Voltaire called his opponents ragpickers, but as a humble compiler, he also ascribed the same quality to himself. Denis Diderot is said to have described theEncyclopédie's contributors in this way. In 1800, Pierre Villiers published a parodic collection of rapsodies entitled Le Chiffonnier ou le panier aux épigrammes; one critic confused this title with Le Panier aux ordures by Armand Gouffé. The frontispiece shows the writer for the first time as a ragpicker. In 1824, Étienne de Jouy recounted his encounter with a "literary ragpicker" whose grand oeuvre consisted of fifty volumes of new literature. In April 1814, he wrote a parodic will demanding that his papers be burned to escape the "chiffonniers de la littérature" (literary ragpickers), borrowing a phrase from one of his correspondents who, in 1812, attacked the "écumeurs de la littérature" (literary scum).
In his song "Le Chiffonnier du Parnasse", Louis-Marie Ponty swaps the croc for the plume, a permutation found in an ironic elegy attributed to a chiffonnier-troubadour in 1827. The small-press journalist is also often associated with the ragpicker: in Le Satan, in 1843, the article "Les Chiffonniers littéraires" refers to Paul-Émile Daurand-Forgues, a professional ragpicker whom Baudelaire called "le pirate, l'écumeur de lettres" (he had published a translation of Edgar Allan Poe without naming him). The comparison can be found in caricatures from 1848 or in Le Diable à Paris. In his Dictionnaire démocratique, Francis Wey refers to professors as "ragpickers in the cemeteries of literature". The assimilation of the ragpicker and the writer is everywhere, from Janin to Gustave Le Vavasseur, and even in La Caricature, where Sue is depicted as a ragpicker in 1842. In La Physiologie des physiologies, there's a whole chapter on "Les chiffonniers littéraires". The two figures are interdependent, even if the ragpicker's market favors the seller, unlike that of poetry. Plagiarism also brings them closer together, as in Charles Nodier's 1831 article.
In February 1856, in Le Figaro, Louis Goudall delivered a charge against Champfleury and "le chiffonnier Réalisme". Nadar's caricature of Baudelaire as a "prince of carrion" resembles that of Champfleury as a ragpicker, by the same Nadar - who calls him Balzac's ragpicker. Zola will often be caricatured as a ragpicker - even though there are none in Les Rougon-Macquart. The figure can also be taken in good part, as on Célestin Nanteuil's poster for La Revue anecdotique, in 1855, which shows a beautiful young ragpicker as Némésis. But this remains a rarity; the ragpicker is more associated with reporting, then with "reportage". Vallès uses the metaphor to evoke the beginnings of his career as a journalist, following an entirely negative model.
