Bibliophile Jacob (aka Paul Lacroix)

The Romanticist writer, bibliographer, historian, editor Paul Lacroix, a.k.a. Bibliophile Jacob, played a multi-faceted role in the development of the avant-garde. Along with Charles Nodier, Lacroix/Jacob was the leading bibliographer and literary researcher of the first generation avant-garde, and his short stories about antiquarian and bibliographic subculture are still republished today in small editions for bibliographic clubs. In 1840 he contributed to the development of an avant-Romanticist micropress scene with his self-published proto-zine called The Black Butterflies. He was among the most assiduous in resurrecting Rabelais’ work, which had lain forgotten for a century in France, along with Villon's and other major influences on radical Romanticism, laying the groundwork for the alternative history claimed by them and passed on and expanded by subsequent generations of dissident subculture. He was a leading novelist of Frenetic Romanticism, using his historical research to create intellectualized horror stories such as Danse Macabre set in a richly-textured medieval world, serving a double purpose as anti-gentrification propaganda to save locations included in his stories from demolition. In the mid-1830s, he became associated with a christian Socialist movement led by Philippe Bouchez, a former Saint-Simonist, along with his brother-in-law, Jean Duseigneur (aka Jehan Du Seigneur) of the Petit-Cénacle / Bouzingo group, with whom Lacroix/Jacob was close. Under his own name Paul Lacroix, he compiled and wrote a series of groundbreaking histories of everyday life in Medieval France, illustrated with hundreds of reproductions of Medieval artifacts, illuminations; some of these were co-edited with Duseigneur.