Figures publiques: l’invention de la célébrité, 1750–1850 by Antoine Lilti (review)

Celebrity as an object of academic study has steadily been gaining currency in recent years. It remains, though, an ambiguous term: at one extreme, it is employed to denote a very modern state, specifically linked to audio-visual media; while at the other it is considered to encompass the whole spectrum of fame, from the glory of emperors, to the fascination of the beautiful starlet, to the charisma of a religious cult. Antoine Lilti sets out to navigate a course between these two points, considered respectively as too reductive or too broad. Instead, he investigates the birth and development of a very precise phenomenon: namely, a widespread interest in the private lives of public figures, which resulted from the elision between public and private worlds that took place from the mid eighteenth century. In order to better define this form of fame, Lilti usefully makes brief reference to associated contemporary notions, including reputation (related to honour), glory (generally posthumous), and popularity (most often associated with politics). Celebrity, in his definition, refers to the process by which the colleagues, admirers, or neighbours among whom a reputation might exist are replaced by a public that has no prior association with the famous individual. The illusion of intimacy is acquired through the close attention paid to the mundane, private details of the celebrity’s life: curiosity is the defining feature of this one-way relationship. Lilti argues that this served the further purpose of creating communities of interest that defined themselves by whom they admired, quite distinct from the rational public sphere of earlier accounts. The book proceeds through a series of case studies, ranging from Voltaire, Rousseau, Garrick, and Mozart through Mirabeau, Marie-Antoinette and Franklin, to Byron and Napoleon. The central consequence of examining these varied figures is to underline what, for Lilti, is one of the key features of his version of celebrity: it is an egalitarian process, to which the actor or the writer is just as susceptible as the emperor or politician. But the different figures also allow for discussion of different facets of this developing trend: the media for creating celebrity, the drawbacks of being a public figure, the relationship between man and work, and celebrity as it is linked to power. Although Lilti does describe how the phenomenon he studies relates to modern celebrity culture, this is not, I think, his only concern. Rather, he is interested in a particular moment; a combination of sociopolitical circumstances that resulted in the development of a very specific form of fame. There are many pathways he is forced to leave untrodden, not least the complex relationship between his version of celebrity and the posthumous glory to which he only gestures. It is inevitable, too, that those wedded to the idea of a much longer history of celebrity will dispute the historical specificity of this account. However, Lilti contends that his aim is to make celebrity a useable tool for researchers, and in this regard this meticulously researched and engagingly written account is immensely valuable.