SOURCE: "Exile and Return: La Rue à Londres," in his Feet First: Jules Vallès, University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1992, pp. 145-72.

[In the following excerpt, Redfern discusses Vallès's exile in London, from about 1872 to 1880, focusing on Vallès's contrasting views of Paris and London and the background for Vallès's book La Rue a Londres. Redfern also describes Vallès's efforts to work in Paris following his return from London and the defeat of the Paris Commune, particularly his work on the newspaper Le Cri du peuple.]

Exile

Long before he was forced into it, Vallès hankered for a chosen exile, an expatriation (or 'exmatriation').¹ Eight years before his first trip to England in 1865, he observed some Englishmen in Paris: 'L'Anglais garde, dans son faux col trop raide et son coatchman [sic] trop large, un air ètrange et distingué. Il est muet, il a caché sa langue au fond de sa valise; s'il ose parfois s'en servir, s'il parle, on ne comprend point son langage' (I, 63). An unpromising introduction: stiffness, reserve, incomprehensibility, otherness, and yet an imposing idiosyncrasy. When he actually set off for England, the unwitting dramatic irony as regards the future is intense: Je n'ai point le douloureux honneur de partir proscrit, rien ne m'oblige au rôle d'exilé' (p. 771). And again at the end: 'Après trois semaines de séjour à Londres, je m'aperçus que pour pouvoir parler de l'Angleterre, il fallalt y passer dix ans.—Je regardais et je ne voyais pas; j'écoutais et n'entendais pas: je n'aime à parler que de ce que j'ai entendu et vu. Je me moquai de moimême et repassai la mer' (p. 793). This honest admission of his limitations is typical. On the more positive side, he was already grateful for the haven offered here to (post-1851) proscrits; and impressed by policemen sorting out a brawl: 'Au lieu d'être violents parce qu'ils représentent l'État, ils étaient indulgents parce qu'ils étaient la loi' (p. 1559). He salutes the beneficial effects of self-control; 'Dans la rue comme au parlement, le self governement [sic] s'exerce et l'individualisme est en campagne' (p. 1566). When the trip became an exile, from late 1871, or early 1872 onwards to 1880, these mixed reactions to things and people English had ample time to develop in complexity.

He was sentenced to death in absentia: the ultimate sanction for taking French leave. Although he experienced England in many ways as a prison, a far from magnificent hulk, and has kept under surveillence like other political refugees, in fact his freedom of movement was constrained only by his financial state. This was adequate at the outset, by reason of receipts from Le Cri du peuple and a windfall inheritance, of which, despite legal tangles, he managed to get part; but for the bulk of his time in London he was severely strapped for cash. As he knew and partly gloried, his style was too blatantly telltale for his journalism to appear under pseudonyms in Paris papers. When this subsequently became more feasible, he badgered his friend Malot unmercifully (as he had already in the early 1860s) about loans, contracts, approaches to editors and publishers. Frequently using images of safety valves in his correspondence, Vallès occasionally apologised: 'Pardonnez ce qu'il y a d'6goiste dans ces exhalaisons à outrance' (Corr. M., p. 187). When another friend, Arnould, rebuked him for his one-sided view of friendship, Vallès, cut to the quick, responded speciously (Corr. A., p. 285). His main defence was that he underwent, in effect, an eight-year fit of le spleen, the exile's blues. Even his affair with a Belgian schoolteacher, who bore him a daughter whom he loved deeply, ended tragically when the baby died after nine months on the fateful date of 2 December.

He enjoyed little comradeship or agreement with the other Communards in exile, finding, as always, the Marxists too aridly theoretical, and the Blanquists obsessed with armed insurrection. Indeed, Vallès seemed to be veering towards venture capitalism. He nursed various fruitless projects: a wine business, porcelain painting, a non-political weekly aimed at a comfortably-off English readership and bringing news of cultural life in Paris. This might in turn spin off a luxury art shop. Together with other exiles, he founded the short-lived French Athenaeum, a meeting place for lectures and language tuition. The even briefer-lived The Coming P (the title, suggesting a damp squib, shows Vallès's shaky grasp of English. The full 'People' would hardly have been incriminating, anyway) displays Vallès's energetic efforts to get into print (he tried as far afield as Russia, via Zola).² From about 1876, his correspondence talks repeatedly of a novel, a kind of Vingtras IV, for which he mooted various titles: Les Réfractaires de Londres, Les Mystères de Londres, Les Mystères de Londres, Londres infâme. Much of the material for this project was used instead for La Rue à Londres. He started work on L'Enfant in 1876. He mentions reading few books in these years (though he kept up to date with the Paris press). Swotting up some books on banking and commerce, he commented: 'C'est lourd comme le plomb, ces livres sur l'or' (Corr. M., p. 262). His trips away from London were to Belgium and Switzerland and, within Britain, to Brighton, Kent and Jersey; he did not venture to the industrial Midlands, North, Scotland or Wales.

As for psychological exile, Wittlin, on the basis of the Spanish destierro (deprivation of homeland) coined destiempo: 'The exile lives in two different times simultaneously, in the present and in the past. This life in the past is sometimes more intense [… ] and tyrannises his entire psychology. [ … ] An exile, as it were professionally, moves backwards.³ Home thoughts from foreign parts are normal, and the Irish Bull tells us that the exile is not at home when he is abroad. In some ways, Vallès in London thinking of Paris resembles Vallès in Paris recalling his provincial childhood. 'L'exil', he recognised, 'est une province. On n'y voit pas plus loin que le bout de sa manie!' In this perspective, even Paris becomes parochial: 'Sans autre parisiennerie que celle de la Commune racontée, reracontée, jugée, re-jugée—parisiennerie effroyablement provinciale!' (Corr. M., pp. 81; 223). Exile reinstated the climate of childhood (and thus helped the writing of L 'Enfant): Vallès complains frequently of being left out in the cold, starved of warmth, contact and news. He is like a lover, or a desperate child, waiting for the postman in high anxiety and deeply frustrated when there is nothing for him. He refuses to understand why he does not get responses by return of post to his pleas, questions and demands. He sums up his state in these terms in a letter to a Paris editor: 'Vous avez la goutte, moi j'ai l'exil. Je ne veux pas vous arracher des larmes, je ne pose pas au martyr, je ne me drape pas, je m'embête. C'est embêtant, le manque de patrie!' (quoted II, p. xxxiv). Yet he learned to know in his bones that his exile changed his writing for the far better, that, in this area, it paid off handsomely. 'II est à constater que le brouillard de Londres n'a jamais endolori le talent ni voilé la flamme dans les têtes françaises. Au contraire, il a trempé des styles, comme l'eau boueuse du Furens trempe les armes' (TP, p. 259).

