Opening the Zo d’Axa / Béatrice Arnac Project
Among the various archival and translation projects presently underway at Bacchus Editions, one of the largest concerns a man who seems perpetually to evade capture…
Zo d’Axa appears everywhere once one begins looking for him. He drifts through anarchist newspapers, police files, memoirs, scandals, caricatures, literary histories, anti-militarist campaigns, theatrical controversies, prison cells, boulevard journalism, and fin-de-siècle gossip.
Yet strangely, he almost never appears whole.
For English-language readers, the situation has remained especially peculiar...
A handful of translated fragments circulate (with gratitude to vincent! & Bill for earlier efforts unearthing portions of his writings), and certain famous passages surface from time to time. An isolated article here, a quotation there. Yet the larger body of writings and adventures remains largely inaccessible, scattered across publications and archives rarely visited outside France. The result is that generations of anarchists (and other curious readers) have inherited only glimpses.
What emerges from those glimpses is already compelling enough: a fierce opponent of patriotic hypnosis, a relentless satirist, an enemy of authority in every form it assumed, and a writer whose theatrical instinct pushed beyond the boundaries of conventional anarchist journalism. But the fragments alone do not convey the atmosphere of the whole. That absence became impossible to ignore.
Bacchus Editions has been undertaking the complete recovery and translation of Zo d’Axa's writings through the forthcoming volume Zo d’Axa: The Complete Writings: Journalism, Vagabondage, Revolt, & Theatrical Insurrection.
Alongside this work is the first English edition of Béatrice Arnac’s extraordinary study of her grandfather, appearing as Intimate Shadows: Béatrice Arnac on Zo d’Axa ~ A Rare Familial Portrait of the Fin-de-Siècle Vagabond.
Arnac’s book occupies a singular place within the literature surrounding Zo d’Axa. Rather than attempting to explain him, it preserves something far rarer: gesture, temperament, contradiction, and the living presence of the man himself.
The project carries a certain personal closeness for one member of Bacchus Editions as well. Years ago, time was spent with Béatrice during her later years, a small continuity surviving beneath the official record. Arnac herself passed away in Castels et Bézenac in 2020, but her remarkable portrait remains one of the most intimate windows into the world surrounding Zo d’Axa.
Readers who encounter Béatrice here for the first time will also find her reappearing elsewhere within the forthcoming Bacchus Editions volume The Criminal Grace of Dancing: The Performing Body Through Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Artaud, and Genet (featuring Isadora Duncan, Valeska Gert, Loïe Fuller, Béatrice Arnac, and Lavinia Schulz), a separate project exploring dance, theatricality, gesture, and revolt.
Together, these projects involve far more than translation alone. They require reconstruction, archival recovery, travel, and the slow work of following scattered traces across a landscape that has spent more than a century falling apart and reassembling itself.
The dedicated project portal for Zo d’Axa and Béatrice Arnac is now open and will gradually gather translation excerpts, archival discoveries, publication updates, rare materials, reconstruction notes, et occasional surprises encountered along the way.
Have a look, wander a little, and consider bookmarking the portal. The first translations, discoveries, and progress notes will begin appearing there soon.