Philothée O'Neddy: Translation Volunteers?????????????????? !!!!

A shameless plea to already busy people: O’Neddy Translation Opportunities!

I've been posting translations and an essay in progress over the past few weeks from the forthcoming Philothée O'Neddy anthology. This is the first full-length book of his work ever assembled in English, and the most ambitious Bouzingo/Revenant-related project undertaken yet, involving around 100 pages of newly-translated material and that much again that has been out of print for a century, all newly annotated. (See previous posts for more on O'Neddy)

 

The more we can translate by summer, the more comprehensive the book will be, and my time is even more meagre than my fluency in French. There are a lot of short articles, essays, etc. that might be simple for a fluent reader to translate in an afternoon or a few spare moments, and some longer pieces that might catch somebody's interest. 

 

So in case you might be interested and able, I'm posting brief descriptions and page-counts of some items that I'd love to include but may not have time to get to; if you want to take anything on, just let me know so I can warn anybody else who might thing of translating the same thing. You'll get a free copy of the finished book, if you're not already owed one for contributing other translations, or helping me consistently on my own.

 

Here are the little orphan texts:

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The first group are short, but unavailable online; I can photograph or transcribe you the text from my copy in the archive.

Letters to Translate:

March 30, 1836 (on Romanticist theory) 3 p

Aug. 12, 1857 (on Politics, Haussmann, etc.) 3 p

Nov. 16, 1862 (on Civil War, Lincoln, & French Revolution) 1.5 p

April 19, 1871 (Stuck in Paris during the siege, on his deathbed) 0.25 p

May 5, 1871 (bedridden during the Commune, dying) 0.5 p

Aug. 18, 1855 ? (Alphonse Karr, the french revolution, Hugo)

June 1, 1871? (French bombarding Paris, his final letter) 1 p

Maybe Aug. 1 1836 (long, but stuff on school friend-group & switch to journalism & on romanticism)

 

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The set of texts below are accessible here:

https://archive.org/stream/oeuvresenproser00ongoog#page/n366/mode/2up

Theatre Reviews-Hugo, The Burgraves (p. 215) 8 p.

---Popular Parody of The Burgraves #1 (p. 232) 2 p.

---Popular Parody of The Burgraves #2 (p. 235) 1 p.

 

Letter from Hugo to O’Neddy on his defense of The Burgraves (p 237) 2 p.

 

Short story: L’Escarcelle et la Rapier (The Purse and the Rapier) 7 p.

 

Verse Preface to Enchanted Ring (D’un Anneau enchantée) 2.5 pages, around 100 lines.

(This Preface is not in the online version, but I can photo or transcribe it from my archive copy. It seems to give great clues about what the Verse form meant to O’Neddy, why he stopped publishing it at the same time he dropped his pseudonym, and connects the realist novel to bourgeois hegemony.)

 

Section/s from Enchanted Ring; chapters range between 7 and 22 pages; entire story is 70 pages

There is also a 1-page verse epilogue to Anneau enchantée.

 

There are lots of other theatre reviews and letters in the book, which may be of interest to people out there, so snoop around; I’ve just listed my personal interests here.

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More poems would be great of course! We could use anything from Feu et flame EXCEPT the following poems, which HAVE already been translated: 

 

Avant-Propos

Pandæmonium

Névralgie

Rodomontade

Nécropolis

Succube

Fanatisme

 

There are later poems I could track down if you want to go even more off the beaten path for some reason, let me know….

Hector Berlioz

The Book of Beauty: Historical Memories

Le Livre de beauté: Souvenirs historique (The Book of Beauty: Historical Memories). ed. Louis Janet? (1834) Sole Edition? Louis Janet: Paris. 239 pp.

 
This interesting volume indicates how closely related historiography and poetics were considered among the early avant-garde, and reveals the increasing strain between mainstream and Frenetic Romanticism. In French Romanticism, the revolution in historiography and that in creative culture were considered part of the same continuum, and the founders of modern French historiography–Michelet, Méry, Lacroix, Maquet, etc.–incorporated both academic history and historical fiction into their larger historiographic projects (sometimes to the despair of later historians). We see here that this general tendency was also reflected within the extremist fringes of the broader movement.

Published (and likely edited) by Louis Janet, whose ultra-Romanticist press published the comprehensive yearly avant-garde anthology Les Annales Romantiques, this anthology presents a selection of 14 texts about historical women, most written by people known primarily as radical Romanticist poets and playwrights, including four members of the Jeunes-France/Bouzingo. The contributors were young, most ranging from their mid-20s to mid-40s, and included the most radical exponents of Frenetic Romanticism, Petrus Borel and Charles Lassailly, and ultra-Romanticists such as Aimable Tastu (the only female contributor), Cordellier Delanoue, Gustave Drouineau, Henri Martin, and Jean-Pierre Lesguillon. Their chosen subjects diverge from mainstream selections in such collections, which typically focused on women known for their moral correctness, social compassion, and self-sacrifice–traits traditionally associated with 'the weaker sex'. Instead, here we find women notable for their political influence, in some cases exerted as strong monarchs, in other cases as royal mistresses. Many of the texts are hybrid constructions, which shift between traditional scholarly reportage and historical fiction, punctuated by contemporary commentary.
  

