190 pages Text(s) by Jules Vallès Foreword by Jérôme Latta Designed by Morgane Masse & Anouk Rebaud 20 x 12 cm Language: French Paperback Publisher: Éditions Divergences First edition of 4000 copies 2025
Written amid the despotism and speculative frenzy of France’s Second Empire, Le Peuple de Paris is Jules Vallès’s searing portrait of a city and an age on the brink of revolt. The future Communard, silenced as a republican and enraged by injustice, turns journalism into a weapon, wielding irony, compassion, and fury in equal measure.
Through his sharp, humane sketches of the 1860s Parisian streets, its poets and outcasts, poor students and booksellers, circus performers, boxers, mythomaniacs, and murderers, Vallès gives voice to those history forgets. “I am of the people,” he writes, “and my chronicle is too.”
Part political satire, part social chronicle, The People of Paris stands as both an indictment of empire and a celebration of popular life. With warmth, humor, and moral fire, Vallès transforms everyday scenes into acts of resistance, revealing a Paris alive with contradiction, dignity, and revolt.
