Long before Albert Camus's L'Homme révolté (1951; translated as The Rebel, 1953), Jules Vallès, through the example of his life and literature, articulated boldly and firmly a revolutionary "non." His "non! à un monde mal fait" (no! to a poorly made world) and its attendant revolt were the foundation upon which he constructed what is considered by most modern critics his master-piece, the Jacques Vingtras trilogy. These three thinly veiled autobiographical novels (Jacques Vingtras: L'Enfant [1879], Jacques Vingtras: Le Bachelier [1881], and Jacques Vingtras: L'Insurgé: 1871 [1886; translated as The Insurrectionist , 1971]--the titles referring to the hero, respectively, as child, graduate, and insurrectionist) first appeared in either epistolary or journalistic form during one of the most politically turbulent periods in nineteenth-century French history. In fact, from 1848 to 1885, Paris, which certainly provides the gravitational pull (if not the center) for all three novels, was a seething cauldron of political...