Alexandre Privat d'Anglemont, Paris inconnu; Précédé d'une Étude sur sa vie par M. Alfred Delvau (Unknown Paris: Preceded by a Study on his Life by Alfred Delvau). 1875. First Edition. Adolphe Delahays: Paris. Hard-bound 18-mo, 311 pp.
The illegitimate son of a mulatto women, Privat d'Anglemont came to Paris from Guadaloupe and became close to the post-Romanticist group formed around the ex-bouzingo Théophile Gautier, including Baudelaire and Banville, all three of whom wrote collaboratively and often borrowed from each other's poems in their youth. He was obsessed with Paris, particularly its eccentric and marginalized people, places, and subcultures, and along with Henry Murger, became one of the main chroniclers of the Bohemian subculture that developed in the 1840s out of underground Romanticism. But whereas Murger's version of Bohemia (as passed down in his novel & play Vie du Bohême and the Verdi opera based on it) is ultimately sentimental, innocuous, and apolitical, Privat d'Anglemont recorded a more gritty, heterogeneous Bohemia in which artists and writers were inexorably mixed with street performers, activists, buskers, criminals, hucksters, beggars, and other people marginalised by the progress of industrialized capitalism. He wrote an entire series on "unknown jobs" worked or invented by people of the very lowest urban class.
This book, his most popular, contains many of these eyewitness studies, initially published in various journals and newspapers. It includes a biographical study by avant-garde historian Alfred Delvau, who probably knew Privat personally. This copy was owned by Maurice Privat, who may have been one of Privat's descendants. If so, he did not live up to his radical inheritance: he was an advisor to Pierre Laval, Prime Minister of France in the Nazi-controlled Vichy government.
The best English account of Privat and his work is Jerrold Seigel's Bohemian Paris, which contains a thorough study of his life and work in Chapter 5.
The illegitimate son of a mulatto women, Privat d'Anglemont came to Paris from Guadaloupe and became close to the post-Romanticist group formed around the ex-bouzingo Théophile Gautier, including Baudelaire and Banville, all three of whom wrote collaboratively and often borrowed from each other's poems in their youth. He was obsessed with Paris, particularly its eccentric and marginalized people, places, and subcultures, and along with Henry Murger, became one of the main chroniclers of the Bohemian subculture that developed in the 1840s out of underground Romanticism. But whereas Murger's version of Bohemia (as passed down in his novel & play Vie du Bohême and the Verdi opera based on it) is ultimately sentimental, innocuous, and apolitical, Privat d'Anglemont recorded a more gritty, heterogeneous Bohemia in which artists and writers were inexorably mixed with street performers, activists, buskers, criminals, hucksters, beggars, and other people marginalised by the progress of industrialized capitalism. He wrote an entire series on "unknown jobs" worked or invented by people of the very lowest urban class.
This book, his most popular, contains many of these eyewitness studies, initially published in various journals and newspapers. It includes a biographical study by avant-garde historian Alfred Delvau, who probably knew Privat personally. This copy was owned by Maurice Privat, who may have been one of Privat's descendants. If so, he did not live up to his radical inheritance: he was an advisor to Pierre Laval, Prime Minister of France in the Nazi-controlled Vichy government.
The best English account of Privat and his work is Jerrold Seigel's Bohemian Paris, which contains a thorough study of his life and work in Chapter 5.
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