Octave Uzanne (French pronunciation: [ɔktav yzan]; 14 September 1851 – 31 October 1931) was a 19th-century French bibliophile, writer, publisher, and journalist.
He is noted for his literary research on the authors of the 18th century. He published many previously unpublished works by authors including Paradis Moncrif, Benserade, Caylus, Besenval, the Marquis de Sade and Baudelaire. He founded the Société des Bibliophiles Contemporains, of which he was president. His research produced a considerable literary output and frequent publications in newspapers such as L'Echo, Le Plume, La Dépêche de Toulouse, Le Mercure de France, Le Gaulois and Le Figaro of Paris.
One of the topics his research focused on was the discussion of fashion and femininity in the French fin-de-siècle. This took the form of monographs and works including Son Altesse la femme (French for Her Highness Woman), Féminies and La Française du siècle (The Frenchwoman of the Century). His own works include novels and fantasy books, such as Surprises du Coeur and Contes pour les bibliophiles (Tales for bibliophiles).
Louis Octave Uzanne was born on 14 September 1851 in Auxerre, to a bourgeois family originating from Savoy. His parents were Charles-Auguste Omer Uzanne, a merchant, and Elisabeth Laurence Octavie; his elder brother Joseph, had been born the previous year. His classical studies began in his home town; he moved to Paris after his father's death to study at the Collège Rollin in Paris—a residential school for the children of the French upper-class. In Paris he became interested in the evolution and history of manuscripts and books. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 he was attached to a school at Richmond in England. Continuing with law studies, he abandoned this line of work when he came into an inheritance in 1872, allowing him to pursue his literary interests.
He became a regular visitor of the Library of the Arsenal, where he joined a group of followers of the former librarian, Charles Nodier, along with the journalist Charles Monselet, writer Loredan Larchey, and author and bibliophile Paul Lacroix. He also joined the Société des Amis des Livres (founded in 1874), the first French bibliophilic association since the Société des Bibliophiles François (founded in 1820).
At the start of his career, Uzanne focused on the lesser-known writers of the 18th century, creating four volumes of work published by Jouast, and an additional 20+ volumes published by Albert Quantin. He was an admirer of the Goncourt brothers, who were also writers on the subject of 18th-century France. Uzanne looked for mentors who were bibliophiles like him, rather than literary scholars (érudits) like his companions at the Arsenal. While focusing on past subjects, he was very up-to-date on the technical aspects of printing and publishing. His 1879 work Le bric-à-brac de l'amour (literally, A bric-a-brac of love) was one of the first to employ the gillotage, a zincography technique, and photo-mechanical reproduction. Jackson points out that Uzanne, in Les Zigzags d'un curieux (literally, Zigzags of a Curious Man), divided the book collectors in two groups: those who are interested in the book as if it were a kind of stock market share (valeur de Bourse), a market quotation whose fluctuations "they follow with a gamester's interest", and those—whom he considers "pures"—attracted to the book itself, its contents, rarity or beauty.
After leaving the Société des Amis des Livres, which he found too conservative and too concerned with the reissue of old works, he started two new bibliographic societies, the Société des Bibliophiles Contemporaines (1889–1894) and the Societé des Bibliophiles Indépendants (1896–1901). The first consisted of 160 people, including the writers Jules Claretie and Jean Richepin, the artists Albert Robida and Paul Avril, and the journalist and critic Francisque Sarcey. Uzanne also edited two magazines, Conseiller du bibliophile (literally, Adviser of bibliophile, 1876–1877) and Les miscellanées bibliographiques (The Bibliographical Miscellany, 1878–1880), and then ran three consecutive bibliophilic magazines: Le livre : bibliographie moderne (literally, The Book: Modern Bibliography, 1880–1889), Le livre moderne : revue du monde littéraire et des bibliophiles contemporaines (literally, The Modern Book: Journal of the Literary World and Contemporary Bibliophiles, 1890–1891), and L'Art et l'Idée : revue contemporaine du dilettantisme l'littéraire et de la curiosité (Art and Ideas: Contemporary Journal of the Literary Dilettantism and Curiosity, 1892–1893). In the early 1890s, he was considered to be "... the best authority that book lovers know on subjects specially interesting to book lovers". Nevertheless, such books as Le Miroir du Monde (The Mirror of the World) or L'ombrelle – le gant – le manchon (The Sunshade, Muff, and Glove) received negative reviews from some newspapers for Avril's illustrations.
In contrast to most bibliophiles of his time, Uzanne was chiefly interested in the creation of new, luxurious bibliophile works, collaborating closely with printers, binders, typographers and artists (especially the Symbolists and early Art Nouveau artists). Among them were such painters as James McNeill Whistler, Adolphe Lalauze and Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly—who wrote the preface of Le bric-à-brac de l'amour (1879)—, the writer Jean Lorrain, and jewellery artists and exponents of Japonisme such as Henri Vever. One of the main artists collaborating with Uzanne was the Belgian Félicien Rops, who illustrated some of his books and created the cover illustration for Le Livre Moderne, and who called Uzanne "the Bibliophile's dream". The overall quality of Uzanne's books was remarked upon by The New York Times when reviewing his 1894 work La Femme à Paris: "The book is a highly-artistic achievement in a typographical sense ... This artistic element and the style of the author ... elevate the work from its sphere of usefulness into the sphere of pure literature. It will be serviceable a century from now to students of our civilization." Other symbolic works of art were Féminies (1896), in which Rops illustrated many scenes of worldly life, or Son Altesse la femme (Her Highness Woman, 1885), on which he drew a naked witch in the chapter on medieval women. In the work he explored the lives of women at all levels of French society of his time. But also, according to Silverman, Uzanne associate feminism with a dangerous debauchery of sexual and moral investment, making full use a series of medical and philosophical sources, with the intention of proving the inability of women to merge into public life and the labour market, because of their temperament. Uzanne further indicated that the female figure and ornaments were essential in the French decorative arts, something that was missing in the early 20th century.
Uzanne's bibliophile activity in the early 1880s coincided with the gradual abandonment of manual methods of printing illustrations kin favour of photomechanized methods. His collection of contemporary bibliophilic books was sold in 1894 by Hôtel Drouot. It contained some of the finest examples of late 19th-century French bookbinding, by binders like Charles Meunier, Lucien Magnin, Pétrus Ruban, Camille Martin, René Wiener and Victor Prouvé.
Uzanne was also well known in the literary circles of his day, as attested by this poem of Stéphane Mallarmé in Vers de circonstance (1920):
Non comme pour étincelerAux immortels dos de basaneTard avec mon laisser-allerje vous salue, Octave Uzanne
(Not as if to sparkle with mirth
at the immortal sheepskin spines
As a journalist, sometimes employing the pseudonym "la Cagoule", Uzanne wrote for L'Écho de Paris, Le Gaulois and other newspapers. In addition, for other French and foreign magazines like The Studio, Magazine of Art, and Scribner's Magazine, for which he wrote in 1894 an article, "The End of Books", which he thought would come because of the rise of phonography, where he predicted the rise of radio and television. Uzanne was fascinated by modern technology and the possibilities it offered for the reproduction and dissemination of words, sounds, and images, which was evidenced not only in that article or in his groundbreaking work in book publishing, but also in an article he wrote in 1893 for the French newspaper Le Figaro, about a visit he made to US President Grover Cleveland and the inventor Thomas Edison during the EXPO Chicago 1893, where he witnessed the Kinetograph shortly before it went public.