When it comes to the ragpicker, literature is always mixed with administrative considerations - as in a report referring to Privat d'Anglemont's La Villa des Chiffonniers. W. Benjamin considered Baudelaire to be in solidarity with the ragpicker, model of the proletarian and the revolutionary, but he is misled by a myth. Karl Marx was more accurate when he included ragpickers in the malleable, politically unconscious lumpenproletariat. Nevertheless, the ragpicker was one of the most popular heroes of mid-nineteenth-century French society.
The first photograph of a ragpicker, by Charles Nègre, was also one of the first to be considered a work of art, by critic Francis Wey in 1851; he saw it as a "composition thought out and intended". In his L'Illustration feuilleton in 1848, he offered a sort of semiology of contemporary clichés, and called for greater consideration for ragpickers. He defended the realism of Gustave Courbet, with the same sensibility that led him to praise Nègre and compare his photography to the drawings of François Bonvin. He praises the calotype against the daguerreotype, in the name of a "theory of sacrifices" (from detail to the whole), reminiscent of Baudelaire's Salon of 1846 or the "science of sacrifices" defended in L'Artiste by "the late Diderot" (no doubt Arsène Houssaye). Nègre has photographed a myth, an allegory - the ragman's hood is empty. Similarly, in the paintings of Édouard Manet and Jean-François Raffaëlli, the ragpickers are relatively clean.
In Du Vin et du Haschisch, the description of the ragpicker conforms to the myth of the period, commonplaces and the lexicon of physiologies; the collection becomes a treasure, and the ragpicker a sage or poet. The ragpicker, no doubt a former grognard, takes himself to be "Buonaparte" (a pejorative spelling at the time) under the influence of alcohol, as Privat does, his "sept" turning into a "sceptre". Berthaud also describes this ragpicker as drunk and enraged, taunting passers-by, with no trace of political or social protest. The ragpickers meet to drink into the night, at Paul Niquet's famous "débit de consolation", sketched by Honoré Daumier and described by Sue. Baudelaire used this name for the title of one of his prose poems. However, unlike most journalists and physiologists, Baudelaire returns in the end to the terrible reality of the trade, indicating a possible solidarity with the ragpicker, absent from contemporary accounts, which are more concerned with the picturesque.
