Exciting Addition: Three Volumes of the Annales Romantiques!

Due to a quite astounding and fortuitous discovery of a batch of under-priced (around 60% of their value on the bourgeois bibliographic market) books, a few months ago the Revenant Archive became considerably nearer to the long-time goal of assembling a complete set of the seminal anthology series, the Annals Romantiques. All three of the new additions are quite rare and in very good condition, all originally owned and bound by the same unidentified owner.
 

One of the most influential anthologies of the first-generation avant-garde, the Annales Romantiques were yearly compendia of work by the Romanticist underground, published from 1823–1838 and sporadically thereafter, and thus covered nearly the whole period of the concentrated Romanticist assault on culture. It provides the most textured and complete window into the Parisian Romanticist community of the time, when that community was still in the process of defining itself; for rather than focusing like retrospective anthologies on the few most canonized representatives of the movement, the Annales printed work by between 60 and 80 Romanticist writers each year, and provide a comprehensive glimpse of the entire community, including avant-gardists who never published complete books and represented only here and in various journals that have lain nearly unread since 1835.

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Annales Romantiques: Recueil de morceaux choisis de litterature contemporaine. (Romanticist Annals: Anthology of Choice Morsels of Contemporary Literature) Ed. Charles Malo. (1830) Sole Edition. Louis Janet: Paris. Hardbound 32mo, 367 pp.

 

The 1830 volume collects work by 71 Romanticist writers submitted in the summer of 1829, and thus presents French Romanticism on the eve of the Battle of Hernani and the radicalization of the movement. The community's increasing self-assertion is manifested in various ways including Cyprian Desmarais' essay on the 'Character of Civilisation and Literature Since 1814'. The communal nature of the emerging avant-garde is subtly signaled by 'Bertrand of Dijon', aka Aloysius Bertrand (aka Louis Bertrand), in his prose poem 'Ma Chamière' ('My Cottage'), when after mentioning the king he adds in a footnote to the poem that, "The king will never read this piece; but my friends shall read it, and will know that I also dream in total wakefulness . . ." The most recent Romanticist icon, Joseph Delorme (Charles Saint-Beuve), appears with his own contribution and a dedication by Émile Deschamps. Rumblings of the revolution that would erupt within months of the book's publication appear, such as 'Liberty' by Nestor de Lamarque, together with the imperialist, ultra-Nationalist monarchist ode (awarded by the Royal Academy) by Anne Bignan, who was something of a laughingstock in intellectual circles for his slavishness for official honours. His militarist poem, which feels icily fascist, is an odd fit yet is the first piece in the whole volume, and may have been included as a 'balance' to the liberal material in a compromise with government censors, who were in the midst of a clamp-down as the anthology was being assembled.

The Orientalist thrust of the Annales volumes from the 1820s is continued here, in the form of poems on middle-eastern themes but also in a collection of traditional Arab maoual songs, preceded by a scholarly essay on Arab literature, with a footnote by Malo that this excerpt from a forthcoming volume was being printed here in advance for the advantage of "young orientalists" engaged in poetic research. Though Frenetic Romanticism remains just beyond the horizon, there are bubblings of the germanophilic gothic-fantastic Romanticism exemplified by Hoffman and Göethe (the subject of Paul Foucher's contribution), such as Dumas' 'The Sylph', Delavigne's 'The Bandit's Death', and Victor Pavie's treatment of the Wandering Jew legend, a staple of Gothic subculture.

Though books at the time were sold unbound, to then be taken to a binder, as literacy outpaced economic prosperity many people – especially students and young intellectuals in the Paris underground – could not regularly afford binding, leading to the development of paperbacks. Romanticist publishers such as Janet and Ladvocat began issuing some copies in lavishly designed paper wrappers. Though the owner of this volume did bind their copies quite nicely, they also preserved the wrappers at front and back and by preserving the spine of the paper wrapper at the rear of the textblock.

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Annales Romantiques: Recueil de morceaux choisis de litterature contemporaine. (Romanticist Annals: Anthology of Choice Morsels of Contemporary Literature) Ed. Charles Malo. (1831) Sole Edition. Louis Janet: Paris. Hardbound 32mo, 368 pp.

