I had thought the French re-editions of Lefebvre had dried up, but the brief text ‘Vers un romantisme révolutionnaire’, first published in 1957 in Nouvelle revue française, is just out in a new edition, with a ‘présentation’ by Rémi et Charlotte Hess. Rémi Hess was one of Lefebvre’s students and his biographer; Charlotte is his daughter and a specialist on German romanticism. This piece appeared around the time Lefebvre was splitting from the French Communist Party, and produced some debate – there was a book of discussions on it published in 1958 that included contributions by Tristan Tzara and Lucien Goldmann. Kurt Meyer’s 1973 book Henri Lefebvre: Ein Romantischer Revolutionär took this text as a designation for Lefebvre as a whole. The text was reprinted in Au-delà du structuralisme; and Lefebvre returned to this later as the longest of the preludes in An Introduction to Modernity had the title of ‘Towards a New Romanticism’. What’s interesting about the title of the reprinted piece is that it is romanticism that is the key term, modified by revolutionary, and not the reverse.
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