New Addition: 'Les Annales Politiques et Littéraires' issue on Hugo, Gautier, and Hernani

Les Annales Politiques et Littéraires (Political and Literary Annals). ed. Adolphe Brisson. Year 21, No. 1044 (June 28, 1903). Paris. Folio, 24 pp.

 

(Left: Magazine cover. Right: Table of Contents for Jan–July, 1903)

 The Political and Literary Annals was a journal dedicated to literary and cultural history, composed of both short articles and republications of archival documents, on a similar model to the older Anecdotal Gazette (see tab for this archive's collection) and its predecessors, but aimed at a broader public and larger circulation. Its format is therefore different from chapbooks of the former journal, which catered to a smaller readership; the Annales is folio size, on cheaper paper. Wider distribution was also paid for via advertising, in the form of an exterior wrap packed with four pages of adverts (themselves an interesting window into mainstream society at the time), while the journal itself was ad-free. It also includes a supplement for "The Woman," which includes articles and images on fashion and etiquette, health, society events, and some embroidery patterns and targeted adverts.

 

(Advertising Wrap)

 

This issue is loosely themed around Victor Hugo, including the "Battle of Hernani." Articles include one on Gautier's 'red waistcoat' worn at Hernani, one on Hugo's visual art along with reproduced drawings, some of his reprinted correspondence, a few articles touching on the recently inaugurated Victor Hugo museum (housed in his home) along with some photographs, sheet music by Saint-Saëns to a Hugo poem. There is also a memoir by George Sand about the Romanticist activist, philosopher and publisher Pierre Leroux, with whom she had collaborated on a Socialist newspaper. There is also a geological essay about volcanic activity on Haiti, on one cooking thermometers, and another on a new photographic technique; "political and literary" affairs was indeed interpreted broadly...