Le Livre de beauté: Souvenirs historique (The Book of Beauty: Historical Memories). ed. Louis Janet? (1834) Sole Edition? Louis Janet: Paris. 239 pp.
This interesting volume indicates how closely related historiography and poetics were considered among the early avant-garde, and reveals the increasing strain between mainstream and Frenetic Romanticism. In French Romanticism, the revolution in historiography and that in creative culture were considered part of the same continuum, and the founders of modern French historiography–Michelet, Méry, Lacroix, Maquet, etc.–incorporated both academic history and historical fiction into their larger historiographic projects (sometimes to the despair of later historians). We see here that this general tendency was also reflected within the extremist fringes of the broader movement.
Published
(and likely edited) by Louis Janet, whose ultra-Romanticist press
published the comprehensive yearly avant-garde anthology Les Annales Romantiques,
this anthology presents a selection of 14 texts about historical women,
most written by people known primarily as radical Romanticist poets and
playwrights, including four members of the Jeunes-France/Bouzingo. The
contributors were young, most ranging from their mid-20s to mid-40s, and
included the most radical exponents of Frenetic Romanticism, Petrus Borel and Charles Lassailly, and ultra-Romanticists such as Aimable
Tastu (the only female contributor), Cordellier Delanoue, Gustave
Drouineau, Henri Martin, and Jean-Pierre Lesguillon. Their chosen
subjects diverge from mainstream selections in such collections, which
typically focused on women known for their moral correctness, social
compassion, and self-sacrifice–traits traditionally associated with 'the
weaker sex'. Instead, here we find women notable for their political
influence, in some cases exerted as strong monarchs, in other cases as
royal mistresses. Many of the texts are hybrid constructions, which
shift between traditional scholarly reportage and historical fiction,
punctuated by contemporary commentary.
The
anthology begins with a surprisingly ambivalent preface by Charles
Nodier, and reflects the awkward place in which he found himself in
1834, when the divergence of mainstream Romanticism from the nascent
avant-garde was becoming definitive. As the organiser of the Cénacle
group, he had overseen the cultural coup-d'état that was swiftly making
Romanticism the dominant force in nearly every domain of contemporary
culture. But through his experimental, sometimes hallucinatory
gothic-horror novels he was also the half-intentional father of the
dark, violent, gothic substream known as Frenetic Romanticism, around
which had built up the even-more radical community beginning to call
itself the avant-garde, which was proving a political and aesthetic
embarrassment as the movement's leaders settled into relative
respectability. After a few predictable pages of the usual commonplaces
regarding the virtues of Love (cf. "Women are the masterpieces of
Divinity", Nodier ends his Preface by stating his disappointment at the
low moral character of many of the women chosen for the anthology, and
exhorting his readers to focus on the uplifting contributions such as
the one on Queen Elizabeth. One feels that Nodier is fulfilling a
contractual obligation, fearful of endorsing an anthology destined for
critical attack from the respectable mainstream press.
In
addition to Janet assembling this collection and publishing dozens of
female writers in his anthologies, journals and books, his editor for
the Annales Romantiques, Charles Malo, had also published his own book of feminist biographies several years earlier. Closely associated with the Frenetic and
other extremist currents, Janet's fortunes seem to have been tied to it,
and he appears to have ceased publishing by the time that it had
subsided at the end of the 1830s and the energies of the avant-garde
diverted away from Romanticism.
