Resurrecting the Bouzingo / Jeunes-France

JUNE UPDATE

2011-06-22T17:43:00.002-04:00

The past several months have seen a very large amount of research on my part, but extremely little of this has made it to the webpage as I'm immensely busy with other projects. For the most part it will be awhile longer before I can do a comprehensive update of the site, but I hope to keep tweaking in the interim.

Thankfully, other people have been lending a hand with research, the most exciting of which is posted below. This is doubly nice, in that it not only furthers and broadens our understanding of the Bouzingo, but even more importantly moves the project farther in the direction of a true community undertaking, in which a number of us are investigating and reconstructing whatever aspects of the Jeunes-France and their milieu we find most pertinent to our current practice.

So, updates:

Tim Gaze has done research into connections between the Bouzingo's community and Eliphas Lévi, the one-time Evadamist who was instrumental in re-organising the French occultist community as it developed through the 19th Century. His text is posted below, and will soon be uploaded to the 'French Romanticist Community' tab as well.
Gleb Kolomiets is beginning to research early Russian Romanticism in tandem with this project, and is encountering a number of historiographic challenges which he describes in the text below. He has also translated the only Russian-language writing on the Bouzingo that he could find online, also posted below and soon to be uploaded to the 'French Romanticist Community' tab.
Warren Fry is currently writing a monograph on Achille Devéria's 1835 series of satirical erotica, Diabolico-fucko-mania: A History of Morals under King Louis-Philippe, teasing out the Jeunes-France's politicised relationship with Libertine subculture.
The one thing I've managed to do myself is to add a freewheeling kind of catalog of my nascent archive of 19th Century avant-garde/gothic/counterculture ephemera, under the 'Physical Archive' tab. There will be photos up there eventually.
Translation has been rather stalled lately, not an unforeseen circumstance given everybody's busy schedules. In the meantime I am [VERY] slowly undertaking the task of editing a very heavily annotated anthology of French Romanticist Prefaces & Manifestos, which is a long-term project but one which may succeed in making the general outline of the community's development and self-identification comprehensible in a way which is based in their own statements and proclamations, while also providing a richly-textured picture of the overlapping social and intellectual contexts in which and for which they operated. I'm using primarily translated texts already in the public domain, plus texts already translated for this project and whatever others are translated by the time the project comes together.

Tim Gaze: research on connections of Eliphas Lévi w/the Jeunes-France

2011-06-21T13:18:00.005-04:00

Some research by experimental/ asemic writer & publisher Tim Gaze in Australia on Eliphas Lévi, who a few year after the Bouzingos' dissolution was involved with the Evadamist commune of the Mapah Ganneau. There's also a bit on this group HERE and HERE and HERE. Many thanks, Tim!

Connections between Eliphas Lévi & the «Bouzingo»

I did a tiny bit of research, to see if there were any obvious connections between the Bouzingo people and the influential scholar of esotoric knowledge, Eliphas Lévi.

My main source was Eliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival by Christopher McIntosh (Rider, 1972).

Eliphas Lévi is the name under which our protagonist is best known.

Named at birth (8th February 1810) Alphonse-Louis Constant, Lévi was educated from 1825 at the seminary St-Nicolas du Chardonnet, with the intention of becoming a priest. The Principal, Abbé Frére-Colonna, was an expert in supernatural phenomena such as the animal magnetism used by Anton Mesmer.

Later, he studied philosophy at a college in Issy, then entered the theological college of St-Sulpice, training to become a priest. He was ordained as a Deacon in 1835, but abandoned the idea of becoming a priest in 1836.

After leaving St-Sulpice, he started to attend artistic and literary salons, and became active in radical politics.

At some time around 1838, Lévi met Honoré de Balzac, at the home of a Mme Girardin.

In 1839, in the company of the writer Alphonse Esquiros, Lévi visited the prophet Mapah, whose family name was Ganneau, who is already mentioned in prior Bouzingo research.

Alphonse-Louis wrote a radical book, La Bible de la liberté, published by Auguste Le Gallois in 1841. Both author and publisher were fined and imprisoned for this work.

He wrote a number of other articles and books on political ideas and religion. McIntosh comments that Constant managed to simultaneously be a radical and a traditionalist, fusing Socialist ideas with Catholicism. Constant's drawings and poetry were also published in journals.

In addition, he edited some notes entrusted to him by his recently deceased friend Flora Tristan, which were published as L'Emancipation de la femme, ou testament de la paria, in 1846. An early feminist work?

His first famous work on occultism, Dogme et rituel de la haute magie, was published under his pseudonym in 1856. Fluent in reading Hebrew because of his religious education, he decided to convert his Christian names into equivalent Hebrew names, changing Alphonse-Louis to Eliphas Lévi. Sometimes he used the name Eliphas Lévi Zahed.

Another famous work, Histoire de la magie, was published in 1860.

In the 1870s, Lévi received a visit from the author Judith Gautier (Mme Judith Mendès), who was the daughter of Bouzingo Théophile Gautier. Judith's husband, also an author, named Catulle Mendès, was an enthusiast of Lévi's work, and invited him around, where Eliphas met Victor Hugo. Victor knew of Lévi's writing.

