Dear Yuletide Writer, 2018
Welcome, O Yuletide writer!
Thank you for offering to write me a story. I commend your excellent taste in fandoms, and I'm sure I'll love whatever you write. My optional details in the requests over at AO3 give a basic idea of what I'm looking for, but if you'd like a bit more information about my preferences, here it is. Sorry it took me a week to post this letter!
I must also apologize for its length, but please don't be intimidated or annoyed - it's not because I'm picky and hard to please. I talk a lot here because I haven't said much about these fandoms elsewhere, which means my letter is the sole guide to my preferences for an author who wants one. If you're not someone who likes getting a lot of additional detail, feel free to skip it entirely.
Beneath the cut you will find my squicks and more detailed thoughts on yaoi, the characters, the fandoms, and possible directions you may want to take your story in, if you find yourself in need of inspiration.
All about me:
Triggers:
None
Squicks:
• Anything combining sex and digestion. Feeding a lover strawberries, licking chocolate or whipped cream off them, force feeding, scat, watersports... none of this please. I don't mind parts of the digestive tract doing double duty as an erogenous zone - anal and oral sex are fine. So is using a cucumber for a dildo or sex on the dining room table. But no sexy games with fondue.
• Mutilation, scarification, knifeplay, needle play. Killing the characters or beating them to a pulp is fine by me, but for some reason it bothers me if you give them a papercut first. Nothing with sharp edges please, unless someone is getting stabbed by criminals.
• Ageplay and infantilization. Spanking is lovely, but let’s keep it between grown-ups acting like grown-ups.
Everything else is a-okay. Violence, character deaths, torture, non-con or dub-con, mind games, twisted power dynamics, general bleakness - all fine! I love dark fics. I love fluffy or uplifting stories too, so don't feel obliged to write something dark, but if that's the direction your muse takes you then feel free to go for it. Holiday fic is fine too.
Things I like in stories:
• Worldbuilding. I like getting the sense that the story is a little window into a larger world where other people are going about their business and events are happening just offscreen, instead of a window on a few characters interacting inside a bubble surrounded by vacuum. Unless they're in space and they actually are interacting in a bubble surrounded by vacuum. But even then they probably have to think about where they're going to refuel.
• Challenging the text. I'm fond of these fandoms or I wouldn't have requested them, but I'm not... protective of them. If some character is marginalized by the canon, I'd love to see a story from their perspective. If you've noticed a plothole, I'd love for you to latch onto it and rip it to shreds and then think up an explanation to set it right. I'm always interested in the answers to questions like "If Galadriel lives in the shady primeval forest where does she grow the grain for all that lembas?"
• Politics. I'll spare you the passionate lecture about my heartfelt belief in the ability of politics to effect change, but don't be fooled by my cynical fandoms: I'm a progressive at heart.
• Clever characters being clever.
• Clever characters being outsmarted by even cleverer characters.
• Power struggles, hierarchies, how these arrangements are negotiated and balanced and change over time and in response to changing circumstances.
• Culture clashes.
• Women kicking ass.
• Victories for social justice, democracy or tolerance.
• Depressing defeats for social justice, democracy or tolerance that still leave seeds of hope for the future.
• Characters trying to balance competing obligations and loyalties: personal vs. professional, practical vs. ideological, etc.
• Gen fic. Casefic, wacky adventures, character studies - they're all great.
• Shipping, as long as shipping is not the only thing in the fic. (Good characterization counts as a second thing.) Het, slash, femmeslash, polyamory, threesomes - I like them all. I'm not protective of my favorite pairings, either, so feel free to pair anyone with anyone.
• Explicit porn, as long as sticking Tab A into Slot B is not the only thing in the fic. (Good characterization counts as a second thing.) D/s and BDSM are welcome.
• Humor.
• All the dark stuff from the list above.
• Characters I like being cute and fluffy and happy together.
As you can see, I like a wide variety of things! Write something that makes you happy, and I will almost certainly be happy too.
A few things I dislike:
• Crackiness to no obvious purpose. I don't mind an AU where all the characters are living room furniture, but if you're going to write one the choice of furniture should be telling us something about the characters.
• Idiot plots. If characters have to suffer a major drop in IQ for a story to make sense, it needs a different plot. Stupid romantic comedy misunderstandings that could be cleared up in five minutes fall into this category.
• Healing cock, instantaneous peace after the crowning of a king or the birth of some biracial baby, and other forms of magical recovery from personal or national traumas. Good stories are like real life: events have consequences and people have to live with them.
On to the fandoms! I'll give a brief overview of what each one is and where to find it, so if you want to switch and learn about a new fandom you'll know what you're getting into.
La Comédie Humaine - Honoré de Balzac
Characters: Corentin
The Comédie Humaine is Honoré Balzac's sweeping panorama of French society, institutions and politics during the first half of the nineteenth century. Comprised of more than ninety novels and short stories, it's an ambitious body of work that paints a satirical and finely detailed picture of French life during this era. It's also an early example of a multimedia franchise: the Comédie Humaine characters all inhabit the same universe and pop up in multiple books at different times and in different roles, and also star in a set of spin-off plays.
What I like about it:
Balzac is a mean-spirited reactionary, but I admire his robust commitment to his worldview that everything is shit and his willingness to let bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people in his novels in support of that thesis. He's a keen observer of humanity and an incisive, intelligent critic of just about everything he looks at. He has a deep understanding of power dynamics and the emotional realities of abuse, and he's too sincere a misanthrope to let his own faction off the hook: he situates good and bad characters across the political spectrum and gives his adversaries fair representation. Engaging plots, well-drawn characters and a fundamental honesty about human nature make his books well worth reading despite his awful politics.
Corentin appears in the following books:
- Les Chouans | The Chouans
- Une ténébreuse affaire | The Gondreville Mystery | An Historical Mystery | Murky Business
- Splendeurs et Misères des courtisanes | Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans | A Harlot High and Low
- Les Petits Bourgeois | The Lesser Bourgeoisie | The Middle Classes
You don't need to read all of them to write this request, but you should probably read Une ténébreuse affaire and be conversant with what Corentin does in the other three. (Ctrl+F on Corentin's name and skimming the relevant sections will suffice; you definitely don't need to understand what's happening with Balzac's full cast of thousands.)
The books are all in the public domain, so they can be found for free online in both French and English via Wikisource, Google Books or both. They may also be available in your local library.
Optional details:
I love Corentin and there are a grand total of zero fics about him, so the world is your oyster here. I would be happy with casefic or a character study or PWP, gen or slash or het.
If you like historical RPF, I'd love a fic about Corentin's relationship with Fouché or a crossover that pits him against a baby Chabouillé early in their careers. If your taste runs more to sinister plots, it would be fun to see him go up against Vautrin again. Or what if he's forced to work with Laurence de Cinq-Cygne to thwart some Restoration-era plot against the Bourbons? Or if you're more in the mood for domestic drama, he could babysit Peyrade after one of Peyrade's benders or spend a cozy-yet-creepy-around-the-edges Christmas with Lydie.
