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THE FROG PRINCE KEVIN MCCANN

when they elected old Brisset Prince des Penseurs, Romains, Vildrac and Chennevire and the rest of them before the world was given over to wars Quand vous serez bien vieille remember that I have remembered, mia pargoletta, and pass on the tradition Ezra Pound, Canto LXXX

In January 1913, French papers announced that a littleknown seventy-six-year-old philologist and philosopher named Jean-Pierre Brisset had been voted the Prince of Thinkers in an election organized by the recently founded Society for Ideology. He had solidly beaten out the better-known, second-place candidate, Henri Bergson. A ceremony was arranged for April of that year. Coming into Paris, the great man was met with a solemn reception at the Montparnasse train station, where a young girl presented him with flowers on the platform and the assembled crowd was treated to a poem that Charles Vildrac had written especially for the occasion. After an intimate lunch, Brisset was brought to the Pantheon to offer a few choice words by the foot of Rodins Thinker. He subsequently met with members of the press, including reporters from Le Figaro, Le Matin, and Excelsior, and then headed to the Htel des Socits Savantes to deliver a public lecture in which he explained that Man had descended not from apes but from frogs, and that proof of this could be discovered by a close examination of ordinary language, in which the history of our species, along with the mysteries of God and of the world, remained encoded.1 Human speech is the book bound with seven seals described in Revelation, and Brisset himself was the seventh angel who had broken the final seal and revealed its contents. The words we use today still register our initial reactions to moments of great import in the course of our divinely orchestrated evolutionthe moment when humans amphibious and asexual ancestors discovered their incipient genitalia; early acts of violence destroying the peace that once existed between animal and man; the experience of good and evil and encounters with angels and demons (who were also our ancestors, a middle stage of development between Man and frogs). Though Brissets books had revealed the secrets of God and Man deduced through his analysis of the French language, he had emphasized in his La science de Dieu ou la creation de l homme (The science of God
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Jean-Pierre Brisset addresses a crowd in front of Rodins Thinker at the Pantheon, 13 April 1913. Courtesy Marc Dcimo.

or the creation of man) of 1900 that Gods language is equally audible in all current languages and he was not claiming any special status for his own national tongue: The present work cannot be translated in its entirety, but each language can be analyzed by following the Great Law and the methods presented in this volume. The result will be the same: The creation of man, both as animal and as spirit.2 Indeed, from his earliest works, Brisset had turned his attention not only to various languages but even to the sounds made by certain animals. For instance, he notes in his 1883 La grammaire logique (The logical grammar), the meowing of cats (the French word is miauler, the English verb Brisset cites is to mew) is made up of two elements: mi or me, the indirect object pronoun (in French, the letter m is sufficient to suggest the word me) and au or w, which approximates the designation of water, au being close to eau, the French word for water, and w being short for water in English. Cats are in fact saying, Me. Water, or Bring me water. When discussing the German for meowing, miauen, Brisset attempts to demonstrate that the au sound, though not in Wasser, the German word for water, still indicates water. He does this by combing through the German language for water-related nouns that contain the same sound, including the German name of the Danube river, Donau, and the word for eye, Auge (the logic being that tears fall from eyes). The German au,

