The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France (review)

We are now all prisoners of the media sphere, and the global reign of the spectacle makes it tempting to romance the good old days before digital film, before television, before photography even. Maurice Samuels' fascinating new book on the culture of the historical spectacle in early nineteenth-century France will quickly cool any such impulse. The Spectacular Past reveals to what extent the decades after the French Revolution saw the rise in number of historical spectacles (from the wax museum to the panorama), designed to render the past vividly, using state-of-the-art technologies that were no doubt as persuasive then as digital images are now. Against this popular backdrop, the book studies three major forms of romantic historical literature (illustrated historiography, the romantic drama, and the historical novel), before turning, in the last chapters, to canonical realist texts by Balzac and Stendhal, which critically confront the period's historical passions. Overall, Samuels offers a masterful account of the romantic obsession with "realizing the past," and reads this desire politically through Guy Debord's concept of the spectacle as a vehicle for ideology, for the post-revolutionary quest for identity, and for the commodification of the past. He thereby provides a vivid, richly documented, and indispensable study of romantic culture, one that will be invaluable also to anyone interested in the historical imagination, the critique of spectacular culture, or the genealogy of modernity.

Starting from the premise that the French Revolution set off an identity crisis, the book documents the effort to ground French national identity in visions of the past, and shows how newly developed technologies of illusion responded to this ideological need. Popular spectacles (the wax museum, the panorama, the diorama, the phantasmagoria) discussed briefly in the first chapter were mobilized to "realize" a recent past that was at once fleeting, unstable, and disconcertingly present, and in so doing gave ideological coherence to much of recent history. But beyond forging a stable national identity, pictures of the past also helped to legitimize each new regime, from the Empire to the July Monarchy, by inserting them into a larger historical continuity. The core of the book is devoted to three major literary forms of romantic historicism (theater, historiography, the historical novel), and brilliantly shows how their attempts to "realize the past" echo the mechanisms of the popular spectacle. These chapters do not directly address canonical works, but their interest and impact are all the greater for emerging directly from the study of a large body of forgotten texts. Samuels does not reread Hernani, but offers an illuminating survey of the many spectacular Napoleon plays that proliferated in the aftermath of the July Revolution, and instead of looking at Michelet, he examines the cultural politics and poetics of visual illustrations in historiography. These chapters, along with the one on Walter Scott's French heirs, are exemplary instances of modern cultural history. They are critically informed, painstakingly researched, and consistently clear, fresh, and entertaining; especially impressive is the close attention given to the contemporary press, and the careful reconstruction of its debates, polemics, and critical discourse. This extensive historical groundwork lends a great depth to Samuels' theses on the romantic "spectacle," and convincingly exposes the solidarity between high and low cultural forms.

In the two final chapters, Samuels turns to two canonical authors, Balzac and Stendhal, whose breakthrough realist texts of 1830 , Le Rouge et le noir and Adieu, he reads as pioneering critiques of the romantic historical spectacle. Interpreted as allegories of the dangers of reliving the past, these texts help to articulate explicitly a denunciation of the spectacle that runs throughout the book. At the outset, the spectacle had been defined, via Balzac, as something "that one sees for money," and the idea that it embodies a commodified and inauthentic relation to the past emerges as a leitmotif; the book thus also doubles as an ideological critique, attentive to the way in which the spectacle...