The Archive of the Revenant Avant-Garde: Great new addition: 1830 Anti-Romanticist satire, ...

The Revenant Archive has added the following . . .

Antoine Jay, La Conversion d'un romantique, manuscrit de Jacques Delorme [The Conversion of a Romanticist, manuscript of Jacques Delorme]. 1830. First Edition. Moutardier, Librairie-Éditeur: Paris. Hardbound Octavo, 431 pp. Inscribed in Red Pen: [cf]. So. / Paris 8[?] 16  1848" & "A. [O?eg?es?]".

From the early 1820s until the "Battle of Hernani" in February of 1830, French Romanticist subculture became increasingly eccentric, militant, and visible to the public eye, at least in Paris. The resistance of the Classicist mainstream was ramped-up apace, and found its most forceful expression in this harsh anti-Romanticist satire by Antoine Jay, which rallied and catalyzed the Classicist opposition. 

 

Like many on the left in the 1820s and early '30s, Jay was progressive in political matters but deeply reactionary in linguistic and cultural matters. This book made him one of the most prominent critics of "The New Literature" as Romanticism was often called. Two years after its publication, Jay was elected to the Académie Française, where he militated against the admission of Victor Hugo in 1841; though Hugo was admitted, Jay saw his revenge the following year when Classicist audiences organised riots at the first performances of Hugo's play The Burgaves, spelling the end of the Romanticists' dominance of the popular stage since Hernani premiered within months of this novel.

The satire claims to have been written by Jacques Delorme, parodic brother of Saint-Beuve's arch-romanticist nom-de-plume Joseph Delorme. Jay parodies the "excesses" of the emerging avant-garde's lifestyle (attacking the Jeunes-France group by name), skewers Romanticist poetics, insults the movement's leaders and canon, and argues its literary principles. He spreads rumours about the subculture, exaggerates them, and invents others. He criticizes their experimental language, the distortion of grammar in their work, their use of neologisms, their employment of bizarre and inscrutable figurative language, even reprinting large passages of Romanticist verse and drama in order to ridicule it.

The book thus swiftly entered the Romanticist canon as a favoured target of invective and ridicule, and probably exercised some reciprocal influence on the radicalization of the movement's extreme fringes into the avant-garde, which was accelerating just as the book was published. It certainly affected the movement's representation of itself to the public, for the avant-garde Romanticists typically portrayed themselves in satirical form, as a function of their generally destabalising project. Gautier's roman-à-clef The Jeunes-France is, in one dimension, a parody of Jay's satire, as explicitly signaled in the tale, "Daniel Jovard; or, the Conversion of a Classicist".

This first-edition copy has been well-read but also well cared-for by at least one generation already, and probably at least two; the binding is tight and the pages clean, but the spine and edges are worn from use. The book's first owner has left no discernible trace, but an inscription in red ink, which I can only read in part, records its purchase in Paris during the 1848 revolution. A descriptive note in pencil, written on the back of a scrap of paper torn from an advert for fountain pens, has been tipped in as a bookmark by a subsequent owner, probably in the 1920s.