We will express it with this title no metaphor. The characters in this book are a few dozen, a few hundred proletarians who were 20 years old around 1830 and who had decided, at that time, each on their own, not to bear the unbearable anymore: the pain of time stolen every day to work wood or iron, to sew suits or to nail shoes, for no other purpose than to indefinitely preserve the forces of servitude alongside those of domination.

The subject of this book is, first of all, the story of those nights torn from the succession of work and rest: imperceptible, harmless interruption, it would be said, of the normal course of things, where one prepares, dreams, lives and the impossible: the suspension of the ancestral hierarchy that subordinates those who dedicate themselves to working with their hands to those who have received the privilege of thought.

The history of those proletarian nights would just like to raise a question about that zealous care to preserve popular, commoner or proletarian purity. Why has learned or militant thought always needed to impute to an evil third party - petty bourgeois, ideologist or wise - the shadows and opacities that hinder the harmonious relationship between their self-awareness and the identity of their "popular" object? "? Wouldn't that evil third party be completely wrought to ward off the most fearsome threat of seeing the philosophers of the night invade the field of thought?