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}

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. 

Read some Issues Online (in French)

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.

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.

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.