So, there were definite connections between Alphonse-Louis Constant/Eliphas Lévi and members of the Bouzingo circle, although they occurred much later than the 1930s. Constant was still finding his way in the world in the 1830s. The word "Bouzingo" does not occur in McIntosh's book.

A deeper question about magic and the Bouzingo would be: was there any conscious, willed intentional magic by members of the Bouzingo during their most active period?

rough research by Tim Gaze, June 2011

Gleb Kolomiets: on independant historical research in Russia

2011-06-21T13:12:00.002-04:00

Writer/theorist/publisher/organiser Gleb Kolomiets in Smolensk is attempting to coordinate research on radical Russian Romanticism contemporaneous with the Bouzingo/Jeunes-France, but is encountering historiographic challenges quite different in many ways than what independent researchers face here in the West (and similar in many other ways). His account of his current struggles in this direction are fascinating:

There was a quite serious school of history of literature & fine art in the USSR (Marxist-Leninist ideology always insisted on a primary nature of political and social conflicts in the questions of art and art history). Most investigators tried to describe and analyse the political and social background of biographies, but the problem is that they gave a communist interpretation for almost every political act of every artist/writer/etc. So most soviet investigations on the history of art is a lie. For example Pushkin who lived a quite apolitical life and concentrated mostly on his sexual activity and on sexual activity of his wife is often described as a 'fighter for freedom' and 'active participant of the Decembrist uprising'. Yes, he was somewhat involved in the Decembrists political group, but it's almost impossible to investigate the 'real' character of this relation because of communist propaganda in the historical writings on Pushkin.

Contemporary art history in Russia, on the contrary, is quite anti-communist and Pushkin is described as a fully apolitical figure or a national loyalist in "new" writings. Besides this there is a strong intention of biographers to write a "scandalous bestseller", the facts are distorted to achieve good sales. The most representative example is the investigation of Mayakovsky's suicide which I read couple of yeas ago. The author was certain that Myakovsky was murdered by the NKVD but his certainty wasn't proven by any facts. Yes, I can feel a falsification in the books I read, I can see the 'hollow' places filled by hollow words but it's extremely hard to reach "original" documents. Most publications of the letters by Russian classics and memoirs of their contemporaries were "edited" in Soviet times and there are no new re-publications now.

The relationship to prominent writers|artists|etc in Russia is very harmful: the classics are the saints and nobody dares to defame their virtue. So there is a huge amount of unpublished or extremely rare "discrediting evidence" locked in the archives and in special custody where any non-specialist is never permitted.

So I've described the problems which I shall surely face when I start my investigation on Russian romanticism and its social and political background. But I still think about these ideas as very interesting and perspective. I'll try to review available materials and books and try to make a decision: is it possible to be at least relatively objective in my investigation.

By the way, a couple of years ago I found out that there was a quite active group of Futurists here in Smolensk. I tried to find info on their activities, but I found out that there is no information on this issue on the Internet at all, and all existing documents are stored in the Moscow literary archive which is unassailable for those who have no historical/philological education or just live outside Moscow... The way of prostituting and perverting the history of art in Russia is much more straightforward than in the USA...

by Gleb Kolomiets

(See the post below for Kolomiets' translation of the only Bouzingo-related text he's found in Russian)

Bazensky/Kolomiets: Russian Text on the Bouzingo

2011-06-21T12:40:00.003-04:00

Gleb Kolomiets has translated the only text he could find in Russian dealing with the Bouzingo. This piece by Andrey Bazensky plays pretty free and easy with the name 'Bouzingo', and deals with the whole 19th Century avant-garde, but does suggest the way in which the group's influence can bee seen throughout the century. It's approaching it as analogous to punk rock, reminding me a bit of Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces. Thanks, Gleb!

By Andrey Bazensky
translated by Gleb Kolomiets

Bouzingos - the name of 19th century Parisian punks. They didn’t play music then, but wrote poems and novels. Some of them made it rather shrill and beautiful. Anyway they always played out of tune.
The leather boots and tight pants, a black velvet tunic and white Baroque-style shirt with ruffles, pink gloves, hair painted in bright green - that is Charles Baudelaire’s ordinary “suit” at the meeting of the Club des Hashischins. Once during a high-society dinner Baudelaire complained with boredom that the cheese has the smell of a child's brain…
Another sad punk and emo, Gerard de Nerval, was close to Dada and a Monty Python sketch: he was the one who walked his lobster on a blue ribbon over the streets of Paris.
Alphonse Esquiros recorded his somber hit – “The Wizard”, featuring, among others, a harem of dead courtesans, the bronze robot, as well as a hermaphrodite in love with the moon.
The album by gloomy aristocratic post-rocker Villiers de l'Isle-Adam dedicated [The Future Eve] to the inventor-Rosicrucian (he resembles Thomas Edison to me), who created an artificial woman. Mallarmé once said about Villiers de l'Isle-Adam: “this man never existed, except for his dreams”.
Huysmans tried to commit to a kind of androgenic focus in a Ziggy’s and/or in a Münchhausen’s manner: he tried to twist himself inside out in his creative experiments.
Some of these voyants suffered from synaesthesia. And most of Bouzingos sought the disorder of all the senses. They fled their own nature anywhere: into Africa, into drug addiction, to the barricades. They were stubbornly stroking themselves against the grain and heard, like Kafka, too many fraudulent votes to make up one whole personality. Bouzingos were the centaurs, openhearted freaks, walking stills trying to accommodate too many ingredients all the time.
Being aware of their monstrous nature, they believed a God, the demiurge, who isn’t a great specialist in a molding of humans. Blake once marked Him by the punk pun “Nobodaddy”. A friend Theo [this is Gautier--O.L.] called de Nerval “footless swallow”.
In short, everything has already happened. Today we can - in a cozy atmosphere - open the book and enjoy the results of theirs sublimation, an unparalleled soup from swallow-foot, transparent and delicate liquor silicum, which dissolves and disappears under the action of ordinary air…

