Recommendations
Books Like L'Enfant by Jules Vallès
Books for readers who love the furiously autobiographical novel of childhood class humiliation and political formation
L'Enfant (1879) is the most politically angry French childhood novel — Jacques Vingtras's class humiliation at his father's hands becomes the rage that leads to the Paris Commune. These 8 books share its fury, its incandescent prose, and its view of childhood as political formation.
- 1Buy on Amazon
Le Bachelier
by Jules Vallès
Volume 2 of the Jacques Vingtras trilogy — Jacques fails at the Paris university system; the transition from childhood rage to adult political formation
- 2
Buy on AmazonL'Insurgé
by Jules Vallès
Volume 3 — Jacques as Communard; the childhood rage fulfills itself in the 1871 insurrection; written in London exile after the Commune's suppression
- 3
Buy on AmazonPoil de Carotte
by Jules Renard
The dry, stoic version of the same childhood — Renard's red-haired unloved boy survives through internal stoicism where Vallès burns with incandescent rage
- 4
Buy on AmazonThe Road to Wigan Pier
by George Orwell
Orwell's account of discovering poverty and working-class life — the same class awakening as Jacques Vingtras's childhood, the same political formation through first-person observation of injustice
- 5
Buy on AmazonHunger
by Knut Hamsun
Norwegian contemporary of Vallès — a young man in a city surviving on nothing, the same bodily experience of insufficiency that Vallès describes as the condition of the poor child in a bourgeois world
- 6
Buy on AmazonLes Misérables
by Victor Hugo
The epic version of Vallès's rage — Hugo's panorama of French poverty and revolution covers the same terrain as the Jacques Vingtras trilogy, from the child's humiliation to the barricades
- 7
Buy on AmazonL'Assommoir
by Émile Zola
Zola's working-class Paris — the Naturalist documentation of the conditions that produce Vallès's rage; where Vallès is incandescent, Zola is systematic, but both see the same social reality
- 8Buy on Amazon
Sons and Lovers
by D.H. Lawrence
Lawrence's autobiographical novel of working-class childhood — Paul Morel's formation in a mining family as Jacques Vingtras's formation in a provincial school; the same fusion of autobiography and class analysis
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