however, is also associated with sounds of pain (ow or ouch in English; ah, ahi, or ouf in French) because Germans still retain unpleasant memories of rain falling like blows on their backs.3 Early on, especially when people first began living on land and missed the water that had previously been their home, they frequently meowed as well. Had he lived longer, Brisset would have pursued his dream of publishing a single dictionary of all languages. A project of this nature makes sense only if one grants that each of the sounds that make up our words (and each of the combinations of sounds) has a particular meaning that is the same in all languages. Just as o designates water, pi sounds indicate creative powers, and the ee sound (rendered in French by the letter i ) is a call to move forward or the designation of a path or route. While he expounded to the audience gathered at the Htel des Socits Savantes on the moral, social, and religious implications of our batrachian origins, a number of listeners in the crowd, which extended out into the street, regularly made frog noises, shouting couac, a word that Brisset himself was fond of repeating.4 Brisset finished his talk by discussing the prophecies God had revealed to him, and promised that the kingdom of God would arrive in 1945, inaugurating an era of peace, justice, and liberty. At dinner, the menus featured an illustration of frogs crowning Brisset with laurels. A number of foreign writers stood up and delivered speeches in German, English, Spanish, and Italian. Many in attendance were impressed that Brisset was able, at the end of each speech, to address each speaker fluently in his own native tongue. Brisset was then presented with a bronze bust representing pure thought. The election and subsequent celebrations were, of course, understood as an elaborate hoax by most of the participants. Both the honorific Prince of Thinkers and Brissets nomination were the work of Jules Romains and the other poets gathered around the magazine LEffort Libre, who had also recently tried to have a lunatic elected as a member of the Chamber of Deputies. But Brisset himself was not in on the joke. He spoke in earnest and was deeply moved to be receiving attention after a lifetime of obscurity, and excited by a flurry of interest in the books he had been self-publishing and attempting to disseminate for decades. For some, Brissets earnestness marked him as a better man than those in the audience for whom he was a figure of fun. An article in Le Figaro stated that twenty-eight-year-old Jules Romains had tarnished his emerging reputation by elaborately mocking a harmless old lunatic (Brisset responded to this article by writing to Romains to
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assure him of his full support against the slander of a small cabal inspired by jealousy and malevolence). Most saw no harm in simply enjoying the spectacle and the strange, oddly moving, wildly anti-Catholic, and sometimes scandalously erotic things Brisset was saying. And the intended target of Romainss joke was not in fact Brisset himself, but the self-important stupidity of contemporary literary culture as evinced by earnest but similarly meaningless contests for a prince of poets and a prince of storytellers that had recently been announced in the press with all seriousness. If a prince of thinkers were to be put forward, it had to be someone who could not possibly be seen as representing a norm or standard toward which young thinkers should aspire. Decades later, Andr Breton would write of Brisset: This paltry dignity will dishonor him only for those who pass by the greatest peculiarities that the human mind has to offer with their eyes closed.5 Breton, who included Brisset in his Anthology of Black Humor, notes that he represents a humor produced entirely in reception, which he opposes to the more familiar, intentional humor of emission. Brisset compares his revelations to those of Moses and Jesus and believes the publication of The Science of God to be the sounding of the seventh trumpet of the Apocalypse, but it is fairly certain that no one ever has read Brissets works as he intended, as a straightforward revelation of divine truth. The flagrant disconnect between common sense and the bombastic assertions being confidently and proudly put forth by the author generate, as Breton writes, a large-scale humor, in which the person responsible does not participate.7 Toward the end of his life, Romains himself still felt his own intentions had been misunderstood and wrote somewhat defensively that at Brissets funeral, members of his family greeted me with emotion and assured me that he had never stopped singing my praises and evoking that day, April 13, 1913, which had been the happiest of his life.8 Receiving Brisset in a different spirit than he intended or would have wished does not mean adopting a purely external stance toward him. On the contrary, Breton notes that a level of identification is necessary for the humor to take effect. In his account, humor is a refuge into which one withdraws after having undergone a process of identification. Humor is a reflex of preservation that protects the reader from being emotionally overwhelmed after having allowed all the most stable elements of reason and society to be called into question.
opposite: Diagram from Brissets La natation ou lart de nager appris seul en moins dune heure , 1870, promising readers a method for learning to swim the breaststroke in less than an hour.

