Akademos, Revue mensuelle d'art libre et de critique

First edition, complete with all 12 issues of this luxurious and short-lived review founded and directed by Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen, one of the exceedingly rare copies on japon, the only deluxe paper, with four states of the colour engravings.

Bound in half sand-coloured cloth, morocco lettering pieces, marbled paper boards, spines and wrappers preserved for each issue, a fine copy with wide margins.

Our copy indeed contains the four colour states reserved for the deluxe issue, printed on various papers, of each of the 23 photogravures in Arts & Crafts, Symbolist, Renaissance, Art Nouveau, and Classical styles, after Maxwell Armfield, Henri Saulnier Ciolkowski, Léonard Sarluis, Bernardino Luini, Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, Gustave Moreau, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Pollaiolo, Correggio, Piero della Francesca, Rubens, Jose de Ribera, Francisco Goya, Mederhausen Rodo, Cardet, and statues and steles from the museums of Naples and Athens.

The elegant cover design is by George Auriol, master of Art Nouveau typography.
Contributions by Laurent Tailhade, Émile Verhaeren, Renée Vivien, Colette Willy, Joséphin Peladan, Jean Moréas, Henri Barbusse, Arthur Symons, Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen, J. Antoine-Orliac, Paterne Berrichon, Jules Bois, Jean Bouscatel, Tristan Derème, Léon Deubel, André du Fresnois, Maurice Gaucher, René Ghil, Henri Guilbeaux, J.-C. Holl, Tristan Klingsor, Ernest La Jeunesse, Gabriel de Lautrec, Abel Léger, Legrand-Chabrier, Louis Mandin, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Francis de Miomandre, John-Antoine Nau, Maurice de Noisay, Julien Ochsé, Edmond Pilon, Ernest Raynaud, André Salmon, Valentine de Saint-Point, Robert Scheffer, Tancrède de Visan...

A very handsome and extremely rare copy on japon, of the first French homosexual review.

It was only in 1869 that the term « homosexuel » first appeared, in the correspondence between German journalists and jurists Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Karl-Maria Kertbeny. Their writings attest to the first attempts to describe physical attraction towards the same sex, not to condemn the act, but to have another form of sexuality accepted in the eyes of society.
Indeed, while homosexual relations have been part of human societies since their origins, they were long addressed solely from the perspective of the carnal act. Stigmatised, the inverted sexual act was in turn codified, tolerated, or severely condemned across times and cultures, but never interpreted as an exclusive attraction. Thus, France, the first country to decriminalise homosexuality, abolished in 1791 the « crime of sodomy » in the Penal Code, but it would take until the second half of the 19th century for the awareness of a true homosexual identity to emerge, as Michel Foucault describes in his Histoire de la sexualité:

« L'homosexuel du XIXe siècle est devenu un personnage : un passé, une histoire et une enfance, un caractère, une forme de vie ; une morphologie aussi, avec une anatomie indiscrète et peut-être une physiologie mystérieuse. Rien de ce qu'il est au total n'échappe à sa sexualité. Partout en lui, elle est présente [...] Elle lui est consubstantielle, moins comme un péché d'habitude que comme une nature singulière. Il ne faut pas oublier que la catégorie psychologique, psychiatrique, médicale de l'homosexualité s'est constituée du jour où on l'a caractérisée [...] moins par un type de relations sexuelles que par une certaine qualité de la sensibilité sexuelle, une certaine manière d'intervertir en soi-même le masculin et le féminin. L'homosexualité est apparue comme une des figures de la sexualité lorsqu'elle a été rabattue de la pratique de la sodomie sur une sorte d'androgynie intérieure, un hermaphrodisme de l'âme. Le sodomite était un relaps, l'homosexuel est maintenant une espèce. » 