Feb. Update, #1

2010-11-27T09:05:00.016-05:00

Progress has been slow but steady so far this Winter, as everyone involved with the project--myself not least of all--has been busy with other projects and duties. Nonetheless a number of new leads and areas of investigation have been opened, and now merely await the time to be followed up. I'm heavily involved with organising the Marginal Arts Festival here in Roanoke, VA, which occurs in less than a month, so nearly all of my energies will be there until then. It's likely to be early Spring before I'm able to resume heavy research or writing, though I'll try to keep updating the site in the meantime with what I do uncover.

Though I'm not adding much to the site itself, lots of juicy tidbits have turned up. Right now I'm just posting a few of the juicier ones, I'll try to get the rest up in the next week or two, we'll see what happens.

So here are some of the promising developments from the last couple months:

A French-language monograph written by Aristide Marie on Louis Boulanger, the Bouzingo painter & printmaker, has recently come into my possession. This is quite a windfall! A large number of black and white images and a solid amount of text I am unable to properly read. It's listed on Amazon but no copies have been available there for over a year; I managed to find a copy available on ebay. I am gradually scanning in Boulanger images and adding them to his online portfolio; there are already several new ones in there now. It's easy to understand his popularity in Frenetic & Gothic circles, looking at some of these grisly beauties. This project has also made me tolerably competent in scanning French texts for information, though if I slow down to try translating specific words and phrases my comprehension collapses; so I'm slowly semi-reading the texts and eventually will be able to correct and expand the biography of Boulanger that has already been posted on this site. There are also a number of poems, many of which are dedicated to Boulanger by his friends and some of which I suspect are written by him, but I need to examine French articles more carefully to be able to figure this out. Either way, these will one day end up being translated, or at least posted.

In addition to this book, I have found online a review of Bouchardy's print "Fire from Heaven"(above), an illustration of Hugo's poem on the destruction of Sodom. The picture was produced in 1831, amidst the tumultuous convulsions of the Bouzingo's condensation as the most radical manifestation of Romanticist subculture. This enthusiastic review is from the same 1832 issue of the Revue des Deux-Mondes as the bitingly antagonistic review of Borel's Rhapsodies (possibly by the same person--reviewers are anonymous), and as such indicates that the split between the (newly) mainstream Romanticism of the Cénacle group and the evolving avant-garde Romanticism of the Jeunes-France was not universal. It seems that while Borel had forcefully placed himself on the Cénacle's shit-list, his friend Boulanger maintained more than cordial relations with them; indeed he remained one of Victor Hugo's closest friends throughout his life. The reviewer praises Boulanger's intellectual approach to the plastic arts, noting the immense amount of historical and anthropological research that Boulanger had conducted for this piece; he also deplores Boulanger's exclusion from the recent Salon, where his painting had been rejected on political grounds by the new July Monarchy. This and the reference to Boulanger's Romanticist classic The Torture of Mazeppa reaffirm his status at this time as a standard-bearer of Romanticist painting. Other comments provide a glimpse into the relationship of Romanticism to mass culture, as the reviewer anticipates copies of the print posted in the homes of Romantic supporters throughout France.

Another example of the interaction of the Jeunes-France with mass culture, particularly through lithography, is also another recent acquisition: I am now the proud owner of a print of Célestin Nanteuil's The Cavern, reproduced in a British newspaper, the date of which I cannot learn since the print had already been cut out but which, from printing on the back, I estimate is from the mid-1850s to early 1860s. I've read enough 18th and early 19th Century gothic novels to recognise the subject as the hidden den of a robber band, such as those described by Radcliffe, Lewis, Maturin, Teuthold, etc. etc. So here again is a tantalizing indication of the Jeune-France's relationship with popular gothic/frenetic subculture.