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Unlike Breton, however, most readers will not find that association and disassociation belong to separate movements, nor will they feel that their relation to reason or society was ever seriously threatened by reading Brisset. The humor (or perhaps just fun) of reading Brisset comes in part from the brazen excesses at the heart of all nonsense (literality taken to absurd extremes, the letter of the law pompously asserting itself against the spirit), and from surprise at the ingenuity of his word play, the strangeness of his ideas, and the complexity and cohesion of the mythology he has developed. But it also involves playing alongBrissets writing would not have been particularly interesting or amusing if he had not meant every word of it, and it would not have been possible to enter into it if he had not been sympathetic on some level. One accepts his premises without really believing in them, and is compensated by nonsensical word play and an extraordinary fantasy world. Breton comes closer to pinpointing Brissets appeal when he states that we are witnessing here the return not of one individual but, in his person, of the entire race to childhood.9 The fluidity with which Brissets words turn into things that emit words that turn into other things reminds one of nothing so much as Alices Wonderland filled with mock-turtles and rocking-horse flies, where Humpty Dumpty pays his words extra when he makes them communicate a large amount of information all at once. It is only natural to approach Brisset with admiration, and perhaps a touch of envy. His colorful world of demonic priests and fellating frogs is oddly liberating. Born in 1837, Brisset had grown up in a poor farming family and left school by the age of twelve. At fifteen, he moved to Paris to apprentice as a pastry chef and two years later, he joined the army and fought in the Crimean War. He began learning Italian after being wounded and taken prisoner in 1859 at the Battle of Magenta during the Second Italian War of Unification. A decade later, a head wound suffered during the Franco-Prussian War provided him with the opportunity to work on his German while confined as a prisoner in Magdebourg. Brissets first publication dates to 1870, right before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, when he wrote a pamphlet offering a simple method for learning to swim by practicing the breaststroke while lying on ones back on dry land. The last section of the pamphlet gives advice on dealing with drowning victims. One should not become too quickly discouraged if a drowning victim does not initially show any signs of life: Rigor mortis
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is not certain proof of death. Only putrefaction is incontrovertible.10 Subsequently, he also patented a flotation device to be worn by beginning swimmers. In 1871, Brisset left the army and spent a few years in Germany as a French teacher. While he was there, he published Methode zur Erlernung der Franzsische Sprache (Method for teaching the French language), a moderately successful book that distinguished itself merely by stressing the repetition of conversational questions and answers over the memorization of grammar rules. When he returned to France, he found work as a senior administrative supervisor with the railway, and in 1878 he published an equally unremarkable grammar book in French entitled La grammaire logique (The logical grammar). In 1883, he published a new edition of the book, this time with an expanded title and scope, La grammaire logique, rsolvant toutes les difficults et faisant connatre par lanalyse de la parole la formation des langues et celle du genre humain (The logical grammar resolving all difficulties and making known through the analysis of speech the genesis of languages and of the human race). The title page also bore the device La Parole est Dieu (The Word is God). This second version of The Logical Grammar is the turning point in Brissets thinking, and in some ways the strangest book he ever produced. Whereas his previous books were relatively sober grammar books and his subsequent books are straight delirious prophecy, The Logical Grammar is both. After seventy pages of carefully considering the functioning and importance of auxiliary verbs, reflexives, adjectives, etc., Brisset begins discussing the relation of French to Latin, looking in particular at verb endings. After a few pages, there is a single odd moment when Brisset claims that the sound ee, meaning go, was the first uttered by Man, and then there are a couple more pages before Brisset begins explaining that French is not derived from Latin, that in fact Latin and Sanskrit are languages invented by elites to mystify the population at large and that nobody ever spoke either of them as their mother tongue. All languages, Brisset contends, are equally old and equally close to the original language. That there are separate languages at all is due to the fact that we have taken to distinguishing ideas that belong together. We have lost the intense emotive immediacy with which we previously stated several things all at once. As Brisset will explain in later works, we were driven to forget by the Holy Spirit as punishment for past transgressions. It is then that Brisset explains, for the first time, that Man has descended from frogs and makes known the meaning of the cocks crowing, the dogs bark, and the horses whinny.

