Tribune Romantique

Heavily involved with the campaign of community organising and propaganda that led up to the 'Battle of Hernani' in 1830, the young radical Romanticist writer Casimir Cordellier-Delanoue, already involved with the little magazine Psyche, recognised the necessity of continuing the communal velocity created by that event,and to use  it as a catalyst to press the Romanticist revolution to new extremes and continued cultural struggle. To that end, he scraped together contributions from among leaders of the "Romanticist Army" attending every performance of the "Battle of Hernani" and launched a small journal called Le Tribune romantique, or Romanticist Platform. In it, he and his collaborators, including Gérard de Nerval, Alexandre Dumas, Ernest Fuinet, Victor Pavie, Paul Foucher, and Félix Roselly articulated and promoted an aggressively militant Romanticism, linked to progressive politics, in the form of manifestos, critical articles on Romanticist writers and actors, Romanticist theory and historiography, literary, theatrical and musical reviews (including one of Nodier's wildly experimental novel Histoire du Roi de Bohème, held by this archive), translations of German and English Romanticism, and announcements of forthcoming publications. Although the journal published only a few issues in the spring and summer of 1830 and circulated among a small, intimate readership (no full set survives, and it is not even certain how many issues were published), it catalyzed and focused the communal energy unleashed by the ongoing Battle of Hernani, and thus played a foundational role in the development of the avant-garde. It helped to establish a rich tradition of avant-garde journals and zines with tiny runs but decisive long-term effects, including Les Guêpes, Pêre Ubu's Almanac, Le Revue Blanc, Maintenant, Cabaret Voltaire, Potlatch, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, Semina, SMILE, and The Lost and Found Times. 

Read some Issues Online (in French)

Casimir Cordellier-Delanoue

Casimir Cordellier-Delanoue played a central role in the self-conscious radicalization of Romanticist youth subculture into the foundation of the avant-garde. Heavily involved in the campaign of community organising and propaganda that led up to the 'Battle of Hernani,' he recognised the necessity of continuing the communal velocity created by that event, using it as a catalyst to press the Romanticist revolution to new extremes and continued cultural struggle.

 

To do so, he scraped together contributions from among the "Romanticist Army" attending every performance and launched a little magazine called Le Tribune romantique, or Romanticist Platform. In it, he and his collaborators, including Gérard de Nerval, Alexandre Dumas, Ernest Fuinet, Victor Pavie, Paul Foucher, and Félix Roselly articulated and promoted an aggressively militant Romanticism, linked to progressive politics, in the form of manifestos, critical articles on Romanticist writers and actors, Romanticist theory and historiography, literary, theatrical and musical reviews (including one of Nodier's wildly experimental novel Histoire du Roi de Bohème, held by this archive), translations of German and English Romanticism, and announcements of forthcoming publications. Although the journal was short-lived and circulated among a small, intimate readership (no full set survives, and it is not even certain how many issues were published), it catalyzed and focused the communal energy unleashed by the ongoing Battle of Hernani, and thus played a foundational role in the development of the avant-garde. It helped to establish a rich tradition of avant-garde journals and zines with tiny runs but decisive long-term effects, including Les Guêpes, Pêre Ubu's Almanac, Le Revue Blanc, Maintenant, Cabaret Voltaire, Potlatch, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, Semina, SMILE, and The Lost and Found Times. He was involved in several other journals before and after, in addition to maintaining an output of plays, historical novels, literary and music criticism.

George Sand

 

Outside the avant-garde community, George Sand was one of the most notorious avant-gardists of the mid-19th Century, and within it was one of the most divisive. Her cross-dressing, her unabashed sexuality, her ambiguous relationship with nascent Feminism, and her outspoken socialist propaganda novels made her a catalyst for the exploration of gender and its malleability within the Romanticist avant-garde, analogous in many ways to that of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven in the Dada community.

 

Charles Nodier

 

Charles Nodier exercised a tremendous influence on the first generation of the avant-garde in his myriad capacities as Frenetic novelist, organiser, archivist, critic, bibliographer, theorist, and linguist--indeed, the 'Petit-Cénacle' group, later renamed the Bouzingo, took their first moniker in tribute to Nodier's own 'Cénacle' salons, to which they were regular guests when this volume was published in 1830. His Histoire du roi de bohême was considered his most radical book, and was recognised as a seminal influence on avant-garde Romanticist typography, book design, illustration, and narrative technique.

Augustus MacKeat (Auguste Maquet)

 

A member of the Jeunes-France / Bouzingo group, where he was known as Augustus MacKeat, he published only in journals or copied manuscripts during this period, and I'm not aware of any surviving work from the period unless he is behind the possible pseudonym 'Austuste Bouzenot' in the 1834 Annales Romantiques anthology, an avant-Romanticist essay on Hinduism. Soon after the group drifted apart, Maquet became Alexandre Dumas pére's principle collaborator/ghost writer for several decades, substantially writing many of the most popular novels attributed to Dumas, including The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, though his name was suppressed to protect Dumas' celebrity and Brand-name--a practice extended to other Dumas collaborators in the avant-garde including Bibliophile Jacob and Léon Gozlan. In 1858 he sued and was legally recognised as a full collaborator on the novels, and went on to become a leader in copyright and writers'-union activism in France; nonetheless their novels continue to this day to be published exclusively under Dumas' name. his collaborations with Dumas, Maquet not only published a number of novels under his own name but was active as an important Romanticist historian, and co-authored the first systematic, multi-volume history of the French prison system--research that fed directly into his work on Monte Cristo and Iron Mask. He also wrote a number of popular plays in the 1850s.

