Why did spectacular representations of recent history become all the rage in Paris during the first half of the nineteenth century? How did this new approach to picturing the past help the fractured French nation to forge a unified identity? And why did cultural critics of all political persuasions, including Realist novelists such as Balzac and Stendhal, find the trend so troubling? Maurice Samuels, Assistant Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania, offers persuasive answers to these and related questions in his compelling first book.

Although its subtitle emphasizes contributions to the field of French literature, The Spectacular Past has a great deal to offer historians of nineteenth-century art and visual culture. Indeed, the book’s central argument holds that the image, broadly defined, became a dominant vehicle for representing, re-imagining, and contesting the upheavals of the Revolution and Empire. Samuels casts his net wide, looking at historical imagery in media ranging from wax museums, phantasmagoria, and panoramas to Boulevard theaters, illustrated histories, and the ekphrastic novels of Sir Walter Scott.

With its combination of theoretical sophistication, primary source research, and clear exposition, The Spectacular Past offers a model for the study of visual culture before the twentieth century. Following in the footsteps of scholars such as Jonathan Crary and Richard Terdiman, Samuels establishes a dialogue between the writings of twentieth-century cultural theorists (e.g., Benedict Anderson, Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord) and the critics, journalists, and novelists of nineteenth-century France. His most significant contribution comes in his careful examination of the nineteenth-century discourse surrounding the “spectacle.” While engaging thoughtfully with Debord’s critique of the twentieth-century “spectacular society,” which Debord believes de-politicizes its passive viewers by removing them from historical time, Samuels carefully teases out “how the nineteenth century theorized the spectacles of its own era” (13). Drawing on close readings of contemporary texts yields a definition of the “spectacular past” as a representational system that “took up the subject of the recent past,” “charged money for the privilege of witnessing this representation,” and “used new optical technologies” to produce a previously unattainable level of surface verisimilitude (33).

After a lucid introduction to the stakes and goals of his argument, Samuels devotes each of the next three chapters to asking how, why, and with what consequences the spectacular past took form in various visual media. Chapter 1 looks at popular entertainments in Paris, focusing on the wax display created by Philippe Curtius, which was on view in various permutations from the 1770s to the 1840s. It also focuses on Étienne-Gaspard Robertson’s phantasmagoria (a technologically advanced version of the magic lantern show), which opened in 1798, and on the many panoramas and dioramas that pictured scenes from the Revolution and especially Napoleonic battles from 1800 into the 1850s. Freezing such tumultuous episodes into static scenes that seemed to offer every visual detail for consumption afforded bourgeois spectators (who could afford the price of admission) an illusion of mastery over the profoundly unruly past. Explaining the tremendous success of these seemingly veridical presentations, Samuels argues that “a certain segment of the public needed to see the representations provided by the historical spectacles as real . . . because the events depicted there—the Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars—had come to seem unreal,” due to the lightning-fast pace of political change and distant sites of many decisive events (35).

Chapter 2 situates “the increased importance of historical illustration during the July Monarchy” of Louis-Philippe (1830–1848) in the context of the ongoing struggle over the Revolution’s legacy (65). As in chapter 1, Samuels combines close analysis of visual and technological innovations with a broader investigation of their cultural and political resonance. The technical development at the center of this discussion is a new woodblock engraving process, developed in the 1830s, which permitted more prints to be made from each block and allowed text and images to be printed on the same page, rather than relegating images to separate pages covered with protective sheets. National histories that employed this technique, Samuels argues, “spectacularized” the past by appealing to a broader range of consumers than previous illustrated books (due to lower production costs) and by supplementing unfolding narratives with static vignettes, replete with historical detail, enmeshed for the first time within the text. Quoting extensively from contemporary sources, Samuels explicates the debates that swirled around these new illustrated histories. Whereas Romantic historians such as Jules Michelet and Prosper de Barante touted the ability of images to convey the truth with an immediacy, clarity, and impact that language could not approximate, reactionary critics complained about the contents of their writings, which tended to look kindly on both the Revolution and the July Monarchy, and also lamented their reduction of history to mere pictures. In particular, critics argued that such historiographic illustrations described the external appearances of the past without analyzing the causes and results of historical events. Authors who relied heavily on this kind of detailed imagery were charged with abdicating their moral responsibility to instruct readers in the proper interpretation of the events they describe.

The plays about Napoleon that proliferated on the stages of Paris during the 1830–31 season form the core of chapter 3. Banned from theaters during the Bourbon restoration (1815–1830), Napoleonic battles and histories of the Empire returned with a vengeance during the first years of the July Monarchy. As Samuels demonstrates, “the competition among theaters to produce the most realistic recreation of the Napoleonic legend led to increasingly elaborate spectacles” (121). In the pages of daily newspapers, Samuels uncovers evidence of multiple thespian “Napoleons” going about their daily lives in the costume and manner of the Corsican. Back on stage, set, costume, and prop designers followed the lead of Paul Delaroche (discussed briefly in chapter 2) and the Troubadour painters by piling detail upon detail in an attempt to evoke the look and feel of the represented era. Samuels argues that these “hyperrealistic” presentations were more than mere entertainments: “In their depictions of victories and of the sanctification of the hero, these plays offered a vision of a united France to a public divided by politics in 1830” (131). Once again, though, Samuels is equally interested in the frequent criticism that these spectacularized histories attracted. Thus, we learn of critics who feared that these plays would incite revolutionary behavior, and their radical counterparts who objected that such “crass commercialism” leads to “an emptying of the content of history, especially the political content, for the sake of pleasing the largest possible public” (144).

Detailed analyses of the approaches to history and visuality in selected novels by Walter Scott, Balzac, and Stendhal constitute the last three chapters, each of which treats one author. Taken as a group, these chapters juxtapose what a contemporary critic called the “literature of images”—the historical novels of Scott and his French followers in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s—against the critique of historical spectacle that Samuels finds in certain works by Balzac and Stendhal. Whereas Scott’s vivid material descriptions encourage readers to lose themselves in illusions of the past, texts like Balzac’s Adieu (1830) disrupt this fantasy by “emphasizing the constructed nature of the historical narrative, its status as representation” (210). Moreover, as Samuels points out, Adieu, Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir (1830), and other examples of Realist fiction take the “danger of historical spectacle” (219) as a theme. These novels ultimately argue that, by substituting a commodified representation of the past for direct experience with history, historical spectacles disrupt the very processes of identity formation that they claim to enable.

Given the crucial role of images in Samuels’s argument, it is unfortunate that the book includes just fourteen halftone illustrations. Although the author and his nineteenth-century sources evoke the panoramas, wax displays, and other spectacles through vivid descriptions, none of these sights are pictured here. Instead, the volume reproduces only black-and-white engravings and lithographs taken from the pages of illustrated histories, novels, and newspapers. Many are difficult to decipher, due to their small size and low contrast. And none do justice to the scope or quality of the visual sources under discussion.

Ultimately, though, Samuels proposes a new and fruitful way to consider Romanticism (associated here with historical spectacle) and Realism (presented as opposing the spectacular) within the political, social, and optical contexts of early nineteenth-century France. Although painting per se is not Samuels’s focus (Delaroche and Louis-Philippe’s gallery of paintings at Versailles are the only fine arts discussed), the book’s theorizing of the spectacular past provides a thorough grounding for scholars interested in the era’s contested representations of history in all media. Moreover, the contention that Realist novels explicitly thematized and rejected the historical specificity of their Romantic predecessors begs the question of whether we might trace a similarly troubled relationship to history in certain strains of Romantic and Realist painting. Samuels does not address this question, but future scholars might wish to take up where he leaves off.