Théophile Gautier, "Sonnet VII" (1830)

Gautier played a central role in underground, experimental culture for over 40 years, and his influence on the literary avant-garde was both profound and problematic – so much that he was almost systematically erased from the avant-garde 's collective consciousness by the Surrealists. Yet he is ignored to our peril. The problem: he has been enshrined (especially in anglophone criticism) as the father of de-politicized, “Art for Art's Sake” (a term he tossed out when describing what he called the 'cult of art' in his massively influential Preface to Mlle. de Maupin). Gautier truly does have much to answer for here – in retrospect, we can see how he set a politically distanced pattern that was not shaken free of until the Modernists. However, when read carefully and outside of Walter Pater's critical shadow, even his famous Preface turns out much more nuanced and complex, if still flawed. I would propose (some other time) that the vision he proposes there is as close to Hakim Bey's Ontological Anarchy as Pater's Art for Art's Sake. In fact, he specifically espouses Fourierist socialism in that tract, giving the very same reasons that the Surrealists and Situationists would later offer. What he renounces is his belief in the “political” electoral plane as an effective vehicle for change. This poem from his 1st collection, is explicitly political and calls out the current "Liberal Monarchy" that took over after the July Revolution of 1830, the year of publication, and its suppression of multiple democratic uprisings in its wake. Four years later, in the Maupin Preface, he echoed the poem's point: “What matters it whether 'tis a sword, a holy-water sprinkler, or an [bourgeois-republican] umbrella that rules you? It's a stick all the same... it would be far more progressive... to break it and throw away the pieces.” In experimental fashion, even his syntax fractures here, along with his faith in positivist revolution.

    

Sonnet VII (1830)

by Théophile Gautier

 

Liberty of July! Woman of bust divine,

And whose body ends in a tail!

Gérard de Nerval

  

And this blind life of theirs is so debased,

They envious are of every other fate.

Inferno, canto III

  

With this disgraceful age tis high time that we break it;

The fatal finger placed upon its brow condemned¹

As upon hell’s gates: Hope depleted! – Friends,

Enemies, public, kings, all trump us taken in.

A budget elephant sucks gold by trunk taken in;

In their thrones yet a-quake from yesterday’s ascents,

From kinsmen overthrown they keep all, but rescind

The palm prompt with gifts and pomp breathtaking.

  

And yet in July, neath the sky’s indigo,

There where the cobbles lurched,² they proffered promises

Equal to Charles tenth’s overseen masses!

  

Alone, Poetry manifest in Hugo

Refused deluding us, of which palms divine

Enshadow our debris, destiny inclined.
  

– Trans. Olchar E. Lindsann
  

from Théophile Gautier, Poésies Complètes, Tome premier. 1884. Charpentier: Paris. p.107.
  

1 In the original, this line ends with a mis, “placed”, which is an exact homophone of amis, “friends”, in the next line. I have found it impossible to translate this wordplay.

2 Referring to the paving-stones of Paris being pried up to build barricades, a potent symbol of revolution in France throughout the 19th Century.