Les Amis de l'ABC, known as the Friends of the ABC in English, was a secret society of revolutionary French republican students which was led by Julien Enjolras at the time of the June Rebellion of 1832. The society's name was a pun on the term abaissés, roughly meaning the "downtrodden", and it was one of dozens of revolutionary societies to split from the Society of the Rights of Man over their impatience for a second French Revolution. The society met at the Cafe Musain in the Saint-Michel neighborhood of Paris, and the views of its student members varied from communist agitation to advocacy for democracy and support for the socialist Levellers. On 5 June 1832, the society, led by Enjolras, instigated a riot at the funeral of their hero, General Jean Maximilien Lamarque, setting off the June Rebellion. The Friends of the ABC clashed with the French Army's dragoons before constructing barricades near their cafe, and, that evening, they held off the first of two government attacks on their barricade. The next morning, the society found that the people of Paris still lived in fear and refused to join their uprising, so Enjolras had those unwilling to die leave the barricade; the vast majority of the revolutionaries stayed. That afternoon, the National Guard launched its final assault, and Enjolras and all of the society's members were killed. The only survivors of the barricade were Marius Pontmercy (a student unaffiliated with, but a sympathizer of, the society) and Jean Valjean (who had volunteered on the barricade with the sole purpose of rescuing Marius, the love of his daughter Cosette).
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