Staging Authority: Presentation and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe. A Handbook 9783110574012, 9783110571141

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Staging Authority

Staging Authority

Presentation and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe. A Handbook Edited by Eva Giloi, Martin Kohlrausch, Heikki Lempa, Heidi Mehrkens, Philipp Nielsen and Kevin Rogan

ISBN 978-3-11-057114-1 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-057401-2 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-057141-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2022941712 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: 5. Deutsches Sängerbund-Fest, 1896 Stuttgart, Germania mit Bundesflagge auf dem Marktplatz. clu/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Contents Eva Giloi, Martin Kohlrausch, Heikki Lempa, Heidi Mehrkens, Philipp Nielsen, Kevin Rogan Staging Authority: Introduction 1

Traditional and New Forms of Authority Xavier Marquez Charisma and Authority

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Edward Berenson Napoleon III: The ‘People’s King’

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The Diversification of Authority: New Actors among Old Elites Martin Kohlrausch The Social Promise of Scientific Progress: Technical Experts and the Quest for Authority 91 Tine Van Osselaer Clergy, Mystics, and Religious Leaders Betto van Waarden Mass Media: Intimacy at a Distance

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Presenting Authority on the Political Stage Philipp Nielsen Architecture, Space, and Emotions: Forging Connections between Government and Public 191 Ben Griffin Parliamentary Authority and British Political Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century 225

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Contents

Frederik Frank Sterkenburgh Monarchical Entries in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Emperor Wilhelm I, 1848-1888 259

Nationalism and Empire as Modes of Hegemony Matthew Unangst Mapping Empire

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Sally Totman Imperial Reach: European Explorers and Imperial Agents in the Middle East 339 Darin Stephanov Modern Monarchic Visibility in Eurasian Empires

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Taking Possession of Public Spaces Heikki Lempa Civil Society and the Embodiment of Authority

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Eva Giloi Cultural Tourism and Royal Tours: Possession and Place-Making Juan Fernando Velásquez Ospina Uncivilized and Noisy: Disciplining Listening in Nineteenth-Century Colombian Cities 455 List of Illustrations Authors’ Biographies Index

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Eva Giloi, Martin Kohlrausch, Heikki Lempa, Heidi Mehrkens, Philipp Nielsen, Kevin Rogan

Staging Authority: Introduction Abstract: This handbook focuses on how the presentation, embodiment, and performance of authority changed in the long nineteenth century. It examines how the diversification of authority led to new forms and expressions of authority, how traditional authority figures responded and adapted to those changes, and how the public increasingly participated in constructing and validating authority. The handbook’s fourteen chapters draw on innovative methodologies in cultural history and the aligned fields of the history of emotions, urban geography, persona studies, gender studies, media studies, and sound studies. This Introduction reviews the main concepts that guide the individual chapters. It explains what the term ‘staging’ means in all its facets: physical spaces, embodiment, choreography, dramaturgy, impression management, and media presence. It then reviews the conceptual difference between authority, power, and persuasion, drawing on works by Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, and Pierre Bourdieu. It provides an overview of the diversification of authority over the course of the nineteenth century and finishes with a synopsis of each chapter. Keywords: authority, media presence, staging, charisma, embodiment, persuasion, soft power, Herrschaft, habitus, cultural hegemony, cultural history, emotional communities, embodied communities, mass media, authorization practices ✶✶✶ This handbook started with the words: “Yes, but what about Louis XIV?” We were at the American Historical Association conference in Denver, discussing the nineteenth century’s pivotal role in the commodification of visual technologies and the development of new media practices: newspaper printing, photography, and film. One of us noted that these new forms of media influenced how traditional authority figures presented themselves, expanding their repertoire of representational strategies but also putting them on the defensive. Another of us pointed out that Louis XIV had also staged himself in multiple media. As Peter Burke notes in The Fabrication of Louis XIV: “The king himself and his advisors were very much concerned with the royal image,” and “the selling of the king” could be seen as foreshadowing the “manipulation of public opinion” by the likes of Richard Nixon and Margaret Thatcher.1 How far did we want to go in claiming that there was something new to the nineteenth century?

 Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 2, 4. Burke also notes, though, that the “danger of anachronism is obvious enough” in regard to the ‘selling’ of Louis XIV. Burke, Fabrication, 4. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110574012-001

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That exchange set the goals for this handbook. We would examine how different social groups presented their authority in public in the ‘long’ nineteenth century, roughly covering the era from 1789 to 1914.2 At the same time, we would connect nineteenth-century developments to antecedents and future elaborations, thereby placing the century into a longer time span. By marking out these connections, we would ultimately seek to delineate the nineteenth century’s special characteristics and innovations more clearly. For innovations there were many: the long nineteenth century came to be known as the Age of Revolution for good reason. The American and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth century changed expectations about which constituencies formed the basis of political legitimacy. The people and the nation took on new meaning as political actors, even in states where rulers resisted demands for popular sovereignty. The professionalization of the sciences and social sciences – philology, biology, ethnography – and their impact on demographic classifications shaped definitions of who belonged to the nation. The mercantile, industrial, and consumer revolutions, centered in rapidly growing cities, created an expanded financial powerbase that wielded influence apart from noble and clerical authorities. And not least, technological advances that prompted the circulation of ideas – mass media, new publication techniques, transportation – enabled the cohesion of new demographic groups, extended the influence of their would-be leaders, and expanded the size of the audiences who could be reached through growing literacy and an enhanced public sphere. As our authors argue, the nineteenth century’s widespread changes in politics, economics, technology, and the social realm also led to a diversification of authority. Their chapters investigate how the presentation and embodiment of authority reflected those developments: the relationship between authority and audience, the role that presence played in maintaining authority, how spaces were transformed to offer new possibilities for the presentation of authority, and how the mediatization of presence affected traditional authority. The diffusion of authority was less a direct displacement of power from one group to another, though, than its diversification into multiple centers of credibility. These sites of authority were sometimes in direct conflict with each other, but more often were merely competitive, taking shape as parallel magnets of allegiance. Organized on horizontal lines of identification, the loci of authority drew adherents in multiple directions simultaneously. We can see this symbolic multiplicity at work, for instance, in the cover image to this volume, which depicts the festival of the German Choral Association (Deutsches Sängerbund-Fest) of 1896.3 Hosted by Germany’s largest choral association, this festival was held in various German cities beginning in 1865.4 As in earlier festivities, this

 The completion of this project was aided by the generous support of the Martin L. and Sarah F. Leibowitz Membership Fund at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.  The image is reproduced in full in chapter fourteen.  Dieter Langewiesche, Nation, Nationalismus, Nationalstaat in Deutschland und Europa (Munich: Beck, 2000), 132–169; Barbara Eichner, History in Mighty Sounds: Musical Constructions of German

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fifth incarnation in 1896, hosted in Stuttgart, celebrated and claimed space in the name of the German nation. The boat, in which Germania sits enthroned, raised associations with Richard Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman (Der Fliegende Holländer), just as the Deutsches Sängerbund-Fest itself was symbolically aligned with Wagner’s opera The Master-Singers of Nuremberg (Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg).5 The symbolism invoked the composer as a major cultural icon and prime example of Germany’s claim to global cultural prominence as the ‘people of music,’ while the Master-Singers in particular posited a German cultural nation stretching back into an early modern, or even medieval, past.6 Pulled by white horses, long associated with monarchy, this bourgeois parade drew on older forms of royal procession, pressed into service to acclaim the nation’s political rights based on its cultural authority.7 Also reflected in this image are the nineteenth century’s expanded visual reproduction techniques. The basis of the image is a lithograph, with the crowds and buildings drawn by hand into the picture. Pasted into the middle of the drawing is a photograph of the actual parade float and horses, using a photomontage technique common at the time.8 Published in a commemorative book, the image reflects the fin-de-siècle’s widespread literacy, the exponential growth of the publishing industry, a consumer culture that prized souvenirs, and the merchandizing of cultural events sold to an audience eager to celebrate itself. This same self-celebration, garbed in nationalist colors, was common to the bourgeois journals and family magazines that mushroomed in number over the course of the nineteenth century, which also used a variety of reproduction techniques to showcase social, political, and cultural authorities. In those journals, as in the German Choral Association’s photomontage, the presentation of power invariably imagined an idealized audience. The audience drawn into place here is identifiably middle class, appearing as

National Identity, 1848–1914 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2012), 163–228; Celia Applegate, The Necessity of Music: Variations on a German Theme (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), esp. 89–98.  For the reception of the Master-Singers and nationalism, see: Thomas S. Grey, “Wagner’s Die Meistersinger as National Opera, 1868–1945,” in Music and German National Identity, ed. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 78–104.  For the “people of music” designation, see: Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, “Germans as the ‘People of Music’: Genealogy of an Identity,” in Music and German National Identity, ed. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 1–35.  Viktor Ritter von Schmeidel, Der deutsche Sängerbund 1862–1912: Aus Anlaß des fünfzigjährigen Bestandes (n.p.: Verlag des Deutschen Sängerbundes, 1912).  Before the development of snapshot photography circa 1900, outdoor scenes were difficult to capture because long exposure times made any moving objects appear blurry, or even disappear altogether. As a result, photographers routinely used photomontage to create realistic scenes after the fact. Eva Giloi, “Copyrighting the Kaiser: Publicity, Piracy, and the Right to Wilhelm II’s Image,” Central European History 45, no. 3 (2012): 407–451.

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the representative of the bourgeois fantasy of public order.9 While the working class is elided from this constructed image, so are the aristocracy and Germany’s royal dynasties, even though King Wilhelm II of Württemberg was the official patron of the festival in 1896 and Emperor Wilhelm II was a well-known fan of men’s choral singing. Germania, not the royal sovereign, parades here as the people’s figurehead. Finally, we can use the festival image to think about the social reproduction of rank that inhered in such symbolic display, even at the grass-roots level. Behind such grand festivals stood the parochial, everyday club life of middle-class male choral societies. Choral associations were especially widespread in the German states, where they were often linked to a moderately liberal vision of nationhood, especially early in the nineteenth century when conservative repression made the overt expression of progressive ideas dangerous.10 As social events, the everyday rituals of singing provided space for the expression of nationalism, while also turning heady feelings of patriotism into easily consumable entertainment. In the act of socializing, the all-male singers formed an “emotional community” that not only reinforced but also taught and produced an affective commitment to the nation and its people.11 Parading and singing in local and national festivals, the choruses staged themselves as an “embodied community,” performing a type of self-indoctrination that presumed a hierarchy of national subjects: bourgeois above working class, male above female.12 As a form of asserting social prominence, such public spectacles were never politically innocent. Even the relatively unstructured and open parades of mid-century America – open at least in terms of class and ethnicity, if not gender or race – were shot through with social contests. As Mary Ryan notes, the withdrawal of AngloSaxon elites away from the parade grounds and into Victorian domesticity signaled their rejection of the new immigrant groups who sought inclusion in the civic order through the iconography of parading.13 The use of public spectacle to advance political and social expectations continued to spread nonetheless among subaltern social classes who had previously been displaced from public display, including workers

 This reflected the associations’ actual membership which, while seemingly open to all, was mostly limited to the middle class. Separate working-class choral associations grew in number at the end of the century, reaching nearly 100,000 members in 1900 in the national German Workers’ Choral Association (Deutscher Arbeiter-Sängerbund). Applegate and Potter, “Germans as the ‘People of Music,’” 18.  Alexander Rehding, Music and Monumentality: Commemoration and Wonderment in NineteenthCentury Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 21.  Ruth Dewhurst, “Banners and Flags, Mottoes, Lieder: German Choral Societies and Material Culture, 1871–1918,” in Feelings Materialized: Emotions, Bodies, and Things in Germany, 1800–1950, ed. Derek Hillard, Heikki Lempa, and Russell Spinney (New York: Berghan Books, 2020), 222–234.  Joep Leerssen, “German Influences: Choirs, Repertoires, Nationalities,” in Choral Societies and Nationalism in Europe, ed. Krisztina Lajosi and Andreas Stynen (Leiden: Brill, 2015).  Mary Ryan, “The American Parade: Representations of the Nineteenth-Century Social Order,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 131–153.

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and women. The dialectic of these developments, with elites and subalterns establishing their claims to authority and further responding to each other’s claims, is at the heart of this handbook.

Staging What do we mean when we use the word ‘staging’? Staging is presentation, as our volume’s subtitle suggests, and it works on multiple levels: through physical spaces, embodiment, and choreography. As our chapters argue, authority needs to be staged to be felt. It needs to be acted out, made manifest in the person of the ruler or ruling group to be given reality, both to the rulers themselves and to their audiences. Embodied rituals have always been at the root of traditional practices of rulership, from coronations and court rituals, to church rites and sacraments, to the maintenance of hierarchy through social ceremonies. These strategies were consequently adopted by new groups who strove to assert their position in the social realm. Authority was thus captured not only in words and symbols; authority had materiality, whether in gestures and the movements of bodies, in the spaces they occupied, or in the images that were projected in the media about them. The term ‘staging’ can thus be taken literally, as the physical stages on which various forms of authority were played out. Many of our chapters examine the spaces that provided the platform for claims to authority, for instance new parliament buildings and scientific laboratories. Some of these spaces were contested, such as the dance halls and gymnastics fields where newly empowered nationalist groups expressed their superiority, as Heikki Lempa’s chapter explains, or the urban plazas and cafés where elites used sonic habits to present themselves as more civilized than their subalterns, as Juan Fernando Velásquez Ospina’s chapter illuminates. Urban spaces created the backdrop for both royal parades and bourgeois tourism in which social prestige was acted out, while physical maps of empire created mental maps of domination and turned school rooms into showcases of European power, as Matthew Unangst shows. Within the landscape of self-presentation, Napoleon III arises as a hinge figure at midcentury, as Edward Berenson’s chapter argues. On the one hand, the French emperor adopted traditional spectacles of rule, such as coronations and classical portraiture. On the other, he pioneered new forms of self-presentation, cloaking his reign in the modern garb of technological advances and creating a grand new stage for himself in Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s urban reconstruction of Paris. Staging can also mean self-presentation in a metaphorical sense, with dramaturgy as a referent. What might be termed ‘impression management’ was acted out in a choreography of movement, often on a very conscious level, for instance in royal processions and their emphasis on the physical presentation of militarized bodies, as the chapters by Frederik Frank Sterkenburgh and Darin Stephanov

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demonstrate. At other times, the movements inherent in class-specific cultural activities, for instance dancing or gymnastics, broadcast the cultural capital of a given social group through the mastery of certain physical gestures. In its most radical form, embodied authority took on the nature of charisma, with divine election imprinted on the bodies of mystics, both men and women, who displayed their corporal stigmata to followers at revivalist religious ceremonies, as Tine Van Osselaer illuminates. Even in the more routine venues of traditional politics, physical gestures acted out before an audience were central to establishing the right to dominance in the public sphere. Parliamentary buildings, as new political venues, facilitated the display of embodied practices, from the stances of British parliamentarians designed to demonstrate their gentlemanly deportment in the pursuit of politics, as Ben Griffin writes, to the emotional outbursts of visitors during German parliamentary sessions as a form of grass roots political participation, as Philipp Nielsen reveals. The chapters in our volume examine how these different social groups, from above and below, activated new spaces and media technologies to present themselves to a chosen audience.

Authority How do we define authority, and how does it differ from power? As Lempa suggests in the opening to his chapter: authority is power but not all power is authority, especially if it requires the naked use of force to get its way. Some of the entities we examine here – kings, parliamentarians, press barons, scientists, and other social elites – had actual political power, or at least access to the ears of politicians. Many others – mystics, tourists, dancers, gymnasts, to name a few – had a more distant relationship to political power, but gained in social and cultural influence, which could ultimately have political consequences. We might also imagine that the latter had the power of persuasion, at least the more charismatic ones. But persuasion is not the same as authority, as authority appears self-evident enough not to need the coaxing, cajoling, or rational justification that defines persuasion. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt notes, authority, which is always tied to some form of hierarchy, “is incompatible with persuasion, which presupposes equality and works through a process of argumentation.”14 If authority is not coterminous with power or persuasion, then what exactly is it? The question is far-ranging and has been contemplated in debates reaching back to the ancient Greeks and before. While we cannot give a comprehensive review of those arguments here, we will draw out three strands of thought which emerged in

 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking, 1965), 93.

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the twentieth century, and which appear most directly in our chapters. Early in the twentieth century, at a time of political upheaval and uncertainty, Max Weber developed his famous typology of the three basic forms of rule, as Xavier Marquez outlines in detail in his chapter on charisma and authority. Stated briefly here, as the basis for his ideal types of authority, Weber differentiated between the German terms Macht, as outright power, and Herrschaft, which can be translated variously as authority, dominance, hegemony, mastership, or rule.15 Weber defined Macht as the likelihood of being able to enforce one’s will even against resistance, regardless of how one attains that ability. In contrast, he defined Herrschaft as the probability that a command will be obeyed by a given set of people within a certain field, and without the explicit use of force. Macht suggests the ability to dominate under any circumstance, often through violence, while Herrschaft is less overtly physical and less all-pervasive. The latter implies the ability to carry weight within a specific context, which could mean the highest realm of state governance, but could also be as limited as a particular field of science or scholarship. Herrschaft, as authority, is thus more subtle than naked force but is still tied to the ability to command. Weber further explored the nature of the relationship of Macht to Herrschaft in his triptych of rule: legal-rational, traditional-hereditary, and charismatic. For Weber, these three types of rule have a modulated relationship to outright power. In both traditional and legal rule, institutional mechanisms such as law codes and police enforcement guarantee the dominance of the sovereign or the governing body, since the state (whether monarchic or bureaucratic) has a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force in executing its commands.16 In that sense, these two forms of authority also have formal power. Charismatic authority is different, at least in its pure state before it becomes routinized. For Weber, charisma is “a ‘residual’ form of authority whose origins lie outside tradition, on the one hand, and institutions and law, on the other.”17 As outsiders to the state, charismatic figures do not have the legal means to enforce their will through violence. To quote Weber:

 Opinions are divided on how best to translate Herrschaft. See the classic translation in: Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. and trans. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, vol. 1 (New York: Bedminster, 1968), 53–54, versus: Max Weber, Economy and Society: A New Translation, ed. and trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019), 134–135, as well as Tribe’s explanation for why he translates Herrschaft as ‘rulership’ rather than ‘authority,’ 471–473.  For Weber, an entity is defined as a state “if, and to the extent that, its administrative staff can lay claim to a monopoly of legitimate physical force in the execution of its orders.” Weber, Economy and Society: New Translation, 135–136. Weber elaborated on this definition in 1919 in a published lecture. Max Weber, “Politics as Vocation,” in Weber’s Rationalism and Modern Society: New Translations on Politics, Bureaucracy, and Social Stratification, ed. and trans. Tony Waters and Dagmar Waters (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 129–198, definition on 136.  Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi, “Introduction,” in Constructing Charisma: Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 1–17, here 3.

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followers are “not forced by custom or laws or coercive power” to submit to the charismatic leader.18 Instead, those leaders inspire action in their acolytes through their visionary and (seemingly) extraordinary feats. They can also promise future financial rewards in exchange for loyalty, and perhaps deliver on those material incentives if they achieve their ambitions.19 If they succeed in seizing the levers of power and establish themselves as the new leaders of the state, the routinization of their charisma begins. Pure charisma is then transformed either into hereditary charisma (Erbcharisma) or the charisma of office (Amtscharisma), lending their possessors the ability to enforce their authority through a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force.20 In Weber, then, there is a graduated relationship between power and authority. Arendt, on the other hand, draws a more programmatic line between power and authority in her influential essay “What is Authority?”21 For Arendt, authority implies the ability to create a willing following, not based on the overt use of violence. In opposition to Mao Zedong’s famous dictum that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” Arendt argues that this is a superficial understanding of power, reduced to the level of transitory Macht. True and lasting power only comes with consensual authority: “Where force is used, authority itself has failed.”22 For Arendt, authority differs from both persuasion and power as it is (largely) accepted as self-evident. Writing in the context of the 1950s and 1960s, after decades which had seen the rise of violent dictatorships and totalitarian regimes, Arendt worried that this kind of consensual authority “has vanished from the modern world.” If authority was formerly based on “authentic and undisputable experiences common to all,” the decline of that shared consensus initiated a crisis of authority and its replacement by far more sinister and arbitrary forms of domination.23 Setting herself the task of excavating the sources of true authority, Arendt found an answer in the Roman Republic. Rather than basing authority on a future vision of a utopian state, as nineteenth and twentieth-century progressive and radical movements did, ancient Rome grounded its vision of authority in the past. Rome’s sacred founding, an act shrouded in the past, was binding for all future generations and kept alive through communal traditions.24 The religious power of this unique origin point created the consensual acceptance of political authority. What those who commanded and those who obeyed had “in common is the hierarchy itself, whose rightness and legitimacy both recognize and where both have

 Weber, “Politics as Vocation,” 138.  Weber, Economy and Society: Outline, vol. 1, 241–245; Weber, “Politics as Vocation,” 137–140.  Weber, Economy and Society: Outline, vol. 1, 246–249 and vol. 3, 1121–1148.  Arendt, Between Past and Future, 141.  Arendt, Between Past and Future, 93. See Arendt’s evaluation of Mao Zedong’s dictum in: Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970 [1969]), 11.  Arendt, Between Past and Future, 91.  Arendt, Between Past and Future, 98, 120.

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their predetermined stable place.” In sum, writes Arendt, both the commanders and the commanded held their social truths to be self-evident.25 How were those traditions initiated, though? By what mechanisms did those truths come to seem self-evident? Arendt does not address these questions in her essay, but they are at the heart of the concept of habitus advanced by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in the decades following Arendt. In Outline of a Theory of Practice, Bourdieu develops the concept of doxa, or knowledge that is common-sensical and taken for granted. Doxa works below the level of conscious awareness: it is made up of assumptions that seem universally true or natural, and about which one cannot have different opinions because one does not even have an awareness that they could be questioned, they seem so self-evident. For Bourdieu, the transmission and reproduction of cultural doxa, which regulates everyday praxis as individuals align their actions to follow these unconscious assumptions, occurs on the physical plane. Doxa is ingrained through movement, as social relations are coordinated in time and space, acted out through physical practices that naturalize social hierarchies, and is thus passed down through generations through the mechanism of everyday routines of social interaction. As the social system comes to seem inevitable, individuals adjust to the ‘natural’ order by learning to want what is within their reach. This (unconscious) self-discipline is based on the feeling that alternate goals are not normal. For Bourdieu, habitus is “history embodied.”26 Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is but one of numerous theoretical approaches that investigate how authority comes to seem self-evident, and that illuminate the covertly coercive measures underpinning that naturalization. Other prominent approaches include the concept of cultural hegemony as outlined by the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, and Michel Foucault’s eminently influential analysis of how knowledge creates power, specifically through dressage of the body, panoptic surveillance, and other micro-techniques of power. One of the major contributions of cultural history in the half-century since Arendt wrote on authority has been to outline the factors that make the historical seem natural.27 These critical approaches appear in our chapters as well, as our authors draw on a variety of interpretive tools used in cultural history and adjacent fields of study, including the history of emotions, urban geography, persona studies, thick description, gender studies, media studies, and sound studies. By providing multiple entry points to understanding how authority was established and

 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 120–121.  Bourdieu elaborates on these concepts at length in: Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), and the concept of doxa specifically in Chapter 4.  For a classic but still relevant anthology of critical theories and cultural history approaches, see: Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner, eds., Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

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contested in the nineteenth century, we hope to illuminate how dominance is naturalized and resisted in our own time as well.

Nineteenth-Century Europe and the Diversification of Authority Our handbook’s center of gravity lies in the long nineteenth century, roughly beginning with the French Revolution and culminating in World War I. Our focus is primarily on Europe, although it would be false to draw a clear dividing line between Europe and other parts of the world. Certainly, nineteenth-century Europeans did not draw a line, instead engaging in an increasingly frenetic imperialism to exploit foreign resources and markets. Several of our chapters explore these global connections and how Europeans maintained dominance in both foreign colonies and domestic empires such as the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Along with racial dominance, we draw on gender as a useful category of historical analysis, to borrow Joan Wallach Scott’s famous formulation.28 Women appear in our chapters both as actors with political and social influence, as Sally Totman shows for Gertrude Bell, and as subjects who were acted upon, in particular as the physical enactment of masculinity and the marginalization of women were used to undergird male political power. Class took on its own dialectic of conflict and compromise. The middle class, in its ascendency, enjoyed increased access to both political and economic power as the nineteenth century progressed, even if most European states did not adopt direct forms of democratic governance. In the face of these challenges, older elites clung to their hereditary privileges and fought to maintain constitutions that mixed authoritarian and democratic power structures. In that sense, there was a persistence of the old regime, although it did not go unchallenged.29 The American and French Revolutions, the Haitian Revolution, the Decembrist Revolt, the Greek War of Independence, the July Revolution, the Belgian War of Independence, the November Uprising in Poland, the pan-European Revolutions of 1848, and the Italian Risorgimento were among the many collective actions that rested on the ability of charismatic outsiders and other non-traditional contenders to galvanize ‘the people’ into political action. In terms of numbers, aristocratic and bourgeois notables were eclipsed after mid-century by the growing socialist parties, which became increasingly visible in the parliaments and on the streets of European cities as they organized themselves into modern mass

 Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986): 1053–1075.  The phrase was coined by: Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York: Pantheon, 1981); for a critique of Mayer’s arguments, see for instance: James J. Sheehan, “The Persistence of the Old Regime,” Social History 8, no. 1 (1983): 111–112.

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movements. Despite retaining their control over the levers of state power and institutions of social reproduction, including schools and the military, elites found themselves in need of appropriating new techniques of presentation to compete with these alternate centers of authority. Much of the contest over authority was played out in the cultural realm, which served to buttress political action. As an origin point, the French Revolution of 1789 stands out as a catalyst for change both politically and culturally, even at a time when the powers of restoration worked hard to contain the forces that had been unleashed.30 In the half-century following the revolution, Europe witnessed an alternating cycle of political revolt, often based on a forward-looking, utopian idealism, and reactionary repression, leaving contemporaries uncertain about the fate of their political institutions and the authority of traditional notables. Along with political turmoil, the revolutionary era also spurred the rise of the ‘historical actor,’ to use historian Peter Fritzsche’s term. As Europeans came to terms with the longlasting effects of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, they expressed their personal experiences in vast numbers of letters and personal anecdotes. Published in the press or circulated among friends, such personal accounts legitimized their authors as valid authorities on contemporary events. As historical actors and commentators, ordinary people crafted personalized ‘epic-dramas’ about the Napoleonic period by writing about their experiences and by drafting “idiosyncratic syllabi” chosen from a large number of different sources.31 As a result, writes Fritzsche, “history had become a mass medium that authorized, made poignant, and gave value to ordinary testimony.”32 This new emphasis on individual opinion, given sustenance by the Romantic belief that “authentication had to come from within the individual soul,” caused consternation among both conservatives who held to the traditional canon of received wisdom and progressives who championed a new order based on rationality and reason.33 John Stuart Mill, the English philosopher and political economist, was among the latter, voicing his misgivings in a series of articles, titled “The Spirit of the Age,” in the British intellectual journal The Examiner in 1831. Mill believed he was witnessing a transition in the basis of authority, and while transition was welcome for a progressive like Mill,

 For restoration governments, see: Michael Broers and Ambrogio A. Caiani, eds., A History of the European Restorations, Volume One: Governments, States and Monarchy (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).  Peter Fritzsche, “The Historical Actor,” in Constructing Charisma: Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 134–144, here 143.  Fritzsche, “Historical Actor,” 134.  Robert K. Webb, “A Crisis of Authority: Early Nineteenth-Century British Thought,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 24, no. 1 (1992): 1–16, here 13.

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who could not fathom humankind staying stagnant, the tools to guide the process were hard to find. As Mill wrote: But reason itself will teach most men that they must, in the last resort, fall back upon the authority of still more cultivated minds, as the ultimate sanction of the convictions of their reason itself. But where is the authority which commands this confidence, or deserves it? Nowhere: and here we see the peculiar character, and at the same time the peculiar inconvenience, of a period of moral and social transition. At all other periods there exists a large body of received doctrine, covering nearly the whole field of the moral relations of man, and which no one thinks of questioning, backed as it is by the authority of all, or nearly all, persons, supposed to possess knowledge enough to qualify them for giving an opinion on the subject.34

While doctrine may have conferred authority in the past, to Mill rationality now appeared to be the ultimate outside force bestowing legitimacy, and terrestrial authority increased the closer one came to the pinnacle of rationality. All around him, though, Mill saw the demotion of rationality in favor of opinionated persuasion, largely through the growing mass press, leading him to lament that: “For the first time, arts for attracting public attention form a necessary part of the qualifications even of the deserving; and skill in these goes farther than any other quality towards ensuring success.”35 The power of the audience to decide which authority to follow, and the concomitant need to win audiences through public persuasion, was at the root of what Mill regarded as a crisis of authority. What to Mill was a crisis, was to others an opportunity. As the century progressed, subalterns who were expected to remain quiescent instead laid claim to authority alongside traditional elites. The elite world of scholarship responded, as historian Robert Webb notes, by basing intellectual authority on neither inherited wisdom nor individual opinion, but on a new set of metrics and institutionalized procedures for establishing the veracity of scientific claims. Expertise, not argumentation, became the basis for “competent authority.” This refashioned authority was established and reproduced in new venues of knowledge, which developed a “consensus about standards” and how to judge the worthiness of authority figures.36 The crisis of reason and opinion was resolved, writes Webb, at least until the advent of postmodernism in the late twentieth century. As Martin Kohlrausch reveals in his chapter, however, even the sciences and their technical institutions continued to have to appeal to the public, and well to the end of the nineteenth century employed the same media techniques of attracting public attention that Mills found so worrying. Audiences and their opinions continued to matter.

 John Stuart Mill, “The Spirit of the Age” II, Examiner, 23 January 1831: 50–52.  John Stuart Mill, “Civilization,” London and Westminster Review, 3 and 25 April 1835, quoted in: Webb, “Crisis of Authority,” 10.  Webb, “Crisis of Authority,” 16.

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At the far end of the long nineteenth century, just after the end of World War I, the public acclamation of Daniel Mannix gives a striking example of how far the diversification of authority had progressed.37 Mannix, the Irish Roman Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, arrived in San Francisco from Australia in the spring of 1920 as part of a long journey home to visit his mother in Ireland. He embarked upon a transcontinental train ride, making regular stops to hold mass rallies in support of the Irish republican cause, drawing thousands. Arriving at Pier 60 on the New York City waterfront, Mannix’s peculiarly authoritative status in matters of Irish independence represented a problem. Waiting to embark on the White Star ocean liner Baltic, Mannix was confronted by two groups. The ship’s cooks and stewards, primarily English, declared that they would strike rather than work the vessel on its transatlantic voyage. In response, the Irish coal passers for the ship’s engines exhorted that they would strike if Mannix wasn’t allowed on, and kissed his ring as he approached the ship. The Irish won the battle at Pier 60 through sheer force of numbers. The Baltic did manage to depart, but was intercepted by the British Navy, which took Mannix ashore under guard at Penzance, Cornwall. This intolerable event touched off the Irish Patriotic Strike back in New York and Boston, illuminating how symbols of authority cut across established social and political boundaries as even highly traditional authority figures were appropriated by subalterns vying for political influence. While the International Longshoremen’s Association opposed the strike as “illegal, unauthorized and foolish,” rank-and-file union members pressed ahead and made alliances across racial lines in the name of a high-ranking member of the Catholic Church, a man both conservative in his views on private morality and progressive in his advocacy of workers’ rights. Despite its name and seemingly singular cause and purpose, the strike spread along the docks as Irish longshoremen and their wives made inroads with African-American dockworkers. Universalizing Mannix’s unjust capture into a general sentiment for liberty for other groups, the protests eventually crystalized, with the support of black nationalist Marcus Garvey, into both a call for self-determination and a clarion call for international labor. But the impetus at the strike’s heart was a single man, allied to a single cause: a Sinn Feiner for Irish independence, an Australian bishop in the port of New York. His actual power on the piers was technically and legally nil, but his capacity as an authority, for the dockworkers, was clearly immense.

 Bruce Nelson, Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 227–238, quote on 230. The travels of Archbishop Mannix are given an excellent expository gloss in the first chapter of: Bruce Nelson, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

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Audiences and Elites Mannix’s example raises three further considerations for understanding the similarities and differences between the nineteenth century and the age of Louis XIV. One significant continuity from the pre-revolutionary age is that traditional elites maintained outright power, even if it was veiled behind other justifications. We must not lose sight of the fact that, for many traditional elites, authority was not divorced from the ability to use violence. Instead, their vested ability to apply force created the scaffolding that upheld their pervasive social authority. One can think here of the imperial maps that Unangst examines in his chapter. Imperial maps justified colonial rule by clearing out indigenous populations symbolically and marking out territory for colonization, but this iconographic staging of European authority was backed up by guns and gunboat diplomacy. In the same way, Queen Victoria became symbolic of the imagined community of the British Empire, and to some extent elicited allegiance from colonized subjects, but Britain’s ability to enforce its presence rested on decades of forcible, imperial rule. As such, we may say that Herrschaft was an additive tactic to expand traditional Macht into spheres that soldiers, spies, and the elites themselves could not reasonably enter, or at least not easily dominate. Within Europe, too, traditional elites maintained their authority thanks to longstanding instruments of power, including outright forms of physical violence or threats of exclusion. As Van Osselaer argues, nineteenth-century popes sought to present themselves in personalized ways to shore up the faithful, but they also still had the power to excommunicate. In the same way, the German Emperor Wilhelm I used processions to display his authority to his subjects, as Sterkenburgh shows in detail, but the emperor also had the power of the army and the police behind him. His grandson, Wilhelm II, may have been Europe’s first ‘film star,’ but he also claimed the power to command his soldiers to shoot on their fathers and brothers if he so desired.38 In a similar way, the bourgeoisie used its economic muscle and growing access to legislative machinery to underpin its social hegemony. All these elites claimed consensual authority, but their Herrschaft was still upheld by Macht in the last resort. One significant departure from the age of Louis XIV was that elites compensated for the challenges to their power – challenges that were given teeth in times of violent revolution – by employing what has been termed ‘soft power.’ Unlike ‘hard power,’ which is akin to Macht in its ability to force others to obey, soft power is based on persuasion by example, as it seeks to cajole others to follow by setting an attractive model for behavior.39 Soft power is therefore not quite the same as

 John C. G. Röhl, Wilhelm II: Der Aufbau der persönlichen Monarchie, 1888–1900 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001), 452–453.  The term was coined by former Assistant Secretary of Defense Joseph Nye and became popular in international affairs circles. Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004). For the term’s application to nineteenth-century Europe, see for

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authority, at least not according to Arendt’s understanding that persuasion implies equality and therefore lacks authority’s aura of inevitability.40 Here the difference between nineteenth-century elites and pre-revolutionary power-holders like Louis XIV becomes most visible. The French king may have sought to represent himself with a broader set of iconographic strategies to a wider audience than his predecessors, but he still had unquestioned authority in Arendt’s sense: even critics of the Bourbon dynasty did not seriously contest monarchy as an institution before the radicals of the French Revolution did so. In that way, the concept of soft power is all the more appropriate to the post-revolutionary nineteenth century, since it implies a type of symbolic, but fragile, enticement based on sentiment and affect, at root in many of the strategies of self-presentation outlined in this handbook. How effective was soft power with its emphasis on persuasion, and did it meet its intended purpose? Here we enter the realm of reception history: not only how audiences responded to the presentation of authority, but also how they consumed, appropriated, or modified those mediated messages to fit within a multitude of everyday experiences. As the example of Archbishop Mannix shows, the diversification of authority made it possible to combine a multiplicity of allegiances, sometimes in seeming contradiction with each other. Elites’ attempts to harness popular forms of representation thus have to be put into the broader context of media offerings, including popular spectacle, pedagogy, and entertainment. As Eva Giloi’s chapter demonstrates, subjects approached Europe’s princes with multiple personal motives, including a desire for entertainment, recognition from peers, and touristic cachet. The issue is not simply whether the iconography used by elites had its intended effects, but how consistently it did so as it competed for attention with other centers of authority. In the case of Queen Victoria, for instance, Walter Bagehot’s dictum of 1867 that “royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions” is often invoked to emphasize her representational capital as a form of soft power.41 Victoria’s ability to interest an eager audience turned her into a “media monarch” and a focal point for identification both nationally and (to some extent) within the empire.42 Her public ceremonials, for instance the Diamond Jubilee of 1897, drew massive crowds and unleashed a slew of memorabilia. She was hardly alone in eliciting such public enthusiasm, though. When the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi visited London in 1864, half

instance: Royal Heirs and the Uses of Soft Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Frank Lorenz Müller and Heidi Mehrkens (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).  Arendt, Between Past and Future, 93.  Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966 [1867]), 82, 86.  John Plunkett, Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); John Plunkett, “Of Death and Dominion: Queen Victoria and the Cult of Colonial Loyalty,” in Ruler Personality Cults from Empires to Nation-States and Beyond, ed. Kirill Postoutenko and Darin Stephanov (London: Routledge, 2021).

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a million people came out to greet him, the same number that had come to welcome the Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth in Manchester thirty years earlier. They, too, had been fêted with public festivities and an abundant array of memorabilia, leading Victoria to grouse that these kinds of public honors were “usually reserved for Royalty.”43 The fact that revolutionaries and monarchs could be greeted with the same fervor suggests that the desire to attend any sort of spectacle per se – what one might call ‘event enthusiasm’ – was a significant motivating factor even when it came to participating in royal celebrations.44 Seen in this light, the tenor of the monarchy’s soft power takes on a more tenuous tone. Victoria’s example highlights another, obvious difference between the nineteenth century and the age of Louis XIV, namely the reach and effect of mass media. New contenders to authority presented a threat to older elites in part because of the ‘attention economy’ created by new media technologies, whereby a large number of media outlets fought over the (necessarily limited) attention of the public by highlighting some personas over others.45 As Betto van Waarden demonstrates in his chapter, mass media enabled social and political celebrities to expand their visibility and enhance their public profile. With some late-nineteenth-century illustrated newspapers selling over a million copies per week, those who had access to media outlets could reach a vastly larger audience than had Louis XIV. While the absolutist king had seen his image spread widely in certain time-honored media – on coinage and in church liturgy, for instance – most of his representational strategies were aimed at and absorbed by a small coterie of aristocrats.46 In the nineteenth century’s media landscape, in marked contrast, news of even marginalized mystics could stir up the curiosity of a national following, as Van Osselaer shows. We must be careful, though, not to assume that nineteenth-century mass media ushered in a ‘mass culture’ composed of disembodied, abstract audiences, despite what social critics liked to think at the time. While our chapters often reflect on the ways that elites imagined themselves pitted against irrational masses, we understand those ‘amorphous crowds’ to be acting in ways that corresponded to multiple, often unstated interests, allegiances, and motives. Audiences were as important to the staging of authority as the actors themselves.

 Lucy Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 332, 336, quote on 336.  For an elaboration on this idea, see: Eva Giloi, “Introduction,” in The Cultural History of Fame, vol. 5: Age of Industry, ed. Eva Giloi, gen. ed. P. David Marshall (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2022).  For a brief definition of the term ‘attention economy,’ see: P. David Marshall, Christopher Moore, and Kim Barbour, Persona Studies: An Introduction (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), 224.  See examples in: Burke, Fabrication.

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Handbook Structure The chapters in this volume follow a uniform organizational structure. They each begin with an overview of their field of study and methodology, whether it be the history of emotions, urban geography, persona studies, and so forth. From there, they present a detailed study of their topic, acknowledging both the specificity of the nineteenth century and how nineteenth-century developments were embedded in a longer history. In their first section (I), the chapters illuminate the antecedents that set the groundwork for developments in the nineteenth century. In their longer second section (II), they examine innovations that were characteristic to the nineteenth century. In their third section (III), they sketch out seeds of future impact contained in those nineteenthcentury developments, bridging the caesura of World War I. What follows here is a brief sketch of each chapter and how it fits within the larger themes of the volume.

Traditional and New Forms of Authority Was the nineteenth century an age of charisma? Weber seemed ambivalent on the point, at least when it came to ‘pure’ charisma in its ideal type. Weber discerned charisma in his era in artists and religious figures who impressed their disciples with divine revelations: the Mormon leader Joseph Smith and the lyrical poet Stefan George, for instance. In politics, he observed the potential for demagogues to appeal to mass audiences through mass media, but he also detected a greater rationalization and bureaucratization of society, which fostered disenchantment with miracles and undermined the basis of charismatic authority. While he identified the two Napoleon Bonapartes, earlier in the century, as charismatic, politicians in his own time, such as William Gladstone and Theodore Roosevelt, found their charismatic potential hemmed in by the orderly functioning of the political party machine.47 And Weber flatly rejected the German Emperor Wilhelm II’s attempts to recharismatize his reign through royal spectacle: the emperor may use demagogic techniques at times, but he was “the very opposite” of the “genuinely” charismatic ruler since he relied on the “convenient pretensions” of the divine right of kings.48

 Weber, Economy and Society: Outline, vol. 1: 242, 245; vol. 3: 1130–1133, 1393, 1400–1401.  Weber, Economy and Society: Outline, vol. 3: 1114 and footnote 4 on 1157. Weber also considered Wilhelm II a “simpleton.” Weber, Economy and Society: Outline, vol. 3: 1148 and footnote 13 on 1157. Other contemporaries saw more charismatic potential in the emperor. See: Martin Kohlrausch, “The Workings of Royal Celebrity: Wilhelm II as Media Emperor,” in Constructing Charisma: Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 52–66.

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Xavier Marquez’s chapter on charisma and authority helps us to make sense of the elusive nature of charisma in the nineteenth century. Marquez outlines the contours of Weber’s thought on charisma, separating it from similar, popularly used terms like celebrity, prestige, and fame, and thus retaining its rigor as a tool for historical analysis. One of Weber’s main innovations, writes Marquez, was to theorize how charisma relates to authority, since charisma is understood as a quality inherent by definition in outsiders while authority presumes access to traditional (i.e. insider) justifications of power. Following on Weber, Marquez elaborates that hybrid and ‘routinized’ charisma, rather than ‘ideal type’ charisma, dominated the presentation of power in the nineteenth century: those who sought followers often did so in populist ways, mimicking the magnetic display of charisma without wielding its actual authority. Audiences were crucial to whether routinized charisma succeeded or failed as a legitimizing strategy. More so than for traditional or bureaucratic elites, followers needed to believe in the miraculous powers of their would-be charismatic leaders and decide whether their claims were credible. By delineating the conceptual framework for understanding charisma and its relationship to authority, Marquez’s chapter lays the definitional groundwork for many of the chapters in this volume. At the century’s mid-point, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte stood out as a leader who employed a variety of techniques, both traditional and charismatic, to cement his authority. As Marquez writes, Napoleon III offers an early example of a personality cult, claiming ‘the people’ – the entire nation of France – as the foundation of his power, without allowing them actual political participation. Edward Berenson’s chapter elaborates on how Napoleon III created his public persona as a ‘people’s king,’ and how he was able to use that persona to seize and maintain power despite suppressing the political promise of the Revolution of 1848 that had swept him into power. Berenson reviews the merits and demerits of the term Bonapartism, concluding that Napoleon III was not merely a pale imitation of Napoleon I. He demonstrates instead that Napoleon III’s political strategies were inventive in significant ways, even though he also activated his uncle’s Napoleonic myth on his path to power. Napoleon III threw everything into the pot of his public relations stew: plebiscites, public appearances and speeches, coronation ceremonies featuring royal iconography and religious ritual, written publications outlining his political platform, public festivals and national holidays, military parades, inauguration ceremonies of public works and urban improvements, grand new boulevards to showcase his power, collectible photographs and lithographs that depicted him as a loving father and husband. Undergirding it all was an environment of censorship and the repression of dissent. The French emperor was a pioneer in mixing together the imperial and the populist, bringing together monarchy and democracy, and creating that hybrid creature: the ‘people’s king’ who ruled autocratically for everyone.

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The Diversification of Authority: New Actors among Old Elites In the nineteenth century, authority lived on continuity and crisis. Rather than a demise of authority, traditional leaders were complemented by new agents, representational strategies, and public stages on which authority was acted out. As Betto van Waarden suggests in his chapter, traditional, elitist legitimizations of political notables were gradually replaced by a ‘mass personalization’ of authority figures. The Catholic Church, one of the classic centers of authority in early modern Europe, represents a clear example of this transformation in the nineteenth century. As Tine Van Osselaer argues in the first part of her chapter, papal authority was reshaped and revitalized as the Vatican reconfigured age-old religious iconography with a newly mediatized audience in mind. Papal authority was imbued, writes Van Osselaer, with a new emotional culture that invited the faithful to connect to the Church hierarchy through a cult of the papacy and through empathy with the pope as an embattled prisoner in the wars of Italian unification. A focus on emotion and catharsis also enabled charismatic forms of religious authority to emerge. Many of these charismatics were women, including Catholic mystics who did not necessarily challenge the institutional authority of the male clergy, but set up parallel sites of ecstatic religious experience. Outside of established churches, other religious visionaries used their marginalized status to claim a more authentic connection to the divine. Van Osselaer shows how these men and women – the preacher Mary Ann Girling poses a prime example – used the new mass media in exceptionally savvy ways to build their following. If new forms of laic authority transformed religion, so did the rise of technical experts change scientific authority. Early modern Europe boasted outstanding engineers, as Martin Kohlrausch shows in the famous case of Sébastian Le Prestre de Vauban, the architect of Louis XIV’s fortresses. Vauban’s authority derived from his proximity to the king, though, and it was not until centuries later that he received posthumous recognition as an expert in his own right. Change came in the late eighteenth century with the British inventor James Watt, who was regarded as a hero of the nation and enjoyed a cult-like following. By the middle of the nineteenth century, with the establishment of modern, state-sponsored scientific institutes, gentlemen scientists and inventors such as Watt were replaced by star-like national scientists and celebrity engineers – Charles Darwin, Rudolf Virchow, and Gustave Eiffel among the most prominent – who saw themselves serving their nations through their scientific work. Two main factors led to the rise of the celebrity scientist, writes Kohlrausch: an expanded number of scientific spaces in the urban landscape and a rapidly growing mass media. By the end of the nineteenth century, scientific experts had become publicly fêted authorities seen as guardians of the social body. In the twentieth century, the authority of the expert began to erode. Gone were the times of great inventions and heroic discoveries, replaced by institutionalized ‘big science.’ Experts such as Wernher von Braun found themselves in a Faustian bargain, serving murderous regimes; those who avoided the pitfalls of power,

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such as Albert Einstein, won international fame without finding a place of national authority. Mass media is the common denominator that connects these cases, as it affected the diffusion of religious, scientific, and other types of authority. As van Waarden argues, the nineteenth century saw the rise of mass media as a central, and soon unavoidable, tool for staging authority. Louis XIV had stood above the media: he was its subject but was not formed by it. By the late eighteenth century, political leaders such as George Washington and King George III were openly discussed, criticized, and celebrated in the public sphere but remained aloof from directly currying popular favor. In the nineteenth century, finally, a new form of celebritization made public figures seem intimately accessible to the reading masses who followed their lives, scandals, and public feats with incessant intensity. From print’s earliest beginnings in the midseventeenth century, newspapers grew in volume and circulation to the point that, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, London alone boasted over fifty newspapers, and by the end of the century close to 700. The daily circulation of the largest British newspapers reached over 200,000 by 1900. With the growing social predominance of news, readers decided on following some public figures over others, and thus determined their level of renown within the attention economy. Mass media also shaped authority visually, van Waarden shows, first through lithography and photography in the nineteenth century, and then through film, radio, and television in the twentieth century. Public figures tried to master the new media landscape, often succeeding in manipulating it to their own ends. Just as often, press demands and audience expectations forced their hands, and they found themselves having to play to the new media logic in ways that exposed them to fierce public scrutiny.

Presenting Authority on the Political Stage Societies in the age of constitutionalism experienced a diversification of authority in the sense that more agents gained, and demanded, access to political participation. That participation, whether granted or denied, had to be acted out in physical spaces, from urban streets and plazas to palaces and parliament buildings. Philipp Nielsen’s chapter shows how the political stage shifted from royal architecture to purpose-built parliament buildings, as ideas of constitutionalism and nationalism gained ground in the nineteenth century. Both palaces and parliaments were designed to impress audiences and claim social and political influence for those who used them. The big change between them, symbolically, was the degree to which audiences were expected or allowed to participate in the proceedings on the ‘stage.’ Taking cues from the history of architecture and the history of emotions, Nielsen understands palaces and parliamentary buildings as environments for political theater, and his chapter analyzes how emotions were expressed in and around these structures, as well as how design elements acknowledged, created, and guided the

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feelings of subjects and citizens. Debates about design focused, for instance, on the feelings that would be aroused as speakers performed at the rostrum or responded to outbursts from other parliamentarians on the floor or from visitors in the galleries above. The chapter shows how parliamentary buildings and those performing in them learned to allow, but also to regulate, expressions of emotions and how control of the passions became a crucial element of projecting political power. Ben Griffin’s contribution draws our attention to the human body and to gendered performances within the British parliamentary sphere. Embodied performance, writes Griffin, represented a potent, added layer of politics, above and beyond the routines of statecraft, party maneuvering, and the discourse of political speeches. As celebrities of their era, members of parliament staged their authority and asserted the legitimacy of the constitutional settlement by taking part in political debate. Members of the public who attended sessions as an audience and the ever curious and growing political press scrutinized these performances by speakers and discussants. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, Griffin explains how audiences were interested not only in the content of debate, but in the parliamentarians’ physical appearance, tone of voice, attire, gestures, and countenance. Viewers interpreted those physical representations as clues to whether the parliamentarians were proper politicians, living up to the habits that distinguished the gentleman politician. This set of male attributes created a parliamentary culture that rested on the exclusion of women and on the construction of certain kinds of ‘whiteness.’ Parliaments hence became spheres in which non-elites interacted with the governing class and where accepted and acceptable representations of political power were defined. Frederik Frank Sterkenburgh explores royal entries as opportunities for monarchs to stage their authority and communicate with various audiences. By following Wilhelm I of Prussia over four decades, the chapter throws into sharp relief specific aspects of royal authority that the prince chose to represent at different stages of his career and in response to political challenges. The relationship between Wilhelm I and his subjects certainly had its high and low points: driven abroad by the Revolution of 1848, the prince returned to become King of Prussia in 1861 and eventually to communicate imperial might as German Emperor from 1871. Sterkenburgh bases his chapter on Edward Shils’ concept of the social center and Clifford Geertz’s thick description of cultural practices to reveal how the emperor and his entourage on the one hand and various municipal authorities on the other used the sovereign’s royal processions to define their relationship to each other. Each side determined the ceremonial elements within its grasp: the order of procession, choreography, soundscape, and attire (by the monarchy) versus the placement and symbolism of decorations and the content of formal reception speeches (by the municipalities). In the process, the emperor sought to embody his sovereignty in the urban space while local authorities practiced a form of Eigensinn as defined by Alf Lüdtke: the self-assertion used by subalterns to press their claims in everyday life.

