L'Enfant Reading Order

L'Enfant (1879) by Jules Vallès is the first volume of his autobiographical Jacques Vingtras trilogy and one of the most politically angry novels of childhood in French literature — a portrait of class violence experienced from inside a child's body, written with a fury that distinguishes it from every other French childhood novel. Jacques Vingtras is the son of a provincial schoolteacher who beats him regularly, who uses him as a pretext for class pretension, who forces him into clothes and situations that humiliate him before his classmates, and who (like Madame Lepic in Poil de Carotte) does not love him and barely pretends to. Where Renard's treatment of the same material is dry and ironic, Vallès's is incandescent: he writes from inside the child's rage and humiliation, and the prose has a kinetic quality that reflects the child's experience of time — endless boredom punctuated by sudden violence. Vallès was a Communard who participated in the Paris Commune of 1871 and wrote the trilogy in exile in London after the Commune's defeat; the childhood in L'Enfant is the beginning of the political formation that leads, through the second volume Le Bachelier (the failed student) and the third L'Insurgé (the Communard), to revolutionary politics. The novel is one of the essential French texts on the relationship between class humiliation and political radicalization.