Abstract: This article seeks to show through micrological analysis of Rimbaud’s « Forgeron » (1870) the extent to which the poet indirectly conjures up the actuality of his own fraught era under the auspices of a 1792 episode from the French Revolution. What one finds in the folds of this historical parallax is nothing short of the seeds of the poet’s later engagement with the Commune, germinating as early as the autumn of 1870.
