Jules Vallès
| Jules Vallès | |
|---|---|
Jules Vallès by Gustave Courbet
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| Born |
June 10, 1832 Le Puy-en-Velay, Haute-Loire, France |
| Died | February 14, 1885 (aged 52) Paris, France |
| Occupation | Journalist and author |
| Nationality | French |
Jules Vallès (10 June 1832 – 14 February 1885) was a French journalist and author.
Vallès was born in Le Puy-en-Velay, Haute-Loire. His father was a supervisor of studies (pion), later a teacher, and unfaithful to Jules' mother. Jules was a brilliant student. The Revolution of 1848 in France found him participating in protests in Nantes where his father had been assigned to teach. It was during this period that he began to align himself with the budding socialist movement. After being sent to Paris to prepare for his entrance into Lycée Condorcet (1850) he neglected his studies altogether. He took part in the uprising against Napoleon III during the French coup of 1851, fighting together with his friend Arthur Ranc at one of the rare barricades on December 2. Vallès later fled to Nantes, where his father had him committed to a mental institution.(ref 1978, Bernard Noël e.a.) Thanks to help from his friend Antoine Arnould, he managed to escape a few months later. He returned to Paris, where he joined the staff of Le Figaro, and became a regular contributor to the other leading journals.
In 1853 he was arrested for conspiring against Napoleon III, but was later freed due to a lack of evidence. He lived in poverty, writing journalism for bread (the page of the Figaro even, until fired for his bias against capitalism). It was under these conditions that he wrote his first book L'Argent (1857). Les Amours de Paille (1859), a comedy written in collaboration with Poupart-Davyl, was a failure.(ref 1990 Alain Viala) At the insistence of his colleague Henri Rochefort he found an administrative job issuing birth certificates for the Vaugirard town hall.(1860) He became a steady friend of Hector Malot and began to live with his lover, Joséphine Lapointe. He decided to become a pion himself in Caen, but was quickly discharged. Back in Paris, his friend Hector Malot helped him reacquire his job at the town hall. In 1864–1865 he wrote literary criticism for Progrès de Lyon. In 1865 he collected much of his newspaper work in a book Les Refractaires that sold well. A second collection in 1866 La Rue had less success. In 1867 he started the newspaper La Rue, which was later suppressed by the government after a mere eight months of publication. The forgotten French artist Pierre-Roch Vigneron (1789-1872) had attracted the attention of Jules Vallès with an article "Le Convoi du Pauvre" in La Rue 1866. Andre Gill's friend Jules Vallès is visible on the cover of La Lune 1867 as a troublesome dog after a hearse. Jules Vallès should with the newly started newspaper La Rue be the simple people faithfull, just as the dog after the hearse in Pierre-Roch Vigneron's genre picture Le Convoi du Pauvre from 1819. Vigneron's image have been widely interpreted as "Mozarts funeral" (L. van Beethoven), and had been paraphrased later by other artists, such as the Swedish printmaker Torsten Billman, in 1965, with the grisaille woodcut Mozarts funeral etc.
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