Guillaume Roquille

Cover of Breyou et so disciplo (1836)

Jean Guillaume Roquille's birth in Rive-de-Gier, in the industrial Gier valley between Saint-Étienne and Lyon, was recorded on 26 October 1804. His father was a crocheteur (porter) on the canal in Rive-de-Gier. He grew up in a humble household and received only basic education. He became a tinsmith by profession.[1]

Guillaume Roquille published a number of texts in the Franco-Provençal language in the 1830s, often commenting on events of the day.[2] His criticism of the brutal suppression of the 1834 silk workers revolt in Lyon earned him prosecution for a misdemeanor, although his detailed account of the police provocation and the massacres appear to be accurate.[3]

The police archives record that he was hawking "subversive" literature in Valence and Grenoble in support of the striking miners in 1844, and he had to leave Rive-de-Gier in 1846. He was not in Rive-de-Gier during the "red revolt" of 1849. He returned under the Second French Empire (1852–1870), resigned and now conformist.[2] In his last years he was a janitor in a factory.[3] He died in hospital in 1860 at the age of 56.[2]

Guillaume Roquille published two long texts in patois at Rive-de-Gier: Breyou et so disciplo (1836) and Lo Pereyoux (1840). These are difficult to find today. At that time, writing poetry in the patois used in day-to-day speech was very unusual, and publishing without a translation was a bold step. Educated people often though of patois as being suitable only for jokes or comic plays.[4] Although he knew French well, he chose to write in dialect to have a more direct effect on his audience, for his work was clearly intended to be read aloud.[2]

His choice of subjects was also unusual, often dealing with current political issues.[4] In 1835 his collection Ballon d’essai d’un jeune poète forézien (Trial balloon of a young Forézien[lower-alpha 1] poet) violently attacked the arrival of the Saint-Étienne–Lyon railway, which would ruin the Givors canal from Rive-de-Fier to Givors on the Rhone on which his father worked as a porter. In 1836 he published a long piece reyou et so disciplo in which he criticized the savage suppression of the Lyon silk workers' revolt in 1834. He supported the Rive-de-Gier miners' strike of 1840, mocking the authorities at a time when workers' associations and strike were forbidden.[2] He published a long poem in French, Les Victimes et le Dévouement, in which he described the death of thirty-two Rive-de-Gier miners in a hydrogen gas explosion on 29 October 1840.[5]

Roquille was a remarkable witness to his times, with a caustic wit and rage against injustice and the misery of the working classes. He was also an excellent rhymer in both French and Franco-Provençal.[6] His work was often, by his own admission, far from serious. For that reason, and because of his anarchist and anti-clerical views, it never achieved fame beyond the Rive-de-Gier region.[3]

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