The anthology begins with a surprisingly ambivalent preface by Charles Nodier, and reflects the awkward place in which he found himself in 1834, when the divergence of mainstream Romanticism from the nascent avant-garde was becoming definitive. As the organiser of the Cénacle group, he had overseen the cultural coup-d'état that was swiftly making Romanticism the dominant force in nearly every domain of contemporary culture. But through his experimental, sometimes hallucinatory gothic-horror novels he was also the half-intentional father of the dark, violent, gothic substream known as Frenetic Romanticism, around which had built up the even-more radical community beginning to call itself the avant-garde, which was proving a political and aesthetic embarrassment as the movement's leaders settled into relative respectability. After a few predictable pages of the usual commonplaces regarding the virtues of Love (cf. "Women are the masterpieces of Divinity", Nodier ends his Preface by stating his disappointment at the low moral character of many of the women chosen for the anthology, and exhorting his readers to focus on the uplifting contributions such as the one on Queen Elizabeth. One feels that Nodier is fulfilling a contractual obligation, fearful of endorsing an anthology destined for critical attack from the respectable mainstream press.

In addition to Janet assembling this collection and publishing dozens of female writers in his anthologies, journals and books, his editor for the Annales Romantiques, Charles Malo, had also published his own book of feminist biographies several years earlier. Closely associated with the Frenetic and other extremist currents, Janet's fortunes seem to have been tied to it, and he appears to have ceased publishing by the time that it had subsided at the end of the 1830s and the energies of the avant-garde diverted away from Romanticism.

New Updating Effort in the Works!

Although research has proceeded unbroken over the past several years and much information has been posted on related sites (Revenant Archive, mOnocle-Lash, and the facebook avatar), this page has suffered from a certain amount of neglect in updates, aside from fleeting posts. This is an inevitable consequence of my having far, far, far greater goals than I have time. In the past several months however, I have become aware that more people are actually using the website than I had suspected, and have had the pleasure of interacting with them; as a result, I am making a relatively concerted effort to start updating it and making it generally more useful.

 

There's a lot of work to do, and little time (and I'm juggling 30 projects and a 60-hour workweek), so it will be gradual. I invite contributions from others, and welcome requests to move certain things to the top of my "to-do" list in order to help those of you using the site for your own projects, with the understanding that it may still not be immediate.

So far, I have updated the "Biographies" and "Translations" tabs to reflect what's been produced in relation to the project in the last year or two, and begun a major overhaul/expansion of the "Romanticist Community" section, which will probably be my main focus for the foreseeable future. I would like it to evolve into as complete as possible a database of the French Romanticist community between 1800 and 1850–it will be a looong project. I'm going to begin posting each page in the form of a blog post, which will be linked to from this page. This means there will be a string of Romanticist bios popping up over the coming months.

 

Again, this effort is largely in response to seeing how people are using this information in cool ways I would not have foreseen. Though I am a slow and erratic correspondent due to the volume of my work and email, please feel welcome both to contribute texts & links for the website and to let me know how you use the website and how it can help you. 

 

Cheers, and I hope the new updates indicated above are stimulating!

In Richmond This Weekend

Are any of you in the Richmond, VA area? Come meet in person!
 

This weekend mOnocle-Lash & Revenant Editions will have a table at the Richmond Zine Fest! If you're in the region, stop by the main downtown library from 11–4 this Saturday to browse, talk, buy and trade books with well over a hundred micropress publishers from across the eastern seaboard.
 

mOnocle-Lash will have around 70% of our catalog available for trade, buy, or wheedle from me as a gift, including most of the recent avant-historical books from the Revenant Series relating to the Jeunes-France / Bouzingo and related groups & descendants. 

This is our first time tabling here but our second visit–it's a huge, exhilarating event that is not to miss if you're in the region and interested in autonomous, progressive, DIY culture of any kind!
 

New Revenant & mOnocle-Lash Publications!

Three New mOnocle-Lash / Revenant Releases

JUST REALEASED! Three New Publications from Monocle-Lash Anti-Press, all related to the "Resurrecting" project, and available in print practically at cost, or as FREE PDFs from the m-Lash website!

This is a distinctly historiographic release:  Two of these are published under the Revenants Editions imprint and bring to light texts from the very early avant-garde for the first time in English, and the first time in any language for over a century. The other makes one of the first and most hated/popular turn-coat apostates in avant-history accessible to a new generation of lazy readers:

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1.) Rêvenance: A Zine of Hauntings from Underground Histories. Issue 1.
–ed. Olchar E. Lindsann

Rêvenance is the flagship journal of the Revenant Editions series, dedicated to the forgotten or untold histories of 19th Century avant-garde and other countercultures. It includes essays, translations, and many experimental forms of historical writing and research that connect those traditions to continuing radical communities today.
 
The first issue features translations (by Olchar Lindsann and Raymond Ernest André III) of work by Alphonse Allais, Gérard de Nerval, Maurice Rollinat, Alphonse Karr & Georges d’Heylli; poetic re-workings of Charles Nodier & Michel Roly by John M. Bennett; poems in Volapük by Francis Vielé-Griffin and Michael Helsem; essays by Gleb Kolomiets and Olchar Lindsann; visual texts by Edward Kulemin; and a conversation by Jim Leftwich, John M. Bennett & Peter Ciccariello about Rea Nikonova, Malevich, and the Incoherents group of the 1880s.
 
32 pgs on folded 8.5”x14”. Sept., A.Da. 100 (2016).
$5.00 + 1.00 s/h or Free Download
 

***~~***~~***~~***~~***~~***~~***~~***

 
2.) Pif Paf Patapan! A Sampler of Phonetic Poetry From the 19th Century
–by Paul Verlaine, Théophile Gautier, Charles Nodier, & Francis Vielé-Griffin; ed. Olchar E. Lindsann
 
Though Phonetic Poetry as a designated, focused practice was developed in the early years of the 20th Century, experiments with phonetics and non-semantic sound have been explored in the avant-garde since at least 1830. These are the poets who were read by the Futurists, Dadas, and Zoumists, and whose experiments (and others’?) they consolidated into a new form.
8 pgs on folded 8.5” x 11”. Sept., A.Da. 100 (2016).
$1.00 + 1.00 s/h or Free Download
NOTE: Verlaine poem is flawed in the online version of the PDF, due to some obscure coding flaw that changes PDFs when displayed online. Email monoclelash@gmail.com for a free uncorrupted version of the file. Sorry!
 

