Introduction to Choice Morsels from the Bouzingo
by Olchar Lindsann, to the short chapbook Bouzingo anthology, Available Here
The tradition of the Bousingos remained alive through Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Jarry and Apollinaire, and saw a kind of crowning moment in Dada and surrealism in its initial stage.... One sees there, moreover, pushed to the extreme and in negative, so to speak, the very image of the class of power reflected by the warning signs of its own negation.... They helped to guide the poet’s revolt onto the road of that liberty which some recognise today, fully achievable, into the goals of the revolutionary avant-garde, onto the terrain of practical action and into the practice of action.
–Tristan Tzara, “The Bousingos as Social Phenomenon”1
In the early 1830s, the Parisian underground community was galvanized by a flamboyant, aggressive, multidisciplinary group of extremists on the lunatic fringe of the already-groundbreaking Romanticist movement, who on the one hand created literature and art that stretched or broke the extremes of formal & social acceptability and publishability, while on the other hand courting scandal through a series of public pranks, theatrical riots, anarchic themed parties, freely improvised noise-concerts, illegal dances, satirical costumes, and involvement with every stripe of leftist and antiauthoritarian politics of the day. “The Bouzingos” [say: Boo-zayn-goh] were the paradigmatic expression of a whole counterculture in formation, already referring to themselves as “the avant-garde of Romanticism” a term first espoused by co-founder Alphonse Brot, and though they have been all but erased from the cultural memory of today’s avant-garde, nearly all of its defining concerns and practices can be traced to their community. Indeed, our own time’s state of technological, economic, and aesthetic change coupled with political upheaval echoes theirs, and a re-evaluation of their work, collectively and individually, is timely.
The group’s composition was porous and much is lost to time, but they were active collectively from around 1829-1834, working under a series of names, especially the Petit-Cénacle (Small-Cenacle), Jeunes-France (Youth-France), and Bouzingos [sic], the latter two intentionally misspelled, the last referencing an obscure bit of working-class slang. Virtually unknown to mainstream readers but a major influence on successive generations of the avant-garde through the Surrealists, for complex reasons they have since slipped into utter obscurity, and little of their work has made the leap into English – in fact this chapbook is, to my present knowledge, the first Bouzingo-specific anthology ever published in any language – a sampler for a longer-term and much more substantial perfect-bound anthology currently under preparation.
The group emerged in an extremely volatile context which will be explored more in-depth in that anthology; it formed shortly before the 1830 Revolution, and matured amidst the disenchantment that followed its co-optation by capitalist interests backing a “liberal king”. They were the most radicalized young fanatics of the Romanticist movement which had just boiled over from the salons and academies into a subcultural phenomenon involving hundreds of young self-identifying Romanticists re-inventing every aspect of daily life – a true youth movement spawning its own sociocultural “scene” presaging Punk, and which had no analogue in British Romanticism. The Bouzingos first distinguished themselves as organisers and combatants of a watershed event in the history of radical counterculture, the so-called “Battle of Hernani” – a two-month campaign of nightly theatrical riots between Romanticists and the reactionary Classicist establishment. In its wake, they collectively determined to drive Romanticism past its own frontiers into new formulations of language, aesthetics, theory, sociality, politics, and daily life.
The Bouzingos were an affinity group of extreme nonconformists, and as such they were bound by ties of mutual challenge and solidarity, not by any single ideology. Theirs was a community of free agents sharing distinct, but integrated and complementary private quests within the sociocultural context of underground Romanticism, sharing a constellation of shared interests and enthusiasms. Their work is rich with shared themes, aesthetics, and strategies, but each member played with these in differing admixtures, in diverse ways, to a variety of effects.
