UK Britain, Anarchist Federation ORGANISE! #85 - Culture
FEATURE -- Jules Vallès-Child -- Student Revolutionary
Journalist Novelist (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
Vallès was born Louis-Jules Vallez in Puy-en-Velay, in the Auvergne, in France, on June
11, 1832. Vallès's last name was wrongly entered on his birth certificate, and in young
adulthood he embraced this mistake and used it as a revolt against his father. ----
Jules's father was a pion, a teaching assistant or class supervisor who descended from a
farming family, and pursued a career as a teacher in order to obtain social status. He was
never able to rise above the lowest level of the teaching profession. His mother came from
a peasant family of even lower social standing. The family atmosphere was one of
bitterness. This was in the context of a France ruled by Louis-Phillippe known as the
"bourgeois king" who defended the interests of that class and called on people to enrich
themselves. This is what the Vallez family sought to do but with little success.
From an early age Jules was brutally beaten by his mother
and these beatings continued into his teens. Later on his
father started administering beatings too. At the same time his
father made sure that he received a classical education, as
part of the family plan for social aspiration, and as a child Jules
was an excellent student, doing very well in Greek, Latin and
rhetoric. Jules was deeply unhappy at home, but inwardly he
harboured a spirit of resistance to the harshness and cruelty
of his life. It was not surprising that he was to develop as an
intransigent enemy of authority and oppression, that he was
to generalise his own desire for kindness, freedom and justice
to freedom and justice for all. He also developed caustic and
cutting senses of humour and irony which sustained him
through his childhood and indeed the rest of his life.
Jules witnessed with enthusiasm the fall of Louis-Phillippe
whilst in Nantes. The establishment of the Second Republic
led on to an uprising of the workers and Jules' enthusiasm
turned from delight to consternation as he saw captured
workers being marched down the street, especially in the wake
of the 1848 uprising of students, artisans, and unemployed
workers in Paris. He took part in the unrest of 1848, joining
a republican circle and putting forward motions, tellingly, on
the abolition of the baccalaureate and the absolute liberty
of childhood. He increasingly rebelled against his father's
insistence on the need to pass the baccalaureate and pursue
a career in teaching.
He was sent to Paris in September 1848 to study. He
became increasingly involved in republican groups. He had
a deep seated love for the masses, for the downtrodden
and oppressed. At the same time he rejected revolutionary
idols such as Robespierre and was later to write that he
was the elder brother of Bonaparte, that is a betrayer of the
Revolution. He similarly disliked another idol of the republican
revolutionaries, Rousseau, who he regarded as a hypocrite.
He increasingly neglected his studies and by necessity
started living a bohemian existence. With the coup d'etat by
Louis Napoleon in 1851, Vallès attempted to rally resistance
and fought on one of the rare barricades at that time. Fleeing
to Nantes, he ended up being sent to a mental asylum by
his father. This may have been to protect him from pursuit
by the authorities, but nevertheless Jules managed to be
released early next year. He then passed his baccalaureate
and returned to Paris. However he could not obtain any
worthwhile job and returned to a bohemian existence,
becoming part of the expanding "intellectual proletariat" of
the period, graduates unable to obtain work and forced into
unemployment or low-paid jobs.
He tried to get a job as a bricklayer but was rejected, the
employer realising that he was educated. He worked at a
number of secretarial and tutoring jobs and started writing
to obtain the odd bit of money, putting his hand to dictionary
entries (where he made up literary references!), jingles, tour
guides, and articles in newspapers. It should be remembered
that Louis Napoleon who had now proclaimed himself
Napoleon III, kept a tight grip on the press and all articles
were heavily censored.
Jules's father died in 1857 and he was deeply affected by
this. Despite the harsh treatment he had received from his
parents, he still retained a love for them and was to recognise
in his novel Le Bachelier (The Graduate) that his father was
just as much a victim of exploitation as himself and others.
Vallès continued to be involved in republican activity and in
several abortive plots against Louis Napoleon. He became
an admirer of the thinker Proudhon, opposing himself to
Jacobin currents. He had a fierce hatred of religion and of
the police and this often got him into trouble. He got various
jobs working for liberal dailies and produced a book called
L'Argent (Money), financed by an industrialist, which made
out it was about how to use the stock exchange but was in
fact a disguised attack on finance that was full of sarcasm
and irony.
