The ragpicker is a highly Parisian type, hardly a Londoner. Charles Dickens was interested in the Parisian ragpicker, but was not fooled by the illusory English superiority over French dirtiness. Note the remarkable absence of ragpickers in La Comédie humaine: they only appear in Une double famille, where Balzac recalls that, during the Revolution, they were called "members of the Comité des recherches", and refers to Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet's cartoon entitled "École du balayeur". The latter includes a counterpart in which a ragpicker exclaims, at the sight of a drunkard outside a cabaret: "Voilà pourtant comme je serai dimanche!" - This is probably what Larousse is thinking of in his article "Caricature". This old anecdote was previously attributed to a sausage-maker, in famous verses that appear in turn-of-the-century rhetoric textbooks. Gavarni, however, turned the story around and attributed it to a young man consulting a fashion journal in a tailor's shop.
The ragpicker "member of the Research Committee" is a commonplace. This periphrase, which appears in numerous engravings from 1789-1791, or in an anecdote often recounted, notably by Mirabeau-Tonneau, already associates the ragpicker with the informer and personifies the political inquisition. For Georges Duval and Lamartine, the section des sans-culottes (Mouffetard) was made up of numerous chiffonniers and presided over by the chiffonnier Gibon; but in the directory of Parisian sections, we don't find a single one. Critics of the Revolution often link the ragpickers to Marat. A reminder of this can be found in Les Misérables, where Marat's shroud and a ragpicker's hood stand side by side in the sewers of Paris. In a 1792 almanac, Charles Cochon de Lapparent, secretary of the Comité des recherches, is referred to as a "chiffonnier"; conversely, the royalists of the Midi were known as "chiffonnistes", then "chiffonniers", by joking corruption of the name of a certain Gifon, where they met. Finally, the ragpicker became an early symbol of the Wheel of Fortune, and in particular of the downfall of the aristocracy. In 1780, the future Philippe-Égalité was ridiculed as a "ragpicker prince" in connection with a real estate investment. In 1790, it was the priest who found himself depicted as a ragpicker in search of the clergy's titles. The character has a carnivalesque, jester-like dimension, never far from the king. He embodies the proverbial saying "extremes touch", which Rétif de La Bretonne uses as the epigraph to La Semaine nocturne. From the Revolution onwards, he acquired a reversible allegorical status.