La Rue à Londres

Vallès's documentary groundwork for La Rue à Londres, finally published in 1884 after a dozen or so years of fits and starts, was essentially the reading of French visitors to these shores: Flora Tristan, Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc, Alphonse Esquiros, Taine and Louis Enault (with wood engravings by Gustave Doré) (see II, 1983). La Rue à Londres, similarly, had drawings and etchings, by Auguste Lançon, an ex-fedéré. Possibly needing to boost his own morale, Vallès boasted to Malot in 1876: 'Ce serait le premier livre impartial sur l'Angleterre. Tous ont menti jusqu'ici depuis Esquiros jusqu'à Taine. Mettons qu'ils se sont trompés' (Corr. M., p. 129). La Rue à Londres is not impartial; it is passionately wrong-headed, with moments of insight. In its admission of defeat (the English are beyond summary, if not beyond judgment), its rueful acknowledgment of the complexity of the subject, it is closer to interesting fiction than to a sociological survey feigning accuracy.

Much of the text is mnemonic. Afraid of losing Paris for good in fact or in memory, Vallès recites its characteristics, in opposition to those of London. Just as mother and son bounced off each other originally, Vallès always needs to play off polarities in this way, favouring now one, now the other, in a cross-Channel shuttle. He starts with la rue, his favourite space, in both cities. The streets of Paris win hands down: light, gay, not overcrowded and gloomy like their London counterparts. Here, there is little conversation, that 'vie d'échange' that Vallès needs like oxygen. He cannot tell the English apart, for they are like interchangeable mechanisms: 'Ils vont, ils viennent comme des pistons de machines, ils passent comme des courroies se mêlent, comme des trains se croisent' (II, 1135). Thus running together the Industrial Revolution and individual Londoners, Vallès gives fair notice of what will be his regular tactic of overstatement, of demonological (and, much more rarely, angelical) procedure. London 'n'a pas pour deux liards de fantaisie' (p. 1137). Exiled, he rosifies Paris, polarising even public drunkenness in both cities: 'C'est la soulaison noire, point l'ivresse rose' (p. 1139). He was especially disgusted by female drunks, vomiting on the cobblestones (ibid.). He wilfully underestimates French alcoholism, accusing Zola of slandering le peuple in L'Assommoir (p. 1309). Shuttling, however, he notes that London streets are less military than Parisian ones: fewer soldiers, and they stroll unarmed (p. 1139).

Disoriented, he misses landmarks. 'Rien ne s'accuse en traits nets et logiques' (p. 1140). He sounds here like the quintessential neo-Cartesian Frenchman he never was. Though he accuses England of compartmentalisation, this is in fact what he misses: in London the poor and the rich live cheek by jowl (p. 1148). He offers a stereotyped French notion of English antisystematic thinking: 'L'esprit anglais ne sait pas classer ni déduire, voilà pourquoi mes voisins de la bibliothèque anglaise, tout en bûchant plus qu'on ne biche chez nous, ne feront pas sortir du sol des idées nettes et claires. Leurs pensèes flottent dans le brouillard, comme leur soleil s'y noie' (p. 1303). Amid all such diametrically opposed patterns, however, his eyes are open to a phenomenon still observable today: 'Une cité où les sergents de ville ont l'air poli et ou les gentlemen ont l'air féroce' (p. 1140).

We have to wonder how many English homes Vallès penetrated, and in those he did how often he was slighted by long waits in the halls. (We must also wonder how many middle or upper-class homes Vallès was familiar with in Paris). Against the common British sense of French homes as impregnable bastions, Vallès presents English homes shut up against the world outside: 'Pays hostile, race murée!' (p. 1142). Vallès kicks against the cliché of 'le confortable anglais' (though I for one find little physical ease in French furniture): 'L'Angleterre est le pays du mal-vivre, du mal-loger, du mal-manger, du mal-s'asseoir, et du maldormir' (p. 1206). In these areas, Vallès misses concierges, a table de nuit for the jerry, and sauces on food (pp. 1207; 1211; 1213). Churches are no more welcoming than homes. Protestant temples are lugubrious, have less garish colour and smell than French Catholic ones; reformed religion offers an 'implacable tristesse' (p. 1144), and infiltrates everywhere Like Stendhal before him, Vallès was appalled at the British veto on breaking the Sabbath. The English Sunday lasts all week: 'La platitude du jour sacré' (p. 1194). Vallès almost renegues on his godlessness: 'La simplicité crue du protestantisme m'effraie plus que la grâce enivrante et enflammée du catholicisme, but luckily he pulls himself up short: 'L'encens et les bouquets font presque oublier Dieu dans les chapelles embaumées de France' (p. 1196). A few pages after the largely black-and-white opening, Vallès admits the complexity of the subject, and his own perplexity: 'Quelle ville! … toute pleine de contradictions énormes, amas de confusions!' (p. 1146).

The biggest contradiction is the coexisting grandeur and misery of London. Whereas the poor in Paris 'ont la pudeur de leur misère', the English paupers flaunt theirs, using the doorstep as a sofa (pp. 1146; 1148). 'On ne connaît point la blouse à Londres' (p. 1140). As ever, Vallès looks for badges of membership, identity tags, forgetting that the blouse concealed a host of different political persuasions. English workers prefer 'avoir l'air d'un commis, d'un clerc, d'un monsieur', as they buy reach-me-downs cast off by their social betters (p. 1283). Clothing unmaketh the man. In Petticoat Lane, he gives this sartorial ideology a rest, and reverts to his lifelong anxiety about arse-out breeks: 'N'es-tu pas las aussi de montrer ton derrière, pincè par le vent, et qui a la chair de poule? [… ] Pour un shilling seulement, si tu ne tiens qu'à être pudique, tu auras une culotte à pont' (= full-fall trousers—p. 1279). He prefers, however, French skill in making-do and mending, wifely husbanding of resources (p. 1149).

While profoundly anxious about the fate of children in the gin-soaked slums, Vallès recognises that children are freer, allowed to be children more than in France (pp. 1150; 1215). Their parents, remaining standing to drink in pubs, are thus prevented from the real get-together for the exchange of ideas that large French café tables offer (p. 1170). It has been pointed out by Tholoniat that, in concentrating on the squalid public bars, Vallès neglected the back-room meeting-places of dissident groups.⁴ He sees the isoloir, and not snug. Perhaps his visceral need for drinking in company, compotation, was hindered by the level of his English and his disrelish for draught beer. All the time, and naturally, he holds it against England, his unnatural second home, for not being France. He remains, however, open to new experiences. Lacking small-group discussions, he enjoys open-air mass meetings (e.g. Hyde Park Corner). Even if there are no political slogans or graffiti on the walls, no revolutionary historical markers, even if the English 'n'ont point senti le tremblement social' (pp. 1140-41), Vallès is moved by large numbers freely speaking their minds in public, just as he admires elements of British justice such as habeas corpus (p. 1146).

