Did you know that the "V" in "Eugene V. Debs" stands for Victor? Yes, the parents of political activist Eugene Debs named him after Eugene Sue and Victor Hugo. Les Miserables was apparently his father's bible and it became Eugene's favorite book, which he read over and over again.

The character of Fantine (whom he calls "the greatest character in fiction") inspired him to write the following article, "Fantine In Our Day," in 1916. It was originally published in the International Socialist Review (I came across it in the Brisbane Worker.) In it, Debs examines sex work through the framework of worker's rights and the exploitative nature of labor under capitalism. Some of his arguments are rooted in misogyny, to be sure, but I was surprised by how much the article holds up (in my opinion) and in any case, it's an interesting historical document.

Read it yourself beneath the cut.

Fantine in Our Day by Eugene V Debs The reader of "Les Miserables" can never forget the ill-starred Fantine, the mournful heroine of Hugo's immortal classic. The very name of Fantine, the gay, guileless, trusting girl, the innocent, betrayed, self-immolating young mother, the despoiled, bedraggled, haunted and holy martyr to motherhood, to the infinite love of her child touches to tears and haunts the memory like a melancholy dream.

Jean Valjean, noblest of heroes, was possible only because of Fantine, sublimest of martyrs.

Fantine—child of poverty and starvation—the ruined girl, the abandoned mother, the hounded prostitute, remained to the very hour of her tragic death chaste as a virgin, spotless as a saint in the holy sanctuary of her own pure and undefiled soul. It was of such as Fantine that Heine wrote: "I have seen women on whose cheeks red vice was painted and in whose hearts dwelt heavenly purity."

The brief, bitter, blasted life of Fantine epitomizes the ghastly story of the persecuted, perishing Fantines of modern society in every land in Christendom. Everywhere they are branded as "prostitutes" and shunned as lepers. Never was the woman born who could sink low enough even in the upper class to be called a "prostitute," and the man who calls a woman by that hideous epithet bears it upon his own forehead.

Why are the Fantines of our day charged with having "gone wrong" and with being "fallen women"? Not one in all the numberless ranks of these sisters of ours who are so despised by the soulless society of which they are the offspring has "gone" wrong and not one has "fallen" to her present debased and unhappy state. If there is on earth a woman who has "fallen" in the sense usually applied to women who mortgage their honor in the battle for bread I have yet to see or hear of her.

There are certain powerful social forces which in the present order of things make for what is known as "prostitution," but it is to be noted that there are no "prostitutes" in the upper classes of society. The women in the higher strata may be sexually as unchaste as they will, they are never "prostitutes." The well-to-do woman, not driven by these forces to sell her body to feed her child, may yet fall into the grossest sexual immorality through sheer idleness and ennui, but she has got "gone wrong"—no one thinks of her as a "fallen women," or dreams of branding her as a "prostitute," and unless she is flagrantly indiscreet in the distribution of her favors her social standing is not materially affected by her moral lapses.

But let a poor shop-girl, a seamstress or domestic servant—in a word, a working girl—commit some slight indiscretion, and that hour her doom is sealed, and she might as well present herself at once to the public authorities and have the scarlet letter seared into her forehead with a branding iron. She may be pure and innocent as a child but the "benefit of the doubt" never fails to condemn her. She has "gone wrong," is now a "fallen woman," and the word "prostitute," coined exclusively for her, now designates the low estate which is to be her lot the rest of her life.

A rich woman may sink as low as she can—and a woman can sink very low in the moral and spiritual scale without necessarily indulging her carnal appetites—she is never a "prostitute." She does not sell herself from necessity but indulges herself from desire and therefore is not a "prostitute."

"Prostitution" as generally understood has economic as well as moral and sexual significance and application. "Prostitution" is confined to the "lower class" and hears a direct and intimate relation to the exploitation of the "upper class."

The Fantines of modern society, the "prostitutes", of the present day are wholly of the working class; the segregated area is populated entirely by these unfortunate sisters of ours, and the blasted life and crucified soul of every mother's daughter of them pleads in mute agony for the overthrow of the brutal, blighting, bartering system which has robbed them of their womanhood, shorn them of every virtue, reduced them to the degraded level of merchandise and finally turned them into sirens of retribution to avenge their dishonour and shame.

As these lines are being written the report of the Vice Commission of the State of Maryland appears in the press dispatches to inform the public that investigation of vice recently concluded in the great cities of that state discloses the fact—not at all new or startling to some of us at least—that many of the girls who "go" wrong and recruit the ranks of the "fallen" women have been seduced and ruined by their employers; bosses, and other stripes of "superior" of one kind or another, AS A CONDITION OF THEIR EMPLOYMENT. Countless others, cheated of their childhood, pursued from birth by poverty, were doomed before their baby-eyes opened upon a world in which it is a crime to be born, a crime punishable by cruel torture, by starvation of body and soul, and by being cast for life into a den of filth to glut the lust of its beastly keepers.