With its deadline six months after the Romanticist watershed of Hernani and only weeks after the July Revolution, the work in this volume from 81 Romanticist writers represents the movement at the most confident and optimistic moment in its development. One outlet of this optimism was in the array of quasi-heretical liberal and socialist Christian movements that intersected with Romanticism, particularly the one led by the rapidly radicalizing Lammenais, who would be cast out of the Church within a couple years. The deadline was so close to the July Revolution that this volume essentially still wears the shackles of government censorship, and it is not until the next year that the celebrations of the revolution appear. Non-persecutable hints do appear here, such as "The Poet Prisonner by the obscure Norman poet Alphonse Le Flaguais

The Saint-Simonian Romanticist Léon Halévy contributes extracts of a translation of Macbeth, signalling Shakespeare's preeminent position in the Romantic dramatic canon. The Orientalist strain of the anthologies continues unabated with "The Banquet of Esther", written by the anthology's editor Charles Malo (which owes a good deal to Bechford's gothic Orientalist novel Vathek); "The Palace of Nagasaki" by by Denne-Baron. Medievalism also makes a strong showing, with pieces such as the arch-Medievalist Bibliophile Jacob's "Potency"; Charles Dovalle's "The Fairy of the Lake"; Himly's "The School of the Magician"; and Brès' avant-Mystery play "The Man Who Went to See the Devil".
 
The avant-garde shows its head in the Annales for the first time in this year; frenetic Romanticism again makes its presence felt in pieces such as Nestor de Lamarque's "Despair" and Adolphe Mathieu's "The Execution"; "The Vision" by the poet-archaeologist Boucher de Perthes; "A Night Scene in a Moastery" by the Baron Talairat, later elected mayor of Brioud, France; Henri de Latouche's poem on "The Last Day of Salvatore Rosa", the prototypical visual artist of Frenetic Romanticism (ironically, given Latouche's animosity toward the arch-frenetic Jeunes-France group); Auguste Desportes' frenetic 'imitation' (loose translation-as-rewriting) of a Hebrew song on "The Destruction of Sennacharib"; a Anglemont's morbid ballad "The Orphans"; Théodore Carlier's sonnet epigraphed by Byron; and the translation of Bürger's "Lenore," an iconic poem of French freneticism. The latter and/or the passage by Goëthe were likely translated (anonymously) by Gérard (later Nerval) of the Jeunes-France, who contributes an oddly-constructed lyric on "Disease" under his own name. Throughout the volume we see the proliferation of intertextuality that permeated the Romanticist avant-garde, in the form of many more epigraphs, dedications, and other intracommunal references than had appeared in the previous year. 

As usual in this series, the engravings are quaint, mainstream English prints in a compromise with the market (bourgeois households would buy them for the engravings, regardless of the often challenging literary content, which they simply ignored); however, this volume does contain one engraving reproducing a painting by Turner. As in the other two copies bound by this book's first owner, the wrappers have been preserved at front and back, with the spine of the original paper wrapper at the rear of the textblock.

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Annales Romantiques: Recueil de morceaux choisis de litterature contemporaine. (Romanticist Annals: Anthology of Choice Morsels of Contemporary Literature) Ed. Charles Malo. (1835) Sole Edition. Louis Janet: Paris. Hardbound 32mo, 295 pp.
  

 
This volume collects work by 47 Romanticist writers. The anthology's editor, Charles Malo, contributes a weirdly experimental frenetic poem called "Nightmare!" that explores the theme of parricide in verses rhythmically and syntactically fractured by dozens of elipses and dashes, and dozens more semicolons and exclamation marks. The frenetic tendency dominates this year's anthology, with works such as Carlier's "Book of Death", Peyronnet's ode to "Misfortune", Anaïs Ségelas' meditation on "A Death's-Head", Gautier's long poem "Malancholia", and the macabre tale "The Cavern of the Cadavers," under the pseudonym Achille Jubinal. Liberal Nationalism – with both its progressive and its reactionary/Eurocentric problematics – is on the rise; Émile Deschamps contributes an ode to the liberal nationalist movement "Young Germany" and the socialist Alphonse Esquiros to the Greek rebellion against the Ottoman Empire, in which Byron had died. Gérard de Nerval is represented by a series of lyric "Odelettes", Emile Saladin by a short story (his only non-Orientalist piece in the entire series), and Auguste Bouzenot furnishes an essay on Hindu mythology.