He spends a lot of time on leisure activities, presumably believing that you can tell a great deal about a people by examining its pleasures. Theatre, dances and music halls are all dismissed as inferior in London. Vallès dislikes the auctioneer-style hammer of the master of ceremonies, which affords an attack on automated pleasures, piston-like movements of artistes: 'I'éternelle marche à la soldat!' (p. 1165). All the same, while finding English stage-movements gross, he still admires 'ces friands de l'énergie, ces gourmands de vigueur' (p. 1167). The cross-dressing, the drag routines, so central to the English tradition obviously troubled him. One area that delighted him was music-hall satire, mocking Crown and Government. He voices a bitter complaint against all the spying on and censoring of free-tongued pleasure in France: 'Gabelous de la morale, gardeschiourmes du gotû' (p. 1162).

Vallès admitted to Séverine (and the phrases are delectably double-layered): 'La Femme anglaise ne m'a jamais enthousiasmé', and ('J'ai attaqué la femme anglaise, que j'ai coupée en deux' (Corr. S., pp. 151; 73). While admitting eventually that pleasure with women is obtainable in London and its up-market tarts less blasé than French horizontales, Vallès misses demimondaines (in-betweens like himself) (p. 1271). He misses flirtatiousness, the come-on, the clear confidence that the girl or woman is the cynosure of male gazes. In England, women go off rapidly: 'On avait une gazelle hier, on a une girafe demain' (p. 1136). In contrast, 'la femme de trente ans, comme nous l'aimons, grasse et blanche, ou souple et dorée, appétissante comme un fruit mûr, irritante comme une odeur sauvage, on ne la frôle point, on ne la sent pas sur le pavé de Londres' (ibid.). English girls can be delectable (if boyish) up to a certain age, but then their blatant pursuit of marriage partners withers them. Perversely, he states that the very availability of English girls, the absence of social obstacles as in France, kills passion (p. 1261). On a more practical level, though finding breach of promise cases rather ludicrous, and though paternity payments derive from a mercantile logic, he finds them more humane than French practice. Reverting to male chauvinist wolfishness, he misses the ocular whistles of Latin men: 'C'est le seul pays d'Europe ofu j'aie vu circuler les gens sans regarder les passantes' (p. 1263). He obviously enjoys the chat decorating such lust, for he says of Englishmen: 'S'ils s'y mettaient, ils les examineraient comme des chevaux, tandis que le boulevardier sait fleurir de politesse et ouater de discrétion son audace de suiveur, son grappin d'abordage' (ibid.). The aggressive last metaphor gives away the violence beneath the violets. In all his discussion of women on both sides of the Channel, Vallès keeps sliding betwen classes, so that he blurs the whole issue. Parisiennes are more hard-headed and more romantic; Englishwomen go in for far-niente (which class?) (p. 1265); they are also do-gooding campaigners, which transmutes them into a third sex, neither female nor male (p. 1272).

As for sport, (within 'le dur sport de la vie' (p. 1285)), while having some reservations, Vallès is full of praise. Derby Day is a mundus inversus: 'L'Angleterre s'y montre la tête en bas, les pieds en 1'air (p. 1284). In this land of compartments, this is a free-for-all, promiscuity: 'Cette inondation de la foule; cette éruption de volcan, dans ce pays de cellules sociales et de mutisme pénitentiaire' (p. 1285). By this stage of his account, Vallès has wearied of being a registering eye: 'On veut être à la fois acteur et observateur dans la pièce' (ibid.). He revels in the jovial matiness of the omnibus ride (une kermesse entre quatre planches'—p. 1286)). Then, by a cinematic double-take, he realises he has conned himself. The joviality has blinded him to the have-nots, the beggars. Vallès feels anger at the insulting charity thrown to them: cruel scenes of mendicants made to beg like dogs or to jig about (p. 1290). As in theatres, however, vigour plays off against coarseness. 'Nulle part', he writes of the mass return home, 'jamais, il n'y eut ce pêle-mêle, cet encombrement, cette verve sauvage, cette fureur de casse-cou' (p. 1292). In this way, throughout La Rue à Londres, the rush to moralise has to take on board the extra-moral.

Fascinatedly appalled at bareknuckle boxing, he still believes that sporting prowess (strange how England was once reputed for it) helps to explain British world dominance: 'C'est a ces moeurs du ring et du turf quel'Angleterre doit d'être le champion de la résistance dans le champ clos du monde' (p. 1299). Picking up his previous attacks on the under-emphasis on physical education in France, he praises English schools (public schools, designed to produce élites—but Vallès focusses on the formation of self-reliance): 'Au lieu d'être élevés comme des métaphysiciens ou des poètes, les adolescents sont dressés comme des fils d'hercules ou de maîtres de natation' (p. 1294). In contrast, in Soho, he notes the degenerate scum of French expatriate society (p. 1196). Critical of many English forms of pleasure, he unreservedly lauds (after Dickens) the English Christmas: the presents, the fun, the good cheer and drink (for once), and the reading of popular romances and ghoststories (pp. 1215-16). He appears to mistranslate Boxing Day as an occasion for drunken punch-ups in the streets (p. 1220). He enjoys pantomime, despite the cross-dressing, for there the (earthly) 'gods' rule the roost (p. 1221).

For all the emphasis on garish colours and ubiquitous advertising, Vallès never loses sight of the reverse picture. The sections on workhouses record his visits to these organised, measured infernos, with their highly programmed dispensing of charity. He is too streetwise not to realise the ambivalence of the whole workhouse phenomenon: it can abuse regulars, and be abused in turn by spongers and shirkers. Here again religion interferes. Some women there catch 'la névrose de la religion, ce qui est l'avortement des âmes' (p. 1246). In the world of actual work, at London docks, the visitor marvels in horror at the huge scale of operations generated to service the maritime colossus of the nineteenth century, the runaway growth of mechanisation. He notes the indigo warehouses where the workers salivate blue, the massive stores—a carceral cornucopia (pp. 1227-8). He tries unavailingly to anthropomorphise forbidding buildings: 'On voudrait leur voir un front, des yeux, des lèvres, [ … ] des fentes larges par où rirait un peu de lumière—des rides ou des cicatrices, au besoin! Non! c'est comme une colossale bedaine de pierre, ronde, unie, à la peau brune et tendre' (p. 1232). He remains open to the call of the open sea, ships off to the ends of the earth: 'Cela écorche et éblouit les yeux, cela aussi recule le paysage et ouvre à l'affamé un horizon profond' (p. 1233). But the stevedores who have to stay, performing repetitive, uncreative tasks of loading and unloading, lack all rebelliousness; they are 'ces fakirs du chômage' (p. 1232). Human labour comes cheap: 'A quel prix est payée la balistique humaine?' (p. 1233). In keeping with their context, 'leur vie fait eau de toutes parts' (p. 1231). He watches the recruiting sergeants, and notes, by a bitter twist on 'cochons vendus', poor wretches paying to get into the army. As for the underclass of hooligans with their violent horseplay, Vallès feels a mixture of fear and distaste:

C'est une race terrible, allez, et je ne voudrais pas que ma patrie devînt leur ennemie—ni leur amie. [ … ] Musulmans sans soleil, ces fils de la Grande Bretagne! Ils ont la résignation muette des Orientaux, sous leur ciel de fer. Ils sont fiers d'être Anglais, c'est assez—et ils se consolent de n'avoir pas de chemise en regardant flotter un lambeau de drapeau. (pp. 1276-7)

Have things changed so much today?

