VIII

On est en révolution, on y reste . . . il s'agit seulement d'avoir le temps de montrer ce qu'on voulait, si on ne peut pas faire ce qu'on veut!
Vallès, L'Insurgé

We are in revolution, and we're staying there . . . we only need the time to show what we wanted to do if we cannot do what we want!

Vallès' conception of a lived revolution and a communal literature could not differ more from the prophetic sense of self and grandiose conception of literature that guided Victor Hugo for over half a century. By the time he gets to Quatrevingt-treize, Hugo has transformed Paris into a heavenly city, not of God but of revolution. Vallès, on the contrary, from the beginning to the end of his career, writes against such sublimation. His Paris is the city of combat, not a cosmic struggle between good and evil but the struggles of everyday life to build a better future. Vallès is at once more ambitious and less universal. His literary ambitions are tied to his political actions; he would undoubtedly be content to claim for his writing what he insisted upon for his political actions: "My name will remain posted in the workshop of social wars as that of a worker who was not idle" (2:1087). To the aesthetic of inflation that governs Hugo's apocalyptic imagination Vallès responds with an aesthetic of deflation, of compression and contraction to the quotidian of the worker.

No single example better displays the distinctive nature of the two aesthetics than the way each represents the guillotine. From the executions of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette through those of the Terror, the guillotine came to symbolize the dark side of the French Revolution. A life-long opponent of capital punishment, Hugo wrote his first denunciation of the guillotine in Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné in 1829. Continued recourse to the guillotine offered telling evidence of the lack of progress in a supposedly progressive age. The final chapter of Quatrevingt-treize, with its confrontation of the guillotine sent from Paris and the medieval Breton tower, sets up the guillotine as the ultimate symbol of the Revolution and of '93. Hugo turns the

guillotine itself into a figure of rhetoric, a giant oxymoron: the agent of modernity that is at the same time the product of feudalism, a terrifying machine that originates in nature. Hugo projects a guillotine that dwarfs the Revolution itself.

Vallès, instead, sees the guillotine in very prosaic terms. The machine terrifies precisely because it is so commonplace. There is no need for rhetorical flourishes. Vallès' account of an execution (1:930-36) insists upon the ordinary quality of the event, upon the absence of drama and the want of spectacle. He deliberately deflates the rhetoric of the guillotine to cut the machine itself down to size. Vallès paints himself as a victim of books, for here again the grotesque, inflated narratives have left him totally unprepared. He expected a sinister executioner; he envisioned the guillotine itself "like a supplicating angel holding its red arms toward the sky" and terrifying all those who looked upon it. If the spectators shiver at this execution, Vallès makes it clear that the shivers have nothing to do with the dramatic horror of the situation: the prison yard was freezing. The "puny scaffold" that arrives in pieces and has to be put up by carpenters wrapped up in scarves so as not to catch cold reminds Vallès of provincials setting up a float for the annual Corpus Christi parade. There is not much to see at all, and whatever drama there is comes from Vallès' imagination fired up by all the books he has read. Monsieur de Paris, the executioner, resembles nothing so much as the bourgeois that he so obviously is, with his long overcoat, his cigar, his sleepy and vaguely bored look, and his innocuous conversations about gardening. He has a job to do, and he does it with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of attention to detail. A final blow to an overwrought imagination, the Provencal accent reveals that Monsieur de Paris is not even from Paris!^[23]

Behind and sustaining this deflationary rhetoric is the aesthetic of the street. Once people and places and language are brought down to the level of the street, then the street takes over to put forward its people and places and language. The revolution is permanent in L'Insurgé because there is always deflationary work to be done: the monuments of the bourgeoisie to be torn down, the pretentious language of the bourgeoisie to be punctured, the Paris of the bourgeoisie to be redefined. Jacques Vingtras traces the first stirrings of this book to the funeral of Henry Murger, the author of Scènes de la vie de Bohème (on which Puccini based his even more maudlin opera, La Bohème ).

Seeing the hearse pass by, Vingtras swears that he will set the record right. In the place of Murger's happy-go-lucky "bohemia of cowards," who turned into dull and proper bourgeois once they sowed their wild oats, he will show the true bohemia of "desperate and threatening individuals." His book will speak to and for "those who have kept their anger," who have not sold out, and who have not been beaten down by poverty (2:889).

Vallès' Paris will be the city of workers and the poor, the city of combatants for a better world. This Paris is the city of revolution not because it embodies the idea of revolution but because the struggle continues there, in the street and on the page. If for Hugo, Paris is the place where the revolution took place, for Vallès the city is the space that remains open to revolution. In the very last lines of L'Insurgé, just as he crosses the border to freedom, Jacques Vingtras looks in the direction where he "senses" Paris. The deep blue sky and the red clouds over the city remind him of "an immense worker's shirt drenched in blood" (2:1087). In this, the final line of the novel, Vallès proposes the bloodied worker's shirt (la blouse ) as a badge of his participation in "the great federation of sorrows," the community that frames the novel, from the dedication to its reappearance on the final page. Vingtras finds the justification for his existence in the larger community forged in suffering and in combat. L'Insurgé displaces the christological implications from the martyrdom of the exceptional individual to the collectivity, from Gauvain-Hugo to the community of the faithful. Vingtras designates "our crucifix" as the stake on an execution ground near Versailles where so many Communards had been lined up to be shot after the most summary of military judgments. The reprise of the familiar images only highlights the distance from the usual referents of those signs. Like Hugo, who envisions the city as a totality from contrary perspectives—the bird's-eye view of Notre-Dame de Paris and the sewer in Les Misérables—Vallès views the city through the oxymoronic duo of revolution and revelation.

