ABSTRACT
This chapter takes the so-called worker-poets who were active during France’s July Monarchy as its focus. While the majority of the poets I study here rejected formalism in favor of a poetics of engagement, their individual approaches to versification and to the mantle of poetry in general were far from uniform. Some worker-poets purposely rejected the more recognizably popular songwriting associated with café and cabaret culture, while still others sought to imbue their verse with the chanson’s political power and popular appeal. The Saint-Simonian Jules Vinçard self-identified as a chansonnier like Béranger, but the shoemaker Savinien Lapointe instead embraced a social realist brand of poetry akin to Hugo’s while also loudly critiquing what he saw as the better-known poet’s political posturing and paternalism. In contrast to both Vinçard and Lapointe, Charles Poncy, a young poet from Toulon, comes perhaps closest of all to prefiguring a Baudelairean stance exploring themes of voyage across space and time that ultimately reveal Romanticism’s investment in colonial expansion.