'Qu'on le sache bien, l'Anglais a la haine instinctive, aveugle, de ce qui est français' (p. 1205). This is probably truer than we want to think. Periodically, Vallès reverts to the initial polarisation, and can then slump into cliché: 'Ainsi nous sont-ils hostiles de toute la force de leur tristesse et de leur patriotisme religieux et glacial. C'est le brouillard furieux qui en veut au soleil; c'est le rire blême qui en veut au rire clair; c'est le duel de la bière et du vin!' (p. 1205). He makes the standard charges: we are non-enthusiasts, whereas the French need to 'penser tout haut' (p. 1260). And yet he recognises a futile quality in his own country's humour, in comparison with English phlegm: 'Nous paraissons des gamins souvent, à crier ainsi contre le vent, et à envoyer des chiquenaudes au nez des avalanches' (ibid.). The Englishman practises not only 'le rire jaune', but also 'vit jaune' (Corr, A., p. 201).

At one point, Vallès spends two whole paragraphs, inflating the problems of getting back into the crowd at a procession to a symbol of the impenetrability of English society. So doing he points to the crux of the exile's dilemma: 'On ne péenètre pas dans un milieu où l'on n'a pas racine' (p. 1275). Like the crowd in the Commune, England remains unreadable. Like the Thames: 'Cette eau ne reflète rien, elle est comme le visage des Anglais' (p. 1153). An abyss of twenty miles lies between Calais and Dover (p. 1325). For all that, Vallès remembers to express his authentic gratitude for lessons in freedoms, and especially for the transnational haven of the British Museum Library, far better stocked on French history than the Bibliothèque Nationale: 'J'ai pu vivre en pleine terre nationale pendant neuf ans d'exil' (p. 1306).

Hyperbole is the commonest mode of La Rue à Londres. 'Par esprit de patriotisme, parce qu'ils ont le Derby et la mer, ils ont tous des têtes de cheval ou de poisson' (p. 1135). The reader, even non-English, is tempted to respond: 'What! All of them? Why do rabid individualists so often generalise manically?' Lugubrious conceits occur frequently, as in this Thames-side scene: 'On voit se balancer dans l'air des sacs mous qui oscillent au bout des poulies avec des pesanteurs et des gigotements de pendus. On pend ici; c'est laid et sourd, cela plaît bien' (p. 1155). Perhaps he prefers the sharp clunk of the guillotine.

It is a patchwork text, 'cousu de pièces dècoupèes, rapportèes, accolèes' (Bellet, II, 1982). Vallès was fully conscious of this himself, as he makes clear in his instructions to his secretary, Séverine: 'Cela aura I'enlevé d'un croquis, le je-ne-sais-quoi saisissant des observations collées chaudes mais sans suite sur le papier. A vous d'étayer et de dresser cela comme on pare un plat fait de morceaux' (Corr. S., p. 90). Tholoniat detects a dominance of the colour yellow in these fragmented descriptions:

L'Anglais vit jaune, il rit jaune dans sa barbe de même couleur; le brouillard est couleur merde d'oie; la Tamise, les murs, les écriteaux ont des reflets jaunâtres. L'énergie du couple rouge-noir atteint son entropie avec les couleurs seulement définies par le terne, le pâle et le blafard.⁵

In a generally overheated article, trying to enlist Vallès into German Expressionism, Blanc accurately observes: 'Vallès gauchit les perspectives, tourmente les lignes, noircit le tableau. La vision remplace la vue.⁶

As Bellet puts it pungently, but for once with inadequate nuance, apart from political freedom, Vallès relished virtually nothing about England, for whose life he felt an aversion as visceral as that which, as a child, he had felt for onions (II, p. xii). Any English person hailing from outside London would exclaim how unfair it is to judge all England via the capital, which many natives find every bit as alien and hateful as do many foreigners. Critics underplay the shuttle or seesaw tactic of La Rue à Londres, which at different points seems to have been written (as indeed it was) from opposite sides of the Channel, so that Vallès refers at times to England as 'là-bas'. Two principal critical approaches predominate. The documentary (Tholoniat): Vallès's account is lacunary, inaccurate and biassed; and the aesthetic (Blanc): never mind the lesser contact with observable reality, what internally coherent picture does Vallès create? On the issue of his non-visits to provincial cities, where, Vallès recognised, working-class militancy would have been more obvious, Tholoniat suggests that the experience of the Commune—the provinces refusing to emulate Paris—might have blinkered him. Vallès, besides, was reluctant to admit that other forms of worker organisation—trade unions, provident societies—offered more gradualist forms of activism than he was yet ready to value.⁷ To his credit, he did not exaggerate the scale of poverty in London, but, like Taine, did little to analyse its causes, only its consequences. Cardboard cities are not recent inventions. Tholoniat points out that the number of skilled and well-paid workers was much higher than that of exploited semi-skilled or unskilled workers: 'Ce manque d'homogénéité de la classe ouvriére—et non la résignation—peut expliquer son apparent manque de combativite.'⁸ My own estimation is that the facts Vallès incorporates are generally accurate, but that he omitted—more through ignorance than perverseness—crucial areas. What is unforgettable about La Rue à Londres is the sense of a man mortally afraid of but fighting back against étouffement: asphyxiation, silencing, anonymity: a forgotten man lost in the crowd.