***~~***~~***~~***~~***~~***~~***~~***

 
3.) The Prelude: Book 3
—by William Wordsworth
——translated into Even-More-Boring-and-Trite by Fast Sedan Nellson
 
From the self-proclaimed ‘Prince of Translators’, this is the third volume in Nellson’s copiously annotated translation of Wordsworth’s 230-page biographical poem into an obscure dialect of English, ‘Even-More-Boring-and-Trite’. (Wordsworth’s original poem is in a related dialect, ‘Boring-and-Trite’.) To be issued over several years as a set of 14 volumes, followed by an eventual deluxe perfect-bound edition with parallel translation and extensive introduction and commentary.
Vol. III Continues Wordsworth’s boring adventures as “I Live in Cambridge”.
 
16 pgs. on folded 8.5″x11″. Feb, A.Da. 96. (2012 Anti-Vulgar)
$1.50 + 1.00 s/h or trade or Free Download
 

***~~***~~***~~***~~***~~***~~***~~***

Revenants Archive acquires book of Frenetic Historiography!

Le Livre de beauté: Souvenirs historique (The Book of Beauty: Historical Memories). ed. Louis Janet? (1834) Sole Edition? Louis Janet: Paris. 239 pp.

This interesting volume indicates how closely related historiography and poetics were considered among the early avant-garde, and reveals the increasing strain between mainstream and Frenetic Romanticism. In French Romanticism, the revolution in historiography and that in creative culture were considered part of the same continuum, and the founders of modern French historiography–Michelet, Méry, Lacroix, Maquet, etc.–incorporated both academic history and historical fiction into their larger historiographic projects (sometimes to the despair of later historians). We see here that this general tendency was also reflected within the extremist fringes of the broader movement.

Published (and likely edited) by Louis Janet, whose ultra-Romanticist press published the comprehensive yearly avant-garde anthology Les Annales Romantiques, this anthology presents a selection of 14 texts about historical women, most written by people known primarily as radical Romanticist poets and playwrights, including four members of the Jeunes-France/Bouzingo. The contributors were young, most ranging from their mid-20s to mid-40s, and included the most radical exponents of Frenetic Romanticism, Petrus Borel and Charles Lassailly, and ultra-Romanticists such as Aimable Tastu (the only female contributor), Cordellier Delanoue, Gustave Drouineau, Henri Martin, and Jean-Pierre Lesguillon. Their chosen subjects diverge from mainstream selections in such collections, which typically focused on women known for their moral correctness, social compassion, and self-sacrifice–traits traditionally associated with 'the weaker sex'. Instead, here we find women notable for their political influence, in some cases exerted as strong monarchs, in other cases as royal mistresses. Many of the texts are hybrid constructions, which shift between traditional scholarly reportage and historical fiction, punctuated by contemporary commentary.

It seems that the book once contained portraits of each woman, by artists who were equally associated with Frenetic and Avant-Garde Romanticism, including Jeunes-France members Louis Boulanger and both of the Devéria brothers.

This copy of the book lacks the illustrations (there is no obvious evidence of removal, leaving open the possibility that it was a reduced, cheaper edition, possible bound from overstock when the tipped-in engravings ran out). Nonetheless, according to worldcat there are only two surviving copies of the book held in public libraries, both in Europe, possibly making this the only copy of the book available in the Western hemisphere.
 

The anthology begins with a surprisingly ambivalent preface by Charles Nodier, and reflects the awkward place in which he found himself in 1834, when the divergence of mainstream Romanticism from the nascent avant-garde was becoming definitive. As the organiser of the Cénacle group, he had overseen the cultural coup-d'état that was swiftly making Romanticism the dominant force in nearly every domain of contemporary culture. But through his experimental, sometimes hallucinatory gothic-horror novels he was also the half-intentional father of the dark, violent, gothic substream known as Frenetic Romanticism, around which had built up the even-more radical community beginning to call itself the avant-garde, which was proving a political and aesthetic embarrassment as the movement's leaders settled into relative respectability. After a few predictable pages of the usual commonplaces regarding the virtues of Love (cf. "Women are the masterpieces of Divinity", Nodier ends his Preface by stating his disappointment at the low moral character of many of the women chosen for the anthology, and exhorting his readers to focus on the uplifting contributions such as the one on Queen Elizabeth. One feels that Nodier is fulfilling a contractual obligation, fearful of endorsing an anthology destined for critical attack from the respectable mainstream press.

In addition to Janet assembling this collection and publishing dozens of female writers in his anthologies, journals and books, his editor for the Annales Romantiques, Charles Malo, had also published his own book of feminist biographies several years earlier (see Historiography tab). Closely associated with the Frenetic and other extremist currents, Janet's fortunes seem to have been tied to it, and he appears to have ceased publishing by the time that it had subsided at the end of the 1830s and the energies of the avant-garde diverted away from Romanticism.
 
This copy was owned by the Institution Hortus (Here is a prospectus of the school the year of Huysmans' graduation), and was probably in the library while it was attended by the future Decadent novelist J.-K. Huysmans, who attended from the age of eight to eighteen, and would himself later contribute famously to the avant-garde intertwining of history, fiction, and social theory.

