Choses vues Reading Order

What makes Choses vues unusual as a nineteenth-century journal?

Most nineteenth-century French literary journals — including those of Stendhal, the Goncourts, and Baudelaire — are primarily records of the writer's interior life: his artistic ideas, his aesthetic judgments, his emotional states, his opinions of contemporaries. Choses vues is fundamentally different: it is, as the title says, things seen — Hugo's record of what is in front of his eyes rather than what is going on inside his head. Hugo is an extraordinarily attentive observer of the external world, and the entries in Choses vues have an almost photographic specificity: a street scene, a legal hearing, a description of a dying man's room, a snippet of overheard conversation. This externalizing quality makes Choses vues unlike any other nineteenth-century journal — it is more like a collection of documentary vignettes than a private diary — and it explains why it is both more readable and less intimate than the great French diaries of the period. It is also valuable as historical documentation: Hugo was present at some of the most important events of the nineteenth century, and his firsthand accounts of the 1830 revolution, the 1848 revolution, and the 1851 coup are among the most vivid we have from any direct witness.