Vallès, Jules

(1832-1885)

   writer, journalist

   Born in Puy, Jules Vallès came to Paris to dedicate himself to a career in letter, but soon took up other diverse professions. As an uncompromising polemicist, he collected his various articles (written between 1861 and 1865) in LesRéfractaires (1865) and La Rue (1866), in which he demonstrated his enthusiasm for the proletarian cause. in 1871, he became a member of the Paris commune, which he defended in his journal Cri du peuple. Condemned to death at the end of the insurrection, he sought refuge in London and did not return to Paris until 1880. His romantic trilogy, Jacques Ving-tras (1879-86), which includes L'Enfant (1979), Le Bachelier (1881), and L'Insurge (posthumous, 1886), evokes the author's youth and struggles, as well as the tragedy of the Commune. outraged by the injustices of bourgeois society (and the ideas that it put forth), Vallès never claimed to be objective but wrote in a lively style, full of unexpected images and in a sometimes disconcerting syntax. He also resorted to an often shocking realism enlivened by his revolutionary lyricism and rhetoric.