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Nationalism and Empire as Modes of Hegemony In his chapter on cartography, Matthew Unangst demonstrates how mapping became a key instrument for envisioning and establishing European dominance over large parts of the world. Nineteenth-century cartography built on the significant role that maps had played in establishing centralized states within Europe in previous centuries. As European states expanded outwards into colonies, they incorporated scientific advances in mapping that were closely linked to voyages of exploration. The authority of the modern state thus rested on ever more detailed and potent maps. This was true in both a practical and a representational sense: maps were used to dominate territory on the ground as well as to claim an alleged European superiority. Imperial maps implied European omniscience, for instance by disregarding the native knowledge that went into their creation. Maps increasingly went beyond depicting some form of ‘reality’ and added new tokens of authority: map iconography depicted European figures as harbingers of civilization, while native populations were relegated to the maps’ margins as mere, exotic color. As Unangst also demonstrates, the rise of the celebrity explorer and the expansion of scientific mapping were closely intertwined, one of several ways in which maps were drawn into nationalization projects. In the nineteenth century, maps served as a communicative tool to establish ‘imagined communities,’ which in turn established authority over territory. In the twentieth century, ‘suggestive maps’ depicting politically desirable outcomes in regional conflicts came to be openly associated with national missions for territorial expansion. Unangst demonstrates how maps and the authority they signified were forged in the interplay between Europe and the territories it conquered and dominated. Sally Totman unravels this nexus as she examines European interactions with the Middle East, and the role played by European celebrity explorers in those encounters. At the beginning of the century, Napoleon I’s campaign in Egypt combined military conquest, scientific scholarship, and political charisma, an amalgamation that influenced how Europeans perceived the region. A century later, a similar mix of factors drove the media presence of Gertrude Bell and T. E. Lawrence (‘of Arabia’). Their public personas – and the public acclamation they received – were fueled by internecine European power struggles which assigned key strategic importance to the Middle East. The explorers’ authority rested on their first-hand knowledge of a region which appeared enigmatic to European eyes, and their deeds, broadcast in the media, solidified Europeans’ assumptions about their own superiority. The explorers’ celebrity was not merely a sideshow of ‘exotic’ adventures but was put to practical use for European colonial projects, for instance winning political support and monetary funding. Explorer personas and their nations merged, constituting a new, hybrid authority for both. The resulting transformation of Europe’s perception of the Middle East had lasting consequences: rather than being seen as an entity in its own right, the region was understood as territory waiting to be exploited.

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The interplay of new forms of visibility and new configurations of space forms the basis of Darin Stephanov’s chapter as well. Stephanov analyzes how rulers of the Russian and Ottoman Empires dramatically increased their public visibility in the nineteenth century. Numerous new ceremonial events extended the celebration of the ruler from the capital to the provinces, a process increasingly supported by new means of communication. In Stephanov’s reading, this widened field of symbolic interaction constituted a genuinely modern form of authority, in that it tightened the center’s connections to the periphery while also bridging long-standing social and religious divides. In contrast to earlier inspection tours undertaken by rulers, nineteenth-century sultans and tsars strove not only to see their subjects, but also to be seen by them. The ability to stage this visual presence far beyond the capital turned into a signifier of modern authority per se. This visualization process can be understood in terms of adaptive practices. Although religious considerations limited ruler visibility to some extent in the Ottoman case, Ottoman rulers were inspired by what Stephanov calls Russia’s ‘dynastic pantheon,’ which included a multitude of objects capable of relaying a positive image of the monarch. As Stephanov writes, a full-blown personality cult emerged out of these developments by the end of the nineteenth century, with a lasting legacy in both countries today.

Taking Possession of Public Spaces With the rise of the public sphere in the late eighteenth century, bourgeois civil society gained in prestige as the locus for intellectual authority. That authority was also conveyed through physical gestures and embodied practices. The diffusion of authority from courtly society to civil society was acted out by competing bodies – aristocratic and bourgeois – moving through social spaces. After the regicide of 1793, as Heikki Lempa’s chapter demonstrates, the special power of the royal body which had revealed its connection to the divine, for instance the royal touch that healed scrofula, no longer carried persuasive power. In the same way, the embodied practices of the aristocracy, for instance the courtly dances that visualized nobles’ superiority through civilized gestures, were challenged by social groups who newly sought authority in the name of the nation. Into this transition stepped the dance-master and the gymnast, both of whom trained the bourgeoisie in bodily habits of authority. As subjects turned into citizens and increasingly moved into cities, their (male) bodies took on authoritative character, and their physical education came to dominate the thought of nationalists. The goal of producing strong, limber bodies became a shared cultural project across Europe: influential books on etiquette, exercise, and diet were translated across multiple languages, and Germans, Danes, Swedes, Czechs, the French, and the English all drew inspiration from each other for their nationalist organizations. As Lempa writes, these embodied practices – dance, dueling, gymnastics – became authorization practices.

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In Eva Giloi’s chapter, the contest for prestige and hegemony was played out through tourism as a way to lay claim to urban space. Giloi’s chapter examines two parallel developments in the nineteenth century: the transformation of the royal tour as part of the nationalization of monarchy, and the rise of cultural tourism as a strategy employed by the educated bourgeoisie to enhance its cultural hegemony. Modern tourism had its origins in early modern travel practices such as the pilgrimage, the Grand Tour, and the royal tour of the realm. In the nineteenth century, the royal tour was slowly replaced by public appearances in which sovereigns demonstrated their utility to the nation, although princes also continued to act out their possession of the urban landscape through processions and parades. In those same years, writes Giloi, educated middle-class tourists developed strategies to enhance their cultural capital, developing forms of travel that set them off from their subalterns: middle class above lower classes, educated bourgeoisie above businessmen, men above women. Seeking cultural epiphany by viewing Europe’s artistic and architectural heritage, educated bourgeois tourists visited national capitals and laid claim to those spaces symbolically. In the process, they also appropriated the country’s monarchs who set themselves out on parade. Monarchy thus entered the world of entertainment, consumed as a tourist attraction and as a metonym for place. In his study of newly independent Colombia, Juan Fernando Velásquez Ospina details how sound and noise became social markers that structured urban space. Velásquez’ chapter details a development witnessed by nineteenth-century European cities as well, but under the distinct circumstances of a postcolonial society. Colonial cities were sites of overt social and racial segregation prior to independence, divisions that fell away, de jure, with the creation of the republic as a national community. Nonetheless, Colombian elites sought to retain their political power and social distinction by performing a complicated balancing act: they displayed their independence from Europe by claiming political power as representatives of the new nation, while also enforcing their domination over Colombia’s lower classes by connecting themselves to metropolitan European patterns of civilization. Sound was drawn into this project of domination, writes Velásquez, as elites categorized the sounds of the lower classes as noise, enabling them to impose a regime of aural discipline on subalterns. The older colonial town had located elites close to the central plaza to enhance their racial dominance. The postcolonial aural regime that privileged ‘civilized’ music over undisciplined indigenous noise performed a similar social stratification, retaining the racialized segmentation of the colonial era. Yet urbanization and new technologies, such as phonographs, disrupted the desired aural and spatial order. As authority proliferated and urban populations increased, old as well as new public spaces – plazas, parks, ballrooms, cafés, and theaters – became sites of contestation for status and power.

Traditional and New Forms of Authority

Xavier Marquez

Charisma and Authority Abstract: This chapter explores the connections between the idea of charisma and the idea of authority, including the ways in which social, political, and economic changes affected the ‘staging’ of charismatic authority starting in modern times. It begins by briefly sketching the religious genealogy of the idea of charisma, from its origins in Pauline theology to its usage by German theologians in the nineteenth century. It then presents a detailed account of Weber’s paradigmatic account of charisma, stressing the ways in which he appropriated and secularized what was until then essentially a religious concept with little applicability outside of theological polemics. Weber’s main conceptual innovation was to connect charisma to authority, and thus to the recognition by others of exceptional qualities demanding obedience, independent of their religious content. Charisma must nevertheless be distinguished from a number of superficially similar concepts, including celebrity, prestige, fame, and popularity, insofar as concepts like celebrity or fame do not have the same connection to authority even if they grant influence or cultural prestige. But charismatic authority, like all authority, needs to be staged to reach any group larger than a few people; and the technologies available to represent charisma and decode such representations changed immensely over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Changes in the economy, society, and politics also produced new sources of ‘charismatic competition,’ as industrial leaders, artists, and demagogues could and did make claims to authority based on charismatic claims that sometimes conflicted with the routinized charisma of traditional monarchs. The final section of the chapter systematically explores the ways in which these changes affected the staging of charismatic authority in the last two centuries. Keywords: charisma, authority, Max Weber, celebrity, fame ✶✶✶

This chapter explores the connection between charisma and authority. Its inescapable starting point is the thought of Max Weber, whose articulation of the concept of charismatic authority made it possible for a religious term with little use outside of theological polemics to become a major tool of social analysis and an idea of enormous cultural significance. The popular and scholarly success of charisma, I argue, has much to do with how Weber linked the Christian idea of a ‘gift of grace’ with secular authority in the early twentieth century. The chapter thus begins by sketching a brief genealogy of charisma, from its origins in Pauline theology (specifically 1 Corinthians and Romans), through its near disappearance after the second century, to its usage by German theologians in the nineteenth century. I draw in particular on John Potts’ A https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110574012-002

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History of Charisma for this review, and follow this with a more detailed account of Weber’s paradigmatic account of charisma, intended to stress the ways in which he appropriated and secularized the concept.1 Weber’s main conceptual innovation was to connect charisma to secular authority and to present it as one of the three basic building blocks of structures of domination, alongside legal and traditional domination. By reformulating charisma as a relational concept based on free recognition and emptying it of its religious content, he opened the way for thinking more generally about charismatic leadership. It was no longer necessary to understand the source of charisma in strictly religious terms: any exceptional quality, so long as it was recognized by enough people, could produce structures of domination based on loyalty to a person (i.e., charismatic authority). Based on the free recognition by others that the qualities of particular individuals were exceptional, charismatic authority appeared in Weber’s analysis as a form of authority capable of overcoming the constraints of legality or tradition that pushed modernity into an ‘iron cage.’ Charismatic authority became the deus ex machina in Weber’s understanding of politics, the one force capable of producing genuinely revolutionary transformations of society, even as it lost its connection to a particular understanding of divine grace. Charisma in this new sense proved useful as a neutral term to describe political phenomena which had been treated polemically throughout the nineteenth century with words like Caesarism or Bonapartism. But charisma soon escaped the confines of Weber’s sociological system, entering popular discourse as a description for the mysterious qualities which enable some people to acquire power, influence, and authority over others. The politician, the artist, the teacher, and the preacher may all have charisma, and all could lose it if they did not deliver on their promises. The entrance of charisma into everyday language, however, also produced numerous conceptual confusions. The second section of this chapter thus distinguishes charisma from a number of seemingly similar concepts, including celebrity, prestige, fame, and popularity. In its purest form, charismatic authority produces obedience to a person on the basis of the recognition of exceptional qualities, though such authority could also, as Weber argued, be routinized – located in particular offices and divorced from connection to specific people. By contrast, superficially related concepts like celebrity or fame do not have the same connection to authority, though they may grant influence or cultural prestige. Charismatic authority, like all authority, needs to be projected to reach any group larger than a few people. The charisma of a leader must be projected outwards, and the technologies available to represent charisma and to decode such representations changed immensely over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as other contributions to this volume attest. Moreover, changes in politics, society, and the economy also produced new sources of ‘charismatic competition,’ as industrial

 John Potts, A History of Charisma (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

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leaders, artists, and demagogues made claims to authority that sometimes conflicted with the routinized charisma of traditional monarchs and bureaucratically appointed officials. In the final section of this chapter, I explore systematically how such changes affected the staging of charismatic authority. I distinguish between ‘top-down’ processes that made intentional use of particular technologies to address charismatic claims to new audiences – such as the use of representations of political leaders in mass-circulation newspapers – and ‘bottom-up’ processes through which particular social groups could accept or reject charismatic claims addressed to them – e.g., commodity markets for images or other representations of a leader. Developments in the use of written or oral propaganda, architecture, visual art, and ritual could be used to cement charismatic claims to authority, as other contributions to this book reveal; but importantly, they could also fail. I will conclude with a brief look at the emergence of the modern technologies of the cult of personality, whose appearance in the mid-nineteenth century, and further development in the early twentieth century, represents the culmination of the new mode of staging charismatic authority in mass societies. Such cults presented charismatic claims on behalf of a leader who embodied the nation or the people, and forced the recognition of this charisma through ubiquity, social sanctions, and participation in ritual and ceremony.

I The Genealogy of Charisma: From Early Christianity to Max Weber Charisma began as a religious concept. The term was first attested in Paul’s first Epistle to the Corinthians, where he discussed several charismata, or gifts of grace, that testify to the presence of the holy spirit in the church (1 Corinthians 12:4–11). It seems likely that Paul coined the word, a compound of charis (grace) and the suffix -ma, signifying the result or work of grace, hence the meaning of charisma as the ‘gift’ of grace.2 The charismata mentioned by Paul in 1 Corinthians 12 included faith, wisdom, healing, miracle-working, prophetic speech, discrimination between spirits, speaking in tongues, and the interpretation of tongues, though this list is not necessarily exhaustive (see, e.g., the slightly different list of charismata in Romans 12: 6–8). As several commentators note, Paul was primarily concerned in these letters with the unity of the congregation.3 Charismata could too readily be mobilized to claim special status within the church, tending to produce divisions between a  Potts, History of Charisma, 35–36.  Potts, History of Charisma, chapter 3; Paul Joosse, “Becoming a God: Max Weber and the Social Construction of Charisma,” Journal of Classical Sociology 14, no. 3 (2014): 266–283, doi:10.1177/ 1468795x14536652.

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charismatic elite (those who could, for example, speak in tongues) and the rest of the congregation. In 1 Corinthians Paul attempted to emphasize that everyone in the church had been given a distinct gift by the spirit, and that the more important gifts were those that enabled some to bring others to Christ. This interpretation of the gifts of grace tended to de-emphasize the importance of qualities like speaking in tongues that were concerned primarily with an individual relationship to god rather than a direct communal benefit. Paul even explicitly ranked the interpretation of tongues higher than the gift of speaking in tongues.4 Paul thus downplayed the degree to which these gifts of grace could give authority to anyone, and instead mobilized charisma to support a highly egalitarian conception of the church community, in which everyone had a gift of the spirit and all the gifts were complementary to one another.5 In doing so, he was working against an entrenched tendency in these communities to give those who displayed visible manifestations of spirit (miracle-working, healing, speaking in tongues) authority over the rest. The history of charismatic claims in the Church after Paul’s time can then be read as a series of attempts to marginalize the degree to which charismatic manifestations could provide anyone with authority over others, independent of bureaucratic church authority – a conflict which Weber later described in more general terms.6 Within this history, some writers emphasized the communal nature of charisma, as did Paul; others stressed the universality of charisma as the gift of salvation, as did Augustine; and yet others argued for a cessationist perspective that insisted that the age of miracles was over, and individual people no longer received charismata. Whatever the term’s application in earlier church history, by the nineteenth century the word charisma, though still in use within Christian theology, played little role either within or outside of the church. This is not to say that broadly equivalent concepts did not exist. In particular, the role later played by charisma in Weber’s work was fulfilled earlier by the terms ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘prestige,’ the first for more religious settings, the second for more secular ones.7 The anti-authoritarian, antibureaucratic value of those manifestations of direct spiritual connection with god that used to be called charismata remained alive as well, especially within Protestant denominations that valued salvation by grace and justification by faith alone. In this context, Weber drew on the writings of the Protestant historian and theologian Rudolph Sohm, whose work Outlines of Church History provided Weber with the main elements of the concept of charisma and its relationship to authority.8 For Sohm, the charismata played an anti-bureaucratic role, but were nevertheless meant

 1 Corinthians 12:27–28, 14:2; see: Potts, History of Charisma, 40–43.  Joosse, “Becoming a God,” 268.  Potts, History of Charisma, chapters 4–5.  Potts, History of Charisma, 95, 109.  Rudolph Sohm, Outlines of Church History, trans. M. Sinclair (London: Macmillan, 1909), first published in 1895. Weber himself credits Sohm with the idea; see: Max Weber, Economy and Society

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to grant authority to particular people insofar as they represented a direct connection to Christ as head of the Church.9 The authority granted by charismatic gifts was opposed to the quasi-legal authority of bishops and Church officialdom more generally, though it remained a specifically Christian authority: the gifts of grace were still the Pauline charismata, transcendental manifestations of the Christian god. Weber no longer shared these Christian assumptions. His concept of charismatic authority instead stressed its social construction, as Paul Joosse rightly notes.10 In his mature thought (Part I of Economy and Society, written between 1918 and 1920), Weber wrote: The term ‘charisma’ will be applied to a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a ‘leader.’11

Weber thus placed emphasis on how followers considered, regarded, or treated the leader as having extraordinary qualities – and hence singled him or her out as a leader – rather than on the qualities themselves or on the community as the recipient of diverse charismatic gifts.12 Charisma had to be attributed to the individual by his followers; without validation by them, no exceptional quality could provide authority.13 Moreover, Weber indicated that these exceptional qualities needed not be thought to be of divine origin; merely exemplary qualities could also provide charisma. Here Weber relativized charisma: no longer the gift of the Christian god, charisma could now be found wherever enough people considered another person to have some

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 216, 1112. Weber also used the concept of charisma in his sociology of religion, though in a somewhat different sense than in his sociology of domination. As Martin Riesebrodt notes, moreover, he also drew on different writers to theorize charisma in the religious field, including anthropologists who used the term mana (of Polynesian origin) instead of charisma; see: Martin Riesebrodt, “Charisma in Max Weber’s Sociology of Religion,” Religion 29, no. 1 (1999): 1–14, doi:10.1006/reli.1999.0175.  The charismata also played an anti-bureaucratic role in Paul, whose conception of the church was radically unstructured. See: Potts, History of Charisma, chapter 3. On Sohm’s anti-bureaucratic conception of charisma, see: Joosse, “Becoming a God,” 269–270.  Joosse, “Becoming a God,” 274–276.  Weber, Economy and Society, 241, emphasis added.  Charisma in Sohm, as in Paul, is given to every member of the community (though not necessarily to the same degree). As David Beetham notes, charisma is originally “a gift possessed by all believers; [but] in Weber’s later sociology it becomes a special attribute of leadership.” David Beetham, “Max Weber and the Liberal Political Tradition,” European Journal of Sociology 30, no. 2 (1989): 311–323, here 321, doi:10.1017/S0003975600005919. See also: Peter Baehr, Caesarism, Charisma and Fate: Historical Sources and Modern Resonances in the Work of Max Weber (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2011), 99–100.  Weber, Economy and Society, 242.

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exceptional quality that made him or her worthy of obedience. The specific qualities that produced charisma thus receded into the background, as these varied from context to context depending on what was considered extraordinary in a given cultural setting. What mattered was not the particular quality that is seen as exceptional, but that the quality is so regarded by specific people. Weber even suggested that some cases of charisma were simply the result of successful “swindles.”14 The recognition of a leader’s charisma by a group provides the group with a reason to obey the leader that goes beyond any incentives (economic resources or coercive penalties) he may also be able to deploy to secure obedience. Charismatic authority is a form of legitimate authority (Herrschaft) precisely because it is not reducible to such incentives; indeed, like all forms of legitimate authority, it may induce people to act in ways that go against their material interests or to disregard threats of coercion.15 Charismatic authority is distinguished from other forms of legitimate authority because the reasons it provides for people to obey a leader are always personalized – specific to the particular leader, rather than arising from a leader’s position in a legal structure or from traditional norms – and hence may pit charisma against existing sources of authority. In Weber’s view, genuine charismatic authority (that is, the public recognition of charismatic qualities) is thus always “revolutionary,” capable of disrupting traditional and legal-rational forms of authority and thus at least temporarily shaking the ‘iron cage’ of modernity.16 Charismatic authority is also ephemeral, however. The recognition of charisma is always fragile, dependent on the continual validation of followers.17 To the extent that charismatic authority is “foreign to all rules” and indeed to all “economic considerations,” it must be transformed – routinized, in Weber’s terminology – if it is to be made consistent with the material interests of the charismatic community of followers who validate the leader’s charisma, and hence to endure.18 For charisma to be made routine, it must be traditionalized or rationalized in ways that depersonalize it, rendering it independent of any particular charismatic leader. And this process of

 See: Weber, Economy and Society, 242, on Joseph Smith. The fact that no specific quality always produces the charismatic relationship gives charisma its commonly noted “mysterious” quality; see: Potts, History of Charisma, chapter 9. No one can say exactly what charisma ‘is,’ because charismatic authority relationships can be produced by any number of qualities, from success in war to demagogic speechmaking to “sophisticated swindles.”  Xavier Márquez, “The Irrelevance of Legitimacy,” Political Studies 64, no. 1 suppl. (2016): 19–34, here 21–22, doi:10.1111/1467-9248.12202.  Weber, Economy and Society, 244. Here Weber departed from Sohm in stressing the “innovative” and “anti-traditionalist” aspects of charisma rather than its tradition-enhancing aspects; see: Riesebrodt, “Charisma,” 7. In his sociology of religion he nevertheless notes that charisma need not be revolutionary, but instead can be used to support and reinforce tradition (as when charismatic prophets and teachers exhort people to return to traditional forms).  Weber, Economy and Society, 242.  Weber, Economy and Society, 244, 246.

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routinization requires constant staging: the deployment of persuasive techniques that validate the charismatic authority of leaders who need not be spontaneously recognized as charismatic.19 Though genuine charisma is always ephemeral, two pathways to successful charismatic authority can be distinguished in Weber’s conceptualization: what we might call the charisma of works (or what sociologists currently call ‘success charisma’) and the charisma of the spirit and the tongue.20 One can acquire charisma by performing something that is considered a miracle, that is, an unusual achievement on behalf of the group that seems exceptional given prior beliefs about the competence of the leader or the difficulty of the act; or one can, as the demagogue does, persuade others in advance of any particular miraculous proof that one has certain charismatic qualities.21 The charisma of works stands and falls with the success of the leader; as Weber emphasized: “If proof and success elude the leader for long, if he appears deserted by his god or his magical or heroic powers, above all, if his leadership fails to benefit his followers, it is likely that his charismatic authority will disappear.”22 To be sure, this was not, in Weber’s view, experienced by the followers simply as a rational choice whereby they made an instrumental calculation to remain loyal so long as they received sufficient benefits. On the contrary, Weber stressed that as long as the leader’s charismatic authority endured, the followers saw it as their duty to obey and felt complete “personal devotion” to the leader.23 Charisma is in this sense an ‘authoritarian’ notion: though the charisma of the leader must be recognized by the followers in order to have social effects, the followers do not experience this recognition as a free choice.24 Weber nevertheless implied that, unless the leader fulfilled his promise again and again, rational calculation would reassert itself and followers drift away. In this sense there is a kind of instrumental rationality in the social recognition of charisma. Weber’s key examples of this sort of charisma were war leaders whose success or failure determined whether or not they would retain their extra-institutional

 Weber’s analysis of the process of routinization begins from the problem of succession: how does the successor of the charismatic leader retain charismatic authority? See: Weber, Economy and Society, 244. This problem is typically resolved by means of selection rituals (i.e., search procedures, elections, coronation ceremonies) that publicly dramatize the transfer of charisma from one individual to another, and hence ‘stage’ a person’s charisma while divorcing it from its original holder.  Weber, Economy and Society, 1126–1127. ‘Charisma of works’ is my term, not Weber’s. But the parallel between these two forms of charisma and the contrast between salvation by works and salvation by faith is too interesting to ignore.  Weber, Economy and Society, 242.  Weber, Economy and Society, 242.  Weber, Economy and Society, 242.  Baehr, Caesarism, Charisma and Fate, 91–92.

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authority over their followers. Ian Kershaw’s analysis of Adolf Hitler’s charismatic authority follows this model, and it is worth describing in some detail to understand how the recognition of this type of charismatic authority is in a sense rational, but also how it depends on certain forms of staging.25 It is commonplace to note that the crises of the Weimar Republic paved the way for the rise of charismatic demagogues, as mainstream party leaders failed to resolve problems seen as existentially threatening to large sections of the German public. Though Hitler’s own rise to power cannot simply be attributed to the early crises of the republic, the economic shocks and political instability of the late 1920s and early 1930s did enable him to establish authority among a broader German public, as by the mid-1930s he attained the successes that had eluded his predecessors. Just as the Nazis took power, unemployment began to decrease, and within a few years Hitler began to achieve unexpected and significant foreign policy gains at low cost (the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the annexation of Austria, and the occupation of the Sudetenland). Because Hitler was also an outsider – his background, education, and political record should not have inspired any confidence in his success – these achievements seemed sufficiently unusual to many Germans as to be ‘proof’ of charisma. In Kershaw’s analysis, the sources of Hitler’s charismatic authority among the broader public in the mid- to late 1930s lay less in his demagogy or speechmaking, or on the use of spectacle by the Nazis (in other words, on the staging of authority), than on the fact that his followers attributed substantive and unusual successes to his actions while shifting responsibility for failures of governance to Hitler’s subordinates in the Nazi party.26 This does not mean that Hitler had no charisma of the spirit and the tongue. But his charismatic demagogy was most effective among members of the Nazi party, where the values he represented resonated most strongly, while his authority among the broader public required more tangible proofs. The charismatic authority he derived from his oratory and from Nazi spectacle and propaganda had definite limits in the absence of substantive successes.27 Moreover, in the early years of Nazi rule, from 1933 to 1935, before he had given sufficient proofs of success to the broader public, Hitler’s personal charismatic authority required reinforcement through other means.

 Ian Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).  Kershaw, Hitler Myth, chapter 3; see: also Frank Dikötter, How to Be a Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019), chapter 2.  Careful later work that evaluated whether Hitler’s rhetorical activities influenced his ascent to power has not found that they had much impact, though any such assessment is of course very hard to make; see, for an example: Peter Selb and Simon Munzert, “Examining a Most Likely Case for Strong Campaign Effects: Hitler’s Speeches and the Rise of the Nazi Party, 1927–1933,” American Political Science Review 112, no. 4 (2018): 1–17, doi:10.1017/S0003055418000424. See also, for a more historically oriented assessment of this question that reaches a similar conclusion: Dikötter, How to Be, chapter 2.

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Bureaucratic resources, such as the use of censorship and police powers to suppress criticism, and army oaths of loyalty to the commander in chief, were repurposed to support his charismatic claims, helping to make the recognition of his charisma normative for groups beyond the Nazi party. Though success in war and foreign policy were at the basis of Hitler’s charismatic authority in the mid- to late 1930s, even these successes had to be staged to promote their attribution to Hitler rather than to the Nazi party more generally. Accordingly, much Nazi propaganda was designed to insulate Hitler from associations with failures of everyday governance, something that was aided by Hitler’s obvious lack of interest in such matters: The Führer . . . appeared to be on an elevated plane far removed from the humdrum problems of everyday life and was presumed to be preoccupied with the ‘mighty’ issues of the nation, pondering matters of foreign and defense policy, of war and peace, holding the fate of the nation in his hand. It was a domain which, in peacetime at any rate, scarcely affected material interests in any direct or obvious way, but one which could be called upon to engender – even if only temporarily – high emotional involvement and maximum national unity.28

Charismatic authority based on continual success in foreign policy was ultimately unsustainable, no matter how effective its staging. When the failures of the German armies at Stalingrad were attributed to Hitler, his charismatic authority declined, as Kershaw notes.29 It is worth stressing that the failure that dented his charismatic authority was massive in scope and was clearly linked to his heavily publicized decisions, and therefore not something that could easily be deflected by propaganda. Only this kind of failure could produce a permanent loss of credibility for his charismatic claims. In contrast to the charisma of works, the charisma of the spirit and the tongue does not necessarily require such successes, but instead poses other challenges for the charismatic demagogue (including Hitler during the early years of his rise) as he must convince others of his charismatic qualities.30 To do so, the charismatic demagogue represents certain values or identities in especially persuasive ways, so that certain groups of people come to see him as their ‘champion’ as he fights for

 Kershaw, Hitler Myth, 121.  Kershaw, Hitler Myth, 193.  Demagogue is a term that Weber takes pains to use in a relatively neutral way. Max Weber, “The Profession and Vocation of Politics,” in Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 309–369, here 331. Weber tended to equate the charismatic leader in a democracy with the demagogue, sometimes pejoratively, but he also distinguished between “responsible” and the “irresponsible” demagogues; see: Walter Struve, Elites Against Democracy: Leadership Ideals in Bourgeois Political Thought in Germany, 1890–1933, Princeton Legacy Library (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 142.

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their cause.31 He might be said to embody the values of a group in ways that make it value-rational for them to follow him. But his authority derives (at least initially) from triumphs that are rhetorical or symbolic rather than substantive: victories that are by definition staged, insofar as they are rhetorically constructed.32 But when a demagogue is embedded in a formally democratic system, the experience of charisma tends to be inverted. Because the followers choose the leader through elections or plebiscites, charisma is experienced in a democratic or antiauthoritarian way: The personally legitimated charismatic leader becomes leader by the grace of those who follow him since the latter are formally free to elect and even to depose him. . . . Correspondingly, the recognition of charismatic decrees and judicial decisions on the part of the community shifts to the belief that the group has a right to enact, recognize, or appeal laws.33

In this context, the charismatic demagogue is subject to what Weber called “plebiscitary” legitimation, as his authority is “derived from the confidence of the ruled” – even though Weber added that “the voluntary nature of such confidence is only formal or fictitious.”34 Given his view of ‘the masses’ as irrational – a position he shared with classic ‘mass’ theorists like Gustave Le Bon – Weber was unable to see this transformation of charismatic authority as genuinely democratic.35 The demagogue “exploit[s] . . . the emotionality of the masses” through persuasive techniques; their choice of him as their leader is not really autonomous.36 But we must be wary of attributing too much causal power to particular techniques for the production of charisma; even Weber did not think that this type of charismatic authority is a simple function of persuasive technique. The credibility of any particular charismatic appeal will depend on the cultural and social context in which it is made. As we shall see in more detail later in this chapter, particular forms of staging often do not produce persuasion, that is, they do not produce the free private recognition of a person’s charismatic authority. Instead, they make the recognition of a leader’s charisma normative: they produce common knowledge  Max Weber, “Parliament and Government in Germany Under a New Political Order,” in Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 130–271, here 191.  The need for rhetorical victories leads Weber to propose that lawyers, who are trained in debate, will be over-represented among democratic demagogues. See: Weber, Economy and Society, 191.  Weber, Economy and Society, 267, in the chapter entitled “The Transformation of Charisma in a Democratic Direction.” See also: Stefan Breuer, “The Concept of Democracy in Weber’s Political Sociology,” in Max Weber, Democracy and Modernization, ed. Ralph Schroeder (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1998), 1–13.  Weber, Economy and Society, 267.  Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1897); Baehr, Caesarism, Charisma and Fate, 95.  Weber, “Profession and Vocation,” 343.

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that one should recognize a person’s charisma, which transforms it into authority. The staging of charisma transforms individual recognition into social recognition, with all of its compulsions.

II Charisma, Prestige, Celebrity, Fame, Popularity: A Typology of Concepts As Peter Baehr has argued, Weber’s introduction of charisma in his late work replaced his earlier usage of the more historically specific and polemical concept of Caesarism, which Weber had used in his political writings to criticize Otto von Bismarck and to argue for reforms to German politics that would promote strong, responsible leadership.37 In these early political interventions, the Caesarist ruler was essentially the charismatic demagogue, sometimes viewed positively, sometimes negatively. By contrast, charisma was a word with “no polemical overtones . . . [a]ffording ample scope for wissenschaftlich definition and elaboration [and providing] a route of escape from the unruly preconceptions tenanted in the house of Caesarism.”38 Moreover, charisma was a term that could encompass a wide variety of relationships, not just political connections, in contrast to the narrowness of Caesarism. The newfound scope and versatility of Weber’s version of charisma as an analytical category helped it to become successful within both scholarly and public discourse, and thus to acquire new meanings and valences. The further popularization of the term (and its attendant loss of rigor) was also accelerated by the emergence of fascist movements after Weber’s death. Their tendency to personalize power invited the use of charisma as a descriptor and justification of these new types of leadership. Already in the 1920s, Italian fascist intellectuals were drawing on Weber to “bestow special power on [Benito] Mussolini.”39 In the early 1940s, Francisco Javier Conde likewise attempted to justify Francisco Franco’s authority in Spain by appealing to the notion of charismatic authority.40 In these cases, charisma became not merely a descriptive concept but a justificatory one. More generally, Weber’s reframing of charisma as an attribute of individual leaders and his praise of its revolutionary potential also helped to popularize and even trivialize the word at a time of increasing awareness of structural constraints on human action.41

 Baehr, Caesarism, Charisma and Fate, chapter 3.  Baehr, Caesarism, Charisma and Fate, 103.  Roger Eatwell, “The Concept and Theory of Charismatic Leadership,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 7, no. 2 (2006): 141–156, here 143, doi:10.1080/14690760600642156.  Francisco Javier Conde, Contribución a La Doctrina Del Caudillaje (Madrid: Vicesecretaría de Educación Popular, 1942).  Bryan Wilson, The Noble Savages: The Primitive Origins of Charisma and its Contemporary Survival (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 12, as cited in Riesebrodt, “Charisma,” 1.

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Yet Weber’s success in appropriating the concept of charisma from its theological context and its subsequent entry into popular discourse greatly diluted its meaning. Charisma became reified as a mysterious personal quality that people either have or do not have, or as a talent that can be cultivated to “win friends and influence people.”42 The contradictions of this popular concept are manifest: on the one hand, charisma is seen as something that can be cultivated and handbooks on how to become charismatic are written; yet charisma is also seen as an inborn talent that only a select few possess.43 Moreover, the fact that charismatic authority depends on its free recognition by others also gives it an indistinct quality: since any number of qualities can be recognized as exceptional – from prowess in war to speechmaking abilities to personal charm – no specific quality is always and everywhere recognized as charismatic. A certain amount of conceptual disaggregation is therefore necessary to ensure that charisma remains a useful category for historical analysis. From a Weberian perspective, the main difference between charisma and similar concepts is the fact that charisma grants authority, that is, it provides people with reasons to obey the commands of the person who is recognized as charismatic.44 Because charisma is by definition extraordinary, such reasons can override forms of authority based on convention or law, while the charismatic leader is seen as deserving absolute trust or devotion.45 Note that in this view there is no necessary connection between charisma and popularity; what makes leaders charismatic is the depth of commitment they are able to inspire and their ability to direct others to act even in defiance of convention and law, not the number of their followers. Social scientists accordingly speak of “coterie” charisma, where a small core group of followers see the leader as charismatic, and distinguish this from the “frontstage” charisma we typically associate with rousing orators in large-scale settings.46 There is no necessary association between coterie charisma and frontstage charisma; the charismatic leader in one-on-one interaction may be an uninspiring orator and an inept crowd pleaser or vice-versa.47 To be sure, well-known charismatic leaders

 To use the title of Dale Carnegie’s famous self-help book: Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1936).  Potts, History of Charisma, chapter 9.  Authority or domination, in Weber’s view, is always about the probability of obeying specific commands; see: Weber, Economy and Society, 53.  Weber, Economy and Society, 242.  See for instance: Eatwell, “Charismatic Leadership,” 144.  For example, by most accounts Donald Trump has little coterie charisma – his staff and closest collaborators do not appear to respect him – but a great deal of frontstage charisma in front of ideologically affine audiences. Some political leaders have, by contrast, enormous coterie charisma and little frontstage charisma; an amusing example is the early twentieth century Argentine president Hipólito Yrigoyen, whose molelike habits and inability to make public speeches contrasted strikingly with the veneration he inspired in small-scale settings. See: Robert D. Crassweller, Perón and the Enigmas of Argentina, 1st ed. (New York: Norton, 1987), 58–59.

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will typically have some popularity, or at least notoriety, and hence achieve a measure of cultural impact. Strictly speaking, though, charismatic authority is not identical with cultural impact.48 Celebrity is instead best placed to address the phenomenon of large-scale cultural impact.49 A celebrity is a person who has a high degree of what we might call ‘cultural presence,’ even if, as in Daniel Boorstin’s famous put-down, they are famous only for being famous.50 Charismatic leaders – or, more precisely, people who have charismatic authority – can be celebrities, but celebrities need not have authority in the strong sense discussed by Weber; their cultural influence is far more amorphous. For example, Queen Victoria in the nineteenth century has been called the first “media monarch.” She certainly had widespread cultural presence in the form of various visual and textual artifacts, and also fulfilled an important function as a political figurehead, especially in her role as Empress of India.51 Over the course of her long reign, she increasingly withdrew from the daily workings of government. While she relied ever more on her prime ministers to work the political levers associated with her position as sovereign, she retained nonetheless a strong measure of hereditary charisma: people cared about what she said because she was the queen. Still, all of this made her more like a celebrity with cultural influence than a charismatic leader. If one regards her as an individual, divorced from the authority of her hereditary office, it is clear that she had little magnetism or power to move people, and certainly not the revolutionary or utopian vision that Weber associated with charisma in his political sociology. The term ‘celebrity’ is itself a transformation of the earlier classical concept of fame. Fame was connected with the idea of glorious or great deeds capable of ensuring that the doer would live on after death in collective memory – precisely the sorts of deeds that Weber might later argue would enable someone to acquire charismatic authority – and belonged to the same family of concepts as “glory, reputation, renown, [and] distinction.”52 Thucydides articulated the idea with unparalleled force in Pericles’ funeral oration: “The famous have the whole earth for their memorial.”53 However, usage of the term ‘fame’ (as well as glory, renown, and reputation) in English-language published books declined greatly at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to be

 For the various distinctions between renown, glamour, and notoriety, see: Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion, 2001), chapter 1.  Rojek, Celebrity, chapter 1.  Daniel Boorstin’s famous aphorism actually ran as “the celebrity is a person who is well-known for their well-knownness.” See: Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 58, as cited in Graham Turner, Understanding Celebrity (London: SAGE, 2004), 5.  See: John Plunkett, Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).  Baehr, Caesarism, Charisma and Fate, 22.  History of the Peloponnesian War 2.43, following Baehr’s translation of epiphanes as “famous.”

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replaced only in part by the term celebrity in the twentieth century.54 This change was also accompanied by a shift in focus away from fame’s temporal articulation towards presence and evanescence. Celebrities are a focal point of public attention, their images disseminated through media, while the fame of the hero endures in collective memory. It is not surprising that celebrity and charisma are sometimes confused, since the same forces that give celebrity its power also affect the production of charismatic authority. The same technological and social developments that made celebrity possible, such as the emergence of the mass media of communication, also affected the staging of charisma. Still, while charisma, like celebrity, is mediated and constructed by representations of the leader or the celebrity, for these representations to provide a person with ‘disposable’ authority (rather than amorphous cultural influence) they must provide credible reasons to accept that person as worthy of obedience; credibility is never a given.55 Moreover, while the concept of celebrity emphasizes the mediated ways in which a person comes to be a focus of public attention, grabbing, as it were, a disproportionate share of this resource, the idea of charismatic authority emphasizes instead the agency of the followers in recognizing (or not) the gifts of the leader. It is true, as noted above, that Weber disdained the rationality of the masses and argued that the followers of the charismatic leader do not experience the recognition of charisma as a choice but as a compulsion. Nevertheless, as we have also seen, there is an implicit rationality to all forms of charisma, whether the instrumental rationality of ‘success charisma’ or the value rationality of ‘demagogic charisma,’ and all charismatic leaders must act in ways that further the ultimate symbolic and material interests of their followers or else be deserted by them.

III The Staging of Charisma Charisma, as an ideal type, is always transitory and exceptional. But most of Weber’s discussion of charisma concerns its subsumption under traditional or legal authority, its routinization or even what we might call its ‘domestication.’ In this process, charismatic authority changes face. A political leader may then retain a special personal appeal, yet still be constrained by existing sources of authority; he

 One can use the bookworm word frequency viewer for the HathiTrust book collection, https:// bookworm.htrc.illinois.edu/develop/#, to verify the striking decline in the usage of fame, glory, and related terms in published books since 1760. The HathiTrust collection comprises more than thirteen million digitized books.  On the construction of charisma and celebrity in the nineteenth century, see the essays in: Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi, ed., Constructing Charisma: Celebrity, Fame, and Power in NineteenthCentury Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010).

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or she may be respected yet unable to provide reasons for obedience that override the reasons for obedience inherent in traditional or legal sources of authority; and the revolutionary potential of charisma is lost. The paradigmatic case of this process, for Weber, is the transformation of the charismatic warlord into the traditional monarch, whose apparently unlimited authority is nevertheless tightly constrained by conventional rules and roles.56 In this process of routinization, the staging of charisma becomes particularly important. The charismatic claim must be ritually tested and affirmed, while insulating it from the vagaries of real events and rendering it compatible with existing normative and legal structures. Coronation ceremonies, healing rituals, royal progresses, monuments, and artwork were only some of the many ways in which charismatic claims were staged and routinized before the nineteenth century, with some rulers, like Louis XIV, using them in particularly skillful ways.57 The point of such staging was always partly persuasive, undertaken to convince an audience of a ruler’s charisma even in the absence of substantive successes, but also (and more importantly) a matter of making the recognition of charismatic authority normative. Much of the meaningful content of ritual ceremonies and iconographic representations of rulers was, after all, physically and semantically inaccessible to most audiences; as Paul Veyne once noted, if Trajan’s column, glorifying the exploits of the emperor, was propaganda, it was mostly “without viewers.”58 Similarly, even if more than a tiny fraction of the French population had been able to see Hyacinthe Rigaud’s Portrait of Louis XIV, most of them would hardly have understood its symbolism, as Jan Plamper notes.59 Indeed, much monumental art and legitimating ceremony seems to be for the sake of self-legitimation, persuading the ruler of his own charisma and right to rule rather than any external audience.60 But the existence of costly ceremonies or monumental art is often sufficient to produce common knowledge among large audiences that the charisma of the ruler is recognized by others, and thus to create what we might call norms of recognition: the personal authority of the king must be recognized because others recognize it. This sort of staging of charismatic authority was not particularly novel in the nineteenth century, but the technologies available to reach particular audiences and the basic ideas underpinning the legitimation of power did change significantly. On

 Weber, Economy and Society, 227, 246–249.  On Louis XIV’s use of ceremony, image, and staging, see: Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).  Paul Veyne, “Conduct Without Belief and Works of Art Without Viewers,” Diogenes 36, no. 143 (1988): 1–22, here 1, 3.  Jan Plamper, The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 5.  Rodney Barker, Legitimating Identities: The Self-presentations of Rulers and Subjects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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the one hand, the development of mass circulation newspapers, including illustrated papers, coupled with broad literacy made it possible for the meaningful content of charismatic claims to reach broader audiences. On the other hand, the rise of democracy, broadly understood as the expansion of suffrage, the de-legitimation of aristocratically constituted bodies, and the loss of credibility of claims to divine right, made possible new ways of articulating and routinizing charismatic authority, such as plebiscites and elections.61 Finally, the emergence of commodity markets in which representations of political leaders could be bought and sold added further complexities to the staging of authority. Consider the case of Napoleon III, one of the first people whose authority was analyzed under the rubric of Caesarism.62 One of the striking characteristics of his rule, first as president of the Second Republic and later as emperor, was its reliance on mass ceremonies – what Matthew Truesdell calls the fête impériale. Coronation ceremonies, important anniversaries like the birthday of Napoleon I, the inaugurations of public works: all were experienced vicariously through the press, including new illustrated papers such as L’Illustration, by large numbers of people who could not be physically present. These ceremonies and their representations in the press, which simplified the symbolism of authority and made it available even to the illiterate, communicated not Bonaparte’s divine authority but his popularity. In this kind of charismatic staging, Napoleon III’s exceptional qualities were proven not through his success on the battlefield nor his cosmological centrality and connection to god, but through his ability to symbolize the unity of the nation by mobilizing large numbers of people. Take, for example, his victory in the 1852 plebiscite ratifying the 1851 coup d’état, which loomed large in the staging of his authority as president. The lopsided results (7,439,216 votes for Louis-Napoleon, 641,737 against) were sometimes painted on the façades of buildings used for public ceremonies and intended as proof that he symbolized the unity of the nation.63 Much of this staging was driven from above: events were planned, crowds were mobilized, professional ‘cheerers’ hired. After the coup of 1851, moreover, the press was censored and prevented from printing anything that cast doubt on LouisNapoleon’s popularity, and prefectural and press reports were carefully scrutinized to look for signs of discontent. Yet as Truesdell also notes, these practices were

 This process is described in great detail in volume 1 of R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (Princeton.: Princeton University Press, 1959).  Matthew Truesdell, Spectacular Politics: Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte and the Fête Imperiale, 1849–1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).  For the celebrations after the 1851 plebiscite, the architect Viollet-le-Duc decorated the front of the Cathedral of Notre Dame with, among other things, “large gilded letters just above the entry [spelling] the number 7,500,000 – the number of ‘yes’ votes in the plebiscite.” Truesdell, Spectacular Politics, 37.

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never fully effective in making the emperor’s charismatic claims persuasive.64 Not only was there occasional dissent within ceremonies – from vandalism under the cover of darkness to insufficient enthusiasm to outright heckling at public events – but counter-rituals also existed which kept alive legitimist and republican claims to authority. The mere assertion of routinized claims of personal authority, when totally divorced from economic or military success (as during the last years of his reign as emperor), could not sustain Napoleon III’s rule over the long term. Similar ways of staging charismatic authority could be observed in the England of William Gladstone, the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the Russia of Alexander III and Nicholas II, and other parts of nineteenth-century Europe as well. As Weber observed, the development of mass democracy was conducive to the emergence of the charismatic demagogue, whose appeal depended in part on the intentional use of new communication technologies to address charismatic claims to new audiences. As he saw in the case of the German Empire of Wilhelm II, such demagogues need not be elected.65 These developments would only accelerate at the beginning of the twentieth century with World War I, which further entrenched mass politics. Finally, the emergence of commercial advertising and professional marketing techniques, which came into their own in the interwar period, cross-fertilized with the “branding” of charismatic leaders to enhance their power in the twentieth century.66 But we see here, too, the limits of these new top-down techniques of charismatic staging. When charismatic claims, either traditional or modern, lost credibility, the mere staging of authority failed to legitimate or even stabilize a ruler’s power. When Nicholas II attempted to project “his image on objects of everyday life” through the use of standardized mass media, attempting to compete with the Duma through appeals to the masses, his image was trivialized and desacralized. Add to this a defeat in war and the spread of competing narratives of legitimation, and the stage was set for a complete collapse of his traditional-charismatic authority.67 Even in times of political stability, official representations of leaders are never univocally interpreted, and in the most restrictive contexts, people appropriate such images for their own purposes, sometimes admiring or even worshiping them, but sometimes also mocking or disregarding them. This multivocality is exacerbated by the development of markets for the representations of the leader, as in Queen Victoria’s time and Wilhelm II’s reign, in

 Truesdell, Spectacular Politics, chapter 9.  Weber, “Parliament and Government,” 176. The same was true of Russia, where the absence of formal suffrage and parliamentary representation did not prevent the emergence of mass politics. See: Plamper, Stalin Cult, 5–9.  Steven Heller, Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-Century Totalitarian State (New York: Phaidon, 2008). Not all of these marketing techniques were driven from the top; profit-driven decisions by individuals to produce and disseminate leader representations also played a role in the construction of these leader brands.  Plamper, Stalin Cult, 7–9.

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which leader memorabilia was developed by independent entrepreneurs.68 Control over the staging of charismatic authority is lost when leader representations circulate freely and can be used in a variety of unapproved ways outside of the public eye. Looking ahead to future developments, the case of Napoleon III also represents an early example of what came to be called the personality cult. Charismatic authority here was based on ‘the people’ as the foundation of power, but without giving them access to political participation.69 Although personality cults tend to develop in authoritarian or at best partially democratic regimes, and not in more fully democratic societies, they are nevertheless a phenomenon of mass politics.70 The ruler is worshiped or venerated not because he is divine or has the ‘mandate of heaven,’ but because he represents the people, or the nation, or the proletariat; his charismatic claims are bound up with this representative function. As such, the cult of personality is a variant of the routinization of charisma, detaching it from the need to produce an endless string of miraculous successes, but within a secular context. In earlier religious ages, the warlord’s charisma was institutionalized in hereditary monarchy, which imbricated divine selection with dynastic succession to create the divine right of kings: god appointed the next king in the womb, and the people had no right to question that divine selection. For the modern authoritarian leader who was not part of a legitimate line of succession but nonetheless sought to solidify his rule by routinizing his charisma (like Napoleon III), the cult of personality validated him as a leader supposedly chosen by the people to represent them and their interests, a ‘choice’ that had to be demonstrated visibly through popular participation in the rituals of the cult. Ideology has been no bar to the emergence of cults: they have developed in Marxist-Leninist regimes and postcolonial dictatorships which claimed to have an egalitarian basis, as well as in fascist regimes that exalted their leaders as representatives of the nation.71

 On Queen Victoria, see: Plunkett, Queen Victoria; on Wilhelm II, see: Eva Giloi, Monarchy, Myth, and Material Culture in Germany 1750–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).  Plamper, Stalin Cult, 2–5.  Partial exceptions exist; we can speak today of the cult of Trump in the USA among a subset of Americans, or the cult of Maurice Thorez, leader of the PCF in France after World War II, among French communists, as described in Kevin Morgan, International Communism and the Cult of the Individual: Leaders, Tribunes and Martyrs Under Lenin and Stalin (London: Springer, 2016). I explore some of the reasons for the emergence of such cults in democratic societies in: Xavier Márquez, “Two Models of Political Leader Cults: Propaganda and Ritual,” Politics, Religion & Ideology 19, no. 3 (2018): 265–284, doi:10.1080/21567689.2018.1510392.  The cult of Stalin is the most systematically studied of these Communist cults. See: Robert C. Tucker, “The Rise of Stalin’s Personality Cult,” The American Historical Review 84, no. 2 (1979): 347–366; Plamper, Stalin Cult; Benno Ennker, “‘Struggling for Stalin’s Soul’: The Leader Cult and the Balance of Social Power in Stalin’s Inner Circle,” in Personality Cults in Stalinism – Personenkulte Im Stalinismus, ed. Klaus Heller and Jan Plamper (Göttingen: V & R unipress, 2004), 161–195.

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Of course, the deification and literal cult of leaders is not a modern phenomenon. Egyptian pharaohs, Roman emperors, and Hellenistic monarchs, to name three disparate sets of ancient rulers, all were given cult honors and worshipped as gods in antiquity. But the modern forms of this phenomenon – secular, based on popular sovereignty, and targeted to newly literate masses using mass media and mass-produced goods – have their roots in the nineteenth century.72 It is likely that the rationalism of the French Revolution made it possible for the idea of a ‘cult’ – which, like charisma, was primarily a religious, not a secular term – to be used in secular contexts.73 Nineteenth-century Romantic artists like Richard Strauss and Friedrich Schiller still talked about a cult of genius that gave the genius cultural prestige but not political authority in the sense described above. For them, the cult retained its connection to worship rather than authority, despite its entrance into a secular context. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, Marx (and Marxists) began to use the term cult of personality to denigrate the unwarranted worship of particular leaders and the personalization of political causes.74 Much later, this Marxist tradition made it possible for Nikita Khrushchev to denounce Joseph Stalin’s cult of personality, or “cult of the individual,” in his famous Secret Speech as an aberrant pathology rather than an expected consequence of the Soviet system of rule.75 Khrushchev’s usage of the term in turn licensed the scholarly use of the term in studies of the process by which some leaders received a sort of ‘artificial’ public recognition of their charisma. The ambiguous relation of the Marxist tradition to the cult of personality – Marxist regimes regularly produced leader cults while in theory condemning the phenomena – made such cults problematic, stimulating inquiry into the mechanisms that lead to the production and recognition of charisma. Three particular mechanisms played a role in the production of modern personality cults, which I have elsewhere called direct production, loyalty signaling, and ritual

The key work on the Lenin cult is Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). The Mao cult has been studied extensively in Daniel Leese, Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China’s Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Several of the postcolonial cults are discussed in Dikötter, How to Be. I study the Chávez cult in Venezuela in Márquez, “Two Models.” Studies of the Mussolini cult can be found in Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) and Stephen Gundle, Christopher Duggan, and Giuliana Pieri, The Cult of the Duce: Mussolini and the Italians (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). The literature on the Hitler cult is vast, but Kershaw, Hitler Myth, is a good starting point.  Plamper, Stalin Cult, 5.  Jan Plamper, “Introduction: Modern Personality Cults,” in Personality Cults in Stalinism – Personenkulte im Stalinismus, ed. Klaus Heller and Jan Plamper (Göttingen: V & R unipress, 2004), 13–42, here 22–23.  Plamper, “Introduction: Modern Personality Cults,” 23–33.  Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, “Speech to 20th Congress of the C.P.S.U.,” 1956, Marxist Internet Archive, accessed 1 April 2022, http://www.marxists.org/archive/khrushchev/1956/02/24.htm.