Brisset goes on to explain biblical passages and Greek myths, and reconstructs exclamations (cris) from the originary language in trains of nonsense syllables: Miau, miau; Piau, piau. Youyouyou! youppipi! youddidi! iau! iau! iau! agagag! , , u, dio, da, ri, arri, di, didi, dada, a bo , a do, an , coco, ri co, mat, mat, mort, mort. Tra in , tra in ar, tra deri, tra dera, tra deri dera, tra l l. I, fami. I, va. Dam. Si or. O mo, etc., etc.11 Brissets subsequent prophetic worksLe mystre de Dieu est accompli (The mystery of God is fulfilled, 1890), La grande nouvelle (The good news, 1900), La science de Dieu (1900), Les prophties accomplies (Daniel et lapocalypse) (The fulfilled prophecies: Daniel and the apocalypse, 1906) and Les origines humaines (Human origins, 1913)are exclusively dedicated to revealing the language of God and the meaning of the Bible, all of which is made possible by his discovery of what he calls the Great Law: All ideas expressed with similar sounds have an identical origin and in principle refer back to an identical object. Though in some cases Brisset does discover genuinely surprising correspondences and teases them out brilliantly, he often has to resort to a sort of pidgin French to make his point. He makes odd word choices, uses strange syntax, rearranges words, and leaves out important grammatical elementsat times, he even rearranges parts of words. He twists and tortures words, breaks them down into constituent elements, and then reassembles them to make them tell the delirious stories that he wants them to. He takes quite literally the idea that the Word is God and God is spirit. Man is also spirit. Spirits live in electricity, it is their natural element; our body is an electric machine that channels thunder, because Man is the son of thunder (Mark 3:17), and he is himself the thunder of God.12 It is the word of God that speaks in us and through us at all times and tells the story of our biological and spiritual past as well as our future. Because language is not something we created, but the element we live in and the energy that animates us, it can never be changed; it can only be misspoken and misunderstood. We always have some notion of what we are saying and what is being said to us, but because we have forgotten the true nature of language, the better part of its secrets eludes us. Countless pages of Brissets work are devoted to the moment in our evolution at which our sexual organs first became apparent. According to him, the first genitals were a small opening that looked like an eye. That fascinating and joyful discovery accounts for a considerable portion of our words and phrases. Initially, Brisset
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associates sexe, the word for genitalia as well as for sex, with various ways of asking, What is this? (ce que cest in Brissets garbled and asyntactic imagined French of the ancestors) or Do you know what it is? (sais que ce). Similarly, I dont know what it is (je ne sais que cest) is the same as A young/new genital it is! (jeune sexe est). To get a sense of how Brisset often twists French around to make similar sounding phrases that suit his purposes, one could posit rough proto-English equivalents (though English is at its core less replete with homophones and free-floating particles to play with). To make up an example: ancestors asking what was happening to them would have asked not, What is happening to us? but, What happin us? This would have also been a recognition that this was new genitalia, What? Ha! Penis! The same expression would have indicated their admiration for the glory of the new member, What a penis! and the joy that this discovery caused them, What happiness! But to return to the examples that Brisset himself provides: the word sexaminer (to examine oneself) is related to having ones genitals in ones hand (sexe en main), as they were the first object of fervent examination. The words new and nine (both neuf in French) are connected because the genitals, which were the first truly new and interesting thing our aquatic ancestors discovered, formed at the same time as the ninth tooth made its appearance. Our frog ancestorstoothless as well as sexless and hairlesslived in an idyllic world where the strong helped the weak and gatherings were filled with song and communal good will. But that was not to last, and in developing sexual organs, the frog transformed bit by bit into a devil.13 At the very first stage of sexuality, frogsor rather the post-frog, pre-human creatures they became, now slowly starting to acquire teeth and hair and the beginnings of thumbswere sweet and joyous creatures that our language remembers with the designation angels. Their burgeoning genitals made them, if anything, even more generous and loving.14 In Brissets strange evolution, physical changes accompany moral and linguistic changes, and he speaks of angels transforming into demons. However, in almost the same breath, he explains that demons and angels were not different in kind. What distinguishes the demon is an immoderate desire to be noticed and admired, adored. Already in him one finds all the faults and all the vices of the devil which will be his point of culmination, because the devil is a perfect demon, a rebel archangel, an animal wanting to always command and never obey.15

To confuse matters further, angels and demons sometimes appear to be the same as gods, who are also our ancestors, but not to be confused with God, who is the Word and the creator of the universe, but seemingly not anthropomorphic. There is no real consistency as to whether devils and gods represent different factions in a mythic past, or different stages of development in Brissets writing, these often seem muddled together, as the biological merges with the mythical and the linguistic. Just as importantly, there is never any real separation between past, present, and future. An idyllic past in which we lived in peace and community with all the animals and knew no death or social hierarchy is lost. Though one golden age is gone and the other will not arrive until 1945, both are and have always been present in every word we utter. Atavism is rampant: with the appearance of the very first tadpole, it was already clear that it would one day turn into Man. And Brisset apparently saw the frog in himself when he looked in the mirror: Any man caring to examine himself in his perfect nudity and compare himself to a frog, imitating its poses and its walk, will soon recognize his ancestor in himself and understand that, as an animal, he is no more than an upstart.16 During his own childhood demonic stage, he discovered that Man was already present in frogs through a traumatic experience that created his lifelong affection for and connectedness to an animal he had wrongedfor no particular reason, the young Brisset crushed a frog with a wooden rod, after which when the poor creature suddenly extended
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its arms and legs, we were stupefied. We lowered ourselves down to see better; one would say it was a little person ... and we walked away pensive and regretting our barbarity. Because, theres no doubt about it, the frog already has all the physical traits of a charming little human being.17 The demonic, then, though it belongs to an earlier age, is still with us and the Devil is still active, as is God. Though Brisset is himself a prophet of the Lord and an interpreter of Scripture, he is extremely hostile to any religion that requires faith and prayer: The man who prays excites his spirit and becomes intolerant; he casts blame on all those who dont imitate him. Prayer makes man active and zealous in the service of his God; through it he manages to beat, torture, and burn his neighbor and damage him through all the means in his power.18 Men who demand our faith are worse than charlatans; they are the descendants of demons and Brisset insists that the Pope is the antichrist. Our language records this: the French word for cross (croix) is a contraction of the words queue roi, or king cock (the cross of honor that is sometimes worn around the neck is connected to queue roide, or stiff cock). This is what the priest is symbolically holding in his hands when he demands that the faithful kneel down before the cross to kiss and worship it. In the past, the demon priests demanded the sacrifice of those who refused to adore their crosses. Jesus, however, told his followers to take their own crosses and follow him. They refused to kneel before the crosses of others and never made anyone kneel before theirs. Like all men of good

