Money

[sophia_sol]

On this reread of Les Miserables I’m paying a lot more attention to the money than last time because it is INTERESTING. Also I happen to be in the middle of Hugo glorifying Marius’ voluntary poverty and I am annoyed so I am writing this instead of continuing to read.

Here are some of the things I have noticed. Probably I’m not saying anything surprising here. I’m just documenting for myself my observations:

Marius makes about 2 francs a day. Feuilly, on the other hand, who fandom often thinks of as “the poor one,” makes 3 francs a day - so that’s actually a very livable wage Feuilly is making. Bahorel’s allowance comes to a little over 8 francs a day.

One cannon shot costs 6 francs to fire. (Hugo mentions this when discussing the waste of the formal shots that are a sign of respect within the navy, and the amount of money wasted.) This is really interesting to me, because a recurring theme within the Aubrey-Maturin novels is the importance of captains having to supplement their stores of powder because the allowance from the government is not enough to get your crews really practiced at firing accurately. So all of a sudden I have a bit more of a sense of HOW MUCH MONEY it costs to do all of that practicing.

Fantine, after she is fired from the factory, makes 12 sous a day, which is then reduced to 9 sous a day - which is around a quarter of what Marius makes when Marius is poor. (20 sous per franc is the conversion.) Of course, there’s a decade or so (I think) between those two time periods, and the value of money may well have changed in that time; and also there’s the difference in cost of living in Paris versus the small town of M-sur-M. But it gives one an idea of how little Fantine was living on - especially considering she had to send 10 sous of that 12 to the Thenardiers for Cosette, so she was living on 2 sous a day, which is ONE TWENTIETH of what Marius lives on.

Comments

[skygiants]

This is FASCINATING. I wonder what Fantine was making when she did work in the factory?

[bobbiewickham]

Thanks for cataloging all this! Bahorel's allowance sounds less extravagant when you put it as 8 francs a day, though OTOH he costs more than a cannon shot. Also, all this drives home the point that Feuilly is a skilled artisan and therefore not destitute.

[pauraque]

Cool post! When people write historical fiction or pseudo-historical fantasy they rarely consider how different the money economy has been in different time periods.

[genarti]

I love all this tracking -- thank you for it, and especially for breaking it down into daily wage for everyone for comparison purposes! And, wow, I hadn't realized the cannon shot was so expensive. That does put things in perspective.

I really wish I had a better idea of the difference between a small town's economy and Paris's, because I know there was definitely a difference but I don't know how vast it was. But it's pretty clear that Fantine is indeed living on basically nothing. (Fantiiiiiine. :( )

I wonder how much variation there was in Feuilly's wage? Like, is 3 francs a day an average, and he has times when there's a lot of work or particularly well-paying commissions or something and then lean times, or is it pretty steady? Either way, I've seen other people make the point that the real difference between Feuilly's economic circumstances and the students he hangs out with isn't actually the money as such, especially since for several of them we don't know what their finances were actually like. It's that he was time-poor -- he had to work hard for that wage, and if he misses work he misses earning, whereas they get allowances and can faff around in the free time between classes. (Or, for some of them, just skip class too, since they are definitely not all committed to those degrees they're theoretically working towards.)

[carmarthen]

There was some meta about Feuilly and finances a while back but Tumblr, idk where.

It's not really clear that Feuilly consistently makes 3 francs a day--that may be a maximum for him, but even so I'm not sure 3 francs a day is a "very livable" wage. And Feuilly is working poor and an orphan--he has no social safety net to fall back on. While Marius's poverty is real, and he has rejected his family's help, if push comes to shove and he gets seriously ill--well, they were there to pay for a doctor. So I wouldn't say that Feuilly is better off than Marius even if he does consistently make 3 francs a day.

There are 10+ years (almost 15, I think) between Fantine's wages and Paris, but Fantine would have made more money as a prostitute than as a seamstress or a factory worker--so there are some complicated things going on.

(Also, Hugo probably made up a lot of his numbers, tbh. It's pretty much impossible to reconcile Javert's role in the book and the money he apparently has with actual police wages, and I wouldn't assume Feuilly's or Fantine's wages are necessarily more true to life--he picked numbers more for the impression they gave the reader than anything else, I suspect.)