3 ‘That Which We Learn with the Eye’ Popular Histories, Modernity, and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century London and Paris Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group All rights reserved Billie Melman ‘There is’, opined historian Frédéric Masson in Le Théâtre in 1900, ‘a new attempt at a democratic and popular history, inspired by national passion, served by illustrious artists, and towards whose completion no amount of money, work, or research was spared’ He was waxing lyrical about the new realistic and lavish historical tableau, ‘Une soirée a Malmaison’, which displayed forty-nine life-size wax figures of Napoleon’s entourage, thus resurrecting the emperor’s court in 1800 at the Musée Grévin in Paris for full-house audiences ‘In effect’, Masson enthused, ‘these are no longer wax figures, it’s part of history, it’s History The best teaching, according to the modern patois, is that which we learn with the eye—the lesson of things.’1 What is noteworthy about Masson’s hyperbolic observation on apparently new forms of popular visual history is neither their novelty—for these forms had developed from the very beginning of the nineteenth century, nor the democratic character of their nationalism, but the relationship between these histories and a ‘History’, of which they were ‘a part’ Masson, a mainstream Republican and popular biographer of Napoleon, incorporates mass-circulated visual representations of the national past into the body of historical knowledge and authority and capitalizes them: they are elevated to History with a capital H Masson’s observation singles out a set of processes which began about 1800 and culminated towards the close of the nineteenth century: an unprecedented popularization of national histories; their mass circulation; the democratization of access to history and its reach across classes, genders, and age groups to audiences which hitherto had had little access to the past; and the explosion of a visual and material historical culture Masson also touches on the relationship between the production of popular representations of history and their mass consumption on the one hand and modernity on the other This chapter is about the triad of the rise of a new visual and material grasp of history, modernity, and the role of Berger, Stefan, Lorenz, Chris, and Melman, Billie, eds 2012 Popularizing National Pasts : 1800 to the Present London: Taylor & Francis Group Accessed August 13, 2020 ProQuest Ebook Central Created from tau on 2020-08-13 06:49:54 Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group All rights reserved 76 Billie Melman the nation in popular culture Modernity has been broadly described as a set of unprecedentedly intense transformations—usually located in the ‘long nineteenth century’—in technologies, social production and societal relations, urbanization, and the lived-in environment Modernity has also been connected to a new temporality: new experiences of time and place and an obsession with the past In the following, I single out one aspect of modernity: a new kind of urban and metropolitan experience I approach representations of the national past and their consumptions as a part of a trans-European culture of history which cuts across discrete national cultures By ‘culture of history’ I mean the myriad ways in which pasts, in the plural, were imagined, represented, circulated, looked at (in the most literal sense of this word), and literally consumed in the everyday world and within urban and specifically metropolitan settings, by individuals and groups.4 The production and distribution of visual and material histories reached explosion at the age of mass literacy and expanding democracy To paraphrase Jean-Louis Comolli, men and women of that age were living in a ‘frenzy of the visual’.5 The new culture drew on new technologies in optics and involved new forms of ‘showing’ the past and new practices and procedures of urban spectatorship During the last two decades historians of national histories have gradually outgrown our trade’s traditional suspicion of the visual and privileging of written histories and have started mapping visual and material representations and traces of the past.6 Their work supplements that of art historians, historians of literature, fi lm historians, and practitioners of cultural studies.7 The visualization of the past and its materiality (evident in a multiplicity of historical objects) during the age of modernity forces us to reconsider some questions and assumptions central to studies of national histories Did modern popular historical culture reiterate or duplicate the master or hegemonic narratives of the nation’s past, or did it resist, counter, or subvert them? In more specific national terms, was the Whig interpretation of the British past—routinely regarded as the overarching interpretation and narrative of change and modernity, with emphases on liberal descent, continuity, stability, and progress in national institutions and the development of the ‘people’—that all-embracing? Were histories in France, notwithstanding their immense diversity, different political and ideological agendas, and investment in religion—or divestment of it—becoming increasingly Republican and secularist as the nineteenth century progressed? And did they gradually absorb monarchist, non-secularist, and anti-Republican versions of the past? More broadly, what were the limits of the nation as a motif and an explanatory tool configuring change in the social world and imagination of urban people during the age of early and later industrial capitalization and modernity? And how did the nation cohabit and interact with other components of popular historical culture, such as the pleasures derived from the past, sensationalism, anxieties engendered by the presence of the past in the modern city, and consumerism? Berger, Stefan, Lorenz, Chris, and Melman, Billie, eds 2012 Popularizing National Pasts : 1800 to the Present London: Taylor & Francis Group Accessed August 13, 2020 ProQuest Ebook Central Created from tau on 2020-08-13 06:49:54 ‘That Which We Learn with the Eye’ 77 Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group All rights reserved THE COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE: SOME CAVEATS To even attempt to address all of these questions may seem irresponsibly ambitious Nevertheless, asking them and restricting the discussion to a comparison of select visual and material historical forms and genres in nineteenth-century London and Paris may be helpful London does not represent Britain or even England; Paris represents France even less, as numerous studies of local ritual and memory have demonstrated.8 The diverse ‘Frances’, as Pierre Nora and Eugen Weber have noted, took very long to be forged into a unity,9 and diversity within unity has characterized the union of the various parts of Great Britain But the reasons for studying the two capitals together are quite plain: both were metropolises which served as cultural and economic centres of their respective national and imperial peripheries, both were imagined and represented as world cities and as capitals of modernity, and both exemplified processes of modernization that were differently paced and took on different trajectories Parallel and uneven developments in capitalism and politics in Britain and France impacted on the growth, governance, and economics of each of the capitals Yet even throughout the nineteenth century their histories were commonly intertwined as ‘a tale of two cities’ (the title of Dickens’s 1859 novel on the French Revolution seems apt here) More broadly, the study of capitals and a popular metropolitan culture, of the local and at the same time the global, is crucial for our understanding of national histories and may refi ne our understanding of the national.10 Since the Revolution, the intense and troubled relationship between them, ‘more important than any other relationship France or Britain has had’,11 was manifest in an intense traffic in ideas and culture and, most relevant here, a shared culture of history Producers and consumers of this culture exchanged themes and images of the past, historical genres (both literary and visual), and a booming market of historical artefacts (historical genre paintings, prints, spectacles, and historical fiction) And popular tastes for history were set and mediated by a new group of cultural entrepreneurs who may aptly be described as impresarios of history and who moved between the two capitals, initiated, transferred, and distributed new historical forms, the optical technologies on which these forms drew, and new systems of marketing visual histories The chapter’s focus on popular histories of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era almost imposed itself The era of revolution between 1788 and 1815 presented urban experiences that were recognizable in material traces and could be replaced within the orbit of living memory and modernity The revolutionary decades and their aftermath constituted a fissure in a historical continuum, yet, at the same time, were connectable to the popular experience of urban life and culture and, from the late nineteenth century, to mass democracy Paris was identified with the Revolution and seen and imagined as ‘revolution’ Its modernization was punctuated by revolutions separating a succession of regimes that depended for their Berger, Stefan, Lorenz, Chris, and Melman, Billie, eds 2012 Popularizing National Pasts : 1800 to the Present London: Taylor & Francis Group Accessed August 13, 2020 ProQuest Ebook Central Created from tau on 2020-08-13 06:49:54 Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group All rights reserved 78 Billie Melman legitimacy and survival on their affiliation with or rejection of the great Revolution: the second, Restoration monarchy (1815–30), the July Monarchy (1830–48), the Second Empire (1852–70), and the Third Republic.12 London, to be sure, escaped a direct experience of the great cataclysm, but the Revolution shaped modern Britishness, British senses of national belonging, cross-class relationships, and narratives of national English history Above all, the Revolution and Napoleon were highly visible in popular British culture, becoming ‘inescapable’.13 The former was, as Lord Cockburn remarked, ‘not just here, or there, but everywhere’.14 And in both capitals, the Revolution came to represent the grand political event, the ultimate historical happening, a ‘world historical’ spectacle, and the essence of the modern age As Thomas Carlyle put it in a letter to John Sterling in September of 1833, this was ‘the grand work of our age’ The nineteenth century itself, noted Victor Hugo in his monumental Introduction to the 1865 Paris Guide, was the ‘son of the Revolution’ It became the dominant framework for making sense of, creating meanings for, and using the past and, through it, responding to processes of change and modernity.15 But the Revolution, as this chapter proposes, resisted yielding to overarching or unifying narratives of the nation Popular histories are perhaps better understood as competing narratives or versions of the past rather than in binary terms, as dominant master narratives and subordinate ones To turn upside down Georges Clemenceau’s famous dictum about the French Revolution, it was not a ‘bloc’, to be wholly accepted or rejected; rather it was a field of conflict in which rival and contending representations and interpretations and myriad uses vied with one another and engendered popular uses Narrative changed not only according to regime, ideology, and party politics, as Robert Gildea has importantly demonstrated, but also in relation to different experiences of modernity and urbanism.16 In the following I first outline the two main modern forms of metropolitan historical spectacle: ceroplastics, or wax-modelling, and the panorama, a generic term covering an array of grand-scale optical illusionist representation I consider commonalities in the technologies of their production, forms of spectatorship, and the agents producing and consuming them: the new entrepreneurial impresarios of history and their audiences I discuss each form as a generically urban form of history, typifying specific processes and characteristics of metropolitan modernity in Paris and London Ceroplastics and the kinds of images of the past it perpetuated are particularly relatable to patterns of modernity in London; the panorama was more prevalent in Paris I then discuss representations of the Revolution and their uses that contested the precedence of the nation and connected the past to modernity A GENERAL MAP: FORMS, AGENTS, AND AUDIENCES The two most popular and longest surviving forms of telling about the past during the nineteenth century may serve as showcases of the immensely rich Berger, Stefan, Lorenz, Chris, and Melman, Billie, eds 2012 Popularizing National Pasts : 1800 to the Present London: Taylor & Francis Group Accessed August 13, 2020 ProQuest Ebook Central Created from tau on 2020-08-13 06:49:54 Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group All rights reserved ‘That Which We Learn with the Eye’ 79 culture of history They each hone the prominent features of this culture: constant traffic and exchange of technologies across states and national communities, transnational commercialization, diffusion and apparent democratization of access to the past, tempered by distinction and segregation between audiences, and new kinds of cultural mediation and entrepreneurship Additionally, ceroplastics and the panorama puncture some binaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures, and between traditional and modern forms of spectacle and entertainment Of the two forms, ceroplastics was the most fi rmly established in traditional spectacle and cultures of display The art of modelling in wax, practised in the West since Roman times, was by the end of the ancien régime used for diverse purposes: religious and secular, commemorative, didactic, and prurient (in collections of anatomical and erotic waxworks) At the end of the eighteenth century it was established in aristocratic and court culture in France and England and associated with conspicuous, luxury consumption, but, at the same time, was extremely popular in plebeian fair—and street—culture.17 The mix of the glamorous and respectable on the one hand and the rough and plebeian on the other would mark the culture of history throughout the nineteenth century as a popular culture cutting across classes This double parentage was evident in the two exhibits simultaneously run in Paris on the eve of the revolution by Swiss-born Philippe Curtius (Kreutz), Europe’s most celebrated wax modeller, and his illegitimate daughter (known as his adoptive daughter) Marie Grosholtz, later known as Marie Tussaud Their Salon de cire, at the Palais-Royal, displayed celebrities and historical figures of the great and good; their Caverne de grands voleurs on the Boulevard du Temple exhibited the notorious, criminal, and dangerous In London historical greatness was displayed in ceroplastic exhibits and models in aristocratic houses and in sacred places, notably Westminster Abbey; a melee of the great and the notorious was exhibited at Saint Bartholomew’s Fair, Southwark, and in the Fleet area As the term ‘ceroplastics’ itself implies, wax’s special qualities and plasticity rendered it an ideal imitative medium to create the illusion of reality Relatively cheap, free of glycerin, able to absorb colour and light, and easily kneaded and shaped, it appeared to late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century audiences to be the substance most suitable to create verisimilitude When in 1801 Tussaud imported to London her collection of thirty-three full-size Revolution and ancien régime figures, she also brought along her authority as popular interpreter of the Revolution and Empire This authority is characteristic of the culture of spectacle as a whole: it is visual and usually borne on the presenter/historian’s power as eyewitness to a ‘reality’ or the historical event To be sure, the role and epistemological status of the witness were central to the development of historical authority But, as Franỗois Hartog has noted, the growing prestige of history as a discipline and a human science drove a wedge between texts, written by historians and describing invisible phenomena and structures in the past, and visual and Berger, Stefan, Lorenz, Chris, and Melman, Billie, eds 2012 Popularizing National Pasts : 1800 to the Present London: Taylor & Francis Group Accessed August 13, 2020 ProQuest Ebook Central Created from tau on 2020-08-13 06:49:54 Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group All rights reserved 80 Billie Melman audible ‘testimonies’.18 Popular spectacle retained the precedence of the presenter’s (and audience’s) visual sense and the former’s expertise as copier or simulator To be veritable, history had to be seen as ‘lifelike’, authentic, and fi rst-hand Tussaud’s reputation was built on her role as both participantobserver of the Revolution (as wax modeller for the Convention, modelling historical figures mostly from guillotined heads) and its victim (allegedly incarcerated during the Revolutionary Year II) Jean-Charles Langlois, France’s leading panoramist between the 1830s and 1870, also built his reputation on experience acquired during a long military career, as participant and witness to the grand Napoleonic battles and painstaking and well-advertised historical research, made on the spot, of the battlefields he celebrated in his panoramas Eyewitness expertise and authority rather than nationality often made the reputation of culture entrepreneurs as interpreters of the nation’s past Tussaud’s authority and repute in Britain were based on the authenticity of her experience, an authenticity that drew on her Frenchness (i.e., foreignness) Gradually her collection became absorbed into popular British culture, perpetuating and shaping popular notions of history, chiefly of the Revolution, until at least the First World War As the journalist John Augustus Sala noted in 1895, when the annual numbers of visitors to Tussaud’s skirted the figure of one million, it became ‘not just an exhibition, but an institution’, and the exotic Madam Tussaud herself the embodiment of Englishness and English history.19 Displays of historical waxworks survived in Paris until 1846 and, with the exception of marginal and sporadic ‘shows’, disappeared from metropolitan spectacle in that city until the establishment of the Musée Grévin in June of 1882 Initially established as a museum of actualities, the Grévin was likened to a ‘plastic newspaper’ and was designed to imitate the urban illustrated press It was envisaged as an encyclopedia of modern life rather than a pantheon of the nation’s past In early 1885 it embarked on exhibiting realistic historical tableaux, significantly picking on one of the most divisive episodes of the Revolution to inaugurate its historical galleries: the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat Reaching the quarter million figure of visitors by the end of its first year, its attendance soon became second only to that at the Louvre 20 The lag in ceroplastic culture in France is attributable to the success and adaptability of panoramic spectacles to the development of modern Paris A British import, invented and fi rst patented by the Scottish surveyor and landscape painter Robert Barker about a year before the outbreak of the Revolution, the fi rst ever panoramas—realistic paintings on cylindrical canvases—were exhibited in Edinburgh, then in London, in 1788 A decade later the panorama was brought