Commune de Paris

The Commune de Paris appears in the book not as a narrated episode but as a landmark in the political history of Jules Vallès. His biography connects revolutionary politics in 1871 with exile in London, while the surrounding material on Les Misérables recalls a different Parisian uprising, set nearly four decades earlier. Keeping those histories distinct clarifies the book’s movement between literary fiction and political biography.

Historical reference and chronology

The explicit reference to the Commune de Paris occurs in the biographical note on Jules Vallès, described as a novelist, journalist, and far-left politician. In 1871, he was elected as a deputy of the revolutionary movement of the Commune de Paris. The note gives a direct consequence of his political involvement: he was forced into exile in London from 1871 to 1880.

This chronology differs from the events of Les Misérables. The novel’s barricade episode is situated on 5 June 1832, when a popular uprising is being prepared in Paris. That fictional setting belongs to the Insurrection républicaine de juin 1832 à Paris, not to the Commune de Paris of 1871. The two references share a revolutionary Parisian setting, but the book places them in separate historical moments.

Vallès, politics, and exile

The Commune reference gives political context to Vallès’s literary career. His biography presents his public roles together: he was a journalist and novelist as well as a deputy associated with a revolutionary movement. Exile in London follows as a consequence of that political commitment, extending from 1871 through 1880.

The same note identifies L’Enfant, Le Bachelier, and L’Insurgé as a trilogy with autobiographical inspiration. It describes the first volume, L’Enfant, as devoted to early childhood and dedicated to people oppressed by schoolmasters or beaten by their parents. The Commune is therefore part of the political background surrounding a writer whose work also turns toward childhood and family suffering; the supplied account does not, however, establish that the trilogy narrates the Commune itself.

The Commune beside the barricades of Les Misérables

The book’s material on Les Misérables emphasizes suspense, pursuit, changing identities, and the novel’s shifting tones. Its barricade plot belongs to the 1832 uprising: a handful of companions, including Courfeyrac, Bossuet, Combeferre, Enjolras, and Gavroche, prepare to fight government soldiers. A separate passage describes the insurgents as outnumbered and awaiting forces far larger than their own. These details belong to the novel’s earlier fictional conflict, not Vallès’s Commune-era political activity.

The editorial note on the selected edition makes this distinction especially useful. It says that historical and narrative digressions were cut to keep attention on Jean Valjean and the relationship between Cosette and Marius, and that the account of the 1832 days and barricades was reduced to its simplest form. The Commune itself is not presented in these selections as a scene or a developed historical narrative; its place here is biographical and chronological.

Place in the book’s historical frame

Other political landmarks in the book’s contextual material concern Victor Hugo’s earlier career: his election as a deputy in 1848, his break with Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte after the coup of 2 December 1851, and his ensuing exile. These events precede the 1871 reference to Vallès and should not be conflated with it. Together, the separate biographies and the novel’s 1832 setting establish several distinct layers of French political history rather than a single continuous insurrection.

The Commune de Paris consequently functions as a compact historical marker. It identifies the political circumstances attached to Vallès’s exile and places his life within a later revolutionary context, while the surrounding literary discussion preserves the difference between that context and the earlier barricades of Les Misérables.