VII

II fallait une phrase, rien qu'une, mais il en fallait une où palpitât l'âme de Paris; il fallait un mot à Paris pour prendre position dans l'avenir.
Vallès, L'Insurgé

A phrase was needed, just one, but one in which the soul of Paris beat; Paris needed a word to take its position in the future.

Published in full only a year after his death, L'Insurgé is Vallès' political as well as literary legacy, both a statement of his political

convictions and a handbook of his literary practices. Like his first book, whose conception and delivery are recounted in L'Insurgé, this novel is "the son of [his] suffering" (2:889). Its readers gave him the sense of family that he never had, "a family that loves you more than your own ever did" (2:908). It records the liberation of the very autobiographical Jacques Vingtras from the traumas of L 'Enfant and the misery of student days detailed in Le Bachelier. In the extraordinary fraternity of the Commune, in the "grand federation of sorrows," Vingtras finds vindication for his loneliness and his suffering. "Many other children have been beaten like me, many other students have gone hungry, and have arrived at the cemetery without having their youth vindicated" (2:1087). His rancor is dead—he "has had [his] day" (2: 1087). L'Insurgé is not the reporter's chronicle of the Commune; it is not even a participant's testimony; it is instead Vallès-Vingtras' wrenchingly personal record of "his day."

In literature too, Vallès moved from revolt to revolution. The narrative itself is as self-consciously revolutionary as the political program elaborated by Vallès and his fellow Communards. L'Insurgé also recounts the passage from literary rebel (révolté ) to revolutionary, from an awareness that the nineteenth century needed a new aesthetic to the realization of that aesthetic, first in his journalism, and then in the Jacques Vingtras trilogy. It testifies to the success of the literary insurgence even as it recounts the ultimate failure of the political insurrection.

Early on in L'Insurgé, when Vingtras-Vallès is a minor clerk in the town hall of the fifteenth arrondissement in Paris, he is invited to lecture on Balzac to an audience that largely opposes the imperial government of Napoléon III. But if these bourgeois contest the current political regime, they firmly support the reigning literary mode. Like Robespierre and his imitators, they are austere fanatics of classical form (2:897). Vingtras gets carried away, he forgets Balzac, and finally "breathes freely." But why, he wonders, does the audience not protest? Why are they still in their seats? And he realizes that he has dressed up his language as he himself has dressed up, in overcoat, hat, and gloves, in bourgeois black formal attire. "These imbeciles let me insult their religions and their beliefs because I do it in a language that respects their rhetoric" (2:898).^[21] Even so, the subversive content of the lecture gets him sacked.

Vingtras learns his lesson. Language does not simply carry revolutionary content. It must itself be revolutionary. Henceforth his insurgency would be as much linguistic as political. Aesthetic insurgency creates as many dilemmas as political revolt. When Vingtras endeavors to obtain a position as a regular contributor to a paper, he finds that "no place is there any place for my brutalities." The mighty Émile de Girardin sends him away and refuses his collaboration on the grounds that, even if he steers clear of overtly political subjects, Vingtras' very distinctive language will be too strong. The sound of his trumpet will drown out the "clarinets" of the other collaborators (2:903-4). True enough, Vingtras admits, he always manages to wave a bit of the red flag in the most innocuous articles and to slip in among the roses and the violets of his "Saturday bouquets" for Le Figaro "a bloody geranium, a red aster" (2:905). Vallès protests vehemently against the segregation of language, of "style," of "good writing." He is "almost ashamed" at the praise heaped on the style of his first book, so great is his outrage that the critics do not see "the arm hidden under the black lace of my sentences like Achilles' sword at Scyros" (2:907), that, in sum, they close literature off in a world apart.

In L'Insurgé Vallès confronts the predicament faced in the novel by Jacques Vingtras and three other men of letters charged with drawing up a proclamation of resistance to the Prussian army then encircling Paris. Men of letters, bourgeois, they had to devise a language that would do justice to the situation and, more importantly still, to the people in whose name this proclamation was to be made. This proclamation in the name of the people had to avoid both bourgeois platitudes about the lower classes and the equally deadly and equally false high-blown rhetoric: "We had to have the people speak a language that was both simple and ample. Before history they were taking the floor, in the most awful of storms. . . . We had to think of Country and Revolution at the same time" (2:1017). The Prussian bombardments of Paris that began the very morning that the proclamation was to be made public made this task more urgent than ever: "A phrase was needed, just one, but one in which the soul of Paris beat; Paris needed a word to take its position in the future" (2:1017-18). The word "commune," the phrase "Place au Peuple! Place à la Commune!" And it was this final phrase that would declare the Commune two months later. "Commune" was the word they were seeking, the

fateful word that expressed the conjunction of the people and the city, the word that soon thereafter would turn into a reality. Here was proof that the right word had been found, a word that contained the soul of the city.

This new city—the "country of honor, the city of salvation, the bivouac of the Revolution" (2:1031), the "city of combat" (2:1395)—is also a creation of words. The need to find the right word haunts Vingtras throughout the novel. Bourgeois especially by virtue of his studies, he fears falling into the trap of rhetoric. He himself is necessarily another victim of the book, which explains his admiration for the comrades in the Commune who care not a fig for the niceties of grammar or the elegance of the well-turned phrase. One character in particular, Vingtras' deputy at the town hall of La Villette, "signs orders paved with barbarisms but paved as well with revolutionary intentions." Not the least of the revolts his deputy has organized is "a formidable insurrection against grammar" (2:1033). Vingtras rejoices when the minister of public instruction of the Commune, a cobbler in his cups, boasts of having introduced "leather" into the Conservatory of the French Language—"leather" being the slang term for solecism—and having given tradition a kick in the backside (2:1037) Yet this same man apologizes to Vingtras the journalist for the grammatical errors that "gum up" his plan for public education. But the plan for public education that this untutored, aggressively ungrammatical shoemaker comes up with leaves Vingtras almost speechless. In these "dirty crumpled sheets" of paper scribbled by a funny looking quasi illiterate, Vingtras finds more good sense and more wisdom than in all the schemes put forward by the "bilious looking scholars" who spend all their lives on the subject (2:1038).

At every turn Vingtras confronts the dilemma of the bourgeois revolutionary: he chooses the people, but do they choose him? L'Insurgé records the ceaseless effort of the writer to bridge the gulf that society erects between Vingtras and his chosen people. The virulence of the condemnation of the Commune by most writers of the time flows from the fear of what abolition of hierarchy would do to the very conception of literature and the literary. That Vallès himself was a member of the Commission de l'Enseignement of the Commune was, for writers like Edmond de Goncourt, almost the worst that could be said about the insurrection. Classical France, Goncourt declared,

would never accept such theories and still less the practice they implied.^[22]