All through the beginning of the Second Empire to Victor Hugo’s Republican apotheosis, the paradoxical anti-romanticism of Jules Vallès offers a privileged and literal “point of view”. Vallès shares with social romanticism the ideal of politically active, revolutionary and democratic art; it is in fact that very convergence of views that leads to a rupture : when the lyricism of the sewers debases solidarity into hypocritical sentimentalism, when an intimist aesthetic becomes maniac autolatry, when the purple of the prose covers up reality, modernity is requested to invent new poetics that are both realistic and contemporary in order to reinvent a literature by all and for all.