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BauDebord/03: Romance&Anarchie!


4. Fin de Siecle

After Baudelaire died in 1867, political turmoil was revisited upon France by Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew, Louis Napoleon III, who had earlier siezed power intent on leading France to another glorious empire. He failed to achieve world domination, but unfortunately succeeded in leading the nation to destruction in a disastrous war against the new modern artillery and the cool ruthless efficiency of the emerging Prussian empire led by Bismarck. In the aftermath of this crisis there was a brief phase in political history when distraught civil authorities had virtually abandoned Paris to effective citizen self-government, a return to that idealized socialist experiment of the revolutionary era, the commune. Perhaps it might have worked, but re-occupation brutally ended that experiment.

One of the casualties of this disaster of 1871 was an unknown young prodigy named Isadore Ducasse, who had written one novel under the pseudonym Lautremont: the disturbing, hallucinogenic and blatantly blasphemous Maldoror. Although this haunting book was never distributed during his lifetime, it was cited by many of the Surrealists as a favourite text half a century later.

After recovering from defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, democracy was re-established and France finally enjoyed a phase of relative political stability and economic growth, and as the fin de siecle approached, the cultural climate of la belle epoch began to emulate the serene complacency of Victorian England. A typical televised art history documentary illustrating this era might linger over Monet's placid water lillies, set to the mellifluous rippling of the music of Debussy. Considering what was to follow, the hostile critical reactions vented by contemporary journalists against the experiments of the Impressionists seem oddly quaint and misguided in retrospect.

Not everyone was content to be lulled into distraction by this hypnotic atmosphere. Alfred Jarry was the penultimate shit-disturber. Out of spite for one of his ridiculous schoolmasters he conceived of a demented parody of scientific study, which he formalized as Pataphysics. His clever slapstick comedy, Ubu Roi, consisted of aggressive anti-authoritarianism and crude obscenities. Public perfomances of his plays often degenerated, quite intentionally, into disruptions and riots. The attention generated by these happenings assured his profile as a cult diversion, though perhaps not quite a hit, as the harsh edge in his style prevented him from achieving widespread acceptance. It appeared that he did not have any particular influence on his contemporaries, although his influence on the next generation of experimental artists in the new century was that of a dramatic time bomb.

By the close of the 19th century the influence of 'The Romantic Era' as a specific movement in the history of Western Art and Literature was quite dead, along with Freidrich Nietzche, perhaps the last profound intellectual to take the idea of Romanticism seriously in itself as a vista worthy of concentrated attention. In spite of (or perhaps because) he was one of the cleverest thinkers who had ever lived, Nietzche drove himself quite insane attempting to reconcile the inherent contradictions of the Romantic spirit, among other things.

That which was to follow pursued quite different intents... although some of the more general elements of the Romantic spirit would prove impossible to completely eradicate, popping up in the most unusual ways...

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