Figaro

 

The satirical journal Figaro played a fraught but defining role in the history of the Bouzingo group--indeed, they were given that name in the articles contained in the archive copies of Figaro. Founded in 1826, the journal had helped to lay the groundwork for oppositional satire in France and was closely tied to Romanticism. Many Romanticist and avant-garde satirists and writers published their early work there, including Gustave Karr, Émile Zola, and Jules Claretie.
 
However, its editor, Henri de Latouche, opposed the excesses of the nascent Romanticist avant-garde, attacking the Petit-Cénacle / Jeunes-France group with a series of outrageous humurous stories in the winter of 1831, in which the group's extreme public persona (Gothic, Revolutionary, Blasphemous, Rowdy) was pushed to extreme limits. This seems to be the first time that the name 'Jeune-France' was applied to the group in print, and may have been the genesis of the name, though they deliberately misspelled it when claiming it for their own. They adopted the wild legends with glee in their internal mythology, public personas, and self-referential poems and stories.

 

Latouche was attacked in turn by Petrus Borel in his Preface to Rapsodies, but had already, in January 1832, been replaced as editor, and The Figaro became a right-wing legitimist organ overnight. Searching for a satirical symbol for the political & cultural radicalism they now wished to attack, they settled on the Jeunes-France, several of whom had been arrested in the street in the middle of the night the previous year, singing a song which declared that they "were doing" or "making the bouzingo". The Figaro thus created a stock-caricature of the mad, godless, rabidly anti-government "Bousingot" and published another series of comic stories, accentuating the group's political radicalism and mapping the resulting stereotype onto a larger segment of radicalized youth culture. Again, the group (temporarily) adopted this term of intended abuse; their attempt to publish a group anthology of Tales of the Bouzingo never came about, but several stories about avant-garde life--themselves satirizing the Figaro's satires--were published  in 1833.

In the course of the 1830s, the newspaper was sold to a series of editors both Left and Right, including the Romanticist dandy magician and dramatist Nestor Roqueplan, then the Romantic Saint-Simonist Léon Halévy for a brief period in 1838, until finally re-established as a conservative newspaper later in the century, which still exists, and was the publisher of Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurism.

Here are  few translations of Bouzingo-related issues from 1832.