Pick whichever era/book/character group you prefer and run with it. My sole request is no Corentin/Lydie.
I was probably drawn to Corentin at first because Balzac so clearly hates him, but he's interesting in his own right. In a series that can basically be summed up as "the venality of evil", Corentin... isn't. Virtually everyone around him is grifting for money or fame or power, but post-Chouans Corentin seems content to remain in the shadows and quietly do his job (with the occasional detour to take revenge on rude aristocrats). He rebuffs Talleyrand's offer of higher status. He's earned/embezzled enough for a comfortable middle-class existence - financial security, a first-floor apartment in a mediocre neighborhood, two servants, a carriage when he wants one - but no more than that. He has, as Balzac says, "neither passions nor vices". When he needs a stiff drink he drinks sugar water.
Corentin definitely has a moral code of some sort, but it's a blue and orange morality orthogonal to the values of his time. He disdains the contemporary loathing for spycraft. He seems sincerely devoted to the good of the police service, but in an era when the police are profoundly political he has no apparent allegiance to any political faction. He cares nothing for funerary customs - a social convention so strong that even the great cynic Vautrin honors it! - and lets his best friend be buried in a pauper's grave. Yet he takes care of Peyrade's mentally ill daughter in his own home for eleven years. Desperate though he is to find a successor and a husband for Lydie, he doesn't conscript Théodose until Théodose proves he has no honor that could be compromised by a career in the police. Peyrade dies because Corentin gets stuck in the middle of nowhere for nine days because he lets someone else take the last seat in the diligence. And in marked contrast to the protagonists in three of these four books, Corentin never uses sexual violence.
We're presumably not supposed to admire Corentin's sang-froid, cunning and predatory patience as much as I do, but his other good qualities are genuine virtues and in the Comédie Humaine vanishingly rare. We're meant to hate him, but he comes off better than many of Balzac's heroes.
Some prompts:
• Assuming that Fouché's Comédie Humaine timeline is consistent with his timeline in our universe, he's in Vendôme from 1784-1787, when Corentin is 7-10 years old. This throws a wrench in the "illegitimate son" hypothesis. Corentin is old enough to be at the Vendôme College while Fouché is teaching there, but Fouché teaches high school logic. What could a ten-year-old possibly have done to attract the interest of a high school teacher? (Besides the interest Catholic priests notoriously take in prepubescent boys, which, uh… sure, if you want to go there.)
• What's their working relationship like? Does Corentin resent his position of eternal instrument while Fouché’s legitimate kids get plum government jobs and join the nobility? Did he get in trouble for the fruitless domiciliary visit in Une ténébreuse affaire? Is there dub-con? Daddy issues?
• Peyrade seems to have taken the whole "Once I was the student, now I am the master" swap with surprisingly good humor. He's twenty years older! How did the hierarchy switch happen? Did Fouché order it? Did Peyrade just wake up one morning and say "Hey, you're smarter, you should be in charge"?
• Everyone in the Comédie Humaine seems convinced that Corentin did something sinister and brilliant in Les Chouans. In fact Corentin contributed virtually nothing to the success of the mission, which depended entirely on Marie and Montauran's asinine decision to arrange a suicidal tryst in a garrisoned town. Did Corentin just go back to Paris and lie his head off? Is he trying to convince himself he planned the whole thing so he won't be upset about Marie? Is he upset about Marie?
• Laurence de Cinq-Cygne is smart and badass and she and Corentin hate each other with a passion. They should fuck. Not during the domiciliary visit because they both had too much work to do, but Laurence in Paris is a different gal and there are no more secrets between them. And prudent though it might be, I can’t believe the honor of the Cinq-Cygnes would allow the matter to rest with the score standing 5-1 Corentin.
• Chabouillé from Les Mis/Real Life is someone whom Corentin should encounter professionally. Evil baby bourgeois cops in the Directory or the Empire! Probably trying to destroy each other (Corentin had to get arrested those two times somehow) and falling back on hatesex once they discover they're evenly matched.
• Are Corentin and Vautrin really quits? Vautrin still seems pretty angry about Lucien, and Corentin did swear vengeance for Peyrade's death. And nobody said the length of three corpses separates them in bed. I don’t normally have strong top/bottom preferences but given the way they present themselves physically - how Vautrin vaunts his strength whereas Corentin consistently tries to appear feebler than he really is, Vautrin actually picking Corentin up and putting him out of the room like a naughty cat - I'm pretty sure Vautrin thinks he’s topping and Corentin thinks he’s topping from the bottom. (Which if either of them is correct in this belief is up to you.) Feel free to add in Vautrin’s daddykink or Corentin’s possible daddy issues.
La Cousine Bette | Cousin Bette - Honoré de Balzac
Characters: Lisbeth Fischer, Valérie Marneffe
A novel in which Bette Fischer suffers one slight too many at the hands of her inconsiderate rich relatives and decides to rain down the fires of hell upon all their heads. She enlists the mistress of the family patriarch, her neighbor Valérie Marneffe, to help with her scheme, and through the combined powers of Bette's brain and Valérie's beauty the pair manage to wreak epic revenge and amass quite a lot of money before they are finally thwarted by a combination of overreaching and assorted dei ex machina.
What I like about it:
The Comédie Humaine is not short on magnificent bastards, but Bette is their queen. La Cousine Bette features one of the greatest revenge plots ever written, and while Bette's actions are morally indefensible there comes a point when you just have to sit back and admire a master at work.
That would be attraction enough, but the book also has fascinating gender politics. Balzac is a raving misogynist but of a very specific kind: he's willing to grant his female characters full agency and interiority and in his books they are as intelligent, courageous, active, and audacious as the men. Bette is easily the most clever and strong-willed person in La Cousine Bette and the prime driver of most of the action. But she has to be the antagonist, because while Balzac will happily bestow all these talents on his female characters, they are only allowed to employ them in selfless devotion to their husbands and children. As a spinster, Bette lacks the nuclear family necessary for female virtue and is therefore doomed to villainy.
But Balzac is also a very keen observer of power and abuse in all its forms, and he's unable to completely blind himself to the evils of patriarchy. He examines its power structures as he does any power structure he encounters, and then ferrets out ways for a clever member of the subaltern class to hack the system and turn it to their advantage. The result is what we might call weaponized femininity in its true form: exploiting your enemies' gendered assumptions about your role, your ambitions, and your capacities to fuck them up. Valérie is your typical evil temptress leading all the men astray with her feminine wiles, but Bette is something much more sophisticated. Her deliberate use of the traditional female emotional and physical caretaker role to lure her enemies into a deadly trap is a plotline I've never seen done before, and perhaps one that only Balzac with his odd combination of misogyny and insight could write. The result is a book that's inadvertently feminist in its themes, if not in its narration.
La Cousine Bette is in the public domain, so you can read it for free online in both French and English on Wikisource or Google Books. It may also be available in your local library.
