New Addition: Charivari on the "Hugophiles"

Le Charivari (The Hullabaloo). March 7, Year 11, No. 66 (Monday, March 7, 1842) Paris. Paperback Quarto, 4 pp.

Despite its early association with Romanticism and continued publication of Romanticist cartoonists, the satirical journal Charivari had established a position outside the Romanticist-Classicist debate by the 1840s, and was in a position to skewer both sides. By 1842, Classicism was experiencing a resurgence as Romanticism, now infiltrating every aspect of French culture, was beginning to split into several divergent subcultures and cultural tendencies, many adherents to which felt little connection with the movement in its current, mainstream form. While young people in the Romanticist orbit did not remember the movement in its underground, revolutionary stage but simply as the backdrop of further innovation, young Classicists were now able to see themselves as rebels against Romanticist hegemony. 

 

In 1842, a renewed Classicist campaign was launched, ultimately aiming to bring down the impending premier in 1843 of Hugo's new Romanticist play The Burgraves. This issue of Charivari contains a quirky relic of this critical campaign, which resulted in a Classicist riot at the premier, and the end of organised Romanticism in France. It addresses the critical debate swirling around Victor Hugo's Romantic travel guide of The Rhine, between the "Hugophiles" (Romanticists) and "Hugophobes" (Classicists), though generally sympathetic to Hugo. At issue is an argument about a side-comment there in which Hugo suggests the orthography Asculum for a (possibly apocryphal) Roman town briefly mentioned in Horace, OEquotuticum, which Hugo argues cannot be scanned within a French alexandrine line of verse. The Classicist press, it seems, was outraged, asserting that one must retain the Latin at all costs; as more publications joined the fray, this spiraled into a heated battle about poetic scansion. The article pokes fun at both sides in the debate, but unequivocally blames the Classicists for stirring it up, hearkening back to, "the beautiful evening on which the two enemy camps [the Romantics and Classicists] had at it not only with the mouth, but even with hair in the stalls of the Théâtre-Français, over the first performance of Hernani."

 
The featured cartoon in this issue caricatures a group of dandies (or "lions" in Parisian slang) at the opera, peering about the audience with opera-glasses from their private box. It is labelled "The Lions' Pit" (a double-pun, since the cheapest seats, below them, were known as "the pit"). One dandy exclaims, "Naught shall have talent, save us and our friends," to which his companion/s respond in English: "Yes!" Dandy subculture was strongly anglophilic, owing in part to the movement's British roots.