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amplification.76 Direct production refers to the use of the bureaucratic authority of the state to produce leader representations – official hagiographies, portraits, or statues of the leader, etc. – that support his or her charismatic claims, and by the same token prevent the production of unauthorized images. Where scholars speak of a cult, these representations are typically produced with a semantic content understandable to large populations and at a scale substantial enough practically to saturate public spaces. The nineteenth century brought new developments in the techniques for mass producing and broadcasting standardized representations of political leaders (though even these were not unknown in earlier times; consider images of rulers on coins). Combined with the spread of literacy, this meant that new simplified forms of charismatic authority could be staged and routinized for larger audiences, while the growth of bureaucratic states provided greater potential to control unauthorized representations of leaders. Still, except arguably in the case of Napoleon III, leaders did not yet effectively institute personality cults in the nineteenth century. The centralized production of leader representations and the policing of unauthorized uses were haphazard; European regimes did not actively monitor non-participation in rituals of state; and leader memorabilia was produced more often by independent entrepreneurs for standard profit motives as had happened in the more distant past.77 In this sense, it is important to distinguish between the nineteenth century’s new techniques of what came to be called ‘propaganda,’ which could serve to stage and routinize the charismatic authority of rulers, however ineffectively, and the variety of other decentralized processes that would help cults grow to monstrous dimensions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.78 Propaganda, or the use of mass persuasion techniques, often by the state, can be used for a multiplicity of purposes, including the legitimation of rulers. Wilhelm II, for example, made use of the new technologies of photography, mass circulation media, and film to ‘recharismatize’ the German

 Xavier Márquez, “The Mechanisms of Cult Production,” in Ruler Personality Cults from Empires to Nation-States and Beyond: Symbolic Patterns and Interactional Dynamics, ed. Kirill Postoutenko and Darin Stephanov (London: Routledge, 2020), 21–45.  For example, during the seventeenth century in the Holy Roman Empire, “entrepreneurs throughout the empire, including Protestants, printed works friendly to imperial reputation, from pamphlets and broadsheets to medals and learned books. They were not in the service of the dynasty but hoped to earn money.” Jeroen Duindam, Dynasties: A Global History of Power, 1300–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 276.  See: Márquez, “Two Models;” Márquez, “Mechanisms of Cult Production.” As Palmer notes, the very word “propaganda” in its modern sense seems to have been first used during the French revolution (Palmer, Age, vol. 2, 51), though its usage became much more frequent from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards (see the frequency graphs in the HathiTrust bookworm tool for the English ‘propaganda’ and the French ‘propagande,’ https://bookworm.htrc.illinois.edu/develop/#). Like Caesarism, personality cult, and even charisma, propaganda is part of a new cluster of concepts that crystallized around new forms of staging authority.

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monarchy at the end of the nineteenth century.79 Before the twentieth century, however, such uses of propaganda were rarely consistent or pervasive, let alone effective, and they did not usually result in the emergence of cult behavior. Indeed, propaganda is better suited to the production of celebrity than of charisma: it can generate cultural impact, as happened in Wilhelm II’s case, but only rarely enhance authority. Even in crisis situations, when leaders are most likely to rely on propaganda to enhance their own legitimation, the use of such techniques in the absence of genuine successes at best achieved short-term boosts of popularity that were liable to crumble if the crisis persisted, as the example of Napoleon III shows. Full-blown personality cults have tended to grow not simply when states have used propaganda to burnish a leader’s image (a common enough situation), but when power struggles within an elite produce incentives to signal loyalty through costly or ostentatious displays of flattery, regardless of whether or not these displays are credible to larger audiences. In these circumstances, people wishing to avoid social sanctions or to secure particular benefits tend to produce flattery (from outlandish praise to special gifts) that recognizes a leader’s charisma. Powerful members of the leader’s inner circle may compete by directing the state apparatus to produce flattery of the leader, while party cadres or minor bureaucrats send congratulatory messages, name buildings and cities after the leader, applaud the leader’s speeches longer than is necessary, and commission obsequious portrayals of the leader to be published in the press in order to gain promotion or prevent their rivals from accusing them of insufficient loyalty. These “nauseating displays of loyalty” bind people more tightly to the leader, especially when they violate implicit norms against flattery or involve a loss of face.80 This process of ‘flattery inflation’ is further augmented by the fact that previous signals of loyalty quickly lose their value when others learn to use them for the same purposes. The expectation soon emerges that the extraordinary qualities of the leader must be publicly acknowledged in extreme ways, even among the general population, especially if harsh punishment or loss of economic opportunity can follow from failure to do so. Flattery inflation is not new; examples can be found in many different historical contexts, from Caligula to the present.81 But new

 Martin Kohlrausch, “The Workings of Royal Celebrity: Wilhelm II as Media Emperor,” in Constructing Charisma: Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 52–66.  See: Victor Chung Hon Shih, “‘Nauseating’ Displays of Loyalty: Monitoring the Factional Bargain through Ideological Campaigns in China,” The Journal of Politics 70, no. 4 (2008): 1177–1192, doi:10.1017/S0022381608081139.  The phrase “flattery inflation” was coined by the historian of Rome Aloys Winterling, who used it to describe the process leading to the cult of Caligula. See: Aloys Winterling, Caligula: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). A good modern example of flattery inflation is found in the Mao cult during the Cultural Revolution, as discussed in Leese, Mao Cult. For a more general discussion, see: Márquez, “Mechanisms of Cult Production;” Márquez, “Two Models,” with examples from a wide variety of regimes.

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and insecure regimes in which the ruler’s position was not fully consolidated (Stalin in the late 1920s, Franco in the early 1940s) provided many opportunities in the early twentieth century for this inflationary process to unfold, this time with the use of modern propaganda techniques. Alongside direct production and loyalty signaling, political leaders intent on staging charisma also developed a deep appreciation of the power of mass ritual and spectacle. Rituals of all sorts, when successfully staged, tend to produce “emotional amplification,” cementing connections to the central symbols of the ritual and to the community that participates in it.82 The most important new ritual to emerge in the nineteenth century was the election along with its associated events (campaign rallies, public speeches, and debates, etc.) that made the leader the central focus of attention. As Weber saw, the “electoral battlefield” was the place where modern leaders proved their charisma.83 It is in electoral rituals (or their associated events) that many people come to recognize the charisma of their leaders; it is no accident that much cult-like behavior in democratic societies is found among strong partisans of political leaders (who must campaign for their position) or followers of religious leaders (who are at the center of recurrent communal rituals). But other rituals – including invented festivals from Napoleon III’s inauguration ceremonies of public works to the Nuremberg rallies in Nazi Germany to the May Day parades in the Soviet Union – also played a role in allowing larger publics to strengthen emotional connections to a particular leader and to compel the recognition of his charisma, even in places where elections did not play a large public role or where attendance at the events was not compulsory.84 In the end, personality cults represent a degenerate case of the staging of charismatic authority. The excessive and wasteful use of bureaucratic authority to produce symbols of charismatic recognition or to organize participatory rituals of public adulation, when joined to the signaling dynamics attendant to an environment where insufficient loyalty can be punished harshly, tend to produce bizarre claims and absurd scenes.85 While the pressure to participate in the public recognition of charisma are

 See: Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).  Weber, “Profession and Vocation,” 342.  Nazi festivals were designed to produce ecstatic experiences of belonging in a pure ‘German’ community unified around loyalty to the Führer. See: Malte Rolf, Soviet Mass Festivals, 1917–1991 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 162. And descriptions of Cultural Revolution mass rituals sometimes bring out the degree to which leader symbols were experienced as sacred. See: Michael Dutton, “Mango Mao: Infections of the Sacred,” Public Culture 16, no. 2 (2004): 161–187.  For example, at the height of the Mao Cult during the Cultural Revolution, Zhou Enlai criticized the immense allocation of aluminum to the production of Mao badges. See: Leese, Mao Cult, 216. Examples of absurd claims made on behalf of leaders in the twentieth century abound. In Syria, Hafiz al-Assad was said by cult propagandists to be the country’s ‘premier pharmacist’ in the 1980s. Lisa Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 1, 12. In North Korea, the newspaper Rodong

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immense, the production of these cults does not necessarily imply that the leader actually has that authority; this is an ‘artificial’ charisma. Nevertheless, personality cults are based on the same mechanisms that underpinned the staging of charismatic authority in the nineteenth century: in the propaganda that burnishes a political leader’s image and organizes campaign rallies, and in the enthusiasm of followers in political events and other rituals (including, today, social media campaigns). The key difference is the degree to which participation and the production of signals of loyalty are enforced and effectively inescapable. Charisma must always be recognized by the followers to become an authentic source of authority; and this is only possible if they are motivated to signal this recognition publicly. Without this recognition, the staging of charisma merely leads to celebrity; where it is rigorously policed from above, it becomes the personality cult. Charisma, the ‘gift of grace,’ is a fickle basis for authority. Though the concept is no longer tied to divine favor, it retains something of its origins in its mysterious aspects and its connection to revolutionary action. As we saw above, Weber’s reconceptualization of charisma succeeded in divorcing it from its religious context, but it also connected it with the validation of the public, who can recognize charisma (or not) for sometimes arbitrary reasons. Moreover, charismatic authority remains tied to substantive success, and can be lost if success is not forthcoming or representation is flawed. And although the new technologies of mass persuasion that began to develop in the nineteenth century opened new possibilities for the routinization and staging of charisma, the need for genuine recognition and obedience in charismatic authority makes this a much harder enterprise than the production of celebrity, which merely demands attention. The production of charismatic authority since the nineteenth century has generally relied on the use of the modern state’s bureaucratic authority to stage the person of the ruler. To play on the theatrical metaphor, bureaucratic authority creates a stage on which the persona – the mask – of the ruler is placed to play a scripted role, such as father of the nation or as its first servant and representative. A spectacle of rulership is produced, and the impresarios hope to enchant their audience

Sinmun published an article in 2006 claiming that Kim Jong-il had mastered teleportation to avoid being tracked by American satellites. Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh, The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009), 55. In Zaire in 1975, Mobutu was hailed as a new ‘Prophet’ and ‘Messiah,’ and proposals were made to replace crucifixes with his image. Crawford Young and Thomas Turner, The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 169. And in one of the most incredible episodes of the Cultural Revolution, mangoes were worshipped because they had been given by Mao to a particular factory in Beijing. Dutton, “Mango Mao;” Adam Yuet Chau, “Mao’s Travelling Mangoes: Food as Relic in Revolutionary China,” Past & Present 206, no. suppl. 5 (2010): 256–275, doi:10.1093/pastj/gtq020.

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(which may be forced to attend the performance in any case). Other actors also participate in the making of this spectacle: the entrepreneurs who see opportunity in creating or disseminating images of leaders, the politicians who support the ruler because they see their fate tied to them, and the antagonists who use their own resources and authority to claim the allegiance of the audience. But the audience, as Weber saw, may refuse to clap; unless the spectacle is credible and appealing in its own right, the stage play of rulership collapses.

Edward Berenson

Napoleon III: The ‘People’s King’ Abstract: This chapter examines how Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoleon I, took advantage of France’s Napoleonic myth to transform himself from an impatient insurrectionist into emperor of the French. In doing so, he brought together aspects of monarchy and democracy to stage political authority as a people’s king. Keywords: Napoleon, Bonaparte, Bonapartism, democracy, universal suffrage, plebiscite, myth, coup d’état, St. Simonian, Fourierist, pauperism, republican, propaganda, democ-socs, Crimean War, Notre Dame, Piedmont-Sardinia, redevelopment ✶✶✶

On 10 December 1848, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the forty-year-old nephew of Emperor Napoleon I, was elected president of the French Republic by a massive 75 percent of the vote: 5.4 million to 1.4 million.1 This election arguably represented the world’s first experience of universal male suffrage in choosing a head of state. And the newly enfranchised French electorate strayed far away from the conventional elite, decisively rejecting the narrow liberal regime that had preceded the Revolution of 1848. Just two and a half years earlier, Louis Napoleon had languished in the fortress of Ham, serving a life sentence for a flopped attempt – his second – to overthrow the government of King Louis-Philippe I.2 How did this young, politically inexperienced man transform himself from humiliated convict to democratically elected president of the republic, and then to Napoleon III, Emperor of France? The answer turns on two key points to be explored in this chapter: Louis Napoleon’s savvy understanding of France’s powerful Napoleonic myth; and his success in melding aspects of monarchy and democracy, hereditary sovereignty and popular sovereignty, to stage political authority and legitimacy as a ‘people’s king.’ Napoleon III represented himself as a monarch anointed by the demos to rule absolutely on everyone’s behalf. The Napoleonic myth has commanded a fair amount of interest from recent historians, as have the two Napoleonic empires in general, the first under Napoleon I from 1804 to 1815 and the second under Napoleon III from 1852 to 1870, both seen as the

 André-Jean Tudesq, L’éléction présidentielle de Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, 10 December 1848 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1965). The second-place candidate was General Eugene Cavaignac, the nominee of France’s bourgeois elites. Coming in a distant third with 5 percent was Alexandre LedruRollin, who represented the republican left.  Juliette Glikman, Louis-Napoléon Prisonnier: Du fort de Ham aux ors des Tuileries (Paris: Aubier, 2011), Kindle edition. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110574012-003

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two most potent regimes of post-revolutionary France.3 That potency has traditionally been ascribed to the two Napoleons’ ability to create a new form of politics and government, namely ‘Bonapartism,’ that shaped French politics and society throughout much of the nineteenth century and continued to hold sway well into the twentieth.4 This idea posits an essential continuity from the First Empire to the Second and assumes that not much changed during the interregnum between the two. Those who hold this view see both Napoleons as concentrating the bulk of authority and sovereignty in their own hands and vastly strengthening the power of the state. Napoleon I and Napoleon III are both said to have used the military and warfare to enhance their authority and to have promoted new elites in place of traditional ones. In doing so, they appealed to ordinary people, especially soldiers and peasants, and identified with them. The two men are also said to have substituted plebiscites, an authoritarian technique, for democracy and snuffed out the liberal institutions created by the French revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848. There is a fair amount of truth in these observations, but they disguise several important differences. While Napoleon I certainly drew power and authority from his military conquests, this is much less true of Napoleon III, who unlike his uncle had no military background to speak of. Napoleon III did intervene in the Crimean War of 1853–1856 and in Piedmont’s war against Austria in 1859, but neither was a rousing success. The first proved a gruesome, desultory affair; France’s victory, such as it was, boosted Louis Napoleon’s prestige, but not nearly to the extent that Austerlitz or Jena-Auerstaedt did for Napoleon. On the purely negative side of the ledger, Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Crimean War turned the tsar into an implacable enemy of France, which left Napoleon III without a strong ally on the continent for any future conflicts with Prussia.5 As for Napoleon III’s war to eject Austria from northern Italy, it was stymied by the hostility of French Catholics, who correctly feared that the pope would suffer from the unification of Italy, and checkmated by Bismarck’s Prussia, which threatened to intervene against France if Napoleon III did not back down. He promptly did exactly that, reneging on his commitment to Piedmont and revealing weakness to the

 Sudhir Hazareesingh, The Legend of Napoleon (London: Granta Books, 2004); David Bell, Napoleon: A Concise Biography (New York: Oxford University Press); Adam Zamoyski, Napoleon: The Man Behind the Myth (New York: William Collins, 2019); Steven Englund, Napoleon: A Political Life (New York: Scribner, 2004); Eric Anceau, Napoléon III: Un Saint-Simon à cheval (Paris: Editions Tallandier, 2008). See also the works on Napoleon III and the Second Empire in the notes below.  See for example: René Rémond, Les droites en France (Paris: Aubier, 1954); Frédéric Bluche, Le Bonapartisme (Que-sais-je) (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1981); René Rémond, Le bonapartisme (1800–1850): Aux origins de la droite autoritaire (Paris: Nouvelle editions latines, 1980); Louis Bergeron, L’episode napoléonien (Paris: Editions du seuil, 1972).  T. C. W. Blanning, “The Bonapartes and Germany,” in Dictatorship in History and Theory: Bonapartism, Caesarism, and Totalitarianism, ed. Peter Baehr and Melvin Richter (New York: Cambridge University Press), 62–63.

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world. Napoleon III ultimately saved face by acquiring Nice and Savoy from Piedmont-Sardinia, but this represented a diplomatic rather than a military victory. Beyond warfare and the military, another supposed similarity between the two Napoleonic empires turns on their appeal to the peasantry. They both addressed this key social group, but in substantially different ways. Napoleon I’s main contribution – beyond conscripting peasants into his armies – was mainly to confirm what the French Revolution had already done, namely to allow them to retain lands confiscated from the Catholic Church and aristocratic émigrés. Napoleon III, by contrast, added significantly to the peasantry’s standing and prosperity by giving the adult men among them the right to vote, which connected them to the regime in unprecedent ways and enabled them to benefit from it. As a group, peasants became Louis Napoleon’s most loyal and devoted supporters, and he reciprocated by defending them rhetorically, and even materially, from the depredations of local elites.6 And unlike Napoleon I, who was away on military campaigns for much of his reign, his nephew adroitly used public celebrations and tours of the country to add all the more to his aura in the eyes of peasants and working people. It helped, too, that France enjoyed a strong measure of prosperity under Napoleon III, unlike during the First Empire when constant warfare drained the country’s resources. As for the politics of the two empires, they look similar only at first glance. Whereas Napoleon I gained much of his legitimacy from military victories, Napoleon III earned his from the skillful use of universal male suffrage. Beyond the plebiscites that inaugurated his regime, he held regular elections that, although undemocratic in the conventional sense of the term, conferred legitimacy on the regime by having voters massively endorse the candidates hand-picked by the emperor and his lieutenants. These electoral victories, engineered by the government’s administrative power and by limits on public speech and assembly, not to mention the repression of dissent, enabled Louis Napoleon to claim that the overwhelming majority of French people supported him and therefore that, as emperor, he incarnated their will. At times, this patina of democracy turned into something deeper, especially at the local level. As the Second Empire moved into its second decade in the 1860s, French men became accustomed to the experience of voting, and communities sometimes used elections to gain a measure of local autonomy, escaping to some extent the government’s authoritarian control. Such relative autonomy occurred because Bonapartist officials and writers increasingly deemed centralized bureaucratic government inefficient or counterproductive. The resulting relaxation of hierarchical control had the largely unintended consequence of undermining the government-designated “official candidates” who had mostly prevailed until then. In the Limousin, for example, local elections unfolded “with little prefectorial direction,” allowing a wider variety of people to win municipal and regional elections

 Alain Corbin, Village of Cannibals (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), chapter 1.

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than had been possible earlier in the regime. “Local political factors,” writes Sudhir Hazareesingh, “were therefore allowed to play a much more significant role in determining electoral outcomes, as was symbolized by the growing proportion of mayors who ran for election” as opposed to being appointed or promoted by the state.7 Also, in institutions such as religious consistories, bar associations, and masonic lodges, the election of officers increasingly eschewed traditional or Napoleonic elites to promote new leaders through democratic procedures inspired by those that Napoleon III had devised mainly as a legitimation technique. Unlike Napoleon I, whose regime progressively shed the façade of democracy with which it began, his nephew, however unintentionally, opened the door to a fuller democratization to come.8 Beyond these political differences, the First and Second Empires diverged markedly when it came to social life. Although the Napoleonic myth that emerged in the 1820s cast Napoleon as a friend of the working man and would-be republican, in reality he was neither. Louis Napoleon, by contrast, genuinely flirted with republicanism in the 1830s and 1840s and drew prominent republicans into his orbit. More important, Louis Napoleon was influenced by the explosion of socialist ideas and projects in the 1840s and devised a plan for the “extinction of pauperism.”9 This plan was less radical than those of Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier – to say nothing of the incipient feminist Flora Tristan and the communist Etienne Cabet – but it nonetheless bore their imprint. Shortly after Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état of December 1851, the event that presaged his self-anointment as emperor a year later, the liberal former prime minister François Guizot declared in horror: “This is the complete and definitive triumph of socialism.” More positively, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon wrote: “We are in a full-fledged socialist regime.”10 These reactions were hyperbolic but understandable given Louis Napoleon’s writings and associations of the 1840s. But Guizot need not have worried: the young Bonaparte had no interest in altering the social order. As emperor, Napoleon III adopted the most conservative version of Saint-Simonianism, favoring industrialists over workers and striving for economic efficiency more than social equality. Still, in the 1860s, he recognized the right to strike, which no previous French regime had done, and accepted the idea of workers’ associations.11 His massive redevelopment of Paris, begun in 1852, provided a huge number of working-class jobs, although skyrocketing rents forced many Parisian workers out of their homes.

 Both quotations are from: Sudhir Hazareesingh, From Subject to Citizen: The Second Empire and the Emergence of Modern Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 92.  Hazareesingh, Subject to Citizen; Philip Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).  Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, L’extinction du paupérisme (Paris: Pagnerre, 1844). Pagnerre was known for publishing radical, anti-government texts.  Anceau, Napoléon III, 343, both quotations.  Anceau, Napoléon III, 257–267, 343–366, 423–426.

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All of these differences – political, economic, and social – between the two Napoleons suggest that there was no such thing as a consistent Bonapartist practice or ideology, except perhaps in the realm of Napoleonic myth, on which Louis Napoleon drew heavily, as will be clear below. The lack of any consistent Bonapartism did not lessen the impact of the two Napoleons; they just shaped the history of France and the wider world in different ways. Napoleon I’s influence was more profound – he, after all, created the French administrative, legal, and educational structure still largely intact today and reshaped much of Europe while leaving an institutional imprint in Louisiana, the Caribbean, and South America. Although Napoleon III’s influence is generally seen as slight in comparison with his uncle – Karl Marx and Victor Hugo ridiculed Louis Napoleon almost to oblivion – his success in using media, ceremonies, and official voyages to stage his authority arguably exceeded what his uncle was able to do.12 Napoleon III owed his success in this domain in part to the visual and print media that had existed only embryonically before 1815. These media, and especially the illustrated press, gave Napoleon III a cultural resonance that Napoleon I enjoyed only posthumously. That resonance deepened Napoleon III’s authority and allowed him to claim, with some justification, that he incarnated the will of his people and spoke in their name. The plebiscites he won overwhelmingly did much the same thing, as did the form of democracy he invented. It was an illiberal democracy, one with a neutered parliament and tightly constrained speech, assembly, and press, but a democracy nonetheless, featuring as it did universal male suffrage at a time when liberal democracy was vanishingly rare. Louis Napoleon’s version of democracy conferred popular legitimacy on the emperor while concentrating the lion’s share of power in him and his administrative apparatus, rather than in the people and their representatives. His political system presaged the illiberal democracies increasingly common today – democracies such as those of Hungary, Poland, and Turkey that enlist universal voting rights in service of incipiently authoritarian regimes. These governments, which rely more on consent than repression or terror, resemble France’s Second Empire far more than the fascist projects of the twentieth century, although for reasons already explained it seems unhelpful to call them “Bonapartist.” Nor should that term apply to Otto von Bismarck, who remained suspicious of all forms of democracy and did not concentrate autocratic power in his hands.13 But given the rise of illiberal democracy in our own time, including in the United States, it is important to examine how Napoleon III staged his authority and built political assent – how, that is, he styled himself a people’s king.

 The famous texts are, of course, Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and Victor Hugo’s Napoleon the Little.  Allan Mitchell, “Bonapartism as a Model for Bismarckian Politics,” Journal of Modern History 49, no. 2 (1977): 181–199; Blanning, “Bonapartes and Germany,” 65–66.

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I Louis Napoleon and the Napoleonic Myth Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was born in 1808, the son of Napoleon’s brother Louis, the king of Holland from 1806–1810, and the emperor’s step-daughter, Hortense de Beauharnais. Rumors circulated widely at the time that the boy was illegitimate, even that he was sired by Napoleon himself. But Louis Napoleon’s best and most recent biographer finds the notion unfounded. Louis and Hortense had been estranged spouses, but they reconciled briefly and shared a residence at the time Louis Napoleon was conceived.14 Louis Napoleon had always looked up to his uncle, and Napoleon’s status in the young boy’s mind mounted all the more after the emperor, exiled in 1814, escaped from his confinement on the Mediterranean island of Elba and returned to France. On 1 March 1815, Napoleon landed with 1,100 men at Golfe-Juan, a tiny inlet not far from Cannes. He then led his small troop north toward Paris, skirting the southern and western parts of the country whose inhabitants largely endorsed a Bourbon restoration. In eastern France, local supporters had prepared his itinerary, and propagandists, enlisted in advance, touted Napoleon’s return as the “flight of the eagle.” Hundreds of songs were composed during the eagle’s flight, and growing numbers of people performed them at each stop en route to the capital. Napoleon enjoyed a warm welcome at the gates of Grenoble and an enthusiastic one in Lyon, reaching Paris after an arduous three-week-long march. King Louis XVIII fled in panic, and Napoleon took up residence in the Tuileries Palace, where thousands of soldiers and ordinary people hailed his return. Napoleon had not lost his ability to dazzle. One eyewitness wrote: “There was something about this scene which was sensational, out of all proportion with human events.” Another declared: “It was like witnessing the resurrection of Christ.”15 For some, especially soldiers and certain peasants and workers, Napoleon’s charisma was such that they seemed willing to submit to a new authoritarian empire. But France’s bourgeois elites made clear that they would support Napoleon’s return only if he installed a liberal, constitutional regime. Napoleon received the message and had Benjamin Constant, the liberal philosopher, prepare a constitution that granted complete freedom of the press, religious liberty, and an autonomous judicial system. No hint of such liberties had existed under Napoleon’s empire. But now, having returned from exile, the chastened emperor made a virtue of necessity, presenting himself as a son of the Revolution, a man who would prevent the Bourbons from turning back the political clock. They were “the enemies,” Napoleon said, “of our rights and of those of the people.” The new Napoleon would enshrine “popular sovereignty” as the “only legitimate source of power.”16 What is

 Anceau, Napoléon III, 28–31.  Hazareesingh, Legend, 20.  Hazareesingh, Legend, 26.

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more, he declared that he had returned to preserve peace, not to wage war, but added: “I come to reclaim my rights, which are also those of the people.”17 The latter statement gave liberals pause, for despite what Napoleon had said about individual liberty, he identified his rights with those of the people, as if he represented everyone and spoke for everyone. Worse, he maintained that France “needs a sovereign,” albeit one “who has emerged from the Revolution,” adding however: “I am that sovereign.”18 For liberals, this was a prescription for renewed authoritarian rule, but for some republicans and budding democrats nostalgic for the French Revolution, Napoleon’s claim to have derived his power and authority from the Revolution was liberty enough. Other republicans, especially former Jacobins, and a fair number of peasants supported the “return of the eagle” on grounds of Napoleon’s defense of the “nation” against the foreigners occupying its soil. This “nation-talk,” as Steven Englund calls it, appealed in particular to current and former members of the army, who, in the wake of the foreign occupation, recalled the glory of Napoleon’s military triumphs more than the agony of endless war. Throughout his reign, and more so during the Hundred Days, Napoleon had identified himself with the French nation and claimed to speak for a people united in and through himself.19 Louis Napoleon would later take up this nation-talk and appeal to soldiers, peasants, and republicans enamored with the Napoleonic myth. In the spring of 1815, nation-talk did not unify the country, nor could it enable Napoleon’s hastily reconstituted army to resist the European forces arrayed at Waterloo. There would be no liberalized empire, and this time Napoleon would be exiled to a place from which he could never return: the remote south Atlantic island of Saint Helena, 1200 miles west of Angola and 2,500 miles east of Rio de Janeiro. Hortense, too, found herself on the road to exile; Louis XVIII considered her much too close to the banished “usurper.” Then in 1816, France’s Restoration parliament passed legislation banning all members of the Bonaparte family from France forever. Though she lost her homeland, Hortense acquired a sizable fortune from an inheritance and by selling properties in France. With that wealth she bought a small chateau in the eastern Swiss town of Arenenberg, where Louis Napoleon grew up. His older brother had gone to Italy to live with his father, so in Arenenberg it was just the young boy, his mother, tutor, and a handful of servants. The tutor Philippe Le Bas was the son of a Jacobin and friend of Robespierre’s who found the twelve-yearold Louis Napoleon uneducated and “having no interest whatever in studying.”20 Le Bas, who later became an eminent historian and professor at the École normale supérieure, imposed a rigorous academic regimen on his charge. In addition to the

   

Hazareesingh, Legend, 23. Hazareesingh, Legend, 24. Englund, Napoleon, especially 196–200. Anceau, Napoléon III, 40.

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standard humanistic subjects, he exposed him to the freemasonry and republicanism with which he had been raised. Louis Napoleon would retain traces of this Enlightenment and revolutionary heritage, but his mother’s reverence for Napoleon affected him far more deeply. She transformed the Arenenberg chateau into a Napoleonic shrine and taught her son that Bonaparte stood for national unity, liberty, and sympathy for the downtrodden and oppressed. By “liberty,” she meant not the individual freedoms dear to liberals, but rather the independence that Napoleon had given his country from priests and nobles at home and foreign powers abroad. Hortense also instilled in Louis Napoleon the notion that he was destined for greatness and that, one day, he would become the ruler of France.21 After Napoleon died in 1821, Le Bas obtained a copy of the Memorial of Saint Helena of 1823, a memoir by Emmanuel de Las Cases, one of the twenty people who had accompanied Napoleon to Saint Helena. Las Cases talked to Napoleon almost daily and claimed in the Memorial that he had faithfully transcribed those conversations. In fact, the book was a coauthored piece of Napoleonic propaganda and one of the founding documents of a Napoleonic legend that would be shaped and circulated over the three decades following the emperor’s death.22 The Memorial presented Napoleon as, at once, a martyr persecuted and mistreated by his English jailers and a superman capable of overcoming his daily misery through his strength of body, character, and will. In the text, Las Cases has Napoleon respond vigorously to the plethora of critiques levelled against him. His coup d’état was necessary to save France from itself; his tyrannical behavior a “necessary evil” given the forces arrayed against him and against France; his military conquests valiant efforts to liberate Europe from the forces of reaction and oppression. As proof of these intentions, Napoleon maintained via Las Cases that when he returned to France during the Hundred Days, he planned to create a liberal empire with representative institutions, civil liberties, and a limited role for himself. Napoleon claimed as well that, on his return, he wanted not to wage war, but to install a reign of peace. It was France’s enemies who wanted war. The most important element of this apologia was Napoleon’s claim that he was “a part of the people,” and that because he belonged to the people, he could speak for them. The people, Napoleon added, agreed that he represented them and that he “had been elected by the people.” Las Cases recounted a scene in which Napoleon was traveling around Lyon incognito and overheard an elderly woman saying: “The Bourbons were the kings of the aristocracy; Napoleon was the king of the people; he is our king.”23 The young Louis Napoleon apparently took all this to heart. He would later make what contemporaries began to call ‘Bonapartism’ a key to his own political

 Hazareesingh, Legend, 192–195.  Hazareesingh, Legend, 164–165.  Hazareesingh, Legend, 169.

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identity and to his legitimacy as Napoleon’s heir. In the meantime, he passionately committed himself to the European liberation movements he believed his uncle would have endorsed: Italian freedom from Austria and Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire. The former would be delayed, but the latter achieved in 1830 with crucial British, French, and Russian help. Louis Napoleon was thrilled over the Greek victory; he would be joyful again in July of that year, when a new French revolution overthrew the Bourbon King Charles X. His happiness was short-lived. Charles’ successor, Louis-Philippe I, who belonged to the quasi-liberal Orléanist offshoot of the Bourbon family, refused to rescind the ban on members of the Bonaparte family. And when the new regime appeared nearly as oppressive as the one it had overthrown, Louis Napoleon sided with those in rebellion against it. He would soon undertake a rebellion of his own. In the meantime, Louis Napoleon made contact with French republicans, who faced intense repression and increasingly operated underground. Clandestine politics suited the Bonapartist prince, who had flirted with the Italian Carbonari in their covert struggle against Austrian rule. Louis Napoleon helped plan and fund a combined republican-Bonapartist uprising set for November 1831. But the French authorities got wind of the conspiracy, which had to be called off. Despite this setback, Louis Napoleon could not but be pleased by the prevalence of Napoleonic imagery in France and the posthumous reverence the emperor seemed to inspire. Inexpensive images d’épinal glorifying, even deifying, Napoleon circulated throughout the French countryside and in cities large and small. They were carried in the packs of peddlers, who sold them to eager peasants and workers. Hundreds of songs about Napoleon, many of them composed by the poet Pierre-Jean de Béranger, circulated as well, and huge numbers of people sang them when they could.24 Beyond the woodcuts and songs, Napoleonic imagery was stamped onto wallpaper, clocks, watches, lamps, pottery, biscuits, bottles, glasses, fans, writing paper, calendars, inkwells, and dozens of other things.25 The novelist Stendhal, himself a devotee of Napoleon’s memory, represented the power of the Napoleonic cult in his character Julien Sorel, hero of Le rouge et le noir, published in 1830. Sorel, a peasant who rose to the peak of society before his inevitable fall, wanted to model his life on Napoleon’s and took the Memorial of Saint Helena as his bible. Hugo also paid homage to the emperor in his writings, calling his life a “magnificent spectacle” and the man a prince – not by heredity, but by “his genius, by destiny, and by his actions.” “Everything about him,” Hugo added, “made him the legitimate holder of a providential power.”26 In 1838, the poet made a pilgrimage to the inn at Golfe-Juan where Napoleon had refreshed himself

 Glikman, Louis-Napoléon, loc. 4545.  Hazareesingh, Legend, 200.  Glikman, Louis-Napoléon, loc. 4280.

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as he began the ‘flight of the eagle,’ and thousands of other French men and women followed him there and to Grenoble, whose gates became a Napoleonic shrine. The German poet Heinrich Heine, who lived in Paris in the 1830s, described the Napoleonic cult to his readers back home: It is hard for anyone outside France to imagine the extent to which the French people still idolize Napoleon. . . . His image is everywhere, in drawings, in plaster, in metal, in wooden shapes and in all situations. On the boulevards . . . stand a large number of speakers who celebrate the memory of ‘the man,’ and popular singers who recall his exploits. Last night . . . I saw a child, barely three years of age, sitting on the ground in front of a small illuminated tallow candle; he was mumbling a song to the glory of the great Emperor.27

This growing cult was gratifying to Napoleon’s nephew, as was the attention he now received from key literary and political figures in France. Chateaubriand, once an ardent opponent of the emperor, told Louis Napoleon in 1832 that if something were to happen to the Bourbon pretender, Henry V (Charles X’s grandson), no one would better serve the “glory of France” than the young Bonapartist heir. Because Napoleon’s son (Napoleon II) by his second wife had just died and Louis Napoleon’s older brother had perished in 1831, Louis Napoleon, as the emperor’s stepson, claimed to be next in line as Napoleon’s successor. Acknowledging the cult, Lafayette told Louis Napoleon in a private meeting that no name other than Napoleon’s was genuinely popular in France, which Louis Napoleon took as a personal endorsement by the “hero of two worlds.”28 The Orléanist government could not fail to observe the Napoleonic cult as well. King Louis-Philippe and his ministers decided to build support for their unpopular regime by ratifying, even fostering, the rose-colored memory of the great man. In 1833, officials placed a statue of Napoleon atop the Vendôme Column, restoring a Napoleonic sculpture to the perch first occupied in 1810 by the emperor’s likeness in Roman garb. The allies who had defeated Napoleon removed it in 1814, and the Restoration government of 1815–1830 had melted it down. The new July Monarchy statue, sculpted by Emile Seurre, portrayed Napoleon in what became his iconic “little corporal” pose – in uniform, with his hand tucked inside his vest.29 Shortly after Seurre’s statue went up, officials resolved to recover Napoleon’s ashes from the British and bring them to France. The July Monarchy also rushed to complete the Arc de Triomphe, which had been conceived in 1806 to mark Napoleon’s great victory in the Battle of Austerlitz but left unfinished under the Restoration. Louis-Philippe inaugurated the monument with considerable fanfare in 1836. It was far from coincidental, finally, that Adolphe Thiers,

 Hazareesingh, Legend, 199–200.  Hazareesingh, Legend, 196.  Matthew Truesdell, Spectacular Politics: Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte and the Fête Impériale, 1849–1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 157.

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a perennial prime minister of the regime, began his twenty-one volume History of the Consulate and the Empire in the 1830s. Louis Napoleon, meanwhile, decided that the time was ripe for him to transform the Napoleon cult, until then largely a cultural phenomenon, into a potent political force. He bid for the support of key republicans, whose movement was brutally suppressed in 1834–1835, and especially for the backing of French soldiers and young officers. He gained a measure of support from both groups and on that basis planned to overthrow Louis-Philippe’s government by staging a coup in the eastern city of Strasbourg, where a large military garrison was stationed. But government spies found out about Louis Napoleon’s plans in advance and easily succeeded in foiling the attempt.30 The young Bonaparte was captured and imprisoned briefly, but rather than put him on trial and risk turning him into a Bonapartist martyr, Louis-Philippe sent him into exile in the United States. This was the right decision, as subsequent events would make clear. When Louis Napoleon’s accomplices in the failed coup stood trial in Paris in January 1837, they were all acquitted by a jury of middle-class citizens, a verdict applauded by the large crowd packed into the courtroom and surrounding it in the streets.31 Louis Napoleon planned a lengthy voyage of discovery around the United States but hastily returned to Europe in June 1837 after learning that Hortense was terminally ill with cancer. He arrived in Arenenberg in time to say goodbye and then took up residence in London, where he joined several of his French confederates and began to plan his next attempt to overthrow Louis-Philippe. In the British capital, he lived under constant surveillance from British and French agents, and in mid-1840, a French spy inserted himself into his immediate entourage.32 The various agents alerted French officials that an incursion by the prince was imminent, but the ministry of the interior did not take the information seriously. Louis-Napoleon proved the spies right by crossing the English Channel on 6 August 1840 with the intention of overthrowing the French government. His landing at the port of Boulogne, accompanied by a small band of confederates, took the local authorities by surprise. But the operation was poorly planned and based on the fantasy that once Louis Napoleon appeared on shore, the local troops would side with him and follow the young Bonaparte all the way to Paris. Instead, soldiers blocked the faux-emperor’s efforts to enter the city and then chased him and his ill-equipped, undisciplined band back to the port. The rebels waded waist-deep into the water and jumped into an overloaded canoe, which nearly capsized. Regular soldiers fired on the retreating insurgents, lightly wounding Louis Napoleon on the arm before capturing him sopping wet. Shortly afterwards, a

 Hazareesingh, Legend, 204.  Anceau, Napoléon III, 72.  Glikman, Louis-Napoléon, loc. 259.

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pamphleteer wrote: “You (the familiar, insulting “Tu” was used) wanted to take France by force, but all you did was take a bath. They plucked you from the water and threw you in jail.”33 Thus began the Nephew’s long sojourn in a cold, dark fifteenth-century castle, the fortress of Ham, where the government intended to leave him, forgotten, for life. But Louis Napoleon did not intend to live and die in oblivion. Once installed in his prison, he befriended his guards, who became his couriers by smuggling his letters, articles, pamphlets, and other writings beyond the prison gates. After a time, the prison authorities gave up the effort to keep him quiet. Early in his imprisonment, Louis Napoleon represented himself as a martyr, not unlike his uncle, who had been confined to the island-fortress of Saint Helena, and from there suffered for the redemption of his people. As one supporter wrote in a letter made public: “The people saw in this prisoner [Louis Napoleon] a martyr to their cause,” a Christ figure whose travails would ultimate benefit the forgotten and the oppressed.34 In the same vein, Auguste Vitu, one of Louis Napoleon’s correspondents, wrote: “In this captivity, whose rigor the government did nothing to soften, Louis Napoleon had to struggle against the atrophy of his body and the depression of his spirit.” He won both struggles, and “unfazed by his own suffering, he developed a painful awareness of everything that threatened the glory and prosperity of France.”35 Louis Napoleon Bonaparte presented his suffering – and the ability to overcome it – as evidence that a great destiny awaited him. “I believe in fate. If my body has miraculously escaped every danger, and if my soul has refused to be subdued, it is because I have been called to do something important.”36 That something was to embody the French people and to deliver them from the sorrows caused by their governments and by a political system that divided citizens from one another rather than bringing them together, as Louis promised to do. In describing his suffering at Ham, Louis Napoleon wanted the French people, especially peasants and working people, to identify with him, to see him as one of them. Ordinary French men and women lived modestly, frugally, and so did he. His prison, he wrote, was no gilded cage, and even before being confined to such Spartan quarters, he had always lived humbly, eschewing the trappings of his royal heritage. At Arenenberg, confirmed his mother’s physician, Dr. Conneau, his dwelling “was essentially a soldier’s tent.”37 Even as a free man, his deprivation, his “twenty-seven years of suffering and sorrow” in exile from France, prepared him to endure the

 Glikman, Louis-Napoléon, loc. 510–511. “Tu voulais prendre la France de force, et tu n’as pris qu’un bain. On t’a remassé dans l’eau, et l’on te porta en prison.”  Glikman, Louis-Napoléon, loc. 4272.  Glikman, Louis-Napoléon, loc. 4234.  Glikman, Louis-Napoléon, loc. 4048.  Glikman, Louis-Napoléon, loc. 4007.

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rigors of prison life. And not just to endure them but to overcome them, Louis Napoleon wrote in a letter made public in 1841, thanks to his “Spartan education and upbringing.” In prison, according to his supporters Granier de Cassagnac and Paul de Cassagnac, Louis Napoleon resisted the fortress’ deadening atmosphere through “patient, incessant, indefatigable labor, from which he never had to rest, or even to catch his breath.”38 With words such as these, the “plebeian prince,” as his supporters now called him, appeared not just as someone ordinary people could identify with, but as an individual with extraordinary powers whom they could look up to as well. Until now, most Napoleonic songs had been written about the emperor, but with Louis Napoleon’s imprisonment and martyrdom, dozens, and then hundreds, of songs were devoted to him. “Captive eagle,” went a popular tune: The fatherland turns its eyes to the heavens And cries out for your freedom. The young eaglet gnaws at the bars of his cage Where without honor he languishes oppressed. He would have died of shame and anger Had the sun not restored his vigor and his life.39

With this renewed vigor, Louis Napoleon promised to represent the working man in his struggle against oppression. His most famous effort to do just that was his fiftythree-page pamphlet, The Extinction of Pauperism, first published in installments in Le Progrès du Pas-de-Calais in 1844. In this booklet, Louis Napoleon proposed to abolish pauperism by establishing dozens of “agricultural colonies” on unused land throughout provincial France. Much of France’s underemployed and underpaid workforce would find employment there, and by producing far more than was currently the case, the colonies would dramatically lower the cost of foodstuffs and allow French people to eat better and become healthier and more robust. This would make them more efficient workers and allow them to afford wine and manufactured products, which would, in turn, stimulate commerce and manufacturing. This system, Louis Napoleon wrote, would “give justice to a working class that has been deprived of all the goods that civilization can provide.” “Within a few years,” he added, the agricultural colonies would “transform the poorest class of our time into the richest association [of producers] in all of France.”40 There are clear St. Simonian and even Fourierist echoes in this proposal, but Louis Napoleon framed his ideas in more overtly political terms than they did. “Today, the compensation that laborers receive is set by chance or violence. The master oppresses the worker, who then rebels.” Louis Napoleon’s system, by contrast,

 Glikman, Louis-Napoléon, loc. 4024.  Glikman, Louis-Napoléon, loc. 4318.  Bonaparte, L’extinction.

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would create “an exact equilibrium between the needs of those who work and the necessities of those who employ them.”41 This was not quite Marx’s slogan of 1875, “From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs,” but it sounded socialistic to radical workers and intellectuals of the time. What dramatically distinguished Louis Napoleon’s quasi-socialism from Marx’s “scientific” alternative was the prince’s belief that the different social classes could come together under a benevolent government. Rather than encouraging a class struggle fought to the bitter end, Louis Napoleon’s “great and holy mission” was to “heal the wounds and calm the suffering of humanity by uniting the citizens of the same country in a common interest.” Such coming together was for Louis Napoleon the essence of democracy. “The triumph of Christianity destroyed slavery; the triumph of the French Revolution destroyed serfdom; the triumph of democratic ideas destroyed pauperism.”42 This pamphlet put Louis Napoleon on the map of republican and socialist publicists of the time and earned him the praise of some of the most famous people on the left. Although George Sand rejected the Napoleonic idea that a single individual could incarnate the will and genius of an entire people, she waxed enthusiastic about The Extinction of Pauperism and about Louis Napoleon’s identification with the poor. “The People,” she wrote, “like you, are in chains. The Napoleon of today is a man who personifies the suffering of the people, as the other Napoleon personified its glory.”43 While Sand wrote to the captive prince, a great many other well-known people traveled to see him at Ham. The leftish lawyer Ferdinand Barrot visited him in 1842, as did the republican editors of the Progrès du Pas-de-Calais and the Journal du Loiret. The latter, Marcel Peauger, declared: “Louis-Napoleon is no longer for us a pretender; he is a member of our party, a soldier marching under our banner.”44 Still, despite his effort to appeal to republican and socialist leaders, and his apparent interest in democratic ideas, Louis Napoleon persisted in seeing himself as the ‘people’s king’ – a view that distanced him from most republican leaders.45 By mid-1845, Louis Napoleon had spent five years in prison. Leading opponents of the Orléanist regime, and even supporters such as Thiers and Odilon Barrot, leader of the “dynastic” (i.e. loyal) opposition, now urged Louis-Philippe to set him free. Barrot argued that by releasing him, the king would “crush this young opportunist under the weight of royal generosity.”46 But Louis Napoleon refused to ask for clemency, and Louis-Philippe refused to grant it. The best option for the prince was to try to escape.

     

Bonaparte, L’extinction, 50–51. Bonaparte, L’extinction, 53. Glikman, Louis-Napoléon, loc. 4552. Glikman, Louis-Napoléon, loc. 4654. Glikman, Louis-Napoléon, loc. 4711. Glikman, Louis-Napoléon, loc. 5266.

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On 25 May 1846, he took advantage of some renovations to the prison to disguise himself as a workman and walk out the door. Louis Napoleon’s worker costume appeared to many observers symbolic of the prince’s identification with France’s laboring men and seemed to borrow a page from Eugène Sue’s wildly popular Les mystères de Paris, a novel published in ninety morning installments in 1842–1843. The book’s hero, Prince Rodolphe, exacted justice in the murky underworld of Paris by donning a workman’s garb. Readers followed Rodolphe’s exploits so compulsively that they produced an epidemic of tardiness for work and school.47 Did Sue have Louis Napoleon in mind when he created his hero? The novelist drew on stock figures in French melodrama and did not need a real-life model, but he had been deeply influenced by the eclectic socialism of the 1830s and 1840s and would have been familiar with Louis Napoleon’s aura and writings. In any case, the Bonapartist prince successfully fled France and landed once again in London. He no longer harbored illusions about overthrowing Louis-Philippe, but without a concrete political project, he appeared hopeless and at loose ends. What saved him was the French Revolution of 1848.

II Gaining Power Louis Napoleon and his supporters had played no role in this event, which was purely the work of republicans who had overthrown the Orléanist king and wanted no part of a Bonapartist monarchy. But the pretender quickly took advantage of the political opening that the revolution had created. Not only did the political explosion of 1848 take the radical step of decreeing universal male suffrage, but it also created a political system that resulted in elections every few months. Since candidates were allowed to run simultaneously in several departments but could represent only one of them, victories in two or more resulted in vacancies. These vacancies were filled through by-elections, except that there, too, multiple candidacies inevitably produced new vacancies, and in turn more by-elections. It was common for well-known candidates to win in several departments because no one needed to garner a majority of the vote. To be elected, a candidate just had to rank among the top vote-getters in his department depending on the number of seats allotted to that department. In one

 Eugène Sue, Les mystères de Paris (Paris: Charles Gosselin, 1843); Glikman, Louis-Napoléon, loc. 5494; Dominique Kalifa and Marie-Ève Thérenty, “Les Mystères urbains au XIXe siècle: Circulations, transferts, appropriations,” Média 19, Littérature et culture médiatique, accessed 1 April 2022, https://www.medias19.org/publications/les-mysteres-urbains-au-xixe-siecle-circulations-transfertsappropriations; Marie-Ève Thérenty, “Les Mystères urbains au prisme de l’identité nationale,” Média 19, Littérature et culture médiatique, accessed 1 April 2022, https://www.medias19.org/publications/ les-mysteres-urbains-au-prisme-de-lidentite-nationale.

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with seven seats, for example, the top seven vote-getters were elected. If votes were evenly distributed, a candidate could win with 12–15 percent of the vote, or even less. Although Louis Napoleon had stayed out of the first parliamentary elections following the February revolution, he jumped into by-elections held in June 1848. He ran in several departments and won in four, including the most important one in the country, the Seine, which encompassed the city of Paris. The Seine had eleven seats, and Louis Napoleon came in eighth, with 29 percent of registered voters. He received sizable vote totals even in departments in which he did not run. In several departments, the announcement of Louis Napoleon’s score evoked the cry: “Vive l’Empereur.”48 Encouraged by these results, expected neither by Louis Napoleon nor anyone else, the prince’s minions launched a major propaganda effort on his behalf, aimed mainly at workers and peasants. Inexpensive lithographs showing Louis Napoleon both with and without his uncle flooded the country. So did an array of Napoleonic paraphernalia: medals, ribbons, eagles, and sheet music. One song featured the refrain: Je suis républicain dans l’âme Pourtant j’aime Napoléon Peu m’importe à moi qu’on le blâme Il fit respecter son nom. Vive la République! I’m a republican in my soul But I love Napoleon Who cares that people criticize him He brings us respect. Long live the Republic!49

It was unclear whether the song referred to Napoleon or Louis Napoleon, but that was the point: the little-known prince sought to take advantage of the Napoleonic legend. Meanwhile, Bonapartist agents stirred up crowds of workers, especially the unemployed among them, who demonstrated their support for Napoleon/Louis Napoleon on the streets of Paris. Members of France’s governing Executive Commission used the demonstrations as an excuse not to seat Louis Napoleon, but the majority of the Assembly overruled them. Even so, the prince decided not to press the issue and staged a tactical retreat: he did not want to be banned again from France or compromised by the working-class unrest that he and others knew was brewing. It would explode at the end of June.

 Bernard Ménager, Les Napoléon du peuple (Paris: Aubier, 1988), 93–94.  Ménager, Napoléon du people, 94.

