New Addition: First Pirate Edition of Hugo's 'Hernani'!

Victor Hugo, Hernani. 1830. Laurent Frères: Brussels. Softcover 64-mo.

 

Read 1st Parisian Edition online.

The production of Hugo's Hernani, a play that embodied the officially-proscribed Romanticist movement and incorporated anti-Monarchist codes, was the result of years of coordinated political maneuvering by members of the Romanticist community. Hugo collaborated with young leaders of the underground Romanticist subculture in Paris, including Gérard de Nerval, Petrus Borel, Achille Devéria, Célestin Nanteuil, and Hector Berlioz, to turn the performances into high-profile media sensations by meticulously planning with them a riot that would ensure that Romanticism grabbed the imaginations of people throughout France and beyond. Pitched struggles, often breaking into physical blows, characterised almost every performance of the play's first run, and provided the catalyst and proving-ground from which a radicalised, extremist Romanticism emerged, calling itself several different names including Frenetic and Avant-Garde Romanticism.

The 'Battle of Hernani', as it was known, was both a seminal event in the evolving avant-garde and a major revolution in mainstream French culture, and official first editions (as well as second, third, and fourth) are virtually unobtainable. Not so this Belgian edition of the play, printed within months of the premier, which indicates the immediate and wide-ranging impact that the play and the conflicts surrounding it made throughout Europe. Belgium was the capital of pirate publishing throughout the 19th Century, and Laurent Frères went on to produce cheap editions of other Romanticist works, including the pirate edition of Gautier's Comédie de Mort held by the Revenant Archive. International Copyright Law, to the extent that it existed at all, was ambiguous and difficult to enforce, and it is unclear whether this edition was licensed or not; it includes an unattributed appendix describing the acting styles of the Parisian cast, in order to help the actors in any potential new production, implying that this cheap paperback edition may in fact have been endorsed by Hugo.

 
The production of Hugo's Hernani, a play that embodied the officially-proscribed Romanticist movement and incorporated anti-Monarchist codes, was the result of years of coordinated political maneuvering by members of the Romanticist community. Hugo collaborated with young leaders of the underground Romanticist subculture in Paris, including Gérard de Nerval, Petrus Borel, Achille Devéria, Célestin Nanteuil, and Hector Berlioz, to turn the performances into high-profile media sensations by meticulously planning with them a riot that would ensure that Romanticism grabbed the imaginations of people throughout France and beyond. Pitched struggles, often breaking into physical blows, charcterised almost every performance of the play's first run, and provided the catalyst and proving-ground from which a radicalised, extremist Romanticism emerged, calling itself several different names including Frenetic and Avant-Garde Romanticism.

The 'Battle of Hernani', as it was known, was both a seminal event in the evolving avant-garde and a major revolution in mainstream French culture, and official first editions (as well as second, third, and fourth) are virtually unobtainable. Not so this Belgian edition of the play, printed within months of the premier, which indicates the immediate and wide-ranging impact that the play and the conflicts surrounding it made throughout Europe. Belgium was the capital of pirate publishing throughout the 19th Century, and Laurent Frères went on to produce cheap editions of other Romanticist works, including the pirate edition of Gautier's Comédie de Mort held by the Revenant Archive (see below).