Gleb Kolomiets has begun taking a look at Russian Romanticism to discover if there are historical secrets there analogous to what is being uncovered regarding the Bouzingo. He has also translated a short essay on the Bouzingo from the Russian, which I'll try to post in a week or two along with some very interesting comments that Kolomiets has made about the unique historiographic challenges that he's meeting in Russia as he tries to dig beneath the official interpretation and canon; in certain ways the challenges are vastly different than what we face here in the West, in other ways surprisingly similar. Through the Mycelium publishing project that he has initiated, Kolomiets has also launched a series of books reprinting works by 'The Forgotten Avant-Garde' from throughout history, the first book being visual poetry, diagrammes, etc. by the Renaissance alchemist Robert Fludd. This project too is closely akin to the underlying historiographic concerns of the Bouzingo project (also just published by mycelium is a Russian translation of my own related essay, Toward a Radical Historiography: Creative Sociality and Traditions of Dissent.)

Quick Update on the status of translation/material gathering for the initial Bouzingo chapbook:

Finished Translations (including older public domain translations) for: Borel (Essay), O'Neddy (Essay), Gautier (Sonnet & Essay), Nerval (Short Poem), Bertrand (Prose Poems); Translations in Progress for: Borel (Poem), O'Neddy (Poem), Nerval (Poem); Still need to start translations for: Bouchardy (act of a Play), MacKeat/Maquet (Poem or chapter or act, unless we use his unaknowledged collaborations with Dumas), Brot (Poem).
We have images for: Thom/Thomas, Boulanger, both of the Devérias, Duseigneur, Nanteuil. I've found no images or architecture yet by: Clopet, Vabre, or Vigneron. I have a feeling I'm unlikely to find any, so they may be represented simply by bios and remembrances by their friends.
Thus: We're probably a bit less than 2/3 through the translation for this first volume, while taking the visual work we're somewhat more than that.

This is likely to take awhile yet. What may be feasible before then is an annotated collection of French Romanticist manifestos. This would be mostly Prefaces (the favoured format of Romantic manifestos), and would include those by the Jeunes-France (Borel, O'Neddy, Bertrand, Gautier) among those by other key Romanticists such as Hugo (a copy of his Preface to Cromwell was mounted as a Holy Relic on the wall of the Bouzingos' Tartar-Camp commune), Berlioz, Dumas, Stendhal, Delacroix, de Staël, Mussett, Sand, and others that are already in the public domain (I'd love to find some Nodier, Saint-Beuve, and Vigny...) but never collected together in order to provide a comprehensive picture of Romanticist Theory between 1820 and 1840. This could help all of us to get a better handle on the general intellectual context within which the group was operating.

And that's it for this post--hopefully I'll have more up soon.

Late November Update

2010-10-29T12:10:00.020-04:00

Things progress! Some recent updates:

The most exciting news: new translations have been posted of three prose-poems by Aloysius Bertrand. These have been translated by Jonah Durning-Hammond, who is responsible for the translation of the fragments of the novel Sodom & Zion by Dondey (O'Neddy), mentioned in previous updates and linked to in a sidebar along the right of the blog. The first, which dedicates his collection Treasurer of Night to Victor Hugo, is a fascinating explication of the attitude of the Jeunes-France toward their place in the developing Romanticist/ avant-garde canon, and the strategies used to ensure their potential rediscovery (see my copious intro and notes to the piece). The other two are strange and haunting texts thoroughly encoded with alchemical iconography and subtexts. Many thanks to Jonah for taking these on!

We are not alone. In the course of research I learned that John Emerson has been looking into the Bouzingo and the surrounding 19th Century counterculture for some time, and with access to a wider range of materials, being francophone. HIS BLOG has a good deal of valuable information, and is worth spending some time with. The analysis comes from a politically engaged, countercultural perspective and not only supplements what we've been able to turn up so far, but sometimes comes to somewhat different conclusions which should make for good discourse as things develop.

One vexed question that Emerson's blog throws considerably more light onto is the issue of what this group were called. Still something of an open question, though his research helps us to map out the territory of that question. First, every name applied to them (Bouzingo, Jeunes-France, and Cénacle) was at some time applied to other, less defined groups as well; most or all of these names were first applied by parties hostile to the group, and then claimed (possibly) by (at least some) of them. At points two or three names were probably used simultaneously. There were a number of variant spellings used for both 'Jeunes-France' and 'Bouzingo', often intentionally misspelled. Some members seemed to prefer certain names, while others preferred alternatives. This issue warrants its own more extended post, which I'll get around to at some point. But I increasingly get the feeling that 'Bouzingo' was not the favoured term. While continuing to use all three names until this question is clarified, I am generally opting for the name 'Jeunes-France', which seems, all averages being worked out, to be the term that the largest number of the group would have the most agreement with the largest part of the time...

