The ragpicker's reputation for plebeian wisdom was endorsed in plays such as Le Chiffonnier by Alphonse Signol (1831). Identified with Diogenes, he is a model of the Parisian prowler. At the start of the Restoration, Étienne de Jouy had already painted the portrait of a literary ragpicker who spoke Greek and Latin and collected printed matter; a famous engraving by Édouard Traviès in 1832 depicts Liard without his accessories and outside Paris, proof of his fantasy. Collector Henri Beraldi judged Traviès's "poseur chiffonnier" or "pseudo-chiffonnier" rather harshly, and was astonished by Baudelaire's benevolence towards him. In reality, it's better to trust the police, Frégier or Parent-Duchâtelet, who insist on the large number of ex-convicts and former prostitutes in the profession - a fact reflected in the caricatures.
In Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, Louis-Agathe Berthaud, like Frégier, reduces the ragpicker to his hood, hook and lantern. These objects are often poeticized in metaphorical terms: the hood is a "mannequin", a "paletot", a "wicker cashmere", sometimes a "cabriolet"; the crochet stick is called "numéro sept"; the bollard is an "armchair", the ragpicker a "chevalier du crochet" or even a Cupid, because of his hood-quiver. Baudelaire uses this slang in "La Mort des artistes". But according to the police, these instruments were also dangerous weapons. In 1855, Frédéric Le Play praised the independence of a profession emblematic of the industrialism and economic liberalism desired by the regime, and saw in it the transposition of the traditional activities of hunting and fishing. He did, however, study an unrepresentative case, an abstainer (who drank little), imbued with religious sentiment. In 1828, ragpickers were forbidden to take their hoods to wine merchants, but the order was little respected.
The ragpickers' shady origins explain why they were granted a few privileges. According to Georges Renaud, in 1900, "chiffonnier" was almost synonymous with "mouchard". In L'Âne mort, the jailer is a former ragpicker. In "Le Vin des chiffonniers" (The Wine of the Ragpickers), the reference is to "mouchards, his subjects": for W. Benjamin, this refers to fighting on the barricades, but with a few exceptions (Father Bribri in Les Mystères du peuple), the ragpicker's reputation is the opposite. In Les Misérables, Gavroche meets a conservative, royalist ragpicker as he approaches the barricades. Even the ragpickers' riot of March 1832 is devoid of revolutionary demands. That same year, La Caricature featured a ragpicker shaking hands with Louis-Philippe. Jules Vallès in turn denounced the ragpickers' complicity with the police - they met at "La Casserole", a slang term for an informer.