Here's a full annotated translation of Gautier's review of Napoleon Musard and the Infernal Galop, as danced at the Opéra Ball of 1845. (Read French text)

In plain text:

The other evening, finding ourselves awake by chance at the hour of the Opera Ball, we went there:–it was the opening ball, and our vocation as journalist imposed upon us the need to assist at every first performance. We are the assessors of Paris' pleasures. One does not pass the cup to the public until we have wet our lips on it and one sees at the end of twenty-four hours that we are still not turning green and marbled with black blotches.
 
The masked ball always saddened us, either by the joyous emotion of others in which we cannot partake, or by the kind of instinctive aversion that the mask inspires in us and which derives no doubt from some childhood terror. –– More cheerful imaginations than our own always imagine beguiling faces behind the black satin, and see behind this face of goat and monkey to paper beard shredded from anthology illustrations, angel or sylph heads; for us the hideous mask nearly always conceals a horrifying face; all the monsters, striges, ghouls, lamias, profit by the occasion and disguise. Even the women we know, and who are notoriously pretty, become suspect to us as soon as they don the domino; this is not a very favourable disposition to pass an agreeable night at the ball. We thus walked in quite a gloomy fashion into the mezzanine, crammed with all the world, scarcely having room to pull our handkerchief to wipe the brow that had been made so hot.––We nonetheless believed ourselves hardened against the warmth by our exertions in Africa, in the months of July and August, in full sunlight, when one of our friends came to gather us and conduct us onto the dance-floor, at the foot of the musicians' platform, to make us look at Musard, unleashing the carnival with a signal of his conductor's baton.
 
Musard was there, bleak, livid and pock-marked, arms outstretched, expression fixed. To be sure, it would difficult for a priest of bacchanals to have a face more sombre and more sinister; this man, who sheds joy and delirium on so many crazed heads, acts like one meditating on the Night Thoughts of Young or the Tombs of Harvey. –– After that, the pleasure that one gives away one no longer has, and this is no doubt what renders comic poets so morose.
 
The moment came, he was bent over his pulpit, stretched out the arms, and a tempest of tones suddenly exploded into a fog of noise which soared over the heads; lightning-fast notes flew back and forth across the tumult of noise with their piercing lightning, and one would think that the horns of the last Judgement had been hired to play quadrilles and waltzes. We [recognised?] in this sabbath the family of instruments of our friend Adolphe Sax––the dead would dance to such music. Would you believe that somebody came up with a contradanse entitled The Path of Iron; it begins with the imitation of horrible blows of the whistle whch announces the departure of convoys; the wheezing of machines, the collision of valves, the upheaval of the sword-fights are perfectly imitated here. After this comes one of those crushed and breathless galops next to which the sabbath ring is a tranquil dance.
 
A torrent of Pierros and Débardeuses span around an islet of stangnant masks in the middle of the dance-floor, rattling the floorboards like a cavalry charge. Beware those who fall.
 
It is only at this price that one can still be amused today; he must, by dint of leaps, of pivots, of extravagant dislocations, by swinging of the head to be dismantled from the neck, to achieve a kind of cerebral congestion: this intoxication of movement or delirious gymnastics, has something strange and supernatural. One would think one saw sick people attacked by cholera or Saint-Vitus' Dance.
We were at Blida and in Ben-Kaddour's Haousch, at the epileptic fits of snake-charmers, those terrible convulsioners. We saw in Constantine the dance for the conjuration of the Djinns, but all this is moderate in comparison with the Parisian cachucha.
 
Of which ennuis do such amusements make the counterweight?
 
As if we were kept at home, we watch to step out from a cafe a band of forty pierrots all costumed identically, who returned to the Opera Ball, preceded by a banner where were written these words: How bitter is life!

Announcing "Revenance: A Zine of Hauntings from Underground Histories"

The Revenant sub-imprint is kicking off its own periodical, Revenance, and is open to contributions!
Revenance promotes history practiced as game, as activism, as trans-generational collaboration, as communal memory. A historiography that runs athwart the academic, refuses to describe history as dead, as finished, which does not stand apart to observe its object from a distance, in the posture of false 'objectivity' which Power always assumes. Instead: a committed historiography, which does not claim to stand outside the stream of time or apart from its object, intellectual and precise, yet ludic and multi-form, one moment manifest as an essay, the next as a poem; a historiography researched and written from within the utopian fringe, and for the same community, responsive to our changing conditions, needs, and desires. A historiography that we take personally, which merges imperceptibly into daily life, thought, and continued experimental practice and life.
 
Like the Revenant imprint and archive, the journal will focus on forgotten and newly-discovered history of avant-garde, radical activist, utopian, and other underground countercultures. While the primary focus will be on the 19th Century, earlier and later material is also welcome, and contributions directly connecting counter-cultural movements and strategies across time are particularly encouraged. The primary goal is to explore histories, communities, and themes that are not consistently represented elsewhere. Revenance seeks to develop a community of independent DIY researchers who see historical work as part of a communal praxis directed toward contemporary and future change; it is a laboratory in which countercultural history is transmuted, reflected and disseminated in the current lifestyle, writing, music, art, and thought of present-day communities of dissent or otherness.
 
There are a small but ardent sprinkling of us across the world whose varied interests have led us to converge, via different paths, upon an overlapping cluster of historical subjects, and who are activating that history within an array of subcultures from the avant-garde to fanfic to punk to Decadence to Weird Fiction; a lot of knowledge and reflection, which has scarcely been shared or made visible. Ideally, the journal's readers will also be its contributors; with time, we will find our separate areas of research connecting and reinforcing each other.
 