to Paris by the American entrepreneur and engineer Robert Fulton, who was granted a state patent for panorama painting, advertising, and distributing in France, which he immediately sold to Americans James W and Henriette Thayer The multinational character of the new enterprise is also evident in the speed in which it caught on in Berger, Stefan, Lorenz, Chris, and Melman, Billie, eds 2012 Popularizing National Pasts : 1800 to the Present London: Taylor & Francis Group Accessed August 13, 2020 ProQuest Ebook Central Created from tau on 2020-08-13 06:49:54 Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group All rights reserved ‘That Which We Learn with the Eye’ 81 virtually all of Europe’s urban centres, from the Low Countries to Switzerland and from Berlin to Saint Petersburg Appropriated from the Greek and denoting an ‘all-embracing view’, in its narrowest and literal sense, ‘panorama’ designated painterly depictions of landscapes, of 180 to 360 degrees But the neologism speedily entered common vocabulary and was extended from monumental cylindrical canvases to large-scale paintings and literary and historical descriptions The principle of the panorama was emulated in a multiplicity of forms originating in London, developed in Paris, and circulated throughout the Continent: moving panoramas, dioramas, cycloramas, stereoramas, georamas, padoramas, and pleoramas, to name a few The craze for the new form, as contemporaries noted, bordered on ‘Panoramania’ 21 Cylindrical painting broke the rules of optics whereby any viewer or painter could take in only forty-five or, at the most, sixty degrees without moving the head The new optics challenged the limits on the range of human sight, creating an illusion, while seeking to realistically imitate ‘nature’ It was an unlimited and unreferenced rendition of an entire circumference, which could now be monitored and controlled by viewers Panoramas’ spectators were positioned, in exact duplication of the position of their executors, on a platform, controlling and ordering the view before them, in purpose-built constructions also known as ‘panoramas’ or ‘rotundas’, the sight facilitated and enhanced by luminosity and manipulation of light.22 The new technology made panoramas ideal not only for representations of cityscapes and exotic places, but also, and especially, for the rendition of history, in particular the recent past, still alive in collective national and individual memories The large-scale canvas suited the grand, dramatic, heroic, or catastrophic historical event embodied in political upheavals such as the French Revolution or the European campaigns and wars that followed it Like large-scale historical genre painting, which spread at exactly the same time, the panorama monumentalized history, capturing the magnitude and singularity of the great historical subject, which necessitated a new aesthetics and ocular language As early nineteenth-century historians, from Prosper de Barante and Adolphe Thiers, through Jacques Nicolas Augustin Thierry and Franỗois Mignet to Thomas Carlyle, noted, the monumentality of the great events of any nation’s past demanded special forms of representation enhancing the visuality of history, and new forms of research 23 The Revolution was most appropriately recovered in grand pictorial histories (‘flame pictures’, in Carlyle’s memorable phrase) These visual histories also made sense of and helped come to terms with history itself Although the social life of historical panoramas spans the entire nineteenth century, its end overlapping the rise of its direct successor, the historical film, the curves of this span in London and Paris are inverted and fit well with the differences in the development of ceroplastics in the two cities There are two surges in early and mid-century: early panoramic spectacles Berger, Stefan, Lorenz, Chris, and Melman, Billie, eds 2012 Popularizing National Pasts : 1800 to the Present London: Taylor & Francis Group Accessed August 13, 2020 ProQuest Ebook Central Created from tau on 2020-08-13 06:49:54 Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group All rights reserved 82 Billie Melman in London included the battles of Trafalgar, Copenhagen, Vittoria, and the Nile A new panorama of Waterloo, in Spring Gardens (at the Strand), premiered in 1824 and prospered for decades, together with Philip Astley’s live-show, The Battle of Waterloo, a plastic panorama of sorts, played in his amphitheatre to huge audiences with real cavalry advances and cannon fi re Waterloo, Wellington, and Bonaparte received a new lease on life in the 1840s and 1850s, following Bonaparte’s state burial in 1840, the February Revolution of 1848, and Wellington’s own funeral in 1852, and lingered as topics for panoramas until about 1860 In Paris, on the other hand, most early panoramas were topographical, and historical panoramas made their grand entry in the 1830s Highly commercialized, produced and distributed by anonymous societies of stockholders, the mid-century panoramas shunned the revolution itself and resuscitated the Napoleonic era and campaigns The Panorama de la bataille de la Moskowa (1835), which attracted an audience estimated at 53,362 full-paying visitors, was followed by the Panorama de l’incendie de Moscou (1839), attracting an estimated 62,645 people; it was exhibited for forty-three months These overlapped with the Emperor’s ceremonial burial at the Invalides in December of 1840 Hard on the heels of the Russian cycle of panoramas, itself accompanied by a plethora of large-scale paintings of the same military campaigns exhibited at the Salon, followed the Panorama de la bataille d’Eylau (of 1807), a smash hit calculated to have 123,334 full-paying visitors (and numerous others) flocking to view and vicariously take part in the grand battle As Théophile Gautier noted, ‘this is a real battle’: viewing it was tantamount to actually taking part in history The Panorama de la bataille de Pyramides, which saw a slump in audiences (56,812 according to a conservative estimate) brought to a close the cycle of Napoleonic and strongly Bonapartist panoramas preceding the Second Empire 24 After the 1860s, when panoramas as a spectacle, a form of entertainment, and a way of narrating the past disappeared from London, they reached explosive proportions in Paris, culminating during the second and third decades of the Third Republic The difference in these rhythms and dynamics may be attributed to the different pace of urban development and modernization In London panoramic representations of the past reached their apogee during the heyday of the rebuilding and remodelling of the West End in the 1820s, the only attempt in the nineteenth century at planning the city on a grand scale In Paris, planning, that is, rational developing, seen as a standard feature of modernization, occurred roughly between the 1840s (actually preceding Haussmannization) and the 1890s (following it) In Paris history was made into grand-scale spectacle when the city itself was spectacularized and monumentalized London, as we shall see, presented a process of modernization and rationalization that was different and complex; hence the persistence of older forms of historical representation, repertories of spectatorships and images Berger, Stefan, Lorenz, Chris, and Melman, Billie, eds 2012 Popularizing National Pasts : 1800 to the Present London: Taylor & Francis Group Accessed August 13, 2020 ProQuest Ebook Central Created from tau on 2020-08-13 06:49:54 Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group All rights reserved ‘That Which We Learn with the Eye’ 83 It was during the fin de siècle that the panoramas in Paris truly became mass histories with an impact comparable to that of the later historical films The Revolution cycle of panoramas, including the Panorama de la prise de la Bastille (1882), Volontiers de 92 (1890), still on display in 1900, and the bevy of Panoramas de la Révolution et de l’Empire 1789–1815 with a panorama of the Battle of Jena as centrepiece and ten accompanying dioramas of revolutionary battles, including Valmy (1792) and Wattignies (1793), and urban crowd scenes attracted masses These coalesced with other commercial spectacles all over Paris, interpreting and commodifying the Revolution, such as the Tour du Temple, a panorama-like reconstruction of Louis XVI’s last prison, and reconstructions of the Bastille The proliferation of historical spectacle and its diffusion across class to mass audiences certainly presents the democratization of access to history and the inclusion of majorities in the national past However, democratization, taken by most historians and students of culture as central to the new liberal-democratic ‘order of exhibition’ (Tony Bennett’s term), was intertwined with exclusion by cultural distinction 25 Metropolitan popular culture of history consistently displays the paradox of exclusion by distinction within processes of democratization Limitations on access operated from the start through elaborate mechanisms ‘translating’ social difference into cultural ones The early operation of distinction within popular history is notable Madame Tussaud and Langlois refi ned policies and devices of distinction, which became less intrusive as the century progressed, though nevertheless persisted Entry fees to Langlois’ Moscow panorama were 2.50 francs for fi rst-class tickets and 1.25 for second class, both putting the panorama far beyond the reach of working-class audiences and common soldiers and making it a distinctly bourgeois pastime Family packages of four tickets for francs were aimed at the same audience Cheap franc entry fees targeted soldiers and were distributed through regiments From the Eylau panorama onwards, franc tickets were extended from the military to workers and marketed through workers’ corporations for 50 centimes In the Third Republic