Victor Hugo

 

Victor Hugo was a key strategist, inspiration, and the most visible standard-bearer of Romanticism during its take-over of the French cultural infrastructure during the 1830s. By the time of his death half a century later his influence had fundamentally infiltrated every facet of both intellectual and popular culture, an incalculable affect on Western society comparable in the twentieth century only to that of the Beatles. While Hugo developed and epitomised the mainstream Romanticism that the avant-garde in some ways set itself against, Hugo was key in developing a popular perception of creative activity as an ethical and intellectual praxis, which in turn made the activities of underground Romanticism comprehensible; both were born at the 'Battle of Hernani', in which Hugo was the chief strategist and the organisers of the avant-garde the tacticians and fighters; and the personal and ideological bonds between Hugo and the avant-garde community never disappeared.

 

The production of Hugo's Hernani, a play that embodied the officially-proscribed Romanticist movement and incorporated anti-Monarchist codes, was the result of years of coordinated political maneuvering by members of the Romanticist community. Hugo collaborated with young leaders of the underground Romanticist subculture in Paris, including Gérard de Nerval, Petrus Borel, Achille Devéria, Célestin Nanteuil, and Hector Berlioz, to turn the performances into high-profile media sensations by meticulously planning with them a riot that would ensure that Romanticism grabbed the imaginations of people throughout France and beyond. Pitched struggles, often breaking into physical blows, charcterised almost every performance of the play's first run, and provided the catalyst and proving-ground from which a radicalised, extremist Romanticism emerged, calling itself several different names including Frenetic and Avant-Garde Romanticism.

Philothée O'Neddy: Translation Volunteers?????????????????? !!!!

A shameless plea to already busy people: O’Neddy Translation Opportunities!

I've been posting translations and an essay in progress over the past few weeks from the forthcoming Philothée O'Neddy anthology. This is the first full-length book of his work ever assembled in English, and the most ambitious Bouzingo/Revenant-related project undertaken yet, involving around 100 pages of newly-translated material and that much again that has been out of print for a century, all newly annotated. (See previous posts for more on O'Neddy)

 

The more we can translate by summer, the more comprehensive the book will be, and my time is even more meagre than my fluency in French. There are a lot of short articles, essays, etc. that might be simple for a fluent reader to translate in an afternoon or a few spare moments, and some longer pieces that might catch somebody's interest. 

 

So in case you might be interested and able, I'm posting brief descriptions and page-counts of some items that I'd love to include but may not have time to get to; if you want to take anything on, just let me know so I can warn anybody else who might thing of translating the same thing. You'll get a free copy of the finished book, if you're not already owed one for contributing other translations, or helping me consistently on my own.

 

Here are the little orphan texts:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The first group are short, but unavailable online; I can photograph or transcribe you the text from my copy in the archive.

Letters to Translate:

March 30, 1836 (on Romanticist theory) 3 p

Aug. 12, 1857 (on Politics, Haussmann, etc.) 3 p

Nov. 16, 1862 (on Civil War, Lincoln, & French Revolution) 1.5 p

April 19, 1871 (Stuck in Paris during the siege, on his deathbed) 0.25 p

May 5, 1871 (bedridden during the Commune, dying) 0.5 p

Aug. 18, 1855 ? (Alphonse Karr, the french revolution, Hugo)

June 1, 1871? (French bombarding Paris, his final letter) 1 p

Maybe Aug. 1 1836 (long, but stuff on school friend-group & switch to journalism & on romanticism)

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

The set of texts below are accessible here:

https://archive.org/stream/oeuvresenproser00ongoog#page/n366/mode/2up

Theatre Reviews-Hugo, The Burgraves (p. 215) 8 p.

---Popular Parody of The Burgraves #1 (p. 232) 2 p.

---Popular Parody of The Burgraves #2 (p. 235) 1 p.

 

Letter from Hugo to O’Neddy on his defense of The Burgraves (p 237) 2 p.

 

Short story: L’Escarcelle et la Rapier (The Purse and the Rapier) 7 p.

 

Verse Preface to Enchanted Ring (D’un Anneau enchantée) 2.5 pages, around 100 lines.

(This Preface is not in the online version, but I can photo or transcribe it from my archive copy. It seems to give great clues about what the Verse form meant to O’Neddy, why he stopped publishing it at the same time he dropped his pseudonym, and connects the realist novel to bourgeois hegemony.)

 

Section/s from Enchanted Ring; chapters range between 7 and 22 pages; entire story is 70 pages

There is also a 1-page verse epilogue to Anneau enchantée.

 

There are lots of other theatre reviews and letters in the book, which may be of interest to people out there, so snoop around; I’ve just listed my personal interests here.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

More poems would be great of course! We could use anything from Feu et flame EXCEPT the following poems, which HAVE already been translated: 

 

Avant-Propos

Pandæmonium

Névralgie

Rodomontade

Nécropolis

Succube

Fanatisme

 

There are later poems I could track down if you want to go even more off the beaten path for some reason, let me know….