I have unearthed a Review of Rhapsodies, by Petrus Borel from the Revue des Deux Mondes, Vol. V, Jan.-March 1832, under 'Book Review' and 'New Literature'. I give the exact information because the site keeps moving the page so this link is likely to be broken in a month or two. Take a look around, you should still be able to find it. The Revue des Deux Mondes appears to have been a Conservative paper prior to the July 1830 Revolution, but then fell into the hands of the Cénacle Romanticist group, with regular contributions by Vigny, Hugo, Dumas, Sue, Nodier, Saint-Beuve, Janin, Musset, Michelet, and other Liberal Romantics. The review here presages the impending split between the Liberal Cénacle (most of whom accepted the July Monarchy and were focusing on disseminating Romanticism to a broader public) and the radicals of the Jeunes-France. The article is in French naturally. The link above is to the google-translated version of the page, for the French version CLICK HERE. The reviewer is anonymous; I am currently trying to puzzle together a hypothesis as to their his identity. He gives an indignantly negative review (despite conceding Borel's promise), which indicates how volatile Borel's Preface (see Joseph Carter's translation in the TRANSLATIONS tab) was within the internal politics of Romanticism itself. The poems themselves are scarcely mentioned except in passing, the Preface being the clear focus of the attack. And even the Republican politics of the manifesto are not the nub of the issue for this reviewer; what he takes issue with above all is Borel's attack on the aristocratic airs of the previous generation of Romantics. When Carter first sent me his translation of the Preface, one of the most obscure parts of the text to me was the passage: "If I have taken pleasure in spreading my poverty, it is because our contemporary bards stink me up with their pretended poems and pashalic luxuries, their aristocratic curve, their Ecclesiastical childishness and marginal sonnets; to hear them, one would believe to see them a hair sweater or coat of arms at the flank, a rosary or a merlin at the fist." Only after reading Bénichou's study of Romanticism did I come to recognise that this was a dig at the Cénacle group, or elements of it, referring simultaneously to their mode of literary self-presentation, their support of the re-instituted 'Liberal' Monarchy, and the recent Catholic-Monarchist past that many of them shared. This very passage evidently struck quite a nerve within the Cénacle, and the reviewer spends half the article responding to it in a rather frantic and indignant fashion.

Tomislav Butkovic has located a copy of Hugo's Hernani, the performance of which was so central to the formation of the Petit-Cénacle/ Jeunes-France, illustrated in part by Achille Devéria, who led a 'Romanticist battalion' at the 'Battle of Hernani', in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY. Earlier this week he went to take a look at the book in the flesh, as it were, got some photos with the help of Tsubasa Berg. This turns out to be an edition from the 1890s with only a frontispiece by Devéria, a portrait of Hugo; the other illustrations are by an academic artist named Arturo Michelena. The publisher seems to have vaguely focused on geological publications... However, the museum is opposed to people having access to the materials that it is their social mandate to give people access to, and though the book is not on display we are not allowed to make the copyright-free plates available. This is part of a research project and at some point in the near future there will be a text coming out of it, which should help to throw some more light on the relationship of the group to both the text of Hernani and the experience they shared of the 'Battles' of its theatrical run.

A small extra tidbit on Bibliophile Jacob, aka Paul Lacroix, the father-in-law and collaborator of Jehan duSeigneur. Turns out that in addition to his pamphlet on Sade (and his central role in the Romanticist historiography of the Middle Ages and Renaissance) he was the author of a definitive history of Prostitution from ancient times to the present. Vol. II is even available in English translation (not sure what happened to Vol. I). Lacroix also co-edited an edition of Villon, the medieval poet, scholar, thief and murderer who was a major model for the Jeunes-France. I am attempting to figure out whether THIS BOOK by Lacroix is the one on which DuSeigneur collaborated; further updates will let you know if so.

And finally, I've found that a horror anthology series produced by Ridley Scott, 'The Hunger', made a half-hour adaptation of Le Morte Amoureuse, a short Gothic tale by Théophile Gautier. The episode is called 'Clarimonde', from the end of the first season, and is available through Netflix, including on Instant Watch. I've seen 'Le Morte Amoureuse' translated as five unrelated titles, but never as its actual translation, which I think is something like "The Loving Dead" (correct me if I'm wrong, actual French-readers). The adaptation's pretty decent, though there are naturally some changes in the story; in particular it bothers me that the woman has short hair in 1835, but what can you do. The original is a great piece, and was published in 1836, so was being written right around the time the Jeunes-France were beginning to drift apart and the Bohême Doyenné group was constellating.

Toward-the-end-of-October Update!

2010-10-25T13:10:00.007-04:00

A few interesting bits and bobs that have turned up in research, updates, and links:

Jonah Durning-Hammond, translator of the remaining fragments of Dondey's/ O'Neddy's Sodom & Zion (see previous post) is on board to help with translations, and is currently looking at some work by Aloysius Bertrand.

An interesting connection: Jules Janin, the Frenetic satirist who wrote The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined Woman, a favourite book of Borel, Gautier (see Gautier's sonnet on the 'translations' page), and others, condemned Borel's novel Madame Putiphar in 1839 for it's sympathetic portrayal of the Marquis de Sade (whose mother spent the last years of her life in a convent on the same street as the last Bouzingo commune). Turns out that a couple years earlier, Janin had also attacked, on similar ground, a sympathetic pamplet on Sade by the Romanticist writer/archivist/publisher 'Bibliophile Jacob' (Paul Lacroix), who was the father-in-law and main collaborator of the ex-Bouzingo Jehan Duseigneur. By the time that this pamphlet was published, Duseigneur was already married to Lacroix's daughter and converted to socialist christianity, and was creating statuary for catholic churches whilst developing with Lacroix a theory of medieval religious art. This connection suggests certain limits to the orthodoxy of Duseigneur's brand of Catholicism...
According to Mario Praz, the British novelist-of-manners William Thackeray read and disliked Borel (by all accounts a mark in the latter's favour), picking Champavert out as an exemplar of the deplorable taste of the Frenetic Romantics in an article of June 22, 1833.

