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

The Spectacular Past is an exciting interdisciplinary work blending historical, cultural, and literary studies. Samuels reveals the centrality of spectacle—pictorial, theatrical, and verbal—to the new historical consciousness shaped by Romantic historiography's efforts to assimilate the Revolution and Empire into an organic national narrative. Vivid historiography began the process, but the easing of censorship under the July Monarchy was decisive in releasing an explosion of spectacular representations depicting controversial figures, most importantly Napoleon, on the stage and in popular attractions.

Samuels's focus on early nineteenth-century visual culture makes his book a welcome complement to Vanessa Schwartz's Spectacular Realities (1998) and Jann Matlock's Scenes of Seduction (1994). Cultural historians will find insightful observations about the reality effect produced by Curtius's life-like wax displays, Robertson's phantasmagoria shows, Langlois's panoramas and dioramas, boulevard theater, and changing techniques used in illustrated histories. These analyses are deftly enlisted in an overarching argument about the dialogical relationship between the diverse vehicles through which history was conveyed. Samuels includes an especially astute examination of how in-text illustration affected both readers and writers of history.

According to Samuels, whose implicit theoretical perspective is indebted to Situationist critiques of twentieth-century mediation, the fraught relationship between history and spectacle was already a matter of impassioned contestation in the 1830s. Adding a new dimension to the "memory crisis" that Richard Terdiman identifies in Present Past (1993), Samuels boldly redefines Romanticism and Realism as competing theories of history. Whereas Scottian Romantics seek to transport the reader into the past, Balzac and Stendhal, and to some extent Flaubert, see the past as an "alienating and destructive force, a false model, leading the plots of the characters awry" (5). Compelling readings of Adieu (1830) and Le Colonel Chabert (1832) assert Balzac's "rejection of the way Romanticism viewed the past." An equally provocative reading of The Red and the Black contends that Stendhal's disillusionment with the historical novel is visited upon protagonist Julien Sorel, whose sense of self has been supplanted by spectacular representations of his hero Napoleon. "By encouraging the public to consume the past and by making that past more real than life […] the new visual forms of history have robbed post-Revolutionary French culture of the very identity such spectacles hoped to foster" (219).

Samuels chides Guy Debord, Umberto Eco, and Jean Baudrillard for their unfounded nostalgia for a pre-mediated bygone era, countering that modernity has always been intimately associated with spectacle. We are, however, left with persistent questions, stemming in part from Samuels's skepticism of poststructuralist theory. As he acknowledges, historical subjects shared the stage with exotic natural history exhibits, panoramas of distant places, wax figures of living celebrities, and depictions of "historical events" often less than a year old. Are we dealing with the problem of history when inaccessibility hinges on class, space, and money? Is the past extricable or distinct from other commodifications of the inaccessible? Samuels's significant contribution to our understanding of modern historical consciousness leaves us with the somber but timely impression that the truth may be inconsequential, providing the consumer feels the spectacle was worth the price.