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With Les Miserables film released and an opening exhibition of the Royal Academy, the cultural giants of France and the city took on a new importance

iron gates of the short passage, close to the fashion district more Montorgueil in Paris, a few steps from Saint Denis prostitutes are closed to the public these days. It is here, in what was passing salmon Rue du Bout du Monde - the end of the road in the world - as Victor Hugo said to be away from the stone pillars of public baths and a reputation for low living a furious battle between republicans and monarchists forces, June 5, 1832. Then slammed the door too, leaving the writer caught in the crossfire. A decade later, Hugo use what they had heard and seen of the student uprising failed, known as the republican insurrection, when he began to write his novel more famous.

Les Mis?rables , Hugo tale of the struggles of the working class and theater who suffer in sewers and streets less safe neighborhoods Paris, was published in 1862 . That same year, Edouard Manet, 30 years younger Hugo made his first major work, "modern", which represents the contemporary life in Paris.

showed beautiful people hear a band in one of the oldest parks in the city real. In the crowd, elegant, cultured and elegant, Manet painted himself and his friends the poets Charles Baudelaire and Th?ophile Gautier and composer Jacques Offenbach. Both works perfectly represent the very contrasting faces of Paris in the mid 19th century, a double face presented to the British public this weekend with the exhibition Manet Describing life which opened at the Royal Academy and the Hollywood version

Les Mis?rables released earlier this month.

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, but portraits of Manet still offer a clear vision of the City of Light, mentioned throughout his severity by Hugo dark. There is no evidence that the two men have never met - at the height of his individual success Hugo fled to France in political exile in Belgium and the Channel Islands - but both enjoyed privilege and social position, Manet, birth, Hugo first literary success. Both were committed Republicans, a political ideology that Hugo, raised by a mother fiercely royalist, was late, but embraced with passion.

And both lived and worked in turmoil; seismic political changes of the 19th century saw France substitute between the Republic hereditary monarchy and a constitutional monarchy and again, each change bringing conflicts and instability in the city

Hugo was 13 when Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo. He announced the return of the Bourbon monarchy, later expelled from their cousins ??Orleans in the second French Revolution of 1830, followed two years later by the republican insurrection. Manet youth was marked by political and social unrest as the third French Revolution overthrew the monarchy of Orleans in 1848 and established a republic again, only to have their elected leader, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, succumb to megalomania and said the Emperor Napoleon III three years later.

Some critics Hugo was the social conscience of France documenting the plight of the lower classes, while Manet was perceived as ironic and cynical voyeur, upper-class dandy, merely to summarize the "new Paris "under agitation without committing to it.

certainly Manet painted the darkest corners of the city: beggars, prostitutes, vagrants and haunting, but it was the eye of an observer, explains Stephane Guegan, Commissioner of exhibition Manet 2011 in the Mus?e d'Orsay in Paris.

"It is not that he has never paid attention to the poor people he met in the streets - and some even tried to paint this topic -., But never with the intention openly criticize the injustice he saw He's Large difference between Manet and Hugo. know Hugo began writing his novel after seeing the terrible conditions in which some workers, adults and children, living in northern France . He wanted to openly condemn this intolerable situation. Moreover

players build their barricade, is still standing, somewhat overshadowed by its neighbor, the mammoth modern Centre Pompidou.

"Paris was always the Paris of the Middle Ages, when Hugo wrote," Stevens said. "Paris Manet was the Paris of Napoleon III, who had held the Baron Haussmann to improve channels of communication the city and remove all boulevards ... in part, of course, so it would not be so easy to block barricades. Manet was a portraitist in large part, do not give us an idea of ??Paris directly. But when you see is modern Paris. Manet also knew that Paris has to pay the price of modernization. Their first painting exhibited at the Paris Motor Show - and rejected - was an absinthe drinker "
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