Abstract EN:

The novelist Jules Vallès (1832-1885) is not a theorist, much less a theorist of violence. In contrast to what it was for a Blanqui or an Engels, violence was not, for Vallès, a means to a political or an economic end. Rather, out of what Pasolini would have called his "violent life", he made a novel that is part recollection, part re-creation. For Jacques Vingtras, the fictional double of the author in L'Enfant (1879), Le Bachelier (1881) and L'Insurgé (1886), the problem is not to reflect – nor, indeed, to reflect upon – violence, not to coldly examine its bloody aftermath or rationalize it as a recourse, but, rather, to conjure it up. Vingtras is an iconoclast and wields a wicked pen. For both of these reasons, he is the target of State violence. As a fictional chronicler, he bears witness to both the institutionalized violence of which he was a victim and the liberating acts of violence in which he participated – moving from ironic detachment to lyrical adherence. Vingtras received violence as his heritage. By exercising his right of inventory, he staked his claim as heir to his own works. But in the end, his individual revolt was absorbed into an insurrectional movement – the Paris Commune. As spokesman for a people in Revolution, it is finally the maelstrom of civil unrest that he was forced to confront.