Optional details:
Femmeslash would be amazing. If you'd prefer to maintain their intense but non-sexual relationship from the book, that's fine too. I just desperately need some fic about them.
I'd love a canon-divergent AU where Bette and Valérie win the day, or a fic that translates the story into a different setting. Or you could explore their relationship in canon: fluff in which Valérie drags Bette with her to the theater or takes her shopping for curtains, darkfic that looks at all the ways in which they are using each other and the toxic interplay between Valérie's honeyed manipulation and Bette's viciousness and need for power and control. Or Valérie could turn her extensive experience in the art of seduction to a less lucrative but more emotionally fulfilling purpose, and introduce Bette to sex.
The second I finished reading La Cousine Bette I went to look for the Bette/Valérie fic that clearly ought to exist according to Rule 34 and all the laws of nature and man. I was met with a gaping void, an eerie rent in the fabric of the universe.
Your mission is to fill this void.
Some fic possibilities:
• I'd love an AU where the story follows what feels like its natural course when not derailed by Balzac's misogyny and princes and poisoners ex machina and Bette and Valérie triumph and become evil lesbian vengeance queens of Paris and roll around in their ill-gotten gains in blissful happiness for the rest of their days. Balzac's male villains get to win; why not them?
What do they actually want from their lives, freed from their financial worries? We know Valérie enjoys the good life, but I feel like she's had way too much fun twisting all her lovers around her little finger to go back to the less heady thrills of theater and fine dining. I doubt she'd keep sleeping with unattractive men once it no longer seemed financially necessary. So what does she do instead? Does she go into salon politics? And what about Bette? She's far too industrious to loll around in idle luxury, and she seems like a woman who expects her money to work for her rather than just sit in a bank account. Does she go into venture capitalism? Real estate?
• The overall plot of the novel is one that could translate easily into different settings, and it would be fun to see an AU version. Maybe Bette is a politician who has a promised ministry ripped out from under her nose by President Hulot and given to his underqualified protégé Hortense, and she teams up with his secretary Valérie to avenge herself on the whole party leadership. Maybe they're ecologists and Steinbock is actually a grant to study alpine ibex that gets awarded to another researcher. Maybe they're naval officers in a space empire and Hortense gets awarded the captaincy of the newly built FS Steinbock because of nepotism.
• Or Bette and Valerie could have sex, because let's be real, Bette really needs to get laid and except for Montès all of Valerie's lovers are probably terrible in bed and the poor woman deserves to orgasm for once. Are they able to be honest with each other, or does Valerie find that either intentionally or unintentionally her long practice in manipulating her lovers transfers to Bette as well?
Engrenages | Spiral (TV)
Characters: Laure Berthaud, Joséphine Karlsson
A very dark French criminal justice procedural in the vein of Law & Order ("In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two incestuously entangled groups: the police judiciaire who investigate crime, and the magistrates who give them their orders. These are their stories.") with a female lead. For a few seasons the show centered on police detective Laure Berthaud, prosecutor Pierre Clément, and investigating judge François Roban, but Pierre flounced out of the magistrature and later got stabbed to death, leaving a former antagonist, defense attorney Joséphine Karlsson, to prop up the lawyerly side of the triangle. The show is big on police brutality, corruption within the magistrature and burnt corpses in cars, and pretty much everyone is dodgy except Roban who is only dodgy in the cause of justice. The French say it's realistic.
Netflix has the first three seasons and Hulu the first five, with English subtitles. (Search under Spiral). Canal+ and the BBC have aired S6, but if you want to watch it now you may need to resort to illegal filesharing.
What I like about it:
The show is well written, and from an American perspective the window into an inquisitorial justice system is interesting (and makes you feel marginally better about our own atrocious criminal justice system). Laure should have been fired for misconduct about five seasons ago but she's nevertheless very likable, even when she's doing stuff like seducing the commissaire of the neighboring department so she can steal the bullet that would incriminate her dodgy subordinate for accidentally shooting a guy in the lung. Roban has an appealing if slightly deranged commitment to seeing justice done at all costs and bears an endearing resemblance to a giant bird. And Engrenages has a gift for giving terrible people plausible redemption arcs, most notably Joséphine, who started out as a venal mob lawyer but whose heart grew three sizes after helping some immigrants.
Optional details:
I've been longing for more interaction between these two ever since Laure barged into Joséphine's apartment to blackmail her and they had that fraught confrontation back in Season 2. The last two seasons really seemed to be teasing it, but in the end canon didn't deliver. That's where you come in.
Femmeslash would be great, fix-it fic for the colossal mess canon left them in would be great, casefic would be great, Laure and Joséphine going for a girls' night out and doing karaoke would be great. Literally anything other than Laure running out into a field to escape her baby while Joséphine's fate rests in the creepy hands of Eric Edelman would be great. They can be friends or enemies or lovers or some combination of the three - just write something about their relationship, romantic, platonic or professional, and I'll be happy.
Laure and Joséphine are bright, driven women fighting for a place in a man's world and they care about justice when they're not too busy committing serious professional standards violations, which makes it hard not to root for them. Unfortunately, between their terrible life choices and the ambient bleakness of the Engrenages universe, rooting for them is a doomed enterprise. After Pierre's death it really looked for about five minutes like something good might happen between them: bonding over shared grief and alcohol, or fun cop vs. defense attorney adventures with Joséphine occupying Pierre's former slot in the show's traditional cop/judge/lawyer triumvirate, or even canon f/f. (Caroline Proust said she was up for it, and Laure's fucked every other hot recurring character, so why not?) Instead we got a rape plot and attempted vehicular homicide.
This is so not where I hoped this was going. Dear writer, please console me for my disappointment.
I am very fond of Roban and find myself inexplicably attached to Herville post-S5 finale, and I welcome their presence in any fic. (Is there an equivalent to shipping where you want people to work together professionally? Because Herville and Laure were weirdly cute together in S6. Never thought I'd come to say that.) Tintin is well shot of these human disasters but I welcome him too. Gilou... exists.
I'd prefer not to have Laure/Gilou as a big focus, but feel free to include it in the background if you want.
Some directions to pursue:
• Femmeslash! Laure has had some pretty bad luck with men, and should consider other options. Joséphine is very attractive, very available, and does not have high moral standards for her lovers. It's a match made in heaven.
• THAT SCENE. You know the one I mean. (If you don't, it's the one in S2 E8 where Laure storms into Joséphine's apartment, encounters her in her dressing gown, talks about her tits and how much she hates her, and then Joséphine tells her that deep down they're the same. If that's not an invitation to foeyay I don't know what is.)
• All the boozy mourning for Pierre seems like it should lead to consolation sex. Joséphine drank a whole bottle of wine and then invited Laure over to her apartment in the middle of the night so she could sob on her shoulder. I mean, come on.
• Laura is besieged on all sides by men who want to parent her baby. A nice problem for a mostly-single mother to have, you might think, but clearly not one that is working for Laure. She won't let Brémont raise Romy, and even with Gilou's support and encouragement she can't bring herself to take the baby either.