We welcome all forms of historical engagement: essays, translations, sample passages of books and images in the public domain, transductions & re-workings of old work, poems (think Ed Sanders' Investigative Poetics, Banville's poems on Romanticism), book reviews, stories (romans à clefs? speculative fanfic?), bibliographies and reading-lists, historiographic theory, and more. Much of this material may be drawn upon for later re-publication in anthologies by Revenant Editions, or expanded to full chapbooks. It will consistently feature passages and translations taken from the Revenant Archive and research relating to it and the 'Resurrecting the Bouzingo' project.
 
The journal will be published on an irregular basis, whenever enough contributions accumulate and I have time to print. Submissions will be rolling: send me what you have when it's ready, and it will go into the next issue. In order to get the ball rolling though, for the first issue the deadline will be July 31, 2016.
Email contributions or questions to monoclelash@gmail.com or olindsann@gmail.com.
 
Previously published work (except on mOnocle-Lash) is fine, and before you think you don't have time–
 
The word 'zine' in the subtitle is a reminder that we desire participation above all, and encourage contributions that are humble in size, but striking in their interest or intriguing in theoir implications. We particularly encourage micro-essays and short essays and translations–we'd rather have a couple paragraphs on a fascinating subject than nothing at all because you haven't the time to write something longer. The projected average contribution would be a page or so, some shorter, many longer. I've even seen facebook posts which, with a citation or two and a few sentences of context added, would be worthy of inclusion.

Philothée O'Neddy's Personal Library!

Check this out and step inside the brain of the first-generation avant-garde: the catalog from the sale of Bouzingo co-founder Philothée O'Neddy's personal library after his death!
http://gallica.bnf.fr/…/bpt6k1240265s.r=bibliotheque%20de%2…
I found it while doing research for the forthcoming FULL-LENGTH Philothée O'Neddy anthology, the first ever to appear in English!
This bibliography probably includes only the books that were worth enough money in 1875 to be worth auctioning individually; books that were either too common or too obscure to be worth much money were most likely bundled into lots and sold to second-hand book dealers en masse.
Here is a longish list, in no particular order, or some of the most interesting things that I noticed out of the 70 pages of listings:
==> O'Neddy owned many books on mysticism & science, alchemy, astronomy, geomancy, cabala, occultism, many 16th & 17th century copies, including a 1695 Hermetic dictionary, and 1611 edition of Nostradamus' prophesies.

==> Books on the theory and history of iconography & hieroglyphics.

==> On linguistics: Latin, French, Greek; dictionaries of rhymes, onomatopoeia (ed. Nodier), and several treatises attacking the official dictionary of the Académie Français through the ages.

==> Several anthologies and studies of comparative religion, as well as those on Islam, and Confucianism.

==> Scores of books from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, especially those dealing with mysticism, heresy, church politics, chivalric romance, and history–his library of medieval history was particularly large.

==> Medieval songs (most in first publications from manuscript during 1830s-50s), complete works of the Medieval criminal-poet Villon, Lazarillo de Tormes, Cervantes, and Rabelais in Bibliophile Jacob's edition with Doré's illustrations.

==> Many books in Latin (especially Medieval books on theology, hermeticism and history).

==> Philosophy and political theory: Moore's 'Utopia', works by the reformer Erasmus, Enlightenment Philosophes Rousseau and Voltaire (complete works), the radical Jacobin revolutionary Saint-Just (a ton of his books, one with an Introduction by Nodier), the anarchist Proudhon, the syndicalist Socialist Louis Blanc, and many works of the Revolutionary Girondistes, and studies of the Reign of Terror, plus a 1658 tract from England advocating regicide.
==> Histoire de l'Assemblée contituante” by Bazard, the ex-Saint-Simonist and founder of Christian Socialism, followed by Bouzngo co-founder Jehan Du Seigneur.

==> Evadamiste Socialist-occultist Alphonse Esquiros' 1847 'Paris, ou les Sciences, les institutions et les moeurs au XIX siècle."

==> "Poésies socials des ouvriers" socialist poems by self-taught workers, edited by Olinde Rodrigues, coiner of the term 'avant-garde'. This is the same 1st édition as that held in the Revenant Archive.

==> Cross-dressing female Romanticist historian & novelist Daniel Stern's 1850 'Histoire de la Révolution de 1848'.

==> A ton of history by the Liberal Romanticist historian Michelet, and a great many histories of the French Revolution, and general French & Roman history.

==> Jules Claretie's biography of O'Neddy's friend Borel.

==> Barbey d'Aurevilly's important Dandyist manifesto, 'Du Dandyisme et de George Brummell,' in 1st edition.

==> Tons of Romanticist literature naturally, many in first edition, some limited editions. Tons by Hugo, Musset, Lamartine, Saint-Beuve, Balzac, Stendhal, and Barthélemy, and a lot of Madame de Staël, Auguste Barbier, Alfred de Vigny, Casimir-Delavigne, George Sand, and Charles Nodier, including his 'Sept chateaux de le Roi du Bohême,' containing some of the very first avant-garde visual poetry and phonetic poetry.

==> Foreign Romantics or Romanticist icons: Byron, Ossian, Herder, Shakespeare, Goethe.

==> Books with personal inscriptions from their authors:
---------------Petrus Borels' 1832 Rapsodies
---------------Borel's 1839 'Madame Putiphar'
---------------Bibliophile Jacob's 1830 'Les Deux Fous"
---------------Honoré de Balzac's 'Monographie de la presse parisien' with text-corrections in Balzac's hand
---------------Casimir Delavigne's 1836 'A Family in the Time of Luther'
---------------Louise Colet's 'Monument de Molière'
---------------Auguste Barthélemy's 1844 'L'Art de fumer, ou la Pipe et le Cigare'
---------------Aimé Martin's 1837 'Plan d'un bibliothèque universelle' (encloses letter)
---------------Ernest Legouvé's 1833 'Morts bizarres, poèmes dramatiques, suivis de poésies'
---------------Lesné's 1827 'Épître à Simier père sur l'exposition de 1823'
---------------O'Neddy's own copy of 'Feu et flame' enclosing letters by Chateaubriand, Béranger
---------------Victor Hugo's gift copy of 'Les Burgraves' enclosing 2 portraits of Hugo and two letters from him, clippings of Dondey's reviews of the play (for which he lost his job), & an unpublished article by O'Neddy on the Neo-Classicist riot at the play's pre-performance.

