Sunday, 16 August 2015

Newly Added: Two Relics of Alphonse Brot of the Bouzingo group

An exciting development: By means of the coincidence which seems sometimes to intervene on the bibliophile's behalf, the archive has added to closely-related artifacts relating to Alphonse Brot, an obscure but important figure in the formation of the avant-garde.


#1:
Alphonse Brot & Saint-Véran, Le Déesse Raison (The Goddess Reason). 1880. Dentu: Paris.  Sextodecimo, softcover, 369 pp. Bookplate of Lucien Puteaux (aka Victor Perceval).

Alphonse Brot is among the most enigmatic members of the Bouzingo group. He is the earliest person to go on record as self-identifying as a member of "l'avant-garde," in his 'Preface to Song of Love and Other Poems,' published in 1829. Yet he explicitly bases this solidarity on the avant-garde's leftist political commitments; he was particularly close to O'Neddy and to Franz Lizst, both at the time keenly interested in Saint-Simonism and other proto-Socialist movements, along with others in underground Romanticism. But formally, he advocates for a middle-ground or synthesis between Romanticism and Classicism, and his close friend O'Neddy later remarked that the group felt he lacked commitment to the Romanticist cause.

After the dissolution of the Bouzingo, his path seems to have drifted away from the avant-garde (at least in its Romanticist form). He appears to have ceased writing poetry, and devoted himself to novels and plays, which sold successfully for the next sixty years; for two years he was co-director of the Théâtre Ambigu-Comique, which specialised in popular melodrama for the lower classes. Despite his popularity at the time, he seems not to have been read at all from within a few years of his death. In the avant-garde, too, his name disappears from the discourse entirely after 1833, with the single exception of the O'Neddy letter referred/linked to above. My French is not good enough to allow me to read with any fluency his books or the hundred others calling for my attention, so we await another re-reading before we can fully reconstruct his trajectory and significance.

But despite this apparent apostasy, continuities seem to exist. On the one hand, many of his popular novels and melodramas seem to continue the gothic-Romanticist tradition of exaggerated violence, passion, and transgression; several of his titles, moreover, suggest themes related to revolution and resistance to tyranny (cf. Pray For Them, Karl Sand (a leftist German poet-martyr), and possibly this volume, which takes place during the French Revolution). On the other hand, enticingly, when in 1866 a group of avant-garde poets advocated for a new, experimental synthesis between Classicism and Romanticism, they designated themselves by a name that Brot used, in the very same paragraph, as a synomym for what he called the "avant-garde": the Parnasse Contemporain (Contemporary Parnassus).

Brot was the last member of the Bouzingo group to die. This paperback is a late novel--by this time, Brot had lived to see what he termed "the avant-garde of Romanticism" evolve into Bohemianism and the Cult of Art, then to Parnassianism (sounding strangely familiar) and Realism, and thence into Naturalism, Decadence and Symbolism; he would eventually live to see the early publications of Jarry, dying in 1895, the year before Ubu Roi premiered. I can find no other trace of his collaborator on this novel of the French Revolution, Saint-Véran. On the back are notices for other books published by Dentu (who published other popular Romantics such as George Sand and ex-Bouzingo Auguste Macquet).

The previous owner of the book, Lucien Puteaux, was probably behind the pseudonym Victor Perceval, who seems to have published volumes of historical-fiction erotica around this time. In any case Puteaux was directly involved in the avant-garde; he was close to Alexandre Dumas and to the Realist 'Batignolles Group' of caricaturists who laid the groundwork for Impressionism; so his ownership of this book suggests at least some remnant of currency for Brot in the late-century avant-garde.



#2:
 Promotional insert for Alphonse Brot & Saint-Véran, Le Déesse Raison. 1880. Double-sided Colour Printing on card, 7 x 5 cm. Petit Moniteur Universel, Paris.



This tiny card advertises the first serial run of this very book. Both melodrama and serial novels operated in society in a way strangely analogous to our current mode of television and film: big budget melodramas focused on thrilling story-telling, familiar tropes, and spectacular special effects to produce blockbuster runs, while weekly installments of novels resembled internet television (dominated by a few major companies but with dozens of small ones also competing, with staggered releases but not a set broadcast schedule). Note that this little advert--probably included with the purchase of another book--is promoting the upcoming series, which will be published in 20 weekly episodes (in very cheap paperback editions, most now decayed) costing five cents each; after the series ends, fans will be able to purchase the full, bound novel on higher quality paper, the equivalent of a box set of DVDs today.

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