You know what could help here? Someone who is as completely unprepared, unenthusiastic, and psychologically unfit for parenthood as Laure is herself. Enter... Joséphine! I honestly think having a coparent who is as freaked out as she is might help Laure cope.
• The # MeToo murder case from hell. Joséphine needs to make better choices and frankly so do the writers. I don't see how she doesn't end up disbarred on account of this nonsense and most likely in jail, but if you can think of some way to make it all disappear that would be great. Maybe Gilou can accidentally shoot Vern in the lung so the main prosecution witness can't testify.
• WTF is going on with Eric Edelman? His default demeanor is so sleazy that I can't tell if he's earnestly being helpful, he's taking advantage of Joséphine's vulnerability to try to get into her pants, he's taking protracted and subtle revenge for all the shitty things she's done to him, or some combination of the three. I welcome your insights.
• Judge Wagner is the unsung hero of this show. The writers obviously want you to root against him, and you do because if he prevails there'd be no show, but he's right almost 100% of the time and French policing would be in a far better state if he got his way. I'd love to see a fic from his perspective, either one where he finally succeeds in getting Laure sacked or the tragic, prolonged saga of his many, many failures. Joséphine can defend her, assuming she's not in prison.
Or maybe Laure ends up in jail too and they can be cellmates.
Political RPF - France 19th c.
Characters: Henri Gisquet
Political RPF about mid-nineteenth century France, or in fandom terms, RPF about the real people who caused the events depicted in Les Misérables and the Comédie Humaine. France in the middle of the nineteenth century is an early modern democracy with all the institutions we expect of a democracy: free elections (albeit with a extremely limited franchise during the Restoration and the July Monarchy), a robust and critical press, a judiciary with the power to curtail the excesses of the executive, and a national ambition not to fall back into civil war. It's a bubbling thermal pool of political philosophy in which our modern concepts of liberalism and socialism are first taking shape. But it also has a capital city which riots at the drop of a hat, provinces which don't even share the capital's language much less its political values, and a legacy of violence and terror less than a generation old that's lurking in the back of everyone's minds. The result of all this ferment is a society riven by irreconcilably different visions for what France should be and what sort of future the government should pursue.
Henri Gisquet embodies these contradictions. A banker by profession, he was a member of one of the major liberal opposition societies during the Restoration and played a small but significant role in the July Revolution that overthrew the Bourbons, signing the court ruling that ordered printers to print banned newspapers in defiance of the king's ordinances and then handing out arms to the revolutionaries once the insurrection started. When conservative Prime Minister Casimir Périer came to power he appointed Gisquet Prefect of Police, and he was the man in charge of suppressing the rebellion that Victor Hugo popularized in Les Mis. Gisquet successfully and repressively ran the police for several years until his political career ended in disgrace when he sued a paper for libel and all his corrupt shenanigans came out in discovery. You can find out more about him at a good library, or from Google Books. (His whole memoirs are up here, if you read French.)
What I like about it:
In our era of intense partisan polarization it's fascinating to open a historical window onto another nation confronting unbridgeable factional divides in its body politic, and I find the centrists of this era especially interesting because they're the ones trying to straddle these yawning chasms and hold the country together. Gisquet is a prime example of this, and he's more fun to study than most of them because his political judgement is hilariously bad.
Optional details:
In the space of two years Henri Gisquet went from an architect of the July Revolution to the Prefect of Police who suppressed the June Rebellion. I'd love to see some fic that deals with Gisquet and the political situation in all its chaos and contradictions: what he thinks of the July Monarchy or the things he's been called upon to do, how a man can topple a government to defend the freedom of the press and find himself arresting newspaper editors just a few years later.
What are his interactions with Casimir Périer like during this era? Périer is much more conservative than Gisquet and disapproved of the July Revolution, so his decision to appoint him Prefect is intriguing.
Alternatively, it's always fun to see him lock horns with Chabouillé. Or he could confront other figures of the time like Charles Jeanne or Armand Marrast or Adolphe Crémieux.
Som potential avenues of ficcage:
• It would be great to see something that depicts Gisquet's interactions with Casimir Périer at the height of their careers. There have been some fantastic fics about the start of their relationship, when Périer took an impoverished young Gisquet under his morally questionable wing and made his career but also made him into his pawn, and others looking at how Gisquet coped with his death. But we haven't had much set in between.
Périer didn't want the July Revolution to proceed at all, and contemporary accounts are full of references to his severity and vicious temper. How did he react to Gisquet defying his wishes and taking the initiative to overthrow the government? Why did he pick Gisquet for Prefect of Police, given his total lack of experience with policing and the dark cloud around his name due to the gun scandal? Was Périer really that desperate, or did he want to give Gisquet a chance to redeem himself in the public eye? Did Gisquet even want to accept the post, or was he doing it as a favor to his beloved mentor?
Slash is fantastic if you ship them, but I'd be happy with platonic mentor and protégé fic too.
• THE GUNS. What even happened with the guns!? Clearly Gisquet was using the commission to reassure his investors that his bank had liquidity and stave off bankruptcy, but that doesn't explain why he accepted such an incredibly overpriced bid, or why the guns he purchased were such defective pieces of crap. What was actually going on? How did Périer react to his own precious protégé dragging his ministry into its first major scandal?
• Gisquet has a hateboner for Armand Marrast the size of the Eiffel Tower, due to the aforementioned gun scandal, Marrast's reporting on the same, and the ensuing libel trial. I swear 30% of his memoirs is just him bitching about Marrast articles that hurt his delicate little feelings. It's been ten years and the man went to jail for exposing the gun scandal, but Gisquet cannot let it go.
It would be fun to pit them against each other during the June Rebellion era when Marrast is once again a free man publishing articles about how Gisquet is terrible at his job. Or maybe they meet up again after Marrast loses the 1849 Assembly elections, having presided over the June Days repressions as Mayor of Paris and become almost as unpopular as Gisquet, and after an initial round of vindicated gloating Gisquet is moved to sympathy and they bond over their shared political disgrace and assaults on civil liberties.
• How does Gisquet cope with the entrenched civil service bureaucracy at the Prefecture, which most likely opposes the reforms that Périer expects him to implement? It's always fun to see him lock horns with Chabouillé, and from time to time they must come into conflict over issues a trifle more substantive than Gisquet's predilection for delectable young secretaries.
• There's honestly no excuse for this prompt except that I love Adolphe Crémieux way too much and as one of the defense attorneys in the Gisquet Guns trial and the June Rebellion cases he and Gisquet would have encountered each other in their professional capacities, but I'd love a fic throwing them together. I'll take anything here, really. Legal snark? Hatesex? Périer and Gisquet trying to intimidate Crémieux into dropping his cases and not causing them any more trouble? (But if you go this last route please don't be too rough with him. He is tiny and precious.)
Crossposted to Dreamwidth: https://kainosite.dreamwidth.org/5828.html. Comment there or here.
