This is the central site for a long-term project to research, examine, and respond to the radical collective of writers, theorists, architects, and visual artists who operated in Paris between 1829 and 1835 under the names of the Jeunes France & the Bouzingo, and through them to build a critical understanding of French Romanticist subculture through the historical lens of a continuing politically vigilant Anglophone avant-garde.

Saturday, November 11, 2017

Alphinse Brot, 'The Young Girl' (1829)

The Young Girl
–by Alphonse Brot

She is far from the soil where Ivandor rests,
A mob of suitors presses around her;
She weeps, she flees from their drunken disorder,
For her heart is possessed absolutely by death!
     
She sings tunes from her lovely land derived,
Those sung long past by a hero favoured in her choice;
Oh, you can scarcely guess, you dazzled by her voice!…
The devouring regrets that lay waste to her life;

If, near her, Ivandor for moments seemed to thrive,
Too soon for his beloved island he was killed:    
His island weeps upon his war-like ashes still,
His Emma far from him shall not for long survive.

Raise a modest mausoleum for the maid,
Near winding woods, which both the lovers knew so well,
So that at last toward evening tender vows might knell
To come beguile at times her desolated shade!

            –Translated by Olchar E. Lindsann

Alphonse Brot, 'The Minstrel'

The Minstrel
by Alphonse Brot

The young minstrel of the war party;
In the ranks of death he hurls himself fearlessly;
The paternal sabre arms his vengeful arm,
His harp is hung at his haughty shoulder.

“Noble land of songs, called the bellicose bard,
When for you the Universe is indifferent,
A sword shall shine at least for your defense,
A lute with soft chords shall bless your laurel!”

The Minstrel was captured; on the foreign riverbank
He kept his pride; the lyre of Tara,
Beneath his scornful fingers, never breathed,
For he casts off his cord to the light breeze.

You wither my fetters, my harmonious lute,
Who so often sang of love and courage;
Your chords were born for generous hearts,
They never not resound in slavery.

      -Translated by Olchar E. Lindsann

1842 Article on the "Hugophiles"

A recent addition to the Revenant Archive, about the Romanticist-Classicist debates swirling about Hugo and his supporters – I posted this on the Archive site a few weeks ago, but I've just scanned the interior so that the entire article is available (in French) and the interior image, and expanded the catalogue description accordingly as below. I can provide a larger-res image for any potential translator.

Le Charivari
(The Hullabaloo). March 7, Year 11, No. 66 (Monday, March 7, 1842) Paris. Paperback Quarto, 4 pp.


Despite its early association with Romanticism and continued publication of Romanticist cartoonists, the satirical journal Charivari had established a position outside the Romanticist-Classicist debate by the 1840s, and was in a position to skewer both sides. By 1842, Classicism was experiencing a resurgence as Romanticism, now infiltrating every aspect of French culture, was beginning to split into several divergent subcultures and cultural tendencies, many adherents to which felt little connection with the movement in its current, mainstream form. While young people in the Romanticist orbit did not remember the movement in its underground, revolutionary stage but simply as the backdrop of further innovation, young Classicists were now able to see themselves as rebels against Romanticist hegemony. 
 
In 1842, a renewed Classicist campaign was launched, ultimately aiming to bring down the impending premier in 1843 of Hugo's new Romanticist play The Burgraves. This issue of Charivari contains a quirky relic of this critical campaign, which resulted in a Classicist riot at the premier, and the end of organised Romanticism in France. It addresses the critical debate swirling around Victor Hugo's Romantic travel guide of The Rhine, between the "Hugophiles" (Romanticists) and "Hugophobes" (Classicists), though generally sympathetic to Hugo. At issue is an argument about a side-comment there in which Hugo suggests the orthography Asculum for a (possibly apocryphal) Roman town briefly mentioned in Horace, OEquotuticum, which Hugo argues cannot be scanned within a French alexandrine line of verse. The Classicist press, it seems, was outraged, asserting that one must retain the Latin at all costs; as more publications joined the fray, this spiraled into a heated battle about poetic scansion. The article pokes fun at both sides in the debate, but unequivocally blames the Classicists for stirring it up, hearkening back to, "the beautiful evening on which the two enemy camps [the Romantics and Classicists] had at it not only with the mouth, but even with hair in the stalls of the Théâtre-Français, over the first performance of Hernani."


