We are pleased to announce the following programming for the convention!
Times are in UST.
Recorded presentations will be available for 2 weeks after the convention for registered people.
The calendar is available in a calendar grid and can be downloaded on iCal.
Welcome Session
In this session, Concom 2026 will kick off BarricadesCon 2026 and welcome everyone. Concom will also walk everyone through some basic information and FAQs to help ensure a fun and interesting con for everyone.
Make Your Own Cockade
Learn how to make your own tricolor cockades from ordinary items you find around the house, so you have the skill in case of a revolutionary emergency. History and material culture of tricolor cockades and their production will also be explored.
The How and Why of Barricades: A Military Study
The street barricade is the iconic symbol of 19th Century revolution, but its purposes are easy to misunderstand. By looking at its use in the uprisings of 1830, 1832, and 1848, we can see the military realities behind how barricades work, when they don’t — and why the Amis had already lost before the first […]
The Combeferre Problem
His name has at least five different possible etymologies. He has over twenty canonical hobbies and interests in his introduction. He believes in the role of science in progress and neither affirms nor denies anything. He silences Marius in two words and sings about it. He’s a pacifist by nature but brings three guns to […]
Give Me Skeleton Wells or Give Me Death
Hugo’s description of the Battle of Waterloo paints a vivid if not entirely factual picture of the events that led to Napoleon’s defeat in 1815. But what really happened at Waterloo? And is there any actual evidence for some of Hugo’s wilder battlefield tales? Let’s find out!
The 1938 Les Mis Illustrated Edition: Guess That Chapter!
I will provide some information about the 1938 Heritage Press edition of Les Mis (info about this edition, showing parts of the Heritage Club member pamphlet it came with, and showing previous work of the illustrator Lynd Ward). Then I will show illustrations from this edition and attendees can guess which part of the book […]
Our Charming Conversations Across a Sea: Letters Between A Publisher and His Author
The correspondence of Victor Hugo and his publisher Lacroix is filled with insights into the process and problems encountered in publishing Les Miserables – political problems, procedural problems, and interpersonal problems. This dramatization of their letters tells the story of two men, separated by the English Channel and who had never worked together before, and […]
Les Misérables Only Connect Group 1
A Les Misérables trivia game based on the UK quiz show Only Connect. Congoers will sign up for two teams (3-5 members each) and compete in four timed rounds of play. Questions will involve the Brick, the musical, potentially other adaptations, Victor Hugo’s life and times, and, this being a game about connections, quite possibly […]
Patron Minette and the Spectacle of Criminality in Les Misérables
Within Les Misérables, the Patron-Minette gang offers a highly sensationalised depiction of criminality that differs from many of the novel’s other characters. These villains straddle a unique boundary between being genuinely dangerous and horrifying Gothic monsters, while also provoking laughter from readers when they end up in absurd, momentarily comedic incidents throughout the narrative. This […]
Translating for Lee’s Miserables: Ideology and Translation in the Confederate Revision of Les Mis
Barricades has had at least one previous panel about the Confederate revision of Wilbour’s Les Mis translation, talking about its general history and context. This would be a quick review of that for folks who missed it before, and then a deeper dive into analyzing the changes and cuts that were actually made to the […]
The Role of Violence in Political Change: The July Monarchy
Jill Harsin is the Thomas A. Bartlett Chair of Public Policy and Professor of History at Colgate University. She is the author of Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Paris and of Barricades: The War of the Streets, 1830-1848. Her interest in the republican activists of the 1830s and 1840s led her to an interest in the […]
Disability in Hugo’s Les Misérables: A Literary Analysis
An analysis of Les Misérables through the lens of disability literary studies, including an overview of disability in 19th century France, and examining how disability intersects with the themes of the novel, what it is used to represent, and how disabled characters are portrayed.
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