Proletarian Poetics in the 1930s: Clément Marchand'sLes Soirs rouges

Abstract

Clement Marchand's collection of poetry, Les Soirs rouges, won the Prix David in 1939, but was not published until 1947. At that time, it was read as a poetic evocation of the plight of the urban poor that betrays, moreover, a deep nostalgia for the comfort and security of rural life. The title was seen as evoking the book's contents: soirs d'une ame sensible et vibrante aux prises avec le regret du passe et la melancolie du present en face de la misere de la vie citadine, particulierement chez la classe ouvriere (Saint-Pierre 127). (1) Thus, Marchand was identified as homme a l'ame demeuree profondement terrienne exile en la grande ville (Mabit 67). A few critics, such as Claude Desjardins, who recognized a courant de revolte in the first part of the collection (Desjardins 160), and Emile Begin, who saw Marchand's workers as dreaming que de revolution et de revanche (Begin 389), did detect intimations of rebellion in the book. Until recent decades, however, the critical tradition sought to ignore, minimize, or trivialize the book's potential as revolutionary discourse. Some reviewers who did take note of possible radical connotations in the title sought to reassure readers of their absence in fact. Typical is the comment of the reviewer in Revue de l'Universite Laval, who begins with the affirmation, Le titre du recueil de M. Clement Marchand a une couleur revolutionnaire: la teneur du florilege ne l'est pas du tout (Lombard 694). (2) This critical stance appears to have been influenced in part by readings of Marchand's Courriers des villages, a collection of short stories written about the same time as Les Soirs rouges, but published earlier, first in 1937 in an incomplete edition, and then integrally in 1940. While not ignoring some of the darker sides of peasant culture, these sketches of rural life are steeped with nostalgia for the uncomplicated, peaceful life of the countryside. Although its perspective is lightly ironic, the collection is formally and thematically traditional. The city is rarely referred to in these texts but, when it is, the reference contains an anti-urban discourse that is not far removed from the theses agriculturistes then propagated by the Church and much of the intelligentsia. (3) Such a discourse, which also draws from a broader thematics of western culture that, at least since Rousseau, had sought to devalorize life in the city, can be found in Les Soirs rouges as well. In La Plainte de la terre, for example, the voice of the earth complains that the city, cite tentaculaire (120), cite des laides pourritures (120), cite de mort (121), has taken away its sons. (4) Hence, the previously mentioned reviewer in Revue de l'Universite Laval can see Marchand, the poet, as fidele aux visions qu'il transportait deja dans Courriers des villages (694). Red, then, can in no way be a threatening signifier. Marchand, he suggests, simply prefers the color red to yellow, orange, or blue. Yet red, though used polysemously in this collection, is not a neutral signifier in the context of a discussion of the working class. Since the silk workers' revolt in Lyons in 1834, red had been associated with working class militancy, and throughout the 1930s (and beyond), it was frequently linked with socialism or communism. In nineteenth-century Quebec, it had designated liberalism, republicanism, and anticlericalism, certainly; its association with proletarian combativeness was already established by 1906 when, during the first May Day parade in Montreal, about 1,000 people marched behind the red flag, singing the Internationale (Levesque 42). In 1930, when Marchand's first poems on the urban proletariat began to appear, 200 unemployed workers paraded through the city of with a red flag, leading to an order by the chief of police to arrest hereafter toutes personnes qui porteront un drapeau rouge dans les rues de Quebec (Levesque 66-67). Grave warnings of the red menace--le peril rouge--abounded throughout the decade, leading to the creation within the Montreal Police Department of an escouade rouge, whose purpose was to ferret out communists. …