 
The featured cartoon in this issue caricatures a group of dandies (or "lions" in Parisian slang) at the opera, peering about the audience with opera-glasses from their private box. It is labelled "The Lions' Pit" (a double-pun, since the cheapest seats, below them, were known as "the pit"). One dandy exclaims, "Naught shall have talent, save us and our friends," to which his companion/s respond in English: "Yes!" Dandy subculture was strongly anglophilic, owing in part to the movement's British roots.

 

Saturday, September 9, 2017

Sunday, August 20, 2017

New Release: REVANANCE Journal, Issue 2!

Rêvenance: A Zine of Hauntings from Underground Histories. Issue 2.
–ed. Olchar E. Lindsann
Revenance 2 cover
 
Rêvenance
is the flagship journal of the Resurrecting the Bouzingo project and 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.
 
This issue includes an 1832 satire of the Bouzingo translated by Elizabeth Birdsall, essays on experimental historiography by Olchar E. Lindsann and Gleb Kolomiets, poems by Arthur Cravan, Marceline Debordes-Valmore, Ivan Gilkin, and Francis Vielé-Griffin (the latter from a manuscript previously unpublished even in French), the preface to Roger de Beauvoir’s 1840 book about the 18th Century black musician and revolutionary soldier the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, a biography of a 17th Century female scam artist known as The German Princess, a 1912 review of Arthur Cravan’s proto-Dada journal Maintenant, transductions by O. Lindsann of poems from the Chat Noir group, and images by Célestin Nanteuil.

Featuring: Olchar E. Lindsann, Gleb Kolomiets, Elizabeth Birdsall, Raymond E. André III, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Arthur Cravan, Célestin Nanteuil, The Chat Noir, Ivan Gilkin, Roger de Beauvoir, Fernand Clerget, Albert Sérieys, Francis Vielé-Griffin, “The German Princess”, Alphonse Karr, Charles-Henry Hirsch, Charles Whitehead, John Payne, & Léon Gozlan.

add to cart
36 pgs on folded 8.5”x14”. Sept., A.Da. 100 (2016).
$5.50 + 1.00 s/h or FREE DOWNLOAD

Thursday, August 3, 2017

Some early Romanticist Fanfic...

1920s Romanticist Fanfic (sadly incomplete) in the Revenant Archive:

Les Annales politiques et Littéraire: Revue Universelle, Illustré, Hebdomadaire. ed. Adolphe Brisson. (Aug 23, 1925). Paris. Paperback Quarto. 26 pp. With Sheet Music Supplement: La Musique des Annales. Paperback Octavo, 8 pp.
and
Les Annales politiques et Littéraire: Revue Universelle, Illustré, Hebdomadaire. ed. Adolphe Brisson. (Oct. 11, 1925). Paris. Paperback Quarto.
 
Les Annales politiques et Littéraire was a journal of literary and cultural history edited by Adolphe Brisson, and had been founded by his father. Brisson had pronounced right-wing leanings, and although the magazine itself was ostensibly apolitical in mandate, the fact that it took such a continuous interest in Romanticism throughout its long existence (see the 1903 issue focusing on Hernani, also collected in the Revenant Archive) is evidence of the extent to which the legacy of the movement's mainstream – and to a certain extent its more radical forms as well – had been pacified and co-opted by bourgeois culture by century's end, to the extent where fanfic about Romanticist subculture in the 1830s is included alongside a nationalistic text by Maurice Barrés,whose parodic "trial" had recently been the pretext for the dissolution of the Paris Dada group, and a racist pro-colonial article by the contemptible ethnologist Gustave le Bon (whose personal copy of Gautier's History of Romanticism, used to research his published attacks against the avant-garde, is held in the Revenant Archive; see Historiography).
 
These issues include episodes 4 and 12 of an illustrated serial novel, Les Enfants d'Hernani (The Children of Hernani) by Tancrède Martel, a spirited and light-hearted saga of young Romanticist writers and artists. Essentially Romanticist fanfic avant le lettre, it is packed with references, in-jokes, and trivia regarding the subculture, and the Romantics themselves would no doubt appreciate its local colour. It boasts a huge cast of characters, including historical avant-gardists such as Petrus Borel, Gérard de Nerval, Camille Rogier, Frédéric Lemaitre, Devéria, Hugo, d'Angers, Vabre, etc. etc. etc. In fact Martel, one of the most respected historical novelists of his day, had been close to many of the Parnassian and older Decadent writers such as Théodore de Banville, Jean Richepin, Barbey d'Aurevilly, and with the aging Hugo himself. The novel never seems to have published on its own, which is a shame.