'Unlike the London residents of other origin, the French Londoner [ … ] remains above all a Frenchman, and retains all the feelings, characteristics, and customs of his race'.⁹ Of course, Vallès did not realise how French he was until he had to live in England. Yet, while undoubtedly as quintessentially French as Montaigne or Diderot, he seems 'Anglo-Saxon' in many ways, and even before he set foot here. His love of sport and of country fresh air; his fondness for eccentrics, all those who march to different drummers; his empirical bent which made him suspect all systems, Marxist, Jacobin or Proudhonist; his awareness of overlap and contamination between all would be clear divisions of thought and behaviour; his passion for exploiting, by wordplay and coinage, the often underused potential of his native tongue; his support of and identification with the underdog, the plucky loser ('II faut toujours applaudir aux révoltés, surtout quand ils sont vaincus'—I, 343). Though he spent a long time in England, he did not get far with assimilating the language, but in attitudes he comes partway to meet the anti-extremist. Playing the shuttle too, I would repeat that Vallès is very un-French in his near-immunity to intellectual incest, yet very French in his belief that cultural devaluation might seriously shake society, and very un-French again in his unworldly-wise capacity for surprise. 'Suis-je devenu Anglais en détestant John Bull? Ai-je perdu le flair et le tact français? Je ne crois pas. J'ai gagné comme tous les camarades, au contraire, le dédain des ficelles, et le désir de netteté en affaires. 'Oui: non'. Ah! I'on gagne cela en Angleterre!' (Corr. M., p. 264).

At a low ebb when trying to get another La Rue off the ground in 1879, he writes to Parisian correspondents:

J'en suis á me réjouir d'être rest dans un exil rigoureux, dans une Angleterre où les placards éclatent comme des pétards, oà il y a des manifestations de 100,000 hommes. Vous m'ôtez le courage. Nous sommes plus gais et plus Parisiens à Londres que la moitié des Parisiens que j'ai revus. [ … ] Vous parlez de mon normandisme d'aujourd'hui. Eh bien, mon cher, appelez ça anglaisisme et vous aurez trouvé le mot. Je ne ferai rien, rien, rien avec quelqu'un sans traité á l'anglaise, sûr, indéniable,. débattu, délini, et convenant á tous les deux.¹⁰

The blatant hypocrisy, the up-front reserve of the English ('perfidious Albion') have given way in Vallès's mind to this reliability. Vallès clearly plays one side off against the other, depending on circumstances. He was too French for the English and too English for the French. A cheval, again: in mid-Channel.

Return and Le Cri du peuple

His problems with this La Rue, which lasted only one month, demonstrate how little Vallès was cut out for working by proxies, or doing anything from a distance. He came alive only in the scrum—the least Olympian, the least point de vue de Sirius (Beuve-Méry) of French journalists. He could not, as he hoped, address the sons of his political enemies without joining them in the fray back in Paris, which had been largely quiescent during his exile, after the Commune. Would his return reveal him as an anachronism?

Edmond de Goncourt aimed to freeze Vallès in a stereotype: 'L'amer que Vallès a en lui, il le soigne, il le caresse, il le dorlote, il le travaille, il le porte en ville, pour le tenir toujours en haleine, comprenant fort bien que s'il venait à le perdre, il serait un ténor déposséedé de son ut'.".¹¹ It is true, and understandable, that on his return Vallès made frequent references backward, trying to reknot broken threads. As usual, he came clean. Turning down in 1881 offers of two Paris candidacies, he stresses that he fights lost battles: 'J'aime mieux être le porte-parole du passé [ … ] C'est un rôle qui vaut bien l'autre—je serai le député des vaincus. [ … ] Je veux être l'historien de la grande foule anonyme qui se révolta et fut écrasée en 1871' (II, pp. 717-18). Although he accepted that workers value their dearlywon suffrage, he seemed to feel a near-anarchist disdain about using his own vote. His mistrust of professional politicians remained intact. 'Nous ne sommes pas des politiciens, nous sommes les soldats et les peintres de l'idée sociale', manning 'notre barricade sans fusils' (pp. 395; 397). The Palais-Bourbon, in his eyes, was fundamentally unserious, a theatre or even trestles, 'I'asile des phrasassiers' (Cri du peuple, 30 mai 1884).

It is not surprising that he steered clear as much as possible of any adherence to constituted parties or doctrines: anarchism or collectivism. 'Je ne vais pas m'enfermer dans un bivouac, quand j'ai devant moi tout le champe de bataille révolutionnaire'. Don't fence me in. As before, he stresses that it is the will, the intentions, that matter in political action, and not class provenance. Here the habit does not designate the monk. In a twist on the idiom 'montrer patte blanche', he says no one needs to 'montrer main noire'; it did not matter in the Commune (II, pp. 440; 444). As Bellet comments, 'la vieille terreur Vallèsienne du clos, du circonscrit, du fermé, du muré, de la grille et de la chapelle, trouve sa correspondance idéologique et politique dans le refus de choisir une "école" socialiste au lieu d'une autre' (JVJR, p. 450).

As for Marxism, Vallès makes no mention of the First International until around 1870, and generally betrays little sense of class in the normal sense. In the 1870s surfaced a tendency, for French leftwingers, especially those in exile in London, to amalgamate Marx and Bismarck (perhaps a phonic coincidence, the second being almost the first twice over) on the grounds of pan-Germanist ambitions. In his letters to Arnould, Vallès asked him to boil down Das Kapital, 'si difficile á lire!' He heads straight for Marx's powerful metaphors: 'Saistu que c'est beau, cette définition du Capital: travail mort qui comme un vampire suce et dévore le travail vivant! [ … ] Et que cette idée de la marchandise, travail cristallisé, solidification de la peine, mérite qu'on y pense' (Corr. A., p. 219). While he had little grasp of the more abstract concepts of economics, he did retain a fascination with the Stock Market and the world of banking (JVJR, p. 451). As we saw in Chapter Two, Vallès coincides, all the same, with Marx in his hostility to historical plagiarism.

The social revolution of the nineteenth century can only create its poetry from the future, not from the past. It cannot begin its own work until it has sloughed off all its superstitious regard for the past. [ … ] In order to arrive at its own content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury the dead.'¹²

In harking back to the Commune, Vallès was hardly even dreaming of seeing it replicated. It was the spirit, and the justice of the Communards' cause, that must be kept alive, and pursued by other means. Though he defended Kropotkin, Vallès wrote against terrorism: 'L'assassinat politique isolé ne porte pas' (II, 1425). As in the previous two decades, he placed more trust and hope in the free exchange of ideas, 'le terrain de rendez-vous' (the word used less in the amatory sense than in that of a duelling-space) represented by his second Cri du peuple. He wanted to coalesce, or help to make coexist, the mutually exclusive and reciprocally destructive forces of the left. Such an effort at neutrality was very necessary for the times and the situation in France.

