Les réfractaires de la bohème

Abstract

This article aims to unite several writers and journalists under the common term of “refractory ones,” following the title of Jules Vallès’s book, Les Réfractaires (1866). These figures share an atypical literary career: Théophile Dondey, one of the 1830s Jeunes-France under the pen name of Philothée O’Neddy, refused to publish during most of his adult life; Gustave Planche became the ultimate untouchable literary critic; Albert Glatigny, a Parnassian poet, lived the life of a vagrant comedian; during and after the Paris Commune, Eugène Vermersch devoted himself to a sort of revolutionary absolutism that estranged him from his political and literary peers. These men’s intellectual and social trajectories question the ways in which we envision the mythical figure of the writer during the second half of the nineteenth century: at a time when the literary field became institutionalized, the “refractory ones” chose a path paved with poverty, illegitimization, and marginality. (In French)