Constructing Charisma: Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe (review)

This compelling volume of essays explores the nineteenth-century European roots of modern celebrity culture. Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi ground the collection with a useful introductory essay in which they establish the theoretical stakes of the contributors — chief among them, to offer a corrective to Max Weber’s analysis of charisma. Following Leo Braudy, whose work on the topic looms large over the collection, especially as he contributes a suggestive coda to the volume, the editors seek to diverge from Weber’s focus on charismatic political leaders and ask ‘whether, or how, cultural figures could develop charismatic authority’ (p. 10). In his study of three late nineteenth-century explorers and adventurers who captured the French and British imagination — Stanley, Brazza, and Lyautey — Berenson attempts to determine more precisely how and ‘why a relationship, an emotional connection, develops between the extraordinary person and those who see him as such’ (p. 23). The most appealing element of these three men’s public persona, according to Berenson, was a renewed form of European masculinity, ‘a manliness widely deemed at risk’ at the time (p. 26). Indeed, an intriguing theme of the volume is the interrogation of the gendered elements of celebrity. In her essay on Sarah Bernhardt and Rosa Bonheur, Mary Louise Roberts argues that late fin de siècle female artists employed ‘eccentricity as a strategy of female celebrity’ (p. 103, emphasis original), using androgyny, among other things, to carve a space for themselves ‘on the peripheries of gender norms’ (p. 111). Several contributors examine the relationship between nineteenth-century celebrity and consumer culture. Eva Giloi explores the creation of Kaiser Wilhelm I as a tourist attraction from the 1870s onward, especially evinced in a culture of autograph hunting, which broke down traditional barriers between visual representations of the monarch and his subjects. Helpfully, this essay is followed by Martin Kohlrausch’s chapter on the media persona of Wilhelm II, ultimately an intriguing tale about the pitfalls of breaking the very barriers Giloi’s essay examines when the monarch in question has ‘insufficient personal charisma’ (p. 66). Peter Fritzsche offers perhaps the volume’s most provocative contribution in his analysis of the consumer market for soldiers’ letters and diaries from Waterloo, an event that turned ‘ordinary witnesses’ into ‘minor celebrities’, and after which popular history ‘came to be understood in a Napoleon-like way in which the drama of ordinary, middling, and unlikely protagonists became poignant and telling’ (p. 141). A number of the essays assess the intersection of charismatic cultural figures — Venita Datta’s Cyrano de Bergerac, Kenneth Silver’s Sarah Bernhardt — and national pride. With twelve proper chapters, as well as the Introduction by Berenson and Giloi and the concluding essay by Braudy, the volume at times suffers from trying to squeeze too much into its relatively compact structure. Foregoing one or two contributions would have allowed the remaining pieces to explore more fully the fascinating questions they raise. Overall, Constructing Charisma is a lively collection, with invaluable insights for scholars working on celebrity and celebrity culture.