Readers' letters were invited, thus hoping to convert the French press from its traditional tribune stance into more of a dialogue, 'une tribune ouverte'. Generous space was given to popular feuilletons in order to increase circulation by making the paper more reader-friendly. Similarly, small emblems were placed at the head of each column to flag its contents at a glance: a bell (for parliamentary affairs), a trowel (for workers' meetings), or an eye (for police news). As an editor and journalist, Vallès always worked for the eyecatching, but not cony-catching. Le Cri du peuple campaigned against colonial expeditions to Tonkin ('La vivisection humaine va commencer'—II, 1093), for teachers, for reforms in the judicial system (especially the abolition of the death penalty). In Vallès's ideal republic, every citizen would do a stint as a constable (Cri du peuple, 5 avril 1884). He always stressed the 'social question' over politics (i.e. ideology, which he left largely to Guesde in the pages of the paper), though he never resolved the question of how you could separate the two.

In a campaign for children's rights, Vallès stresses that he wants prevention of cruelty, not revenge against brutal parents (II, 1369). One of his last articles protests the brainwashing of children by didactic plays disguised as fantasies. Children's dreams are essential, but not at the cost of abolishing reality. This is presumably why Robinson Crusoe, which combines exoticism and hard work, is so central to Vallès's canon. Why not awaken children to the exciting new world of science and industry, as in Jules Verne's work? (pp. 1422-4). On the question of progress, he can seem backward-turned, as when he criticises capitalist enterprises for taking over rubbish-collection in Paris, thus depriving hundreds of chiffonniers of a livelihood. He neglects the improvement in sanitation. Yet even here he has a point. Such biffins supplied other service industries (including restaurants) with recyclable materials. Greens might find these practices easier to stomach than others. Vallès is as well-informed on the daily budgets of biffins as he was earlier of those of saltimbanques (pp. 1105-1107).

Again and again, he returned to the primordial things: work, roof, bread, blood, tears, sweat. To his old category of society's forçats, he added the large numbers trapped and alienated in soulless factory-work. He came to see strikes as the only effective weapon available to workers. One of his last public appearances was at a solidarity meeting for the miners of Anzin in 1884, when desperately ill with the diabetes which would kill him in a few months. That the government was nervous about the popular appeal and influence of Le Cri du peuple is indicated by the Ballerich affair, when two policemen broke in and started shooting at the editorial staff. When one of the two was killed by self-defending fire, Vallès's apartment and even his sick-bed were violently searched. Perrot sums up the political standpoint of Le Cri du peuple in these terms: 'Un socialisme sans doctrine, protestataire et humanitaire, nostalgique et messianique, généreux et confus, perpétuellement résurgent dans la tradition francaise: un socialisme style flamboyant'.¹³

***Vallès's helpmeet after his return to France was Séverine. She used her husband's money to launch Le Cri du peuple in 1883. Their deep relationship, intimate but seemingly non-carnal, is encapsulated in her cry on Vallès's death: 'C'était mon père … C'était mon enfant!' Her frankly warm-hearted encomium makes a nicely sexist division of his influence on her: 'II me donna un cœur de citoyenne et un cerveau de citoyen'.¹⁴ When she eventually left Le Cri du peuple in 1888, after disagreements with Vallès's successors over its increasingly sectarian slant, she frequented, in a very Vallèsian phrase, 'I'ecole buissonnière de la Révolution'.¹⁵ She and Vallès enjoyed an exceptional osmosis; she assimilated his ways of thinking and expressing himself, and he trusted her judgment implicitly. His utter reliance on her puts a more benign slant on his perennial anxiety over plagiarism. As a cleric commented, she was a splended mixture of a pétroleuse (in words, not deeds) and a sœur de charité.¹⁶ Fittingly, in the same way that Vallès escaped 'la Semaine sanglante' in an ambulance, so the director of that service, Dr. Sémerie, introduced Vallès to Séverine and her doctor husband in Brussels. She would nurse his remaining years, when his lifelong taste for heavy peasant food did little to help his diabetes. She brought him comfort and stability, after a life of much insecurity and frequent deprivation. She played a major part in running the paper and in preparing L'Insurge and La Rue à Londres for publication. She protected Vallès when alive and after his death. In La Rue à Londres, he makes a moving dedication to Séverine: 'Vous avez fait à ma vie cadeau d'un peu de votre grâce et de votre jeunesse, vous avez fait à mon œuvre l'offrande du meilleur de votre esprit et de votre cœur' (II, 1133).

Committed Literature

The idea of committed literature pulls together Vallès's two lifelong concerns: politics and literature. There, above all, he is in his characteristic position: à cheval. This straddle is archetypically that of the committed writer (of the left), reneguing on his generally middle class or petit-bourgeois origins, yet rarely, if ever, integrated into and adopted by the working-classes. He is thus often stranded in no man's land, caught in the crossfire. This situation can be alternately or simultaneously exhilarating and anguishing. Of course, all of us live less dramatically in a murky middle ground between metaphor and concrete reality, the spirit and the letter. Tension reputedly energises. Vallès was not un écrivain de chapelle, and so was largely unforgivable to any side in the French literary church.

Mi-figue, mi-raisin, in his first book, L'Argent, Vallès was proclaiming the need to live with your times. At no point did he adopt the posture of the intellectual fakir. Indeed, so convinced was he always of the necessity to have convictions, that he was ready to salute those of his political opponents, for instance Barbey d'Aurevilly: 'Je hais la politique autoritaire et dévote de M. Barbey d'Aurevilly. [ … ] Mais il est resté lui, avec toutes les vertus de ses vices' (I, pp. 349; 348). There is a strong element of the willy-nilly in all this ('en dehors de toute volonté de l'écrivain' (II, 1340)); the writer has to respond to historical reality, which is much bigger than any individual. 'Tout se tient. La littérature change de tour quand la politique change de face' (I, 400). Vallès always persisted, however, in distinguishing the social from the political: 'J'aime mieux, après tout, la littérature qui refait les moeurs que la politique qui fait les lois' (p. 435). These terms suggest that he places far more weight on how society regulates itself (with some guidance from the likes of Vallès) than on abstract theories of how it ought to be organised. As Bellet comments: 'Il a le sentiment, aigu et profond, de la rencontre inéluctable des mouvements artistiques et sociaux, quelles que soient les différences de leurs rythmes propres et même si, souvent, le rythme des mouvements artistiques et littéraires, plus rapide, devance tous les autres' (p. 1418). That is, the writer is not only in step; he may be prancing ahead. Whatever he does, he must never fear, as Nietzsche urged, 'to trespass upon actuality.'¹⁷

Not all agree. Tocqueville spoke of the crisscross contamination of politics and literature, each aping the other, so that politicians often talk like books, and authors think they can set their countries to rights.¹⁸ The grassroots American novelist James Farrell puts his spoke in: 'Literary men have the habit of rushing into the periphery of politics, and they contribute to political struggle—not knowledge, not practical experience, not theoretical analyses, but rhetoric. Rhetoric is the one commodity in politics of which there has never been a scarcity'. It is possible that, when Socrates spoke of 'the unexamined life', he had in mind much political discourse, and much literature that marches in too tight a step with it. We are all so hardened to jargon, cliché and double talk (in electioneering, party manifestoes and press conferences) that we sometimes fail to appreciate the much richer and denser ambiguities of good literature. Many, besides, want fiction to be more obviously up-front than it can or should be; they want it akin to pamphleteering, political correctness. Against such persuasions, a committed writer like Vallès demonstrates how resistance to ideology (mind-bending), even that of your ostensible allies, is every bit as important as endorsement of it. 'Commitment', besides, is not a good translation of the Sartrian engagement. It has legal, forensic overtones, and misses the input of gage (promise, wager). Commitment sounds like that which is imposed on you; engagement what you will yourself to choose (as in 'engaged to be married').