Thank you for offering to write me a story. I commend your excellent taste in fandoms, and I'm sure I'll love whatever you write. My optional details in the requests over at AO3 give a basic idea of what I'm looking for, but if you'd like a bit more information about my preferences, here it is. Sorry it took me a week to post this letter!
I must also apologize for its length, but please don't be intimidated or annoyed - it's not because I'm picky and hard to please. I talk a lot here because I haven't said much about these fandoms elsewhere, which means my letter is the sole guide to my preferences for an author who wants one. If you're not someone who likes getting a lot of additional detail, feel free to skip it entirely.
Beneath the cut you will find my squicks and more detailed thoughts on yaoi, the characters, the fandoms, and possible directions you may want to take your story in, if you find yourself in need of inspiration.
All about me:
Triggers:
None
Squicks:
• Anything combining sex and digestion. Feeding a lover strawberries, licking chocolate or whipped cream off them, force feeding, scat, watersports... none of this please. I don't mind parts of the digestive tract doing double duty as an erogenous zone - anal and oral sex are fine. So is using a cucumber for a dildo or sex on the dining room table. But no sexy games with fondue.
• Mutilation, scarification, knifeplay, needle play. Killing the characters or beating them to a pulp is fine by me, but for some reason it bothers me if you give them a papercut first. Nothing with sharp edges please, unless someone is getting stabbed by criminals.
• Ageplay and infantilization. Spanking is lovely, but let’s keep it between grown-ups acting like grown-ups.
Everything else is a-okay. Violence, character deaths, torture, non-con or dub-con, mind games, twisted power dynamics, general bleakness - all fine! I love dark fics. I love fluffy or uplifting stories too, so don't feel obliged to write something dark, but if that's the direction your muse takes you then feel free to go for it. Holiday fic is fine too.
Things I like in stories:
• Worldbuilding. I like getting the sense that the story is a little window into a larger world where other people are going about their business and events are happening just offscreen, instead of a window on a few characters interacting inside a bubble surrounded by vacuum. Unless they're in space and they actually are interacting in a bubble surrounded by vacuum. But even then they probably have to think about where they're going to refuel.
• Challenging the text. I'm fond of these fandoms or I wouldn't have requested them, but I'm not... protective of them. If some character is marginalized by the canon, I'd love to see a story from their perspective. If you've noticed a plothole, I'd love for you to latch onto it and rip it to shreds and then think up an explanation to set it right. I'm always interested in the answers to questions like "If Galadriel lives in the shady primeval forest where does she grow the grain for all that lembas?"
• Politics. I'll spare you the passionate lecture about my heartfelt belief in the ability of politics to effect change, but don't be fooled by my cynical fandoms: I'm a progressive at heart.
• Clever characters being clever.
• Clever characters being outsmarted by even cleverer characters.
• Power struggles, hierarchies, how these arrangements are negotiated and balanced and change over time and in response to changing circumstances.
• Culture clashes.
• Women kicking ass.
• Victories for social justice, democracy or tolerance.
• Depressing defeats for social justice, democracy or tolerance that still leave seeds of hope for the future.
• Characters trying to balance competing obligations and loyalties: personal vs. professional, practical vs. ideological, etc.
• Gen fic. Casefic, wacky adventures, character studies - they're all great.
• Shipping, as long as shipping is not the only thing in the fic. (Good characterization counts as a second thing.) Het, slash, femmeslash, polyamory, threesomes - I like them all. I'm not protective of my favorite pairings, either, so feel free to pair anyone with anyone.
• Explicit porn, as long as sticking Tab A into Slot B is not the only thing in the fic. (Good characterization counts as a second thing.) D/s and BDSM are welcome.
• Humor.
• All the dark stuff from the list above.
• Characters I like being cute and fluffy and happy together.
As you can see, I like a wide variety of things! Write something that makes you happy, and I will almost certainly be happy too.
A few things I dislike:
• Crackiness to no obvious purpose. I don't mind an AU where all the characters are living room furniture, but if you're going to write one the choice of furniture should be telling us something about the characters.
• Idiot plots. If characters have to suffer a major drop in IQ for a story to make sense, it needs a different plot. Stupid romantic comedy misunderstandings that could be cleared up in five minutes fall into this category.
• Healing cock, instantaneous peace after the crowning of a king or the birth of some biracial baby, and other forms of magical recovery from personal or national traumas. Good stories are like real life: events have consequences and people have to live with them.
On to the fandoms! I'll give a brief overview of what each one is and where to find it, so if you want to switch and learn about a new fandom you'll know what you're getting into.
La Comédie Humaine - Honoré de Balzac
Characters: Corentin
The Comédie Humaine is Honoré Balzac's sweeping panorama of French society, institutions and politics during the first half of the nineteenth century. Comprised of more than ninety novels and short stories, it's an ambitious body of work that paints a satirical and finely detailed picture of French life during this era. It's also an early example of a multimedia franchise: the Comédie Humaine characters all inhabit the same universe and pop up in multiple books at different times and in different roles, and also star in a set of spin-off plays.
What I like about it:
Balzac is a mean-spirited reactionary, but I admire his robust commitment to his worldview that everything is shit and his willingness to let bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people in his novels in support of that thesis. He's a keen observer of humanity and an incisive, intelligent critic of just about everything he looks at. He has a deep understanding of power dynamics and the emotional realities of abuse, and he's too sincere a misanthrope to let his own faction off the hook: he situates good and bad characters across the political spectrum and gives his adversaries fair representation. Engaging plots, well-drawn characters and a fundamental honesty about human nature make his books well worth reading despite his awful politics.
Corentin appears in the following books:
- Les Chouans | The Chouans
- Une ténébreuse affaire | The Gondreville Mystery | An Historical Mystery | Murky Business
- Splendeurs et Misères des courtisanes | Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans | A Harlot High and Low
- Les Petits Bourgeois | The Lesser Bourgeoisie | The Middle Classes
You don't need to read all of them to write this request, but you should probably read Une ténébreuse affaire and be conversant with what Corentin does in the other three. (Ctrl+F on Corentin's name and skimming the relevant sections will suffice; you definitely don't need to understand what's happening with Balzac's full cast of thousands.)
The books are all in the public domain, so they can be found for free online in both French and English via Wikisource, Google Books or both. They may also be available in your local library.
Optional details:
I love Corentin and there are a grand total of zero fics about him, so the world is your oyster here. I would be happy with casefic or a character study or PWP, gen or slash or het.
If you like historical RPF, I'd love a fic about Corentin's relationship with Fouché or a crossover that pits him against a baby Chabouillé early in their careers. If your taste runs more to sinister plots, it would be fun to see him go up against Vautrin again. Or what if he's forced to work with Laurence de Cinq-Cygne to thwart some Restoration-era plot against the Bourbons? Or if you're more in the mood for domestic drama, he could babysit Peyrade after one of Peyrade's benders or spend a cozy-yet-creepy-around-the-edges Christmas with Lydie.