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In the next round of by-elections, held in September, he was reelected in all the departments he had won three months earlier, and this time, finished first in Paris. In the department of the Yonne, just southeast of Paris, he received 83 percent of the vote; in the Charente-Inférieure, on the west coast just north of Bordeaux, he got 88 percent.50 This time, Louis Napoleon took his parliamentary seat, and in early October, the Assembly abrogated the law of 1832 banning the Bonaparte family from French soil. France’s new constitution created the office of president of the republic, to be elected by universal male suffrage. Unlike the framers of the United States Constitution, who feared popular democracy and had no intention of giving all adult men the ability to elect the chief executive, Alexis de Tocqueville and the rest of France’s constitution writers decided to leap into the democratic unknown. Their only effort to constrain the workings of mass democracy was to limit the president of the republic to a single four-year term and to make it next to impossible to amend the new constitution. Both provisions would soon haunt the fledgling republic. In late October, Louis Napoleon announced his candidacy for president and focused his campaign on the French provinces, where the lion’s share of the votes would be harvested. The prince’s main opponent, Louis-Eugène Cavaignac, was a general with scant political experience and little feel for the mass public that would decide the election. Worse, Cavaignac was largely unknown in the provinces and hated by a great many workers for having led the brutal repression of the June 1848 uprising in Paris. The outcome of the presidential contest was a rout: Louis Napoleon took almost 75 percent of the votes, while Cavaignac earned just under 20 percent. Two leftwing candidates split the rest. Louis Napoleon had based his campaign on two key texts, Les idées Napoléoniennes, his pamphlet of 1839, and L’extinction du pauperisme. The former promised land and government support to the peasants while pledging to promote order, the end of revolutions, and national unity to the elites. The second text sympathized with the plight of working people and promised, albeit obliquely, to improve it. These ideas, presented in simple, accessible form, connected Louis Napoleon to his uncle while promising working people something new – and did so without alienating the bulk of the elite, most of whose members now remembered Napoleon as a guarantor of order and bulwark against revolution. He thus appealed all at once to elites and masses, navigating the contradictions with aplomb and presaging the extensive political authority he would wield.51 In the short run, though, Louis Napoleon was plagued by the lack of a genuine political organization. His lieutenants were adept propagandists, but they had no experience in government. When Louis Napoleon selected his cabinet in January 1849,

 Ménager, Napoléon du people, 97–98.  Tudesq, L’éléction présidentielle; Hazareesingh, Legend, 215–220.

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he had to choose between republican politicians and conservative ones. Since the overwhelming majority of the Constituent Assembly, elected in April 1848, was conservative, and the new president was no republican, he went with members of what now was called ‘the party of order.’ He had, after all, promised order, but he had also pledged, or seemed to pledge, measures of social reform. The party of order had little interest in reform and moved quickly to impose its will on the young, inexperienced president. But Louis Napoleon had no intention of deferring to the traditional elite. He immediately began to stage forms of authority all his own. On 24 December 1848, just four days after swearing allegiance to the French republic, he donned a general’s uniform, albeit a general of the National Guard – a citizens’ militia – rather than the regular army, and reviewed the guardsmen stationed in Paris. The constitution forbade him to exercise any military functions; he blithely violated it just a few days into his term. During the review, he referred repeatedly to his Napoleonic heritage and made no mention of the republic. Afterwards, his propagandists disseminated several lithographs portraying this event, and especially his handshake with General Petit, who had served under Napoleon I. The image’s caption quoted Louis Napoleon as saying: “General, my uncle shook your hand at his last review; I am happy to be able to shake it at my first.”52 The new president had won his election in part by presenting himself as Napoleon’s heir, and on taking office, he wanted to make clear that he derived his authority, and his legitimacy, not just from the ballot box but from his lineage as well. This dual legitimacy would become a key theme of his regime: he was, all at once, Napoleon’s legitimate heir and the democratic designee of the French people. Having evoked his democratic and hereditary authority, Louis Napoleon marked his independence from the traditional elites by dismissing his conservative cabinet in October 1849 and appointing a group of ministers with little independent standing. The new cabinet would belong to him. To deepen his authority, now strongly contested by the left-wing Démocrates-Socialistes (or démoc-socs, as they were called), the president, together with the conservative majority of the Legislative Assembly elected in May 1849, enacted measures designed to keep the leftists in check: censorship, constraints on speech and assembly, and administrative surveillance.53 These measures represented Louis Napoleon’s stick. His carrot was the presidential voyage, which he initiated in 1850, imitating a key technique of France’s Old Regime monarchs. In August 1850, he visited several of France’s most radical cities and regions and promised to “ameliorate the lives of workers.” He told his audiences that his “most sincere and devoted friends are not in the palaces but the thatched huts.”54  Truesdell, Spectacular Politics, 15.  Edward Berenson, Populist Religion and Left-wing Politics in France, 1830–52 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), chapters 5–6.  Truesdell, Spectacular Politics, 48 both quotes.

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He visited artisans in their workshops and the sick in their hospitals. He gave alms to the poor – thanks to a monthly allocation of 250,000 francs he wrangled from the Assembly for his travels. Three million francs was not an insignificant sum, and the president used it to good effect. The Bonapartist press elaborately covered these presidential trips and portrayed them as rousing successes. Huge cheering crowds were said to greet him everywhere, demonstrating his popularity and the authority it gave him. These reports emphasized, and likely exaggerated, the number of workers in the crowd, especially in cities and towns “noted as being socialist,” as one paper put it. Journalists portrayed the crowds as spontaneous gatherings that testified to the immense, joyful esteem that the president supposedly enjoyed. But archival evidence makes clear that Bonapartist agents worked hard to prevent any sour notes from being heard. Gendarmes arrested known dissidents in advance of Louis Napoleon’s arrival, and officials in Paris urged local leaders to stack the crowds with “as many people from rural areas as you can,” since peasants tended to be the prince-president’s most reliable constituency.55 Still, it is clear that a great many people flocked to Louis Napoleon’s rallies purely on their own. There seems to have been a genuine, if far from unanimous, fervor for the president. Another of Louis Napoleon’s techniques for staging authority was to extend his military reviews from the national guard to the regular army. During trips to the provinces in September and October 1850, he set up reviewing stands and had the troops march by. As they did, several soldiers yelled “Vive Napoléon,” “Vive le président,” and increasingly, “Vive l’Empereur.” After each parade, Louis Napoleon plied the troops with expensive refreshments that most would have been unable to afford. Marx famously dismissed these crude efforts to curry favor with the soldiers as bribery in the currency of “cigars and champagne, cold poultry, and garlic sausage.”56 As Louis Napoleon bolstered his authority, he and his conservative allies in the Legislative Assembly mercilessly harassed the démoc-soc opposition and drove what was left of it underground.57 But even with his opponents on the run, he faced a major problem: the constitution of 1848 limited him to a single term. His presidency was due to expire on the first Sunday of May 1852. To be eligible for a second term, he and his legislative allies proposed to amend the constitution. The problem was that the framers had made it virtually impossible to alter their work: the

 Truesdell, Spectacular Politics, 28 both quotes.  Truesdell, Spectacular Politics, 29; Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Chicago, IL: Kerr, 1913), 86.  John M. Merriman, The Agony of the Republic: The Repression of the Left in Revolutionary France, 1848–1851 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); Ted W. Margadant, French Peasants in Revolt: The Insurrection of 1851 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).

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constitution required a supermajority of 75 percent of the Legislative Assembly for the approval of any amendments. To undo this constraint, Louis Napoleon travelled around the country once again, this time to build support for a second term. His agents, meanwhile, circulated a petition urging the Assembly to amend the constitution. Within a few months, the petition garnered nearly 1.5 million signatures, but the démoc-socs were adamantly opposed to giving the prince-president a second term, as were a handful of centrists and conservatives.58 In November 1851, the amendment failed.59 Louis Napoleon had no intention of leaving office; imitating his uncle, he planned a coup d’état. To shore up his democratic credentials beforehand, he introduced a bill to restore universal manhood suffrage, which the Assembly had truncated in May 1850.60 Conservatives in the chamber narrowly defeated this effort and then introduced a bill that would give the Assembly control over the army and thus the potential to stage a coup of their own. Conservatives and Bonapartists alike feared that the démoc-socs would win the presidential election scheduled for May 1852 and turn society upside down. When the conservatives’ bill failed, thanks to a de facto alliance of republicans, démoc-socs, and allies of the president, Louis Napoleon secured the cooperation of key elements of the army and launched his coup. On 2 December 1851, soldiers occupied strategic points in Paris while arresting key members of parliament – of the left and the right. Ordinary Parisians awoke that morning to see their city placarded with announcements of what had taken place: the Assembly had been dissolved, universal suffrage restored, and a state of siege imposed. There would be a democratic consultation about these measures in the near future. In his proclamation justifying the coup, Louis Napoleon declared: “My sole duty is . . . to save the country [from royalists and leftists] by invoking the solemn judgment of the only sovereign that I recognize in France, the people.”61 In this declaration, as in earlier statements, Louis Napoleon claimed to derive his authority from the sovereign people and to act in their name. He understood that they wanted him to “close the era of revolution by satisfying the needs of the people and protecting them from subversive passions.”62 It is impossible to know what proportion of the French population actually granted Louis Napoleon the authority he claimed. Judging from public behavior, the evidence is mixed. In Paris, overt resistance was minimal, but potential leaders had been jailed, and a heavy military presence made anti-coup demonstrations futile. Most of provincial France remained quiet in aftermath of the coup, although there were notable exceptions.

    

Ménager, Napoléon du people, 108. Anceau, Napoléon III, 178. Ménager, Napoléon du people, 109. Anceau, Napoléon III, 188. Anceau, Napoléon III, 188.

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In large swaths of the Center and the South, peasants and artisans erupted in rebellion against Louis Napoleon’s seizure of power. About 100,000 people in twentyseven French departments participated in what was France’s largest insurrection of the nineteenth century. The president ordered the army to suppress the uprising, which nonetheless raged for several days before being mercilessly put down.63 In the aftermath of these events, the army remained in place as the government imposed a state of siege. Under these repressive circumstances, Louis Napoleon held a plebiscite – his idea of a democratic consultation – asking voters to approve or reject what he had done. It was essentially impossible to advocate a No vote, but even so, it is highly likely that the overwhelming majority approved – or at least did not disapprove. The rural rebellion convinced the middle and upper classes as well as most traditionalist peasants that Louis Napoleon alone stood between them and a leftist apocalypse.64 In the end, 7.5 million people, 76 percent of registered voters, said Yes, and just 650,000 or 6 percent, No. Although many of the 18 percent who abstained can be counted among the Nos, it was still a massive victory for Louis Napoleon. He had gained more than two million votes since the presidential election three years earlier. Granted, plebiscites are far from models of democratic procedure, especially when conducted under repressive conditions, but as George Sand said at the time: “No one was forced to vote yes, and the great majority voted yes. One does not buy or intimidate 6 or 7 million men.”65 The lopsided vote proved fundamentally important to Louis Napoleon, for it enabled him to maintain that he truly represented the will of the people and that support for him was all but unanimous. Still, he knew that he had acted illegally, that he had violated France’s constitution and his solemn oath of December 1848 promising to relinquish power in May 1852. It was crucial to bury this original sin of his post-republican regime under an avalanche of celebrations anointing him as the savior and legitimate ruler of France.66 To consecrate the new regime created by the coup d’état, while forgetting the coup itself, Louis Napoleon ordered that a Te Deum (“God, we praise you”) religious service take place in Paris at Notre Dame and in every other church in France. The Te Deum, an ancient prayer-chant traditionally sung on days of momentous celebration – the election of a pope or coronation of a king – would in this instance “call the blessings of heaven on France and on the great mission that has been confided to me by the French people.”67 If Louis Napoleon did not claim to govern by divine right, he did appear to believe that God should bless his rule.

 Margadant, French Peasants.  Ménager, Napoléon du peuple, 112–113.  Truesdell, Spectacular Politics, 34.  Sudhir Hazareesingh, The Saint-Napoleon: Celebrations of Sovereignty in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 27–28.  Truesdell, Spectacular Politics, 36.

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The government gave Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the architect responsible for the restoration of Notre Dame, the task of decorating the cathedral for the event. The architect draped the interior with red velvet and liberally sprinkled the letters LN for Louis Napoleon inside and out. He attached large paintings of Charlemagne, Saint-Louis, Louis XIV, and Napoleon on the towers of the church, suggesting that Louis Napoleon was the successor not just of Napoleon but of the other three great rulers as well. All four were said to be incarnations of France, and so was the prince-president, only he also incarnated the French people and drew his authority from them. Louis Napoleon wanted to be sure that everyone knew that the plebiscite had awarded him 7,500,000 votes, and he had Viollet-le-Duc gild that number onto the cathedral’s façade. Just before the Notre Dame festivities began, seventy-five blasts of the Invalides canons rang out, one for every 100,000 yeses he received.68 While continuing to identify himself with Napoleon, Louis Napoleon bathed his new, post-coup regime in the symbols of monarchy, while systematically obliterating those of the republic. He had the republican motto, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, sanded off the façades of public buildings and decreed the removal of the ‘liberty trees’ planted in 1848.69 The Te Deum service in Notre Dame was itself antirepublican, as it recalled the coronation of France’s kings. Louis Napoleon now dubbed himself the “prince-president,” a hybrid title, half monarchical and half democratic, and he made his official residence the Tuileries Palace, where the Bourbon kings had lived. He had his face stamped onto French coins and surrounded himself with bishops of the Church. Still, he wore a general’s uniform, evoking Napoleon, rather than the kings of the Old Regime. Lest Louis Napoleon’s new ‘decennial republic,’ named for his ten-year presidential term, be seen as too monarchical, he invented, or reinvented, a raft of Napoleonic traditions. Foremost among them was a national holiday, originally celebrated under Napoleon, marking the emperor’s birthday, 15 August. This date had the advantage of coinciding exactly with an important Catholic holiday, the Assumption of Mary, which marks the end of the Virgin’s earthly life and the assumption of her body and soul into heaven. Napoleon had made his birthday doubly religious by having the pope canonize a new saint, the Roman martyr Neopolis – Napoleon in French. Likely a fictional character, Neopolis/Napoleon would be called Saint Napoléon; his saint’s day, the Saint-Napoléon, would conveniently fall on 15 August.70 For obvious reasons, France’s two restoration regimes ignored the Saint-Napoléon, as did the republic installed in February 1848. By making 15 August a “national festival,” Louis Napoleon wanted the French people to forget those divisive “political” regimes in favor of what would be, he hoped, a unifying one that transcended politics.

 Truesdell, Spectacular Politics, 36–37.  Hazareesingh, Saint-Napoleon, 127.  Hazareesingh, Saint-Napoleon, 3–4.

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“France surrounds me with its sympathies,” the prince-president declared, “because I am not of the family of ideologues.”71 His decree requiring the Saint-Napoléon to be celebrated nationwide characterized it as a feast day “whose consecration tends best to unite everyone in the common sentiment of the national glory.”72 In defining the SaintNapoléon this way, he expressed a key element of the ideology that would undergird his regime: the Napoleonic empire was “national,” while France’s monarchies and republics were “partial” or “political,” representing only some people and interests. His regime represented everyone, because virtually everyone had elected Louis Napoleon as their ruler.73 His first Saint-Napoléon was lavishly staged on 15 August 1852, the Paris event alone costing nearly 1,000,000 francs. It sprinkled Napoleonic symbols throughout the city – atop the Arc de Triomphe and the Vendôme Column, along the Champs Elysées, and in the Place de la Concorde, among other key locations. It featured a solemn mass at the Church of the Madeleine, an elaborate military review, and a huge ball with 20,000 invitees held in a structure built for the occasion. There were outdoor concerts, a regatta, and a faux naval battle on the Seine. At night, the city was illuminated by thousands of lampions, colored oil lamps that dazzled the eye. The main attraction was a powerful fireworks show that supposedly recreated one of Napoleon’s great military victories. The show was largely a fiction, but what mattered was its ability, as one sympathetic journalist put it, to stimulate “the impressionable imagination of the masses.”74 Louis Napoleon followed this celebration and the smaller-scale ones in the provinces with a new month-long presidential voyage in September and October 1852. As if to emphasize the depth and extent of his victory in the plebiscite of December 1851, the prince-president travelled, without incident, to the very regions in the Center and South that had rebelled against his coup d’état. Some of his advisors were nervous about the itinerary, but accounts of the voyage depicted it as an unvarnished success. We cannot take these accounts fully at face-value, since repression and censorship made it impossible to publish negative views of the prince-president or to demonstrate against him, and the leaders of the rebellion had been jailed or exiled. But it is unlikely that all the portraits of an adoring public enthusiastically greeting the prince-president had been largely made up. A local newspaper in the department of the Cher (central France) reported: “The prince was everywhere and unceasingly welcomed with an immense, energetic, and continuous acclamation. Cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur’ and ‘Vive Napoléon’ dominated this acclamation of almost a hundred thousand voices.”75

    

Hazareesingh, Saint-Napoleon, 122. Truesdell, Spectacular Politics, 40. Englund, Napoleon, brilliantly examines Napoleon’s incessant “nation-talk.” Truesdell, Spectacular Politics, 45. Truesdell, Spectacular Politics, 48.

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Other press reports and the elaborate coverage in L’Illustration, France’s top pictorial weekly and not a Bonapartist publication, echoed these accounts, which all focused on the immense crowds of people acclaiming their ruler. Louis Napoleon’s top military advisor, Marshall Saint-Arnaud, who had questioned the wisdom of the itinerary, ultimately depicted it in glowing terms: “My words cannot describe this crescendo [of acclaim]. Everyone in the department of the Isère descended onto the road, and from Lyon to Grenoble . . . we traveled beneath triumphal arches. Everywhere there were cheers, cheers to wake the dead and to replace the trumpet of Judgment Day.”76 We do not know whether Saint-Arnaud was steeped in the Book of Revelation, but if he was, he would have known that the blast of the last trumpet marked the end of the era of tribulation and the time when “The kingdoms of this world [have] become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever.”77 Did Saint-Arnaud mean to present Louis Napoleon as a messiah? Some writers of the time did just that. “He was a God,” declared one Alexis Guillaume, “who had come down to earth.”78 Although these reports of Louis Napoleon’s voyage doubtless exaggerated his public support and deliberately or unwittingly omitted dissident voices, they nonetheless created the impression that the prince-president enjoyed essentially unanimous backing – just as he himself maintained. The longer his trip went on, and the longer journalists waxed enthusiastic about it, the more the people’s reported cries morphed from “Vive Napoléon” to “Vive l’Empereur,” and soon, “Vive Napoléon III.” When Louis Napoleon returned to Paris in late October, the prefect of the Department of the Seine urged the prince-president to “cede to the voice of the whole people; Providence has borrowed that voice to tell you to complete the mission that has been entrusted to you by taking up once again the crown of the immortal founder of your dynasty.”79 It was now only a matter of time before he would ask the French people to declare him Emperor Napoleon III and agree to abolish the republic in favor of a new, Second Empire. His plebiscite on this question, held on 20 and 21 November, yielded 7.8 million yeses (nearly 80 percent) and just 250,000 noes (2 percent). Some two million people (20 percent) did not participate. Again, open opposition to the referendum was prohibited, and many people doubtless feared that a negative vote could be dangerous. Still, Louis Napoleon had not constructed a police state capable of forcing such a lopsided decision – and there is no evidence that the results had been falsified or rigged.80 Millions of French men took it upon themselves to endorse the authority that Louis Napoleon had so adeptly staged.

 Truesdell, Spectacular Politics, 49.  Revelation 11:15.  Juliette Glikman, La monarchie impériale: L’imaginaire politique sous Napoléon III (Paris: Nouveau Monde Editions, 2013), 208.  Truesdell, Spectacular Politics, 49.  Anceau, Napoléon III, 208–209.

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III Maintaining Authority Now, as Emperor Napoleon III, he had to maintain that authority, and he would do so in numerous ways. He continued to travel around the country, celebrate the Saint-Napoléon, and send propagandists far and wide, while making it difficult for opponents to present dissenting views. Beyond these techniques, he added to his authority by turning himself into a celebrity, his face recognized everywhere thanks to the new medium of photography and the budding popularity of the illustrated press.81 He rooted his regime in a long French past, celebrating the army and France’s military exploits. And he presented himself as a selfless savior of his people in the face of natural disasters and other forms of distress.82 Already in 1850, more than two years before making himself Napoleon III, Louis Napoleon recognized the value of visiting key cities and regions of his country. He was arguably the first modern European leader to take such trips, and virtually all future French heads of state would copy this technique. Napoleon III continued his travels until the mid-1860s, when his health began to fail. But for the previous fifteen years, he basked in the French population’s apparent enthusiasm for seeing him in person. Even before the emperor’s visits, members of the French public may have felt a kind of personal connection with him, an “intimacy at a distance,” thanks to the wide circulation woodcuts showing him not only as a great leader, but also as a proud husband, father, and family man.83 Shortly after inaugurating his new empire, Napoleon III announced his engagement to Eugénie de Guzman, a twenty-six-year-old Spanish woman from a minor noble family. He had hoped to marry into a European royal family but was everywhere rebuffed. The new emperor then made a virtue of necessity by announcing his scorn for traditional monarchical marriages based on dynastic interests. He would marry for love, as a great many of his subjects aspired to do, even if for material and familial reasons they could not. In keeping with his “position of parvenu,” a “glorious title” earned “through the free suffrage of a great people,” Napoleon III resolved to wed “a woman that I love.” Having placed “independence, the qualities of the heart, and the happiness of the family above dynastic prejudices and ambitious calculations, I will  Jean-Pierre Bacot, “La presse illustrée,” in La civilization du journal: histoire culturelle et littéraire de la presse française au XIXe siècle, ed. Dominique Kalifa, Philippe Régnier, Marie-Ève Thérenty, and Alain Vaillant (Paris: Nouveau monde éditions, 2011), 445–462.  On Napoleon as celebrity, see: David A. Bell, “Charismatic Authority in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France,” in Rethinking the Age of Revolutions: France and the Birth of the Modern World, ed. David A. Bell and Yair Minzker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 104–133, here 131–133; David A. Bell, Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020).  Truesdell, Spectacular Politics, 66. For the idea of intimacy at a distance, see: John B. Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 207–208, 219–225.

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not be less strong since I will be more free.” According to the Austrian ambassador in Paris, this speech “had the goal of reconciling the masses with the marriage. From that comes the democratic note that predominates in it.”84 Louis Napoleon’s marriage, like so much else he did, asserted a commitment to democracy, or at least a commonality with his subjects, but beyond this, there was nothing common about it. He and his advisors staged an elaborate ceremony in Notre Dame, decked out once again by Viollet-le-Duc to emphasize the medieval character of the cathedral and connect his marriage with those of his royal forebears. Propagandists

Fig. 3.1: Napoleon III and Eugénie de Montijo marry in an elaborately staged ceremony in the Notre Dame Cathedral (Feb. 1853).

 Truesdell, Spectacular Politics, 59–60.

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for the regime, as well as artists for L’Illustration, depicted the sumptuous pageantry of the event (Fig. 3.1). But Napoleon III and his minions also released simpler, more intimate images, showing Louis Napoleon and Eugénie as a more ordinary, if romanticized couple (Fig. 3.2). And later, after the birth of their son Eugène-Louis-Jean-Joseph Bonaparte, the ‘imperial prince’ and heir to the throne, intimate images of father, mother, and son flooded the country.

Fig. 3.2: Napoleon III and Eugénie’s wedding portrayed with romance and intimacy rather than the pageantry of Notre Dame (Feb. 1853).

In the family pictures, Napoleon III shows no signs of regal or imperial imagery; he and his family appear in bourgeois garb, and the interiors look thoroughly bourgeois as well (Figs. 3.3 and 3.5). In the photograph of 1860, the emperor looks at the camera, the empress modestly downward, while their son gazes at his father – as the young Louis Napoleon once gazed at Napoleon (Fig. 3.4). Only the high-backed chair suggests any kind of political meaning, and the message is subtle. With these images and many others like them, Napoleon staged his marriage and family to suggest a dual authority at once democratic and hierarchic, popular and elite, intimate and grandiose. How well did it work? An American visitor observing the spectacle of the wedding wrote: “I have never seen a more dense mass of people than was collected along” the route of the procession following the event. Bonapartist writers claimed that the emperor and empress received an enthusiastic reception and that

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Fig. 3.3: Napoleon III as bourgeois family man (late 1850s).

“Vive l’Empereur” and “Vive l’Impératrice” rang out everywhere. Louis Napoleon’s American dentist, an influential figure at court, spoke of the “unbounded enthusiasm” for the couple. Other descriptions were less positive, although they came mostly from foreign observers. The Illustrated London News found the wedding ceremony disappointing and claimed that it “failed signally to waken any demonstration of heartfelt welcome or applause.”85 But almost no one in France read the London weekly, which meant that the overwhelming majority of the descriptions and images that circulated in the Hexagon depicted Napoleon III as a massively popular ruler. Those images helped to create and reinforce that popularity, allowing the emperor to represent himself as the people’s king, a monarch who had both inherited his crown and won it on

 Truesdell, Spectacular Politics, 63. See also: Nancy L. Green, The Other Americans in Paris: Businessmen, Countesses, Wayward Youth, 1880–1941 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), chapter 3.

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Fig. 3.4: Napoleon III looks at the camera and Eugénie downward, while their son gazes at his father (1860).

the strength of a near-unanimous democratic vote – a unanimity that persisted into the new imperial regime. Not only did the wedding contribute to that popularity; so did the annual celebrations of the Saint-Napoléon throughout provincial France. Municipalities and villages everywhere fêted the emperor and his empire on what had become an important national holiday, one with powerful religious resonances given its connection to the Assumption. In Deuxnouds, a village in the Meuse, the mayor opened the Saint-Napoléon of 1853 by praising the “peace and prosperity” the regime had brought the peasants of the region. Another village extolled the emperor on this occasion for “listening to our voice and protecting our rights.” In a working-class town, a song composed for the Saint-Napoléon of 1867 honored Napoleon III as the “protector of the working class and of their workshops.” In many of these villages, towns, and cities, residents built miniature arcs de triomphe to honor Napoleon III and associate him with his legendary uncle. Woodcuts from the 1850s and 1860s pictured these mini-monuments as topped with a large letter “N,” referring at once to Napoleon I and Napoleon III. Crowds of people paraded through the mini-arcs, paying homage to the emperor, who appeared

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Fig. 3.5: Napoleon III as doting dad (unknown date).

to be gazing back at them in the form of busts and drawings that proliferated around the country by the thousands.86 The emperor’s face became familiar to everyone, sometimes as a portrait hardened into stone or plaster, and more commonly as inked sketches on thin lithographed sheets. There he was with his trademark mustache and goatee, displayed for his people to admire and revere. Surrounded by images of Napoleon III, French men and women were encouraged to feel an intimacy with him, an intimacy stronger perhaps than what their ancestors would have experienced for earlier rulers, including Napoleon I. Although sharply focused on the person of Napoleon III, celebrations of the Saint-Napoléon also allowed the emperor to restate and reinforce certain ideological pillars of his regime. This was especially true of the notion that the empire had overcome the social and political divisions that had long plagued his country. “The  Hazareesingh, Saint-Napoleon, 40, 61–63.

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poor, the rich, the old, the young all celebrated the national day [15 August] together,” declared the mayor of a small town in the Doubs in 1852. Another ideological pillar was the idea that the Bonapartes had preserved what was best about the French Revolution, namely “the upholding of political equality for all,” while ridding France of the murderous conflicts between republicans and royalists.87 Napoleon III alone could achieve this goal, for unlike France’s traditional rulers or revolutionary leaders, he was a “people’s king” who synthesized in himself the extremes of sovereignty represented by France’s earlier regimes. Rather than the republicans’ complete sovereignty of the people, or the legitimists’ complete sovereignty of a hereditary king, Napoleon III claimed to stand for both. The French people had used their sovereignty to bestow on him the powers that France’s kings had traditionally enjoyed. Above all, Napoleon III represented himself as the embodiment of the French Revolution stripped of its revolutionary implications. “The empire stands for the revolution of 1789,” one popular lithograph read, “without its revolutionary ideas. It stands for religion without intolerance, equality without the follies of egalitarianism, love for the people without the charlatanism of socialists, national honor without the calamities of war.”88 Beyond these ideological fundamentals, all designed to ground Napoleon III’s authority in a popular sovereignty devoid of political conflict, French men and women were encouraged to understand the virtues of the Second Empire in multiple, often overlapping, ways. For his most orthodox supporters, he guaranteed public order and state power, while for a great many peasants, he also represented order and stability while serving as their protector and bulwark against a rapacious nobility still wedded to the Old Regime.89 For devout Catholics, he was deemed a Christian king closely allied to the Church.90 These various, although convergent, representations enabled Napoleon III to draw support from a diversity of social groups. Another key way that Napoleon staged his authority was by associating himself with the French army and reminding his subjects of the glory of its Napoleonic past. For all his assertions of the legitimacy he derived from the French people, Louis Napoleon could not completely forget – or make his opponents forget – that he had become emperor by violating the law and committing acts of violence against his own citizens. The legitimacy conferred by the regime’s two founding plebiscites was never quite enough. Napoleon III also sought a national/nationalist legitimacy from the army. He made a visual connection with the army by appearing in public and in portraits wearing a general’s uniform, although he had never served. The military review,    

Hazareesingh, Saint-Napoleon, 59. Ménager, Napoléon du people, 143. Corbin, Village, chapter 1. Hazareesingh, Saint-Napoleon, 75.

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incorporated into his voyages around the country and various public ceremonies, fulfilled the same purpose. But important as the army was, Napoleon III did not want the imagery surrounding it to give his regime a militaristic cast. He had no intention of reminding peasants and workers that he had launched the army against tens of thousands of them in December 1851. And he saw no evidence that the French people wanted to revive the perpetual warfare of the First Empire. To reassure them, he said again and again that “the Empire brings peace.”91 This slogan did not mean, of course, that he would never go to war. In 1853, Napoleon III injected France into a long-simmering dispute between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. Like the British, he was eager to stem Russian expansionism and especially its designs on Constantinople and parts of the Balkans, principally the Danubian principalities (Romania today), which the Ottomans claimed. When fighting broke out between the Russian and Ottoman Empires, France and Britain entered the conflict on the Ottoman side. The Crimean War of 1853–1856, named for the peninsula on which most of the combat took place, was notable for the incompetence, suffering, and brutality displayed on all sides. But thanks to France and Britain’s superior technology, they won the war, albeit at the cost of 100,000 French lives. No matter, France had won, and Napoleon III staged an elaborate victory celebration. It began with the now de rigeur Te Deum service in Notre Dame and continued when the first troops returned to France at the end of December 1855. Large crowds, in Paris and around the country, came out to welcome the soldiers, and the public was joyful and somber all at once – joyful over the victory and somber over the terrible shape of the survivors. Many were sick and mutilated, and all were ragged from the years of battle. The elaborate celebrations turned them into heroes; as leader of the festivities, Louis Napoleon made himself a hero as well, a hero who appeared to embody both the army and the nation. His ability to associate himself with the soldiers’ glorious suffering added to the popularity of his regime.92 This military and political success doubtless encouraged Napoleon III to play a larger role on the European stage. In the Plombières agreement of July 1858, the emperor pledged to join with Piedmont-Sardinia, the most powerful Italian state, in a war to end Austria’s hold over northeastern Italy. But just two years after the costly Crimean war, there was little appetite in France for new military engagements. To gain support for a potential war, Napoleon III turned to his now tried and true techniques: celebrations of the army and voyages to strategic parts of his country. In August 1857, as he thought about a military alliance with Piedmont, Napoleon III created a new military distinction, the Medal of Saint Helena. The medal would be awarded to all surviving former soldiers who had fought in France’s revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Because so many of those soldiers had been young

 Hazareesingh, Legend, 258.  Truesdell, Spectacular Politics, 146–147.

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at the time, there were some 400,000 alumni of these wars. The medal had Napoleon I’s face stamped on one side and an inscription to his “Companions of Glory” on the other. It represented yet another symbolic link between Napoleon I and Napoleon III, another effort to portray Louis Napoleon as his uncle’s legitimate heir.93 These honors were first awarded in 1858, just as Napoleon III was preparing the French public for a new war. The occasion tended to be the Saint-Napoléon, accompanied by the usual Te Deum. Officials almost unanimously reported the award ceremonies as a great success for the regime. According to the sub-prefect of Béziers: “The presence and the enthusiasm of the recipients of the Medal of Saint Helena have produced a happy effect on public consciousness. By honoring them, the Empire has conquered the sympathies of even the most indifferent and rallied many hearts.”94 Reports such as this should be read with a measure of skepticism, but they cannot be dismissed. By 1858, the regime had loosened restrictions on public expression to some extent; even so, dissenting views about the popularity of the medals and their awardees were rare.95 The awards ceremonies were popular in part because they were accompanied by banquets with wine liberally served. But they also represented effective Bonapartist propaganda and likely added to the authority and standing of the regime. The toasts proffered at these dinners almost always extolled Napoleon III, the “illustrious descendent,” as one village official put it, of the great Napoleon I, who made “heroes of all those humble conscripts who fought memorable battles in order to make France the queen of civilized nations.” Toasts such as these not only evoked the glory of the two Napoleons, but also acknowledged a key idea they held in common, the centrality of ordinary men. These were individuals who, as soldiers, had devoted themselves to their country and, it was said, to their emperors as well, emperors who derived their authority from them and ruled in their name.96 Napoleon III seemed to think that these ceremonies had helped prepare his subjects for war, which he declared against Austria in May 1859. To take advantage of the soldiers’ prestige and that of the army overall, Napoleon III, a man who had never seen combat, placed all French troops under his direct command. He had first traveled to the most deeply Catholic parts of France to tell people – falsely it turned out – that he would do nothing in Italy to compromise the authority of the pope. On his return to Paris, and with great fanfare, the emperor donned a battlefield uniform and led a procession of troops to the railroad station, where the soldiers boarded trains heading south. The writer Prosper Merimée, who supported the regime, reported that an “immense crowd” accompanied Louis Napoleon to the train station amid “frenetic acclamation.” Horace de Viel Castel, the director of the Louvre, declared: “Never has the    

Hazareesingh, Legend, 242–243. Hazareesingh, Legend, 252. Hazareesingh, Legend, 252. Hazareesingh, Legend, 252–253.

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Emperor received such a magnificent ovation as that which he received today . . . it was [a] poignant [moment] . . . a furia that will never be understood by those who were not there to witness it.”97 At this point, there was little, if any, visible opposition to the war. “Even those who since December [1851] had coldshouldered the emperor of the coup d’état,” wrote Emile Ollivier, still hostile at this point to the regime, “bore him off to war in triumph.”98 When the French army began a string of victories in late May, Empress Eugénie held a Te Deum in Notre Dame, again decorated for the occasion by Viollet-le-Duc. But two serious problems soon arose. French Catholics increasingly disliked the Italian war, correctly fearing that Piedmont had designs on the Papal States. And worse, the main battles, Magenta and Solferino in June 1859, resulted in unspeakable carnage, a loss of life so terrible that it moved reformers to devise rules of warfare that would be codified in the first Geneva Convention of 1864.99 It now seemed that the empire no longer “brings peace,” which is partly what prompted Napoleon III to negotiate a hasty end to the war. (He also feared that Prussia would intervene on Austria’s side.) The treaty with Austria satisfied no one. Catholics thought it gave too little protection to the pope, while Bonapartists and republicans, who both wanted Italian independence, believed it did too little to redeem the sacrifices of French soldiers. As for the Prussians, they took note of the relative weakness of the French army and of Louis Napoleon’s inability to inspire his troops. As a military leader, he was no Napoleon Bonaparte. Still, France had prevailed on the battlefield, albeit in chaotic, unconvincing ways, and Napoleon III touted the outcome as a great victory. His regime organized dozens of processions, troop reviews, and Te Deums to celebrate it. That France had not succeeded in ejecting Austria from Venetia dented the emperor’s prestige, but his standing recovered when France acquired Nice and Savoy from Piedmont in 1860 and played a major diplomatic role in the process of Italian unification. Napoleon III had, however, angered Catholics over the pope’s loss of his temporal kingdom in and around Rome. But thanks in part to the coincidence of the Saint-Napoléon and the Assumption of Mary – plus all the Te Deums – Catholics did not, for the most part, abandon the regime.100 Napoleon III’s array of tools for staging his authority had won their loyalty, and he mostly maintained it with his new status as a major player in European affairs. In 1853, he had made a productive alliance with Great Britain, something his uncle could never have done, and together with his new ally he kept Russia in its place. Napoleon III solidified that alliance and confirmed his position as a leading  Mémoires du Comte Horace de Viel Castel (Paris, 1883), 751.  Truesdell, Spectacular Politics, 152.  J. Henry Dunant, Un souvenir de Solferino (Geneva: Jules Guillaume Fick, 1862); J. Henry Dunant, Geneva Convention: The Standards for International Law and for Humanitarian Concern (New York: McKay, 2008 [1864]).  Hazareesingh, Saint-Napoleon, 176.

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European statesman by inviting Queen Victoria and her husband Albert to France in 1855. This was the first official visit by an English/British monarch to France in over 400 years.101 The royal visit proved phenomenally popular and received lavish coverage in the press, including huge pictorial spreads in L’Illustration. As host of the royal couple, Napoleon III basked in their international prestige while boosting his standing and authority at home. Victoria and Albert had come, in part, to tour France’s Universal Exhibition, the first of two World’s Fairs that Napoleon III would stage. The Exposition of 1855, in particular, displayed the new prosperity that marked the early years of the Second Empire and boosted the prestige and standing of his regime, especially among working people.102 The Exposition showcased France’s products and technological advances and associated them with Napoleon III by sculpting his face onto the façade of the main building and pressing his features onto the medals he awarded, in person, to the winners of prize competitions he had established. In Emile Zola’s L’Argent of 1891, the eighteenth of his twenty novels set during the Second Empire, the narrator depicts a duplicitous Napoleon III as taking advantage of the Exposition to present himself “as the master of Europe, speaking with the calmness of power and promising peace.”103 The peace, as we have seen, would be shattered anew in 1859, but Napoleon III’s intervention in Italy allowed him, again, to stage his authority in the international arena. After ending the war with Austria, the French emperor pushed the process of Italian unification forward, while helping the Piedmontese prime minister and king, Count Cavour and Victor Emmanuel II, neutralize Garibaldi’s republicanrevolutionary designs. Thanks in part to Napoleon III’s diplomacy, Victor Emmanuel succeeded in extending his conservative-liberal regime to the whole of Italy, keeping the peninsula’s social hierarchy largely intact. “If we want things to stay as they are,” says the hero of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s great novel of the Risorgimento, The Leopard, “things will have to change.”104 Amid these international interventions, Napoleon III kept his focus trained on France, where he rarely neglected an opportunity to stage – and reinforce – his authority. When eastern France suffered severe flooding in 1856, he traveled to the region to commiserate with the victims. Journalists elaborately covered the trips, reporting that the emperor empathized with the suffering of his people. As soon as Napoleon III arrived in Lyon, he was surrounded, journalists said, by a large crowd of people who had been flooded out of their homes. When gendarmes tried to push back the crowd, Louis Napoleon reportedly said: “It is you, gentlemen, who should  Truesdell, Spectacular Politics, 72.  David Kulstein, Napoleon III and the Working Class: A Study of Government Propaganda under the Second Empire (Los Angeles: California State Colleges, 1969).  Emile Zola, Money, trans. Benj. R. Tucker (New York: Worthington, 1892), 274.  Giuseppe Tomasa di Lampedusa, The Leopard (New York: Knopf, 1960), 28.

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step back; I am here in the midst of my family.” He gave large amounts, it was said, from his personal funds to alleviate the misery, and the recipients shed tears of gratitude for his largesse.105 In Tarascon, devastated by the floodwaters and inaccessible by road or rail, Napoleon III boarded a boat and floated into the town – or so journalists maintained. The stricken inhabitants “let out cries of joy and admiration for this unlimited dedication.” In yet another flooded town, this one known for its radical workers, Louis Napoleon’s efforts on their behalf “instantaneously redeemed the souls of these working men who had been lost to demagoguery.” On seeing what he had done for them, “they shouted in unison, ‘Vive l’Empereur,’ with an enthusiasm that no one can fully describe.” These workers, “misguided until now, recognized and acclaimed as their best friend the man who had braved danger to rescue and console them.”106 Such reports doubtless embellished reality, or invented it altogether, but they reveal the image Napoleon III wanted to project: he was a ruler who cared for his people, sympathized with them, and undertook herculean efforts on their behalf. Amid the voyages around the country, the constant public celebrations, the military reviews, awards ceremonies, triumphal marches, and many other things, it may be that Napoleon III’s most significant effort to stage his authority turned on the massive redevelopment of Paris accomplished under his regime. Louis Napoleon famously chose Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, a gruff, no-nonsense bureaucrat, to direct the rebuilding of the French capital, which in 1852 looked more like a medieval city than a modern metropolis. To modernize it, Haussmann carved an interconnected series of broad boulevards through the capital’s maze of narrow, winding streets and punctuated the urban mass with a network of scenic parks. Haussmann lined his new grands boulevards with sidewalks so broad as to create a kind of outdoor living area for the city. Cafés spilled out onto these pedestrian thoroughfares, filling them with tables from which people could observe the spectacle of city life, as if seated in a theater.107 Under Haussmann, the French capital became the setting not only for the spectacle of urban life, but also for the spectacle of his Bonapartist state. Haussmann opened up the area around the great Paris monuments – Notre Dame, the Tuileries, the Madeleine – the better to use them for Napoleonic display. He also carved out spaces leading to these buildings and to the new ones under construction, especially Charles Garnier’s opera house, which he placed at the end of a long boulevard with sightlines beginning from the Louvre. These new boulevards and vistas  Glikman, Monarchie impériale, 208–209.  Glikman, Monarchie impériale, 210.  T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), chapter 1; Stephane Kirkland, Paris Reborn: Napoléon III, Baron Haussmann, and the Quest to Build a Modern City (New York: Picador, 2014); Robert Moses, “What Happened to Haussmann,” Architectural Forum 79, no. 1 (1942): 57–66; David Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958).

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became the theatrical settings for the processions, military reviews, and ceremonies that Louis Napoleon would use to stage his authority with dramatic, eye-opening effect. Although some of his staging, especially the long tours of the provinces, petered out as he and his regime aged into the mid- and late 1860s, the transformation of Paris never ceased to draw attention to him and his regime. Some of that attention was negative, but for Charles Baudelaire and, later, the Impressionists, Louis Napoleon’s Paris would be the brilliant exemplar of an urban modernity that fascinated them and inspired their most famous works.108 For plenty of working people, neither modernity nor modernization did them any good, as many found themselves priced out of their homes by what we would now call gentrification. But the redevelopment of Paris provided a vast number of jobs, and for that and the general prosperity those jobs helped to sustain, Napoleon III derived a great deal of working-class support. Perhaps most important, the work that Napoleon III commissioned Haussmann to do succeeded in etching the Second Empire onto the very face of Paris while grounding it in the streetscapes of the urban space. Much of Louis Napoleon’s Paris stands largely undisturbed today, 150 years after the collapse of his regime. The dazzling central city, gentrified and globalized as it has become, remains as a testament to Napoleon III’s accomplishments and the authority it helped him display.

 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002); Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (New York: Phaidon Press, 1995); Clark, Painting.

The Diversification of Authority: New Actors among Old Elites

Martin Kohlrausch

The Social Promise of Scientific Progress: Technical Experts and the Quest for Authority Abstract: This chapter sketches the conditions under which a new type of expert was able to gain public authority in the nineteenth century. It examines the development of a new techno-scientific space, established and demarcated by expanded institutions of research and learning, nation-building, the technification of cities, and the rise of mass media. The chapter argues that the media provided a prime stage on which to acknowledge the power of expertise, as well as for experts to voice their demands for authority. In focusing on the media presence of experts, the chapter illuminates a seeming paradox: how certain experts were able to become charismatic media personalities, despite the lack of media savvy that usually characterizes techno-scientific expertise. Keywords: experts, authority, elites, mass media, engineers, inventors, techno-science ✶✶✶

Modern history has long been perceived as a struggle between ascending and descending groups and classes. Scholars of the nineteenth century have extensively studied the mobility and social fate of the aristocracy, the peasantry, the bourgeoisie, and, later in the century, the proletariat. Scientific experts rarely feature in these accounts, however, even though they experienced a striking upward mobility in social prestige between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I. At the end of the eighteenth century, scientists and technicians were generally marginal in their importance; by the start of the twentieth century, they enjoyed unquestioned relevance. Of course, scientists as a group were not a social class in traditional socio-economic terms, and as such were not in class conflict with other social groups in their quest for political power. Their ascent in social influence did not mean the direct displacement of other elites or a usurpation of others’ authority. Even so, the rise of scientists and technical experts was not a foregone conclusion nor a natural process, and was characterized by its own forms of struggle. The concept of authority can help us to make sense of this struggle, not least since expertise is intrinsically linked to the problem of authority and its staging. If we adopt Max Weber’s argument that authority requires recognition to carry weight, then experts – scientists as well as technicians and inventors – are especially dependent on outside recognition of their superior knowledge and abilities. The expert has no existence per se without an audience which actively seeks out his or her authority on specific matters of knowledge. Though these experts individually attain the necessary formal qualifications in their particular field, their prominence thereafter rests on acceptance by peers and the broader public. In the nineteenth century in particular, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110574012-004

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as this chapter will show, expertise had to be performed in public through complex and increasingly mediated social interactions.1 Experts were not new to the nineteenth century, of course, but the specific conditions of industrialization, scientific breakthroughs, the revolution in infrastructure, an expanding bureaucratic state model, booming cities, and the emergence of new publics and mass media fundamentally changed their character. It was only in the 1850s that the term ‘expert’ first became commonly used to circumscribe what we would today call techno-science: a field in which the scientific method is applied to promoting technological advancements, while technological advances simultaneously create the material framework within which scientific ideas evolve. In techno-science, both science and technology influence each other and create the parameters for each other’s development.2 Even as science and technology followed an internal logic of development based on knowledge and discovery, the impact of techno-science cannot be understood without placing it in a larger social and political context.3 The same holds true for the experts on center stage in this chapter. This chapter will therefore not trace the ascent of individual experts, but instead take a schematic view of the conditions in which a new type of expert could gain authority in the nineteenth century. To assess these experts’ relationship to each other and to the public, as well as their position in the broader social and political context, this chapter will examine the development of a new techno-scientific space. This techno-scientific space was demarcated by expanded institutions of research and learning; nation-states that turned productive; the technification of cities; and the emergence of communication grids and transportation networks that connected cities and set the preconditions for the rise of mass media.4 The media, in particular, provided a prime stage on which to acknowledge and voice demands for authority, and thus reflects the processes that underlay the expansion of this

 Joris Vandendriessche, Ever Peeters, and Kaat Wils, eds., Scientists’ Expertise as Performance: Between State and Society, 1860–1960 (London: Taylor & Francis, 2015); H. M. Collins and Robert Evans, Rethinking Expertise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Elke Kurz-Milcke, “The Authority of Representations,” in Experts in Science and Society, ed. Elke Kurz-Milcke and Gerd Gigerenzer (New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004).  Martin Kohlrausch and Helmuth Trischler, Building Europe on Expertise: Innovators, Organizers, Networkers, series: Making Europe: Technology and Transformations, 1850–2000 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 11. On technoscience: B. Bensaude-Vincent, S. Loeve, A. Nordmann, and A. Schwarz, “Matters of Interest: The Objects of Research in Science and Technoscience,” Journal of General Philosophy of Science 42 (2011): 365–383.  Robert Douglas Friedel, A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 2007).  James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Charles S. Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,” American Historical Review 105, no. 3 (2000): 807–831.

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new space. Thus, rather than providing a fine-toothed study of the rise of technoscientific knowledge, this chapter will focus on the contact zone between various actors who defined the boundaries of the techno-scientific space. This chapter also illuminates a seeming paradox about the media presence of technical experts and their relationship to charisma. These experts included scientists and engineers, as well as inventors in new technological fields, for instance aviation. With the increasing professionalization of science, these experts were expected mostly to act behind the scenes in the quiet concentration of the laboratory. Refuge from the noise of public life reflected the value placed on impartial knowledge, which demanded that rational thought should not bend to the fluctuating moods of public opinion. The routine actions and careful calculations of scientific experimentation were the experts’ stock in trade, which were diametrically opposed to the “extra-ordinary” feats of the charismatic leader. As the sociologist Edward Shils notes: “Routine actions are not simply repetitive actions; they are uninspired actions,” while “the charismatic person is . . . the breaker of routine order.”5 Instead, experts seemed to exemplify Weber’s definition of bureaucratic authority. As formally trained professionals, experts’ authority rested on technical qualifications, diplomas, and formal certification; they embodied rational calculation and the application of reason and data, and were marked by the ideals of precision, stability, discipline, and reliability. For these reasons, Weber posits that bureaucratic authority was directly and “sharply” opposed to charisma.6 And yet a good number of experts in the nineteenth century managed to inspire levels of public admiration equal to any charismatic leader of the time. Think, for instance, of the attention gained by aviators.7 The enthusiasm for aviators had begun in the late eighteenth century in France, as the brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier first triggered the imagination of flight. A century later, the American brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright embodied the height of the belief that one or two men, as inventors, could make all the difference regarding technology’s impact on society. Likewise in 1900, the German engineer and former army officer Ferdinand Count Zeppelin launched his first dirigible, and although the success of his innovation remained mixed at best, public enthusiasm was so great that Zeppelin was able to secure the colossal financial means necessary for his high-flying schemes. The media hype that followed him wherever he went was so great that he even challenged the German emperor in terms of public presence.8

 Edward Shils, Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 129.  Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, trans. Eprhaim Fischoff et al., vol. 1 (New York: Bedminster, 1968), 220, 223–226, 244.  Peter Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).  Thomas Lindenberger, Straßenpolitik: Zur Sozialgeschichte der öffentlichen Ordnung in Berlin 1900 bis 1914 (Bonn: Dietz, 1995), 367–368; Martin Kohlrausch, Der Monarch im Skandal: Die Logik

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The spectacular accomplishments of flight are only partly responsible for the public’s visceral response to these pioneers of aviation science. Similar levels of starpower accompanied the technological and scientific work of prominent engineers like Gustave Eiffel and Ferdinand de Lesseps, the ‘constructor’ of the Suez Canal, as well as pathologists like Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, and Rudolf Virchow. What connects these star scientists and experts is their success in working in the nineteenth century’s techno-scientific spaces. Alongside their bureaucratic institutional authority, these experts gained public influence through didactic acts of translation in these new spaces. Not only did they seem to perform ‘miracles’ of invention, but just as importantly they conveyed ideas from the most meaningful sites of social experience: no longer from the heaven that dominated previous religious ages, but from what Shils calls the modern social “center” as “the realm of values and beliefs,” or “what the society holds to be sacred.”9 Star experts of the nineteenth century drew the broader population to that center of meaning by demonstrating to them the significance of potentially life-changing discoveries. In short, experts occupied the role of educator, elucidating the arcana of scientific progress in order to lay bare the conditions of modern society and reconcile it to its fate. These acts of translation between scientific meaning and interested audiences took place in specific types of liminal spaces which allowed the experts to act as a hinge between the two social realms, or the ‘up’ and the ‘down’ in the political hierarchy. In the nineteenth century’s development of the nation-state, experts represented the hyphen, i.e. the link between the emerging nation and the state. Serving as translators between political elites and the general population in the space in-between, experts exploited their authority to interpret state policy, national prestige, and health. In this sense, the term ‘genius’ partially regained its original meaning as a guiding spirit which accompanied and guided the individual on his or her life’s journey.10 To their eager audiences, nineteenth-century technological experts and scientists embodied the double meaning of genius as both innovative thinkers and protective spirits who offered their nations a visionary path into a utopian future.

I From Fortresses to Revolutions The emergence of the modern expert was a multilayered process, with no single or clear origin point. It is safe to say, however, that the secular development commonly

der Massenmedien und die Transformation der wilhelminischen Monarchie (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2005), 421–422.  Shils, Center and Periphery, 3–4, 13.  For a history of the term ‘genius,’ see: Darrin McMahon, Divine Fury: A History of Genius (New York: Basic Books, 2013).