Most Naturalists were essentially 'down there on a visit': slumming. They were exploiting a seam, less like miners than like investors. They rarely sided with the oppressed creatures they described. Even though Vallès, in the 1860s, termed the Goncourts' style 'tourmenté, prétentieux, scudérique', and described their stance as 'le coin d'un cénacle, mais ce n'est pas la vie', he was generous enough to conclude: 'Ce n'est pas senti, mais comme c'est observé!' (I, pp. 350-53). He did not practise 'l'onanisme rétinien' of which they boasted.'¹⁹ Zola did not relish Vallès's calling him 'un rouge en littérature, un communard de la plume' (II, 120). It is fairly comical to watch each bank of the divide tugging the communal blanket to one side in these ways, Vallès claiming that Daudet, the Goncourts and Zola were revolutionary despite themselves, a prophetic twist on the Soviet notion of 'objective guilt'; and the Naturalists trying to water down Vallès's firebrand writings. Gradually, however, Vallès's rough logic made him openly hostile. Naturalists were 'maniaques de la constatation, mouleurs de michès, point mouleurs de vrais mâles!' (a pun on michès and godemichès: brothel clients and dildoes). They waste their talents on lubricious tales, instead of speaking up for real suffering (pp. 1100-1101). Despite seeming to be censorious about subject matter here, it was the pretence of political neutrality that Vallès really could not stomach.

Many of these matters came to a head when Vallès engaged in a polemic with a spokesman for the Zola school of Naturalists, Paul Alexis, who hoped for the advent of a press 'où [ … ] la politique, n'occupant plus que la place qu'elle occupera alors dans la vie des peuples, sera reléguée entre le Sport et les Annonces, piteusement'.²⁰ He was reacting no doubt to earlier charges addressed to him by Vallès: 'L'homme qui dit n'avoir pas d'opinions politiques en a une. Il est le collaborateur et le complice de tous ceux qui ont mis la main sur le pouvoir' (II, 812). Vallès scoops Sartre here. The only alternative to engagement is parasitism: 'Ou insurgé ou courtisan: il n'y a pas à sortir de là'. Vallès goes on to compare would be abstentionists with the 'platonic' (i.e. non-participatory) clients in brothels (ibid.).

Already in the 1860s, Vallès had mocked one such illustrious abdicator, Baudelaire, whom he presumably could not forgive for reneguing on his young man's fling with revolution in 1848 ('Le 2 DÉCEMBRE m 'a physiquement dépolitiqué').²¹ Like Sartre, Vallès homes in on the posturing man and neglects the writer. He is totally wrong, as a result, in judging that Baudelaire's fame will be short-lived. For Vallès, Baudelaire is the perfect mugwump, on the fence, or on both sides of it at once. He hedged his bets on the religious issue. No doubt, too, Vallès's harsh attack on Baudelaire, whom he knew from bohemian cafés, is part of his general attack on the unquestioning cult of genius, the monstre sacré. The crucial criticism is that of bad faith: 'Il n'avait pas la santé d'un débauché et avait dans son enfer une petite porte masquee par ou l'on pouvait remonter au ciel' (I, 973). In other words, in all his pacts with Satan, Baudelaire always inserted an escape clause. 'Il y avait en lui du prêtre, de la vieille femme et du cabotin. C'était surtout un cabotin' (p. 971). It is ironical that he accuses Baudelaire of being a ham actor, when this was the regular complaint about Vallès's public persona. He misses the point of the dandiacal, wilful mystification.

Another preuve par l'absurde of the value of engagement is the sad André Gill. Vallès felt strong sympathy for this excellent caricaturist when he went insane and was locked up. While he could forgive, he never could forget, and Gill's earlier contribution to the cause of contestation had not been followed through; indeed in the Commune Gill had been a turncoat. For Vallès, true commitment preserves sanity, a view which runs absolutely counter to the common twentieth-century dismissal of all political passion as neurotic (II, 721). Before he lost his reason, however, Gill struck home with these remarks about Vallès's stance: 'On a eu dans sa vie une heure pendant laquelle on s'est trouvé particulièrement beau, on s'est gobé; dans la glace on s'est trouvé des airs de héros ou de martyr. [ … ] Héros et martyrs! Vous en riiez autrefois. [ … ] Ne soyez pas une vieille barbe, l'Homère entêté d'une épopée ratée.²² Vallès's problem was a common one: even when you are right, it is hard to avoid appearing self-righteous. Vallès recognised that courage is not on tap to everyone, but inciters must possess some, otherwise they have double standards: calling for blood, then running away (see II, 116). Surely Vallès makes the lily-livered reader at least temporarily ashamed, when he talks of 'ces gens qui se sont fait de leur impuissance un piédestal, et parlent du haut de leur impuissance comme Démosthène du haut de la tribune' (I, 954). Vallès's work is a reminder, writing against the self-induced amnesia both readers and writers so facilely fall into. 'Forgetfulness, especially of classes and class conflict, is a common theme of bourgeois culture, a theme which can be related to the concept of art as a transcendent form of activity'.²³ While never approaching the later notion of 'socialist realism', Vallès's views are certainly close to what has been called 'critical realism', already present in Vallès's lecture on Balzac and later acknowledged as a significant category by Engels: 'Est-ce que les socialistes socialisants ont écrit contre la famille, la vertu et l'or des pages plus cruelles que Dumas fils, Flaubert, de Goncourt, Zola?' (II, 1340). Vallès detects the ideological dimension, the would-be manipulation, even of children's literature: 'Tous [ … ] montraient le doigt de Dieu, partout où il y avait un trou où le fourrer' (p. 744). The Jesuits always knew that you have to catch them young.

