JUNE UPDATE

The past several months have seen a very large amount of research on my part, but extremely little of this has made it to the webpage as I'm immensely busy with other projects. For the most part it will be awhile longer before I can do a comprehensive update of the site, but I hope to keep tweaking in the interim.

Thankfully, other people have been lending a hand with research, the most exciting of which is posted below. This is doubly nice, in that it not only furthers and broadens our understanding of the Bouzingo, but even more importantly moves the project farther in the direction of a true community undertaking, in which a number of us are investigating and reconstructing whatever aspects of the Jeunes-France and their milieu we find most pertinent to our current practice.

So, updates:

• Tim Gaze has done research into connections between the Bouzingo's community and Eliphas Lévi, the one-time Evadamist who was instrumental in re-organising the French occultist community as it developed through the 19th Century. His text is posted below, and will soon be uploaded to the 'French Romanticist Community' tab as well.
• Gleb Kolomiets is beginning to research early Russian Romanticism in tandem with this project, and is encountering a number of historiographic challenges which he describes in the text below. He has also translated the only Russian-language writing on the Bouzingo that he could find online, also posted below and soon to be uploaded to the 'French Romanticist Community' tab.
• Warren Fry is currently writing a monograph on Achille Devéria's 1835 series of satirical erotica, Diabolico-fucko-mania: A History of Morals under King Louis-Philippe, teasing out the Jeunes-France's politicised relationship with Libertine subculture.
• The one thing I've managed to do myself is to add a freewheeling kind of catalog of my nascent archive of 19th Century avant-garde/gothic/counterculture ephemera, under the 'Physical Archive' tab. There will be photos up there eventually.
• Translation has been rather stalled lately, not an unforeseen circumstance given everybody's busy schedules. In the meantime I am [VERY] slowly undertaking the task of editing a very heavily annotated anthology of French Romanticist Prefaces & Manifestos, which is a long-term project but one which may succeed in making the general outline of the community's development and self-identification comprehensible in a way which is based in their own statements and proclamations, while also providing a richly-textured picture of the overlapping social and intellectual contexts in which and for which they operated. I'm using primarily translated texts already in the public domain, plus texts already translated for this project and whatever others are translated by the time the project comes together.