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A philosopher

This philosopher of the night

The ragpicker, this philosopher of the night, who sets off into the city, his sack on his back and his hook in his hand, I am not sure we have the right to classify his industry among the minor trades. Most of the time, the ragpicker is a solemn and serious philosopher who sleeps all day long and works all night. The ragpicker is as relentless as destiny, he is as patient as destiny: he waits; but when the hour to take out his hook has struck, nothing can restrain his arm. A whole world has passed through his sack! The laws of the Empire hasten to join the Republican decrees in this transient pit; all the epic poems since Voltaire have passed through it; the whole newspaper, for thirty years, has sunk into this bottomless abyss, as it continued to devour that which is constantly renewed. The ragpicker's sack is the great highway down which all the rubbish of prose, verse, eloquence, imagination and thought passes. In this respect, the ragpicker is a rather unique figure, who deserves his own special history. The ragpicker is far superior to a manufacturer: the ragpicker is a magistrate, a magistrate who judges human glory irrevocably. He is at once judge, instrument and executioner.

Extract from Un hiver à Paris by Jules Janin, 1843

Artists of the Romantic period (poets, playwrights, writers and painters) seized on the figure of the ragpicker in order to turn him into a philosopher who, being free and living from day to day, seemed to them unencumbered by material contingencies: he knows human nature because he walks the streets with an observant eye.

"See this ragpicker as he passes by, bent beneath his pale lantern; there is in him more heart than in all his fellows on the omnibus."

(Lautréamont, in Les Chants de Maldoror - Chant II)

The Wine of the Ragpickers

Often, in some red street-lamp's glare, whose flame
The wind flaps, rattling at its glassy frame,
In the mired labyrinth of some old slum
Where crawling multitudes ferment their scum —

With judge-like nods, a rag-picker comes reeling,
Bumping on walls, like poets, without feeling,
And scorning cops, now vassals of his state,
Begins on glorious subjects to dilate,

Takes royal oaths, dictates his laws sublime,
Exalts the injured, and chastises crime,
And, spreading his own dais on the sky,
Is dazzled by his virtues, starred on high.

Yes, these folk, badgered by domestic care,
Ground down by toil, decrepitude, despair,
Buckled beneath the foul load that each carries,
The motley vomit of enormous Paris —

Come home, vat-scented, trailing clouds of glory,
Followed by veteran comrades, battle-hoary,
Whose whiskers stream like banners as each marches.
— Flags, torches, flowers, and steep triumphal arches

Rise up for them in magic hues and burn,
Since through this dazzling orgy they return,
While drums and clarions daze the sun above,
With glory to a nation drunk with love!

Thus Wine, through giddy human life, is rolled,
Like Pactolus, a stream of burning gold;
Through man's own throat his exploits it will sing
And reign by gifts, as best befits a king.

To lull their laziness and drown their rancour,
For storm-tossed wrecks a temporary anchor,
God, in remorse, made sleep. Man added Wine,
Child of the Sun, immortal and divine!

Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal

Translated by Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952)

Chiiiiiiiiffonnier !

Chiiiiiiiiffonnier !

The ragpicker's badge

The ragpicker's badge

A guild

A guild

A philosopher

A philosopher

The rag-and-bone man's round

The rag-and-bone man's round

Bad times for the rag-and-bone men

Bad times for the rag-and-bone men

The "fortifs" and the "zone"

The "fortifs" and the "zone"

The ragpickers' territory

The ragpickers' territory

Les Chiffonniers d'Emmaüs

Les Chiffonniers d'Emmaüs

Jopie Huisman, ragpicker-painter

Jopie Huisman, ragpicker-painter

Modern times

Modern times

Le chiffonnier (The Ragpicker), Edouard Manet, 1869.
Le chiffonnier (The Ragpicker)

The Ragpicker (1869) belongs to Manet's naturalistic period. It was painted ten years after The Absinthe Drinker (1859), which had earned the artist his first rejection by the Salon, and which also depicted an alcoholic ragpicker in a top hat. This man, wearing a bowler hat and with his white beard, has slightly more the look of a philosopher than the first—a romantic vision then depicted the ragpicker as a free man, working whenever the mood struck.

It is possible to see in the figure painted in 1869 a form of tribute to Baudelaire, Manet's drunken-poet-philosopher friend who had died two years earlier. Be that as it may, the style is still influenced by Velázquez here, in particular by Menippus, which the French ragpicker resembles very closely. Manet adored Velázquez's painting, it is true, but Napoleon III had also just married a beautiful Spanish woman, Spain was in fashion, and the Frenchman was hungry for success and recognition.

Yet the naturalism of his painting once again shocked the public—and of course filled Emile Zola with enthusiasm. He had championed Manet at the 1866 Salon, had become his friend and had his portrait painted by him in 1868.

Edouard Manet

Edouard Manet's father, Auguste Manet, was a senior civil servant at the Ministry of Justice. His mother, née Fournier, was a diplomat's daughter. It was into this bourgeois environment that Edouard Manet was born at 5 Rue Bonaparte on January 23, 1932. He was a mediocre pupil, an impudent boy who spent his time caricaturing his teachers. Auguste wanted his son to study law, but Edouard chose the navy and embarked on a training ship bound for Brazil at the age of 16. However, upon failing his entrance exams to naval college on his return, he decided to become a painter.

In 1849, Manet entered the studio of Thomas Couture. He remained there for six years, during which time he learnt about painting, copied masterpieces at the Louvre (Titian, Rubens), traveled (Holland, Italy, Germany, Central Europe), and yet did not manage to win over his master. He exhibited his first painting at the 1859 Salon: the Buveur d'absinthe (The Absinthe Drinker), influenced by Velázquez of whom Manet later wrote in a letter to Baudelaire that he was "the greatest painter there ever was". This was to be his first snub: the painting was rejected on the grounds of its triviality (the naturalism) and its unfinished appearance.

The second snub was a genuine scandal: in 1863, Manet exhibited three works at the Salon des Refusés, two Spanish themes and the famous Déjeuner sur l'herbe (Luncheon on the Grass). The coarseness, the violence of the colors, the obscenity of the subject, all contributed to making the painting unacceptable in its time. Two years later, he began again by exhibiting a deliberately provocative painting, Olympia, which caused such an outcry that the painter was quite shaken. Recognition came some ten years later when art dealer Durand-Ruel finally sold some of Manet's paintings. Revered by the young Impressionists, Manet supported their approach and took to painting outdoors. But after 1876, suffering from a serious neuromuscular disease, he no longer left his studio. Racked with pain, he painted his last great work in 1882 (Bar at the Folies Bergères). He had his left foot amputated on April 19, 1883, and died not long afterwards on April 30 after suffering intense pain that his sister-in-law Berthe Morisot described as "horrific".

© The Norton Simon Foundation