Sabbat – by Alphonse Esquiros

The occultist, poet, novelist, and activist Alphonse Esquiros [say: Es-Key-Row] was a member of the avant-garde Evadamist, Bohême Doyenné, and probably Bouzingo groups. In his youth he played a formative role in what his friend and collaborator Éliphas Lévi dubbed the “Fantasist School” of magick, the melding of Occultism, avant-garde Romanticism, and Feminist Socialism. After fighting on the barricades in the Revolution of 1848, he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies as a Socialist, and was forced into exile by the coup d’état of Louis-Napoleon III.

This brutally uncompromising poem depicting a sexual assault and the predation of powerful men on young girls still feels horrifically relevant in the cultural and political climate of the 2020s. Published toward the beginning of his career in 1833, it combines realism, emotional intensity, & allegory to reflect the links Esquiros discerned between Feminism, Socialism, and Antiauthoritarianism. He employs the horror-imagery of Frenetic Romanticism to reveal the deep-seated alliance between sexual violence, economic violence, and the violence of the patriarchal State.