Part Four
The prosecutions, the manifestos, the battles in the pit of the Comédie-Française, and the arguments that turned into movements.
The premiere of Victor Hugo's Hernani at the Comédie-Française on 25 February 1830 was disrupted by organised opposition from classicists in the audience — the so-called bataille d'Hernani.
Fights
The Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes — the dispute over whether ancient or modern writers were superior — ran from roughly 1687 to 1716 and involved Racine, Boileau, Perrault and Fontenelle.
Fights
Émile Zola's open letter to the President of the Republic was published in L'Aurore on 13 January 1898 with a headline chosen by the editor Georges Clemenceau.
Fights
André Breton published the Manifeste du surréalisme in October 1924 through the Éditions du Sagittaire, defining a movement by what it excluded as much as what it proposed.
Fights
The Ouvroir de littérature potentielle was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais; its constraint-based method — the lipogram, the N+7, the snowball — was a formal argument about what literary freedom actually means.
Fights