The innumerable Fantines of our day, found lurking like scarlet spectres in the shadows wherever capitalism easts its withering blight of exploitation, are typified in the child of the garret described by Hugo, the child of slum and street: "There was in her whole person the stupor of a life ended but never commenced." It is these deflowered daughters of poverty, robbed and degraded, that are forever "dropping fragments of their life upon the public highway."

The story, inexpressibly pathetic, is a commonplace. It has been repeated a thousand times in every tongue. Here it is again as told by a writer of today: "She has been fatherless. She has gone hungry. She has known bitter cold, shame, rags, scorn, neglect, want in all forms. She has needed dolls, flowers, play, songs, brightness, sympathy, care, love and has been given the stone of hard |abor instead. Of all the blessings to to which childhood is entitled this child has been robbed. In the brief life of this child there is pathos, endurance, long-deferred hope, experience that scars, denial, self-pity, hunger of the spirit, STARVATION OF A CHILD'S SOUL FOR LOVE, HOME, HOPE, HELP.

Fantine is the greatest character in fiction and the highest type of social martyrdom. The face of Fantine, in which we behold "the horror of the old in the countenance of a child," is the mirror which reflects society's sin and shame.

The Fantines have been raped of their virtue, robbed of their womanhood, dishonored, branded, excluded; the ignorance of childhood is with them still, but not its innocence; they have been shamelessly prostituted, but they are not prostitutes. They are girls, women who have walked the path of thorn and briers with bare agony and bleeding feet; who know the way of agony and tears, and who move in melancholy procession as capitalist society's offering to nameless and dishonored graves.

The very flower of womanhood is crushed in capitalism's mills of prostitution. The girls who yield are the tender, trusting, loving ones, the sympathetic and unsuspecting, who would make the truest of wives and the noblest of mothers. It is not the hard, cold, selfish and suspicious natures that surrender to the insidious forces of prostitution, but the very opposite and thus is the motherhood of the race dwarfed and deformed and denied its expression.

The system which condemns men to slavery, women to prostitution, children to poverty and ignorance, and all to hopeless, barren, joyless lives must be uprooted and destroyed before men may know the meaning of morality, walk the highlands of humanity, and breathe the vitalizing air of freedom and fellowship.

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Melbourne's The Socialist, 27 July 1917

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Below is the view which made me aware of the silly book above.

Gavroche: The Gamin of Paris. From “Les Miserables” of Victor Hugo. Translated and adapted by M. C. Pyle. Philadelphia: Porter & Coates. Chicago: W. B. Keen & Cooke. Such a book, among the inanities that flood the reviewer, comes to him like a fresh flower or some rare rosebud tossed up out of driftwood. Poor little Gavroche! Noble Jean Valjean! What heart has not grown tender in reading this beautiful episode of their lives in that garden of episodes, “Les Miserables.” Who but loves that wretched little Gavroche, always ragged, sometimes starving, but always bright, ready with a song, a laugh, or a jest, who, when he shivers, shivers gayly, and, when he steals, makes us glad he steals successfully; who drifts forlornly through his guttered career, without father, or mother, or any love that he knows, and yet feels within his unloved little heart a spark of the Divine love, a feeling for his race, restless, helpful, budding out in kind deeds, and little self sacrifices; wonderful in his vagabond-life as a lily blooming in filth and slime! One feels his own humanity inspired by the paternal solicitude of the little fellow, stealing, begging, filching, working hard and honestly when the chance is given to provide for his little family, — two little waifs whom he finds helpless in the maze of Paris, and shelters under his own unsheltered wing, to find them afterwards to be his own brothers. The little hero becomes a tiny soldier of the barricades, “a fly on the wheel of the Revolution,” a Napoleon in rags, giving a hint here, lending a hand there; a spy now, and a savior of the barricade anon; handling a musket much larger than himself; and when the Republicans were failing for want of ammunition, is out in the street, between the barricade and its assailants, exposed to their bullets, filling a hamper with the cartridges of the soldiers dead in the street, crawling from one body to another, writhing, gliding hither and thither, emptying the cartridge-boxes as a monkey opens nuts, and, while doing it, is shot! Whose heart does not fall with him? As Jean Valjean carries the dear, little wounded fellow in his arms, through the sewers, to his home, he carries us with him; and when, at the end, we find Gavroche and Jean Valjean, and the family— his two waif brothers — all united, happy, and secure, in Clairvue, on the shores of the great, blue, bloodless sea, far from perils, we are glad, and thank God for the humanity of the story, which is true, and for the poetry of it, which is true and, more than all, for the truth that we have streets of our own with little Gavroches in them, to whom it is not too late for us to play Jean Valjean.

Source: the Chicago Daily Tribune, 20 December 1872 

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The Seattle Star, 2 November 1925

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the White Bluffs Spokesman, 24 March 1932