Even when denied for ideological reasons, the urge to political partisanship is ubiquitous in a cultural tradition like the French given to embattled polemic. You have to take sides, make your bed and lie on it. None of this entails crude propaganda. As Engels said of Tendenz-Literatur: 'I believe that there is no compulsion for the writer to put into the reader's hands the future historical resolution of the social conflicts which he is depicting'.²⁴ The just society can be talked about, if at all, only in the optative mood. L'Insurgé in its practice concurs with this theory. Does this view concede that written attacks can only ever be paper tigers, that political novels can never pack any political clout? Significantly, it is a writer most removed from the fray, Mallarmé, who makes the wildest claim: 'La vraie bombe c'est le livre.²⁵ This statement is pathetic in the truest sense, but a Symbolist poet supporting anarchist explosions would tend to take metaphors for actualities, and experimental writing for a revolutionary deed (a pathos still to be found in some deconstructionist criticism). Vallès knew full well that the pen is never mightier than the sword, but he believed that it may on occasion give added impetus to the sword-arm. Above all, Vallès never suspects or seeks impunity: a price has always to be paid for any decisions acted upon.

I have mentioned Sartre (a self-confessed 'victime du livre' if ever there was one) before in connexion with Vallès. Les Mots unmercifully probes the posture of writer-as-saviour. It is regrettable that, by a strabismic oversight, Sartre missed a powerful trick when he all but omitted Vallès as a vigorous forebear (with real claws) of littérature engagée. In Qu'est-ce que la litérature? he mentions only, in contrast with seventeenth-century social satire, 'la grande satire de Beaumarchais, de P.-L. Courier, de J. Vallès, de Céline'.²⁶ At least he puts Vallès in suitable company. He and Vallès share a similar revulsion for Baudelaire's cabotinage. Both see the writer as a free consciousness addressing a free reader linked by a relationship of trust (a leap in the dark). When Vallès turned down the offer of a seat in the Académie Goncourt, and indeed denounced the whole project, he recalls, all due allowances made, Sartre's refusal of the Nobel Prize. Neither of these committed writers wanted to be rewarded with a prix de sagesse for being literary good boys.

Shortly before Vallès's death, Edmond de Goncourt recorded an anecdote that I would prefer not to be apocryphal: 'Robert Caze, parlant de la maladie de la pose chez Vallès, raconte qu'il l'a vu manger une choucroute dans une brasserie du Quartier Latin, avec un tablier de franc-maçon, dont il s'essuyait les lèvres.²⁷ If true, it would demonstrate his durably iconoclastic attitude to congealed rituals. I wonder what he would have made of his own funeral in 1885: a suitably mixed event, a rehearsal for Hugo's even more massive funeral three months later: very large crowds, scuffles and punch-ups, some German socialists provoking cries of 'Down with Germany'—ironical in that Vallès was never keen on Marx or Germany.

…

Abbreviations

Corr. A:

Correspondance avec Arnould

Corr. M:

Correspondance avec Malot

Corr. S:

Correspondance avec Séverine

TP:

Le Tableau de Paris

JVJR: Roger Bellet:

Jules Vallès, journalisme et révolution

AJV:

Les Amis de Jules Vallès

Notes

¹ Rogozinski, D., 'Franchise autobiographique', AJV, 1 (1984), 66.

² One of his few comments on this was: 'Je sais un peu l'anglais' (Corr. A., p. 79). He mentions very few English acquaintances, and these usually spoke French.

³ Dr. J. Wittlin, cited in Tabori, P., The Anatomy of Exile (Harrap, 1972), p. 32.

⁴ Tholoniat, R., 'Vallès et Flora Tristan face à l'Angleterre victorienne', L'Information historique, XLV, 1 (1983), 35.

⁵ Tholoniat, 'Jules Vallès imagier londonien', AJV, 7 (1989), 61.

⁶ Blanc, J.-N., 'Une ville écrite: l'expressionisme dans La Rue à Londres', AJV, 10 (1990), 53.

⁷ Tholoniat, 'Gavroche et Joë. L'Enfant et l'Insurgé. Deux mythes personnels de Jules Vallès face à la réalité anglaise', AJV, 1 (1984), 87-8.

⁸ Tholoniat, 'La Pauvretà à Londres à travers Notes sur l'Angleterre de Taine et La Rue à Londres Vallès', Confluents, 1 (1976), 92.

⁹ Villars, P., 'French London', in Sims, G.R. (ed.), Living London (Cassell, 1901), II, 134.

¹⁰ Callet, A., 'Lettres d'exil', La Revue du Palais (février 1918), pp. 397-8.

¹¹ Goncourt, Journal, III, 104.

¹² Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, p. 149.

¹³ Perrot, M., foreword to Feller, H., 'Physionomie d'un quotidien: Le Cri du peuple (1883-9)', Le Mouvement social, 53 (1965), 68.

¹⁴ Séverine, Choix de papiers, pp. 22-3.

¹⁵ Quoted in Le Garrec, E., Séverine (Seuil, 1982), p. 306.

¹⁶ Quoted in Gille, G., Jules Vallès, p. 520.

¹⁷ Nietzsche, F., The Genealogy of Morals (New York: Doubleday, 1956), p. 235.

¹⁸ Tocqueville, A. de, L'Ancien Regime et la Rédvolution (Gallimard, 1967), pp. 240-41.

¹⁹ See Bellet's excellent article: 'Les Goncourt et Jules Vallès: une rencontre', Francofonia, 19 (1990), 130.

²⁰ Alexis, P., Le Matin, 17 aoft 1884. Alexis, however, wrote regularly for Le Cri du peuple, often under the pseudonym of Trublot. See also his curious story, 'Jean Vingtrin' (AJV, 2 [1985], pp. 49 ff.), where a writer switches off from the cacophonous gunfire of the Commune to concentrate, unperturbed, on his civilisationsaving life work.

²¹ Baudelaire, Correspondance générale (Conard, 1947), I, 152.

²² Delfau, p. 104.

²³ Rifkin, A., 'Cultural Movement and the Paris Commune', Art History, II, 2 (1979), 207.

²⁴ Engels, F., Über Kunst und Literatur (Berlin, 1949), p. 143.

²⁵ Mallarmé, quoted in Mauclair, C., Servitude et grandeur littéraires (Ollendorff, 1922), p. 116.

²⁶ Sartre, Situations II (Gallimard, 1948), p. 140.

²⁷ Goncourt, Journal, III, 446.

Select Bibliography

Vallès: Editions

Correspondance avec Hector Malot, ed. M.-C. Bancquart. La Rue, ed. P. Pillu.

Le Tableau de Paris, eds. M.-C. Bancquart, L. Scheler.

Vallès-Séverine: Correspondance, ed. L. Scheler.

Books, Theses, Chapters, Articles

Bellet, R. Jules Vallès, Journalisme et Révolution. Tusson: Du Lérot, 1987-1989, 2 vols.

Delfau, G. Jules Vallès: L'Exil à Londres. Bordas, 1971.

Gille, G. Jules Vallès, 1832-1885: ses révoltes, sa maîtrise, son prestige. Flammarion, 1941, 2 vols.