Pick whichever era/book/character group you prefer and run with it. My sole request is no Corentin/Lydie.
I was probably drawn to Corentin at first because Balzac so clearly hates him, but he's interesting in his own right. In a series that can basically be summed up as "the venality of evil", Corentin... isn't. Virtually everyone around him is grifting for money or fame or power, but post-Chouans Corentin seems content to remain in the shadows and quietly do his job (with the occasional detour to take revenge on rude aristocrats). He rebuffs Talleyrand's offer of higher status. He's earned/embezzled enough for a comfortable middle-class existence - financial security, a first-floor apartment in a mediocre neighborhood, two servants, a carriage when he wants one - but no more than that. He has, as Balzac says, "neither passions nor vices". When he needs a stiff drink he drinks sugar water.
Corentin definitely has a moral code of some sort, but it's a blue and orange morality orthogonal to the values of his time. He disdains the contemporary loathing for spycraft. He seems sincerely devoted to the good of the police service, but in an era when the police are profoundly political he has no apparent allegiance to any political faction. He cares nothing for funerary customs - a social convention so strong that even the great cynic Vautrin honors it! - and lets his best friend be buried in a pauper's grave. Yet he takes care of Peyrade's mentally ill daughter in his own home for eleven years. Desperate though he is to find a successor and a husband for Lydie, he doesn't conscript Théodose until Théodose proves he has no honor that could be compromised by a career in the police. Peyrade dies because Corentin gets stuck in the middle of nowhere for nine days because he lets someone else take the last seat in the diligence. And in marked contrast to the protagonists in three of these four books, Corentin never uses sexual violence.
We're presumably not supposed to admire Corentin's sang-froid, cunning and predatory patience as much as I do, but his other good qualities are genuine virtues and in the Comédie Humaine vanishingly rare. We're meant to hate him, but he comes off better than many of Balzac's heroes.
Some prompts:
• Assuming that Fouché's Comédie Humaine timeline is consistent with his timeline in our universe, he's in Vendôme from 1784-1787, when Corentin is 7-10 years old. This throws a wrench in the "illegitimate son" hypothesis. Corentin is old enough to be at the Vendôme College while Fouché is teaching there, but Fouché teaches high school logic. What could a ten-year-old possibly have done to attract the interest of a high school teacher? (Besides the interest Catholic priests notoriously take in prepubescent boys, which, uh… sure, if you want to go there.)
• What's their working relationship like? Does Corentin resent his position of eternal instrument while Fouché’s legitimate kids get plum government jobs and join the nobility? Did he get in trouble for the fruitless domiciliary visit in Une ténébreuse affaire? Is there dub-con? Daddy issues?
• Peyrade seems to have taken the whole "Once I was the student, now I am the master" swap with surprisingly good humor. He's twenty years older! How did the hierarchy switch happen? Did Fouché order it? Did Peyrade just wake up one morning and say "Hey, you're smarter, you should be in charge"?
• Everyone in the Comédie Humaine seems convinced that Corentin did something sinister and brilliant in Les Chouans. In fact Corentin contributed virtually nothing to the success of the mission, which depended entirely on Marie and Montauran's asinine decision to arrange a suicidal tryst in a garrisoned town. Did Corentin just go back to Paris and lie his head off? Is he trying to convince himself he planned the whole thing so he won't be upset about Marie? Is he upset about Marie?
• Laurence de Cinq-Cygne is smart and badass and she and Corentin hate each other with a passion. They should fuck. Not during the domiciliary visit because they both had too much work to do, but Laurence in Paris is a different gal and there are no more secrets between them. And prudent though it might be, I can’t believe the honor of the Cinq-Cygnes would allow the matter to rest with the score standing 5-1 Corentin.
• Chabouillé from Les Mis/Real Life is someone whom Corentin should encounter professionally. Evil baby bourgeois cops in the Directory or the Empire! Probably trying to destroy each other (Corentin had to get arrested those two times somehow) and falling back on hatesex once they discover they're evenly matched.
• Are Corentin and Vautrin really quits? Vautrin still seems pretty angry about Lucien, and Corentin did swear vengeance for Peyrade's death. And nobody said the length of three corpses separates them in bed. I don’t normally have strong top/bottom preferences but given the way they present themselves physically - how Vautrin vaunts his strength whereas Corentin consistently tries to appear feebler than he really is, Vautrin actually picking Corentin up and putting him out of the room like a naughty cat - I'm pretty sure Vautrin thinks he’s topping and Corentin thinks he’s topping from the bottom. (Which if either of them is correct in this belief is up to you.) Feel free to add in Vautrin’s daddykink or Corentin’s possible daddy issues.
La Cousine Bette | Cousin Bette - Honoré de Balzac
Characters: Lisbeth Fischer, Valérie Marneffe
A novel in which Bette Fischer suffers one slight too many at the hands of her inconsiderate rich relatives and decides to rain down the fires of hell upon all their heads. She enlists the mistress of the family patriarch, her neighbor Valérie Marneffe, to help with her scheme, and through the combined powers of Bette's brain and Valérie's beauty the pair manage to wreak epic revenge and amass quite a lot of money before they are finally thwarted by a combination of overreaching and assorted dei ex machina.
What I like about it:
The Comédie Humaine is not short on magnificent bastards, but Bette is their queen. La Cousine Bette features one of the greatest revenge plots ever written, and while Bette's actions are morally indefensible there comes a point when you just have to sit back and admire a master at work.
That would be attraction enough, but the book also has fascinating gender politics. Balzac is a raving misogynist but of a very specific kind: he's willing to grant his female characters full agency and interiority and in his books they are as intelligent, courageous, active, and audacious as the men. Bette is easily the most clever and strong-willed person in La Cousine Bette and the prime driver of most of the action. But she has to be the antagonist, because while Balzac will happily bestow all these talents on his female characters, they are only allowed to employ them in selfless devotion to their husbands and children. As a spinster, Bette lacks the nuclear family necessary for female virtue and is therefore doomed to villainy.
But Balzac is also a very keen observer of power and abuse in all its forms, and he's unable to completely blind himself to the evils of patriarchy. He examines its power structures as he does any power structure he encounters, and then ferrets out ways for a clever member of the subaltern class to hack the system and turn it to their advantage. The result is what we might call weaponized femininity in its true form: exploiting your enemies' gendered assumptions about your role, your ambitions, and your capacities to fuck them up. Valérie is your typical evil temptress leading all the men astray with her feminine wiles, but Bette is something much more sophisticated. Her deliberate use of the traditional female emotional and physical caretaker role to lure her enemies into a deadly trap is a plotline I've never seen done before, and perhaps one that only Balzac with his odd combination of misogyny and insight could write. The result is a book that's inadvertently feminist in its themes, if not in its narration.
La Cousine Bette is in the public domain, so you can read it for free online in both French and English on Wikisource or Google Books. It may also be available in your local library.
