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)