FACELESS POOR AND BOURGEOIS HEROES

THE HUMBLE: IN PAINTINGS THEY ARE AN ANONYMOUS MASS, IN LITERATURE CLICHÉS OR THREATS

Paintings on 1830 show the few middle-class rebels in the center and full-face, the humble as part of a crowd, as in paintings of war (please scroll down).

• The profile of an underclass fighter appears on the left, while three middle-class figures emerge full-face in the right:

Fighting on rue Rohan, July 29, 1830 by Hypolyte Lecomte, 1831, zoom

 

• Figures with recognizable faces are two student leaders, a well-dressed corpse, someone with a top hat, a man in an elegant brown jacket fighting a guard and three guards. The white shirts of two plebeians light up the center, but they are seen from behind:

Taking the Louvre, July 29, 1830, Massacre of the Swiss Guards by Louis Bezard, 1832 / zoom

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In fiction...

• "Good poor" are saints, victims, devoted servants or grateful beneficiaries of upper-class charity.

• Les Misérables (1862). The hero is a former peasant and escaped convict, who has spent 14 years in the galleys for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sick and starving sister. He lifts a cart to save a victim, though he knows that will identify him and send him back to prison:

• The Mysteries of Paris (the first French crime novel, a best seller in 1848). The heroine, an angelic former prostitute, turns out to be the daughter of a prince. To atone for her former profession, which she exercised only for a week and under duress, she becomes a nun. Then she dies:

• Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). The hero is so notoriously docile that among Blacks it is an insult to be called an "Uncle Tom:"  

• Little Women (1866).The girls give their Christmas breakfast, which a loyal servant has prepared, to a poor woman with small children and a newborn. "Angels!" she exclaims. "Funny angels in mittens and scarves," says the heroine, whose humor does not hide the author's complacency:

Zoom

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The poor who do not fit these stereotypes are threats:

• The Mysteries of Paris. The villainess who forces the heroine into prostitution represents the criminal poor, without background or nuance:

• The History of City Hall. A second-rate novel interesting for its platitudes, contrasts middle-class hero and underclass criminal:

       The Dungeons of the Grand-Châtelet by Jules Beaujoint / 1882 (in French) 

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Chain of thought: the contempt of a middle-class battalion commander for his working-class colleague...

"How great was our astonishment when we we learned that, not knowing how to wield the sword, our battalion commander sought to sooth his ignorance by trying to wield the pen. […]

Citizen Varlin, allow me to tell you that the 193rd battalion forgives you, easily and without rancor, for the strange mind warp of which you are subject; we perfectly understand that the sudden transformation of a man who trades the tools that he never should have abandoned for a sword to heavy for his forces would confuse the most solid mind." 

-- Extract of a letter to Eugène Varlin (please scroll down) 

during the siege of Paris in 1870,

cited in My Paris Commune (in French)

The alliance between republicans

 cannot last. 

 

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