Optional details:
Femmeslash would be amazing. If you'd prefer to maintain their intense but non-sexual relationship from the book, that's fine too. I just desperately need some fic about them.
I'd love a canon-divergent AU where Bette and Valérie win the day, or a fic that translates the story into a different setting. Or you could explore their relationship in canon: fluff in which Valérie drags Bette with her to the theater or takes her shopping for curtains, darkfic that looks at all the ways in which they are using each other and the toxic interplay between Valérie's honeyed manipulation and Bette's viciousness and need for power and control. Or Valérie could turn her extensive experience in the art of seduction to a less lucrative but more emotionally fulfilling purpose, and introduce Bette to sex.
The second I finished reading La Cousine Bette I went to look for the Bette/Valérie fic that clearly ought to exist according to Rule 34 and all the laws of nature and man. I was met with a gaping void, an eerie rent in the fabric of the universe.
Your mission is to fill this void.
Some fic possibilities:
• I'd love an AU where the story follows what feels like its natural course when not derailed by Balzac's misogyny and princes and poisoners ex machina and Bette and Valérie triumph and become evil lesbian vengeance queens of Paris and roll around in their ill-gotten gains in blissful happiness for the rest of their days. Balzac's male villains get to win; why not them?
What do they actually want from their lives, freed from their financial worries? We know Valérie enjoys the good life, but I feel like she's had way too much fun twisting all her lovers around her little finger to go back to the less heady thrills of theater and fine dining. I doubt she'd keep sleeping with unattractive men once it no longer seemed financially necessary. So what does she do instead? Does she go into salon politics? And what about Bette? She's far too industrious to loll around in idle luxury, and she seems like a woman who expects her money to work for her rather than just sit in a bank account. Does she go into venture capitalism? Real estate?
• The overall plot of the novel is one that could translate easily into different settings, and it would be fun to see an AU version. Maybe Bette is a politician who has a promised ministry ripped out from under her nose by President Hulot and given to his underqualified protégé Hortense, and she teams up with his secretary Valérie to avenge herself on the whole party leadership. Maybe they're ecologists and Steinbock is actually a grant to study alpine ibex that gets awarded to another researcher. Maybe they're naval officers in a space empire and Hortense gets awarded the captaincy of the newly built FS Steinbock because of nepotism.
• Or Bette and Valerie could have sex, because let's be real, Bette really needs to get laid and except for Montès all of Valerie's lovers are probably terrible in bed and the poor woman deserves to orgasm for once. Are they able to be honest with each other, or does Valerie find that either intentionally or unintentionally her long practice in manipulating her lovers transfers to Bette as well?
Engrenages | Spiral (TV)
Characters: Laure Berthaud, Joséphine Karlsson
A very dark French criminal justice procedural in the vein of Law & Order ("In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two incestuously entangled groups: the police judiciaire who investigate crime, and the magistrates who give them their orders. These are their stories.") with a female lead. For a few seasons the show centered on police detective Laure Berthaud, prosecutor Pierre Clément, and investigating judge François Roban, but Pierre flounced out of the magistrature and later got stabbed to death, leaving a former antagonist, defense attorney Joséphine Karlsson, to prop up the lawyerly side of the triangle. The show is big on police brutality, corruption within the magistrature and burnt corpses in cars, and pretty much everyone is dodgy except Roban who is only dodgy in the cause of justice. The French say it's realistic.
Netflix has the first three seasons and Hulu the first five, with English subtitles. (Search under Spiral). Canal+ and the BBC have aired S6, but if you want to watch it now you may need to resort to illegal filesharing.
What I like about it:
The show is well written, and from an American perspective the window into an inquisitorial justice system is interesting (and makes you feel marginally better about our own atrocious criminal justice system). Laure should have been fired for misconduct about five seasons ago but she's nevertheless very likable, even when she's doing stuff like seducing the commissaire of the neighboring department so she can steal the bullet that would incriminate her dodgy subordinate for accidentally shooting a guy in the lung. Roban has an appealing if slightly deranged commitment to seeing justice done at all costs and bears an endearing resemblance to a giant bird. And Engrenages has a gift for giving terrible people plausible redemption arcs, most notably Joséphine, who started out as a venal mob lawyer but whose heart grew three sizes after helping some immigrants.
Optional details:
I've been longing for more interaction between these two ever since Laure barged into Joséphine's apartment to blackmail her and they had that fraught confrontation back in Season 2. The last two seasons really seemed to be teasing it, but in the end canon didn't deliver. That's where you come in.
Femmeslash would be great, fix-it fic for the colossal mess canon left them in would be great, casefic would be great, Laure and Joséphine going for a girls' night out and doing karaoke would be great. Literally anything other than Laure running out into a field to escape her baby while Joséphine's fate rests in the creepy hands of Eric Edelman would be great. They can be friends or enemies or lovers or some combination of the three - just write something about their relationship, romantic, platonic or professional, and I'll be happy.
Laure and Joséphine are bright, driven women fighting for a place in a man's world and they care about justice when they're not too busy committing serious professional standards violations, which makes it hard not to root for them. Unfortunately, between their terrible life choices and the ambient bleakness of the Engrenages universe, rooting for them is a doomed enterprise. After Pierre's death it really looked for about five minutes like something good might happen between them: bonding over shared grief and alcohol, or fun cop vs. defense attorney adventures with Joséphine occupying Pierre's former slot in the show's traditional cop/judge/lawyer triumvirate, or even canon f/f. (Caroline Proust said she was up for it, and Laure's fucked every other hot recurring character, so why not?) Instead we got a rape plot and attempted vehicular homicide.
This is so not where I hoped this was going. Dear writer, please console me for my disappointment.
I am very fond of Roban and find myself inexplicably attached to Herville post-S5 finale, and I welcome their presence in any fic. (Is there an equivalent to shipping where you want people to work together professionally? Because Herville and Laure were weirdly cute together in S6. Never thought I'd come to say that.) Tintin is well shot of these human disasters but I welcome him too. Gilou... exists.
I'd prefer not to have Laure/Gilou as a big focus, but feel free to include it in the background if you want.
Some directions to pursue:
• Femmeslash! Laure has had some pretty bad luck with men, and should consider other options. Joséphine is very attractive, very available, and does not have high moral standards for her lovers. It's a match made in heaven.
• THAT SCENE. You know the one I mean. (If you don't, it's the one in S2 E8 where Laure storms into Joséphine's apartment, encounters her in her dressing gown, talks about her tits and how much she hates her, and then Joséphine tells her that deep down they're the same. If that's not an invitation to foeyay I don't know what is.)
• All the boozy mourning for Pierre seems like it should lead to consolation sex. Joséphine drank a whole bottle of wine and then invited Laure over to her apartment in the middle of the night so she could sob on her shoulder. I mean, come on.
• Laura is besieged on all sides by men who want to parent her baby. A nice problem for a mostly-single mother to have, you might think, but clearly not one that is working for Laure. She won't let Brémont raise Romy, and even with Gilou's support and encouragement she can't bring herself to take the baby either.
