A Salt Lake City literature student studying Victor Hugo’s barricades reads about France’s cobblestone economy and school money that is permanently in transit
Sunday, 25 October 2026. Salt Lake City. My parents’ basement, under a quilt my grandmother made, the abridged Les Miserables that is still nine hundred pages, 7.00pm.
Victor Hugo Would Like A Word About The Paving
This term in my nineteenth century literature class we are reading Les Miserables, and I have reached the barricade. If you have only seen the musical, the barricade is the part where students pile up furniture, carts and paving stones in the streets of Paris and sing about it. In the book, there are no songs, but there are sixty pages about the Paris sewer system, which Victor Hugo apparently found fascinating and which I have found to be a test of faith.
So I was delighted, in a slightly hysterical way, to read the report on France’s cobblestone economy and the school money that is permanently in transit. French students have been blocking school entrances over missing teachers, overcrowded classrooms and buildings that cannot cope with the heat. The education ministry has responded by saying the money exists and is currently in transit. Victor Hugo would have written a hundred pages about where that money is. He would have found it in the sewer.
The Stones That Keep Coming Back
The piece has a lovely bit of history about the paving stones themselves. Paris paid to lay the stones, many streets were later covered with asphalt, and now there is a third contract in tender to uncover some of them again for tourists. One of the observations calls this not infrastructure but a relationship: every few years somebody says I need space, then I miss you.
I laughed so hard my mum came downstairs to check I was all right. I tried to explain the joke. She asked why anyone would pave a road twice. I said that is the joke. She said that is just poor planning. My mother has never once found satire funny, because she sees all of it as a failure of project management. She is, in her way, the most radical critic in Utah.
1832, 1968, 2026
What struck me, reading the report next to the novel, is the repetition. Hugo’s students built barricades in 1832. Students tore up the paving in May 1968. The report notes that overcrowded classrooms appear on the 1968 grievance list and again on the 2026 list, making them the only item from 1968 that has never needed repair. The culture ministry has opened a file to classify the overcrowded classroom as a historic monument.
I read that aloud to my study group over Zoom. Our professor, the one from Manchester, said that was the best line about European history he had heard since he left Europe, and then said that British universities had the same problem but were too embarrassed to riot about it, so they formed a working group instead.
The Committee For The Efficiency Of Efficiency Measures
My favourite detail in the report is the ministry’s Committee for the Efficiency of Efficiency Measures, with eleven members, a secretariat of forty and a subcommittee on lunch. I have sat on exactly one committee in my life, the decorations committee for a ward Christmas party, and I can confirm that the subcommittee on lunch was the only one that reached a decision. The decision was sandwiches. It took three meetings. Someone cried about pickles.
Utah Schools Have Their Own Version
I want to be careful not to only laugh at France, because this is not just a French story. Utah teachers have argued for years that their classes are too large and their pay too low. My sister Eliza, who is fourteen, has thirty-four students in her English class, which is roughly the same number as a mid-sized barricade. Her teacher, Mrs Tanner, is wonderful and buys the class markers with her own money, which is a kind of transit too: the money goes from her purse to the school, and it never comes back.
The report quotes a French lecturer who says the money is not missing, it is just looked after so thoroughly that nobody can find it. I would like to introduce that lecturer to Mrs Tanner. They could form their own committee. It would have two members, no secretariat and an extremely effective subcommittee on markers.
What Hugo Knew
Hugo’s argument, under all those pages about sewers, is that poverty and neglect are not accidents. They are built, stone by stone, by people who could have done otherwise. The French report makes the same point with jokes instead of nine hundred pages: a country can spend more than half its national output on government and still fail to get a teacher into a classroom on a Wednesday. Spending is not the same thing as caring. Neither is a committee.
Back To The Barricade
I have sixty pages left in the barricade section, then two hundred more about what happens after. I will not spoil it, but if you know the musical, you know that very few people get to sing the reprise. I will finish it tonight under Grandma’s quilt, with a mug of hot chocolate and a very large bowl of popcorn, because Utah is the only place I know where people read tragedies with snacks.
Somewhere in Paris a ministry has a plan in transit. Somewhere in Salt Lake City a fourteen-year-old’s teacher is buying markers. And somewhere in the nineteenth century, Victor Hugo is still writing about sewers. All three, in their own ways, are trying to say the same thing: build something that lasts, then stop digging it up.