Les miserables which war

It was the improvisation of ebullition. Bring all! It was the collaboration of the pavement, the pebble, the timber, the iron bar, the chip, the broken square, the stripped chair, the cabbage stub, the scrap, the rag, and the malediction. It was great and it was little. It was the bottomless pit parodied uon the spot by chaos come again.

Upon the whole, terrible. It was the acropolis of the ragamuffins. Carts overturned, roughened slope;. The fury of the flood was imprinted upon that misshapen obstruction.

What flood? In the end, nothing much has changed in ten years of shakeup, except that the ruling class is now made up of wealthy bourgeois profiteers and financiers instead of the blue-blooded hereditary nobility of the prerevolutionary regime. What happened to No. Napoleon makes his last bid for power but is finally defeated at the Battle of Waterloo June Louis XVIII returns to Paris and the royal line is officially restored for good, although as a limited constitutional monarchy.

Marius, born a couple of years earlier, is brought up by his staunchly royalist grandpapa. Cosette is born sometime around this date. He has no son, so the crown goes to his younger brother, Charles X. Unfortunately, Charles X is a clueless, rigid reactionary with kitty litter for brains, who thinks that going back to the prerevolutionary absolute monarchy would be a perfectly swell idea.

Radicals dream about a second republic while Bonapartists dream of restoring the Empire. His state funeral sets off rioting and armed resistance among disaffected students and workers, who are hoping to repeat the success of the July Revolution and overthrow Louis-Philippe, or at least to have the clout to demand additional social and legal reforms in the established system.

After 18 years of Louis-Philippe, the Parisians kick him out, too, in the Revolution of —which is kinda-sorta foreshadowed with that ginormous barricade full of singing ghosts in the grand finale of the film—and proclaim the Second Republic.

Cue the standout solo, I Dreamed a Dream. Like many of the big numbers in this film, it is shot in blistering, uncut closeup. With each actor you get a chance to see the smears of stage blood, the sweat, the tears caught in the eyelashes, the veins throbbing in the forehead on the high notes, the dirt, the spots, the drool, the snot, and the poverty stains on whatever remains of their teeth.

In a movie already determined to cover all its characters in filth, vomit and human excrement, this is a bit relentless. A historian can't complain about the past being shown to be dirty — it was — but it seems contrary to insist on gritty realism if you're going to have your cast express themselves exclusively in show tunes. Hathaway's performance veers between fragile sobbing and Susan Boyle-style operatics.

But why is the saintly Valjean hanging around in the red-light district? This is a lot easier to get away with on stage. Melodramatic though it may be, Fantine's story is apparently based on a real event. In , Hugo himself saved a woman falsely accused.