REHMLAC (Jan 2013)
« Félix Bovie (1812-1880) : poète et chansonnier dans la franc-maçonnerie bruxelloise »
Abstract
Felix Bovie first made a career as a landscape painter. Later on however, he completely devoted himself to the writingof poetic texts for songs he interpreted himself as a mid-19th-century singer songwriter. A scion of a wealthy familyliving in the Belgian capital, he frequented bourgeois associations such as the Masonic lodges but he was also an adeptof more bohemian, frolicsome societies who liked to mock Freemasonry as such. The song text production of Bovie,which has often been compared to the one of French liberalsinger Béranger, can only beunderstood in the interface ofall those specific spheres. There, artistic and more saucy motives went alongdefinitely anticlerical and particularMasonic themes. Bovie had been accepted by theAmis Philanthropeslodge but eventually left for another Brusselslodge that rejected the politically militant kind of Freemasonry theformer advocated. The songs Bovie wrote andperformed celebrated a spiritualist and convivial Freemasonry,that surely was apolitical but nevertheless provedfrankly anticlerical, if only as a reaction against the Belgian episcopal condemnation of Freemasonry of 1837.