 
Additionally, the August Issue includes a supplement of sheet music containing three short songs, One, La Ronde autour du monde (The Ring Around the World), contains lyrics by the Symbolist Paul Fort (see his manuscript poem and inscribed copy of Hélène en fleur et Charlemagne held in the Revenant Archive). Another has passed through so many translations and adaptations that six musicians and writers share credit – La Veuve joyeuse (The Joyous Widow), by Franz Lehar, with G.-A. de Caillavet, & Robert de Flers, after Meilhac, Victor Léon, & Léo Stein. The last is Premier Amour (First Love) by G. Michiels.

The October Issue, in addition to the episode of the novel, includes the article by Le Bon mentioned above, a short story by Colette, and an article on the theatrical riot at the premier of Wagner's Tannhauser in 1861. There seems no way to recover it short of tracking down and acquiring every issue, but some parts of it can be found in issues online at Gallica HERE.

Friday, July 14, 2017

Role-Playing 1830s Paris, anyone?

I hope to get in a number of looooong-overdue updates over the coming days and months. First, this:

Is there anybody out there who might be actually willing and able to play-test a table-top RPG set in the Romanticist community of Paris, c.1825–45? Yours truly and Warren Fry, game designer & "Resurrecting..."/Revenant collaborator, began testing just such a game a few years ago, and are considering retooling it this summer with a more streamlined system.

Players form a Romanticist Cénacle, and set a collective goal to achieve through organising one or more collective events, demonstrations, interventions, anthologies, journals, plays, operas, etc. The ultimate goal is to enter a state of Romanticist Frenzy – in which (in-game) "reality" and fiction merge, and the players wrest temporary control away from the GM during this period of collective altered-consciousness. In the meantime, they must manage their intellectual careers, their status within mainstream society and within Romanticist subculture (sometimes contradictory), make a living, and negotiate the economic, racial, and gender stratification of the day. Character development and the rule system (hopefully) combine to make the social and psychological transgression of these boundaries provide real effects and challenges – as well as rewards – to the game.

The first play-test involved the defense of a Romanticist play against a Classicist claque, a Romanticist initiation ceremony in the Paris labyrinths orchestrated by Gérard de Nerval, and a fist-fight in a coffee-house.

It would, of course, be helpful to have it tested by someone without our presence; it would also be much easier if they had a basic (or more!) understanding of the period already.

I'm just feeling out the chances of that happening – if you might be interested, email olindsann@gmail.com. I will try to remember to check responses to this post, too!

Sunday, June 25, 2017

Firmin Didot

The Romanticist typographer Fermin Didot was part of the third generation of a respected typographical family; his father had invented the 'point' system still used to measure type, and his brother and cousin were also important typographers and printers. The modern 'Didot' font that he designed is only part of the massive influence that he exercised over modern typography, exploring extreme variations in stroke-width and in vertical/horizontal orientation of the form. Fermin pioneered the use of moveable type to mimic the human hand in calligraphic writing; this was often extended beyond letter-forms to create abstract ornaments of loops and arabesques.
  
Firmin Didot's anagram, showing his characteristic calligraphic stroke.
 
These ornaments, in addition to the combination of multiple typefaces in title material, including exaggerated and visually insistent fonts, became staples of Romanticist book design and were particularly important elements of the Romanticist keepsake anthologies published by Janet, who often worked closely with Didot, most notably the Annales Romantiques anthologies.

 
 
Didot also invented stereotypography, a process that revolutionised the printing industry by exponentially cutting the labour and expense necessary to reprint additional runs of a single edition.

Thursday, June 15, 2017

Le Gastronome

Le Gastronome was an eclectic Romanticist illustrated journal published from 1830 until around 1858, focused on the "frivolous" forms of art and entertainment (according to its masthead, "The Pleasures of Taste, Relaxation, Concerts, Balls, Theatres"). It was founded by Bibliophile Jacob (Paul Lacroix), the archivist, historian, and frenetic novelist. Its writers and editors included Théophile Gautier and Gérard de Nerval of the Jeunes-France group, the historian Henri Martin, and others. By 1852, it was edited by André Borel-d'Hautrive, brother of the Bouzingo co-founder Petrus Borel.