==> Two copies of 1st ed. Hernani: one 1st printing, & a second printing with inscription "Hierro" & a portrait added (details not given in bibliography).

==> Also 12 letters from Borel, one from Saint-Beuve, five from Bouchardy, & one from Hugo

==> Lots of literary history generally.

==> Various other interesting books that jumped out:
---------------Aloysius Bertrand, 'Gaspard de la nuit'
---------------Aimé Martin, 'Plan d'un bibliothèque universelle'
---------------A collection of Bosnian, Croatian & Herzegovinian poetry, edited by Romanticist historian & novelist Prosper Mérimée.

==> A ton of theatre, especially by Cornielle (one of the first writers attacked by the French Academy), the comedian Molière, and the libertine & fantasist Fontaine. Also lots of work by the libertine satirists Crebillon and Rétif de la Bretonne.

==> Complete works of Boilleau, the hero of Classicism!

==> A great many bibliographies, both by subject matter and catalogues of other bibliophiles' collections. The later include catalogs of the personal libraries of the Romanticist defrocked priest Lamennais, O'Neddy's mentor Nodier (3 different bibliographies!), the proto-Romantic writers Chénier and Aimé Martin, the Romanticist preservationist and editor Baron Taylor, Romanticist writers Saint-Beuve and Charles Maurice, most of whom O'Neddy knew personally.

==> Treatises on typography: Henrici Stephani Epistola (1569) & the influential Romanticist typographer Henri Fournier (1825).

==> A small library on copyright law

New Light Shed on the Avant-Garde's relationship to Saint-Simonist Socialism!

This is a long post & description, because the research spurred by a couple of recent acquisitions (this and the letter by Léon Halévy) to the Revenant Archive has begun to shed a ore detailed light on the complex relationship between the Saint-Simonist socialist movement and the emerging Avant-Garde––
Émile Barrault [unsigned], Aux Artistes: du passé et de l'avenir des Beaux-Arts (Doctrine de Saint-Simon). (To the Artists: On the Past and Future of the Fine Arts (Doctrine of Saint-Simon) ). (1830) Alexandre Mesnier: Paris. Stab-Stitched Paperback Octavo, 84 pp. w/ catalogue numbers in ink on front cover, "Barrault / E." & other markings in pencil on flyleaf, deep dog-ear on page 38.

Read Text Online

Utopian Socialism played an important role in radical Romanticism, and the most visible and active Socialist community in their milieu was Saint-Simonism. Both movements were fringe forces in the intellectual community prior to the July Revolution of 1830, and both exploded suddenly into popular consciousness in its wake; inevitably, Saint-Simonian ideas were an important influence on the emerging Romanticist avant-garde, though the nature of that influence was complex and often indirect. Their periods of most intense group activity co-incided almost exactly.

During this brief period of freedom of speech in the wake of the revolution, Saint-Simonists established a commune in Paris in which the genders were (theoretically) equal, set up soup kitchens and free schools in working-class neighbourhoods throughout Paris, attracted thousands of workers, students and women to weekly lectures, acquired the ex-Romanticist newspaper The Globe as their public organ and began a journal for self-taught working-class writers as well as the first Feminist newspaper in France. They distributed many pamphlets mapping out their vision of a new socialist society; this pamphlet is one of those, issued within months of the Revolution, printed crookedly on cheap paper and stab-bound with string to make as inexpensive as possible to buy.

While mainstream Liberal Romanticism was tolerated, and then adopted by the "Bourgeois King" in exchange for tolerance of the Monarchic system itself, Saint-Simonism soon became a major target of the new Orleans regime. A smear campaign by government-associated newspapers was followed by censorship of the newspapers and lectures, a series of police raids on two subsequent communes, and sensational trials. By 1835 the popular movement had died out, though a small community continued on France, Northern Africa and the United States into the 1860s.

The Saint-Simonists made a particularly strong appeal to architects, musicians, artists and writers, who they saw as essential to giving birth to a new consciousness. Their publications and lectures were attended to by many Romanticists, including Franz Liszt, George Sand, and several of the Bouzingo group. Copies of this pamphlet were almost certainly owned or borrowed by a number of them; though unsigned, a previous owner of this copy attributes it, like some other sources, to Émile Barrault.

Opinion within the Saint-Simonist movement was divided, however, as to what forms the called-for artistic evolution should take. The influence of this debate on radical circles in late 1830 has not been documented, at least in English; but this little book may offer some clues once it is fully examined. Barrault admits in his opening that he himself can propose no definite programme--he confesses ignorance of the arts, and proclaims that the artists, poets, playwrights and musicians must themselves invent Saint-Simonist culture; he can merely explain to them the nature of their challenge, and how the arts will fit into the Saint-Simonist worldview. 

Barrault's confession, while frank, begs the question of why he has undertaken the job; especially since the Saint-Simoinists had already published on the question several years earlier. In 1825, another Saint-Simonist, Olinde Rodrigues, had published a sixty-page tract on the subject, in which the term "avant-garde" itself had first been used in an essay--and from which some of the Romanticists had already taken up the term to refer to themselves by 1829. 

