Newly Added: A Short Biography of Alphonse Brot

This short bio has been permanently added to the "Biographies" tab, and accompanies the addition of Brot's late novel Le Déesse Raison, and an 1880 promotional card for it, to the Revenant Archive:

Alphonse Brot

(1807-1895) 

Alphonse Brot is among the most enigmatic members of the Bouzingo group. He is the earliest person to go on record as self-identifying as a member of "l'avant-garde," in his 'Preface to Song of Love and Other Poems,' published in 1829. Yet he explicitly bases this solidarity on the avant-garde's leftist political commitments; he was particularly close to O'Neddy and to Franz Lizst, both at the time keenly interested in Saint-Simonism and other proto-Socialist moveents, along with others in underground Romanticism. But formally, he advocates for a middle-ground or synthesis between Romanticism and Classicism, and his close friend O'Neddy later remarked that the group felt he lacked commitment to the Romanticist cause.

After the dissolution of the Bouzingo, his path seems to have drifted away from the avant-garde (at least in its Romanticist form). He appears to have ceased writing poetry, and devoted himself to novels and plays, which sold successfully for the next sixty years; for two years he was co-director of the Théâtre Ambigu-Comique, which specialised in popular melodrama for the lower classes. Despite his popularity at the time, he seems not to have been read at all from within a few years of his death. In the avant-garde, too, his name disappears from the discourse entirely after 1833, with the single exception of the O'Neddy letter referred/linked to above. My French is not good enough to allow me to read with any fluency his books or the hundred others calling for my attention, so we await another re-reading before we can fully reconstruct his trajectory and significance.

But despite this apparent apostasy, continuities seem to exist. On the one hand, many of his popular novels and melodramas seem to continue the gothic-Romanticist tradition of exaggerated violence, passion, and transgression; several of his titles, moreover, suggest themes related to revolution and resistance to tyranny (cf. Pray For Them, Karl Sand (a leftist German poet-martyr), and possibly this volume, which takes place during the French Revolution. On the other hand, enticingly, when in 1866 a group of avant-garde poets advocated for a new, experimental synthesis between Classicism and Romanticism, they designated themselves by a name that Brot used, in the very same paragraph, as a synomym for what he called the "avant-garde": the Parnasse Contemporain (Contemporary Parnassus).

Brot was the last member of the Bouzingo group to die. In the course of his life, Brot lived to see what he termed "the avant-garde of Romanticism" evolve into Bohemianism and the Cult of Art, then to Parnassianism (it name sounding strangely familiar) and Realism, and thence into Naturalism, Decadence and Symbolism; he would survived to see the early publications of Jarry, dying in 1895, the year before Ubu Roi premiered. Unfortunately, we have as yet uncovered nothing to indicate what he thought of these developments.