Les Misérables Part 4, Book 10 Summary

5 June 1832

  • Things are really heating up in the streets of Paris. All over the place, young people are getting fed up with their government. What this all leads to is an event known as the June Rebellion or Paris Uprising of 1832. As history tells us, this was an unsuccessful uprising that involved democratic thinkers who wanted to overthrow the French monarchy once and for all.
  • We're about to get a look into how this whole thing went down.
  • All of Paris is like a loaded gun in June of 1832, according to Hugo. It only needs a spark to set it off, and that spark came from the death of a guy named General Lamarque.
  • Lamarque was a revolutionary warrior, and his public funeral gives a lot of radical people the opportunity to gather as a group in the streets of Paris.
  • The French government knows that something bad could go down with all these revolutionaries in one place and they have a plan in place. Unfortunately, it doesn't exactly go smoothly.
  • At one point, French soldiers try to prevent the mob from following Lamarque's funeral procession, leading leads to a standoff between the mob and the soldiers.
  • All hell breaks loose. Within the next hour, rebelling Parisians are building barricades in the streets of Paris and using them as military forts.