THE PRECURSORS

It is in this context that, under Balzac's pen, characters appeared who fully assumed their other sexuality, notably Zambinella, Seraphita, and above all Vautrin, considered the first homosexual in French literature. Meanwhile, Baudelaire, who initially wanted to title his Fleurs du Mal « Les Lesbiennes », was condemned for his poems Lesbos and Femmes damnées, celebrating female love.
For in stepping out of marginality and gaining a form of recognition, homosexual men and women found themselves faced with critical gazes and caricatural stigmas.
Some writers, such as Georges Eekhoud or Renée Vivien, openly proclaimed their homosexuality in literature. Others, like Oscar Wilde, assumed it publicly, yet allowed it to show discreetly in their work. Many continued to conceal their true inclinations to secure respectability and literary recognition. Among them, Proust and Montesquiou became the targets of Jean Lorrain's proud and venomous pen, proclaimed « en-philanthrope »: « Mort, Yturri te salue, tante » he wrote to Montesquiou, in the press, on the death of his lover Gabriel Yturri. Similar - and true - insinuations about Lucien Daudet led to Lorrain's famous duel with Marcel Proust.
 

WITCH HUNT

D'Adelswärd-Fersen, born in 1880, grew up at the heart of this revolution in morals and endured the terrible inner conflicts between personal desire and institutional morality, between social representation and intimate freedom. While France represented a space of far greater liberty than its neighbours, the judgment of society remained profoundly heteronormative.
The infamous Paragraph 175 of the new German Penal Code, condemning in 1871 « unnatural sexual acts » across the Empire, or the condemnation of Oscar Wilde to hard labour in 1895, aroused the indignation of declared homosexuals and the silent concern of others. The literary world was not spared. In 1900, G. Eekhoud was prosecuted for Escal-Vigor, the first novel to speak openly and positively of male love. In 1902, Friedrich Alfred Krupp committed suicide following the scandal of alleged « sexual orgies » in Capri. The following year, d'Adelswärd-Fersen, just of age, was in turn accused of conducting « black masses » with young adolescents and involving aristocracy.

From medieval witch hunts to modern conspiracy theories, the accusation of satanic ritual has always been a topos of the phantasmatic constructions of societies confronted with different expressions of otherness.

Fersen had in fact offered his judges the literary model of their accusation. It was indeed with the publication in 1902 of L'Hymnaire d'Adonis: à la façon de M. le marquis de Sade that he drew the attention of the Prosecutor. And if he received only six months' imprisonment, for acts that today would be judged far more severely, it was because he was reproached more for the public and literary expression of his sexuality than for his unhealthy erotic stagings of adolescents in antique costume.
Deeply affected by the media frenzy and the violent rejection of homosexuality he witnessed, Fersen published in 1905: Messes noires. Lord Lyllian, a roman à clef inspired by his story and featuring the homosexual luminaries of the late 19th century: Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas, John Gray, Jean Lorrain, Joséphin Peladan, Achille Essebac, Robert de Montesquiou, Friedrich Krupp, and Fersen himself.
The intention of the young 25-year-old poet was no longer solely artistic, it had become political. D'Adelswärd-Fersen thus became one of the forerunners in the struggle for the recognition and acceptance of homosexuality in modern society.
It was in this spirit that the project of Akademos was born. Though ostensibly inspired by Adolf Brand's German review Der Eigene, Fersen was far more ambitious, seeking through his review to transform mentalities. He also took interest in more engaged figures such as the German scientist Magnus Hirschfeld, who, in 1897 with the writer Franz Joseph von Bülow, founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (« Wissenschaftlich humanitäre Komitee », WhK), the first organisation for the defence of homosexual rights.
At the end of 1907, from Villa Lysis in Capri, Fersen thus wrote to Georges Eekhoud:

« La permission fort aimable que vous m'avez donnée d'écrire à Hirschfeld sous votre égide sera mise à profit. Je ne connaissais après mes passages en Allemagne que Brand et son Eigene. D'autre part, j'attendais, afin de correspondre avec les chefs allemands du parti, la réalisation d'un projet à moi, que j'ose vous confier : je voudrais, n'ayant d'ailleurs comme titre suffisant que l'orgueil de nos idées et une ardeur indicible à les savoir moins méconnues, fon­der à Paris, en février prochain, une revue d'art, de philosophie, de lit­térature, dans laquelle petit à petit pour ne pas faire d'avance un scan­dale, on réhabilite l'autre Amour. J'espère, cher monsieur Eekhoud, que vous nous ferez l'honneur, un jour, de votre compagnie et de ce talent, universel aujourd'hui, qui vous range parmi les apôtres du « mouvement ». Dans tous les cas, je vous remercie pour la sympathie si délicatement exprimée, pour les espoirs que nous partageons, pour les bonheurs décrits, que tous les deux, nous avons, en marge des autres, savourés. »

