The street is an essential element of Jules Vallès’ literary, journalistic and political identity. In adopting the street as his identifying marker, Vallès transfers to the field of the media the revolution romantic historiography had brought about slightly earlier : in the same way as Michelet invents a total history which gives the victims a voice, the street chronicler brings into the social sphere of representation represented by the newspaper those who are usually invisible. The street, as the locus of the everyday, is a privileged site for sociological investigation : social proto-journalism finds in the street an interface between public and private, signs and symptoms, norms and practices. Vallès dreams of a newspaper that, born of the street and turning its attention to it, would open up a space for republican debate in a manner authentically democratic and social.