Guillaume Roquille

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.

[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.

[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] 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.