You know what could help here? Someone who is as completely unprepared, unenthusiastic, and psychologically unfit for parenthood as Laure is herself. Enter... Joséphine! I honestly think having a coparent who is as freaked out as she is might help Laure cope.
• The # MeToo murder case from hell. Joséphine needs to make better choices and frankly so do the writers. I don't see how she doesn't end up disbarred on account of this nonsense and most likely in jail, but if you can think of some way to make it all disappear that would be great. Maybe Gilou can accidentally shoot Vern in the lung so the main prosecution witness can't testify.
• WTF is going on with Eric Edelman? His default demeanor is so sleazy that I can't tell if he's earnestly being helpful, he's taking advantage of Joséphine's vulnerability to try to get into her pants, he's taking protracted and subtle revenge for all the shitty things she's done to him, or some combination of the three. I welcome your insights.
• Judge Wagner is the unsung hero of this show. The writers obviously want you to root against him, and you do because if he prevails there'd be no show, but he's right almost 100% of the time and French policing would be in a far better state if he got his way. I'd love to see a fic from his perspective, either one where he finally succeeds in getting Laure sacked or the tragic, prolonged saga of his many, many failures. Joséphine can defend her, assuming she's not in prison.
Or maybe Laure ends up in jail too and they can be cellmates.
Political RPF - France 19th c.
Characters: Henri Gisquet
Political RPF about mid-nineteenth century France, or in fandom terms, RPF about the real people who caused the events depicted in Les Misérables and the Comédie Humaine. France in the middle of the nineteenth century is an early modern democracy with all the institutions we expect of a democracy: free elections (albeit with a extremely limited franchise during the Restoration and the July Monarchy), a robust and critical press, a judiciary with the power to curtail the excesses of the executive, and a national ambition not to fall back into civil war. It's a bubbling thermal pool of political philosophy in which our modern concepts of liberalism and socialism are first taking shape. But it also has a capital city which riots at the drop of a hat, provinces which don't even share the capital's language much less its political values, and a legacy of violence and terror less than a generation old that's lurking in the back of everyone's minds. The result of all this ferment is a society riven by irreconcilably different visions for what France should be and what sort of future the government should pursue.
Henri Gisquet embodies these contradictions. A banker by profession, he was a member of one of the major liberal opposition societies during the Restoration and played a small but significant role in the July Revolution that overthrew the Bourbons, signing the court ruling that ordered printers to print banned newspapers in defiance of the king's ordinances and then handing out arms to the revolutionaries once the insurrection started. When conservative Prime Minister Casimir Périer came to power he appointed Gisquet Prefect of Police, and he was the man in charge of suppressing the rebellion that Victor Hugo popularized in Les Mis. Gisquet successfully and repressively ran the police for several years until his political career ended in disgrace when he sued a paper for libel and all his corrupt shenanigans came out in discovery. You can find out more about him at a good library, or from Google Books. (His whole memoirs are up here, if you read French.)
What I like about it:
In our era of intense partisan polarization it's fascinating to open a historical window onto another nation confronting unbridgeable factional divides in its body politic, and I find the centrists of this era especially interesting because they're the ones trying to straddle these yawning chasms and hold the country together. Gisquet is a prime example of this, and he's more fun to study than most of them because his political judgement is hilariously bad.
Optional details:
In the space of two years Henri Gisquet went from an architect of the July Revolution to the Prefect of Police who suppressed the June Rebellion. I'd love to see some fic that deals with Gisquet and the political situation in all its chaos and contradictions: what he thinks of the July Monarchy or the things he's been called upon to do, how a man can topple a government to defend the freedom of the press and find himself arresting newspaper editors just a few years later.
What are his interactions with Casimir Périer like during this era? Périer is much more conservative than Gisquet and disapproved of the July Revolution, so his decision to appoint him Prefect is intriguing.
Alternatively, it's always fun to see him lock horns with Chabouillé. Or he could confront other figures of the time like Charles Jeanne or Armand Marrast or Adolphe Crémieux.
Som potential avenues of ficcage:
• It would be great to see something that depicts Gisquet's interactions with Casimir Périer at the height of their careers. There have been some fantastic fics about the start of their relationship, when Périer took an impoverished young Gisquet under his morally questionable wing and made his career but also made him into his pawn, and others looking at how Gisquet coped with his death. But we haven't had much set in between.
Périer didn't want the July Revolution to proceed at all, and contemporary accounts are full of references to his severity and vicious temper. How did he react to Gisquet defying his wishes and taking the initiative to overthrow the government? Why did he pick Gisquet for Prefect of Police, given his total lack of experience with policing and the dark cloud around his name due to the gun scandal? Was Périer really that desperate, or did he want to give Gisquet a chance to redeem himself in the public eye? Did Gisquet even want to accept the post, or was he doing it as a favor to his beloved mentor?
Slash is fantastic if you ship them, but I'd be happy with platonic mentor and protégé fic too.
• THE GUNS. What even happened with the guns!? Clearly Gisquet was using the commission to reassure his investors that his bank had liquidity and stave off bankruptcy, but that doesn't explain why he accepted such an incredibly overpriced bid, or why the guns he purchased were such defective pieces of crap. What was actually going on? How did Périer react to his own precious protégé dragging his ministry into its first major scandal?
• Gisquet has a hateboner for Armand Marrast the size of the Eiffel Tower, due to the aforementioned gun scandal, Marrast's reporting on the same, and the ensuing libel trial. I swear 30% of his memoirs is just him bitching about Marrast articles that hurt his delicate little feelings. It's been ten years and the man went to jail for exposing the gun scandal, but Gisquet cannot let it go.
It would be fun to pit them against each other during the June Rebellion era when Marrast is once again a free man publishing articles about how Gisquet is terrible at his job. Or maybe they meet up again after Marrast loses the 1849 Assembly elections, having presided over the June Days repressions as Mayor of Paris and become almost as unpopular as Gisquet, and after an initial round of vindicated gloating Gisquet is moved to sympathy and they bond over their shared political disgrace and assaults on civil liberties.
• How does Gisquet cope with the entrenched civil service bureaucracy at the Prefecture, which most likely opposes the reforms that Périer expects him to implement? It's always fun to see him lock horns with Chabouillé, and from time to time they must come into conflict over issues a trifle more substantive than Gisquet's predilection for delectable young secretaries.
• There's honestly no excuse for this prompt except that I love Adolphe Crémieux way too much and as one of the defense attorneys in the Gisquet Guns trial and the June Rebellion cases he and Gisquet would have encountered each other in their professional capacities, but I'd love a fic throwing them together. I'll take anything here, really. Legal snark? Hatesex? Périer and Gisquet trying to intimidate Crémieux into dropping his cases and not causing them any more trouble? (But if you go this last route please don't be too rough with him. He is tiny and precious.)
Crossposted to Dreamwidth: https://kainosite.dreamwidth.org/5828.html. Comment there or here.