fares slumped further and a reduced Sunday tariff of 50 centimes was introduced with a soldiers’ reduction to a mere 25 centimes, so that a bit of history could be purchased for less than the price of a pint of beer or a glass of wine But distinction between classes of spectators, corresponding to economic class difference and social dispositions, persisted Audience segregation was operated through separate hours or days for the respectable and the rough, for working-class and ‘elegant’ audiences In Paris, as late as 1889, special, ‘exclusive’ days were effectively reserved for elite audiences, which grew distinctly cosmopolitan, with cut-throat fees of francs As Le Figaro noted approvingly on July 1889, ‘All the elegant world turns up at the panorama of the history of the century’ 26 The location of spectacles was another means of distinction, translating physical horizontal (residential) class segregation, typical to London at least Berger, Stefan, Lorenz, Chris, and Melman, Billie, eds 2012 Popularizing National Pasts : 1800 to the Present London: Taylor & Francis Group Accessed August 13, 2020 ProQuest Ebook Central Created from tau on 2020-08-13 06:49:54 84 Billie Melman from the seventeenth century and effectively operating in Paris from the age of Haussmannization Wax shows and panoramas took place in the modernized western parts of both capitals, London’s West End (on Regents Park or in Leicester and later Portman Squares), or its margins (Marylebone Road) and Paris’s newer western or north-western quarters (Boulevard Montmartre, the place of the famous 1800 passage de panoramas, thence on the Champs Élysées, within the parameters of the universal expositions, which celebrated modern technology, and on their borders) Location thus signified more than just class segregation; it signalled the relationship between the spectacularization of history and urban development and modernity The sites of spectacle were also hubs of new forms of consumption that involved distinctive ways of pedestrian movement in the city or of urban travel using modern forms of transport, above and beneath ground, and the appropriation of new public spaces by urban consumers 27 Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group All rights reserved CONTESTING NARRATIVES OF THE NATION: THE REVOLUTION AS A NARRATIVE OF HORRORS It is too easy to regard the plethora of spectacles simply as a means to initiate majorities into the state and nation, if not as direct propaganda The curves in the lifespan of both the historical wax show and the panorama certainly indicate relationships between politics, ideologies, and power on the one hand and the commercialization of history on the other Madame Tussaud’s monarchism and attachment to both the Restoration monarchy and British Royalty, shrewdly exploited in her collection’s advertising campaigns, Langlois’ Bonapartism, and the strong Republican affiliation of fin de siècle panorama painters Théophile Poilpot, Alfred Stevens, and Henri Gervex all certainly point at such relationships However, popular historical spectacle countered dominant narratives of the Revolution, resisting, influencing, and reshaping them Moreover, spectacular popular histories introduced into historical consciousness and the sense of the past a gamut of meanings, new pleasures and sensations, apart from, or beyond, patriotism Madame Tussaud’s shaping and mediating of sensational histories is a prime example of the complex relationship between spectacles and what we have come to study as overarching and privileged histories and their narratives Tussaud’s presented the history of the Revolution as a history of urban crime and made it the cornerstone of an alternative narrative that successfully competed with what John Burrow has called the ‘confident narrative of the British past’, a narrative that was essentially Whig, confident in possessing the past and deciphering continuities between it and the present, and plotted this past as a story of progress, liberties, and a unique stability in political institutions 28 In Tussaud’s version history was neither a secure and comfortable place nor a progress towards liberty and prosperity, but a site of danger, violence, and disorder Representations of Berger, Stefan, Lorenz, Chris, and Melman, Billie, eds 2012 Popularizing National Pasts : 1800 to the Present London: Taylor & Francis Group Accessed August 13, 2020 ProQuest Ebook Central Created from tau on 2020-08-13 06:49:54 Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group All rights reserved ‘That Which We Learn with the Eye’ 87 the criminal dead, but also pleasures such as thrill, joy, and ridicule at the odd, grotesque, and often Gothic.37 The images of the guillotine, prison, and incarceration and audiences’ illusion of a proximity to the historical crime spilled from the museum to urban spaces in London and were easily relatable to an urban lore of crime and disorder that survived in that city until the 1870s, as well as to a lived metropolitan experience of a unique form of modernity I have described elsewhere as ‘mixed modernity’.38 Comparison between the revolutionary prison and contemporary British criminal law and its execution was rampant One persistent comparison was that between the Bastille and Paris’s prisons after 1793 and Newgate Workhouses, set by the New Poor Law of 1834, were popularly known as ‘Bastilles’, and the symbol of the Revolution loomed large in the metropolitan sense of identity: ‘We have never’, wrote Dickens in January 1853, ‘outgrown the wicked old Bastille’, which he identified with Newgate.39 These overlaps between the past and an oppressive present have to with the complexities of London’s modernization, which defy linearity and ‘progress’ narratives London, from about 1800 the world’s largest city, epitomized modernity in its staggering and uncontrollable growth from about a million inhabitants in 1801 to Paris’s 500,000, to 2,362,000 in 1851 to Paris’s 1,000,00, to 3,254,000 in 1871 to Paris’s 1,900,000, to eight million to Paris’s three million on the eve of the First World War London’s status as the centre of the world’s largest empire and financial hub and as the harbinger of technological progress was manifest in the nineteenth century’s most spectacular projects of civil engineering, such as the huge subterranean drainage and sewer system and the world’s fi rst subterranean transport system that made the mega-city, as David L Pike has noted, an icon of modernity At the same time London’s pluralist economy connected it to traditional trades and labour; it lacked central rationalized government until 1885 and preserved forms of leisure, disciplining, and social control that persisted into the ‘liberal city’ from pre-reformist time.40 Most notable among these was the ritual of public hanging, which survived until May of 1868 and was one of the metropolis’s most enduring and popular pastimes, quite often politicized The hands-on experience of history, as public and punishable crime, inside venues such as Tussaud’s and other national monuments, most notably the Tower of London, was extendable to and interchangeable with the spectacle of crime and punishment conspicuous in public spaces and societal action The riotous, dangerous, and criminal past persisted and superimposed projects of modernity HISTORY AS A PANORAMA: PANORAMA AND SPECTACLE IN PARIS The cluster of images of history as a dangerous, disordered, and unmanageable place seems at odds with the technologies of the panorama and the Berger, Stefan, Lorenz, Chris, and Melman, Billie, eds 2012 Popularizing National Pasts : 1800 to the Present London: Taylor & Francis Group Accessed August 13, 2020 ProQuest Ebook Central Created from tau on 2020-08-13 06:49:54 Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group All rights reserved 88 Billie Melman forms of spectatorship it engendered Stephen Bann has noted that panoramas and other viewing devices invented in the nineteenth century ‘testify to an extraordinary appetite for commanding vision’ He compared the panorama’s amphitheatre-like structure, simulation of the all-round vision, and manipulation of light to the Benthamite panoptical view, thus connecting panoramic historical representation to social control and Foucault’s analysis of the new regime of bio-power and discipline as embodied in the panopticon.41 Horror, sensationalism, and the hands-on, face-to-face access to historical events seem to have been the reverse of the persistence of the panoramas in Paris, where from the 1830s they were established as the ultimate historical spectacle The panoramas were consistent with the monumentality that accompanied the reconstruction of Paris’s urban fabric and helped buttress the legitimacy of imperial and monarchical regimes, most notably the Second Empire The public drama of Haussmannian building and the symmetry and flamboyance of the new architecture seem to have initially had a distinct political aspect that focused on the populism of the Napoleonic heritage and legend and the representation of the power of the imperial state The panoramas, as popular spectacle of the past, and the metropolis itself, as spectacle, undoubtedly played an important role in the construction of social control, manifest in the similar modes of vision and spectatorship they offered Both were identified with modernity and the rationalization of urban space The panoramas were also means for mass education, apprenticing majorities in national history, particularly through the spectacular and grand narrative of military feats As Eugène Delacroix put it to the municipal council of Paris: ‘The Panoramas are the spectacles made to moralize and enflame the nation.’42 France and its history were embodied in the canvases of historical scenes and in their makers Jean-Charles Langlois, the soldier-painter, was the ‘little soldier, and a