In the interim, Rodrigues and Léon Halévy (Saint-Simon's personal secretaries before his death) had split away from the main branch of the movement, eschewing the (idiosyncratic) religious emphasis of its interpretation. I have not yet had time to examine Rodrigues' essay (I am only one person, after all), and I am not aware of any comprehensive paraphrase of his theory in English. However, the fact that the organisation felt the need to issue a new essay on radical art, even if by a writer who did not feel fully qualified for the task, seems to imply a doctrinal or strategic conflict with Rodrigues and Halévy. This inference is strengthened by the fact that Halévy was himself a Romanticist poet with strong connections to the avant-garde, was published in several volumes of the Annales Romantiques anthologies (including the 1832 and 1834 volumes in this archive), and was a personal friend of Petrus Borel, and therefore probably of Philothée O'Neddy and Alphonse Brot--all co-founders of the Bouzingo group, the latter of whom had become in 1829 the first person to describe the group in print using Rodrigues' terminology, as "the avant-garde of Romanticism". (See the "Personal Artifacts" tab for the letter from Halévy in the Revenant Archive.)

Halévy's Romanticist activity thus seem distinctly at odds with this pamphlet, for after initially refusing to commit on the Romanticist-Classicist debate, Barrault goes on eventually to dismiss Romanticism--especially its Frenetic tendencies--which he considers too idiosyncratic to provide the basis for orderly social co-ordination, referring to its "bizarre monstrosities," its "profound sorrows, desolations, and desolation," its destructive "irony" and "horrors of doubt and anarchy". This seems--tentatively--to imply that the advent of radical Romanticism was bound up with a crisis in Saint-Simonist activism, the nature of which will be better revealed once Rodrigues' text is more thoroughly examined. When O'Neddy, for instance, recalled that the Bouzingo group were engaged with Saint-Simonism, it seems that their engagement must have been shaped in large part by these competing elements within the movement; this potentially clarifies the ambivalent attitude that their activity and writing reveals toward the larger, more publicly visible Saint-Simonist group who had published this pamphlet. The owner of this copy may have been closer to the "avant-garde" than to the main branch of Saint-Simonism; they cut the pages and read up to the discussion about the decay of religion and "organic" vs. "critical" epochs on page 38, which they dog-eared deeply, then stopped reading: the rest of the pages remain uncut.

A hypothetical trajectory of Saint-Simonist/Romanticist relations from 1825-1830 might be sketched out thus:

• In 1825, Rodrigues publishes his Saint-Simonist tract on ""L'artiste, le savant et l'industriel" (The Artist, the Scientist, and the Industrialist"), where the term 'avant-garde' is coined.
• In 1829 Alphonse Brot uses the term to refer to radical Romanticism and the group soon to become the Petit-Cénacle/Jeunes-France/Bouzingo, clearly implying that it exercised at least some influene over their thinking and practice. 
• By or around this time, Rodrigues and Halévy have split from the main Saint-Simonist group, and the latter is writing in the community that Brot had called 'the avant-garde of Romanticism'--indeed, is or will soon become close to some of the group's co-founders, likely including Brot himself.
• In Feb. 1830, the Romanticists fight the "Battle of Hernani" and begin their cultural revolution; in July, the Bourbon monarchy is overthrown but replaced by the Orleans Monarchy. The main Saint-Simonist group, disapproving of Rodrigues' ideas as they were being (at least to some degree) appropriated by the Romanticist avant-garde, feel the need to issue a new treatise on Saint-Simonist art to replace his, upon different doctrinal grounds.

Further research will confirm, disprove, or alter this hypothesis...

Revenant Archive adds 1833 issue of 'Charivari' with Review of Bouzingo co-founder Alphonse Brot

Le Charivari (The Hullabaloo). Year 2, No. 333 (Wednesday, Oct. 30, 1833) Paris. Paperback Quarto, 4 pp.

The satirical magazine Charivari was one of the most vocal opponents of the July Monarchy, repeatedly prosecuted by the government for sedition and libel against the King. It served as the model for the famous British satire magazine Punch, which was subtitled "The London Charivari".

 
Founded by the political cartoonist Charles Phillipon, the journal attracted many of the leading Romanticist illustrators, caricaturists and draftsmen, including Bouzingo co-founder Célestin Nanteuil, Honoré Daumier, Tony Johannot, and Grandville (many of whose work can be found in elsewhere in the Revenant Archive), and would later become one of the key links between visual Romanticism and Realism. Oddly, the only drawings contained in this issue are a series of tiny naturalistic tableaux of "Various Little Subjects" as the title indicates, signed 'Jules 1831' in tiny lettering. Other features include a satirical comedy sketch about the National Guard, a fake gossip column about the hated government minister Tallyrand, an actual gossip column with bits of news about the Romantic poet Lamartine and career politician Thiers, a column of assorted topical one-liner jokes, a poem entitled "Political Cipher", some barbs thrown in debates with various other newspapers, and a listing of the plays currently showing at each of the city's 19 theatres (among which are included the Diorama and Panorama).
 

For the Revenant Archive's mandate, the main interest in this issue is a review of the novel Ainsi soit-il: Histoire du coeur (So Be It: Story of the Heart), by Alphonse Brot, co-founder of the Bouzingo. Brot is one of the more obscure writers of this obscure group, and this is one of the few traces of his activity and reputation during its lifespan--four years after he first described himself and his comrades in print as "the avant-garde of Romanticism".

O'Neddy–one of Brot's oldest friends in the Romanticist community–later recalled that his work was considered too conservative by his comrades (he was attempting to merge Classicism and Romanticism, a feat that would not find support in the avant-garde for another decade). The anonymous reviewer here also notes that Brot's plot–a love triangle between an aging Napoleonic general, his son, and her fiancé–is conventional, but praises the novel for the way in which the plot is handled: "But the happy, truly original idea of Mr. Alphonse Brot's novel, is to have summoned all of the interest onto [the General] Luigi's passion. Everywhere else, amorous old lechers are almost constantly ridiculed . . . Things pass more humanely in So Be It. One sensed that the love of a young man, beneath the withered features of the old man, was something tragic rather than clownish..."