Throughout, we find a love of themes and tropes from low-brow gothic horror and melodrama, hints or open espousals of radical politics, a fascination with non-European religions and cultures, and the embrace of a cult of art addressing what their descendants the Surrealists call the absence of myth. Their inspiring hero, Victor Hugo, had called French Romanticism “Liberalism in Art” and the Bouzingos gestured toward a Radicalism in Culture, integrating Neo-Jacobin insurrectionism, Fourierist and Saint-Simonian Socialisms, proto-Anarchist and Illegalist ideas, heretical Christian Socialism, and Socialist Occultism. Though this activity has not been taken seriously by 19th- and 20th-century literary & art historians, it was taken seriously by the real experts, the Parisian secret police, who kept a file on the group and assigned spies and informants to watch them; several spent time in the political prison at Saint-Pélagie.
The Bouzingo group included poets, painters, novelists, sculptors, architects, theorists, historians, translators, printmakers, critics, playwrights, costumers, and comedians, with most members working in multiple disciplines. Their work was fiercely interdisciplinary and collaborative for its day, through direct and indirect means. Artists collaborated directly on paintings and prints, writers on plays and novels. Poets wrote ekphrastic poems about Bouzingo artworks, printmakers illustrated Bouzingo books or made popularizing prints of Bouzingo paintings, sculptors made plaster bas-relief medallion-portraits of Bouzingo members.
Though at first glance 200 years of continued formal experimentation can obscure how radical the Bouzingos were in this domain, they pioneered the call for a continual renewal and diversity of aesthetic form that still characterizes the avant-garde, and a glance at contemporary attacks on them read uncannily like those produced against the 20th-century modernists and later movements. In the visual arts, they tended toward complex composition, and strange distortions of figure and space – in painting, strong violent colour and textured surfaces, in printmaking, primitivist abstraction that radicalized the graphic and decorative impetus of medieval art. In literature, our unfamiliarity with French prosody makes their innovations even easier to miss, though arguably even more extreme. These include, in brief, an unheard-of degree of rhythmic eccentricity and metrical rule-breaking and -stretching, intensive and semantically unsettling wordplay, straining and distorting syntax to create deliberate ambiguities and complications, the constant creation of neologisms, often including the incorporation of archaic and Middle-French vocabulary and/or conjugations, the juxtapositions of vocabulary and rhetorical elements from a wide range of literary and vernacular discourses, and a whole poetics of epigraphs, quotations, and dedications that created an entire stratum of intertextual connections uniting the work produced by the group, informing the content of each others’ pieces, and carefully designed to enable the eventual rediscovery of their community.
The Romanticists called their integration of nonconformist intellectual, social, aesthetic, and political life camaraderie – a creative practice explicitly rooted in friendship. Drawn together by their shared cultural affinities and refusal of alienated life, and yet stimulated to growth by the celebration and cultivation of their individual eccentricities and differences, sharing their lives and often their living spaces and food, the semi-formal collectives they formed, known as cenacles, combined radical individuality with fierce communal spirit to build a micro-culture with utopian aspirations, devoted to contesting consensus reality in the midst of the society designed to crush them. The principle can be seen at play within nearly every avant-garde group since.
Internally, they delighted in outré, quasi-official initiation ceremonies such as drinking wine from a skull sourced by Gérard de Nerval, in a complex intertextual ceremony involving references to both Hugo and Byron. They developed an insular, hermetic slang or argot for themselves, so thick they were incomprehensible even to other Romanticists. The Bouzingo and other cenacles met in members’ apartments or studios – disorientingly adorned and often themed environments, combining artwork by each other, their friends in the broader Romanticist community, and shared influences with all sorts of knick-knacks and antiques from junk dealers, items pulled from the trash for their hidden aesthetic qualities, and displays of books and prints “sacred” to the group, arranged and juxtaposed according to symbolic and aesthetic qualities.