For some texture on the political, literary, and social discourse of Liberal circles in the wake of the July Revolution, check out (via google translate if necessary) the online transcriptions of the Revue des Deux-M ondes. The journal seems to have begun as a conservative paper but after the revolution fell into the hands of the Cénacle circle and Liberal (not radical) Romanticism. Of particular interest is THIS ARTICLE, a review of the year 1832, by co-founder of the Cénacle group, Alfred de Vigny. It would no doubt be more helpful to those who can read French fluently, but among other relevent issues Vigny comments upon the fallout of the July Revolution, including the rise and fall of the Saint-Simonist communes, which served as important models for the activity of the Jeunes-France in that year, and reviews a novel which apparently proposes its own proto-socialist model, with the implication that such undertakings were quite common at the time. He also revues a collection of poems by the recently deceased writer and publisher Charles Brugnot, a close friend and collaborator of the Jeune-France Aloysius Bertrand. Interestingly, one of Brugnot's poems quoted by Vigny contains as epigraph the same quote from Wordsworth's Prelude used as epigraph in Gautier's sonnet (the same that quotes Janin's Dead Donkey, on our 'translations' page). Gautier's poem had probably been published in 1830, but the book was never distributed due to the Revolution breaking out the following day. It may or not have appeared in a journal in the interim, but was published again in the same year as Brugnot's collection. The transmission was most likely based on seeing the poem in manuscript form, especially interesting given the poetics of epigraph that is a major theme in Gautier's poem (see my notes on the poem) and which Brugnot was expanding.

There are several places where Tristan Tzara cites Frenetic Romanticism, and Borel and Nerval in particular, as models for his conception of Dada and of a poetics that was inscribed within society and outside literature. Until my books are unpacked from the storage unit where they are now imprisoned, I cannot look all of these up. Breton discusses the Bouzingo in the same connection in his Anthology of Black Humour and various Surrealist manifestos (also currently inaccessible to me). But HERE'S an interesting passage concerning Tzara's drawing the history of Sound Poetry back through the Symbolists to Borel, Nerval, and their fellow Frenetic, Charles Lassailly.
Another interesting bit on Borel: it appears that his son, Aldéran, was named after one of his own characters from Champavert. In the story Aldéran is murdered by a cuckolded husband, his skin stripped, and is turned into an anatomical showpiece. Hm.
And, here's the front page of the February 1844 issue of Satan, the satirical journal of politics, writing, and art edited by Francisque and Petrus Borel. This is the first issue under Borel's editorship:

OCTOBER UPDATE!

2010-10-03T17:56:00.008-04:00

I've been updating the site over the past week or two with new texts and research; here's what's new, to spare you searching through everything:

BIOGRAPHIES

A new, huge biography of Petrus Borel, one of the group's principal organisers and theorists. Borel had as great if not greater influence than anyone on the direction the group took; AND there is a book-length biography available in English (Enid Starkie's 'Petrus Borel, Lycanthrope'). So this bio could serve as a pretty good general introduction of the group's activities and trajectory.

Additionally, due to the tiny typeface on the blog, I've made it possible to download PDF versions of the three bios that are up so far (Borel, Bouchardy, and DuSeigneur). The Borel bio is fairly thoroughly cited with hyperlinks to the online sources. There are also a few tune-ups to the other bios; while all three cover almost the same historical ground between 1830 and '34, I don't think that they're redundant as I've been careful to present in each a different perspective on what the group was doing and the different reasons each member had for being involved, the unique approach that each added to the collective whole. So that in Borel the focus is on militant politics, the group's relationships with other Romantic-affiliated utopian communes and micro-utopias in Paris, and the influence of Gothic / Frenetic subculture on the group; in Bouchardy it is on their relationships to the visual arts and their opposition to Classicism; in DuSeigneur it is their early formation and engagement with History and Historiography. The next biography will be organiser/theorist/writer Philothée O'Neddy, for whom a short portrait or 'stub' as they would say on wikipedia is already posted.

RESEARCH

Needless to say, research continues; the main sources I'm working through presently are Bénichou's brilliantly textured, perceptive, and researched study of the gradual gestation and then birth of French Romanticism, Consecration of the Artist, 1750-1830; Mario Praz's passive-aggressive and frustratingly half-translated but still extremely valuable The Romantic Agony; and 'Romantic' and Its Cognates: European History of the Word', which is pedantic and flawed but still quite helpful in helping to establish the dynamic that Romanticism represented in Germany, England, France, and when I get to it Italy etc. Next things to start looking at a bit down the road will be scattered translations of more French Romantics, bio of Charles Nodier, and more background on radical politics in the 1820s-40s.