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referred to as absolutism – in both its rigid and enlightened variants – helped to produce and shape this new type of professional. The territorialized state that emerged after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 relied on a bureaucracy to collect the taxes necessary for its key projects, including the expansion of capital cities and royal courts, the development of infrastructure such as harbors, canals, and road networks, and the construction of fortresses to mark and secure state borders which had now attained a greater significance. Absolutism, in both its early modern French and later Prussian ‘enlightened’ variants, engendered a new military system, composed of systemically trained standing armies, which further demanded cutting-edge technological expertise. The creation of this knowledge was fostered in new military schools, dictated by codes of certified training.11 The career of Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban may serve as a vivid illustration of this process, as he both embodied the dynamics of French absolutism and personified the early modern model of the expert. Vauban, who lived from 1633 to 1707, is today mostly known for constructing fortresses in the shatter-zone between France and Germany. Trained in the sciences, he made his career in the French military and was appointed Royal Engineer in 1655. From the 1660s to the 1680s, he was charged with fortifying harbors and cities mostly in the territories newly conquered by King Louis XIV. In all, Vauban oversaw the realization of 300 projects covering an impressive geographical expanse.12 Under Vauban’s direction, fortresses adopted cutting-edge infrastructure that combined the skills of various trades, crafts, sciences, and technologies and thus demanded immense financial and political investment.13 These structures also acquired a deep symbolic meaning as they combined the (military) survival of the state with technical ingenuity, both of which reflected back the luster of their creator. Along with turning the construction of walls into a scientific endeavor, Vauban understood from early on that engineers were a critical military resource, and one in notoriously short supply.14 Consequentially, Vauban played a key role in setting up training institutes of a modern kind, specifically the Corps royal des ingénieurs militaires. He also published extensively across disciplines, and his interest in the emerging field of statistics foreshadowed the emphasis on data that characterized modern expertise.15 Inspired by

 John H. Weiss, The Making of Technological Man: The Social Origins of French Engineering Education (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 1982).  Thierry Martin and Michèle Virol, Vauban, architecte de la modernité? (Besançon: Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2008).  Christopher Duffy, Siege Warfare: The Fortress in the Early Modern World 1494–1660 (London: Routledge, 1995).  Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 267.  On early configurations of expertise: Liliane Hilaire-Perez and Catherine Verna, “Dissemination of Technical Knowledge in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era: New Approaches and Methodological Issues,” Technology and Culture 47, no. 3 (2006): 536–565. See also: Caspar Hirschi, “Moderne

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Fig. 4.1: Cenotaph of Vauban in the Royal Chapel of the Hôtel des Invalides, Paris.

Vauban’s insistence on forming a corps of engineers, the École des ponts et chaussées, founded in 1747, sought to produce that ‘modern engineer’ by enforcing Vauban’s strict entry requirements, thus enhancing the institution’s prestige and building an esprit de corps among its graduates.16 As training schools for this new type of engineer-expert sprang up in different regions in Europe in the eighteenth century, they often copied the French example, which remained the dominant model well into the nineteenth century.17 Tellingly, Vauban’s authority relied on both the traditional force of the king’s favor and the more modern one provided by his expertise with military technology. The public acknowledgement Vauban received reflects this fact. Vauban was inducted into the French Académie des sciences – itself a product of Vauban’s time –

Eunuchen? Offizielle Experten im 18. und 21. Jahrhundert,” in Wissen, maßgeschneidert: Experten und Expertenkulturen in der Vormoderne, ed. Björn Reich, Frank Rexroth, and Matthias Roick (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2012), 290–328.  Bruno Belhoste and Konstantinos Chatzis, “From Technical Corps to Technocratic Power: French State Engineers and their Professional and Cultural Universe in the First Half of the 19th Century,” History and Technology 23, no. 3 (2007): 209–225, here 212; Antoine Picon, L’invention de l’ingénieur moderne: L’Ecole des ponts et chaussées, 1747–1851 (Paris: Presses de l’Ecole nationale des ponts et chaussées, 1992).  Patrick Peltcjean, “Scientific Development, Engineering Schools and the Building of a Modern State,” History and Technology 12, no. 2 (1995), 191–204.

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and received military and noble titles as well as multiple other decorations, demonstrating his virtuosity in grasping glory in the absolutist state. He also turned into a renowned public figure and military hero whose fame enjoyed a significant afterlife. In 1867, Napoleon III renamed his birthplace Saint-Léger-Vauban, such was the degree to which Vauban’s expertise was regarded as exceptional well into the modern technological age (Fig. 4.1). Vauban’s example thus points to the birth of a bilateral dependency between experts and the state, spearheaded by early modern France, as well as the fact that public attention was not merely a signifier but could also translate into concrete influence for experts like Vauban. In becoming a public figure and national hero, Vauban acquired an authority which far exceeded that of his office alone. Still, Vauban’s example was unique in the Ancien Régime, which becomes clear when one looks eastwards to the Kingdom of Prussia, another of Europe’s most prominent absolutist states. Prussia had long emulated the French absolutist model, but in the eighteenth century developed its own variant in what historians later branded ‘enlightened absolutism.’ As enlightened absolutists, Hohenzollern monarchs fashioned themselves as champions of reform and improvement. They embarked on extensive projects of military reform and the so-called inner colonization of territories that Frederick the Great, according to his own words, “conquered” in peacetime along the river Oder by importing western expertise from France and the Netherlands.18 None of these schemes produced singular heroes in Prussia as they had in France, however. Instead, the Prussian king, who called himself “the first servant of the state,” reserved all the laurels for himself and allowed only a few army generals to bask in his reflected glory.19 It seems, then, that Vauban was singular in his time, even if he did serve as a precursor to the encyclopedists and the value they placed on rational thought. Even so, philosophes and technicians in the age of Enlightenment did not attain Vauban’s social standing and prominence in politics, science, or the realm of public attention. Nor should we designate Vauban as a modern expert avant-la-lettre, as he did not have the modern expert’s level of autonomy, which became a critical marker for social authority. Vauban remained largely caught in the strings of a Europe dominated by the nobility and a financial system constrained by royal patronage. His plans for extending the French tax base, for instance, were both visionary and logical given the scope of his infrastructural program, but they failed nonetheless due to opposition at the royal court. In short, it was only during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic period that techno-scientific institutes, as envisioned by Vauban, gained momentum and turned

 David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (New York: Norton, 2006), 40. See also the largely ‘anonymous’ experts in: Jakob Vogel, Ein schillerndes Kristall: Eine Wissensgeschichte des Salzes zwischen Früher Neuzeit und Moderne, Industrielle Welt 72 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2008).  T. C. W. Blanning, Frederick the Great: King of Prussia (London: Allen Lane, 2015), 457–463.

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experts into a professional group in their own right.20 And it was only at this point that experts won a qualitatively new degree of autonomy: although they were still aligned with the state, they were able to set the rules and expectations of their disciplines. This was a piecemeal and long-term process. Until well into the nineteenth century, even new institutions of technical training retained a mostly military character. Indeed, the term civil engineer – or génie civil in French – is the relic of an age when one had to specify if technical knowledge was not military in nature, since ‘martial’ engineering was the implicit norm. When the French Revolution prompted a new type of training institute, the École Polytechnique – another model widely copied throughout Europe – it blended the older state orientation with new expectations of autonomy. The older military schools had drawn their students mainly from the upper strata of society and were demonstratively part of the Ancien Régime. The new polytechnical schools were also marked by older state insignia, such as the uniforms worn by polytechniciens and the military rank they received that conferred state-acknowledged elite status onto them, but the new entrance requirements were more democratic and meritocratic than before. This seemingly paradoxical combination of old and new served in the long term to secure the experts’ independence and leeway for action. The Polytechnique’s motto at its founding in 1805 – Pour la Patrie, les Sciences et la Gloire – combined critical knowledge with state interests in a way that gave its graduates an authority that even the state could not strip off. The closure of the Polytechnique during the Restoration period remained a mere episode, confirming the state’s dependency on the ‘sorcerer’s apprentices’ it had created in the previous century.

II Engineering Society The new type of expert represented by the polytechnicians flourished in the increasingly overlapping space between the state and the sciences, spurred largely by the growing prestige and power of bourgeois society. With the nineteenth century’s ascent of new forms of visual and mass media, public attention became a critical resource, especially as it was directed onto individual personalities, that could both be transformed into authority or used by experts to challenge traditional authority.21 This increased public attention helped support the new technical experts’ public standing and ability to innovate novel styles and sources of authority, even as most experts still worked behind the scenes in the sheltered spaces of their laboratories.

 Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763–1815 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).  Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 1989).

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To illuminate this process, the following section will examine the rise of science and technology as systems in their own right, connected to but not identical with technological progress, as well as its interconnections with the new functions adopted by the state in the nineteenth century, transformations in the public sphere, and an expanding (mass) media.22 In order to illustrate these developments, we will examine three dynamics that transformed the authority of experts in the nineteenth century. We will inquire first into the rise of the inventor as a public figure in the early nineteenth century, whose achievements paved the way to economic welfare and military success. Next, we will investigate the celebritization of the brilliant scientist, whose own unique genius stood for the special genius of the nation at a time of increasing standardization, uniformization of methods, and globalization in the form of cosmopolitan exchanges in congresses, international associations, and scholarly journals. Finally, we will focus on a new type of expert emerging in the second half of the century, marked by a proximity to the expanding state and imbrication into new knowledge systems meant to improve society: the expert with a mission to save the nation’s social body. These dynamics were acted out in new conceptual and institutional spaces shaped by the rise of the nationstate, and each involved acts of translation that (re)presented the secrets and (purported) fundamental truths of modern life to the community at large.

The Future as Site of Authority: The Rise of the Inventor That experts did not attain their authority merely on the basis of their institutionalized position is clear from the role that inventors played as early figures of inspiration to the public, a fact obscured by the rudimentary term ‘professionalization.’23 Well into the nineteenth century, there were multiple alternative definitions of what constituted an expert and a scientist – and how they attained their expertise – that are not easily grouped into a hierarchy of esteem. If we shift the view from France to the fast-industrializing United Kingdom, we see how varied definitions of scientific and expert authority could be. While in France state-trained polytechnicians were gaining in public profile, in Britain the unattached gentlemen-scientist

 Andreas W. Daum, “Social Relations, Shared Practices, and Emotions: Alexander von Humboldt’s Excursion into Literary Classicism and the Challenges to Science around 1800,” Journal of Modern History 91, no.1 (2019): 1–37.  Andrew Delano Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Charles E. McClelland, The German Experience of Professionalization: Modern Learned Professions and their Organizations from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Hitler Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Peter C. Kjergaard, “Competing Allies: Professionalisation and the Hierarchy of Science in Victorian Britain,” Centaurus 44, no. 3/4 (2002), 248–288.

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was an accepted figure well into the second-half of the nineteenth century, and was often deemed superior to the state-supported scientist.24 The struggle between practitioners and scientifically-trained experts over the prestige of their respective methods and knowledge bases was a long-standing battle, as Jakob Vogel has shown for the knowledge system that emerged around salt as a central resource.25 This conflict affected a broad range of technical experts who found that formal technoscientific training did not automatically confer greater authority in the public’s view. Unlike their continental European counterparts, British engineers, whether practicing in Britain or abroad, did not enjoy the blessing of formal titles. Those titles counted for a great deal in France and Germany, but training on the job and professional success counted for more in Britain.26 Even so, it took decades for those who conceived of the machines that made industrialization possible and who thus created the basis for Britain’s global dominance to find the public admiration they believed they deserved. As Christine MacLeod has shown, Britain’s “heroes of invention” faced a battle on two fronts. First, they had to fight a severe image problem as they were associated with the pejorative term ‘patenteers,’ understood in the eighteenth century to mean potentially fraudulent money-makers. Secondly, the public imaginative space of heroism was occupied by British generals and admirals who had won the wars against Napoleon, as well as by heroic explorers who broke ground for imperial expansion. The inventor, in contrast, “toiled in an anonymous workshop, far from the glorious field of battle, or the terrors of the ice floes, the desert, or the jungle.”27 In the first half of the century, then, British inventors did not fit into the image of heroism described by Thomas Carlyle in the 1840s, nor did they have much in common with the (mostly) cultural figures celebrated as geniuses in the eighteenth century.28 Eventually, though, both of those ideals – heroism and genius – came to inflect the inventors’ public reputation and social status. The reasons for this change

 Barton argues that the X Club cannot adequately be understood solely in terms of professionalization since the ideal of gentlemanly scientific engagement remained important. Ruth Barton, The X Club: Power and Authority in Victorian Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 23.  Vogel, Schillerndes, 290–295.  Robert Angus Buchanan, The Engineers: A History of the Engineering Profession in Britain, 1750–1914 (London: Kingsley, 1989).  Christine MacLeod, Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism and British Identity, 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1.  Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History (London: Chapman & Hall, 1840); Caspar Hirschi, “Compiler into Genius: The Transformation of the Dictionary Writer in Eighteenth-Century France and England,” in Scholars in Action: The Practice of Knowledge and the Figure of the Savant in the Eighteenth Century, ed. André Holenstein, Hubert Steinke, and Martin Huber (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 145–172. For the inherently gendered structure of the concept of the genius: Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (London: Women’s Press, 1994).

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were multilayered. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the profoundly dynamic nature of industrial progress became readily apparent. Steamships and railways symbolized progress, and these easy-to-grasp signifiers came from somewhere: the public demanded to know who had dreamed up the technology behind such “modern wonders.”29 An increasingly image-addicted media eagerly published pictures of stunning new infrastructure – tunnels, bridges, and the like – and illustrations of the taming of nature by techno-scientific experts became a favorite subject. Even seemingly uninspiring inventions attracted enormous interest. Marc Isambard Brunel’s “steampowered, block-cutting machines” at Portsmouth’s Royal Dockyard, for instance, were “ennobled” by a visit in 1814 from the Prince Regent, the Emperor of Russia, and the King of Prussia, as reported extensively in The Times.30 Underpinning these vignettes was the social expectation of a better and radically different future, brought about by the genius and expertise of an elite few. One can see the seeds of this change in Britain in the 1820s, as an age of accelerated political reform in the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat. As the glorification of military leaders, in particular Admiral Nelson and the Duke of Wellington, found itself at odds with the reform rhetoric of liberal politicians, the meritocratic hero-inventor presented itself as a more palatable figure than the representatives of the traditional upper classes. The death in 1819 of the inventor of the modern steam engine, James Watt, was attended by a funerary commemoration of heretofore unseen dimensions, culminating in the erection of a monument to him in Westminster Abbey in 1824. The king, pressured by his prime minister, led the list of those supporting the erection of the monument, seeing in Watt a way for the industrial and industrious nation to celebrate itself in the most hallowed of social spaces.31 The inscription on the monument lauded Watt as an inventor who “enlarged the resources of his country.” Watt also posthumously served as an exemplar for the rising aspirations of industrial workers alongside the growing group of technical experts.32 By linking the industrial revolution to an iconic hero, the cult of Watt challenged the military nation: “For the first time, an inventor was celebrated as a national benefactor by the political nation, and in a style unprecedented for any commoner and civilian,” as MacLeod notes. Watt turned into a symbol of both scientific ingenuity and the impressive social improvement that could be brought about by science.33

 Bernhard Rieger, “‘Modern Wonders’: Technological Innovation and Public Ambivalence in Britain and Germany, 1890s to 1933,” History Workshop Journal 55, no. 1 (2003): 152–176.  MacLeod, Heroes of Invention, 73.  The ‘Scientists’ Corner’ in Westminster Abbey later also included Darwin, perhaps surprisingly so in such a religious setting; the abbey also featured a stained-glass window of the Smeatonian Society of Civil Engineers.  MacLeod, Heroes of Invention, 1.  MacLeod, Heroes of Invention, 91–95, quote on 94.

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In Britain, cults around inventors like Watt were highly effective in communicating a new model of the nation as the idealized site of future progress to their audience. This was in contrast to continental Europe, where men of science were also represented in national pantheons but were not celebrated to the same extent; and indeed, the type of inventor represented by Watt was hardly to be found among them. In France, Foucault’s pendulum was incorporated in the Pantheon to merge the sciences with national commemoration, and Claude Louis Berthollet, a noteworthy chemist who also enjoyed a political career, likewise found his place there. Vauban, on the other hand, was commemorated in the Dôme des Invalides because of his military stature. In the German states, too, the discussion of who should be included in various pantheons was critical to the German national project, such as the Walhalla established between 1830 and 1842 near Regensburg under the chairmanship of Bavarian King Ludwig I.34 Erected long before unification, the Walhalla included a few scientists in its vision of national greatness, but in a less prominent position than politicians or military leaders.35 What shifted the spotlight of fame and authority in the direction of the inventor in Britain was the fact that nationalism there became increasingly aligned with tangible, material progress, boosting the symbolic prestige of technical experts as Britain led the world in industrial production. In the 1840s, Friedrich Engels first wrote about the industrial revolution as driven by technological inventions, a concept that found visible expression a decade later in London in the Great Exhibition of 1851.36 In this international event, the fusion of inventors with their nation reached a new highpoint in public perception, both because of the impressive technological artifacts on display and the groundbreaking architectural structure of the Crystal Palace, all of which was publicized by extensive media coverage of the exhibition.37 The public and parliamentary debates leading up to the reform of patent law in 1852 further generated a positive image of technical experts as bearers of progress, innovation, and national competitiveness. The Crimean War, however, introduced negatives into the previously uncomplicated equation between national progress and the advancement of civilization and world peace.38 The capacity to wage war was intimately tied up in the development of technological innovations, and seemingly peaceful, civilian

 Stefan Berger, “Building the Nation among Visions of German Empire,” in Nationalizing Empires, ed. Alekseĭ I. Miller and Stefan Berger (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2014), 247–308, here 272.  Eveline G. Bouwers, “Das Nationaldenkmal als Projektionsfläche: Eine großdeutsche Geschichtsidee von der Romantik bis zur Wiedervereinigung,” Historische Zeitschrift 304, no. 2 (2017): 332–369.  Friedrich Engels and Florence Kelley, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (Oxford: Benediction Classics, 2012).  Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).  MacLeod, Heroes of Invention, 3.

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technological systems like the railway and telegraphy were just as heavily employed by the military as weapons.39 The technical experts here responsible did not feature as harbingers of peace and prosperity, but demons of heretofore unheard-of amounts of suffering. In other ways, too, the Great Exhibition fused technical expertise and internationalism in an ambivalent manner. Bringing together experts from all over the western world, the Exhibition provided fertile ground for intellectual exchanges and led to the foundation for the international scientific associations that flourished in the second half of the century. Yet these manifestations of scientific and technological internationalism also helped to shape a space that was marked by sharp national competition, which played out in the new scientific congresses, international learned societies, and scholarly journals.40 The strained interplay of national and international interests was already evident in the Great Exhibition, as international recognition in that venue reflected back positively on scientists at home. That international bodies of scientific inquiry were often founded in part to enhance the prestige of experts as national ambassadors is something of a paradox.41 Despite these developments, officially-trained experts still did not enjoy a monopoly of authority in the public sphere, as gentlemen-inventors continued to flourish in nineteenth-century Britain. At the same time, Britain’s industrial middle and working classes were more vocal than their counterparts in most continental European states. As they pressed their claims to share in the country’s social goods and political structures, the British bourgeoisie and proletariat voiced their veneration for “iconic inventors” as symbols of modern industrial growth.42 This claim to greater social recognition mirrored the view of many experts as well, who based their status on their autonomy and individualism as self-made men, captured in the oft-quoted words of Humphry Davy: “What I am I made myself.”43

 Yakup Bektas, “The Crimean War as a Technological Enterprise,” The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science 71 (2017): 233–262.  Robert Fox and Anna Guagnini, eds., Education, Technology and Industrial Performance in Europe: 1850–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Eckhardt Fuchs, “Wissenschaftliche Kongressbewegung und Weltausstellungen: Zu den Anfängen der Wissenschaftsinternationale vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” Comparativ 6 (1996), 156–177; Madeleine Herren, Internationale Organisationen seit 1865: Eine Globalgeschichte der internationalen Ordnung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2009). On the rise of the scientific journal, see: Geoffrey N. Cantor, Gowan Dawson, and Graeme Godday, Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).  Martin Geyer and Johannes Paulmann, eds., The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Kohlrausch and Trischler, Building, 65–70.  MacLeod, Heroes of Invention, 14, 91–95.  Kohlrausch and Trischler, Building, 58. On Davy: David Knight, Humphry Davy: Science and Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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Against this background, the question of who should be honored in St. Paul’s Cathedral, as Britain’s first national pantheon, led to fierce conflicts over who rightly represented the nation.44 But while they loomed large in the popular imagination, Britain’s inventors also faced challenges from other types of experts. In comparison to inventors, scientists had a greater set of credentials and the backing of powerful state institutions to represent their interests. Around the same time, engineers, as a new group, also laid claim to a proper place in the economy of recognition.45 Eventually, without access to these same professional support structures and finding their universalist knowledge increasingly obsolete as the scientific world specialized into disparate research areas, old-style inventors faded from public view and national memory.46

The Nation as a Site of Authority: Systems of Science While state support helped to catapult experts into a position of authority vis-à-vis traditional forces, the experts’ resulting autonomy then had to be safeguarded from the rising influence and presence of the state. The national frame, which became a defining feature in the work of almost all scientists and experts in the nineteenth century, was the space in which these tensions between old and new groups, their orientation towards the state, and their need to secure autonomy was acted out. This space, too, contained an act of translation, as public experts began to weigh in on social questions in a manner befitting the authority of the spirit genius: they were the inspirational forces who could act as guardians of the social good. Moreover, as the nineteenth century saw the rise of the ‘hyphenate concept’ of the nation-state, experts became a vital link between those two entities. Inhabiting this space in-between, they gained an autonomy that gave them authority to interpret both state policy and national prestige and health. Positivism underpinned the scientist’s social authority, employed as a scientific framework which worked to counteract the divisiveness of scientific disciplines. By building bridges between different types of experts across national boundaries, positivism gave scientists a transnational identity with the ability to intervene in their nation’s burning social questions. As first articulated in the writings of Henri de Saint Simon and Auguste Comte, positivism was a world-view, a belief-system, and an allencompassing explanatory mode based on scientifically gained knowledge, and one that assigned a special authority to experts.47 Comte, in particular, theorized about

 MacLeod, Heroes of Invention, 14–19.  Andrew Saint, Architect and Engineer: A Study in Sibling Rivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).  MacLeod, Heroes of Invention, 5.  Wolf Lepenies, Auguste Comte: Die Macht der Zeichen (Munich: Hanser, 2010).

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the transference of scientific insights into the broader social realm, with experts as the driving force behind the implementation of technocratic ideas.48 Given the central place of exact knowledge in this belief system, assigning greater authority to scientists and experts was the logical consequence of positivist thought. In contrast to similar ventures that passed over the social influence of the techno-sciences in silence, Comte’s Positivist Calendar of 1849 lauded a number of experts as “remembered for their effective work in the development of human society.”49 Of course, the link between nation, society, and science was not new to the nineteenth century. One of the most influential scientists of all times, Carl Linnaeus, conceived his universalist classification of natural phenomena within the boundaries of Swedish state territory and its flora and fauna; he also theorized, already in the eighteenth century, what it would mean for a state to govern based on scientific principles.50 In the nineteenth century, however, the accelerated spread of national movements, the vast expansion of state activity and intervention, and the tremendous speed of scientific development magnified the connection between these three entities and profoundly expanded the authority of the technical and scientific expert. Once established in a central space in the public sphere beyond their narrow technical disciplines, these experts became entangled in the great social questions and ideological debates of the day almost by default. Publicly visible scientists were expected to take a stand on such issues as the role of religion, the ideal extent of democratic participation, and later the place of women in society. The fierce and immensely widespread public quarrels over Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories are the clearest example of what was at stake, as the intense and potentially adverse effects of Darwin’s theory on religion propelled a scientific question into general public debate for the first time.51 Indeed, there were probably few other public figures, let alone scientists, who were caricatured as often as Darwin in the second half of the nineteenth century (Fig. 4.2).52 The new role of public commentator was welcomed by many scientists, as Ruth Barton has shown for the X Club, an association of outstanding scientists in Victorian Britain who fiercely supported Darwin. With members like Thomas Henry Huxley and Herbert Spencer, the X Club’s nine members shared a common vision of the position of scientists in society and politics, even if they disagreed on much else.  Belhoste and Chatzis, “From Technical Corps;” Antoine Picon, “French Engineers and Social Thought, 18th-20th Centuries: An Archeology of Technocratic Ideals,” History and Technology 23, no. 3 (2007): 197– 208.  Quoted in: MacLeod, Heroes of Invention, 23.  Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).  Julia Voss, “Darwin oder Moses? Funktion und Bedeutung von Charles Darwins Porträt im 19. Jahrhundert,” NTM Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin 16 (2008): 213–243; Janet Browne, “Charles Darwin as a Celebrity,” Science in Context 16 (2003): 175–194.  Janet Browne, “Darwin in Caricature: A Study in the Popularization and Dissemination of Evolution,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 145 (2001): 496–509.

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Fig. 4.2: Charles Darwin as “Man of the Day” for his theory of natural selection. Vanity Fair, 1871.

For the X Club men, an expert’s public reputation was predicated on his ability to maintain an “independent status” made steadfast on the bedrock of the “‘authority’ of science.”53 The X Club men also shared a clear sense that academic excellence alone did not suffice to claim authority. They understood very well that the academic sphere and the wider public sphere overlapped, and that authority garnered in the one could under certain conditions be translated into authority in the other. To build the requisite bridges, they strategically infiltrated the proliferating royal societies and other academic institutions of the day with the intent to set the rules of debates that were being partially fought out in public.  Barton, X Club, 16–17, 267–284.

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By inhabiting the liminal space between scientific institutions and the Victorian social world, the X Club men demonstrate how experts in search of “cultural authority” could become “public persons with public responsibilities.”54 On the one hand, the X Club men knew how useful it was to secure the support of the established classes, both symbolically and politically. Science for these men served as an entry ticket to higher social circles, and the Friday evening lectures at the Royal Institution sparkled due to their “combination of scientific achievement, social status, and fashionable ladies.”55 As much as the X Club men seemed to rise above common interests by tapping into the disinterested authority of science, they also strategically sought to engage “titled aristocrats as presidents” of the learned societies through which they built their academic standing. By 1900, some inventors and scientists had secured peerage in Britain, after a long process of upward social mobility.56 But while they were often well-connected with the establishment, the X Club men also defended the interests of the aspiring classes and sided with the workers both strategically and out of personal conviction.57 Given their self-appointed role in championing the cause of the lower orders, the X Club men cannot simply be seen as scientists alone, and they probably would not have seen themselves as such either.58 Rather, they might best be understood as public moralists who appealed to the ideal of impartial expertise (while still looking out for their own interests). The experts’ ability to translate the terms of the highest common good into an accessible vernacular – that is, to act as interpreters between state and nation – was facilitated by the exponential rise of popular media, which supplied them a platform from which to reach a wide audience. While the media created national spaces within linguistic and political boundaries, it also brought about and intensified new transnational links. Huge festivals which celebrated technology, such as the World Fairs, were spectacular media events that fêted the performance of the host nation in front of international attention of a near global scale. Both at home and abroad, a graphic representation of scientists – the simple fact that their images became well-known – gave substance to their role as mediated genii (Fig. 4.3). The quick development and spread first of lithography and then photography was essential in turning scientists and technical experts into national icons and allowing

 This authority was often gained through strategic alliances with traditional authority, e.g. by aligning themselves with military officers or the aristocracy. Barton, X Club, 139, 450, quotes on: 365, 367.  Barton, X Club, 139.  Barton, X Club, 214–216, 147–151, 167. For the importance of having social status confirmed by traditional elites, even for scientific and technical experts, see: Kohlrausch and Trischler, Building, 59–65.  Kohlrausch and Trischler, Building, 35.  For the concept of persona as used by scientists: Lorraine Daston and H. O. Sibum, “Introduction: Scientific Personae and Their Histories,” Science in Context 16, no. 1 (2003): 1–8.

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the public to develop a close emotional bond with the aggrandized experts.59 Subscription systems likewise enabled public participation in the cult of the scientist, as followers were given the opportunity to invest in publications, monuments, and other modes of commemoration.60 Experts also connected up and down, or traditional hierarchy and populace, by staging their authority in the urban space, in part by shaping the contours of the cityscape. In London, for example, Edward Jenner, the pioneer of the smallpox vaccination, received a monument on London’s Trafalgar Square in 1858 despite heavy opposition from more traditionally-minded circles who disapproved of its vicinity to Lord Nelson’s monument.61 Equally redolent in its symbolic domination of urban space, the Royal Institution occupied a prominent place in the city of Westminster since 1799. That façade was turned to public service in the 1820s when the institution fostered popular science via lectures; Michael Faraday, for instance, initiated his famous Christmas lectures while continuing to conduct research and make key discoveries at the Institution. In 1857, London again broke ground in fostering public access to scientific inquiry by founding the South Kensington Museum as one of the world’s first museums devoted to a modern conception of science. Renamed the Science Museum in 1885, the museum glorified both scientists and the new class of technical experts, embodied by the engineer Robert Stephenson and his steam locomotive Rocket. The popularization of science thus was inextricably bound to the popularization of scientists as technical experts, with them appearing simultaneously aloof and accessible.62 The popularization of science, which had a longer history, also dovetailed well with nationalization. This was a European-wide trend, exemplified in the founding of the Gesellschaft deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte of 1822, which was intended as an aspirational symbol of German unity half a century before unification was actually achieved politically, and which also became a model for the British Association for the Advancement of Science, founded in 1831.63 Europe’s burgeoning science museums went a step further. Nations could celebrate themselves not only in the Science

 Jennifer Tucker, “Photography as Witness, Detective, and Impostor: Visual Representation in Victorian Science,” in Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 378–408.  MacLeod, Heroes of Invention, 98–101.  MacLeod, Heroes of Invention, 231–232.  Barton, X Club, 300–303. For the United Kingdom, see: Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); for Germany, see: Andreas W. Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert: Bürgerliche Kultur, naturwissenschaftliche Bildung und die deutsche Öffentlichkeit 1848–1914 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2002).  Ralph Jessen and Jakob Vogel, “Die Naturwissenschaften und die Nation: Perspektiven einer Wechselbeziehung in der europäischen Geschichte,” in Wissenschaft und Nation in der europäischen Geschichte, ed. Ralph Jessen and Jakob Vogel (Frankfurt a/M: Campus Verlag, 2002), 7–37. Generally for Germany: McClelland, German Experience.

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Fig. 4.3: Celebrating the achievements of science and engineering: Victorian “Men of Achievement.” Counter-clockwise: Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Faraday, Tyndall, Huxley, Robert and George Stephenson, Rennie, Lyell, Kelvin, Brunel, Siemens, and Rowland Hill. Illustrated London News, 1897.

Museum in South Kensington, but also Paris’ Conservatoire national des Arts et Métiers (National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts) and Munich’s Deutsches Museum von Meisterwerken der Naturwissenschaft und Technik (German Museum of Masterpieces of Science and Technology). These museums were especially attractive because they attested also to the nation’s aggregate genius, which was taken to represent fitness in the struggle for international prestige. Along with representing the nation, scientists also internally represented the state to the nation, as a linking element between the two. This dynamic rested on what Charles Maier describes as territorialization: the rapidly increasing degree of

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administrative control of modern nation-states. Territorialization produced an increasing mutual interdependency between the state and experts who were involved in ever more specialized disciplines deemed useful to the state.64 The state relied in particular on new disciplines such as statistics and demography, as well as urbanism after 1900, to govern its increasingly heterogeneous populations; those populations, in turn, tended to expect more from their states.65 Experts inhabited a sheltered liminal space between the two: on the one side, they were interpreters of data from the population up to the state authorities, and on the other side, they legitimated social policy down from the government to the populace. The state’s dependence on ever more voluminous bodies of knowledge necessitated a space of authority for technical experts, wherein they could enjoy greater autonomy and professional leeway. But this dependence could equally lead to ever more intense attempts to place experts under direct state control or to further integrate them into state-led structures. Technology was an equally double-edged sword on the plane of international competition. The revolution in communication technologies facilitated new advances in standardization and statistics, leading to the emergence of a shared language of precise technical measurement, which in turn enabled a politics of comparison.66 Advances in urban sanitation could now be compared between states as easily as a country’s electrification or the health status of its population. These comparisons – often designed to be instrumentalized for various political or social causes – could put governments under pressure to govern more efficiently, and thus further lifted experts into a position of political influence due to their ability to deliver remedies.67 Experts also benefitted from the politics of comparison as their achievements became signifiers for the nation’s standing in an imagined race to the future. In turn, the public personas of these national heroes could serve as the direct embodiment of complex scientific theories. This social-scientific knowledge was not limited to any one particular political orientation. Modern nationalism depended heavily on modern science as well, with the consequence that scientific statistics provided the foundation for definitions of who belonged in the nation and how to improve public health, both of which fed into the notorious ideology of eugenics.68 The use of scientific data for social engineering was not the only challenge to the supposed link between technological progress and civilization; indeed, as David Edgerton notes, techno-nationalism set up an uneasy  For the fascinating and ambiguous example of lighting the modern city: C. Otter, The Victorian Eye: a Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and generally: Maier, “Consigning.”  Christiane Crasemann Collins, Werner Hegemann and the Search for Universal Urbanism (New York: Norton, 2005).  Morgane Labbé, La nationalité, une histoire de chiffres: Politique et statistiques en Europe centrale 1848–1919 (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2019).  Roy M. MacLeod, Government and Expertise: Specialists, Administrators and Professionals, 1860–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).  Jessen and Vogel, “Naturwissenschaften,” 9.

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relationship between universalism and service to the nation.69 As technical experts increasingly earned state-sanctioned credentials – for instance diplomas from prestigious training institutions – they also gained new chances to exercise their expert authority in Europe’s imperialist projects, which reached their height from the 1880s onwards. As a result, “profound anxieties about the loss of national leadership” in Britain “coalesced with the opportunistic propaganda of scientists and engineers campaigning for state sponsorship.”70 Not only did inventors and other technical experts provide the means of prevailing over other nations – both militarily and economically – in the ever more violent competition over colonies, but these experts also provided both practical and moral justifications for imperial expansion.71 In sum, experts claimed authority as safeguarding their country’s position in the international order by securing the nation’s survival in war.

The Metropolis as a Site of Authority: Guardians of the Social Body Industrialization spurred rapid urbanization, especially from mid-century onwards. Faced with overcrowded and under-resourced industrial cities and vast conglomerations of complex technological and public health challenges, states turned urgently to experts working in the fields of hygiene, sanitation, epidemiology, urban infrastructure, mobility, and communication technologies. By altering the visible face of the cityscape and fighting non-visible but lethal threats to public health, these scientists once again performed an act of translation between state and people, seeking to bring the state’s financial resources into alignment with the national expectations of physical health and economic well-being. This time, though, the effect was more immediate and evocative for the wider public, as the experts performed groundbreaking – indeed almost magical – interventions in the fabric of everyday life. This explains, perhaps, why certain figures such as Pasteur and Eiffel were counted among the most famous celebrities of their time (Fig. 4.4). Like Zeppelin in aviation, the pioneers of engineering and medicine gained public cachet as visionary leaders who rivalled the heroism of military commanders and imperial explorers in the public imagination. The state, too, regarded these experts as virtual miracle workers who could preserve the health of the nation and the body politic. Given the ever-fiercer competition among nations, states needed to ensure that the soldiers in their barracks and the sailors manning their expensive new battleships remained as healthy as the students

 David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (London: Profile Books, 2019), 103–106.  MacLeod, Heroes of Invention, 8–9.  Maria Paula Diogo and Dirk van Laak, Europe Globalizing: Mapping, Exploiting, Exchanging (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

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Fig. 4.4: Cartoon depicting the perseverance of Gustave Eiffel.

being trained in the compulsory and ever more efficiency-oriented system of national instruction.72 Rapidly growing cities, and capital cities in particular, were becoming sites of national pride and showcases of national productivity. But these megalopolises also became the setting in which the modern state had to prove its legitimacy – and indeed could dramatically fail if it let epidemics rage unchecked, as did London in the 1850s and Hamburg in the 1890s. Cholera and typhus plagues were only the most visible failures; the inability to provide the escalating numbers of city dwellers with adequate hygienic facilities was a constant and highly publicized scandal.73 Against this backdrop, experts in the realm of infrastructure found authority bestowed upon them due to the usefulness and technological alchemy of their constructions, especially when they represented tangible interventions into the municipal

 Silvia Berger, Bakterien in Krieg und Frieden: Eine Geschichte der medizinischen Bakteriologie in Deutschland 1890–1933 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2009).  See the classic account: Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). On cholera: Valeska Huber, “The Unification of the Globe by Disease? The International Sanitary Conferences on Cholera, 1851–1894,” Historical Journal 49, no. 2 (2006): 453–476.

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Fig. 4.5: Festive banquet, honoring the Cholera Commission, in the conservatory of Berlin’s Centralhotel, with Robert Koch and Rudolf Virchow present. 1884.

problems introduced by fast-paced urbanization (Fig. 4.5). As three cases in point: Georges-Eugène Haussmann is renown, even today, for his reconstruction of Paris during France’s Second Empire; James Hobrecht became globally celebrated for sewer construction in Berlin between the 1860s and the end of the nineteenth century; and Joseph Bazalgette equally found public acclaim for overseeing the construction of London’s modern sewer system in response to the city’s Great Stink of 1858. In order to mobilize the immense funds needed for their improvement schemes – and to overcome the substantial opposition of existing vested interests – all three experts had to make their case publicly, relying on colorful media depictions of what they were fighting for, what was at stake in terms of social hygiene, and how their genius could fix the cities’ modern problems. These same factors shaped the career of the Russian engineer Yurj Lomonosov, who rose to fame as a personification of modernization due to his construction of locomotives and his role as inspector of the Russian railway network starting in the late nineteenth century.74

 Anthony Heywood, Engineer of Revolutionary Russia: Iurii V. Lomonosov (1876–1952) and the Railways (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). On infrastructures in modern European history: Dirk van Laak, Alles im Fluss: Die Lebensadern unserer Gesellschaft: Geschichte und Zukunft der Infrastruktur (Frankfurt a/M: S. Fischer, 2018).

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The century’s true engineering blockbusters offered not only public utility and innovation, but also sheer optical opulence: the bigger (and more visible) the construction, the better. These stunning markers of technological progress were a result of high modernity and became potent symbols of its achievements.75 While the earlynineteenth-century public acknowledged the social relevance of the engineers who built bridges and sewers, the celebrity enjoyed by Eiffel and Lesseps was novel in its proportions. Their achievements were, in the public mind, linked to national ingenuity as much as international standing, and were broadcast by the extremely efficient medium of world exhibitions.76 In the Netherlands, Cornelis Lely was no less grand a figure as the mastermind behind the enclosure of the Zudersee. To be sure, Lely was less globally famous than Eiffel or Lesseps, but his fame was significant enough domestically to prompt the state to name a city after him.77 These men’s dramatic feats of taming nature seemed to blur the lines between science fiction and reality, and inspired fin-de-siècle Europeans to dream of new utopian worlds in the same way as did the bestselling novels of Jules Verne.78 Once again, mass media and its own technological improvements in visual technology played a seminal role, as Europeans could now view these achievements in illustrated newspapers and magazines, and eventually see them in action in the ‘cinema of attractions’ that developed at the end of the century.79 Europe’s leading medical experts – Pasteur, Koch, Virchow – outshone even the celebrity engineers. Pasteur’s germ theory of disease, Virchow’s cellular pathology, and Koch’s work on the model of infectious disease all represented key insights and path-breaking concepts which altered the contours of medical theory.80 All three also represented a different type of scientist than the more traditional practitioners known for a particular discovery in their fields, however important that discovery might be. In contrast, these three experts also played an immense public role due to the actual and presumed social impact of their work. Their discoveries not only advanced  Bernhard Rieger, Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany, 1890–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).  Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the 19. Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).  Kohlrausch and Trischler, Building, 70–72.  For the example of Russia: Anindita Banerjee, We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2012). See also Roger Luckhurst, “Modern Literature and Technology,” British Library: Discovering Literature: 20th Century, accessed 27 June 2022, https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/modern-literature-and-technology; and Declan Fahy, “Scientists in Popular Culture: The Making of Celebrity,” in The Routledge Handbook of Public Communication of Science and Technology, ed. Brian Trench and Massimiano Bucchi (New York: Routledge, 2014).  Cantor, Dawson, and Godday, Science.  For Koch see: Christoph Gradmann, Laboratory Disease: Robert Koch’s Medical Bacteriology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); for Virchow: Constantin Goschler, Rudolf Virchow: Mediziner – Anthropologe – Politiker (Cologne: Böhlau, 2009); for Pasteur: Gerald L. Geison, The Private Science of Louis Pasteur (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

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science but promised to relieve humanity from the scourges of cholera, typhus, and tuberculosis. They equally embodied the amazing success story of experimental science and the breakneck speed of medical breakthroughs, intimating a bright future reached through scientific progress to their contemporaries. Although different in character and career paths, all three men shared key similarities. Along with being outstanding conceptual thinkers, they took a hands-on approach to their medical craft, for instance when Virchow investigated in person the typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia in 1847–1848. Likewise, Pasteur famously gave public demonstrations on the efficiency of his anthrax vaccination in Pouillyle-Fort in the Département Seine-et-Marne, marking the first ever public demonstration of a vaccine developed in a laboratory. Once again, the event was published and popularized immediately. Koch, too, played a highly public role in 1892 as he probed the cholera crisis in Hamburg during the worldwide epidemic of the early 1890s. At different stages in their careers, all three scientists thus heroically exposed themselves to the illnesses they sought to cure, evoking an image of courage in the face of death.81 All three also dealt with diseases that had long ravaged the population until their cures were developed. Together, these three pioneers contributed to the nascent field of public health. In each case, the scientists’ discoveries were accompanied by a media frenzy which promoted the idea that they had not only improved on existing structures but seemed to change the world radically and forever, creating a fundamental rupture between the past and the present. Along with the Wright brothers, Count Zeppelin, and the radio-innovator Guglielmo Marconi, these scientists’ ability to stage a ‘before-andafter’ intervention in the history of progress gave their discoveries a magical sheen.82 It thus seemed wholly appropriate that, at the Tenth Medical Congress in 1890, Koch’s public unveiling of an alleged cure for tuberculosis was performed in the converted Circus Rentz as the only building in Berlin able to seat an audience of 5,000 participants. On a more mundane level, the city as research space enabled scientists to interact with state and public institutions on a routine basis.83 The attention they were able to command at public and municipal events translated into immense financial

 Lawrence K. Altman, Who Goes First? The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).  Kohlrausch and Trischler, Building, 154–160.  Sophie Forgan, “From Modern Babylon to White City: Science, Technology, and Urban Change in London, 1870–1914,” in Urban Modernity: Cultural Innovation in the Second Industrial Revolution, ed. Miriam R. Levin et al. (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 2010), 75–132; Christopher Hamlin, “The City as a Chemical System? The Chemist as Urban Environmental Professional in France and Britain, 1780–1880,” Journal of Urban History 33, no. 5 (2007): 702–728; Mikael Hard and Thomas J. Misa, “Modernizing European Cities: Technological Uniformity and Cultural Distinction,” in Urban Machinery: Inside Modern European Cities, ed. Mikael Hard and Thomas J. Misa (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 2008), 1–20; Oliver Hochadel and Agustí Nieto-Galan, eds., Urban Histories of Science: Making Knowledge in the City, 1820–1940 (New York: Routledge, 2019).

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benefits. Laboratories located in capital cities and industrial centers turned into institutions in their own right with their own rules of access and conduct.84 The state took a great interest in these developments, supporting larger laboratories to become cutting-edge, large-scale research institutions funded by a mix of public and private monies – the kind of ‘big science’ that Germans called Großforschung and that focused on problems of social or broader strategic (i.e. military) relevance. Scientific research supported government aims in a number of other ways as well. Research institutions dealing with anthropology, ethnology, eugenics, and tropical medicine all had a clear imperial dimension and reflected the darker sides of some of the projects in which Koch and Virchow were invested.85 Science policies also appeared as an efficient way to strengthen the still feeble national unity of the young German Empire. With Germany’s leading role in the second industrial revolution and its continuing authoritarian political system, conservatives in the state bureaucracy were also attracted to the idea that experts could help to ease social tensions without challenging the government.86 For all of these reasons, Emperor Wilhelm II evinced a great deal of personal interest in the potential of big science. He became instrumentally involved in establishing Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institutes (KWI), named in honor of his grandfather, just as he played a considerable role in raising the profile of Germany’s technical universities.87 The emperor also enjoyed holding personal discussions with men of science and technology, and contributed to the organization of the KWI around great men of science rather than a more clearly rational, institutional logic.88 This privileged place in the state’s quest for technological advances gave scientists both greater authority and some room for political autonomy even in an authoritarian political system, as Virchow discovered. While Wilhelm II may have been favorably inclined towards men of science who brought social progress without disrupting the social fabric or challenging the political system, not all scientists were so quiescent. For many experts, their belief in scientific progress impelled them to adopt political progressivism as well. Virchow’s statement that medicine was “a social science and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale” reflected this worldview and

 Paul Weindling, “Scientific Elites and Laboratory Organization in Fin de Siècle Paris and Berlin: The Pasteur Institute and Robert Koch’s Institute for Infectious Diseases Compared,” in The Laboratory Revolution in Medicine, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 170–188.  Berger, “Building the Nation,” 283.  Kees Gispen, New Profession, Old Order: Engineers and German Society, 1815–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).  Wolfgang König, Wilhelm II. und die Moderne: Der Kaiser und die technisch-industrielle Welt (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2007).  Bernhard vom Brocke and Hubert Laitko, Die Kaiser-Wilhelm-/Max-Planck-Gesellschaft und ihre Institute: Studien zu ihrer Geschichte (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1996).

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provided a kind of political program for the public health movement.89 Declining to be ennobled as ‘von Virchow’ in honor of his discoveries in pathology, he was instead a founding member of the German Progressive Party and, as a civic reformer and active politician in Berlin’s municipal government, sparred often with both Otto von Bismarck and the Prussian royal house.90 Nor was Virchow alone: throughout Europe, agents of public health formed alliances between liberalism and a pragmatic type of public welfare that became known as municipal socialism. While Britain was an early frontrunner of municipal socialism, by the late nineteenth century it was overtaken by Imperial Germany, with progressive city administrations adopting a prototype of the twentieth century’s welfare state.91 But fame and authority could be fleeting, too, if the scientists lost their ability to perform stunning successes and thus their connection to the sublime secrets of nature. Weber notes in his analysis of charisma that: “If proof and success elude the leader for long, if he appears deserted by his god or his magical powers, above all, if his leadership fails to benefit his followers, it is likely that his charismatic authority will disappear.”92 This explains, perhaps, why some of the greatest scientific heroes were embroiled in the greatest public scandals. That the media eagerly followed scientists when their star was rising is understandable. Covering the public personas of Pasteur or Zeppelin meant personalizing abstract processes such as pasteurization or aeronautics and rendering intelligible things that were inherently abstract. Personalizing these phenomena also allowed the media to nationalize them, creating an identification for readers that piqued their interest and increased newspaper sales. Scandals equally made for good reading, though, attesting to the prominence of experts as media personas like a photo negative, scandals highlighted the social inroads the new celebrity-experts had made. And yet, the punishment for scientific scandal was more ambivalent and less severe than one might expect. When it became evident that Koch’s widely touted Tuberkulin not only did not cure patients but could be deadly in and of itself, Koch had to leave the country in 1891 for Africa and Asia, together with his new wife whom he had met, tellingly enough, while sitting for a portraitist to be immortalized on canvas. He continued his work in the colonies, where medical practices that had become doubtful in the metropole were still accepted – or rather forced on the indigenous population. Koch soon returned to Germany and successfully reclaimed his role as

 The full quote reads: “Medicine as a social science, as the science of human beings, has the obligation to point out problems and to attempt their theoretical solution; the politician, the practical anthropologist, must find the means for their actual solution.” E. Friedlander, “Rudolf Virchow on Pathology Education,” Pathguy.com, accessed 27 June 2022, http://www.pathguy.com/virchow.html.  Goschler, Rudolf Virchow.  Anne I. Hardy, Ärzte, Ingenieure und die städtische Gesundheit: Medizinische Theorien in der Hygienebewegung des 19. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt a/M, Berlin: Campus Verlag, 2005).  Weber, Economy and Society, vol. 1, 242.

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public expert: despite his earlier public fall from grace, Koch was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1905 for his discoveries relating to tuberculosis. Likewise, Eiffel and Lesseps played a highly compromising role in the Panama Canal scandal of 1892, which was laced with corruption, construction failures, bankruptcy, bribes, and hush money handed out by Lesseps. To exonerate their heroes, the public sought scapegoats in two Jewish middle-men who were blamed for handing out the bribes that Lesseps had initiated. Even the prison sentences handed down to Lesseps and Eiffel were soon annulled on appeal.93 This leniency might be explained by another one of Weber’s observations, that charisma rests on “recognition . . . freely given” by followers and “consists in devotion to the corresponding revelation, hero worship, or absolute trust in the leader.”94 In this analysis, followers devoted to the charismatic leader’s miraculous powers are as likely to be attached to the revelation he represents as to the leader himself. This may explain the protection from public excoriation that some scientists enjoyed. Rejecting a military leader for a lost battle or a politician for immoral behavior meant discarding the hero of the moment and replacing the flawed present with a better present. Toppling the gods of science, on the other hand, required relinquishing a utopian future that promised a better life for society; it meant jettisoning the visionary future along with the present. The individual failure could not be punished too severely, lest his or her revelation be cast into doubt. This ambivalence is thrown into even higher relief in the life of Marie Skłodowska-Curie. Curie’s career was itself almost magical, not only as a woman rising to the zenith of the world of science, but also as the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, for Physics in 1903 and for Chemistry in 1911 (Fig. 4.6).95 This accomplishment is all the more astounding given that, as a woman, she was banned from practicing science in her native Poland (under Russian rule); even in France’s more liberal atmosphere she had to team up initially with her male partner, Pierre Curie.96 When Curie was then put on trial for adultery in 1910, her trespass against reigning social norms for women was so spectacular that two French newspaper editors, from the political right and left, dueled to the death over their respective coverage of the trial. Due to the scandal, Curie was asked not to travel to Sweden to accept the Nobel Prize that she was due to receive in early 1911, but when she decided to go to

 Damien de Blic, “Moraliser l’argent Ce que Panama a changé dans la société française (1889–1897),” Politix 71, no. 3 (2005): 61–82.  Weber, Economy and Society, vol. 1, 242.  Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, Making Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebrity Culture in an Age of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).  Kaat Wils, “The Revelation of a Modern Saint: Marie Curie’s Scientific Asceticism and the Culture of Professionalised Science,” in Beyond Pleasure: Cultures of Modern Asceticism, ed. Evert Peeters (New York: Berghahn, 2011), 171–189.

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Fig. 4.6: Marie Curie and Pierre Curie portrayed as “People of the Day.” Vanity Fair, 1904.

the ceremony anyway, she was not officially rebuffed by the Swedish Academy. While it took several years for her to live down the public opprobrium of the adultery scandal, she finally did so in World War I by putting herself in harm’s way to save soldiers’ lives by operating a field hospital and mobile unit x-ray machines (thus imitating the death-defying interventions of the epidemiologists Virchow, Pasteur, and Koch). Curie was certainly an exception who proved the rule: the vast majority of women were barred, by custom and by law, from the higher reaches of scientific inquiry. But the vagaries of Curie’s career also show how robust the exceptional authority of the expert could be and how far it could push the rules of society and still remain intact. Her experience highlights with particular clarity how scandal traced the fault-lines behind the intensified expectations of the expert’s social relevance and the increasing contact zone between science, state, and society.