Publicly, in addition to the textual strategies already discussed, the Bouzingo and other avant-Romanticists manifested their camaraderie and affiliation with the Romanticist youth subculture by sporting elaborate Romanticist beards and hairstyles (such as Du Seigneur’s “flame of glory”, today called a fauxhawk), banned revolutionary bonnets, flamboyant and sometimes illegal Romanticist fashions using anachronistic, non-European elements and bold, garish colours or else funeral clothing and corpse-paint, and engaging in public cosplay by dressing as characters from Romanticist or medieval literature and history; carrying daggers openly in the street; staging interventions and riots at theatrical, musical, and dance events; singing drinking songs about themselves and radical politics in the streets; perpetrating public pranks like dragging a mannequin through the streets in a burial shroud, claiming to have just dug up a grave; presenting free-improv house shows on broken instruments they had no training on; and throwing wild costume parties combining poetry readings, themed meals, role-playing, bowls of flaming spiked punch, ice cream served in skulls, and Romanticist dances such as the “Infernal Gallop” (now called a circle-pit, except they shot pistols off in time with the music).
These aggressive public manifestations made them a magnet for satire and scandal, and the press picked up and exaggerated the group’s activity, prompting them to play up their mythical public image even more, developing a dialectical relationship – especially with the government-owned satirical journal Figaro, whose attacks on the group actually inspired two of their names. Ridiculed there as “Jeunes-Frances” [sic] and “Bousingots”, they took the names up for themselves – but not before intentionally misspelling the latter.
However, the backlash was severe. Not only did their public persona shock the mainstream, but it caused a rift between the more moderate Romanticists swiftly turning their early notoriety into solid careers, and the emerging avant-garde insistent on continuing to radicalize its agenda even at the expense of respectability. Moreover, the attacks of Figaro and their police file make it clear that the regime, then clamping down on the temporary burst of political freedom after the 1830 Revolution, considered the growing underground Romanticist/ proto-Bohemian community a political threat, and the Bouzingo group to be the major influence and figurehead of that movement. The combined result was a (mostly) unofficial blacklist against the group as such, and especially its most outspoken members such as Pétrus Borel and Philothée O’Neddy. Book & exhibition reviews as well as private communications made it clear that if core members wanted to publish and show their work, they must dissociate from the collective identity and start creating and behaving less radically. Some buckled under and continued their careers; others refused, and ceased seeing print or being shown. Though there was no declared “end” to the group, over the mid-1830s the members gradually drifted in various directions: some into new avant-garde cenacles, continuing many of their collaborative relationships in other combinations; others toward more or less successful traditional careers; and others into poverty, self-imposed isolation, depression, and early death.
The new cenacles, journals, and communal undertakings in which many members became involved after the group’s dissolution provided the foundation of a permanent avant-garde community, particularly through Théophile Gautier, who mentored several generations of Romanticists, Parnassians, and Symbolists, passing down both the subcultural lifestyle and memory that would bloom into Futurism, Cubism, and Dada four decades after his death.
A small but intense core has continued to be inspired by the Bouzingos, as evidenced each generation by new editions of a few hundred copies of Bouzingo masterpieces, new exhibitions and monographs ignored by the mainstream now as ever, new historiographic efforts of widely varying degrees of acuteness – a tradition in which this and other Revenant Editions books continue. Their effect however, and that of the larger community of which they are simply one of the most extreme examples, far exceeds their name-recognition in today’s cultural underground, persisting in many of the most basic aspirations and strategies we use to contest hegemonic misery. It is long past time that we start getting to know them again.
1Tzara, “Les Bousingos comme phénomène social,” in Les Petits romantiques français, 1949, ed. Francis Dumont, Les Cahiers du Sud, p. 61. My translation. Historians’ & even members’ own spellings of Bouzingo vary greatly throughout the writings on the group, to be explored more fully in the forthcoming anthology.
The Bouzingo
Petrus Borel--writer/organizer/theorist/translator/painter/architect
Joseph Bouchardy--writer/engraver
Louis Boulanger--painter/scenographer/poet
Théodore Gautier--writer/theorist/painter/organizer
Augustus MacKeat--writer/historian/teacher
Gerard de Nerval--writer/translator/organizer
Philothée O'Neddy--writer/organizer/theorist
Célestin Nanteuil--engraver/possibly writer
Jehan du Seigneur--sculptor/historian/theorist/teacher/theologian
Jules Vabre--translator/architect/theorist
Eugène Devéria--painter/writer/teacher, Achille's brother information.