Saturday, May 13, 2017

Alphonse Karr on Bohemian Dancing, Jan. 1841!

Here's are two little articles from Alphonse Karr's Jan. 1841 issue of the self-published Bohemian gossip & satire magazine 'Les Guêpes' (The Wasps) from my archive, one about police persecution of "indecent" dances such as the early Cancan, and one on dance-club etiquette. (They appeared next to eachother in the issue). This links up directly with the lacture I gave at last year's AfterMAF about avant-garde Romanticist dance–note the discussion about Musard, the inventor of the Infernal Gallop, Broken-Chair-Gallop, etc.

The footnotes that contain French are passages I'm not quite sure about the translation of.
HERE are the original articles from a later reprint.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Random Stuff
by Gustave Karr

In The Favourite, presented at the Paris Opera, – there’s still a church, – there’s now one in every opera.[1] – which must naturally be diverted[2] into two kinds of people, – first the pious people, who don’t like that we allow actors such performances. And those who, not going to mass, neither want to discover it upon the boards, where they come looking for something else.

The former like nothing better than to go to mass, – the latter prefer the Musard Ball.

But, everything’s mixed up, everything’s confounded in a weird Tohu-bohu.[3] – If the Opera, on certain days, has the air of a church, – we have the church of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette[4], which has the air of an auditorium or ballroom, and which we justifiably dub a Musard church.

It is, every Sunday, the meeting-place of a slew of dancers[5] and all the kept girls[6] of the neighbourhood. – What’s more we encounter there a throng of young guys, less punctilious than in yesteryear to the holy services.

That’s probably by virtue of the fact that this church isn’t terribly well-formed – why they position so many uniformed policemen there – probably to prevent indecent dances. – They announce a massive ball at Notre-Dame de Paris.

Regarding these indecent dances and policemen, militiamen[7], etc. – who are charged with cracking down, in the public establishments, – on the popular cauchucas[8] and exaggerated fandangos, – aren’t they capable of making some huge mistakes? – Recently, a man arrested by them for a like offense, called upon, before the sixth chamber, some embarrassing theories.

–We have, said he,

The gracious cancan, – the saint-simonian, – the half-cancan, – the cancan, – the cancan and a half, – and the cahut; – this last dance is is the only one prohibited. I was dancing the gracious cancan.

Wouldn’t it be timely to open, for the good of those gentlemen the police and militiamen, a special school of bizarre dances, – where they would learn to perfectly discern the specific characteristics of these dances they have too much of[9].

@  @ @

Out in the world, when a man has invited a woman to dance who can’t accept due to a previous offer, he goes on to another, and it seems to me to be an insult to both women. To the first, he would say thus: “I asked you by chance, without preference; I don’t dance with you; so it goes! I’ll dance with someone else.” – To the second: “I take you for lack of anyone better; if the one whom I invited first had been free, I’d never consider you; she’s prettier than you, more elegant, more spiritual than you.”

Some people, in order to avoid this, don’t dance when the woman whom they’ve chosen isn’t free; – but it can thus come about that they pass the night without dancing, some wish they would have.

Here’s how they do it in some of the towns in the Midi:[10] – each man, when coming in, plucks from a basket an artificial flower, – and, when he’s going to invite a woman to dance[11], – in the place of this seldom-varied formula:

“Would Madame like to do me the honour of dancing with me?” he offers her a flower, which she keeps in her waistband until she’s danced the promised contradance; – then, the contradance over, she returns the bouquet to him, which he’ll offer to another. – In this way, they don’t run the risk of inviting a woman already spoken for, – because each woman who doesn’t have a flower is free and waiting to dance.


from Les Gûepes, Janvier 1841, p. 66–68. 