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III The Promise of Expertise goes Astray With the escalating complexity of technology and research, as well as the advancement of big science with its gigantic laboratories and anonymous workshops of the type culminating in the Manhattan Project, the twentieth century presented fewer opportunities for experts to gain both institutional and public authority than they had had in the nineteenth century.97 In short, while the contact zone between science, state, and society grew larger in the twentieth century, it also became too complex and monolithic for the public to understand. The growing specialization in science and technology made it far less likely that discoveries could still be personified by one single expert, as they had been by Koch, Virchow, or Pasteur. Instead, the nineteenth-century scientist who embodied national excellence largely vanished in the faceless structures of large-scale research institutions. Alan Turing is a case in point: his fame was a belated one and then very much connected to his war effort. If his discoveries were not fully heralded in his time, this was partly because he made them while working on top secret government projects that were hidden by the Official Secrets Act. War played other roles, too, in determining scientists’ less inspiring public profile in the twentieth century. Neither positivism nor the urban schemes to improve social hygiene in the nineteenth century were entirely apolitical; in the twentieth century, though, expert authority often took on a more blatantly political intent. World War I was a first instance of this change. In 1917, at a time when the German war effort was confronted with extreme challenges, including a starving population, the first technoscientist was finally installed in the Walhalla’s hall of great men. The nineteenthcentury chemist Justus von Liebig was chosen specifically because of his pioneering research in the chemical industry, as his basic research had made it possible to feed the population during wartime. Yet the accolade found little public resonance, suggesting that this official, and sudden, reframing of the scientist as a harbinger of world war was not palatable, even in 1917.98 Even though scientists’ contributions to the war effort were acknowledged officially, their moral compass was greatly tarnished by their material support for the war’s widespread destruction. Many of the great names of German science felt no qualms in justifying the burning of the library of Louvain: the notorious apologia of 1914, the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three, was signed by Emil von Behring, Paul Ehrlich, Emil Fischer, Otto Hahn, Wilhelm Ostwald, Max Planck, Wilhelm Röntgen, and

 On the rise of the industrial scientist: Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); on large-scale research: Helmuth Trischler and Hans Weinberger, “Engineering Europe: Big Technologies and Military Systems in the Making of 20th Century Europe,” History and Technology 21, no. 1 (2005): 49–83.  Bouwers, “Nationaldenkmal,” 346–347.

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Wilhelm Wundt, among others.99 Similarly, although Fritz Haber received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on synthetic ammonia in 1918, he also came to be seen as the instigator of chemical warfare and the embodiment of amoral science for his wartime work on weaponizing chlorine. After defeat in war and the perceived ignominy of the Versailles Treaty, science in Central Europe became even more politicized.100 While there is no direct link between the Ninety-Three or Haber and the excesses of Nazi science, the radicalization of World War I paved the way for a toxic mixture of radical nationalism, social Darwinism, eugenics, and racism that coalesced into genocidal policies.101 The Faustian bargain between German experts and Nazism is most clearly exemplified by the capitulation and collaboration of Wernher von Braun and Albert Speer with their brutish overlords. Speer turned into a celebrity, but of a notorious, sinister kind in the postwar period, while Braun managed to perform a spectacular remodeling of his image as the (alleged) father of the United States’ space program.102 Albert Einstein, whose bust was only added to the Walhalla in 1990, was one of the very few German scientists who distanced himself from the German war effort in World War I. He suffered extensive public attacks in interwar Germany as a result, but also built the basis for the moral stature he acquired once the Nazis came to power, and which he exercised in the postwar United States as a voice for peace and social justice.103 As one of the most famous scientists of the modern world, Einstein also points to the way that the expert’s public authority changed from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, specifically in the decline of the national icon and the splintering of that legacy.104 As one splinter, sublime translation was deflected from earthly social issues into the cosmic realm. Alongside Einstein, the most famous

 Jürgen von Ungern-Sternberg and Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg, Der Aufruf ‘An die Kulturwelt!’: Das Manifest der 93 und die Anfänge der Kriegspropaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1996).  David Freis, Psycho-Politics between the World Wars: Psychiatry and Society in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Maciej Górny, William Edward Martin, and Antoni Górny, Science Embattled: Eastern European Intellectuals and the Great War (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, Brill Deutschland, 2019).  Berger, “Building the Nation,” 286–290; Paul Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe 1890–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Marius Turda, Modernism and Eugenics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).  On the Faustian bargains of experts in the twentieth century: Kohlrausch and Trischler, Building, 143–175; on Speer’s postwar celebrity: Magnus Brechtken, Albert Speer: Eine deutsche Karriere (Munich: Siedler, 2017); on von Braun: Alexander C. T. Geppert, “Space Personae: Cosmopolitan Networks of Peripheral Knowledge 1927–1957,” Journal of Modern European History 6, no. 2 (2008): 262–286.  Richard Crockatt, Einstein and Twentieth-Century Politics: A Salutary Moral Influence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Milena Wazeck, Einsteins Gegner: Die öffentliche Kontroverse um die Relativitätstheorie in den 1920er Jahren (Frankfurt a/M: Campus Verlag, 2009).  Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality (London: ICON Books, 2009).

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scientists of the twentieth century included astrophysicists such as Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan.105 Through their (charismatic) gift of interpretation, they explained not the divine realm of heaven nor the ultimate values of the nationalized social center, but rather the realm of the universe – or the Cosmos, in Sagan’s aptly titled television series. In its etiology, the term ‘cosmos’ stands somewhere between science and metaphysics, and it is the sense of awe in the face of an unintelligible universe that fueled the public acclaim of scientists who could communicate those mysteries in an accessible way. Still, those concepts were arcana, and except for Einstein, the astrophysicists might have had scientific fame, but not social authority. A second off-shoot involved changes to the scale of seemingly magical inventions, as personal consumer goods came to replace the marvels of grand-scale engineering in the public’s esteem. As it became possible to possess the technological invention and bring it into the private realm of the home – first with the phonograph, then radio, television, and eventually the personal computer – admiration was projected onto the object close at hand rather than the inventor who stood behind it. Even when products were branded with the names of their inventors, this did not necessarily convey celebrity status onto the inventor in question. “The hero-worship of inventors is one nineteenth-century ‘tradition’ that has not survived,” MacLeod concludes, and points to changes in the media landscape that now pays more attention to technologies than to the single inventor.106 Taken a step further, this observation points to the rise of the (often contested) “public technologies in the twentieth century” that Robert Bud and Helmuth Trischler have diagnosed for Nuclear Energy as part of an intense interplay of technology with social and cultural factors.107 As a third legacy, expert interventions in the urban space continued in the form of the twentieth-century planner and technocrat, who was aligned with the broader technocratic movement after World War I. The highly abstract belief-system of technocracy – understood as the political rule or at least substantial political influence of ‘neutral’ experts – integrated a number of substantial personal cults, for instance in the extremely potent form of Fordism, but also to a lesser extent in the celebration of Frederick W. Taylor and Henri Fayol.108 Even René Descartes enjoyed a striking second career as the personification of rationalism.109 What makes technocratic thinking so suggestive in our context is that technocratic experts often relied upon technical

 Charles Seife, Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity (London: Basic Books, 2021).  MacLeod, Heroes of Invention, 6.  Helmuth Trischler and Robert Bud, “Public Technology: Nuclear Energy in Europe,” History and Technology 34, no. 3–4 (2019): 187–212, doi:10.1080/07341512.2018.1570674.  Stefan J. Link, Forging Global Fordism: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Contest over the Industrial Order, America in the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 51–72.  Jens van de Maele, “Architectures of Bureaucracy: An Architectural and Political History of Ministerial Offices in Belgium, 1915–1940” (PhD diss., University of Ghent, 2019), 218–219.

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neutrality while at the same time demanding authority and employing the media to gain public standing. While the public personas of Haber or von Braun – despite their moral ambivalence – still fit within the wider frame of the glorified technician of the nineteenth century, the twentieth century saw the rise of the sober but famous ‘technocelebrity.’ In terms of technocratic interventions in the urban space, we could look to the ‘starchitects’ Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius as prime examples. Both were global celebrities, but as projection screens for far-reaching social reforms, they had little in common with even the most famous architects – still mainly builders – of the nineteenth century. Nor were they like the starchitects of today.110 In a paradoxical fashion, these technocelebrities combined teamwork with a career centered on glorifying their singular biography. Architects like Le Corbusier or Gropius, both of whom employed media in a highly perceptive way, were hailed as problem solvers and at the same time glorified as harbingers of a new global modernity. But they also represented a wider current that melded architecture, urban planning, and social engineering.111 With the 1960s’ growing skepticism towards science and the efficacy of planning, the belief in this type of expert vanished or even turned him or her into a symbolic villain for a complex set of social crises. If Le Corbusier and, to a lesser extent, Gropius are still admired today, it is more for their aesthetic accomplishments in modern design than for their technocratic urban planning. Like other celebrated modernist architects – Eero Saarinen, Alvar Aalto, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe – they are, in today’s perception, more closely aligned to artists in their public profile, as they are renowned for erecting striking sculptural edifices that seem to defy the heaviness and fixity of the materials used in their construction. That the dream of the inventor-hero fighting for social justice and cosmic salvation is not dead is clear from the immense popularity of the Avengers movie franchise, with Tony Stark as a superhero clad in his own technological inventions. Whether a latter-day technology-designer and self-declared ‘technoking’ such as Elon Musk can take on that mantle in real life seems more doubtful. Despite the glamour of his prestige projects, Musk is still, like the other celebrities of Silicone Valley, tied to the routine tasks of coding and design, and in this sense distant from the spectacular gifts of the spirit that connected nineteenth-century experts to the social center of values and meaning.

 Fiona MacCarthy, Walter Gropius: Visionary Founder of the Bauhaus (London: Faber & Faber, 2019); Mardges Bacon, Le Corbusier in America: Travels in the Land of the Timid (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 2003).  Martin Kohlrausch, Brokers of Modernity: East Central Europe and the Rise of Modernist Architects, 1910–1950 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2019), 57–96.

Tine Van Osselaer

Clergy, Mystics, and Religious Leaders Abstract: This chapter addresses the staging of religious authority within Catholic and Protestant contexts. It shows how different types of religious authority benefitted from the increasing media possibilities of the nineteenth century and points to the importance of emotions in this staging. Drawing on the work that has been done on the commodification of religion and exploring the ways in which religious authorities participated in the creation of their public identities, the chapter addresses devotion to the pope, the mediatization of mystics, and marginality as a power strategy for outsiders. Keywords: religion, charisma, celebrity, media ✶✶✶

On 7 February 1878, Pius IX died. His papal chamberlain, Joachim Cardinal Pecci, Bishop of Perugia, tapped the old pope’s forehead three times with a silver hammer, thereby repeating his name and stating, “the pope is really dead.” He removed the Fisherman’s Ring from Pius’ finger and “had it smashed, a symbol of the end of his authority.”1 On 12 March 1952, a German journalist watched pope Pius XII dress for the festivities surrounding the thirteenth anniversary of his coronation. During the complex dressing ceremony, which included garments such as the falda, albe, amict, fano, tunic, dalmatic and chasuble, gloves, the triple papal crown, and Fisherman’s ring, the pope allegedly whispered to him: “What you see here play out in front of your eyes is the metamorphosis of a man into a symbol.”2 These two short episodes illustrate how the popes, and in extenso other ecclesiastical authorities, were ringed and dressed with their authority. Their vestments “transform the man into the office, making visible the powers he wields as priest

 Michael P. Riccards, Faith and Leadership: The Papacy and the Roman Catholic Church (Lanham: Lexington Books: 2012), 297.  Cited in: Ton van Schaik, “Heersers, heiligen en herders: De pausen van 1800 tot 2000,” in Pracht en Praal van de paus: Schatten uit het Vaticaan, ed. De Blaauw et al. (Amsterdam: Ludion; Utrecht: Museum Catharijneconvent: 2003), 14–33, here 15. The author would like to thank John Arblaster for this reference and other literature suggestions. Also: Robert Macalister, Ecclesiastical Vestments: Their Development and History (London: Elliot Stock, 1896), accessible at Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/ecclesiasticalve00maca/page/18/mode/2up. On the liturgical robes, see: Anne Morelli, “La mise en scène du pouvoir du ‘souverain pontife’ (XIXe-XXe siècles): Des faites baroques à l’humilité ostentatoire,” in La sacralisation du pouvoir: Images et mises en scène, ed. Alain Dierkens and Jacques Marx (Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2003), 255–264, here 255. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110574012-005

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and official.”3 Each clerical rank called for different garments. As David Morgan has explained, the complexity of the list of offices and its distinctions is not unlike the hierarchical structures of civil government and municipal authority in ancient Rome. He notes: “The careful delineation of rank in vestments, accoutrements, and placement in ecclesiastical ceremony preserves the antiquity of the apparatus and the cultus of authority that are characteristic of the Roman Church.”4 Though almost a century apart, the two scenes above show the continuity in the Vatican’s approach to symbolic garments and rituals and their role in the representation and creation of authority. Both episodes seem to be testimonies of age-old, unchangeable traditions devoid of, and not influenced by, any worldly matters. In the following pages we will see, however, how authority claims and the staging thereof were in fact influenced by historical events and thereby subject to change. A short example will help us illustrate the matter here. Let us remain in the Vatican a little longer and look at the staging of the Urbi et Orbi, the pope’s apostolic blessing ‘for the city and the world,’ performed at Christmas, Easter, or when a new pope is chosen (Fig. 5.1). Traditionally, the pope gives his blessing from the central loggia that faces Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s St. Peter’s Square, where the faithful gather. The loggia is right above a sculpted representation of Christ handing the keys of Heaven – the symbol of papal authority – to Saint Peter, the first bishop of Rome. However, after the demise of the Papal State, the location of the blessing moved to the interior balcony. The new setting was hidden from public view and demonstrated how the pope had become the ‘prisoner of the Vatican’ due to tensions arising from the Risorgimento, the Italian unification movement. Only fifty years later, in 1922, did Pius XI again bless the people from the traditional location.5 In sum, while the ritual remained the same, a changed setting altered its meaning and impact as well. Visual representations of papal authority call for a similar contextualization of their moments of production. The painting presented by the Camerieri to Pope Leo XIII for the fiftieth anniversary of his priesthood in 1887 is a case in point. As Pietro Amato notes in the introduction to his book on the treasures of the Vatican, the painting, by Francesco Grandi, was officially titled The Triumph of Faith, but it might more aptly be called the “Glorification of the Pontificate of Leo XIII.” The triumphalist, monumental painting was meant to glorify the power claims of the Vatican, representing the pope on

 David Morgan, “Vestments and Hierarchy in Catholic Visual Piety,” in Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, ed. Andrew Bolton (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018): 97–103, here 99; Maureen Miller, “Clothing as Communication? Vestments and Views of the Papacy c.1300,” Journal of Medieval History 44, no. 3 (2018): 280–293.  Morgan, “Vestments and Hierarchy,” 98.  Sible de Blaauw, “Het Vaticaan: theater van pauselijk ritueel,” in Pracht en Praal van de paus: Schatten uit het Vaticaan, ed. De Blaauw et al. (Amsterdam: Ludion; Utrecht: Museum Catharijneconvent, 2003), 34–55, here 43–44; Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 233; Riccards, Faith and Leadership, 300.

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Fig. 5.1: Benouville, François-Léon. “Pope Pius IX Imparting the Blessing Urbi et Orbi.” Drawing/Graphite. 1847.

his throne in rich robes and crowned with the tiara, extending his right hand in a blessing gesture, and surrounded by seven personifications – Faith, Peace, Architecture, etc. – meant to represent his virtues and actions. The date of the painting suggests it may have served as a complaint against the Italian state which had reduced the pope during the Risorgimento to a prisoner of the Vatican.6 As these brief examples demonstrate, in order to understand the staging of religious authority we need to place its practices and means within their specific historical context. What might look similar is not necessarily so. In the following pages, I use the term ‘authority’ in the way Laura Feldt describes the concept: as relational, fragile, and

 Pietro Amato, “De verheerlijking van het pontificaat van Leo XIII,” in Pracht en Praal van de paus: Schatten uit het Vaticaan, ed. De Blaauw et al. (Amsterdam: Ludion; Utrecht: Museum Catharijneconvent, 2003), 13–14, here 13.

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different from power. “Authority,” she states, “suggests an uneven relation of influence, the power to motivate and gain obedience, or an ascribed prestige, recognition, or status.”7 Authority depends on a range of media to function, and changes in media therefore affect social relationships and forms of power.8 In line with other studies of religious authority, I differentiate here between (Weberian) categories: charismatic authority (Charisma) and charismatic authority of office (Amtscharisma). This division is primarily intended as a way to organize the chapter: as we shall see, these two types of authority overlap and too strict a differentiation can produce a distorted view. Before I address some of these changes in the nineteenth century, I need to add a few brief caveats. The following pages focus primarily on how authority was staged in Christian denominations. While I will discuss some trends under the umbrella terms ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant,’ it is important to keep in mind that within Catholicism and Protestantism there were different views on authority, building on different traditions. As Michael Wheeler suggests in his work on The Old Enemies in nineteenth-century English culture: “Catholic claims to authority were based upon the Petrine rock of the Church of Rome, whose interpretations of both the Bible and tradition on major matters of faith and doctrine was regarded as infallible. Protestant claims were based upon the rock of the Scriptures – a narrower and, in an age of criticism, more vulnerable kind of authority.”9 As a second caveat, given the amplitude and fragmentation of the research field, many of the following reflections are based on exploratory case studies conducted by scholars from different sub-fields. The following pages also pay attention to the role that emotions played in the staging of religious authority. Work on the history of emotions has been booming in the last decade and have included the role emotions have played in religious practices, the gendered nature of the ascription of affect, and the importance of specific emotions in the promulgation of Christian ideals (e.g. the preachers’ use of fear in sermons and teachings about the afterlife to inspire – or frighten – the faithful into leading a more virtuous life).10 In

 Laura Feldt, “Reframing Authority: the Role of Media and Materiality,” Postscripts 8, no. 3 (2012): 185–192, here 185; Laura Feldt, “Marginality, Media, and Mutations of Religious Authority in the History of Christianity,” in Marginality, Media, and Mutations of Religious Authority in the History of Christianity, ed. Laura Feldt and Jan Bremmer (Peeters: Leuven, 2019), 1–21, here 8.  Feldt quoting Meyrowitz: “New media often lead to social change over time by constructing new patterns of identity formation, socialization and hierarchy.” Feldt, “Reframing Authority,” 189.  Michael Wheeler, The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 187. Authority claims thus built on different traditions and were expressed in different ways. David Morgan notes that: “It was precisely the ritualism and material culture of office rank that Protestantism frequently targeted in its sixteenth-century break with Rome.” Morgan, “Vestments and Hierarchy,” 98.  See the historiographical surveys by: John Corrigan, Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 269–293; Pascal Eitler and Monique Scheer, “Emotionengeschichte als Körpergeschichte: Eine heuristische Perspektive auf religiöse Konversionen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 35 (2009): 282–313;

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studying the emotional aspect of religious culture with a focus on the staging of authority, I follow scholars such as Jacqueline Van Gent who studies eighteenth-century Moravian conversion rituals and their emotional atmosphere, in which new religious leaders could emerge. She notes in particular that, after undergoing an emotionally-loaded ecstatic conversion ritual of self-erasure, adolescent girls could emerge as new ritual leaders and achieve a position of power (as long as their male superiors supported them). Van Gent emphasizes, however, that “by the end of the eighteenth century, the gendered structures of authority had changed in the Moravian Church and aspiring female converts were no longer able to gain political authority to the same extent as they had earlier.”11 Questions of who could claim certain kinds of religious authority and on what grounds depended on various categories of difference. Among these categories, gender and lay/religious status have been the best studied. This chapter draws upon the insights of recent work that highlights the intersection of gender and religion, in particular the so-called feminization of religion and the gendering of religious charisma.12 In the nineteenth century, women came to be regarded as inherently different from men, with different bodies and intellectual capacities. Religion came to seen as a woman’s thing: the ideal woman was religious, and femininity and motherhood in particular were sacralized. Binary and hierarchical gender constructions differentiated between rational men and emotional women, leaving them, as we shall see, with different routes to obtain authority. However, as will become apparent throughout this chapter, studying the sources along the lines of such binary thinking can obscure more than it illuminates. As we shall also see, different types of authority benefitted from the increasing media possibilities of the nineteenth century. In studying the use of the media, I draw on studies of the promotion and commercialization of religion and explore what Donn James Tilson has described as “devotional-promotional communication.” When this kind of campaign is religious in nature, it “may seek to instill great love or loyalty, enthusiasm, or zeal for a particular religious individual, living or deceased, or for a spe-

Piroska Nagy, Xavier Biron-Ouellet, and Anne-Gaëlle Weber, “Rituals, Relics and Religious Rhetoric,” in Sources for the History of Emotions, ed. Katie Barclay, Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, and Peter N. Stearns (New York: Routledge, 2020), 41–52.  Jacqueline Van Gent, “Moravian Memoirs and the Emotional Salience of Conversion Rituals,” in Emotion, Ritual and Power in Europe, 1200–1920: Family, State and Church, ed. Merridee L. Bailey and Katie Barclay (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 241–260, here 253.  On the importance of gender in the study of the history of religion and the impact of hierarchical and binary constructions, see: Randi Warne, “Gender,” in Guide to the Study of Religion, ed. Willi Braun and Russell McCutcheon (London: Cassel, 2000): 140–154; Randi Warne, “Making the Gender-Critical Turn,” in Secular Theories on Religion: Current Perspectives, ed. Tim Jensen et al. (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2000), 249–260.

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cific religion or faith.”13 The following pages also build on work done by Suzanne Kaufman and Sophia Deboick on the history of the commercialization and marketing of religion. Kaufman stresses that the commercial and the devotional should not be regarded as two separate circuits. She explores how the Marian apparition was marketed as a modern travel destination and how those who were miraculously cured at the site could be regarded as modern religious celebrities. The notion of religious celebrity also plays a role in Deboick’s work on Thérèse of Lisieux and how the commodification of her image influenced the campaigns for her beatification and sanctification.14 Drawing upon their studies and exploring the ways in which religious authorities participated in the creation of their public identities, this chapter touches on studies of public personas and the ways in which they combine old and new plot narratives and repertoires. The public persona is understood as located between the specific individual and the social institution he or she represents. Reaching beyond the personal, the public persona can be based on a given social role (i.e. mother), profession (i.e. physician), or calling (i.e. priest).15

I Devotion to the Pope and the Cult of Papacy Changes in political power inspired a new type of religious authority at the highest levels of the Catholic hierarchy in the nineteenth century. On the one hand, the Holy See experienced significant losses in its immediate territory when it relinquished the Papal State during the Risorgimento, while organizationally the Catholic Church became more centralized and beholden to conditions outside the Vatican walls. On the other hand, even though its political power was diminished, Catholic eyes were still

 Donn James Tilson and Yi-Yuan Chao, “Saintly Campaigning: Devotional-Promotional Communication and the U.S. Tour of St. Therese’s Relics,” Journal of Media and Religion 1, no. 2 (2002): 81–104, here 89; Donn James Tilson, The Promotion of Devotion: Saints, Celebrities and Shrines (Champaign: Common Ground, 2011).  Sophia Deboick, “Céline Martin’s Images of Thérèse of Lisieux and the Creation of a Modern Saint,” in Saints and Sanctity, ed. Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2011), 376–389; Suzanne Kaufman, Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).  “Intermediate between the individual biography and the social institution lies the persona: a cultural identity that simultaneously shapes the individual in body and mind and creates a collective with a shared and recognizable physiognomy. . . . categories of people, of collective ways of thinking, feeling, judging, perceiving, working.” Lorraine Daston and Otto H. Sibum, “Introduction: Scientific Personae and their Histories,” Science in Context 16, no. 1 (2003): 1–8, here 2–3. “We have to look at what a person says or does in relation to the discourse and performances of contemporaries.” Mineke Bosch, “Persona en performance van identiteit: Parallelle ontwikkelingen in de nieuwe biografische geschiedschrijving van gender en wetenschap,” Tijdschrift voor Biografie 1, no. 3 (2012): 10–21, here 13–14.

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on Rome as the birth of ultramontanism firmly connected Catholics across Europe to the papal center. The figure of the pope was vital to these developments, as Count Joseph de Maistre’s famous treatise Du Pape (About the Pope) suggests. As Sardinian ambassador to St. Petersburg in 1819, de Maistre wrote: “There can be no public morality and no national character without religion; there can be no Christianity without Catholicism; there can be no Catholicism without the Pope; there can be no Pope without the sovereignty that belongs to him.”16 De Maistre’s influential teachings foretold future developments as Eamon Duffy notes: over the course of the nineteenth century, the “exaltation of the papacy as the heart of Catholicism” and “‘Ultramontanism,’ as it was called, would increasingly dominate Catholic thinking” as the pope was held “in almost mystical reverence.”17 This reverence took two novel forms in the nineteenth century. First, the era saw the development of a more emotionally intense relationship of the faithful with their pope, emphasizing devotion to his moral and religious authority rather his political power. In essence, the more difficulties the pope faced, the greater the loyalty of the faithful. Second, this period simultaneously witnessed the depersonalization of popes as individuals, with popes such as Leo XIII aiming to personify the ‘papacy’ as an institution. As Hans De Valk has shown, while the popes could differ, the Pope was always the same. (Only in the twentieth century did the individual characteristics of the popes feature more prominently in the creation of their public personas.18) In the nineteenth century, as the reigning pope merged with his office and became the personification of the continuity of the papacy, the power and charisma ascribed to the figure of the pope surpassed the actual person who was wearing the tiara.19 This did not mean, however, a lessening of emotional investment among the faithful who were attached to the pope as a symbol, as he represented religious nobility, perseverance, and martyrdom. Scholars like De Valk and Duffy demonstrate how the groundwork for these changes was laid out in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries starting with the imprisonment of Pius VI and Pius VII by the French revolutionary forces.20 While the two men were quite different in their papal personas, both fell victim to French expansionist politics during Napoleon I’s reign. Pius VI died on 29 August 1799 as prisoner in the citadel of Valence to which he had been deported after witnessing the annexation of the legations (ruled by papal legates) of Ravenna and Bologna. Despite Pius VI’s lack of decisive action in previous years, as Duffy notes: “Martyrdom

 Duffy, Saints and Sinners, 216.  Duffy, Saints and Sinners, 216, 225.  Hans De Valk, “De cultus van de paus in de negentiende en twintigste eeuw: van Pius IX tot Pius XII,” in De Paus en de wereld: Geschiedenis van een instituut, ed. Frans Willem Lantink and Jeroen Koch (Amsterdam: Boom, 2012), 319–336, here 335.  De Valk, “De cultus,” 329.  De Valk, “De cultus.”

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wipes all scores clean, and in the eyes of the world Pius VI died a martyr.”21 Napoleon seemed to have been well aware of the impact of the pope’s martyrdom on the faithful. As Duffy explains, one of Napoleon’s first decrees as First Consul, in December 1799, was to order funeral honors for Pius VI, whose body had not yet been buried but was laid in a sealed coffin at Valence. “The Pope, to Napoleon, was ‘a lever of opinion,’ his moral authority equivalent ‘to a corps of 200,000 men.’”22 We can see the same line of thinking in Napoleon’s invitation of Pope Pius VII to his coronation as Emperor of the French. The papal journey was a triumph, much to Napoleon’s annoyance: “Wherever the Pope went, he was mobbed by emotional crowds. His carriage drove between lines of kneeling devotees, men pressed forward to have their rosaries blessed, women married by civil rites under the Revolution to have their wedding-rings touched by the Pope. It was clear to everyone that the papal office had gained more mystique than it had lost in the flux and turmoil of the Revolution.”23 Still, this pope, too, eventually ended up as a French prisoner in Fontainebleau after he refused to close the papal ports to the enemies of France or to step down as the sovereign of the Papal States and appoint the bishops Napoleon had selected. After Napoleon’s downfall, Pius VII finally returned to Rome, triumphant, in 1814.24 As De Valk notes, the ‘martyrdom’ of the two popes initiated an increase in the religious and moral meaning of the papacy, the beginning of an emotional bond between the pope and his flock, and the mental basis for the ultramontane movement.25 Throughout the nineteenth century, the Holy See continued to face political crises as Catholic concepts of hierarchy were challenged: with “the rise of sovereign states, constitutional democracy, the separation of church and state, freedom of the press [. . .] the institution of the papacy [. . .] saw its temporal authority wane to the point of mere symbolism.”26 Still, while the pope lost his worldly power, especially in the course of the Italian unification campaigns, his status as prisoner in the Vatican after 1870 lent him spiritual and symbolic power and, more than ever, emphasized his authority within the Church.27 The papal office had been commanding veneration and respect for centuries via symbols, rites, and protocols, of course. What was new in the nineteenth century, though, was the emotional element that came to characterize the relationship of the faithful to the pope. As Duffy remarks, this devout papalism fit the

 Duffy, Saints and Sinners, 203–204.  Duffy, Saints and Sinners, 206.  Duffy, Saints and Sinners, 209.  Duffy, Saints and Sinners, 203–204.  De Valk, “De cultus,” 320.  Morgan, “Vestments and Hierarchy,” 101.  Jeroen Koch, “XVIII Een pauselijk katholicisme: Het ultramontanisme in de negentiende eeuw,” in De Paus en de wereld: Geschiedenis van een instituut, ed. Frans Willem Lantink and Jeroen Koch (Amsterdam: Boom, 2012), 283–296, here 284; Duffy, Saints and Sinners, 245.

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devotional revolution within Catholicism “away from the sober decorum of eighteenth-century religion towards a more emotional and colorful religion of the heart, a new emphasis on ceremonial, on the saints, on the Virgin Mary.”28 The Holy See actively cultivated this papal enthusiasm, responding to political changes – Italian unification, the siege, and the loss of the Papal State – by mobilizing the financial and moral support of the faithful. The pope was heroized through a coordinated use of the Catholic press, sermons, pastoral letters, novenas, images, and mass manifestations. Recurring motifs, infused with paternal metaphors, enhanced his spiritual power and solidified his unique, irreplaceable position within the Church.29 The faithful not only invested their hearts in the papal cause; they were also financially involved. The St. Peter’s pence – a financial contribution for the ‘pope-martyr’ – was created in 1860.30 More broadly, cheap popular prints, mass produced holy pictures, and the emerging mass media all contributed to the pope’s new status as a ‘popular icon.’ As Duffy notes, the facial features of Pope Pio Nono, in office 1846–1878, were better known than those of any pope in history, as his image hung in Catholic households all over the world.31 This staging of the pope fit within the institutional centralization of Rome and the papacy’s goal of fostering an internationally oriented ‘Romanized’ devotional culture. Seeing the large-scale potential of the mass production processes, Rome embraced these new techniques and autographed portraits of the pope circulated on an international scale. This was not solely a top-down process: the faithful showed their support by signing semi-public addresses that included personalized wishes for well-being and expressed feelings of familiarity. The faithful also engaged in pilgrimages to Rome, which featured the highlight of gaining an audience with the pope and receiving his blessing.32 The collection of signatures supporting the papal cause, financial contributions such as the St. Peter’s pence, and the large scale circulation of prayer cards and photographs of Pius IX generated an intense personal identification with the pope as

 Duffy, Saints and Sinners, 225. According to De Valk, labeling this enthusiasm as ‘devotion’ might be slightly distorting; ‘dedication’ appears to be a more adequate description. De Valk, “De cultus,” 321.  De Valk, “De cultus,” 325, 327.  Jan De Maeyer, “Leo XIII: ‘Lumen in Coelo’: Glissements de la perception dans le contexte d’un processus de modernisation religieuse,” in The Papacy and the New World Order: Vatican Diplomacy, Catholic Opinion and International Politics at the Time of Leo XIII 1878–1903, ed. Vincent Viaene (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2005), 303–322, here 304–305; Vincent Viaene, “De ontplooiing van de ‘vrije’ kerk (1830–1883),” in Het aartsbisdom Mechelen-Brussel: 450 jaar geschiedenis: De volkskerk in het aartsbisdom, een vrije kerk in een moderne samenleving 1802–2009, ed. Jan De Maeyer et al., vol. 2 (Antwerpen: Halewijn, 2009), 33–99, here 94–96; Vincent Viaene, Belgium and the Holy See from Gregory XVI to Pius IX (1831–1859): Catholic Revival, Society and Politics in 19th-century Europe (Leuven: Belgisch Historisch Instituut te Rome, 2001), 146; De Valk, “De cultus,” 322.  Duffy, Saints and Sinners, 228.  De Valk, “De cultus,” 334.

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charismatic leader and a mobilization of loyalty.33 The materialization of the pope’s cause also triggered criticism and mockery, though, as numerous anti-clerical and anti-papist cartoons show.34 Nor was such ‘emotive resourcing’ unique to the pope: De Valk emphasizes that there were similar changes in emotional attachment to royal dynasties in the nineteenth century. Still, the Roman version differed in that it stressed the importance of the continuity of the papal office, pushing the individual who was actually in office into the background.35 As De Valk argues, devotion to the pope seems to have rested primarily on a feeling of solidarity among Catholics, on reverence for the sacrality of the office, and on the impression of continuity between the early Church founded by Saint Peter and the present one led by his successor. A book by the Bishop of Grenoble played to this sense of endurance by situating the pope beyond time: “This gray man will soon be nineteen centuries old. He is the contemporary of the Creator, his name is Peter. Christ and Peter have both died, but resurrected. They live, speak, act and rule.”36 The power and charisma that were linked to the pope surpassed the actual person who was wearing the tiara: in the nineteenth century the “person of the pope seemed to depersonalize . . . While the popes might differ, the Pope is always the same.”37 Some popes – for instance Leo XIII, as Grandi’s painting showed – came to personify the ‘living papacy’ and thus to embody the Church.38 In audience with the pope, the “combination of place and ritual evoked the ultimate experience of universalism, through time and space.”39 This evolution would reach its peak during the papacy of Pius XII in the 1940s and 1950s, as viewers saw his office and person merge into a demi-divine and demi-royal figure, a carefully staged public persona projected via the movie Pastor Angelicus.40 Italian historian Roberto Rusconi thus postulates that, by the first half of the twentieth century, devotion to the pope had developed into the “cult of the papacy.”41 Still, it is important to note that even though emotional ties were strengthened during this time, the office of the pope was by no means democratized or made more accessible, as Vatican protocol continued to emphasize the pope’s status. Leo XIII, in office 1878–1903, insisted for instance that the Catholics he received in audience kneel during

 Vincent Viaene, “Het Italiaanse Risorgimento: De Romeinse kwestie en de internationalisatie van het negentiende-eeuwse pausdom,” in De Paus en de wereld: Geschiedenis van een instituut, ed. Frans Willem Lantink and Jeroen Koch (Amsterdam: Boom, 2012), 259–270, here 264; De Valk, “De cultus,” 325.  John Grand Carteret, Contre Rome: La bataille anticléricale en Europe (Paris: Michaud, 1906), 37.  De Valk, “De cultus,” 321, 333. See also: Koch, “Pauselijk katholicisme,” 296.  De Valk, “De cultus,” 329.  De Valk, “De cultus,” 329. “. . . de figuur van de paus te depersonaliseren . . . De pausen kunnen verschillen, maar de paus is altijd dezelfde.”  De Valk, “De cultus,” 330.  De Valk, “De cultus,” 331.  De Valk, “De cultus,” 332–333.  De Valk, “De cultus,” 330.

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the interview and apparently never allowed his entourage to sit in his presence.42 Likewise, from the 1850s onwards the primacy of the papal office gained an even more central position in theological and ecclesiastical-juridical thinking.43 Indeed, the rising cult of the papal persona went hand-in-hand with a greater Roman centralism marked by milestones such as the First Vatican Council in 1869–1870 and its decree of Papal Infallibility in 1870.44 Pius IX and his followers wanted, so Michael Riccards notes, “a very strong definition that when the pope speaks ‘ex cathedra’ on matters of faith and morals he is infallible, that he is unable to be in error.”45 Riccards sees the reign of Pius IX as the beginning of the modern papacy: “The pope was now even outside the traditional constraints of the councils of bishops and even the ecumenical Council with his assertion of authority and control.”46 While the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church remained the same throughout the nineteenth century, the foundations of the pope’s authority changed considerably. Catholic tradition remained the central selling point, but the political and worldly power that the popes wielded over the Papal States no longer worked in tandem with papal religious authority. In its place came the emotional strings that attached the faithful all over the world to the papacy in Rome. The faithful, mobilized through modern means, felt personally involved in the papal cause and invested money, such as the St. Peter’s pence, and at times also their lives, for instance when volunteers – the Papal Zouaves – defended Rome and the pope during the Risorgimento. This cultivation of an emotional connection to the ‘prisoner of the Vatican’ had its roots in the stories of the two prisoner-popes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, even though the features of the different popes became better known through intentional communication efforts, the pope was not installed at the head of a personality cult. Rather than an emphasis on the personality traits of individual popes, what we see here is the idealization of the office as represented through individuals: the living papacy.

II Mediatized Mystics and Religious Authorities in the Long Nineteenth Century The changing media landscape of the nineteenth century also offered new possibilities for charismatic religious authorities, and not only those who held the authority

    

Duffy, Saints and Sinners, 244. De Valk, “De cultus,” 322. Van Schaik, “Heersers, heiligen en herders,” 22. Riccards, Faith and Leadership, 291. Riccards, Faith and Leadership, 294.

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of office.47 In order to understand how these individuals gained authority, the following pages first address what constituted charisma and how it differed from other forms of authority.48 Due to the feminization of religion and the revitalization of somatic piety in the nineteenth century, charismatic authority was often gendered and built on exceptional bodies. At the same time, the rising discourse of marginalization that located the charismatic person as outsider at the margins of society, as well as a growing reincarnation narrative tied to embodiments of traditional religious leaders such as Moses, helped charismatic people to expand their religious authority. Embodiment, genderization, and marginalization, coupled with the development of a new media culture, provided novel opportunities to enhance charismatic authority. As charismatic leaders used the media to promote their persona and message, their impact scale expanded due to the press coverage they received.

Charismatic Authorities: The Gendering and Embodiment of Charisma In studies of religious leadership, charisma has been analyzed from different angles. Some scholars have addressed it as a divine grace (charism), adopting Weber’s definition of it as a “certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary,” and noted the diffused and vague usage of the term in the media age.49 Others have addressed charisma’s disruptive potential and shown how charismatic leaders emerge when political and economic crises undermine traditional authorities.50 Still others have emphasized the social element in Weber’s definition: in order for charisma to be effective, it needs to be experienced and recognized by followers.51 Within the history of religion, charismatic authority has often been linked to women who could not hold clerical office and therefore drew upon exceptional corporeal phenomena, such as ecstasy or stigmata, as visible proof of the authenticity of their divine messages and claim to religious leadership. This gender division is a later

 For an introduction to the evolution of the term in religious discourse, see: Tine Van Osselaer, Leonardo Rossi, Kristof Smeyers, et al., “Charismatic Women in Religion: Power, Media and Social Change,” Women’s History Review 291, no. 1 (2020): 1–17, doi:10.1080/09612025.2019.1595200.  On different kinds of authority (legal, traditional and charismatic), see: Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 215–216.  Weber, Economy and Society, 242; Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi, ed., Constructing Charisma: Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010).  Gary Dickson, “Charisma, Medieval and Modern,” Religions 3, no. 3 (2012): 763–789, here 766.  See: Charles Lindholm, “Introduction: Charisma in Theory and Practice,” in The Anthropology of Religious Charisma: Ecstasies and Institutions, ed. Charles Lindholm (Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), 1–30, here 9: “Weber [. . .] recognized that, no matter how absurd it might seem for an outsider, the leader’s sacredness exists if followers believe in and experience its existence.”

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development: charism, as understood by Saint Paul and the Church fathers, was not confined to either men or women; divine grace favored both sexes. Gender neutrality changed when charisma became linked to the notion of religious authority, however. Mary Frohlich has shown how in the Middle Ages a “model of complementarity between the ‘masculine’ power of office and the ‘feminine’ power of mystical charism began to take hold.”52 Frohlich connects this evolution to the Gregorian reform of the late eleventh century that emphasized the authority of the male clergy, as well as to Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth century, who stressed that “the book of experience” to which women had ample access was as necessary a theological source as “the book of creation” and the “book of scripture.”53 This differentiation between authority based on divine inspiration and authority based on office has become a recurring theme in the historiography on women in Christianity (and other religions). Rosemary Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin address this trope in the introduction to their 1979 volume Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions. Significantly, they criticize the essentialist understanding of this gender division and advocate the need to contextualize: there was a difference “not because, as men have supposed, women are more disposed toward the emotive and intuitive, but because it reflects the sociological fact that women for the most part were not allowed to claim authority of office.”54 Some further caveats need to be added to their initial critiques. First, too strict a differentiation between the two types of authority does not necessarily reflect the perception of people at the time. John Coakley, for instance, believes that using Weber’s charisma as a “quality of extraordinary leaders that arises from their own attributes and emphatically not from the routine authority of ‘everyday’ institutions . . . imposes a somewhat more inflexible line between the charismatic and the institutional than the late-medieval situation would suggest.”55 Second, too strict a gendering of the two categories runs the risk of confirming stereotypes and of missing out on women whose religious authority was not based on the alleged reception of divine grace but instead on their wisdom and age, for instance.56 Third, differentiation did not necessarily mean opposition. Female

 Mary Frohlich, “Authority,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 305–314.  Frohlich, “Authority,” 310.  Rosemary Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin, “Women’s Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions: Continuity and Change,” in Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Rosemary Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 15–28, here 19.  A priest, so Coakley notes, would not have thought of his powers as less charismatic, “in the sense of manifesting a spiritual gift, than the informal powers of prophets and visionaries.” John W. Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and their Male Collaborators (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 23.  See: Veerle Fraeters and Imke de Gier, “Introduction: Shaping Female Spiritual Authority in Europe from the High Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period,” in Mulieres Religiosae: Shaping

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mystics were not seldomly supported by members of the clergy, and often their parish priest and/or spiritual guide functioned as their ‘manager.’ Moreover, as Monique Scheer has shown, even though these women gained a certain authority, they did not necessarily seek to challenge traditional authorities or the patriarchal structures of their male-dominated religious contexts that subordinated other women.57 Finally, as we shall see, charisma in its various definitions was not gender-exclusive within religious history: the proverbial great men, new messiahs, and prophets benefitted from its momentum too. We may now turn to some changes in emphasis which defined nineteenth-century Christianity, before moving on to the manifestation of religious charisma in that century’s new media landscape. While charismatic authorities have arisen throughout Christian history, each of them gained their significance within specific historical settings. For the nineteenth century, these era-specific developments included the feminization of religion and the revitalization of somatic piety. Feminization has been used to refer to an increase in the sheer number of women among the faithful and in female religious orders; or it may refer to the sentimentalization of content in the development of a God of fear into a God of love, and the rising popularity of the cult of female saints and Marian devotion. For the purposes of this essay, feminization meant that an era of increased gender polarization saw religion in general come to be regarded as ‘a woman’s thing.’ This was also a period of flowering somatic piety, namely ascetic practices and the idealization of mystical models of sanctity in which exceptional bodies could function as proof of the divine.58 A good example thereof are the ‘living saints’ in nineteenth-century Italy studied by Leonardo Rossi: the nun Maria Rosa Serra, 1766 to (some time after) 1806; the ‘angel of the hearth’ Elisabetta Canori Mora, 1774 to 1825; and the ‘victim soul’ Maria Domenica Lazzeri, 1815 to 1848. Reflecting on their charismata, Rossi argues that these women used their gifts to construct their public image as religious leaders and thus gained greater autonomy than was generally accepted as legitimate for women (Fig. 5.2).59 Rossi also addresses their visibility and how they displayed “their bodies as proof of their divine election. Their bodies – martyrized by stigmata, emaciated by fasting

Female Spiritual Authority in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, ed. Veerle Fraeters and Imke de Gier (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 1–14, here 4–5. See also the reflection on some of these caveats in: Van Osselaer, Rossi, and Smeyers, “Charismatic Women.”  Monique Scheer, “Das Medium hat ein Geschlecht,” in ‘Wahre’ und ‘falsche’ Heiligkeit: Mystik, Macht und Geschlechterrollen im Katholizismus des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Hubert Wolf (Munich: Oldenburg, 2013), 169–191, here 181–182.  Waltraud Pulz, “Vorbemerkung,” in Zwischen Himmel und Erde: Körperliche Zeichen der Heiligkeit, ed. Waltraud Pulz (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2012), 7–13, here 7–10. Nonetheless, it is important to note that we can find references to women’s charisma (not necessarily leadership) and corporeality in studies on Christian women of different eras.  Leonardo Rossi, “‘Religious Virtuosi’ and Charismatic Leaders: The Public Authority of Mystic Women in Nineteenth-Century Italy,” Women’s History Review 29, no. 1 (2020): 90–108, here 92.

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Fig. 5.2: “Elisabetta Canori Mora.” Devotional card.

and self-flagellation, ‘enlightened’ by divine ecstasies – took on a public function, demonstrating their special link with God and in doing so exceeded the boundaries within which the Catholic and bourgeois world wanted to confine women (whether in the domestic sphere or the monastic cell).”60 However, as Rossi emphasizes, the display of charismata was only one side of the coin of charismatic appeal. The other side was its public dimension, namely the relational aspect at work in the creation and acceptance of authority. Divine graces need to be recognized by the community before they can function as building blocks of charismatic appeal and support claims of leadership. The female mystics Rossi studies did not lead a secluded life; their charisma did not develop in isolation. Rossi describes, for instance, how the Roman mother and mystic Mora “daily received visitors and faithful, opened the sacred doors of her home

 Rossi, “Religious Virtuosi,” 92.

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to strangers in need, made public pilgrimages in which she had the recognized function of ‘living saint,’ and talked with high Vatican clergymen.”61 As case studies focusing on different eras demonstrate, not all charismatic leaders received the support of the Church authorities, due to the disruptive potential of charismatic religious authority to the established hierarchy. In fact, though, clashes between different types of authority could vary significantly in outcome. While in some cases they led to public condemnation of the non-official religious leader by the Church, in others the Church took control over a grassroots cult by approving specific sites or the cult’s presence at official ceremonies. Cults surrounding Marian apparitions provide ample opportunity to study such clashes. Karen Park’s work on the apparitions in Champion, Wisconsin is exemplary in that regard, as she explores “the ways in which this apparition site and the visionary saint who founded it have functioned as loci of tension and negotiation of religious authority ever since the shrine’s inception.”62 Park turns specifically to the story of the visionary Adele Brise, a Belgian immigrant to the United States who claimed to have seen the Virgin. Brise gained prophetic and pastoral power through this apparition and a religious authority that would never have been available to her within the patriarchal church.63 Because of her direct ‘access’ to the divine, she did not need the clerical hierarchy “in order to communicate with and receive favors, approbation, prophetic warnings, or penitential instruction from heaven.”64 Park also describes how Brise gradually gained credibility from the visible support of her father who confirmed that he believed in the apparition and constructed a chapel on the site as a material reminder of the divine visit.65 In that respect, Park’s findings are similar to what other scholars have discovered in their research on modern visionaries: apparitions gained wider resonance when individuals with a higher standing (gender, social class) deemed them credible and voiced support.66 In Park’s opinion, Brise became powerful on her own terms during her lifetime. Like all visionaries, she was “a potentially dangerous and destabilizing force who represented a challenge to hierarchical authority. Both her person and the story of her life

 Rossi, “Religious Virtuosi,” 98–99.  Karen Park, “The Negotiation of Authority at a Frontier Marian Apparition Site: Adele Brise and Our Lady of Good Help,” American Catholic Studies 123, no. 3 (2012): 1–26, here 17.  Park, “Negotiation of Authority,” 2.  Park, “Negotiation of Authority,” 18.  Park, “Negotiation of Authority,” 8.  For a similar dynamic in an apparition case, see: Ellen Badone, “Echoes from Kerizinen: Pilgrimage, Narrative, and the Construction of Sacred History at a Marian Shrine in Northwestern France,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13, no. 2 (2007): 453–470, here 465; Marlene Albert-Llorca, “Les apparitions et leur histoire,” Archives des sciences sociales des religions 116 (2001): 53–66, here 62; see also: Nicole Priesching, “Mystikerinnen des 19. Jahrhunderts – ein neuer Typus?” in Zwischen Himmel und Erde: Körperliche Zeichen der Heiligkeit, ed. Waltraud Pulz (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2012), 79–97, here 96–97; Paula Kane, Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticism in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2013), 120.

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and visions have therefore had to be either suppressed or tamed by the succession of bishops in whose diocese this powerful site continues to exist.”67 Park shows how this tension reflected the discrepancies between two types of power: on the one hand the authority of the church to name and evaluate saints and apparitions, and on the other hand the faithful who made their own evaluations of these people and experiences. Park thereby notes an interesting shift in the Church’s attempt to control Brise and her apparitions: “Historically, this control has taken the form of scorn, condemnation, suppression, and interrogation. Most recently, it has taken a new form: control through official proclamation and authentication, but only according to a rigidly defined institutional definition of who Adele was and what her apparition meant.”68

In the Spotlight In order to understand fully the appeal of charismatic religious authority, we need to place it within its specific historical setting. For the nineteenth century, this includes the rapidly expanding mass media and its role in producing and promulgating charismatic appeal. While attention to the interaction between media, religion, and culture is not new, to date scholars have focused primarily on the present era and on non-Western forms of Christianity.69 Religion and media should not be regarded as separate entities in any time period, though. As Feldt emphasizes: “Entanglements of religion, media, and culture have a long history and are about much more than simply religion in modern news and mass media.”70 She goes on to explain: “Media are inextricable from how religion is communicated and re-produced, and from how it functions and becomes effective.”71 This in turn also implies that a study of religious authority requires particular attention to the media and materiality through which it functions: how it is communicated, ascribed, and validated.72 The nineteenth century’s new media cultures played an important role in the staging and form of charismatic authority: “With the emergence of public opinion, the meaning of ‘charisma’ became subject to other, new forms of power. Viewers grew into an audience which became increasingly vocal in its support or dismissal

 Park, “Negotiation of Authority,” 2.  Park, “Negotiation of Authority,” 19. Interestingly, just as in the case of ‘Wise Knut,’ these moments of opposition were written into hagiographical narratives as test moments. Park, “Negotiation of Authority,” 21, about Brise’s excommunication: “Adele’s humiliation and condemnation is necessary in order to prove her obedience to the hierarchy, and therefore her worthiness and authenticity as a visionary.”  Feldt, “Marginality,” 2.  Feldt, “Marginality,” 10.  Feldt, “Marginality,” 11.  Feldt, “Marginality,” 9.

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of a charismatic personality.”73 With increased literacy, the mass production of print media, improvements in modes of transport and communication through railroads and the telegraph, and cheaper, more accessible news outlets, local personalities could rise to international fame while the scale of audience response (and criticism) expanded along with the number of readers and consumers. As a result, “increasing visibility to the public meant that greater attention was paid to the appearance of a charismatic woman” and, we can add, to a charismatic man.74 Those with religious ambitions needed to think about crafting their public persona as a “way to enhance their charismatic appeal.”75 While they were featured in the mass press, they also created their own media, spread religious images of themselves, printed periodicals, and, with support from their followers, were idealized in poems and songs. The new means of communication changed the nature of religious charisma as it “created and directed expectations, such that public opinion, the audience itself, became an authority with the power to make or break charismatics.”76 Kristof Smeyers’ study of Mary Ann Girling, the itinerant Methodist preacher of Suffolk, is exemplary in its attention to the interaction between media and religious charisma. In his detailed analysis, Smeyers reveals the mediated foundations of Girling’s appeal: “Through apocalyptic prophecies, mystical visions, stigmata, and gospel events that encompassed ‘dancing, prophesying and trance utterances,’ and through fashioning a public persona with a complicated relationship with the media and elaborate appearance . . . she gathered a flock of devotees and ensured constant media attention.”77 Smeyers thus shows how “mastering the media” and cultivating public charisma was already high on the agenda for some nineteenth-century charismatic leaders.78 He follows Girling’s story from her initial activities in her self-created chapel under the railway arches in London in 1871 to the later phases of her movement after she and her followers moved to the New Forest Lodge in 1872, where the community developed a more institutionalized structure with Girling as Mother, firmly at the top of the hierarchy. In each of these phases, Girling proved to be media savvy. During her time under the railway arches she circulated handbills about her meetings, showing “shrewdness in using the technological and media developments of the second half of the nineteenth century to her advantage.”79 Likewise, when her community was evicted from the New Forest Lodge, she knew how to rekindle popular interest “for example by organizing a lecturing

 Van Osselaer, Rossi, and Smeyers, “Charismatic Women,” 6.  Van Osselaer, Rossi, and Smeyers, “Charismatic Women,” 9.  Van Osselaer, Rossi, and Smeyers, “Charismatic Women,” 9.  Van Osselaer, Rossi, and Smeyers, “Charismatic Women,” 9.  Kristof Smeyers, “A Christ in Curls: The Contested Charisma of Mary Ann Girling (1827–1886),” Women’s History Review 291, no. 1 (2020): 18–36, here 18.  Kristof Smeyers, John Thom, Stigmatics Database, accessed 4 October 2019, https://media haven-stigmatics.uantwerpen.be.  Smeyers, “Christ in Curls,” 20.