DER EIGENE: THE ANTI-MODEL

Although Der Eigene, published from 1896, was the first European homosexual review and the avowed model for Akademos, it did not pursue the same ends, nor was it built on the same artistic and political foundation.
Presented as documentation of nudist activities and art history, Adolf Brand's review did not advocate social upheaval, but rather a historical reinterpretation of male/female relations. Proclaiming a new Hellenism, it drew on the practices of ancient Greek pederasty to unite a virile community of spirit, and sought to demonstrate, through its contributions, the aesthetic and erotic superiority of the male body in art and customs.

« Didier Eribon souligne de quelle manière les thèses masculinistes de Brand relèvent d'une conception universaliste de la sexualité [...], mais aussi d'une vision misogyne peu encline au changement social. L'étude du masculinisme homosexuel renvoie aussi à la construction d'une image de l'homme pensée comme outil de domination sociale envers les minorités de genre, de classe et de race. [...] la domination masculine se traduit [...] par l'exaltation des vertus morales et physiques de l'homme-machine ».

 Paradoxically, the first homosexual review adopted the codes of the emerging ideology. As early as 1903, « Brand left Hirschfeld's WhK organisation and founded the Community of the Special (« Gemeinschaft der Eigenen », GdE). Influenced by the context of Lebensreform, he exalted adolescent virility and self-mastery in nature. He organised collective camps, sporting marches, and nudist sessions, in line with the practices of the Wandervogel, those youth groups that would fill the ranks of the Hitler Youth at the end of the 1920s. » (Damien Delille, Homoérotisme et culture visuelle dans les revues Der Eigene et Akademos)
 

ANOTHER LOVE, ANOTHER CULTURE

Akademos stemmed from a wholly different philosophy. For Fersen, it was less about exalting virility drawn from Antiquity than about exploring a literary vision of homosexuality inherited from decadent Symbolism. The editorial line of the review is perfectly expressed in another letter to Eekhoud.

« Villa Lysis, 4 août 1908
« Cher Monsieur Eekhoud,
« En décembre ou en janvier dernier, je crois, nous avons parlé d'un projet de revue que nous voulions fonder des amis et moi avec l'aide de l'éditeur Messein. Il s'agissait - sans donner de prime abord à la publication un parti pris, une étiquette, une allure de combat - d'arriver à mettre en lumière la question de la liberté passionnelle - les différentes théories sensuelles. Il s'agissait en quelques mots de défendre l'Autre Amour, par le souvenir des temps passés, par les espoirs des temps présents. Akademos est maintenant une chose décidée. Revue mensuelle (que nous espérons plus tard faire paraître tous les quinze jours) elle comprendra dans chaque numéro un roman (à suivre), deux ou trois nouvelles, deux poèmes, deux pages de musique, un courrier de Paris, critique des livres, critique des théâtres, une critique d'art [et] une lettre de l'étranger. De temps à autre un article de philosophie, de médecine, de jurisprudence. Akademos enfin, contiendra outre la couverture, deux hors texte, reproduction d'une œuvre antique ou moderne (sculpture, architecture, peinture ou paysage). »

Akademos established itself from the outset as a humanist review and a space of tolerance, through which the figure of the homosexual, their specific sensibility, their art of living and the artistic expression of their difference could be inscribed within a quest for aesthetic and literary modernity.
 

ADAM THE ANDROGYNE

While Fersen and his contributors sought in ancient art a historical legitimacy, it was more as a source of inspiration and to offer an aesthetic ancestry to the new artistic figure promoted by Akademos: the Androgyne.
In contrast to the sexual polarity defended by Eigene, the figure of the Androgyne appeared as a reconciliation between genders and a defence of sexual indeterminacy.
Beyond the representation that blended feminine and masculine, the Androgyne acquired in Fersen's review a new, political and avant-garde dimension.
It is thus in Akademos that one finds, under the pen of Joséphin Peladan, the first questioning of gender identity, and the beginnings of a theory of the non-binary.

« L'Amour n'est donc plus pour le lecteur "un sentiment d'affection d'un