Toward-the-end-of-October Update!

A few interesting bits and bobs that have turned up in research, updates, and links:

• Jonah Durning-Hammond, translator of the remaining fragments of Dondey's/ O'Neddy's Sodom & Zion (see previous post) is on board to help with translations, and is currently looking at some work by Aloysius Bertrand.
  

• An interesting connection: Jules Janin, the Frenetic satirist who wrote The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined Woman, a favourite book of Borel, Gautier (see Gautier's sonnet on the 'translations' page), and others, condemned Borel's novel Madame Putiphar in 1839 for it's sympathetic portrayal of the Marquis de Sade (whose mother spent the last years of her life in a convent on the same street as the last Bouzingo commune). Turns out that a couple years earlier, Janin had also attacked, on similar ground, a sympathetic pamplet on Sade by the Romanticist writer/archivist/publisher 'Bibliophile Jacob' (Paul Lacroix), who was the father-in-law and main collaborator of the ex-Bouzingo Jehan Duseigneur. By the time that this pamphlet was published, Duseigneur was already married to Lacroix's daughter and converted to socialist christianity, and was creating statuary for catholic churches whilst developing with Lacroix a theory of medieval religious art. This connection suggests certain limits to the orthodoxy of Duseigneur's brand of Catholicism...
• According to Mario Praz, the British novelist-of-manners William Thackeray read and disliked Borel (by all accounts a mark in the latter's favour), picking Champavert out as an exemplar of the deplorable taste of the Frenetic Romantics in an article of June 22, 1833.

• For some texture on the political, literary, and social discourse of Liberal circles in the wake of the July Revolution, check out (via google translate if necessary) the online transcriptions of the Revue des Deux-Mondes. The journal seems to have begun as a conservative paper but after the revolution fell into the hands of the Cénacle circle and Liberal (not radical) Romanticism. Of particular interest is THIS ARTICLE, a review of the year 1832, by co-founder of the Cénacle group, Alfred de Vigny. It would no doubt be more helpful to those who can read French fluently, but among other relevent issues Vigny comments upon the fallout of the July Revolution, including the rise and fall of the Saint-Simonist communes, which served as important models for the activity of the Jeunes-France in that year, and reviews a novel which apparently proposes its own proto-socialist model, with the implication that such undertakings were quite common at the time. He also revues a collection of poems by the recently deceased writer and publisher Charles Brugnot, a close friend and collaborator of the Jeune-France Aloysius Bertrand. Interestingly, one of Brugnot's poems quoted by Vigny contains as epigraph the same quote from Wordsworth's Prelude used as epigraph in Gautier's sonnet (the same that quotes Janin's Dead Donkey, on our 'translations' page). Gautier's poem had probably been published in 1830, but the book was never distributed due to the Revolution breaking out the following day. It may or not have appeared in a journal in the interim, but was published again in the same year as Brugnot's collection. The transmission was most likely based on seeing the poem in manuscript form, especially interesting given the poetics of epigraph that is a major theme in Gautier's poem (see my notes on the poem) and which Brugnot was expanding.

• There are several places where Tristan Tzara cites Frenetic Romanticism, and Borel and Nerval in particular, as models for his conception of Dada and of a poetics that was inscribed within society and outside literature. Until my books are unpacked from the storage unit where they are now imprisoned, I cannot look all of these up. Breton discusses the Bouzingo in the same connection in his Anthology of Black Humour and various Surrealist manifestos (also currently inaccessible to me). But HERE'S an interesting passage concerning Tzara's drawing the history of Sound Poetry back through the Symbolists to Borel, Nerval, and their fellow Frenetic, Charles Lassailly.
• Another interesting bit on Borel: it appears that his son, Aldéran, was named after one of his own characters from Champavert. In the story Aldéran is murdered by a cuckolded husband, his skin stripped, and is turned into an anatomical showpiece. Hm.
• And, here's the front page of the February 1844 issue of Satan, the satirical journal of politics, writing, and art edited by Francisque and Petrus Borel. This is the first issue under Borel's editorship: