The Brawl

Gérard Bessette’s first novel, La Bagarre (1958) recounts the story of a leftist Montreal student who abandons his studies as a gesture of solidarity for his fellow workers at the Montreal Transit Company.

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Jules Lebeuf is twenty-nine. After having spent some time working in the textile industry in Boston he returned to Montreal to study for his advanced degree. He spends from midnight until eight in the morning sweeping streetcars at the Hochelaga shops of the Metropolitan Transport Company. Jules is in a sense a man of two lives. His leisure time is spent with his student friends while his working hours are shared with 'Bouboule.' Bill, Charlot and other sweepers. Jules aims at writing a novel in which he hopes to bring to life the diversity of milieus with which he comes into contact. These include those of the derelict, the homosexual and the prostitute, which give The Brawl a naturalist tone. / Jules fails to achieve his intellectual purpose and is forced to abandon the writing of the great French-Canadian novel and to reconcile himself to his proletarian life. Lebeuf's Fate is interwoven with that of Weston who attempts a thesis on the French-Canadians, tears it up and returns to Missouri to become a journalist; and of Sillery who, defeated by his homosexual obsessions, goes to Africa to study anthropology.