Unexpected connections keep popping up: Having found more information on the elusive Evadamiste sect, a micro-Utopia founded simultaneously with the Jeunes'France's own that was a strange conglomeration of Saint-Simonian Socialism, Romanticism, Mystical Occultism, and Feminism, I found that Alexandre Dumas, who was involved with the Petit-Cénacle and possible the early Jeunes-France, was a member of the Evadamistes simultaneously, along with a couple other of their acquaintances; a few years later, the sect would be joined by no less than Eliphas Lévi, largely responsible for the Occult revival of the 19th Century and endlessly referenced in Huysmans Là-Bas. This group and its connection to the Bouzingo is treated at some length in the Borel biography that I've posted.

A few people have been doing some independent research and keeping me informed of the results--many thanks, I'd love it to happen more! Warren Fry has been helping for awhile looking into the Devéria brothers and other visual artists, satirists, and eroticists associated with the group and their wider circle and continues to do so (see his earlier post); Tomislav Butkovic has recently been looking into Charles Nodier. This blog is a great place to post this kind of research when you come upon it, making it available to everyone. (contact me if you need an invite to post!)

I am compiling an amazon list of books helpful for carrying out this research or getting a more thorough handle on the Jeunes-France. I am only adding books in English that I've been able to look at and evaluate, so there ARE more things out there. The list is available here.

Additionally, some discussion regarding the research that is being done, and its contemporary applicability, is beginning to occur through conversations with various people including Jim Leftwich, Warren Fry, Michael Peters, Tomislav Butkovic, Rebecca Weeks, Tim Gaze, and Gleb Kolomiets. Hopefully, as above, this discussion will grow and find its way to the blog where it can be engaged in amongst everyone concerned.

TRANSLATIONS

Translation is slowing down again temporarily as most of our translators are returning to school and have less time available. Gautier's 'A Line From Wordsworth' which seems to be from around 1830, has been added, translated by Olchar Lindsann with advice from Joseph Carter, along with an exhaustive unfolding of the complex poetic of quotation, allusion, and subtextual tradition going on in the poem. I have also added several notes to the translation of Borel's Rhapsodies Preface (both blog & PDF versions) relating to subtext dealing with the internal politics of the Romantic community which I have just been able to identify thanks to Bénichou's Consecration of the Writer. It may be awhile before we can make more available.

I have, however, found another Jeunes-France translation available. Last year, Jonah Durning-Hammond translated the only five extant chapters of Sodom and Zion, an unfinished novel by Théophile Dondey, aka Philothée O'Neddy. These three chapters were published as self-contained short stories in journals in 1839, several years after the Bouzingo ceased operating. Chapter 1 is a military story in which an aristocratic officer's egotism is repaid, and reminds me, oddly enough, of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe books. Chapters 17-20 are essentially Gothic-Decadent. The 18th Century occultist Cagliostro, imprisoned in the Bastille, inspires the (apparently?) main character, the proudly blasphemous Regina, to attempt the seduction of an acclaimed priest during confession. This backfires and after a terrifying vision of death and the gates of Hell, rendered in verse, she (perhaps temporarily) recants. These chapters feel midway between Matthew Lewis' gothic novel The Monk of 1796 and Huysmans' depiction of Decadent Satanism in Là-Bas of 1891. In addition, there are a couple exchanges that touch quite interestingly on issues of gender, in ways reminiscent of George Sand (a friend of the Jeunes-France) and, a bit later, Rachilde. Throughout there is a noticable anti-aristocratic current. Durning-Hammond's translation is quite good; the long verse passage is, as it ought to be, rendered into metered and rhymed verse and, as is not often enough the case, it is well-handled and does not feel forced or inanely sing-song despite the rhyme being in couplets, which tend to invite such problems. This is a chapbook of 45 pages and available through lulu, which means it was a labour of love. It is available HERE for $10.

TIMELINE

Along with various minor shufflings, updatings, and corrections, the main additions to the timeline have related to the development of the French Romanticist community between 1813 and 1828, and to the development of Romanticism in Germany between 1798 and 1820.

As always, the key period from 1830-35 is a mess of conflicting evidence, unnamed sources, and undated, anecdotal reminiscences, and the guesses on the timeline are still a bit outaded compared to my better guesses as reflected in the Borel bio, which in turn I am already beginning to question in light of some new information concerning dates of residence for Borel on various properties, the authority of which I need to look into...

Welcome!

2010-09-14T21:52:00.005-04:00

After nearly three months of blog-work and 18 months of research, collaboration-forming, and translating, there is finally enough collected to inaugurate this site, which I hope can serve as a central repository and resource for the massive project to (re)create within radical English-speaking communities the nearly-forgotten group of creative workers who, from roughly 1830-1835, called themselves the Jeunes-France or Bouzingo, and pioneered many of the cultural strategies and traditions that would later come to be known as the avant-garde.

NOTE #1: The group seems to have called themselves the Jeunes-France for most of their existence, but became popularly known in the Conservative press as the Bouzingo, and used the name themselves for perhaps a year. I use one or the other almost interchangably, depending on context.

NOTE #2: Because a number of people have asked: In early 19th Century France (and therefore in all material on this site) "Republican" means anti-Monarchist, pro-Democratic, politically far-left. Sometimes Liberal, in many cases proto-Socialist or proto-Anarchist.