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
NOTES

[1] il y en a maintenant dans tous les opéras
[2] écarter
[3] An extremely rare word, that was likely current as Romanticist/Bohemian slang (note its resonance with other key argot in the article such as the cancan, etc.). It derives from Jewish theology, and denotes the primordial chaos prior to the Word–an idea relating to the theory of Romanticist frenzy, and likely to appeal to the hermetic, quasi-cabalistic elements of the movement.
[4] This new church had been built by the ruling Orleans monarchy five years previous, which gives the pun a subtle political jibe.
   However, Karr is making a pun with Romanticist argot; several months previously, his friend Nestor Roqueplan (a Romanticist humourist) had coined the slang term “Lorette” to signify a young, lower-class single woman supported as a mistress by a wealthy man. (The term grew in popularity and remained current throughout the century.)
   The new church was surrounded by cheaply-built new apartments (note Karr’s jab at the quality of construction) which, due to a slow-drying plaster that caused respiratory problems, became inhabited by many poor working women, many of whom were susceptible to the advances of wealthier young men: hence the slang term deriving from the neighbourhood. (see Michael Marrinan, Romantic Paris: Histories of a Cultural Landscape, 1800–1850, p. 294. Marrinan traces this as the origin of the term, but not to Roqueplan personally.
   Lorettes would often have met their suitors at dance-halls and balls. The source of the term is recorded in the 1888 Dictionary of Parisian slang, which was compiled and published by collaborators of Alphonse Allais, in whose work Karr’s influence is clear.
[5] danseuses, female dancers
[6] i.e., “lorettes” according to the newly-coined slang term.
[7] gardes municipaux
[8] look up in 1829 dictionary & argot dictionary
[9] ces danses qui en ont trop.
[10] The southern coastal regions of France.
[11] va engager une femme à danser

Tuesday, January 31, 2017

New Addition to Revenant Archive: Letter by Romanticist organiser, editor & writer Casimir Cordellier-Delanoue

A new addition to the Revenant Archive by a forgotten fighter in the "Battle of Hernani"-- 
  
Casimir Cordellier-Delanoue, Letter to unidentified theatre director. Undated, c. 1840s.



Cordellier-Delanoue played a central role in the self-conscious radicalization of Romanticist youth subculture into the foundation of the avant-garde. Heavily involved in the campaign of community organising and propaganda that led up to the 'Battle of Hernani,' he recognised the necessity of continuing the communal velocity created by that event, using it as a catalyst to press the Romanticist revolution to new extremes and continued cultural struggle.
 
To do so, he scraped together contributions from among the "Romanticist Army" attending every performance and launched a little magazine called Le Tribune romantique, or Romanticist Platform. In it, he and his collaborators, including Gérard de Nerval, Alexandre Dumas, Ernest Fuinet, Victor Pavie, Paul Foucher, and Félix Roselly articulated and promoted an aggressively militant Romanticism, linked to progressive politics, in the form of manifestos, critical articles on Romanticist writers and actors, Romanticist theory and historiography, literary, theatrical and musical reviews (including one of Nodier's wildly experimental novel Histoire du Roi de Bohème, held by this archive), translations of German and English Romanticism, and announcements of forthcoming publications. Although the journal was short-lived and circulated among a small, intimate readership (no full set survives, and it is not even certain how many issues were published), it catalyzed and focused the communal energy unleashed by the ongoing Battle of Hernani, and thus played a foundational role in the development of the avant-garde. It helped to establish a rich tradition of avant-garde journals and zines with tiny runs but decisive long-term effects, including Les Guêpes, Pêre Ubu's Almanac, Le Revue Blanc, Maintenant, Cabaret Voltaire, Potlatch, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, Semina, SMILE, and The Lost and Found Times. He was involved in several other journals before and after, in addition to maintaining an output of plays, historical novels, literary and music criticism.

In this curt, undated note, the clearly agitated Cordellier Delanoue complains to a theatre director about the delay in staging a reading of one of his plays, the final step in the process of deciding whether to mount a production. The cavalier treatment of writers by the management of the theatre industry (in many ways parallel to today's Hollywood studios) is attested to in many 19th Century memoirs, including those of Arsène Houssaye, Théophile Gautier, and Alexandre Dumas.
 
His insistence paid off; at the bottom, in another hand (presumably that of the recipient) the incomplete date is scrawled: "reading monday 11 8". Neither the play in question nor the date has been determined. Cordellier-Delanoue had nine plays produced at various Parisian theatres between 1831 and 1855; he is known to have lived at this address at least between 1841 and 1847, but it is unknown how long before and after.

The following transcription & translation are tentative; I am attempting to decipher nearly 200-year old cursive in a language I am still learning, so I appreciate all corrections and better transcriptions!

French:
Je n’ai pas [rXXXXXX[1]] à la Lecture pour laquelle je suis inscrit depuis si longtemps, et que plusieurs fois, sur mon sollicitations, vous avez bien voulu me promettre comme très prochaine. Soyez, je vous prie, assez bon, Monsieur, pour designer enfin le jour de cette Lecture, dont le [tour], (déja fixé [s???] M. [Vé??l?],) tarde bien à venir; - et veuillez [??r??er] l’assurance de ma [considération][2] ta [plus] [distinguée].
                Cordellier Delanoue
    [N’s’agis j’me p??n?]
        en 3 actes.
                    31 rue de chabral.
            Un Septembre

lecture lundi 11 8[he] {in another hand}


[1] I am tempted to read this contextually as a conjugation of “reçevoir,” but no such conjugation would explain the diacritical mark.
[2] This fits contextually; however, the word seems to me to terminate in a z, not an n; I have not a found a word that matches…

English:
Sir,

I did not renew? the Reading for which I signed up so long ago, and which several times, upon my request, you were willing to promise me very soon. Be, I beg you, good enough, Sir, to designate at long last the date of this Reading, of which the [tower/journey?], (already fixed XXXX? Mr. [Vé????],) cannot very well be slow to come;- and expect to [????] the assurance of my most distinguished [esteem] for you.
                    Cordellier Delanoue
    [Mustn’t I ????? myself?]
        in 3 acts.
                    31 rue de chabral.
            One September

reading monday 11 [8th?] {in another hand}

Sunday, January 29, 2017

Tribune Romantique

Heavily involved with the campaign of community organising and propaganda that led up to the 'Battle of Hernani' in 1830, the young radical Romanticist writer Casimir Cordellier-Delanoue, already involved with the little magazine Psyche, recognised the necessity of continuing the communal velocity created by that event,and to use  it as a catalyst to press the Romanticist revolution to new extremes and continued cultural struggle. To that end, he scraped together contributions from among leaders of the "Romanticist Army" attending every performance of the "Battle of Hernani" and launched a small journal called Le Tribune romantique, or Romanticist Platform. In it, he and his collaborators, including Gérard de Nerval, Alexandre Dumas, Ernest Fuinet, Victor Pavie, Paul Foucher, and Félix Roselly articulated and promoted an aggressively militant Romanticism, linked to progressive politics, in the form of manifestos, critical articles on Romanticist writers and actors, Romanticist theory and historiography, literary, theatrical and musical reviews (including one of Nodier's wildly experimental novel Histoire du Roi de Bohème, held by this archive), translations of German and English Romanticism, and announcements of forthcoming publications. Although the journal published only a few issues in the spring and summer of 1830 and circulated among a small, intimate readership (no full set survives, and it is not even certain how many issues were published), it catalyzed and focused the communal energy unleashed by the ongoing Battle of Hernani, and thus played a foundational role in the development of the avant-garde. It helped to establish a rich tradition of avant-garde journals and zines with tiny runs but decisive long-term effects, including Les Guêpes, Pêre Ubu's Almanac, Le Revue Blanc, Maintenant, Cabaret Voltaire, Potlatch, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, Semina, SMILE, and The Lost and Found Times. 

Casimir Cordellier-Delanoue

Casimir Cordellier-Delanoue played a central role in the self-conscious radicalization of Romanticist youth subculture into the foundation of the avant-garde. Heavily involved in the campaign of community organising and propaganda that led up to the 'Battle of Hernani,' he recognised the necessity of continuing the communal velocity created by that event, using it as a catalyst to press the Romanticist revolution to new extremes and continued cultural struggle.
 
To do so, he scraped together contributions from among the "Romanticist Army" attending every performance and launched a little magazine called Le Tribune romantique, or Romanticist Platform. In it, he and his collaborators, including Gérard de Nerval, Alexandre Dumas, Ernest Fuinet, Victor Pavie, Paul Foucher, and Félix Roselly articulated and promoted an aggressively militant Romanticism, linked to progressive politics, in the form of manifestos, critical articles on Romanticist writers and actors, Romanticist theory and historiography, literary, theatrical and musical reviews (including one of Nodier's wildly experimental novel Histoire du Roi de Bohème, held by this archive), translations of German and English Romanticism, and announcements of forthcoming publications. Although the journal was short-lived and circulated among a small, intimate readership (no full set survives, and it is not even certain how many issues were published), it catalyzed and focused the communal energy unleashed by the ongoing Battle of Hernani, and thus played a foundational role in the development of the avant-garde. It helped to establish a rich tradition of avant-garde journals and zines with tiny runs but decisive long-term effects, including Les Guêpes, Pêre Ubu's Almanac, Le Revue Blanc, Maintenant, Cabaret Voltaire, Potlatch, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, Semina, SMILE, and The Lost and Found Times. He was involved in several other journals before and after, in addition to maintaining an output of plays, historical novels, literary and music criticism.