At the end of the positive review, the reviewer notes that he has criticized Brot in the past for his "forced situations" and "pretentious style" (both, especially the latter, probably referring to Frenetic / avant-garde elements) and congratulates Brot on reigning the novel in to a more acceptable standard of naturalism and common language, adding that, "we expect still more from Alphonse Brot's talent." We can glimpse here some of the critical pressure exerted upon those in the avant-garde to conform their work to the consolidating expectations of the literary market, visible elsewhere in the review of Gautier's Les Jeumes-France in Revenant Archive's copy of Les Temps, published less than two months before this.
 
Indeed, Brot's short Preface to So Be It (link above) is worth reading if one knows french; it responds to past criticisms of his previous books, relates his  present work to it, and lays out his future plans, eliciting further comment. In his 1829 Chants d'amour (Songs of Love) he floated a passage from a projected play in verse, promising to complete it if the public showed interest; apparently it did not, because it never appeared and in fact Brot stopped writing verse. He did successfully conform to market demands and went on to a successful literary career, his seminal role in founding the avant-garde largely forgotten even before his death; but since then he has disappeared entirely from cultural memory, even in France. Other items in the archive relating to Brot include his novels reproduced in L'Écho des Feuilletons in the "Anthologies" section, his collaborative novel Le Déesse Raison (The Goddess Reason) in "Literature," and an 1880 promotional card for the latter novel, in "Ephemera".

1836 Annales Romantiques Anthology added to the Revenant Archive

Annales Romantiques: Recueil de morceaux choisis de litterature contemporaine. (Anthology of Choice Morsels of Contemporary Literature) Ed. Charles Malo. (1836) Sole Edition [re-bound]. Louis Janet Librarie, Paris. Hardbound 32mo, 315 pp.

  
This is the final volume in the series of Annales Romantiques anthologies; it collects work by 43 members of the French Romanticist community. Malo went on to edit other Romanticist anthologies as well as the journal Revue de Paris (see below for issues & collections in the archive).
 

 
Contrary to the assertions of much subsequent criticism, Frenetic Romanticism appears to have been alive and well, and dominates the collection.
 

 
A masterpiece of avant-garde Romanticist book design, the typography and text-decorations are pushed even farther than in the previous volumes.
 

Lecture on Avant-Garde Publishing of the 1830s for the Aldus Society

Freed From a Parchment Jail: A Bibliographic History of the Birth of the Avant-Garde

Here's the slideshow (in PDF form) from my presentation a couple weeks ago to the The Aldus Society - Columbus, Ohio​; it covers the part of the Revenant Archive that deals with the Bouzingo and the development of the avant-garde from 1825-1840. It even contains one or two new items that have not yet been publicly announced or added to the online catalogue.

The slides are fairly informative and though there will be some gaps/vaguenesses where I was lecturing, it still has quite a bit of information:

FREED FROM A PARCHMENT JAIL

  

 
 

Photo of the talk, with books from the Revenant Archive and translations etc. by Revenant Editions, taken by friend of the project Emily Wampler.

Revenant Archive Acquires 9 Bouzingo-Related Issues of 'Figaro', 1831-32

The Revenant Archive, a sister project of this one, has acquired over the last few months a collection of issues of Figaro from 1831-32, all dealing with the Jeunes-France/Bouzingo, and a letter from an editor with other Bouzingo connections.
 

 

The satirical journal Figaro played a fraught but defining role in the history of the Bouzingo group--indeed, they were given that name in the articles contained in the archive copies of Figaro. Founded in 1826, the journal had helped to lay the groundwork for oppositional satire in France and was closely tied to Romanticism. However, its editor, Henri de Latouche, opposed the excesses of the nascent Romanticist avant-garde, attacking the Petit-Cénacle / Jeunes-France group with a series of outrageous humurous stories in the winter of 1831, in which the group's extreme public persona (Gothic, Revolutionary, Blasphemous, Rowdy) was pushed to extreme limits. This seems to be the first time that the name 'Jeune-France' was applied to the group in print, and may have been the genesis of the name, though they deliberately misspelled it when claiming it for their own. They adopted the wild legends with glee in their internal mythology, public personas, and self-referential poems and stories.

Latouche was attacked in turn by Petrus Borel in his Preface to Rapsodies, but had already, in January 1832, beens replaced as editor, and The Figaro became a right-wing legitimist organ overnight. Searching for a satirical symbol for the political & cultural radicalism they now wished to attack, they settled on the Jeunes-France, several of whom had been arrested in the street in the middle of the night the previous year, singing a song which declared that they "were doing" or "making the bouzingo". The Figaro thus created a stock-caricature of the mad, godless, rabidly anti-government "Bousingot" and published another series of comic stories, accentuating the group's political radicalism and mapping the resulting stereotype onto a larger segment of radicalized youth culture. Again, the group (temporarily) adopted this term of intended abuse; their attempt to publish a group anthology of Tales of the Bouzingo never came about, but several stories about avant-garde life--themselves satirizing the Figaro's satires--were published  in 1833. The issues collected here contain many of those "Bousingot" satires, alongside others of Saint-Simonist socialism, with which the group critically engaged. 

Visit the Revenant Archive page above for links to the articles online and more detailed descriptions, including the hand-written note in Figaro letterhead by Léon Halévy, Saint-Simonist activist and friend of Petrus Borel.