The bloodied worker's shirt that betokens the federation of sorrows also serves Vallès as an emblem of the city. It is not the inexorable guillotine that represents Paris nor again the ship that figures on the seal of the city. The flag for Vallès' Paris is the red flag of revolution, which is hallowed by its metonymic connection to the article of clothing associated not with a martyred individual but with an oppressed

social class. The Commune and, by extension, this text of the Commune have produced a new city.

And yet, however much Vingtras aims to submerge his individuality in the voice of the community, and despite his stated ambition on the last page of the novel that he be remembered simply as "a worker who was not idle" (2:1087), it is as an individual that we remember the man and read the writer. There is no mistaking the distinctive voice, which moves with astonishing rapidity from bitter satire to selfmockery. There is no possible confusion in picking out a writer whose journalistic fervor for the fragmentary of the here and now is not afraid to indulge in a commanding rhetoric of the whole. Vallès' visual imagination fixes on the most ordinary of scenes and almost at the same time paints in sweeping strokes. He actually hears the great variety of tones that swirl about in a great, modern city. The movement of revolution that is the end of L'lnsurgé is also its means. The power of L 'Insurgé to move readers today derives in no small measure from the absolute fit between language and ideology. L'lnsurgé is a modernist text avant la lettre, and it is as a modernist text, a text of fragmentation, of rupture, of dissolution, that this novel claims our attention.

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The confrontation of Hugo and Vallès across their texts of the Terrible Year constitutes rather more than a fascinating exercise in comparative textual analysis. To be sure, it is that, but more is at stake than unquestionably arresting differences between two writers who took on the same challenge of representation. This encounter over the representation of revolution brings to the surface a still larger crisis of definition, one faced by the city itself. Once again, representative texts construe a major issue of urban meaning. As the Revolution of 1789 required reconceptualization of the city and a rewriting of its traditions no less than its topography, so too 1870-71 brought into serious question texts of the city and their claims to define the urban experience and, especially, the experience of Paris. The Terrible Year challenged the conception of the city on both literary and political grounds. What is Paris in the late nineteenth century? What models, what metaphors, what paradigms, make sense of this "rerevolutionized" city? Is it the revolutionary Paris of the First Republic?

The aggressively modernized and modernizing city of the Second Empire? To whom will the city belong in the Third Republic? What texts will turn out to bear the privileged interpretations? Which ones will be the carriers of meaning to the end of the century and beyond?

Answering fundamental queries of this sort invariably tests modes of representation. Hugo and Vallès responded to this challenge from antithetic conceptions of politics, of literature, and, hence, of the city. Vallès contested Hugo on all fronts. His performance of politics countered as it undermined the politics of performance. The "worker who was not idle" defied the prophetic stance of the older writer. And finally, the "city of combat" that took the bloodied worker's shirt as its emblem repudiated the visionary city of the Revolution.

Vallès' Paris cannot be represented by the vision of a single individual because it was not, or was no longer at the end of the nineteenth century, a city to be read from on high. Distance lends itself to myth, and the myth of Paris is precisely what Vallès writes against. The Paris that Vallès writes is written from within. His city is not a place situated in time by a particular event, no matter how riveting. This Paris is not one site but any number of places, each defined and continually redefined by certainly diverse and possibly contradictory practices.

This perception of diversity and of fragmentation effectively explodes the myth of Paris. The ability to conceive the city as a whole, the plausibility of the grandiose, often excessive metaphors and images so often used to construe and explain the city, depended upon a sense of the whole. The Terrible Year destroyed that sense. It is no accident that to recapture the principles that had guided his entire career, Victor Hugo situated his vision of 1870-71 in the past. Vallès, in struggling to capture the sense of the community, acknowledges the need for a work, a phrase, to sum up the situation. ("A phrase was needed, just one, but one in which the soul of Paris beat"). The word chosen, "Commune," is a social institution, not a metaphor, not an image, but a product of a collective understanding beyond an individual rhetoric.

In the search for perspective, Hugo's narrative faced the past, his own past as a writer and an actor in French society for a half century and more. His driving impulse in this process is one of recovery and integration, and often enough he is himself the heroic model for holding things together, the capacious figure unifying everything

through language in the controlling symbol of the Revolutionary city. Vallès' gaze, in contrast, is always on the present and the future in the process of revolution. He sees instead that a changing and changeable city will always demand other kinds of texts—texts that capture the diversity of urban life and that renounce the all-seeing prophet in favor of the worker who needs to see and understand an immediate context, literally the street of the moment.

French literary culture has never made up its mind across this great divide. Although the prophetic figure is not the model of the great writer in the twentieth century, France nonetheless dwells upon and continues to celebrate the emblematic figures in a literary tradition. Hugo to this day is seen more clearly than Vallès, and, to that extent, the lessons of Vallès are yet to be learned, the more disjointed but concrete modernistic city of his conception yet to be fully fathomed. L'lnsurgé remains, in consequence, a revolutionary work as well as a work of revolution, a strange anti-book within a tradition of books. And the city that both men portray divides between them.