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tour, allowing journalists an exclusive interview, [and] publishing a highly controversial theological tract.”80 Furthermore, Girling understood the importance of her physical appearance “both for proselytizing and for realizing her potential as a charismatic prophet.”81 Wearing her hair in ringlets, her style of curls became a trademark for her community, claiming that the ringlets could not be made by human hands but were the result of contact with the Spirit.82 Quick to understand that charismatic leadership was largely performative, she honed her appeal on the stage as well. When the tent camp of the evicted group became a tourist destination, she combined dancing, mind-reading, and rhyming in her public performances: “She shed her black dress to emerge from her tent in loose white robes, with a wreath of flowers in her curls and the manifestations of her prophetic charisma on display: she spoke ecstatically in tongues, and stopped wearing gloves and shoes to display the stigmata on her hands and feet. . . . This new persona was also meant to assert her authority and reinforce her image of untouchable, infallible prophet.”83 As Smeyers illuminates, Girling not only knew how to use the emerging mass media to promote her public persona and appeal to her contemporaries, but she also actively “cultivated, reinvented, and propagated her charisma in function of the changing circumstances of her mission.”84 Still, media attention did not necessarily generate religious authority even though it could strengthen it. As Kaufman has shown in her work on the apparition shrine of Lourdes, the miraculées, or women miraculously cured at a pilgrimage shrine, received their fifteen minutes of fame but did not move on to become leading religious figures on the public stage, even though they could at times remain local celebrities in their places of origin.85 While the fame of any given miraculée might not last, the sites themselves, and Lourdes foremost among them, gained lasting renown in the nineteenth century as modern, commercially attractive pilgrimage sites. Religious newspapers and guidebooks circulated accounts of miraculous healings, souvenir shops provided material memories, and special train tickets transported the pilgrims to Lourdes.86 As Kaufman notes: “By deploying new techniques and commercial practices, authorities encouraged pilgrims to

 Smeyers, “Christ in Curls,” 32.  Smeyers, “Christ in Curls,” 28.  Smeyers, “Christ in Curls,” 29.  Smeyers, “Christ in Curls,” 31.  Smeyers, “Christ in Curls,” 32.  Suzanne Kaufman, “Les Miraculées de Lourdes: Sacred Celebrities in the Age of Mass Spectacle,” Journal of Religious History 42, no. 4 (2018): 517–544.  “[. . .] these pilgrimage activities infused traditional acts of devotion with the cultural attractions associated with bourgeois tourism and modern commercial life.” Kaufman, Consuming Visions, 3. She remarks on how “remaking of Catholic devotional activities within an emerging commercial culture produced distinctly modern forms of popular religiosity, innovative practices that offered new opportunities as well as issues of contention.” Kaufman, Consuming Visions, 4.

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interact with the holy site as modern tourists and consumers. Indeed practices such as reading guidebooks, viewing dioramas, and writing postcards were configured into the devotional life of the pilgrimage, introducing the devout to modern ways of perceiving landscapes, consuming goods, and interacting with other individuals.”87 Apparition sites like Lourdes were not alone in developing into commercially attractive locations; the residences of charismatic religious personalities also had economic potential, as when Girling’s tent became a tourist attraction.88 In Catholic works such as the Guide national et catholique du voyageur en France, published by the Assumptionist Order in 1900 in conjunction with the Exposition Universelle, female saints, visionaries, and miracle workers featured in the guide’s place descriptions. As Sofie Lachapelle argues, such tales functioned to give “an idealized vision of the French nation as pure, devoted, and guided by its faith.” While most of the featured women were historical figures, some were contemporaries: modern apparition stories included the experiences of Catherine Labouré in Rue du Bac in Paris in 1830 and Bernadette Soubirous in Lourdes in 1858, but also those of lesser-known figures such as Estelle Faguette from Pellevoisin (Indre) who was cured in 1876 after a Marian apparition. While most of these stories seem to have contained a message of hope, suggesting that not all was lost since Mary was still appearing, the story of Marie Bergadieu – or Berguille – of Fontet near Bordeaux served instead as a cautionary tale. Berguille claimed to have been miraculously cured after three Marian apparitions. The apparitions continued in the following years, with Berguille receiving visions about future events, but when the predictions failed Berguille’s accounts became more and more suspect. Her story functioned as a warning: “Not all contemporary Marian apparitions were to be believed, not all visionaries were genuine.”89 Still, the attraction of Fontet continued to be fostered by locals who saw the economic-religious potential of the apparition site. As early as 1873, during the first months after Berguille’s miraculous cure, pamphlets circulated encouraging pilgrims to visit Fontet.90 In the following years, this potential was further exploited by the town grocer, who sold medals and rosaries to

 Kaufman, Consuming Visions, 18.  Smeyers, “Christ in Curls,” 30. See also the trips to ‘Wise Knut’ whose case is discussed below. Dirk Johannsen, “Vis-Knut: Marginality in Folklore and Folk-Religion,” in Marginality, Media, and Mutations of Religious Authority in the History of Christianity, ed. Laura Feldt and Jan Bremmer (Leuven: Peeters, 2019), 135–155, here 142, 149.  Sofie Lachapelle, “Touring a Once Pious Nation: Gender, Medievalism, Tourism, and Catholic Nation-Building in Early Twentieth-Century France,” Women’s History Review 29, no. 1 (2020): 37–55, 13.  Sofie Lachapelle, “Prophecies of Pilgrimage: The Rise and Fall of Marie Bergadieu, the Ecstatic of Fontet,” in Sign or Symptom: Exceptional Corporeal Phenomena in Religion and Medicine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Tine Van Osselaer, Henk de Smaele, and Kaat Wils (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2017), 55–74, here 55.

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visitors, and by the notebooks chronicling Berguille’s revelations, written by a local townswoman and circulated well beyond Fontet to attract more pilgrims.91

In the Margins: Outsiders as Christ Reincarnate The media and the corporeal aspect of charismatic religious authority also played a role in another power strategy central to the nineteenth century: marginality. As Feldt and Jan Bremmer argue in the edited volume Marginality, Media, and Mutations of Religious Authority in the History of Christianity, the concept of marginality is central to the construction of religious authority: “Articulations of the intersections between the human everyday world and the superhuman otherworld are of course historically and cross-culturally variable, but they commonly involve intermediary agents and marginal figures, such as angels, demons, wild men and saints, as well as functionally similar spaces, actions and objects. For these reasons, social marginality and religious discourses of marginality often intersect.”92 Religious and social marginality are linked to the concept of liminality – at the threshold between two worlds – “and interestingly, this is where charisma, as a form of religious authority, and marginality intersect . . .”93 Feldt and Bremmer’s volume addresses case studies throughout the history of Christianity to throw “light on the religious power of the marginal, on the strategic and tactical uses of marginality, on marginality as othering, and on performances of marginality.”94 In Feldt’s opinion, “a focus on media and mediality is crucial for understanding the role of marginality – religious as well as social – in authority changes in the history of Christianity.”95 Feldt further elaborates: “. . . marginality is a discourse, which can, on the one hand, be used to horrify, scare, delegitimize and demonize, but on the other it can also be used to distinguish, fascinate, and empower.”96 The media used to convey this discourse are not limited

 Lachapelle, “Prophecies of Pilgrimage,” 64.  Feldt, “Marginality,” 5.  Feldt, “Marginality,” 7. See also: George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal (Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2001), 103: “one discovers that the properties of pure charisma are virtually identical with those of liminality, anti-structure and communitas.”  Feldt, “Marginality,” 2.  Feldt, “Marginality,” 2. Feldt differentiates between social marginality and religious marginality. Social marginality is “involuntary and associated with discomfort and distress, and religious marginality, which can be voluntary, actively sought out, and performed. The marginal is often coconstitutive for religious authority, both in terms of social marginality and in terms of religious discourses of marginality, in as much as we understand marginality and authority as relational and contestable positions, which need to be researched as such.” Feldt, “Marginality,” 3.  Feldt, “Marginality,” 6.

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to the modern media discussed above, but include other forms of communication such as “objects, a set of rules, or the holiness of tradition.”97 Dirk Johannsen’s case study of Knut Rasmussen Nordgården offers important insights into the role of mediated marginality in the staging of religious authority, not least in that it could be instrumentalized by outsiders of both genders. “Wise Knut,” whose life spanned the century from 1792 to 1876, was a peasant with miraculous abilities from the small Norwegian village Svatsum. As the center of a short-lived but intense revivalist movement, Vis-Knut conducted his outstanding career with great cunning. Entering the religious stage of his local community in 1818 as a healer, prophet, and clairvoyant, he performed his religious role in a public setting by visiting neighboring parishes, laying on hands, and receiving visions at well-attended gatherings. Knut’s marginality, based on his low economic status as an indigent farmer and his debilitating bouts of epilepsy that hindered his farm labor, featured prominently in both his self-presentation and in others’ narratives. Legends about Vis-Knut abounded with attempts by the authorities to remove him as a misfit. Knut took up the same themes in his autobiographical narratives, for instance when he was arrested and brought before a local sheriff. Addressing an audience unfamiliar with the local actors, Knut rarely mentioned the clerical and public officials by name and reduced them to ‘the authorities.’ He even compared one official to Herod and thereby cast himself in the role of a modern John the Baptist. Similarly, when the pietistic revivalist Hans Nielsen Hauge found him guilty of deception in two open letters charging Knut with quackery, this public criticism was added to the stories of his oppression. He had become a living legend.98 The narrative of marginality also featured prominently in the biography of VisKnut published by the Norwegian national poet Bjørnsterne Bjørnson in 1878. Bjørnson, so Johannsen notes, ignored the historical complexity of Knut’s case and reduced it to one central argument: “Marginality fostered genuine, creative, almost miraculous expressions of faith and love that would challenge and undermine any religious or political machinery of power.”99 Wise Knut was staged as a “victim of sickness, low socio-economic status, and an oppressive religious and political regime,” and the fact that the authorities teamed up to silence him actually confirmed his power.100 Bjørnson thus painted Knut as similar to other Christian saints as a

 Feldt, “Marginality,” 9: “. . . authority is dependent upon a range of media in order to be upheld – objects, materials, paraphernalia, spatial practices, visual culture, literary forms and techniques, technologies, and bodies – but it is vulnerable and in need of continual maintenance . . .”  Johannsen, “Vis-Knut,” 135, 138, 142. See a similar logic in the story of the Girlingite community, addressing the moment the community was evicted: “Setbacks and failures could even drive charisma forward, depicting the prophet as a modern-day Job whom every adversity is a test of her religious leadership and authenticity.” Smeyers, “Christ in Curls,” 27.  Johannsen, “Vis-Knut,” 136.  Johannsen, “Vis-Knut,” 137, 151.

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threat “to those in power simply by embodying traits they lacked: humility and compassion.”101 Johannsen also notes the ambiguities of public attention and polemics: “On the one hand, journalists mocked Rasmussen and marginalized his clients; on the other hand, they confirmed his appeal and illustrated the alleged beliefs of the commoners with legends and memorates. The controversies made the regionally known cunning man a national curiosity.”102 By comparing himself to John the Baptist, Knut referred to well-known religious authorities who lived on the margins of society. Referring to traditional religious authorities in word and image was an important strategy for strengthening one’s own claims. While John the Baptist was the point of comparison for Wise Knut, Girling saw herself as the new Christ, the New-Forest ‘God-Mother.’ In some cases, these references became more than a mere narrative framing and played a role in physical appearance as well. Girling’s identification with Christ included her signing letters with “Jesus First and Last” as well as claims of being immune to death and of carrying Christ’s wounds.103 One of the most outspoken examples of this ‘reincarnation strategy’ was John Thom, the ‘Canterbury Messiah’ studied by Smeyers. Born in 1799, Thom was a large, bearded prophet who referred to himself as the Messiah and ‘the Saviour of the poor’ and led an uprising in Kent in 1838 against the Poor Laws and other perceived social injustices.104 An ambitious man, Thom developed a program of political, spiritual, and economic reform criticizing the clergy, the aristocracy, and parliament, which he published in his own periodical. As a new messiah, “Thom had even fashioned himself explicitly in the likeness of Christ: when he entered Canterbury in 1832 onlookers immediately compared his appearance to ‘the paintings of Christ by Guido and Carlo Doce.’”105 Thom also displayed the stigmata and publicly staged his alleged invulnerability by shooting himself in the chest and remaining unscathed. Tellingly, on the morning of the Kent uprising’s final battle in 1838, he administered the sacrament to his supporters, distributed bread and water, and promised his followers that if he were to be killed, he would “rise again.”106 To his followers’ dismay, he did not keep that promise. In sum, while both references to marginality and reincarnation narratives were not new, the nineteenth century’s increased media coverage gave them a wider resonance. One did not need to see the charismatics in order to know about them. Newspaper

 Johannsen, “Vis-Knut,” 137.  Johannsen, “Vis-Knut,” 147.  Kristof Smeyers, “When Immortals Die: Excavating the Emotional Impact of the Death of Prophets in Nineteenth-Century England,” Pakistan Journal of Historical Studies 2, no. 2 (2017): 1–32, here 17.  Smeyers, “When Immortals Die,” 4.  Smeyers, “When Immortals Die,” 17.  Smeyers, “When Immortals Die,” 17–18.

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reports (including derogatory ones) and the charismatics’ own publications broadcast their message and helped their public personas reach a wider audience. Moreover, as the cases of Wise Knut and Thom show, men also staged themselves as charismatic religious leaders. Since both men were widely covered in the press, and in both cases referred to their marginalized predecessors in reincarnation stories, audiences were acquainted with male charismatics, new and old. Finally, just as female charismatics were often reduced to ‘hysterics’ by their opponents, Thom was accused of mental instability and newspapers described him as a ‘maniac.’107 Thus, while Girling and other marginal women fit the genus of female mystic who referred to her own exceptional corporeal features in order to gain religious authority, cases like Thom show that this was not the prerogative of female religious leaders alone. Nor did men need to be marginal to draw on the power of charisma; even men in religious office could claim to have exceptional gifts and stoke popular enthusiasm as a result.108 One of the most famous examples in the nineteenth century was Prince Alexander Leopold von Hohenlohe, to whom a number of miraculous cures were attributed in the 1820s.109 As part of his charismatic powers, this German priest could prompt healing miracles at a distance, even as far away as the United States. Hohenlohe instructed those who asked for his help from abroad to hold a novena in honor of the Holy Name of Jesus and receive communion on the final day. At the moment of their communion in the United States, he celebrated mass in Germany and said prayers for their well-being. As Marie Pagliarini argues, the location of the healing in church was of distinct importance: the fact that the miracles took place during mass emphasized the role of the Eucharist and as such also the institution of the priesthood, since only priests had the power to consecrate and dispense the Eucharist. In other words, the miracles had propaganda value for the Catholic Church.110 A similar case of charismatic priesthood, Suitbert Mollinger, features prominently in Paula Kane’s article on miracles in the United States. Mollinger was born in 1828/30 in Belgium and emigrated to the United States to do missionary work. When Mollinger became pastor of the Most Holy Name of Jesus Church in 1868, he began organizing

 Smeyers, “When Immortals Die,” 7.  For a present-day example of such a combination of the power of charisma and institutional authority, see: Keping Wu, “Performing the Charismatic Ritual,” in The Anthropology of Religious Charisma: Ecstasies and Institutions, ed. Charles Lindholm (Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), 33–58.  On von Hohenlohe and the cures he inspired in the United States, see: Marie Pagliarini, “‘And the Word was made Flesh’: Divining the Female Body in Nineteenth-Century American and Catholic Culture,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 17, no. 2 (2007): 213–245; Paula Kane, “Disenchanted America: Accounting for the Lack of Extraordinary Mystical Phenomena in Catholic America,” in Sign or Symptom: Exceptional Corporeal Phenomena in Religion and Medicine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Tine Van Osselaer, Henk de Smaele, and Kaat Wils (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2017), 101–124.  Pagliarini, “Word,” 217–219.

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annual healing services on 13 June, the feast day of Saint Anthony of Padua. These church services were well attended, with up to 10,000 people convening together in the 1890s.111 As Kane notes, Mollinger minimized his own role and insisted that “people were healed not because of him, but by seeing the relics, experiencing the laying on of hands, and the power of God.”112 Not only did he provide charismatic healing methods, but the priest also had medical credentials and techniques: “Inside his parish church, he celebrated Mass and led healing rites on certain days; outside, he directed patients (with prescriptions written in cypher) to the adjacent pharmacy which sold his own patented herbal medicines.”113 In both Mollinger’s and Hohenlohe’s cases, clerical status seems to have contributed to their appeal, while their charisma also enhanced the Church’s appeal to parishioners. The media attention both men received, the public exhibition of their cures, and the numerous enthusiasts they attracted demonstrate that both priests actively – and successfully – staged themselves in the public sphere in order to promote their vision. In short, charismatic leaders, and not only women, knew how to use the media to spread their message and strengthen their religious authority. As religious celebrities, they competed with clergy who held the more traditional authority of office, while the latter also learned how to stage themselves in the press and at public mass ceremonies by instrumentalizing the power of attendance numbers as well as a variety of visual and performative techniques. Such scene-setting was to be found on all levels of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, from the apostolic papal blessing for the ‘city and the world,’ given from the central loggia facing St. Peter’s Square, to Mollinger’s healing services thronged by thousands of eager parishioners. In tandem with the positive use of new media, the Church hierarchy also used the press as a platform to solidify its traditional rights, for instance when episcopal authorities published official rejections of false mystics in the newspapers rather than limiting themselves to more traditional means such as letters to be read out loud to parishioners.

III Media, Morality, and the Masses The twentieth century saw an expanded use of new media, building on developments in the nineteenth century, but with a new sense of urgent intimacy. This combination of wide publicity and public intimacy is most familiar to us in the rise of the televangelist within Protestant denominations. Popular evangelists such as Billy Sunday, Billy Graham, and other modern radio preachers established broadcast media and the organization of mass meetings as core elements of their

 Kane, “Disenchanted America,” 116–117.  Kane, “Disenchanted America,” 118.  Kane, “Disenchanted America,” 118. The pharmacy continued after his death in 1892.

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careers.114 These religious celebrities reached thousands of people in their time (Fig. 5.3). As John Potts notes in his study of the history of charisma, evangelical preachers such as Graham “were considered charismatic in both its senses: magnetic and commanding of an audience (Weberian) and spiritually empowered (Pauline). Although the two meanings were kept apart within Christian discourse, they began to blur together in wider usage. This was primarily due to the high levels of exposure gained by the televangelists and other revival-style preachers capable of attracting and maintaining a large audience.”115

Fig. 5.3: Billy Graham in the Netherlands, meeting at the Olympic Stadion, 22 June 1954. Glass negative. 1954.

Moreover, as Graham’s case shows, in an era of decreasing church attendance and the fear of a looming Communist threat, the Evangelical establishment demonstrated its support for these preachers and their mass rallies by attending the events alongside prominent politicians such as Vice President Nixon. The religious players banked on the enthusiasm stoked by these charismatic personalities “to strengthen

 Uta Balbier, “‘Billy Graham’s Cold War Crusades’: Re-Christianization, Secularization, and the Spiritual Creation of the Free World in the 1950s,” in Secularization and Religious Innovation in the North Atlantic World, ed. David Hempton and Hugh McLeod (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 234–251.  John Potts, A History of Charisma (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 157.

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their own societal and cultural position in their fight against their potential marginalization in increasingly secular and materialistic societies.”116 Uta Balbier notes that when Graham arrived Washington D.C. in 1952, the city was prepared for his arrival with “cottage prayer meetings and marketing, including pictures and neon signs, billboards and lamppost posters, and 50,000 bumper stickers distributed through the organizing committee.”117 Audiences got involved as well: after the mass meetings were broadcast on the radio, attendees later wrote letters to the Washington Post chronicling their experiences and thus helped to amplify Graham’s message. In his preaching, Graham blurred the lines between the personal and the national, as both the individual and the nation were called to action.118 The locations of his meetings in the United States and abroad in London and West Berlin strengthened this message: the meetings were set on the steps of the Capitol, with attendant prayer meetings in Congress and the Pentagon, as well as in West Berlin’s Olympic Stadium and Wembley Stadium and Trafalgar Square in London.119 Both Graham and Sunday paid great attention to the creation of their public personas as a means to counter what they perceived as declining church loyalty. Graham presented himself as a young evangelist who campaigned for Christian conversion and national reconstruction and who had political credentials. As Margaret Lamberts-Bendroth has shown, Sunday employed rugged language and athleticism to prove that Christianity was not a “pale, effeminate proposition” and thus to attract a male audience in need of conversion in his view.120 Despite the broader public presence of evangelists like Graham and Sunday, their modern spectacle also combined intimacy with mass emotion in a very unique way, for instance as sermons were transmitted via the radio into the private domestic setting.121 The means of intimate transmission increased when evangelical preachers adapted to the medium of television in the 1960s and reached huge audiences as ‘televangelists.’122 In sum, while drawing on new media technologies, the groundwork for the present-day spectacle of televangelism was laid in the nineteenth century when

 Balbier, “Graham’s Cold War,” 249.  Balbier, “Graham’s Cold War,” 237. On the importance of the communication of the message in Evangelicalism, see: David Morgan, “Mediation or Mediatisation: the History of Media in the Study of Religion,” Culture and Religion 12, no. 2 (2011): 137–152, here 144, doi:10.1080/14755610.2011.579716: “Evangelicalism is about publishing essential information, whether speaking, writing, printing or broadcasting it. Evangelical Christians from Martin Luther to Billy Graham have invested their greatest resources as preachers, writers and cultural producers in this urgent act of communication.”  Balbier, “Graham’s Cold War,” 238.  Balbier, “Graham’s Cold War.”  Margaret Lamberts-Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 23.  The author would like to thank this volume’s lead editor for this reflection.  Potts, History of Charisma, 157–158: “their individual charisma was thought to transmit itself to even larger unseen audiences through the medium of television.”

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increasing media possibilities, both in the press and in photography, enhanced the emotional connection to religious authority and the commercialization of individual religious figures.123 The papacy was equally touched by these twentieth-century developments, not least as the mediatization of the papal office continued. The case studies in Popestar, an edited volume on the use of the media by modern popes, reveals how twentiethcentury popes became media stars and religious celebrities. (See e.g. the papal memorabilia in Fig. 5.4) Like other mediatized preachers, the pope was now caught on camera as he traveled in public in the popemobile.124 Initially, the new means of communication not only enhanced the visibility of the pope but also stressed his universal character, not least as the development of television and plane travel made that visibility truly global.125 The cult of the depersonalized papacy reached a highpoint with Pius XII but also ended with his death, after which media attention shifted to the personality of each individual pope. As De Valk notes, the cult of John XIII was that of a living person, not of a living monument.126 At the same time, the official regalia were streamlined considerably in the mid-twentieth century: the pope relinquished his tiara in 1964 and disbanded the papal armed corps.127 As Anne Morelli further notes, the pope now no longer primarily spoke Latin, but instead had to master all languages in order to seem accessible. He also participated in public acts of repentance for mistakes made by his predecessors. The pope, so Morelli concludes, “is no longer above human condition via his pomp, his majesty, his august character, but via another sacredness that is angelic stripping. The image of the saint, for our era, is that of humility . . .”128 Based on this increased focus on the pope’s humanity in the latter half of the twentieth century, the papacy has retained its political relevance and moral authority by issuing public statements on ethical matters via radio and the press. The pastoral letter of the Belgian prelate Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier, issued at Christmas 1914, is a prime example. Titled “Patriotism and Endurance,” the episcopal letter’s syncretism

 The author would like to thank this volume’s lead editor for this reflection.  Van Schaik, “Heersers, heiligen en herders,” 24.  De Valk, “De cultus,” 335–336.  De Valk, “De cultus,” 335. De Valk thereby points at similarities with the veneration of ‘the leader’ within right-authoritarian ideologies after 1918.  Noble Guard, Palatine Guard, and Papal Carabinieri. Van Schaik, “Heersers, heiligen en herders,” 30. Still, as Benedict XVI has demonstrated, what has been abandoned does not need to remain so forever. Traditions can be picked up at a later date. While the typical red shoes had been abandoned by his predecessors, Benedict XVI started wearing them again. Pope Francis does not share his predecessor’s choice of footwear. See: Dieter Philippi, “Campagi: The Footwear of the Pope and the Clergy,” Philippi Collection, accessed 22 April 2022, http://www.dieter-philippi.de/en/ ecclesiastical-fineries/campagi-the-footgear-of-the-pope-and-the-clergy.  “Le pape n’est plus au-dessus de la condition humaine par ses pompes, sa majesté, son caractère auguste, mais bien via un autre sacré qui est dépouillement angélique. L’image du saint, pour notre époque, est celle de l’humilité. . .” Morelli, “La mise en scène,” 266.

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Fig. 5.4: Papal memorabilia at the Museum voor Volksdevotie (Kortenaken). Photograph. 2021.

between national and religious feelings had an important impact on the population; it continued to circulate clandestinely after it was confiscated by the German forces.129 In more recent years, episcopal voices continue to be staged publicly in social and political matters such as euthanasia and abortion.130 It appears that, while the domains in which religious authorities have an impact might have narrowed due to the ‘secularization’ of society, in ethical issues their opinions continue to count if they are staged in a public manner.

 Michael Snape, “The Great War,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 9: “World Christianities,” ed. Hugh McLeod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 131–150, here 136; Sofie de Schaepdrijver, “Belgium,” in A Companion to World War, ed. John Horne (Chichester: Wiley- Blackwell, 2012), 386–402, here 390.  See the essays in: Karel Dobbelaere and Alfonso Pérez-Agote, ed., The Intimate Polity and the Catholic Church: Laws about Life, Death and the Family in So-Called Catholic Countries (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2015).

Betto van Waarden

Mass Media: Intimacy at a Distance Abstract: The mass media constructs authority by creating ‘intimacy at a distance’ (John B. Thompson) between public figures and the people. This chapter argues that, over the course of the long nineteenth century, rulers both gained new possibilities for staging their authority through the emerging mass media, and lost control over this mediated staging under specific circumstances, often turning from master of mediated intimacy into its slave. This argument rests on three points of entanglement: the liberalization of the press paradoxically reinforced rulers’ ability to present their authority on the public stage; technological innovations enabled them to do so on an increasingly ‘industrial’ scale; and the commercialization of the press and changes in journalistic culture led to the personalization and celebritization of their authority. Keywords: mass media, intimacy at a distance, personalization of politics, celebrity politics, liberalization of the press, commercialization of media, journalistic culture, public opinion ✶✶✶

“He is the most powerful man in the Empire, probably the most talked of figure in world politics,” the Daily Mail concluded about British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain at the start of the twentieth century. The newspaper mused that it felt a bit odd to set his name among those of other legendary empire builders: “For the purposes of judging we are inconveniently near to Mr. Chamberlain now; our faces almost flat against the canvas.” The paper explained the source of this familiarity: people generally called him “Joe” colloquially because “he is such a man of the people; one whom everybody can understand.” Still, it concluded, this did not prevent him from being “great.”1 These comments highlight five dynamics regarding the mediatization of political figures at the turn of the twentieth century. Firstly, even a mere colonial secretary – a cabinet post not considered prestigious at the time – could stage himself as a great authority, to the point of surpassing his superior, the prime minister. Secondly, despite being a politician, Chamberlain managed to create a close connection to the people that could even be considered intimate. Thirdly, this perceived intimacy could become so informal that it could in turn undermine his authority. Fourthly, whether this colloquial closeness bolstered or undermined his authority depended on the public’s reception of him. And finally, the press, here in the form of the Daily Mail – the first British mass newspaper, established in 1896 and

 “The Strenuous Life,” Daily Mail, 17 August 1903. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110574012-006

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soon the largest paper in the world with an annual circulation of over a million copies – played an essential role in this negotiation between politician and public regarding authority. This chapter analyzes these five dynamics as they developed over the course of the long nineteenth century. In doing so, it will draw on literature regarding the development of mass media and its intersection with politics. The chapter’s point of departure is the concept of “intimacy at a distance.”2 Building on the work of Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, John B. Thompson notes that, over time, mass media enabled a personal relationship between public figures and the people that had two new characteristics. Rather than being a live, face-to-face interaction in a specific location, this relationship developed despite separation in space and time. News about media personalities could be consumed by media audiences in widely dispersed places asynchronously. Moreover, this relationship was non-reciprocal in the sense that the feelings were unidirectional and the bond asymmetrical. The public felt connected to the media personalities, but the latter did not know the individuals who composed that public.3 This intimacy at a distance is relevant to the construction of authority, as it depends not only on coercive power but also symbolic power, exercised through communication. While the media is an important institution of communication, communicated authority can only function if the audience is receptive to it.4 Max Weber famously argued this point for charismatic leaders, but it also applies to other authority figures: the success of a leader’s projection of authority depends on how she or he is received by the people.5 This reception is influenced by social, economic, and political factors to be sure, but also by how the media portrays that public figure, giving the media a key role in the staging of authority. The key terms ‘personalization’ and ‘celebritization’ further delineate how changes in nineteenth-century mass media affected audience reception of political figures.

 John B. Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 207–208, 219–225.  Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance,” Psychiatry 19, no. 3 (1956): 215–229; Thompson, Media and Modernity, 219–225.  Building on Max Weber: Thompson, Media and Modernity, 15–20. For politics as a communicative construct, see also: Thomas Mergel, “Überlegungen zu einer Kulturgeschichte der Politik,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28 (2002): 574–606; Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, “The Impact of Communication Theory on the Analysis of the Early Modern Statebuilding Processes,” in Empowering Interactions: Political Cultures and the Emergence of the State in Europe, 1300–1900, ed. Willem Pieter Blockmans, André Holenstein, and Jon Mathieu (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 313–318.  Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 241–271; Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 73–94; Henk te Velde, Stijlen van leiderschap: Persoon en politiek van Thorbecke tot Den Uyl (Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek, 2002), 7–18.

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The concept of personalization holds that the media increasingly portrayed politics through the lens of public personalities. On the one hand, through a process of individualization, news reports came to focus more on individual political actors such as ministers, prime ministers, and presidents than the political parties, parliaments, and bureaucracies they inhabited. Through this shift in media coverage, public authority became increasingly vested in single political actors rather than in collective institutions. Even if this reframing of power occurred more in people’s imagination than in constitutional changes, this new perception shaped how the public responded to authority. As a related term, the ‘privatization’ of politics posits that political coverage has come to focus increasingly on political actors’ personal characteristics and private lives rather than their policies.6 Political actors’ ability to project their personality in the form of striking and inspiring images was as vital to establishing their authority, if not more so, as their policymaking expertise. While political scientists have largely studied the personalization of politics as a present-day phenomenon, there have been recent attempts to historicize the concept, for instance in analyses of postwar British prime ministers and midtwentieth-century political reportage on Dutch television.7 The process of personalization is closely related to, and constitutes the staging ground for, the ‘celebritization’ of politics. The latter concept describes how media increasingly turned political figures into celebrity stars and how celebrities from other sectors, including the entertainment industry, used their media visibility to engage in politics.8 Public personalities gain ‘celebrity capital’ from media coverage that they can subsequently spend on political purposes.9 Robert van Krieken even argues that this celebrity logic is so pervasive that it has not merely produced a culture of celebrity, but a holistic celebrity society.10 This new celebrity society hinges on a double-sided effect: celebrity can bolster a politician’s authority, but also

 Peter van Aelst, Tamir Sheafer, and James Stanyer, “The Personalization of Mediated Political Communication: A Review of Concepts, Operationalizations and Key Findings,” Journalism 13, no. 2 (2012): 203–220, here 205–208, 215.  Ana Inés Langer, The Personalisation of Politics in the UK: Mediated Leadership from Attlee to Cameron (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012); Rosa van Santen, “Popularization and Personalization: A Historical and Cultural Analysis of 50 years of Dutch Political Television Journalism” (PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 2012).  P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014 [1997]); Darrell West and John Orman, Celebrity Politics (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 2003); John Street, “The Celebrity Politician: Political Style and Popular Culture,” in The Media and the Restyling of Politics: Consumerism, Celebrity and Cynicism, ed. John Corner and Dick Pels (London: Sage, 2003), 85–98; Mark Wheeler, Celebrity Politics: Image and Identity in Contemporary Political Communications (Cambridge: Polity, 2013).  Olivier Driessens, “Celebrity Capital: Redefining Celebrity using Field Theory,” Theory and Society 42, no. 5 (2013): 543–560.  Robert van Krieken, Celebrity Society (London: Routledge, 2012).

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requires adaptation to the demands of the celebrity logic. Moreover, politicians run the constant risk that their celebrity will undermine their image of ‘authenticity’ and thereby their authority. Celebritization, too, is most often studied in current politics, but historians such as Antoine Lilti and Charles Ponce de Leon have begun to trace its past, notably by describing the role it played in the politics of American Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt.11 Together, the concepts of intimacy at a distance and the personalization and celebritization of politics provide a new angle through which historians can study how authority and its staging evolved over time. Building on these concepts, this chapter will argue that, over the course of the long nineteenth century, rulers both gained new possibilities for staging their authority to a mass audience through the emerging mass media and lost control over this mediated staging under certain circumstances, often turning from a master of mediated intimacy into its slave. This argument rests on several points of entanglement: the liberalization of the press paradoxically reinforced rulers’ ability to press their authority on the public stage; technological innovations enabled them to do so on an increasingly ‘industrial’ scale; and the commercialization of the press and changes in journalistic culture led to the personalization and celebritization of their authority. The chapter also explores another modern paradox: while older, hereditary forms of authority were more personal compared to the modern era’s bureaucratized state apparatus, the celebritization of politics reintroduced a personal face to bureaucratic institutions. This personal face could present itself in both authoritarian and democratic ways, but in both cases the authority figure needed to meet the new demand to be interesting to his or her audience. At the same time, the commercialization of media and changing journalistic practices also threatened authority, as they led to more independent newspapers, a focus on journalistic objectivity that investigated rulers’ behavior, and a strengthening of public opinion and its scrutiny of authority. While these developments differed across countries, this chapter will focus on a number of common phenomena in Western Europe and the United States, which (together with China and particularly Japan) were the first regions in which media became a mass phenomenon in the late nineteenth century.12 While the definition of ‘authority figure’ can be broad enough to include religious

 Antoine Lilti, The Invention of Celebrity: 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), notably 160–216; Charles L. Ponce de Leon, Self-Exposure: Human-Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), notably 172–205; see also: Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), notably 450–461; Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi, ed., Constructing Charisma: Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010).  Frank Bösch, Mass Media and Historical Change: Germany in International Perspective, 1400 to the Present (New York: Berghahn, 2015), 62–102.

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or other social leaders, the emphasis here will be on political actors such as monarchs, ministers, and parliamentarians.

I The Political Yet Distant and Elitist Legitimation of Authority Since the development of the Gutenberg press in the fifteenth century and the advent of newspapers in the early seventeenth century, political leaders have used newspapers to portray themselves in a favorable light. The early modern period thus contained emergent outlines of the modern mass media landscape with its imbrication of celebrity, politics, and audience reception, even if the potential for intimacy grew to exponential proportions only in the nineteenth century with its celebrity society. In the prerevolutionary period, the nascent critical public sphere, the structure of newspaper distribution, and government attempts to control the press created a contradictory situation in which an expanding readership was given more access to information about political actors while also being kept at a distance from them through the mechanisms by which the press was structured. These structures will be outlined in brief here, to show how the celebrity politician’s potential for personal popularity and simultaneous vulnerability to public rejection found its origins in the pre-revolutionary period. As Lilti argues, the late eighteenth century saw the inauguration of celebrity culture. In earlier times, images of notable people had been limited to portraits within upper circles, but engravings and new printing techniques now enabled the production of images of celebrities for a wider public. Like authors and artists, politicians were among the first celebrities who benefitted from this new media landscape, including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Along with an expanded range of portraits, a new style of personal biography fed the public’s increasing interest in the private lives of celebrity politicians, spurred in part by the assumption that politicians’ personal qualities helped to explain their public behavior. As newspapers provided virtually ‘live’ coverage of unfolding political events, in particular those of the French Revolution, they turned pivotal public figures like Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, the Count of Mirabeau, who was at the center of events and therefore constantly in the public eye, into celebrities. By creating content of common interest that readers could gossip about, newspapers and the political celebrities they profiled created a sense of public togetherness as readers could see themselves as part of a larger “imagined community.”13 A quantitative increase in the distribution of media content coupled with a qualitative broadening

 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006).

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of politics into general interest reporting thus meant that a select number of key figures transformed from publicly known politicians into political celebrities. The pre-revolutionary public sphere also worked in the opposite direction, however, as early modern newspapers led a new bourgeois readership to adopt a critical and distant attitude towards authority. The initial development of bourgeois ‘public opinion’ had a scrutinizing effect on power that forced rulers to legitimize their authority more publicly, but also created distance between them and their critical audiences. The growth of this public sphere was facilitated by the increasing volume of print literature. Newspapers grew in number and influence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in line with social and political circumstances. The press flourished particularly early in the Netherlands and the Holy Roman Empire due to their polycentricity and religious diversity, combined with their local printing traditions and affluent cities. In regions with liberal political systems, the development of the press was also encouraged through milder censorship policies, for instance in Britain, which instated the first free press in the world, and in the Netherlands where restrictions were maintained but not actively enforced. This was in contrast to Eastern Europe and Russia, where developments were slower due to absolutist rule. Beyond political structures, technical constraints could also influence both the spread and the content of newspapers. The expansion of the press in the United States was slow because of a lack of infrastructure, low population density, and poor communications with Europe. Due to this relative isolation from foreign news, American papers focused on entertainment as well as local and regional news from early on. In Europe, where infrastructure was more developed and newspapers were read across borders, most news centered on military affairs, wars, and foreign policy.14 Even more significant than newspapers, perhaps, were the periodicals that developed in the eighteenth century, which tended to appear less frequently but offered more in-depth analyses of scientific, literary, and political themes. British and French periodicals constituted the model for the rest of Europe, and Germany hosted the greatest variety of journals, with 7,000 titles before 1830 (albeit many short-lived). These publications catered to specific social groups and fulfilled a more educational and moral function than newspapers; as such, they also played an important role in politicizing youths and women. Between 1770 and 1789, forty-three youth periodicals were founded in Germany, while women’s magazines were most prominent in Britain, where publications such as the Female Tatler and Female Spectator also discussed politics. Even more engaged in women’s political education, The Charitable Mercury and Female Intelligence. Being a Weekly Collection of All the Material News, Foreign and Domestick. With some notes on the same circulated briefly in the early

 Bösch, Mass Media, 39–61; Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics and English Society, 1695–1855 (Harlow: Pearson, 2000); Thompson, Media and Modernity, 44–80.

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eighteenth century. Initially, few women’s weeklies appeared in France and the United States, but at least 115 of such publications appeared in Germany over the course of the eighteenth century. While the latter contained little political content compared to their British predecessors, such periodicals were nevertheless crucial in reaching hitherto excluded social groups and familiarizing the public with political authority and its (de)merits.15 Contemporaries consciously perceived print literature as an agent of political change, and thus statesmen began to take the press into account as a tool to justify specific policies as well as their authority in general. By the 1760s in Britain, the broader concept of ‘the people’ established the conviction that the press should serve as a fourth estate to check power.16 This free space of critical debate is what Jürgen Habermas famously described as the public sphere, a conceptual designation that, despite its shortcomings, still offers a useful way to understand the new social and political space that was created by an open readership in the late eighteenth century.17 Through its emphasis on a meritocratic competition of critical ideas – captured in the term ‘republic of letters’ – the public sphere could be both a common forum in which rulers and their subjects experienced each other’s presence and a court of public opinion, as rulers approached the public to legitimate their authority while the public adopted a distant attitude to better scrutinize their rulers’ intentions. Ironically, state-imposed pre-approval censorship and taxation also led to a democratization of the portrayal of authority, due to the structural distinctions between officially sanctioned elite newspapers and illegal popular newspapers, the latter aided by cheap printing technologies. Given the growing demands of public opinion and the often critical perspective of the periodicals, early modern rulers imposed censorship and stamp duties to steer the press; by doing so, they inadvertently fostered a black market of “unstampeds” or illegal broadsheets less prone to top-down manipulation than officially tolerated middle-class and elitist publications.18 State censorship took two forms over the course of time: preventative pre-approval and repressive postpublication sanctions that used lawsuits to promote self-censorship on the part of the press. In the early modern period, approved publications had to secure pre-approval from the authorities in order to be able to print and sell copies. Later on, after the abolition of pre-approval in the nineteenth century, all media had to perform some level

 Bösch, Mass Media, 51–57.  Barker, Newspapers, 15.  Bösch, Mass Media, 39–61; Barker, Newspapers; Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 1991); Thompson, Media and Modernity, 44–80.  See also: Jean Chalaby, The Invention of Journalism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 9–31. While Chalaby analyzes Britain, he argues that these circumstances were present in other countries as well.

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of self-censorship, as authorities now enacted a system of post-publication confiscation of objectionable materials. Illegal early modern newspapers concerned themselves with neither pre-approval nor self-censorship, however, but instead simply sold their copies clandestinely and relatively cheaply. These newspapers’ illegal status lent them a certain freedom to depict authority however they pleased. By pushing newspapers into partial illegality, censors and other officials lost the opportunity to influence how these papers depicted the authorities. Instead, bristling at the imposition of censorship, these newspapers arguably questioned their rulers more harshly. An analysis of the 1640s to 1650s in Britain shows that the English Revolution led to an explosion of both legal and illegal printed matter, which at the time was cheaper to produce than in later centuries due to the rudimentary technologies involved. These publications led to both a tougher scrutiny of the authorities by the broader public and a more participative culture of common politics that persisted even after the monarchy was restored.19 The public’s enduring participation in the politics of the restored monarchy suggests that early modern print had already begun to bring the ruler and ruled closer together – not always to the ruler’s benefit – as the monarch was present in the daily experience of commoners through their print consumption. A century and a half later, the underground press played an equally important role in the emergence of the French Revolution. As illegal papers again encouraged scrutiny of authority, the French police took significant measures to capture libelers thought to threaten the authorities’ political legitimacy. This fear was not unmerited, as poor and disreputable ‘Grub Street’ writers, who aspired to be philosophes like Voltaire and Rousseau but had become disillusioned as they discovered that the Enlightenment was reserved for the privileged, vented their anger on elites in their pamphlets. As Robert Darnton argues, it was their hatred of the Ancien Régime as expressed in underground print, rather than elite Enlightenment literature, that paved the way for the elimination of traditional authority during the Revolution.20 Rather than merely criticizing the authority of King Louis XVI, the underground press threatened the entire system of authority, which according to Lynn Hunt was experienced by contemporaries as a type of family in which the paternal king was meant to take care of his familial nation. Thus it was that the foremost British critic

 See: Jason Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).  Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), notably 1–40; Robert Darnton, The Devil in the Holy Water: Or, the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). However, the idea that illegal publications had a large number of readers and a significant role in the lead up to the French Revolution is disputed in: Jens Ivo Engels, Königsbilder: Sprechen, Singen und Schreiben über den französischen König in der ersten Hälfte des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts (Bonn: Bouvier, 2000).

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of the Revolution, Edmund Burke, feared that the removal of the patriarchal king and his authority endangered the social order.21 This threat to traditional authority was reinforced by visual depictions. In another feat of irony, illegal satiricals provided the public with a very intimate picture of their rulers – sometimes with too great an intimacy to maintain public awe or respect – as they, too, saw no need to try to comply with official regulations or proprieties. The queen, in particular, became an object of underground publicists’ visual attacks. Before the Revolution, they already publicized Marie Antoinette’s alleged licentious behavior at court, but in 1789 such illustrated pornographic pamphlets became even more explicit, widespread, and politicized. While this political pornography undermined the queen’s standing, it also suggested that she feminized and corrupted the French ruling class at large and thus damaged the latter’s mythical authority.22 Legal and illegal prints in the early modern period thus shared the characteristic that they both enhanced and limited the staging of authority, foreshadowing the heyday of political reporting in the mid-nineteenth century. These early sanctioned and illegal newspapers largely focused on political news and brought state affairs into people’s lives, focusing on substantive political decisions and policies over personalities. The early modern press did not shape a personalized image of authority figures nor establish intimacy at a distance between rulers and their people. This is not to say that early modernity constituted a golden age of rational political debate and reporting, which never existed in pure form, but rather that the structure of reporting was less conducive to constructing an authority persona than subsequent structures in the nineteenth century. Even if certain political figures gained (international) celebrity status in the eighteenthcentury press, such as Washington, Franklin, and the Prussian King Frederick the Great, the comparatively low purchasing power of the general public meant that any celebrity culture remained an elite affair by necessity. Experiencing the presence of authority through media would become both widespread and intimate only in the nineteenth century.

II Authority as a Mass Personalized Phenomenon As the media landscape changed in the nineteenth century, so did opportunities for, and constraints on, staging authority. As this section will show, the differentiation between various publics decreased due to a broader liberalization of press laws which forced the underground press out of business. From the mid-nineteenth

 Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 1–16.  Hunt, Family Romance, 89–123.

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century onwards, the majority of readers thus all read the same above-board newspapers. As a consequence, the liberalization of censorship gave authorities more power over how they were depicted in the press, as officially sanctioned newspapers were easier to control and manipulate than illegal, covert ones. In the latter part of the century, commercialization and expansion of press markets made rulers omnipresent in public consciousness and bolstered a sense of intimacy at a distance within the population. Advances in journalistic format, including the feuilleton and home story, increased demand for stories about individual protagonists and thus created more space for savvy rulers to project their personas to a wide audience. This commercial and journalistic evolution, in turn, reinforced the celebrity culture that had emerged in the late eighteenth century, drawing the personal lives of rulers into press depictions to be consumed by an eager readership. Still, the growing commercial and journalistic independence of newspapers also strengthened their claim to represent a public opinion that stood apart from and scrutinized those in power, forcing the latter to legitimate their authority through other public channels like mediated speeches. The ability of both the press and the authorities to project images of power increased as the visual media revolution contributed to a feeling of mediated co-presence between ruler and ruled. In this visual context, authority figures often lost control over their own image as official newspapers expanded their pictorial repertoire in the struggle to compete with cheap and entertaining mass newspapers. Public figures could not control how an audience received those images, and new investigative journalistic practices led to a scrutiny of rulers’ personal lives and an increasing potential for political scandals. The dialectic between personal popularity and vulnerability to public scrutiny through media coverage ultimately led to the public figure’s loss of control over the substance of his or her image and mutated the nature of authority into an explicitly, publicly negotiated phenomenon.

Changing Press Landscapes and Journalistic Cultures Changes in the media landscape over the course of the nineteenth century prompted a shift from a tightly controlled, small-scale projection of power to a less controlled but broader demonstration of public authority. In terms of political newspapers, this century saw one kind of democratized media landscape replaced by another. Around 1800, there was still a widespread underground press in many European countries because of both direct censorship and the stamp duties on newspapers that governments had instituted to restrict information – as a form of power – to elite circles. Illegal newspapers represented an eclectic range of political views that already reached a great number of people, with patrons often reading the papers aloud to groups in taverns and other public spaces. The state’s formal restrictions on the press enabled governments to enjoy a significant influence on how authority was projected in officially sanctioned newspapers. However, over the course of the century, press

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freedoms spread across Europe. Press protections had already been established in Britain in 1695 and in the United States in 1791, and other countries soon followed their lead: Belgium in 1831, the Netherlands in 1848, France in 1881, Germany in 1888, and Austria in 1899. Within the same time period, stamp duties were also abolished in Belgium in 1848, in Britain in 1855, in the Netherlands in 1869, and in Germany in 1874. Even though many unstamped papers had higher circulation numbers than stamped papers, they found their former niches filled by the cheap legal newspapers that emerged with the shift to press freedom.23 Yet these legal newspapers were not completely free: journalists were still prone to post-print censorship and in some cases legal prosecutions, such as in Germany during Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s fight against the Catholic and Social Democratic press in the 1870s and 1880s.24 Moreover, if legal papers wanted to maintain their access to political figures, they needed to exercise some form of self-censorship. Journalists of such papers could technically write what they wanted, but they were still dependent on the political authorities to obtain political news: if the journalists reported negatively on them, the authorities would be less inclined to provide the journalists with information in the future. Reporters thus had to walk a fine line between being a mouthpiece for the government – which could alienate an increasingly critical readership that saw through this officious ploy – and being too critical of the government and disaffecting it to the point that it would withhold information in the future.25 As president, Roosevelt selected and excluded journalists based on how they portrayed him; similarly, in the period leading up to his prime ministership, the Dutch anti-revolutionary leader Abraham Kuyper invited specific journalists to interview him and, if he approved of the results, rewarded them with a photographic portrait or sketch of himself.26 Within the context of colonial politics in South Africa in the late nineteenth century, even the new, muckraking investigative journalists in Britain exercised self-censorship so as not to ostracize themselves from access to official news sources.27 Alongside broad interest papers, political newspapers that were tied closely to growing political parties flourished between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth

 See also: Stephen Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain (London: Fontana, 1990); Robert Goldstein, ed., The War for the Public Mind: Political Censorship in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London: Praeger, 2000); Chalaby, Invention of Journalism, 9–31.  See also: Hans-Wolfgang Wetzel, Presseinnenpolitik im Bismarckreich, 1874–1890: Das Problem der Repression oppositioneller Zeitungen (Frankfurt a/M: Lang, 1975), 117–289.  Thompson, Media and Modernity, 140. On the dynamic of self-censorship in the United States in the late nineteenth century, see also: Ponce de Leon, Self-Exposure, 76–105.  Huub Wijfjes, “Vorm of vent? Mediatisering in de politieke geschiedenis,” in Kossmann Instituut: Benaderingen van de geschiedenis van politiek, ed. Gerrit Voerman and Dirk Jan Wolffram (Groningen: Kossmann Instituut, 2006), 32–38, here 36.  Frank Bösch, Öffentliche Geheimnisse: Skandale, Politik und Medien in Deutschland und Großbritannien 1880–1914 (München: Oldenbourg, 2009), 247–263.

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centuries. This development had a two-fold effect on the projection of power: leaders of political movements gained a personal megaphone to amplify their authority, but the segregation of this political press from the mainstream press made it difficult for them to reach an audience outside of their political ideology. Notable examples were Belgium and the Netherlands, where society became increasingly segregated into ‘pillars’ constituted by social and political institutions – including a political press – based on a liberal, socialist, Catholic, or (in the Dutch case also) Protestant worldview.28 Consequently, Dutch leaders such as Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis of the Social-Democratic League, Pieter Jelles Troelstra of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, and Herman Schaepman of the Catholic Party promoted themselves through their social group’s own press.29 Politicians in more authoritarian states had the opposite problem. In the German Empire, the chancellor was not the elected leader of a political party with its own press but was appointed by the emperor and therefore lacked such a party mouthpiece. Consequently, the German government had to rely on a spectrum of (semi-)official newspapers to stage its authority. For formal announcements, its leaders used the official Reichsanzeiger; for informal information intended to promote the government’s position, they used the state-affiliated Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung; and for attempts to stage their image more ‘objectively,’ they supplied government news to independent but loyal papers such as the nation-wide Kölnische Zeitung and the provincial Provinzialkorrespondenz.30 While the chancellor thus did not command an overt party press, he steered the mediated construction of his authority from a multitude of angles by employing the services of newspapers with various levels of connection to his government. The commercialization of the emerging mass press in the second half of the nineteenth century both increased and segregated leaders’ audiences. Britain and the United States led the way in this commercialization, while continental European

 See the foundational sociological study of: Arend Lijphart, The Politics of Accommodation: Pluralism and Democracy in the Netherlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). While Lijphart focuses on the period from 1917 to 1967, the concept can already be applied to preceding decades. That said, historians are increasingly questioning the empirical accuracy of this concept. See e.g.: Peter van Dam, Staat van verzuiling: Over een Nederlandse mythe (Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek, 2011).  See: Henk te Velde, “Een aparte techniek: Nederlandse politieke acteurs en de massa na 1870,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 110 (1997): 198–212, here 201; Piet Hagen, “Troelstra’s Views Were Never Unchallenged: Political Debates in Dutch Social Democratic Newspapers, 1892–1925,” in Mediatization of Politics in History, ed. Huub Wijfjes and Gerrit Voerman (Leuven: Peeters, 2009), 51–62, here 52.  See also: Ute Daniel, “Die Politik der Propaganda: Zur Praxis gouvernementaler Selbstrepräsentation vom Kaiserreich bis zur Bundesrepublik,” in Propaganda: Meinungskampf, Verführung und politische Sinnstiftung 1789–1989, ed. Ute Daniel and Wolfram Siemann (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1994), 44–82.