will, they did no injury to one another and they populated the earth while the demons devoured one another and tore each other apart. In his will, Brisset entrusted a small sum of money to Jules Romains for the purpose of perpetuating his memory. It was only sufficient to honor Brisset with an annual dinner at which Romains and his friends read passages from his books out loud. In his Amitis et rencontres (Friendships and encounters, 1970), Romains insists that he continued to hold the celebration long after the money that Brisset left had run out.19
1 My source for Brissets theories are his books. Though there are scattered reports on the festivities of 1913, there is no extant transcript for what exactly Brisset said in his speech. A theater troupe from his native Angers, La Compagnie Bernard Froutin, recently tried to recreate the speech and published the text as Le Brisset sans peine, ed. Gilles Rosire (Paris: Gingko Editeur, 2005). 2 Jean-Pierre Brisset, Oeuvres compltes (Dijon: Les Presses du rel, 2001), p. 698. All translations throughout this text are mine; for the sake of readability, I have consistently used English translations of Brissets book titles, even though none has been translated. Indeed, Brisset has, unsurprisingly, never been widely known outside of French avant-garde circles, but he has never been entirely forgotten either, and today his works are far more widely available than they were during his lifetime. A combined French edition of The Logical Grammar and The Science of God was released in 1970 with an extensive preface by Michel Foucault. In 1976, Michel Pierssens devoted a long and somewhat reverent discussion to Brisset in The Tower of Babel, his book on logophile writers, where Brisset was treated alongside Mallarm and Saussure. Since the mid-1980s, Brissets principal champion has been Marc Dcimo, who wrote an exhaustive biography and in 2001 edited a collection of his complete works for Les Presses du rel, including even his patents and the grammar book he wrote in German. He has also released a collection of the most important critical writings on Brisset and was involved in scheduling celebrations for the centenary of

Brissets ceremony, which were held in April 2013 in the Muse Rodin in Paris, at the foot of The Thinker. To date, at least one book on Brisset has appeared in English, All Puns Intended by Walter Redfern, though he assumes considerable mastery of French on the part of his readers and neither translates nor explains his numerous French quotes from Brisset. 3 Jean-Pierre Brisset, Oeuvres compltes, pp. 458459. 4 Batrachian is inexact, as it can be applied to toads as well as frogs. Brisset is very clear that toads play no role in our ancestry, that they are as repulsive as frogs are charming, and that their superficial similarities have unfortunately contributed to frogs being held in lower esteem than they merit. 5 Andr Breton, Anthology of Black Humor, trans. Mark Polizzotti (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997), p. 181. Translation modified. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., p. 182. 8 Jules Romains, Amitis et rencontres (Paris: Flammarion, 1970), p. 106. 9 Andr Breton, Anthology of Black Humor, p. 181. Translation modified. 10 Jean-Pierre Brisset, Oeuvres complte s, p. 27. 11 Ibid., p. 464. 12 Ibid., p. 1136. The biblical passage Brisset is referring to does not actually say that man is the son of thunder; it merely states that sons of thunder was the nickname Jesus gave to two of his disciples, the brothers John and James. 13 Ibid., p. 734. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., p. 735. 16 Ibid., p. 757. 17 Ibid., p. 767. 18 Ibid., p. 473. 19 Jules Romains, Amitis et rencontres, p. 107.

Quentin Faucomprs valiant attempt to illustrate the upshot of Brissets amphibio-sexual philosophy. From Le Brisset sans peine (Ginko Editeur), 2005.

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