patriotic soldier only was capable’ of depicting the grand scenes of historical battlefields.43 Awareness of the importance of visual control of historical spectacle as well as over the panoramic cityscape was manifest in the use of a language of command in the explications, the detailed instructions to viewers Visitors to the Panorama de Moscowa were placed in a small shed ‘which escaped the fi re at the hamlet of Seminvoskoïe’, to contemplate the battle that took place there on September 1812 ‘To render the explication of the tableau easier and clearer’, the instructions specified, ‘we propose that the spectator face the Russian cavalry ’.44 Not only was physical positioning of the spectators fi xed, their temporal location too was reset to match exactly the moment in which Napoleon contemplated the battlefield at ‘the exact time’ in which the campaign was not yet determined In the panorama of the burning of Moscow, spectators were placed on the Borisoff Tower at the Kremlin, to gain a bird’s-eye view of the raging fi re destroying the city, at the very moment in which the emperor commanded escape And at the panorama of Eylau, spectators were transported to the Prussian Berger, Stefan, Lorenz, Chris, and Melman, Billie, eds 2012 Popularizing National Pasts : 1800 to the Present London: Taylor & Francis Group Accessed August 13, 2020 ProQuest Ebook Central Created from tau on 2020-08-13 06:49:54 ‘That Which We Learn with the Eye’ 89 Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group All rights reserved hinterland of 1807 and positioned at the core of the Russian Army, on a small hill, between its fi rst and second lines, east of Eylau on the road leading to Aukpapene.45 During the Third Republic the importance of national education through history reached its highest point The inclusion of the Revolution in a national epic of republican and democratizing modernity was deemed indispensable for the uphill effort to build up a consensual Frenchness that would contain not only varieties of secular republicanism, but also monarchism and Catholicism.46 Such attempts at inclusiveness were epitomized in the Panorama du siècle, a 100 by 14 metre canvas, representing over 2,500 full-size historical figures from the Revolution to the present and displayed in a rotunda at the Tuileries It ‘ma[de] live in an instant under our eyes all the French citizens who contributed to the greatness of the patrie, to the glory of France, as much through their patriotism as through their political career, scientific ways, and literary oeuvres’.47 On a simulated terrace of the Tuileries palace (burnt down during the May days of 1871), the nation’s history was presented through its great people, thus narrating history as serial biography and at the same time making for an inclusive pantheon The Republic’s interpretation of greatness is spelt out in the focus of the panorama: a huge statue of France, seated on a pedestal and holding a table of the Declaration of the Rights of Man in her right hand The plaque at the foot of the pedestal bears the inscription: A la France 1789–1899 Figure 3.1 L’histoire du siècle (1): Victor Hugo contemplating the passage of time, courtesy Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris Berger, Stefan, Lorenz, Chris, and Melman, Billie, eds 2012 Popularizing National Pasts : 1800 to the Present London: Taylor & Francis Group Accessed August 13, 2020 ProQuest Ebook Central Created from tau on 2020-08-13 06:49:54 90 Billie Melman Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group All rights reserved Standing by it is Victor Hugo, contemplating history’s course and serving as the point of visual reference for spectators, who viewed the panorama from left to right, returning to the great man’s figure (see Fig 3.1) The choice of the greatest Republican narrator of the century, whose remains had been put to rest in the Pantheon in 1885 in a ceremony that became the prototype of a civic cult of history and statehood, rendered the panorama authoritative, not least because of Hugo’s status as both a historian and an interpreter of Paris and its multifaceted relation to the Revolution Immediately to his left the biographical panorama unfolded, presenting astounded viewers with virtually all the political and intellectual figures of the Revolution, including the most controversial ones: Georges Danton, Marat, Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Antoine Joseph Santerre (see Fig 3.2) The Revolution in its entirety merged with the Empire, which merged with the Restoration period, which flowed into the July Monarchy, and so on and so forth.48 The all-embracing, all-inclusive panorama (the part presenting 1870 included even repatriated communards such as Louise Michel) transmitted a narrative of seamless continuity between the past and the present, the very opposite of the dungeon and gallows view of history The inclusive, ordered, and controlled past reflected metropolitan grandeur and pride and a sense of the city’s wholeness, which resonated with modernized, Haussmannized Paris Thus the Republican panorama offered continuity with both the imperial past and the imperial city Put Figure 3.2 L’histoire du siècle (2): Revolutionary figures, courtesy Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris Berger, Stefan, Lorenz, Chris, and Melman, Billie, eds 2012 Popularizing National Pasts : 1800 to the Present London: Taylor & Francis Group Accessed August 13, 2020 ProQuest Ebook Central Created from tau on 2020-08-13 06:49:54 Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group All rights reserved ‘That Which We Learn with the Eye’ 91 differently, the unifying and spectacularization of the history went hand in hand with an apparently seamless cityscape As already noted, Paris’s rebuilding and modernization, beginning in the July Monarchy and made into a centralized effort, fi nanced mainly by economic entrepreneurs and supervised by the state during the Second Empire, was significantly different from the modernization of London.49 It was planned, centralist, unified, and comprehensive, and it seemingly successfully helped the monarchy control opposition in the city London’s constant ‘improvements’ (the term used from the 1820s to describe projects for its amelioration), building, and the destruction of its historic parts were piecemeal and had nothing of the totalizing aspect of Haussmannization The vast urban vistas, connecting parts of Paris and cutting into old historic neighbourhoods that were insurgent during all of the revolutions, the massive and unified buildings, and a monumentality that was absent in London until the 1890s and 1900s—all of these made Paris into a visual whole to which the panoramic spectacles of the past corresponded The Haussmann-panorama effect was accompanied by the distancing of urban spectators/consumers from the turmoil, poverty, density, and noise partly associated with plebeian radical Paris Notwithstanding its clearly didactic and political role, grand historical spectacle gradually slipped out of the grip of the state and centralized political control As David Van Zanten and David Harvey have noted, imperial power fell off before that of capital and commerce as driving forces in the reconstruction of Paris and the organization of urban spectacle This may certainly be extended to the Republic The emphasis on the educative importance of history via spectacle notwithstanding, control of the latter was completely taken over by commercial interests Moreover, commercialization went hand in hand with the accessing of the past for plebeian and sometimes oppositional audiences, as we shall see later This transformation of public space and spectacle in Paris is manifest in the insinuation of popular repertories into the panorama One significant characteristic of the grand visual spectacles of the Revolution and Empire was the increasing presence of violence and sensationalism The panorama’s generic realism partly accounts for the change: reproduction of minute details of the historical event often turned the grand view into total chaos, so that the whole was imposed upon by its parts and particles The immense density of such details overwhelmed spectators and sometimes effectively destroyed the detachment and distance from ‘reality’ The commanding view of Napoleon’s Russian and Middle Eastern campaigns became ‘[a] horrible spectacle of a mass of combatants, who grapple body to body, corps to corps, with the rage of despair’.50 And disillusioned spectators noted that looking at death on a massive scale hit spectators with the realization that ‘we were so dazzled by a sonorous and empty glory, by the brilliant but disastrous conquests’.51 The disruption of the panoramic view and unified narrative is at its most apparent in the most consciously educative and ideological Berger, Stefan, Lorenz, Chris, and Melman, Billie, eds 2012 Popularizing National Pasts : 1800 to the Present London: Taylor & Francis Group Accessed August 13, 2020 ProQuest Ebook Central Created from tau on 2020-08-13 06:49:54 Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group All rights reserved 92 Billie Melman spectacles of the centenary of the Revolution in 1889, timed to coincide with the Exposition universelle The Exposition was an inaugural moment of modernity and a celebration of Paris and the Third Republic’s technological progress, cultural clout, and apparent political stability The repeated crises of the Republic during the1880s, culminating in Boulangism, threatened its very core It is against this backdrop that popular representations of the Revolution, challenging the narrow margins of a consensus about its course, trajectory, and place in history, need to be examined The Exposition’s inaugural ceremony took place not on 14 July, which became the Republic’s offi cial festival only in 1880 and proved too divisive, but in May, on the centenary of the convocation of the Estates General in Versailles The Exposition’s physical and symbolic site and most celebrated icon of modernity, the Eiffel Tower, was the epitome of the aerial, all-encompassing view A symbol of the limitless promise of modernity, the tower was the culmination of the repertory and procedures of the panoramic look The view of Paris from the top of the tower was that of a unified post—Haussmannian city, emphasizing that the Exposition’s main exhibit was the city itself But an array of spectacles located on the margins of the Exposition’s parameter and spilling outside it presented histories of the Revolution that competed with the republic’s liberal-national narrative, while cashing in on the explosion of mass consumption At the height of Trocadéro (erected about a decade earlier for the 1878 Exposition), located at the corner of the new Boulevard Delessert, dominating the Champs de Mars and seen from miles away, the Tour du Temple was painstakingly reconstructed The reconstruction of the revolutionary prison, inside what effectively was a panorama overlooking Paris, insinuated the dungeon into the panorama.52 On the Champs de Mars itself, a ‘Reconstitution of the Bastille and the Rue de Saint-Antoine’ at the very beginning of the Revolution contested the official policy of not celebrating Bastille Day Eugene Colibert’s reconstruction, approached and entered from the Avenue Suffren, rose to a height of over 80 metres from street level, thus enabling a bird’s-eye view on its environs, a view enhanced by the ditch excavated around the fortress But inside the buildings, visitors were treated to—and immensely attracted and titillated by—prisons, dungeons, subterranean passes, and displays of instruments of torture 53 The multiplicity of ‘cellars, pillories, sealed rooms’, making the insides of the panorama a ‘horrible place’, exposed a history of the ancien régime that the Revolution had brought to an end The re-enactment of this past and the Revolution was eulogized by the illustrated press, which documented modernity and consumption ‘There!’ noted Le Petit Parisien in September of 1887: ‘what was suffered at the Bastille! Well! These tortures one can have represented while visiting the monument One will suddenly, instantaneously see appear the vision of frightening times when, in this monstrous edifice, the martyrs of royal tyranny were in agony.’ The political subtext of the Berger, Stefan, Lorenz, Chris, and Melman, Billie, eds 2012 Popularizing National Pasts : 1800 to the Present London: Taylor & Francis Group Accessed August 13, 2020 ProQuest Ebook Central Created from tau on 2020-08-13 06:49:54 ‘That Which We Learn with the Eye’ 93 reconstruction is spelt out in the radical republican press and that of the left, which abounded with analogues between the ancien régime and the Third Republic, the absolutist monarchy and feudalism on the one hand and capitalist industrialism and republican policies on the other As Le Cri du peuple put it: Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group All rights reserved Before quitting this sombre restitution of the fortress raised for the defence of royal privileges, a thought dominates us, imposed by a comparison We have beneath our eyes a Bastille ‘for laughing’; the other, attacked and taken by the people with the bourgeoisie at their head and for chiefs, was demolished a hundred years ago The feudalism of barons does not exist anymore, royalty is dead But this serves as an example to the people The chiefs of yesteryear became the masters of our day the new industrialist bands were elevated by fi nancial feudalism, compressing and enslaving the workers in the name of the Republic 54 The dungeon insinuated itself even into historical displays that initially sought to detach history from sensationalism and reduce the horror effect The Grévin, which separated itself from the traditional ceroplastic fairshow and Tussaud’s in London, inaugurated its historical collection, as previously mentioned, with a much publicized reconstruction of Marat’s assassination Because, unlike Tussaud’s, it could not claim to have produced historical figures from their original, it boasted lifelike realism and veracity achieved through massive archival research and the collection of historical objects and relics The vigorously advertised chase after and purchase of Marat’s ‘authentic’ clog-shaped bath is a case in point (see Figs 3.3 and 3.4).55 The assassination scene was soon to be joined by a series of Revolution tableaux in which the effect and look of the panorama were replaced by those of the cell and dungeon These included the royal family at the Temple, Marie Antoinette departing for her journey to the scaffold, and the ‘Solitude of Louis XVII’, displaying the incarcerated and debilitated last dauphin in his disarrayed cubicle.56 The reconstitution of lost history recovered the lost pre-modern city, the vieux Paris, some of whose landmarks were eradicated during the era of rebuilding and modernization Whereas the mid-century military panoramas and British historical panoramas had tended to focus on landscapes, whether of the battlefield or maritime scenes, the fin de siècle historical reconstructions in Paris were distinctly urban in their contents, serving as both histories and topographies of the metropolis Pre-revolutionary and revolutionary ‘old Paris’ became bywords for a plebeian way of life and an economy that preceded high industrial capitalism ‘It is’, enthused the popular press about the Bastille’s reconstruction, ‘old Paris, which is reborn; it is the past that surges from forgetfulness.’57 Berger, Stefan, Lorenz, Chris, and Melman, Billie, eds 2012 Popularizing National Pasts : 1800 to the Present London: Taylor & Francis Group Accessed August 13, 2020 ProQuest Ebook Central Created from tau on 2020-08-13 06:49:54 94 Billie Melman Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group All rights reserved Figure 3.3 Marat’s death, from Musée Grevin, Principaux Tableaux de Musée, courtesy of Archive Musée Grévin As pointed out earlier, the new visual and material historical culture was inseparable from new forms of consumption Access to history was mediated by mass consumption, which was part and parcel of both the metropolitan experience of modernity and identity and the constitution of modern citizenship and inclusion in the nation History was the instrument for a mass participation in modernity The former was not just commodified, advertised, and distributed; it compounded various visual pleasures and extended them, via actual goods, to such ordinary activities as the consumption of necessities such as food and drink Put differently, history was made part of the everyday and the material world of the dwellers of the mega-city and of social activities such as eating outside, social drinking, shopping, and strolling The painstaking reconstruction of the revolutionary Rue Saint-Antoine included the reproduction of workshops, stalls, and shops where ‘period’ goods, paradoxically manufactured industrially, were sold by Parisian retail firms Official guides and maps advertised mass-produced ‘Revolution’ objects, from food and beverages, ‘made on the spot’, to garments, shoes, stationery, and scents.58 The selling power of history proved powerful even outside the modernized consumers’ Paris of the west and north-west quarters, in Berger, Stefan, Lorenz, Chris, and Melman, Billie, eds 2012 Popularizing National Pasts : 1800 to the Present London: Taylor & Francis Group Accessed August 13, 2020 ProQuest Ebook Central Created from tau on 2020-08-13 06:49:54 Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group All rights reserved ‘That Which We Learn with the Eye’ Figure 3.4 95 Marat’s death, Musée Grévin (detail), photograph by Eitan Orkibi working-class neighbourhoods, which also became centres for Bohemia and the hubs of rough entertainment that was distinctly non-bourgeois From the late 1870s, ‘historical’ cafés, designated ‘revolutionary cafés’, restaurants, bars, brasseries, and brothels celebrating and commemorating the Revolution sprouted to the east and south of the Haussmannized centre, though not very far from it, a proximity testifying that these Berger, Stefan, Lorenz, Chris, and Melman, Billie, eds 2012 Popularizing National Pasts : 1800 to the Present London: Taylor & Francis Group Accessed August 13, 2020 ProQuest Ebook Central Created from tau on 2020-08-13 06:49:54 Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group All rights reserved 96 Billie Melman establishments catered for a mixed clientele of working-class neighbourhood customers, tourists, bohemians, and occasional bourgeois fl âneurs Despite the cross-class profi le of their patrons these places presented a distinctly working-class space and consumption epitomized in the café, wine shop, and the café-cabaret Such cafés came under severe regulation during the Second Empire, but their staggering increase from 4,000 in 1851 to 42,000 in 1885 effectively defused control and ensured their importance in social life and often in politics What characterizes the many forms of the rough and riotous self-consciously historical entertainment in these places of popular leisure is the lack of separation between respectable and unrespectable divertissements or pastimes, a mixture censored and deemed unacceptable in middle-class spectacle The historical cafés too represent chain consumption and the absorption of history into the everyday, associating the selling and buying of sensational histories with consumption in its original meaning: literally destroying consommations, such as food and drink (typically alcohol) and sex Significantly, in the gendered market for these histories, women were usually sellers and men buyers The two largest concentrations of the ‘historical’ cheap food and sex industry was in the era of the Bastille and the old Saint-Antoine quarter, in the modernized boulevards cutting through it, yet bordering on the workers’ enclaves remaining in the area; around Montmartre, known for its radical communard identity from the 1870s onwards, and across the Seine, in the mixed working-class and bohemian environs, encompassed and partly camouflaged by the Boulevard Saint-Michel On the Boulevard Beaumarchais, trade in sex and Revolution was booming At the revealingly designated Oubliettes de l’ancienne Bastille, in number 67, cabaret performances, beer, and food served by women dressed up as old regime ‘queens’ were offered.59 Number 73 offered ‘consumables’ plus special visits to the reconstructed cells of the Grand Châtelet and reenactment of prisoners’ interrogation (the infamous ancien régime question), carried on by women only, of course At the Brasserie de Divorce, Les sans culottes-1789, on 40 Rue Severin, off Boulevard Saint-Michel, a glass of beer could be had for 30 centimes and coffee for 40.60 Optional sex was insinuatingly advertised in leaflets featuring a sans-culotte female in breeches, a class as well as gender transgression, because during the Revolution sans-culotte men donned pantaloons and not breeches And along the Rue de Mazagran, not far from the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, at numbers 4, 11, and 16, cheap beer and more were served by ‘servants of the period’, by citizenesses attired la Charlotte Corday (with a reconstruction and enactment of Marat’s assassination to boot) and ‘women of the people’ respectively Probably the most riotous and prosperous and easily the most political of these establishments was the Brasserie de frites révolutionnaires, advertised in a language brimming with salacious innuendo offering fries in fat plus wine, a package so inclusive that it made mockery of the Republic’s attempt at inclusiveness in memory of the Revolution: ‘opportunist, Berger, Stefan, Lorenz, Chris, and Melman, Billie, eds 2012 Popularizing National Pasts : 1800 to the Present London: Taylor & Francis Group Accessed August 13, 2020 ProQuest Ebook Central Created from tau on 2020-08-13 06:49:54 ‘That Which We Learn with the Eye’ 97 revisionist, Boulangist, bourgeois, clerical, royalist, Bonapartist’ Wholesome fries in fat, promised the fl iers that were distributed along the Boulevard and even mentioned in the local press, were sufficient nourishment for a patriotic people to enable it to enact 1792 in a coming siege 61 Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group All rights reserved CONCLUSION The ‘Revolutionary fries’, like the array of spectacles whose parallel and uneven developments have been briefly outlined here, complicate and may help expand and refine our understanding of popular histories and their multivalent relationship to nationalism and modernity The study of these visual histories and of the courses they took expands our notion of the ‘national’ and indicates that the popular culture of history represented both less and more than the discreet ‘nation’: less in that it was urban and local, and more in that it was metropolitan, cross-national, and European Historical spectacle drew on a store of technologies, mechanisms of distribution, and practices of spectatorship and usage that travelled across countries It attracted and drew mass audiences across national borders as well as across classes and genders Its economy too was transnational Some entrepreneurs mediating technologies and representations of the past developed European rather than discreetly national careers Madame Tussaud’s career repeated itself in those of fin de siècle makers of panoramas and wax models such as Stevens and Gervex The capital invested in the production of large-scale spectacles too was multinational This is particularly true of the panoramas, sponsored by ‘anonymous societies’ of stockholders Moreover, from their very beginning, historical spectacles that drew on cross-class and cross-gender audiences capitalized on and generated tourism As the nineteenth century progressed and global tourism was boosted by the universal exhibitions, the Revolution became a tourist attraction At one end of the expanding market were the revolutionary bistros and cabarets that routinely advertised for a multilingual clientele and touted British, German, and even Arab patrons At the other, respectable, end was the quintessentially bourgeois and family-oriented Musée Grévin, which cooperated with travel companies and travel agencies that brought provincial audiences to Paris Metropolitan and cross-national commonalities are also apparent in the resonance of certain themes and organizing images, such as the images and metaphors of incarceration and resurrections of the dungeon and prison that appeared across genres and forms, even in the form that constituted their opposite—the panorama Their counterpart is that of the Revolution as an all-inclusive national biography, but it is quite rare The spectacles described here are best described as competing versions of the revolutionary past In London, the uncosy interpretation of the Revolution, organized around ‘horrors’ as a cluster of images and set of sensations, Berger, Stefan, Lorenz, Chris, and Melman, Billie, eds 2012 Popularizing National Pasts : 1800 to the Present London: Taylor & Francis Group Accessed August 13, 2020 ProQuest Ebook Central Created from tau on 2020-08-13 06:49:54 Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group All rights reserved 98 Billie Melman developed early and thrived alongside and competed successfully with the comfortable Whig narrative of history ‘Horrors’ of course did not signify only fear and a sense of social and political danger, but a sense of the Gothic and ridiculous, and helped domesticate and naturalize the Revolution and Napoleon As Tussaud’s catalogues phrased it, everything connected to the Revolution and the emperor ‘belongs to British History’.62 This is particularly true before the 1870s and 1880s, when the massive expansion of the empire and democratization at home, and a gradual acceptance of the state and monarchy among the ‘rougher’ urban audiences, coincided with the attempt at civilizing urban life and the urban poor It was at the time that the uncosy version of the past began to peter out in London that popular histories and spectacles in Paris erupted into a frenzy of resurrections, commemorations, and a consumers’ spree capitalizing on sensation In Paris, the Revolution resisted the possibility of privileging one dominant, overarching national narrative over others Even such versions imposed by the state, during various regimes, had a limited hold Commercial mass spectacles boomed at the time that the hold of the state over urban spectacle weakened Notwithstanding the affi liation and allegiances of their producers to political causes (such as Bonapartism or republicanism, or, for that matter, a mixture of the two), these spectacles easily absorbed dissenting and non-consensual images and motifs, which in their turn transformed the panoramic view of the past The celebration of the siege of the Bastille is a case in point During its centenary, it was too controversial for the Republic to become a unifying symbol But it was excessively represented and exploited in commercial spectacle, which antedated the more official and mainstream histories In the same way that historical spectacle expanded beyond the nation, it had meanings and uses beyond politics As this chapter has shown, popular visual histories were far from being solely means of political or social control; quite the contrary Spectacles that made history into a social activity triggered a popular sensationalism and thrill in horror and violence; they captured fears of crowds and urban unruliness; they presented delight in new urban forms of consumption; they were inextricably connected to various pleasures—the visual pleasure and the thrill of looking at simulations of the real, pleasures of the everyday and mundane, even physical pleasure In certain popular uses these shows connected resistance and urban transgression These varied meanings and uses were relatable to the two forms of urban modernity discussed here and their different paces, and formed part of them History was a way and form to experience and make sense of modernity NOTES I am grateful to Geneviève Morlet, archivist at the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris (hereafter BHVP), for her generous help Marie Vercambre, archivist at the Musée Grévin, Paris, has been helpful and hospitable I am Berger, Stefan, Lorenz, Chris, and Melman, Billie, eds 2012 Popularizing National Pasts : 1800 to the Present London: Taylor & Francis Group Accessed August 13, 2020 ProQuest Ebook Central Created from tau on 2020-08-13 06:49:54 ‘That Which We Learn with the Eye’ Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group All rights reserved 10 11 12 13 99 also indebted to Vanessa Schwartz, Rebecca Rogers, Daniel Sherman, Peter Mandler, and Stefan Berger for their advice and comments Eitan Orkibi has been the most assiduous researcher, and I thank him for his assistance Le Théâtre, numéro special: Le Musée Grévin Cited in Vanessa R Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley, 1998), 141–2 For defi nitions of modernity here see Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London, 1982; repr 1988) The title points at the Marxist framework of his interpretation For a more nuanced interpretation of Marx’s take on modernity see David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (London, 2006), 1–23 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge, 1990), defi nes late and global modernity For a discussion of the relationship between modernity and history see Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in NineteenthCentury London (London, 2000); Billie Melman, The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past 1800–1953 (Oxford, 2006); and Billie Melman, London: Place, People and Empire, 1800–1960 (Hebrew) (Tel Aviv, 2009) On the long nineteenth century and modernity see Richard Price, ‘Historiography, Narrative and the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of British Studies, 35 (1996), 220–56 Melman, The Culture of History Jean-Louis Comolli, ‘Machines of the Visual’, in Theresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (eds.), The Cinematic Apparatus (Basingstoke, 1980), 121–41 A shortlist includes Peter Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven, CT, 1997); Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture, Vol (London, 1994); Maurice Samuels, The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY, 2004) Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Cambridge, 1984); Rosemary Mitchell, Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image, 1830–1870 (Oxford, 2000); Sue Harper, Picturing the Past: The Rise and Fall of the British Costume Film (London, 1994) For France see Samuels, The Spectacular Past Edwin Jones, The English Nation: The Great Myth, 2nd ed (Stroud, 2000); Lawrence Brockliss and David Eastwood (eds.), A Nation of Multiple Identities: The British Isles c.1750–1850 (Manchester, 1997); Sudhir Hazareesingh, The Saint-Napoleon: Celebrations of Sovereignty in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); Daniel J Sherman, Worthy Monuments: Art Museums and the Politics of Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, 1989) Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire, vols (Paris, 1997), esp Vol 3; Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, CA, 1976) For the comparison between the two cities and their modernity see David L Pike, Subterranean Cities: The World beneath Paris and London, 1800– 1945 (Ithaca, NY, 2005) For periphery and metropolis see James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin (eds.), Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture 1780–1840 (Cambridge, 2005) Robert and Isabelle Tombs, The Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present (London, 2006), 699 Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Paris as Revolution: Writing the NineteenthCentury City (Berkeley, CA, 1994) Stuart Semmel, Napoleon and the British (New Haven, CT, 2004), 53 Berger, Stefan, Lorenz, Chris, and Melman, Billie, eds 2012 Popularizing National Pasts : 1800 to the Present London: Taylor & Francis Group Accessed August 13, 2020 ProQuest Ebook Central Created from tau on 2020-08-13 06:49:54 Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group All rights reserved 100 Billie Melman 14 Henry Cockburn, Memorials of his Time, ed Karl F.C Miller (1856; rev ed., 1974), 73 15 Cited in Lowell Fry, ‘“Great Burke” and the French Revolution’, in Lisa Plummer Crafton (ed.), The French Revolution Debate in English Literature and Culture (Westport, CT, 1997), 84; Victor Hugo, Paris-Guide par les principaux écrivains et artistes de la France (Paris, 1867), xxxiv, xviii 16 Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (New Haven, CT, 1994), 13–62 On the British narratives see Hedva Ben-Israel, English Historians and the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1968; reissued 2002) 17 Michelle Bloom, Wax Works: A Cultural Obsession (Minneapolis, 2003); Pamela Pilbeam, Madame Tussaud and the History of Waxworks (London, 2003); Michel Lemire, Artistes et mortels (Paris, 1990) 18 Franỗois Hartog and Jacques Revel, Historians of the Present Conjecture’, Mediterranean Historical Review, 16, no (June 2001), 1–12 19 George Augustus Sala, ‘Historical Notes on Madame Tussaud’, Madame Tussaud’s Exhibition Guide (London, 1905), 20 Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, 111–51 21 Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA, 1978) 22 Ralph Hyde, Panoramania! The Art and Entertainment of the ‘All-Embracing’ View (London, 1988); Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, trans Deborah Lucas Schneider (New York, 1997) 23 Bann, The Clothing of Clio, 1–8, 32–54 24 All estimates are from Franỗois Robichon, Les Panoramas en France au xixe siècle’ (PhD diss., University of Paris Nanterre, 1982), 648–54, and ‘Le Panorama, spectacle de l’histoire’, Le Mouvement sociale, 131 (Apr.–June 1985), 65–86 25 Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, 32; Bennett, The Rise of the Museum Following Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans Richard Nice (1984; repr London, 2000); Melman, The Culture of History, 32, 59–63 26 Robichon, ‘Les Panoramas en France au xixe siècle’ 27 Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, 209–25 28 John Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, 1981) 29 Melman, The Culture of History, 41–6 30 Charles Dickens, ‘The City of the Absent’, in The Un-Commercial Traveller, Christmas Stories from Household Words and All the Year Round (repr New York, 1926), 225–34 31 Biographical and Descriptive Sketches of the Whole Length Composition Figures and Other Works of Art Forming the Unrivalled Exhibition of Madame Tussaud (1826), 35–40 32 Biographical and Descriptive Sketches of the Distinguished Characters which Compose the Unrivaled Exhibition of Madam Tussaud and Sons (1847), 27–28; Madame Tussaud’s Archives (MTA), London, press cuttings, Punch, 15 Sept 1849 33 V.A.C Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1710– 1868 (Oxford, 1994; repr 1996) 34 Biographical and Descriptive Sketches (1826), 35; (1847), 29–30; (1826), 26; (1847), 21 35 Marie Tussaud, Memoirs and Reminiscences of France Forming an Abridged History of the French Revolution, ed Francis Hervé (London, 1838), 194–5 36 On the cult of Napoleon in Britain see Stuart Semmel, Napoleon and the British (New Haven, CT, 2004); Biographical Sketches (1826), 9; ‘Madame Berger, Stefan, Lorenz, Chris, and Melman, Billie, eds 2012 Popularizing National Pasts : 1800 to the Present London: Taylor & Francis Group Accessed August 13, 2020 ProQuest Ebook Central Created from tau on 2020-08-13 06:49:54 ‘That Which We Learn with the Eye’ 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis Group All rights reserved 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 101 Tussaud and Sons’ New Room: Relics of the Emperor Napoleon’ (1843), Pamphlet, MTA ‘horror, n., horros, n.’, Oxford English Dictionary MS slip, 1st ed Superfluous, Oxford University Press Archives, cited by permission; Oxford English Dictionary (1933), v 397 Melman, London Charles Dickens, ‘Where We Stopped Growing’, Household Words, Jan 1853, in Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens Journalism, Vol 3, ed Michael Slater (Columbus, OH, 1998), 112 Pike, Subterranean Cities; Roy Porter, London: A Social History (London, 2000); Nead, Victorian Babylon; Jerry White, London in the Nineteenth Century (London, 2007); Colin Jones, Paris: The Biography of a City (London, 2004); Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity Bann, The Clothing of Clio, 61; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans Alan Sheridan (London, 1977) Eugène Delacroix, Journal, 14 Apr 1858 Moniteur de l’armée, 1843 Panorama de la bataille de la Moskowa par M Ch Langlois auteur des panoramas d’Alger et de Navarin (Paris, n.d.), Charles Langlois, Le Moniteur universel, 28 May 1839, 29 July 1840; Charles Langlois, Relation du combat de la bataille d’Eylau Robert Gildea, Children of the Revolution: The French 1779–1914 (2008; repr London, 2009), 1–19 ‘Histoire d’un siècle’ (1789–1889), L’Art industriel, Nov 1888 Archives of the BHVP, series 103, panoramas; Ibid; Jeanne de Nivelle, ‘Les hommes du siècle’, Le Soleil, 29 Jan 1896; ‘Disparition du Panorama du Siècle aux Tulleries’, L’Éclaire, 27 Jan 1896; ‘L’Histoire d’un Siècle’, L’Événment, June 1888 David P Jordan, ‘Haussmann and Haussmannisation: The Legacy for Paris’, French Historical Studies, 27 (2004), 87–113, and Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (New York, 1995); Pierre Pinon, Paris: Biographie d’une capitale (Paris, 1999); David Van Zanten, Building Paris: Architectural Institutions and the Transformation of the French Capital, 1830–1870 (Cambridge, 1994) Le Corsaire, Nov 1835 Journal de Paris, June 1839, cited in Franỗois Robichon, Jean-Charles Langlois 17891870: Le Spectacle de l’histoire (Paris and Caen, 2005), 97 Archives of the BHVP, series 103, panoramas Ibid ‘Au Champs du Mars’, Le Cri du peuple, 23 Sept 1887 Le Figaro, 15 July 1885 Musée Grévin, Catalogue Almanach, 43rd ed., 17–23; Almanach GrévinCatalogue Illustré, 54th ed., 19–31 ‘La Reconstitution de la Bastille’ Le Petit Parisien Sept 1887 Exposition retrospective, La Bastille et La Rue Saint-Antoine; BHVP, series 103 L’Ancienne Bastille, ‘Aux Oubliettes de L’Ancienne Bastille’, BHVP, series 103, Cafés, Boulevards, Brasseries, attractifs révolutionnaires ‘Brasserie du divorce Les sans culottes-1789’, ibid ‘Brasserie des frites révolutionnaires’, ibid Biographical and Descriptive Sketches (1863) Berger, Stefan, Lorenz, Chris, and Melman, Billie, eds 2012 Popularizing National Pasts : 1800 to the Present London: Taylor & Francis Group Accessed August 13, 2020 ProQuest Ebook Central Created from tau on 2020-08-13 06:49:54 ... 06:49:54 ? ?That Which We Learn with the Eye? ?? 93 reconstruction is spelt out in the radical republican press and that of the left, which abounded with analogues between the ancien régime and the Third... ? ?That Which We Learn with the Eye? ?? 83 It was during the fin de siècle that the panoramas in Paris truly became mass histories with an impact comparable to that of the later historical films The. .. aspect that focused on the populism of the Napoleonic heritage and legend and the representation of the power of the imperial state The panoramas, as popular spectacle of the past, and the metropolis