Louis Abel Beffroy de Reigny

Louis Abel Beffroy de Reigny , known as the Cousin Jacques , born with Laon the November 6th 1757 and died in Paris the December 17th 1811, is a journalist, dramatic author and French comic poet, called by its contemporaries “the comic poet of the Révolution”.

Its life and its work

He makes his studies with the Louis-the-Large college of Paris, where he has as school-fellows Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins. Initially professor in several provincial towns, it Marie in 1780 and gives up teaching to devote himself to journalism, burlesque poetry and the theater.

Between 1785 and 1791, it makes appear a monthly newspaper, called in turn the Moons of the Cousin Jacques , the Mail of the planets and the New moons of the Cousin Jacques . The readers, who can subscribe there in exchange of a gift in kind, for example velvet breeches, find there accounts, satires, songs, poems, saynètes, tickets of mood and articles of criticism. The lunar allegory makes it possible the author to locate in a utopian place its observations on the political and social transformations of its time. Also, being on the spot of the Storming of the Bastille in 1789, it collects testimonys of the participants; its text is read the very same day in public with the town hall and is printed shortly after. But when it publishes in 1793 the Constitution of the Moon , contrast between this “political and moral dream” and the reality of the ambient terror are such as the revolutionary authorities make it imprison. Undoubtedly must it with the protection of his/her brother, Louis Etienne Beffroy de Beauvoir, prosecutor of Laon and deputy to the Convention, to be soon soon slackened.

With the theater, its greater success is Nicodème in the moon, or the Peaceful revolution, madness in prose and 3 acts, fray of ariettas and light comedies , played for the first time in November 1790. Two villagers, Frérot and Lolotte, deplore the tyranny which prevails under the lunar government, when occurs an air traveller, Nicodème, which praises with the Emperor of the Moon the benefits of the revolution which has just taken place in the distance country of France. The part is represented without interruption until April 1792, then taken again in 1797. Another of its parts, the Club of good-people, whose first in 1791 takes place, knows it also a great popular success. The author however hardly renews himself and the odd comedies that it continues to produce are torpedoed by criticism and end up wearying the public.

In its Dictionary neologic of the men and things , Beffroy de Reigny gathers biographical notes on its contemporaries and of the articles on the words and new concepts appeared during the Revolution. At the end of three volumes, published in 1799, the censure stops the publication of it. Its last part, the Catch , makes a furnace in December of the same year. The author withdraws himself and puts an end to his career by publishing a last compilation of his poems and songs in 1803.

Judgments

1791/ the Chronicle of Paris

One gave, Monday the 21st, with the theater of the street Feydeau, the first representation of the Two Nicomèdes in Jupiter planet, by the Jacques Cousin. We cannot give of it an account detailed, because it is the most ridiculous rhapsody, more the punt slavish flattery which one connoisse in annals of the theater, because in clouds of verses there is not to quote, because the language and the good sense are also wounded there, because it is the last degree of the kind denied; but we observe that it is nothing as dangerous as these nob-democratic species of hochepots, which are good only to hold the spirits in fermentation, & where each moment can become the signal of a bloody brawl.

1886/Lazare Hippolyte Carnot

Beffroy de Reigny, famous formerly under the name of the Jacques cousin, forgotten perfectly today, was however a quite original type, buffoon who laughed and made laugh the public in full terror; journalist, poet, author of plays of which it composed the music. It made run any Paris to the Club of the good people, with Nicodème in the moon . What is better than all that, it is that the Jacques cousin, thanks to influential friends that it had preserved, formed, during the revolution, the link of much of acts of leniency and benevolence. I saw it little time before his death; it appeared old to me, though it was not it, but I was so young! Moreover always the same one: frankness and cheerfulness.

1972/Pierre Versins

Its style, harmonizes some with its manners, is surprisingly relaxed, and its topics are not it less. One owes him a very great number of booklets, saynettes, poems, plays, speech, novels, news, periodicals, where imagination often arises in a form which would enchant the current researchers. And in all this, with profusion, a conjectural imagination to make dream.

Notes, sources and references

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