(this might belong in Cafe Society but I’m not sure so I will leave that decision up to the Mods).
A couple years back, I read Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. A week or so ago, I saw the musical based on it.
One thing that bugged me before and still gets me wondering now is this.
In the beginning of the book, Jean Valjean is released from Prison at Toulon, France. There is a couple chapters that describes his 19 years in prison, but unfortunatly, it doesn’t say too much more about what he actually did other then he worked in the Galleys.
Now, I’m pretty sure they were long past using ships that were propelled by oars, so I don’t think it meant galley slaves. I am guessing that ships were somehow invovled since Toulon is on the coast and the ship ORION is mentioned later in the book.
Can anyone enlighten me exactly what Hugo was talking about? He never really says what aforementioned "Galley"s actually are, just that Valjean worked on then for 19 years(apparently between the years of 1796 and 1815).
Have you ever tried copyediting galleys? Those long proofs always mess you up because you can never figure out where in the book you are. They’re a sentence from hell. I’m sure Victor Hugo felt that way about them as well.
I have seen a drawing of the 60-gun frigate La Belle Poule from 1834 showing what may have been oar ports, but it was certainly not manned like a galley. The last true galley battle was fought in 1717 and the last French galley was launched in 1720. French galleys (actually, galeasses and galeots) were still in use on the Mediterranean as late as the 1770s. The larger galeasses probably still had slaves almost until the Revolution, although their numbers were diminishing. (Galeots were sailed into the 19th century, but their oars were used for getting around ports and becalmed waters, so they did not carry large crews of slaves. )
On the other hand, Loius XIV had instituted a number of laws for the express purpose of garnering prisoners to man his ships and the laws stayed on the books until the Revolution. The petty nature of the laws that could get one condemned to the galleys and the extremely harsh nature of that punishment made allusions to galley slaves vivid descriptors of injustice and horror in the French language that has carried over to the present, so it would have provided Hugo with a simple phrase that conveyed all the horror of Valjean’s sentence, without having to describe the situation. Hugo may have used the image of Valjean slaving in the galleys either unaware or unconcerned that his description was anachronistic.
I don’t think so. Hugo mentions(and it’s a plot point) that Valjean is very strong. Somehow I think he was doing something far harder then just peeling potatos for 19 years.
FWIW there was a comment in a Hornblower book that some people were sentanced ‘to the galleys’ but used just for general hard labour in docks and suchlike.
That’s how I understood it. You’ve never read Hornblower? Do, they’re quite good. Written by C S Forester about 50 years ago, set in Napoleonic times (more or less). AFAIK they’re fairly accurate about nautical terms for fiction books, but I can’t vouch for the ‘galleys’ term for certain, obviously.
Actually, it’s a bad translation. Originally, people could actually be sentenced to row on the galleys. They were called “galériens” in french, sentenced to the “galères”. When the galleys dissapeared, people were instead sentenced to hard work. But the name “galeriens” survived to refer to these people, despite them not rowing anymore.
Toulon was (and still is) the main french military port on the meditteranean sea galleys only sailed on the mediterranean sea), so it’s in this town that the “galeriens”, both the actual ones and later people sentenced to hard work were sent (though the most famous “galeres” were situated in Guyanna, but this infamous prison was created later).
I said it’s a bad translation, because when a french person hear or read “galeres/galieriens”, he doesn’t think about ships but about people sentenced to hard work. So, IMO, it shouldn’t be translated by “galleys” in english, since this word doesn’t have the same meaning.
I can’t believe no one has mentioned the image of Charleton Heston slaving away at the oars of the Roman ship in Ben Hur. I have no idea if that was an accurate portrayal; given the Hollywood reputation regarding historical accuracy I rather doubt it.
That is pretty famous, but Ben Hur took place during the Roman Empire, not the 19th century in france. Though I heard somewhere that everyone who rowed on the galleys were actually Naval recruits…Maybe I misheard.
The earliest reference I can find to galley slaves, historically, is during the 1400s. I have never found any support for the notion that the Romans used slaves/convicts. (They may have used slaves in the sense that nearly all manual labor at the time was carried out by slaves, but it was a different form of slavery and did not include penal labor.