Gustave Karr's rare, self-published avant-garde satirical magazine Les Guêpes (The Wasps) was a milestone series in the history of avant-garde and DIY publishing, and an important potential resource for researchers of the counter-cultural milieu of the time.
The first issue opens with a cogent and pretty detailed analysis of the
way in which,
after the Revolution of 1830, the new moderate-liberal Monarchy
exercised effective censorship through economic rather than political
means, destroying the artist- and activist-run Small Press community in
favour of a few huge corporate press conglomerates. Karr's
response to the situation was to start this self-published venture
(which lasted ten years) with an intentionally tiny audience whom he
called his "unknown friends". This move was extremely rare at the time,
when printing technology was expensive and inaccessible, over a century
before the 'Mimeograph Revolution', and Karr's rationale in this essay
for self-publishing as political and literary dissent, shows him laying
the very early groundwork upon which 'zine and micropress publishing
would eventually emerge. Karr's discourse in each issue swerves and
merges unpredictably, almost as if by stream of consciousness, between
political tirades, comedy sketches, gossip and in-jokes about the
avant-garde community, literary and social criticism, and sarcastic
observations about daily life. The journal ran for just over a decade, from 1838 until the coup-d'état that ended the Second Republic in 1851. Karr briefly attempted to revive Les Guêpes under the regime of
Napoleon III, an undertaking doomed to failure given the conditions of
state censorship. After this, refusing to write any more under the totalitarian regime, he permanently retired from literature and devoted himself to botany, turning his home into a famous garden and having several flowers named after him.
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