Vallès became an early pioneer of reportage, writing a
series of articles in various papers on Les Irreguliers (The
Irregulars), people marginalised by society and including
musicians, tumblers, jugglers and boxers. He also began a
series on Les Réfractaires (Objectors) people like him who
refused to follow the careers they were meant to, bohemian
outcasts who lived lives on the edge.
Vallès was a great walker and used his observations of street
life to put together a number of articles that were collated
in the 1866 book La Rue (The Street). Between 1867 and
1871 he established seven newspapers that had short lives
because they were shut down by the authorities because of
what were seen as subversive articles. In fact Vallès served a
sentence of a month in prison and then later in the same year
of 1868, two months of prison for his articles.
Vallès opposed himself to the outbreak of the war between
Prussia and France in 1870, standing as one of the minority
against the mass war hysteria. The war was disastrous for
the French regime and Napoleon III was overthrown. The
new regime at Versailles attempted to remove artillery paid
for by public subscription from the heights of Montmartre.
This led on to the declaration of the Paris Commune in that
year of 1871.
He was one of the editors of L'Affiche Rouge (The Red
Poster) which proclaimed the Commune in January 1871.
He founded a new paper Le Cri Du Peuple (The Cry of The
People) which became very popular in Paris and he served
on the education commission of the Commune. He was one
of the minority who opposed the setting up of a Committee of
Public Safety (shades of the hated Robespierre!) alongside
others like the painter Gustave Courbet and the worker
Eugene Varlin (see Organise!77 for a biography of Varlin).
The Committee banned all newspapers and Le Cri was one
of those shut down, despite its revolutionary message of self-
organisation. During the Bloody Week of May 1871 which led
to the crushing of the Commune and shootings of thousands
of Communards, Vallès fought on the barricades up to the
last.
He fled to London in October, and was sentenced to death
in his absence. He spent nine years in London, often in dire
circumstances. There he started writing the first book of
what was to become his masterpiece, the Jacques Vingtras
trilogy. This was L'Enfant (The Child) where he described his
unfortunate childhood. He dedicated the book "to all those
who were bored stiff at school or reduced to tears at home,
who in childhood were bullied by their teachers or thrashed
by their parents". Despite the scenes of brutality the book is
laced with humour and brimming with humanity.
After the amnesty for the Communards in 1880, Vallès returned
to Paris and began publishing works he had written in exile,
including Le Bachelier (The Graduate) dedicated to "those
who nourished by Greek and Latin are dead of hunger". This
book has never been translated into English unlike the other
two books of the trilogy. In this writer's opinion it stands as
tall as the other two books, describing a bohemian existence,
often with days without food, an experience that was lived not
just by Vallès but by many other members of the "intellectual
proletariat". It has not received as much recognition as it
should.
Vallès now began to suffer from the years of ill-treatment
and bad diet and contracted diabetes. He died after many
weeks of pain, saying on his deathbed that "I have suffered
very much" a comment that could be applied as much to his
whole life as to his last days. A few days before his death the
hated police raided the flat where he was being nursed, even
searching under the mattress where he lay. We can imagine
that Vallès might have appreciated the irony of this event!
The funeral of Vallès was attended by 10,000 and the
appearance of the coffin greeted by cries of "Long Live
the Commune! Long Live the Social Revolution! Long Live
Anarchy!"
The third book of the trilogy was released after his death.
This is L'Insurgé (The Insurrectionist) which describes
Vallès's growing powers as a writer and the unfolding and
then crushing of the Commune. It is dedicated "To the dead
of 1871. To all those who, victims of social injustice, took
up arms against a badly made world and formed the great
federation of sorrows beneath the flag of the Commune."
Vallès deserves to be discovered. His literary innovations pre-
dated many modern writers like Sarraute, Céline, Queneau,
and Beckett. He is a thoroughly modern writer, with his self-
referencing and his ironic asides addressed to himself. He
speaks to us over the centuries, to all of us who feel profoundly
ill at ease in this society, who are agonised by injustice and
inequality. He celebrates the resistance of the human being
to such injustice and inequality. As Charles Stivale wrote in
1992 Vallès "forcefully introduces the possibility of resistance
and the necessity of history."
