Les Temps: Journal des progrès. Vol. 21, no. 864 (Tuesday, Sept. 12, 1833) Afternoon edition: Paris. Paperback folio, 4 pp.
Les Temps was a moderate Liberal daily newspaper representing the Capitalist centre-left, with close ties to the July Monarchy. This issue contains a review of Théophile Gautier's roman-à-clef of avant-garde subculture, Les Jeunes-France. While admitting Gautier's talent, the unsigned article admonishes him for his too-experimental use of language, his delight in outré, Frenetic themes, and his association with the Jeunes-France group itself, which is attacked and criticized as the greatest offender among the Romanticist avant-garde (Petrus Borel receives particular negative mention). Like most contemporary reviews of the Jeunes-France by moderate-Liberal critics, its over-riding theme is a plea to renounce the formal, political, and thematic "excesses" of radical Romanticism and return to an idiom acceptable to the bourgeoisie, with implicit promises of greater critical support should the writer "return to the fold."
This and articles like it reflect the pressure exerted upon young avant-gardists during the years 1833-36, as the July Monarchy was re-asserting control of the press, quelling massive proletarian protests and uprisings in Paris, Lyon, and other major cities, and mainstream Romantics associated with the regime, now in positions of critical and editorial control, silenced radicals by directly or indirectly closing them off from opportunities for publication. This movement toward hegemony (which reflected the destruction of the small press network in Paris, analyzed by Karr in his 1838 introduction to Les Guêpes) contributed to the dissolution of the Jeunes-France group by 1835, practically ended the literary lives of intransigent avant-gardists like Borel and O'Neddy, and forced others such as Nanteuil, Boulanger and Brot into hack-work. Gautier himself managed to re-figure his practice into one which maintained his real interests in a form acceptable (if not popularly appealing) to the emerging literary establishment.
Les Temps was a moderate Liberal daily newspaper representing the Capitalist centre-left, with close ties to the July Monarchy. This issue contains a review of Théophile Gautier's roman-à-clef of avant-garde subculture, Les Jeunes-France. While admitting Gautier's talent, the unsigned article admonishes him for his too-experimental use of language, his delight in outré, Frenetic themes, and his association with the Jeunes-France group itself, which is attacked and criticized as the greatest offender among the Romanticist avant-garde (Petrus Borel receives particular negative mention). Like most contemporary reviews of the Jeunes-France by moderate-Liberal critics, its over-riding theme is a plea to renounce the formal, political, and thematic "excesses" of radical Romanticism and return to an idiom acceptable to the bourgeoisie, with implicit promises of greater critical support should the writer "return to the fold."
This and articles like it reflect the pressure exerted upon young avant-gardists during the years 1833-36, as the July Monarchy was re-asserting control of the press, quelling massive proletarian protests and uprisings in Paris, Lyon, and other major cities, and mainstream Romantics associated with the regime, now in positions of critical and editorial control, silenced radicals by directly or indirectly closing them off from opportunities for publication. This movement toward hegemony (which reflected the destruction of the small press network in Paris, analyzed by Karr in his 1838 introduction to Les Guêpes) contributed to the dissolution of the Jeunes-France group by 1835, practically ended the literary lives of intransigent avant-gardists like Borel and O'Neddy, and forced others such as Nanteuil, Boulanger and Brot into hack-work. Gautier himself managed to re-figure his practice into one which maintained his real interests in a form acceptable (if not popularly appealing) to the emerging literary establishment.
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