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

George Sand


 
Outside the avant-garde community, George Sand was one of the most notorious avant-gardists of the mid-19th Century, and within it was one of the most divisive. Her cross-dressing, her unabashed sexuality, her ambiguous relationship with nascent Feminism, and her outspoken socialist propaganda novels made her a catalyst for the exploration of gender and its malleability within the Romanticist avant-garde, analogous in many ways to that of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven in the Dada community.
 

Charles Nodier

 
Charles Nodier exercised a tremendous influence on the first generation of the avant-garde in his myriad capacities as Frenetic novelist, organiser, archivist, critic, bibliographer, theorist, and linguist--indeed, the 'Petit-Cénacle' group, later renamed the Bouzingo, took their first moniker in tribute to Nodier's own 'Cénacle' salons, to which they were regular guests when this volume was published in 1830. His Histoire du roi de bohême was considered his most radical book, and was recognised as a seminal influence on avant-garde Romanticist typography, book design, illustration, and narrative technique.

Monday, January 9, 2017

Augustus MacKeat (Auguste Maquet)

 
A member of the Jeunes-France / Bouzingo group, where he was known as Augustus MacKeat, he published only in journals or copied manuscripts during this period, and I'm not aware of any surviving work from the period unless he is behind the possible pseudonym 'Austuste Bouzenot' in the 1834 Annales Romantiques anthology, an avant-Romanticist essay on Hinduism. Soon after the group drifted apart, Maquet became Alexandre Dumas pére's principle collaborator/ghost writer for several decades, substantially writing many of the most popular novels attributed to Dumas, including The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, though his name was suppressed to protect Dumas' celebrity and Brand-name--a practice extended to other Dumas collaborators in the avant-garde including Bibliophile Jacob and Léon Gozlan. In 1858 he sued and was legally recognised as a full collaborator on the novels, and went on to become a leader in copyright and writers'-union activism in France; nonetheless their novels continue to this day to be published exclusively under Dumas' name. his collaborations with Dumas, Maquet not only published a number of novels under his own name but was active as an important Romanticist historian, and co-authored the first systematic, multi-volume history of the French prison system--research that fed directly into his work on Monte Cristo and Iron Mask. He also wrote a number of popular plays in the 1850s.

Victor Hugo


 
Victor Hugo was a key strategist, inspiration, and the most visible standard-bearer of Romanticism during its take-over of the French cultural infrastructure during the 1830s. By the time of his death half a century later his influence had fundamentally infiltrated every facet of both intellectual and popular culture, an incalculable affect on Western society comparable in the twentieth century only to that of the Beatles. While Hugo developed and epitomised the mainstream Romanticism that the avant-garde in some ways set itself against, Hugo was key in developing a popular perception of creative activity as an ethical and intellectual praxis, which in turn made the activities of underground Romanticism comprehensible; both were born at the 'Battle of Hernani', in which Hugo was the chief strategist and the organisers of the avant-garde the tacticians and fighters; and the personal and ideological bonds between Hugo and the avant-garde community never disappeared.
 
The production of Hugo's Hernani, a play that embodied the officially-proscribed Romanticist movement and incorporated anti-Monarchist codes, was the result of years of coordinated political maneuvering by members of the Romanticist community. Hugo collaborated with young leaders of the underground Romanticist subculture in Paris, including Gérard de Nerval, Petrus Borel, Achille Devéria, Célestin Nanteuil, and Hector Berlioz, to turn the performances into high-profile media sensations by meticulously planning with them a riot that would ensure that Romanticism grabbed the imaginations of people throughout France and beyond. Pitched struggles, often breaking into physical blows, charcterised almost every performance of the play's first run, and provided the catalyst and proving-ground from which a radicalised, extremist Romanticism emerged, calling itself several different names including Frenetic and Avant-Garde Romanticism.