Alphonse Brot

Alphonse Brot is among the most enigmatic members of the Bouzingo group. He is the earliest person to go on record as self-identifying as a member of "l'avant-garde," in his 'Preface to Song of Love and Other Poems,' published in 1829. Yet he explicitly bases this solidarity on the avant-garde's leftist political commitments; he was particularly close to O'Neddy and to Franz Lizst, both at the time keenly interested in Saint-Simonism and other proto-Socialist moveents, along with others in underground Romanticism. But formally, he advocates for a middle-ground or synthesis between Romanticism and Classicism, and his close friend O'Neddy later remarked that the group felt he lacked commitment to the Romanticist cause.

After the dissolution of the Bouzingo, his path seems to have drifted away from the avant-garde (at least in its Romanticist form). In his 1829 Chants d'amour (Songs of Love) he floated a passage from a projected play in verse, promising to complete it if the public showed interest; apparently it did not, because it never appeared and in fact Brot stopped writing verse. He did successfully conform to market demands and went on to a successful literary career,  he devoted himself to novels and plays, which sold successfully for the next sixty years––which however retain elements of Frenetic Romanticism, including exaggerated violence and passion and themes of social and political justice. For two years he was co-director of the Théâtre Ambigu-Comique, which specialised in popular melodrama for the lower classes. Despite his popularity at the time, he quickly disappeared entirely from cultural memory, even in France.  
 
His seminal role in founding the avant-garde was largely forgotten even before his death; within the community, too, his name disappears from the discourse entirely after 1833, with the single exception of the O'Neddy letter referred/linked to above.

But despite this apparent apostasy, continuities seem to exist. On the one hand, many of his popular novels and melodramas seem to continue the gothic-Romanticist tradition of exaggerated violence, passion, and transgression; several of his titles, moreover, suggest themes related to revolution and resistance to tyranny (cf. Pray For Them, Karl Sand (a leftist German poet-martyr), and possibly this volume, which takes place during the French Revolution. On the other hand, enticingly, when in 1866 a group of avant-garde poets advocated for a new, experimental synthesis between Classicism and Romanticism, they designated themselves by a name that Brot used, in the very same paragraph, as a synonym for what he called the "avant-garde": the Parnasse Contemporain (Contemporary Parnassus).

See the "Biographies" and "Translations" sections for more on Brot.