NOTE #3: If the work of the Jeunes-France does not immediately read to our eyes as obviously 'avant-garde' in the way that a dada cutup or surrealist frottage might, this is because, of course, this is a century earlier. Moreover, the 'avant-garde' status of the Bouzingo has as much or more to do with how they organised themselves socially, how they positioned themselves in relation to mainstream intellectual culture, and the psychological and social experiments and transformations that they designed for themselves and each other. Context is everything.

THIS IS STILL A WORK IN PROGRESS. It will remain so for years--I hope that others will join us in this project, contributing in whatever they see fit, and that this site will both facilitate and reflect the growth of the project, and the formation of a community through and around it.

Please explore, and come back to check intermittently as things develop. Every tab has a great deal of material already waiting to be added to it once I have time to do so. Just hit the FOLLOW button to your right!

Due to the blog format (it's what we've got, sorry), the text tends to be pretty small, hit [control]++ for PC or [apple]++ for Mac and the text will become larger.

Principle collaborators on the project so far include myself (Olchar E. Lindsann), Joseph Carter, Warren Fry, Emily Panzeri, Tomislav Butkovic, Amy Oliver, and Jim Leftwich. (for more info see ABOUT THE PROJECT) Many many thanks to these people (and if you'd like links to your own sites let me know). IF YOU HAVE ANYTHING TO OFFER TO THIS PROJECT, GET IN TOUCH!

A few notes on the site:

SIDEBARS: The sidebars are full of relevant links, many to wikipedia because that's the stage that research is currently at. The right hand side lists resources directly related to the Bouzingo, the right hand side to the broader Romanticist/proto-Avant-Garde community. Since they are on the side, when coming upon a name, group, source, etc. that interests you in any window, check the sidebars to see if there's a bit more information or further resources available. I'll be adding more sidebars as time passes.

THE BOUZINGO page contains a basic introduction to the group.

The BIOGRAPHIES page currently contains two full biographies (Louis Boulanger and Jehan Desiegneur), there will eventually be biographies of comparably depth and tone of all 15 identified members of the group (to the extent possible). The page also has two brief portraits of Petrus Borel and Philothée O'Neddy, whose full bios are currently underway.

The TRANSLATIONS page contains translations of the Jeunes-France writers that have been done so far by those involved with the project. A number more are underway. (Gautier and Nerval have translations easily available on amazon, though NOT for their Jeunes-France periods). We can use help with this--with the exceptions just noted, almost nothing has been translated by the group. For prose pieces, there is a link underneath the title to download a more easily-readable PDF.

The GALLERY currently has features and commentary relating to two of the Jeunes-France visual artists, Boulanger and DuSeigneur (see their Bios on the appropriate page); BUT there are links at the top to galleries of all of the images I have yet found by all of the visual artists.

THE FRENCH ROMANTICIST COMMUNITY page will be filled out once the Biographies are completed; the Jeunes-France group, considered in the light f an avant-garde, was simply one particularly radical group of the larger proto-avant-garde network and subculture of French Romanticism, and cannot be understood outside that context (which, I am finding, is equally fascinating in its own right).

The TIMELINE is the best and easiest way to orient yourself to what the group did and the context in which they did it. It begins two years before the first of them were born, and ends when Augustus MacKeat, the last of the Bouzingo, died in 1888. It contains political and cultural context as well as directly related material; the Jeunes-France group proper operated from around 1830 to 1835, though related groupings of them operated together from 1826-1845.

ABOUT THE PROJECT explains both the ideological, conceptual, and intellectual position from which I am organising the project, and the practical mechanics of how it will (hopefully) operate, along with the problems facing us and other sundry issues affecting the ongoing research and presentation.

ANTI-TRANSLATIONS AND RESPONSIVE WORK is intended as a repository for contributions to the project that fall outside the domains of either 'translation' or 'research'--this might include transliterations and experimental re-workings of Bouzingo texts and images, illustrations, writings or artwork in response to Jeunes-France work, and anything else that is offered.

Finally, UPDATES & NEWS is where you are now--the place to check back to see what has been added most recently. I would very much like to build a dialogue among communities interested in the Jeunes-France and radical Romanticism in general. If you'd like the ability to leave comments, just let me know and I'll send you an invite. If I leave it open it gets flooded with spam.

Thanks!

Achille Devéria Illustrates George Sand

2010-09-04T21:29:00.012-04:00

Achille Devéria, Illustration for Les Jardins en Italie (Gardens in Italy) by George Sand. From a nineteenth century manuscript copy. 1856

If the date on this is accurate, which seems likely, Achille would have been illustrating this a year before his death. He illustrated Musset's Gamiani in 1848, which was originally published in 1833. Its rumored that Gamiani was partly inspired by Sand, with whom Musset had a brief romance during the early 1830's.

In 1855 Sand rented the Villa Piccolomini in Frascati, Italy from March 31 to April 19, which is presumably where Les Jardins en Italie was written, or at least inspired. She was there with her son Maurice Sand who also illustrated an edition of the text.