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countries generally maintained more formally politicized press landscapes into the twentieth century. Given its pioneering role, Britain’s example is instructive here. British newspapers’ political influence arguably peaked in the 1820s-1830s, though this influence was restricted to a small number of London papers that were read by leaders in government and finance, who in turn believed these papers to be important precisely because they were assumed to be heavily influenced by the authorities.31 These newspapers’ political influence waned, however, as the press market expanded due to an increased consumer demand: rising literacy rates, incomes, and leisure time created a mass reading public. The removal of stamp duties made newspapers cheaply available for a penny or even half penny to this broad public, fostering a highly competitive press market in the second half of the nineteenth century. As circulation and profits increased, more entrepreneurs entered the market to take advantage of these developments. To stay competitive, owners needed to invest in new technologies that would increase the efficiency and output of their production. This industrialization of the press also required capitalization: in the early nineteenth century, a hand press and two employees sufficed to start a newspaper, but in the second half of the century significant financial investment was required. At the same time, it became more difficult to cover costs, as newspapers needed to follow market prices, which sometimes dropped below production costs as rival papers tried to force each other out of the market.32 This hyper-competitiveness led to a concentration in newspaper ownership as failing newspapers went bankrupt and others merged under the control of a small number of press barons, such as Lord Northcliffe, Sir Arthur Pearson, and Lord Beaverbrook.33 Increased social interaction with these media barons offered political figures the potential of receiving widespread and favorable coverage in the press. Accordingly, Chamberlain mingled socially with Northcliffe and Pearson, as did the German court with their German counterpart, August Scherl. As a result, the close intimacy between authority figures and press proprietors led to more visibility of these figures in newspapers, which in turn meant that readers became more familiar with these politicians and experienced a relationship of ‘intimacy at a distance’ with them. Overall figures of the commercializing mass press were staggering. The number of London papers increased from 56 in 1837 to 410 in 1874 and to 680 in 1887, while the number of provincial papers rose from 264 in 1837 to 916 in 1874 and to 1,366 in 1887. Circulation figures soared as well, from an average of 1,800 for the main newspapers in 1801 to 2,775 in 1850 and to more than 200,000 in 1900. This increase was

 Aled Jones, Powers of the Press: Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth-Century England (Aldershot: Routledge, 1996), 140–179.  Notably: Chalaby, Invention of Journalism, 32–54.  See e.g.: J. Lee Thompson, Northcliffe: Press Baron in Politics 1865–1922 (London: John Murray, 2000).

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certainly not limited to Britain: the number of newspapers globally rose from 3,168 in 1828 to 31,026 in 1900.34 Admittedly, in earlier times, papers had already been read aloud and thus reached larger crowds than the lower figures might suggest. Conversely, the new mass press was also segregated into quality and popular newspapers, and thus there was no single type of publication that reached the entire public. Nevertheless, the overall circulation increases meant that news stories about political figures reached mass audiences by 1900, which contributed to creating a sense of (omni)presence of their authority. In addition to the increasing volume of the press, changes in journalistic culture also gave authority figures a greater media presence, albeit with ambivalent results. Again, Britain with its New Journalism and the United States with its related ‘yellow journalism’ inaugurated this transition in the later nineteenth century.35 On a broader, international level, journalism matured as a field in these decades as it established journalistic education, professional organizations, and codes of conduct.36 In Britain and the United States in particular, professionalization was also marked by a new focus on what was called journalistic objectivity, which reinforced the press’ role as a fourth estate that scrutinized the authorities.37 Notably, this desire for objectivity manifested itself in the emergence of investigative journalism, which enabled the reading public to inspect its leaders from up close. However, objectivity could also lead to the opposite effect when newspapers sought to prove their objectivity by decreasing direct coverage of politicians, shying away from political topics for fear of appearing partisan and thereby losing readers in the competitive market of the mass press.38 While this disregard enlarged the gulf between ruler and public, on the level of formatting, the New Journalism implicitly favored authority figures over abstract political institutions and processes to gain public attention. Editors sought to make newspapers more attractive by using more headlines, crossheads, and shorter paragraphs, and news about eccentric individuals, including rulers, lent itself well to these purposes.39 It was easier and more attractive to capture the travels of President Roosevelt in a splash of exciting headlines and punchy paragraphs than to report on the legislative debates of the United States Congress.

 Alan J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press in England, 1855–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1976), 71; Chalaby, Invention of Journalism, 38; C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), 19.  Joel Wiener, ed., Papers for the Millions: The New Journalism in Britain 1850s to 1914 (New York: Greenwood, 1988).  Jörg Requate, Journalismus als Beruf: Entstehung und Entwicklung des Journalistenberufs im 19. Jahrhundert: Deutschland im internationalen Vergleich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995), 11–32.  Chalaby, Invention of Journalism, 1–5.  Koss, Rise and Fall, 4.  Lee, Origins of the Popular Press, 120.

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There was also an increasing realization that humans are storytelling animals and the logic of journalism changed accordingly. The older informal and personal style of political pamphlets – which journalists and politicians continued to use – was partially adopted by newspapers in the nineteenth century, as a study of the Dutch cities of Den Bosch and Groningen show, for instance.40 Newspapers in the past had reported news in a factual and chronological manner, but now they shifted to summaries and inverted pyramids that relayed the most important points quickly, as well as to a narrative form in which news was conveyed through a story about a key protagonist.41 This demand for key protagonists in political news, in turn, favored stories about authority figures, who by virtue of their political position constituted such protagonists. Finally, another new journalistic technique that benefitted political leaders was the interview, which was introduced later in the century and used widely for example by the (in)famous investigative journalist W. T. Stead.42 The interview not only enabled journalists to gather a new type of information about politics, but also gave them a more autonomous and authoritative position in their relationship with politicians.43 Since the interview format required individuals willing to be interviewed, it provided political figures with a platform through which they could construct, and give a more personal dimension to, their media personas. Initially, public figures were wary of being quoted literally until they realized that it was an opportunity to portray themselves as they wanted to be seen and to avoid misrepresentations.44 The staging of authority thus became a negotiation between the interviewer and interviewee, as both sought to shape the image of the authority that was presented outward. Early examples of public figures who regularly spoke to the press include the American Presidents William McKinley and Roosevelt, German Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow, and Dutch Prime Minister Kuyper.45

 Rutger de Graaf, “Pamphlets, Newspapers and the Mediatization of Dutch Politics in the Nineteenth Century,” in Mediatization of Politics in History, ed. Huub Wijfjes and Gerrit Voerman (Leuven: Peeters, 2009), 151–166, here 163.  John Lloyd, “The Powers that Be,” in Mediatization of Politics in History, ed. Huub Wijfjes and Gerrit Voerman (Leuven: Peeters, 2009), 23–32; Søren Kolstrup, “The Change of News Structure: Danish Newspapers 1873–1914,” in Media History: Theories, Methods, Analysis, ed. Niels Brügger and Søren Kolstrup (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2002), 67–108; Marcel Broersma, “Mediating Parliament: Form Changes in British and Dutch Journalism, 1850–1940,” in Mediatization of Politics in History, ed. Huub Wijfjes and Gerrit Voerman (Leuven: Peeters, 2009), 167–184, here 177.  Frank Bösch, “Volkstribune und Intellektuelle: W. T. Stead, Harden und die Transformation des politischen Journalismus in Großbritannien und Deutschland,” in Politischer Journalismus, Öffentlichkeiten, und Medien im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Clemens Zimmermann (Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 2006), 99–120.  Broersma, “Mediating Parliament.”  Ponce de Leon, Self-Exposure, 42–75.  Wijfjes, “Vorm of vent?” 36; Frank Bösch, Mediengeschichte: Vom asiatischen Buchdruck zum Fernsehen (Frankfurt a/M: Campus, 2011), 122–123.

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Journalism also exhibited national peculiarities. In the United States, journalists were expected to be fact finders. In France, public intellectuals engaged in polemical debates in the public sphere. In Germany, academically trained desk reporters wrote with a more literary and political bent. In continental countries like Germany, France, and the Netherlands, the press remained more closely tied to political parties well into the twentieth century.46 Even in the newly objective British press, newspapers that had relinquished official political ties endorsed a particular political view informally for the sake of maintaining income from loyal readers, advertisers, and politicians.47 In sum, while subject to local differences, evolving journalistic styles reinforced the staging of authority in similar ways across Europe and the United States, focusing on the objective scrutiny of power, narrated news using political protagonists, and interviews that focused attention on these protagonists.

The Personalization of Politics As already foreshadowed in the previous section, both commercialization and changing journalistic cultures prompted an increase in media attention on authority figures, largely through the personalization of political news. Unlike in previous centuries, when politics had dominated the news, commercially competitive newspapers now needed to cater to popular interests, which shifted their focus away from politics towards culture, fiction, and sports. However, they also made the remaining political coverage more attractive by focusing on personalities.48 Even though political celebrities emerged already in the late eighteenth century, celebrity reporting became ‘industrialized’ with the expansion of the mass press a century later. There were insiders and outsiders among these political celebrities and the appeal of (supposed) outsiders peaked around the turn of the twentieth century when people increasingly perceived political parties and systems as corrupt. Consequently, in the United States, practical idealists who could reform the system without upsetting upper-middle-class readers and advertisers, such as Roosevelt and later Woodrow Wilson, were popular among journalists. By depicting such practical idealists in personal ways, journalists enabled the public to evaluate whether they were trustworthy, which further aided political outsiders who relied on direct support from the people precisely because they were (alleged) outsiders. On a more practical level, journalists were also drawn to marginal figures because they seemed to stand above or beyond political partisanship and

 Jörg Requate, “Öffentlichkeit und Medien als Gegenstände historischer Analyse,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 25, no. 1 (1999): 5–32; Requate, Journalismus als Beruf, 393–407.  Koss, Rise and Fall, 4; Jones, Powers of the Press, 140–179.  Chalaby, Invention of Journalism, 71–126; Koss, Rise and Fall, 346–347; H. C. G. Matthew, “Gladstone, Rhetoric and Politics,” in Gladstone, ed. Peter J. Jagger (London: Hambledon, 1998), 213–234, here 217.

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could thus appeal to a broader range of readers, bolstering newspaper sales figures.49 The same principle applied to monarchs, who were popular media objects because they often played a unifying rather than a divisive role. In addition to channeling more press attention towards individuals who then became political celebrities, commercialization also fostered character descriptions that gave the impression to readers that they could really know the authority figure. Human-interest stories, in particular, became popular among a broad readership because they appealed to universal emotions and narrated experiences to which readers could relate. Colorful personas such as Chamberlain, with his characteristic eyeglass and buttonhole orchid and his many public performances, lent themselves well to this type of personalized reporting.50 By describing their private lives, journalists also set political celebrities and their families up as role models. The American press showed readers how Roosevelt’s father had played a supportive role in his life and how the younger Roosevelt and his wife raised their children in a modern way by fostering their individualism and expressing loving support.51 Once present in the public eye, the personalized politician benefitted from a “Matthew effect” that made celebrity cumulative.52 The Matthew effect holds that, if someone has already accrued a certain volume of capital – be it political, economic, or cultural – he or she will be more likely to gain more of it in the future in a selfreinforcing dynamic. The Matthew effect thus suggests that political figures who were well known subsequently became even better known. Faced with an overabundance of increasingly global and political news events on which to report, journalists and editors were more likely to cover stories about political figures they were already familiar with and had published on before. The same was true for readers: faced with this overabundance of political news in the commercial mass press, they were more likely to read articles on political figures they already knew and whose political lives they could continue to follow.53 This effect also applies to mediated intimacy: humans are generally drawn to the familiar over the unfamiliar, and with repetition the familiar becomes even more familiar and thus feels more intimate. This reinforced intimacy did not have to be positive: even an article or press photograph of a despised politician was more likely to attract a reader’s renewed attention, bringing that reader closer to the politician. Monarchs such as the German Emperor Wilhelm II and the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina generated a particularly strong Matthew effect as their hereditary position guaranteed press attention

 Ponce de Leon, Self-Exposure, 172–205, more generally also 42–75; Van Krieken, Celebrity Society, 98–118.  Betto van Waarden, “‘His Political Life Story Told in Pictures’: The Visual Construction of the Political Persona of Joseph Chamberlain,” Media History 28, no. 1 (2022): 27–59.  Ponce de Leon, Self-Exposure, 106–140.  Van Krieken, Celebrity Society, 54–61.  Van Krieken, Celebrity Society, 54–61, 110.

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since birth, and this attention naturally grew over time as they moved into positions of widespread authority.54 That Wilhelm II was a controversial figure also illustrates how both admiration and contempt bred a continued intimate interest in his many engagements as they were relayed in the mass press. Celebrity reporting on authoritative figures was also effective because they constituted symbols of identity that reinforced the bonds of an imagined community.55 In their attempt to explain the interactions between different political groups, journalists sought to interview these groups’ respective spokespersons, thus channeling symbolic power towards authority figures who embodied a particular movement or identity.56 This dynamic was particularly relevant in the nineteenth century due to the rising complexity of the political playing field. The growing liberal, socialist, and radical movements took symbolic shape in individual figures such as the British Liberal politician William Gladstone and the German Social Democratic leader August Bebel.57 While their representative function was useful for journalists in selling copy, it also aided their audiences as the simplified images helped them to cope with a diffuse reality.58 While these political movements often put hereditary monarchy on the defensive, the institution as a whole enjoyed stability thanks to the symbolic strength of its traditional role. Monarchical power was vested in a singular person and thus inherently personalized, providing media with a natural political figurehead around which to frame an imagined community. In his famous analysis of the British political system in 1867, the journalist Walter Bagehot explained that “the best reason why Monarchy is a strong government is, that it is an intelligible government. The mass of mankind understand it, and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any other.”59 He further specified that “royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions. A republic is a government in which that attention is divided between many, who are all doing uninteresting actions.” The simplicity of the royal image and its inherent ability to attract

 See also: Martin Kohlrausch, “Loss of Control: Kaiser Wilhelm II, Mass Media, and the National Identity of the Second German Reich,” in Transnational Histories of the ‘Royal Nation,’ ed. Milinda Banerjee, Charlotte Backerra, and Cathleen Sarti (Cham: Palgrave, 2017), 87–107; Selina NagelsCoune, “Van kinds af aan: De representatie van Albert I van België en Wilhelmina van Nederland in de massamedia van 1875 tot 1918,” (master’s thesis, KU Leuven, 2014); Johannes Paulmann, Pomp und Politik: Monarchenbegegnungen in Europa zwischen Ancien Régime und Erstem Weltkrieg (Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 2000), 401–416.  Anderson, Imagined Communities.  Van Krieken, Celebrity Society, 98–118; Marshall, Celebrity and Power, 241–248.  Kate Campbell, “W. E. Gladstone, W. T. Stead, Matthew Arnold and a New Journalism: Cultural Politics in the 1880s,” Victorian Periodicals Review 36, no. 1 (2003): 20–40; D. A. Hamer, “Gladstone: The Making of a Political Myth,” Victorian Studies 22, no. 1 (1978): 29–50.  See also: Lothar Reinermann, Der Kaiser in England: Wilhelm II. und sein Bild in der britischen Öffentlichkeit (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2001), 11–36.  Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966 [1867]), 82, 86.

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attention enabled the monarch to star prominently among the celebrity authority figures of the mass press. When the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli proclaimed Queen Victoria to be Empress of India in 1877, she became the symbolic authority of the global imagined community of the British Empire as well.60 Two decades later, she came to share this function with a non-monarch: while the colonial secretaryship had never been a prominent cabinet post, Chamberlain leveraged it to put himself squarely into the political limelight. Through their reports on his South African politics and his subsequent campaign for intra-imperial tariff reform, the international press shaped him into the embodiment of British imperial identity. A similar dynamic occurred in Germany, where the emperor constituted the formal symbol of the new German Empire, founded in 1871, but subsequently shared this role with the mediagenic Colonial Secretary Bernhard Dernburg in the early twentieth century.61 The desire for recognizable symbols was increased by the uncertainty that people experienced in the modern world.62 Modernization included large-scale urbanization: the anonymity of the city led to weaker personal relations of trust and fewer shared codes of community life, which in turn reinforced the new practice of investigating the personal lives of public personas to establish their trustworthiness. Once deemed trustworthy through press analysis, political figures had the potential of becoming communal symbols.63 However, the relationship between news consumers and authority figures was not simply bilateral; rather, the public figure stood at the center of a web of relations that connected people and acted as a common denominator to whom people could relate. This group feeling was reinforced by visions of an imagined community created by large urban newspaper circulation, for instance in a metropole like Berlin, the population of which had grown from 400,000 in 1848 to two million in 1905 (and with another one-and-a-half million people living in the suburbs). Within the city itself, the newspapers Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger and Berliner Morgenpost sold over 200,000 copies daily after 1900, and the Morgenpost circulation rose to 400,000 by 1914.64 By consuming the same or similar news stories about the same authority figures, people shared a common experience and reference framework that they could talk about and bond over – either supporting or criticizing these figures – with other city dwellers. Staging authority in the press thus had a wider social significance that went beyond  See also: John Plunkett, Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).  Betto van Waarden, “Public Politics: The Coming of Age of the Media Politician in a Transnational Communicative Space, 1880s-1910s” (PhD diss., KU Leuven, 2019), 224–257.  Joachim Radkau, Das Zeitalter der Nervosität: Deutschland zwischen Bismarck und Hitler (München: Hanser, 1998); Edelman, Symbolic Uses, 73–94.  See also: Ponce de Leon, Self-Exposure, 11–41; George Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe: Free Press, 1950), 409–426.  See: Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 7, 51–86; Van Krieken, Celebrity Society, 81–97.

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the immediate interests of rulers and journalists: it meant that readers experienced the presence of an authority they admired or despised not only in their own life, but also as constituting the core of their loyalist or subversive (sub)community.65

A Bolstered Public Opinion As argued above, the personalization of political news could bolster the authority of prominent political figures, but this certainly did not render their authority undisputed. In fact, the congruence of mass newspapers with mass suffrage allowed the press to claim to be speaking on behalf of the people. Journalism’s enhanced ideal of objectivity and its self-assigned goal of scrutinizing power reinforced this claim, especially with the extension of male suffrage in Britain in 1832, 1867, and 1884, Germany in 1871, and Belgium in 1893 and 1920–21, and the female vote in New Zealand in 1893, Finland in 1906, and Norway in 1913. As many readers gained the right to participate in state politics, newspapers also had more reason to represent their opinions. This transition can be seen, for example, in British foreign policy: while Foreign Secretaries George Canning and Lord Palmerston had to cater to only a small elite whom they regarded as representing public opinion, their successors in the late nineteenth century had to satisfy a much larger electorate and more disparate public opinion.66 The press thus took on the self-perceived role of being a mouthpiece for public opinion rather than for the government, at least more so than before. This shift from speaking on behalf of the authorities to speaking on behalf of the people reinforced politicians’ loss of control over how their image was projected and made the press less predictable for their use since the public opinion that newspapers claimed to represent was notoriously vague and turbulent and could turn against public figures overnight.67 In this context, scholars have noted that the earlier nineteenth-century liberal ideal of public opinion was replaced late in the century by liberal elites’ pessimistic visions of the potential harm caused by irrational mass opinion, often expressed through newspapers.68 Faced with such voter unpredictability as well greater scrutiny in the press, public figures sought ways to approach the public proactively to legitimate their authority. The roots of this development began early in the century: already in the 1820s-1830s, the American President Andrew Jackson made abundant use of newspapers during his election campaign, playing into the mass public’s emerging taste for human-interest stories by opening up parts of his private life to

 For more details on these themes: Van Waarden, Public Politics, 190–257.  A. N. Porter, The Origins of the South African War: Joseph Chamberlain and the Diplomacy of Imperialism, 1895–1899 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 1–26.  See: Koss, Rise and Fall, 215–216.  However, this dominant narrative is given nuance in: James Thompson, British Political Culture and the Idea of ‘Public Opinion,’ 1867–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1–27.

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publicity. This media effort contributed to shaping the notion of Jacksonian democracy, which claimed the mantel of mass democracy in which a politician represented the common people rather than political elites. At mid-century, the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi turned himself into an international celebrity by accommodating journalists and making it possible for people across the continent to read about his exploits. His virility and striking image aided this popularity and even led to an eroticization of his figure in the press.69 With the growing anxiety about the vagaries of mass public opinion and a new focus on manipulating rather than enlightening the public, such publicity efforts escalated by the century’s end. Government ministers like Chamberlain and Bülow as well as Cape Colony Premier Cecil Rhodes and Belgian King Leopold II proactively staged their media appearances and approached the press in a systematic rather than ad hoc manner. They relied on press-savvy advisors and press bureaus, funded journalists and newspapers (mostly secretly), used international press agencies, and wrote and edited newspaper content themselves. Moreover, they gave mediatized speeches and posed for photographers and filmmakers and interacted personally with journalists through interviews and at mediatized political events.70 The need to cater to public opinion through the press was thus clear to political actors across different political systems; but how, exactly, did they make the system work in their favor? Since the format of most newspapers fostered two types of communication, textual and increasingly visual, public figures supplied journalists with both news narratives and images. As for the former, political speeches now gained even greater import as a source of news text. The nineteenth century witnessed the first speeches to mass audiences, which were subsequently relayed to even greater audiences via the media. This practice started in the United States with Presidents Jefferson and Jackson and was taken to a new level in the United Kingdom by Gladstone during his Midlothian campaign of 1879–1880.71 Gladstone’s speeches were part of a phenomenon called the Platform, in which politicians addressed large audiences at separate, individual mass rallies, rather than debating each other directly. When the press reported on these speeches, other politicians responded to their rivals’ comments in their own public speeches, so that a debate took place on a national level via the media.72 In Britain, the style of parliamentary speechifying also changed once debates began to be published. Since domestic and foreign audiences could now read their words, parliamentarians started using more

 Lilti, Invention of Celebrity, 217–266; Lucy Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).  Van Waarden, Public Politics, 75–189.  Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 572–578.  Henk te Velde, Sprekende politiek: Redenaars en hun publiek in de parlementaire gouden eeuw (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2015), 170–183.

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pathos, which worked better for newspaper readers. While parliamentarians in the British House of Commons had to speak from their own seats, the French parliament had the advantage that it was already structurally geared towards addressing the public: parliamentarians took turns using the central, elevated post of the speaker and the parliament as a whole was constructed as a large amphitheater.73 The style of the speeches varied by nation and according to the personality of the speaker, but the awareness that public display was necessary became consistent across borders. In Britain, public speeches remained more traditional and eloquent than the short political stump speeches that became popular in the United States, although Gladstone’s short speeches at railway stations along his route in the Midlothian campaign was a notable exception.74 In fact, Gladstone’s ability to fire up crowds with his charisma and speaking style made his events so newsworthy that newspapers felt they could not neglect his speeches purely from a commercial perspective.75 Chamberlain, too, proved masterful at using the press to amplify his speeches, while in the Netherlands, Kuyper and Jelles Troelstra became especially good at connecting with audiences in this way.76 In Germany, the Social Democratic leader Bebel brought props to parliament to play into the media’s search for novelty: while making a speech against colonialism, for instance, he brandished a hippo skin whip used to lash natives to emphasize his points about colonial atrocities.77 By following mass media logic and offering an extended audience something interesting or sensational, public figures could obtain the media attention necessary to bolster their authority. Indeed, publicized speeches became such a fundamental resource for politicians that even traditional political leaders felt they had no choice but to hold speeches as well. In their tenure as prime ministers, Disraeli and Lord Salisbury both disliked this new form of politics, with the latter calling mediated public speeches “an odious addition to the burdens of political life in modern times.”78 But both engaged in this public display nonetheless.79 The pressure to perform in a sensationalist manner grew as the commercial mass press decreased its coverage of unexcerpted political speeches. By the last decades of the century, newspapers covered speeches only if they were newsworthy and were given in a charismatic manner. As the focus on verbatim coverage decreased,

 Te Velde, Sprekende politiek, 127–136.  Te Velde, Sprekende politiek, 170–183.  Basing himself on Colin Matthew’s work: Henk te Velde, “Charismatic Leaders, Political Religion and Social Movements: Western Europe at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” in Charismatic Leadership and Social Movements: The Revolutionary Power of Ordinary Men and Women, ed. Jan Willem Stutje (New York: Berghahn, 2012), 141–154, here 147.  Porter, Origins of the South African War, 95–121; Te Velde, “Een aparte techniek,” 201–207.  Frank Bösch, “Katalysator der Demokratisierung? Presse, Politik und Gesellschaft vor 1914,” in Medialisierung und Demokratie im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Frank Bösch and Norbert Frei (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), 25–47.  Andrew Roberts, Salisbury: Victorian Titan (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999), 248–249.  Te Velde, Sprekende politiek, 170–183.

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newspapers instead increasingly described the venues and mood in which speeches took place, as well as how the local audience reacted, while sketch writers conveyed scenes in parliament or other venues.80 Through these media representations, distant audiences could feel as though they were present at the speaking event, in close proximity to the authoritative speaker himself, which reinforced their bond of intimacy at a distance. To add to the entertainment value of the speeches, which made them more likely to gain media coverage and foster public trust, politicians felt an increased need to choreograph their surroundings to be successful in establishing their authority. In a similar fashion, public figures acknowledged the power of mass visual communication, although they did so with varying degrees of pro-active intervention and different levels of efficacy. The nineteenth century experienced a visual revolution with the advent of the lithograph, daguerreotype, photograph, kinetoscope, and cinematograph. The role of photography was especially important in making political authorities visible to the public from mid-century onwards. Cartes-de-visite – inexpensive photographs the size of visiting cards that people collected, displayed, and traded – created a new form of intimacy at a distance embodied in the photograph album.81 This visual revolution was reinforced by a boom in the illustrated press around the turn of the twentieth century, due to a combination of qualitative and quantitative improvements in photography and, particularly in Germany, an economic upswing.82 While the illustrated press had used lithographs and engravings for several decades, photography entered the press in the 1890s when the autotype made it possible to print photos on a large scale in publications. These images had an impressive reach: the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, Germany’s leading illustrated journal, sold 23,000 copies per week in 1894, 52,000 in 1899, 700,000 in 1913, and 1 million in 1915. While illustrated journals came to define how people saw the world, initially they covered little political news with two important exceptions: they reported on monarchs and on imperialists such as Henry Morton Stanley, Lord Kitchener, Jean-Baptiste Marchand, and Hubert Lyautey, as the latter two were featured prominently in the illustrated supplements of the Petit Journal and Petit Parisien.83 Most of these images remained relatively staid, though, as photography’s long exposure times made the medium too cumbersome and slow to keep up with fast-paced

 See also: Te Velde, Sprekende politiek.  Lilti, Invention of Celebrity, 217–266; Van Krieken, Celebrity Society, 40–61; Riall, Garibaldi, 128–132.  Katrin Bomhoff, “Betrachtung der ‘Sammlung Ullstein,’” in Die Erfindung der Pressefotografie: Aus der Sammlung Ullstein 1894–1945, ed. Stiftung Deutsches Historisches Museum and Axel Springer Syndication GmbH Berlin (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2017), 10–17.  Anton Holzer, “Nachrichten und Sensationen,” in Die Erfindung der Pressefotografie: Aus der Sammlung Ullstein 1894–1945, ed. Stiftung Deutsches Historisches Museum and Axel Springer Syndication GmbH Berlin (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2017), 26–37, circulation figures on 26.

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action in colonial adventures and wars before 1918.84 Film, on the other hand, introduced movement and thus a heightened sense of presence in its pre-war cinema of attractions. By the start of World War I, Berlin already had 350 registered cinemas, and London nearly 600.85 Films came to play an important role in politics, with a newsreel featuring presidential candidate McKinley as the first successful campaign film.86 In 1898, as a commander in the Spanish-American War leading his Rough Riders volunteer regiment at the famous Battle of San Juan Hill in Cuba, Roosevelt had posed for the camera to show his heroism; he was subsequently also the first president of the United States to be filmed during his term in office. Roosevelt’s adventurous exploits in the American West, South America, and Africa made him particularly appealing to filmmakers.87 In Germany, Wilhelm II constituted a similarly attractive topic for the film industry due to his visually striking uniforms, the fact that his public appearances were heavily choreographed and thus easy to film, and his full schedule of events that included a range of interesting cinematic opportunities. Consequently, he became Germany’s first ‘film star.’ Popular caricatures, in turn, reflected on how omnipresent the Kaiser had become in German society through photography and film, which suggests that these visual projections made a mark on contemporaries.88 While the German royal court initially showed little initiative or interest in these films, the royal navy was a different matter, as Secretary of State Alfred von Tirpitz embraced film as a core propaganda strategy.89 In addition to increasing visibility, film also changed its quality. Moving images made authority figures seem even more real than photographs and thus fundamentally changed the nature of mediated intimacy itself. These figures were no longer static but essentially came alive right in front of the audience, so that the intimacy at a distance no longer felt so distant at all.

 Berny Sèbe, Heroic Imperialists in Africa: The Promotion of British and French Colonial Heroes, 1870–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 96–136; Edward Berenson, Heroes of Empire: Five Charismatic Men and the Conquest of Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Lilti, Invention of Celebrity, 257–266.  Jan Rüger, The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 52.  Charles Musser, Politicking and Emergent Media: US Presidential Elections of the 1890s (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016).  Brian Neve, “The ‘Picture Man’: The Cinematic Strife of Theodore Roosevelt,” in Presidents in the Movies: American History and Politics on Screen, ed. I. W. Morgan (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 65–86.  Jost Rebentisch, Die vielen Gesichter des Kaisers: Wilhelm II. in der deutschen und britischen Karikatur, 1888–1918 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2000), 92–99.  Martin Loiperdinger, “Kaiser Wilhelm II: Der erste deutsche Filmstar,” in Idole des deutschen Films: Eine Galerie von Schlüsselfiguren, ed. Thomas Koebner (München: Edition text + kritik, 1997), 41–53; Dominik Petzold, Der Kaiser und das Kino: Herrschaftsinszenierung, Populärkultur und Filmpropaganda im Wilhelminischen Zeitalter (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2012), 178–180.

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Still, while political figures and their officials attempted to use both texts and images to stage authority, they increasingly lost the ability to influence how this authority was finally (de)constructed in the media. The political newspapers upon which they had traditionally relied to shape their image lost ground against an expanding mass market of commercial newspapers offering more entertaining content. In addition, the images of authority figures that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century were distributed not only by elite sellers, but also copied and often vulgarized by unauthorized entrepreneurs for a broader audience. Consequently, these images lost their initial prestige and exclusivity, detracting from the rulers’ authoritative ‘aura.’90 Likewise, rulers could not control how the public received and interpreted their images, or even how they changed them. While Wilhelm II wished to portray himself in an aloof and authoritarian manner and to limit the distribution of his image to an inner elite circle, his middle-class subjects also wanted images of a sentimental and familial monarch – a demand that printers met by pirating his image and montaging him into family scenes.91 Political scandals, too, undermined public figures’ ability to determine how their authority was staged. As Thompson contends, scandals had a long history in print, reaching back to the fifteenth century, but the modern phenomenon of the mediated scandal, arising in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was facilitated by sweeping improvements in the speed and scale of printing and the rise of the penny press later in the nineteenth century. New Journalism’s focus on investigative reporting and its penchant for exposing the secrets of the powerful and exploiting sensation reinforced these developments.92 The increase in mediated scandals, adds Frank Bösch, was facilitated by the ever-closer connections between journalists and politicians, both of whom prompted the coverage of scandals when it suited their political purposes, for instance to damage a rival politician. Bösch demonstrates that the reportage of scandals peaked around 1900: few scandals were reported about Victoria and Wilhelm I in contrast to their successors Edward VII and Wilhelm II.93 In the latter’s case, it was particularly the Caligula affair, Eulenburg scandal, and Daily Telegraph affair that undermined his authority.94 While Wilhelm’s II example shows that mediated scandals could arise in authoritarian states like Germany, they were more

 See also: Lilti, Invention of Celebrity, 257–266.  Eva Giloi, Monarchy, Myth, and Material Culture in Germany 1750–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 267–277, 325–362; Eva Giloi, “Copyrighting the Kaiser: Publicity, Piracy, and the Right to Wilhelm II’s Image,” Central European History 45, no. 3 (2012): 407–451.  John B. Thompson, Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 31–59.  Frank Bösch, “Transfers and Similarities: Journalists, Politicians and Scandals in Imperial Germany and Britain,” in Journalists as Political Actors: Transfers and Interactions between Britain and Germany since the Late 19th Century, ed. Frank Bösch and Dominik Geppert (Augsburg: Wissner, 2008), 16–34, here 18–19. See also: Bösch, Öffentliche Geheimnisse, 1–42.  Martin Kohlrausch, Der Monarch im Skandal: Die Logik der Massenmedien und die Transformation der wilhelminischen Monarchie (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2005).

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likely to erupt in liberal democracies such as the United Kingdom, where freedom of the press was better protected and political figures needed to consider public opinion more carefully to win votes and thus to maintain a reputation untarnished by scandal.95 That said, a culture of scandal could also migrate, so that the French media’s focus on its nation’s scandal-ridden politics led journalists in Britain and Germany to focus more on unearthing scandals within their own countries as well.96 Overall, scandals posed a great threat to political figures as they undermined their authority. Even so, mediated scandals could still make an audience feel closer to an authority figure for various reasons: the volume of media coverage of this scandalized figure increased his or her presence; it brought an exalted leader down to the level of ‘commoners;’ and the audience might empathize with the fallen figure. Even so, this led to what one might consider negative intimacy: the audience might experience the political figure’s presence in his or her human frailty, but at the expense of his or her public authority. Mediated scandals therefore contributed to political leaders’ loss of control over how they staged their authority, and that in turn made authority a public issue negotiated between ruler and ruled. Scandals reveal once again that politicians’ public personas tacked between the reassurance of personalization and the contempt of familiarity.

III From Personalization to Celebritization Moving from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, we see a shift in balance from personalization to celebritization. The nineteenth century focused on the celebrity politician’s personality as one facet of a seemingly intimate and unguarded view into the politician’s private life and character, alongside his or her political significance and symbolism. After World War I, the rise of film, radio, and eventually television, all of which relied on a funding model based on providing more entertainment than news information, brought the nineteenth century’s nascent entertainment logic to its logical conclusion. This entertainment logic led to a celebritization of politics, in which the politician’s ability to conform to mediagenic expectations became as important, if not more so, as his personality or policies. The ever-growing role of the public in deciding political outcomes and the consequent rise of public opinion polling in the United States in the 1930s forced political figures to justify their authority to the public more overtly and continuously. The public’s demand for understandable and entertaining news translated into a narrative media style that focused on individual leaders as symbols for political communities. Ongoing developments in mass communication enlarged both the opportunities and risks for authority figures. In the

 Thompson, Political Scandal, 90–118.  Bösch, “Transfers and Similarities.”

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expanded global communication environment, these figures continued to lose control over their media image, as they increasingly had to style themselves as mediagenic to play into the logic of an independent and increasingly powerful mass media. As this section will illustrate, the manner in which authority was staged in the nineteenth-century media clearly left its marks on the succeeding century. On a first level of continuity, as societies became more impersonal and complex in the twentieth century, politicians’ function as symbolic protagonists who could unify large imagined (urban) communities became ever more relevant. Britain is a prime example here, as the BBC reported on King Edward VIII, King George VI, and Queen Elizabeth II to keep the British Empire unified throughout the mid-twentieth century.97 The media’s need for symbolic protagonists also became clear in the vacuum that Wilhelm II left behind in Germany after his flight into exile at the end of World War I. On the one hand, discussions about the need for a new leader – a Führer – fit in with Weimar Germany’s admiration for business-like CEOs and other strong leaders in republican systems such as France and the United States. On the other hand, these visions of strong leadership also reflected the need for a symbolic figure in modern mass communication societies, which require a central, recognizable authority figure as a focus for their social and political reporting.98 The relationship between media and authority figures also continued to be symbiotic: authority figures needed media exposure as much as the media needed symbolic figures. In fact, the celebrity culture that had emerged in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gained such importance that political celebrity increasingly became a precondition for power rather than its result. Writing in the mid-1950s, C. Wright Mills argued that America’s social hierarchy was no longer dominated by society people from “old money” living in big cities, but by a new national elite celebrated and enabled by a nation-wide media. While the United States had not had a salon culture as did Europe, these celebrities now created a type of national “café society” through the mass media. Politicians needed to stage their authority within this media scene because without such celebrity one lost status in the new power hierarchy. As Mills noted at the time: “Rather than being celebrated because they occupy positions of prestige, [celebrities] occupy positions of prestige because they are celebrated.” While “members of the power elite” – the small, interconnected circle of upper government, business, and military leaders – were still “celebrated because of the positions they occupy and the decisions they command,” he concluded that “they, too, must enter the world of publicity, become the material for the mass media.” Consequently, by the mid-1950s, newspapers such as the New York Times evaluated the degree to which President

 Simon James Potter, Broadcasting Empire: The BBC and the British World, 1922–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).  Kohlrausch, Monarch im Skandal, 386–443.

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Dwight D. Eisenhower, aided by his television consultant Robert Montgomery, mastered the media skill of appearing ‘natural’ on television.99 Media visibility, too, constituted an intensified element of authority, not just in portraying the politician’s power to the public but also in emboldening him in his sense of entitlement to power. In interwar Germany, the media enabled Adolf Hitler to gain attention and become a well-known figure both at home and abroad, which further encouraged him to become more assertive. Initially, as a regional Bavarian agitator, Hitler received little attention, but the international reportage on Benito Mussolini and fascism in Italy created momentum for Hitler as well, as he was described as a German version of the Italian fascist. Within that context, Hitler’s place on the national stage was secured not by the failed Munich putsch, but by the highly publicized court trial in 1924. News reports and images suddenly made him a wellknown face in Germany. As he became more aware of his celebrity status, he began seeing himself as a Führer, a messiah who could determine the fate of his nation, which he put into words in his political autobiography Mein Kampf. Hitler’s widespread publicity paved the way for his rise in the Nazi Party and on to national power.100 Just as important, improvements in telegraphy, radio, and later television enabled political figures to project their power on a global scale, as the mass press also continued to grow. In Germany, the press expanded from three thousand newspapers at the turn of the century to more than four thousand a decade-and-a-half later; in those same years, the top four journals in France had a combined circulation of more than four million.101 Likewise, news traffic on the global telegraphy network trebled in the first decade of the century, which was particularly important for ‘globalizing’ authority.102 It meant that, even while many media outlets and their news distribution remained local throughout the twentieth century, news gathering became highly international and stories about foreign political figures easily found their way into domestic news. In addition, while photos had already been featured in the nineteenth-century press, photojournalism came into common usage in the 1920s. This development further augmented the celebrity of, for example, the Belgian King Albert I. In their drive to illustrate news stories about Albert I at particular events, journalists sometimes even recycled photos of him from earlier  Charles Wright Mills, The Power Elite (London: Oxford University Press, 1993 [1956]), 71–93, quotes on 74 and 83.  Bernhard Fulda, “Adolf Hitler als Medienphänomen,” in Von der Politisierung der Medien zur Medialisierung des Politischen? Zum Verhältnis von Medien, Öffentlichkeiten und Politik im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Arnold Klaus, Christoph Classen, Susanne Kinnebrock et al. (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2010), 141–159.  Jutta Birmele, “The Mass-Circulation Press and the Crisis of Legitimation in Wilhelmine Germany, 1908–1918” (PhD diss., Claremont Graduate School, 1991), 2–3; Yixu Lü, “Germany’s War in China: Media Coverage and Political Myth,” German Life and Letters 61, no. 2 (2008): 202–214, here 204–205; Jane Chapman, Comparative Media History (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 81.  Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, 461–462.

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events.103 Other technological advancements made it easier for individual leaders to communicate and meet face-to-face, which further enhanced their position of authority vis-à-vis parliament and diplomats.104 As it became easier and safer for monarchs, for instance, to travel and meet each other in person, their role in international diplomacy – and in the public eye – was strengthened.105 Enhanced interpersonal communications thus reinforced political figures’ mass communicated authority, which in turn increased their celebrity and brought them yet closer in touch with their people. The increasingly watchful eye of the media also meant, though, that the staging of authority became a near permanent endeavor and that leaders could no longer select or limit the moments at which they presented themselves. There was a continuous loss of control of the distribution of texts and images that (de)constructed their authority. The gradual disappearance of a political press closely affiliated with politicians (and often their parties or movements) ushered in this dynamic. Stephen Koss provides an example of this change from turn-of-the-century Britain. He notes that, critiques notwithstanding, Stead developed a useful hierarchical classification in 1904 that identified four types of London dailies in the early 1900s: highly politically influential but lower circulation newspapers like the Times; editorially strong and politically connected newspapers like the St. James’s Gazette; papers that sought mass circulation with minimal influence like the Daily Mail; and papers that neither aspired to nor possessed any influence. Koss demonstrates that over the following decades, many papers in the first two categories did not survive, while papers in the last two categories flourished, with the consequence that fewer newspapers had close ties to political parties while the number of commercial papers increased. While newspapers did not fully lose their political leanings, they became more subtle; politicians did the same as they tried to influence the papers more spontaneously, covertly, and indirectly. During the interwar years, political papers suffered even further losses in readership and World War II spelled the end for many of them. The majority of people did not want lengthy political news articles, so that the remaining political papers focused on a small but culturally and politically influential section of the population.106 On the continent, the picture was somewhat different, as its distinctive media landscape meant that political newspapers survived longer into the twentieth century. In Belgium’s and the Netherlands’ vertically organized, pillarized political systems, authority figures continued to project their power through favorable media ensembles of press, radio, and television, but mainly to receptive audiences within their own socio-political pillar. In the Netherlands in particular, liberal politicians

 Laurence van Ypersele, Le roi Albert: Histoire d’un mythe (Bruxelles: Labor, 2006), 248.  Archie Brown, The Myth of the Strong Leader: Political Leadership in the Modern Age (London: Vintage Books, 2014), 1–24.  Paulmann, Pomp und Politik.  Koss, Rise and Fall, 439–452, notably 439 and 443.

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benefitted from coverage by the liberal Algemeen Handelsblad and broadcasting organization AVRO, socialist politicians from coverage by the social-democratic Het Vrije Volk and broadcasting organization VARA, Protestant politicians from the Protestant De Standaard and broadcaster NCRV, and Catholic politicians from the Catholic De Tijd and broadcaster KRO. Even so, continental political newspapers did not automatically enjoy more influence than their mass circulation competitors. To the contrary: while political papers in Weimar Germany were considered powerful and influential in instructing their readers how to vote, Hitler ultimately won the elections despite getting little support in the regular political press.107 For Hitler, garnering celebrity attention among a broad popular press was more decisive than influencing traditional political papers. Authority figures also lost control over their image due to the ongoing commercialization of the media, as they had to abide by the rules of commercial viability and to style themselves as mediagenic. Since being mediagenic is in the eye of the media consumer and not of its subject, political figures followed the lead set by journalists and audiences in judging whether their self-projection was sufficiently entertaining. In the United States, President Franklin D. Roosevelt used succinct, comprehensible, and personal radio speeches to bolster his role as democratic leader; it is likely that he reached thirty million listeners via radio even before World War II.108 But authoritarian regimes, too, took the entertainment logic of the media into account. Under the leadership of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis understood the need to employ a range of popular media, and allowed for a surprisingly heterogeneous print media landscape with a variety of publications to fulfill different purposes.109 They were equally attuned to the media logic of film. More than a thousand films were produced from 1933 to 1945, but most were technically non-political: about 50 percent were comedies, 25 percent melodramas, and only 10–25 percent overt propaganda. Comedies and melodramas were also dominant in the Italian and Spanish fascist dictatorships. In all three cases, entertainment films served the political function of stabilizing violent regimes.110

 Bernhard Fulda, Press and Politics in the Weimar Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).  Bösch, Mass Media, 128.  Corey Ross, Media and the Making of Modern Germany: Mass Communications, Society, and Politics from the Empire to the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 191–262; Patrick Rössler, “‘Wir zerstreuten uns zu Tode’: Formen und Funktionen der Medialisierung des Politischen in illustrierten Zeitschriften der NS-Zeit,” in Von der Politisierung der Medien zur Medialisierung des Politischen? Zum Verhältnis von Medien, Öffentlichkeiten und Politik im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Arnold Klaus, Christoph Classen, Susanne Kinnebrock et al. (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2010), 183–242. However, for an original argument on the limits and weaknesses of Nazi propaganda, see also: Ute Daniel, Beziehungsgeschichte: Politik und Medien im 20. Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2018), 181–203.  Bösch, Mass Media, 132–133.

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Radio was somewhat more complicated. The Nazis initially regarded radio as a powerful propaganda tool but overestimated its explicit political efficacy. Goebbels realized relatively soon that radio, too, was most effective when used indirectly, as people had become used to its entertainment value already in the 1920s. This put the Nazi regime into a bind as it faced a more difficult balancing act between trying to use radio to convince people of its political message and providing entertainment.111 For one thing, since radio was listened to in the private sphere, even the authoritarian state could not determine exactly how people interacted with what they heard. And for another, Hitler’s speeches were far less suitable for radio than the radio addresses of progressive or liberal leaders who were more measured in their tone. Having already established a signature, hyper-masculine persona, Hitler could not also give sentimental and personal talks on the radio like Roosevelt or King George V, but had to hold to his virile speeches even on the radio.112 The media’s entertainment logic continued to define the staging of authority in the postwar era. In election campaigns across countries, politicians started to adapt to the market functioning of the media to get their messages across better.113 Much like the mass press in the nineteenth century, television created new possibilities and risks for authority figures. In the United States, Richard Nixon embodied these trends in two distinct ways. Firstly, Nixon initially used the new medium of television to his advantage when campaigning in the 1950s. But by the 1960s, his relationship to television had soured, as he was considered untelegenic compared to political rivals such as John F. Kennedy. Nixon found himself struggling in an age when one had to be a good television personality to be a successful politician.114 Secondly, Nixon’s Watergate scandal points to the continued influence of mediated scandals. As the media became more pervasive and visually oriented throughout the twentieth century, it became increasingly difficult for politicians to hide information and avoid public blunders. The success of scandal in drawing in viewers further reinforced the culture of investigative journalism and its mission to scrutinize authority figures.115

 Inge Marszolek, “‘Nur keine Öde’: Radio im Nationalsozialismus,” in Von der Politisierung der Medien zur Medialisierung des Politischen? Zum Verhältnis von Medien, Öffentlichkeiten und Politik im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Arnold Klaus, Christoph Classen, Susanne Kinnebrock et al. (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2010), 161–182.  Corey Ross, Media and the Making, 389–390.  Gabriele Melischek and Josef Seethaler, “Kontinuität und Wandel im Verhältnis von Politik und Medien in der Wahlkampfkommunikation seit 1945: Methodik und Empirie im internationalen Vergleich,” in Von der Politisierung der Medien zur Medialisierung des Politischen? Zum Verhältnis von Medien, Öffentlichkeiten und Politik im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Arnold Klaus, Christoph Classen, Susanne Kinnebrock et al. (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2010), 243–266.  Susan Aasman, “Looking for the Real Richard Nixon: The Photojournalism of David Douglas Duncan,” Mediatization of Politics in History, ed. Huub Wijfjes and Gerrit Voerman (Leuven: Peeters, 2009), 207–222.  Thompson, Political Scandal, 90–118.

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Faced with television’s perceived power to constrain their actions, other European political figures sought to reassert control over the media in a bid to regain the influence their nineteenth-century predecessors had enjoyed. In France, President Charles de Gaulle tightly controlled television and showed little interest in making its programming more balanced. As Jean Chalaby notes: “For de Gaulle, television was a means to an end: authority and firm leadership.” De Gaulle was also careful to balance visibility with mystery in order to maintain his ‘aura.’ Understanding the value of symbolic power and charisma, which he believed required restraint in public appearances, De Gaulle limited his mediated appearances and orchestrated them to infuse them with displays of grandeur.116 Across the border, West German politicians likewise began exercising more control over the country’s semi-state run television channels in the 1960s and 1970s.117 Here, too, we see attempts made by political leaders to revert to earlier forms of media control to circumvent the new medium’s entertainment logic and the dangers it posed to their authority.

Conclusion The infamous political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli presented a stark choice to princes of his time: they could rule by instilling fear in their people or by winning their love. Machiavelli advised rulers that the former was safer, since they could control fear through violence but could not guarantee that people would repay benevolence with love.118 In truth, early modern leaders had relatively little power to enforce their will by force throughout an entire territory.119 This had changed by the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when political leaders had far more effective means of control at their disposal; however, they also began to operate in a competitive media market that demanded that they please its mass audience – and pander to its love – if they wanted its attention in the first place. Here we can turn from Machiavelli’s binary vision of rulership to Weber’s tripartite definition of authority: traditional, bureaucratic, and charismatic. For Weber, traditional authority was personal in that it was embodied by a king or emperor; modernity inaugurated impersonal authority in the form of large and anonymous bureaucracies; and

 Jean Chalaby, “A Charismatic Leader’s Use of the Media: De Gaulle and Television,” International Journal of Press/Politics 3, no. 4 (1998): 44–61, quote on 56.  Klaus Arnold, “Wie Deutschland begann, sich für Politik zu interessieren: Medienrezeption in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren,” in Von der Politisierung der Medien zur Medialisierung des Politischen? Zum Verhältnis von Medien, Öffentlichkeiten und Politik im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Arnold Klaus, Christoph Classen, Susanne Kinnebrock et al. (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2010), 323–346.  Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998 [1515]), 65–68.  Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, 264.

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Weber assumed that in the modern world personal charismatic authority would increasingly be replaced with an impersonal legal-rational authority. Even so, Weber acknowledged that no form of authority is pure, and that legal-rational authority also requires at least some charismatic dimension.120 Mediated personalization and celebritization, embodied through intimacy at a distance, served to give modern authority this renewed personal dimension, lending personalized authority to the public face of an underlying legal-rational authority. But authority is always a negotiation between leaders, media, and the public, and not just imposed from the top down. As this chapter has argued, political actors gained new opportunities for staging their authority to a broad public through the mass media, but also began to lose influence over the mediated construction of their authority. The use of media made these actors’ authority more (omni-)present in society, but the nature of this presence became subject to the media’s own logic and interests. The public face of power could take multiple forms, from that of the untouchable, larger-than-life authoritarian figure to the accessible, just-like-thecommon-person democratic leader. While celebrity could be used to create an image of either aloofness or familiarity, both types of celebrity politicians needed to be interesting and entertaining enough to be noticed, let alone embraced, by the mass public. In politically liberal states, the independence of commercial newspapers, as well as their new notions of political impartiality, ability to check power, and role in representing a strengthened public opinion, put further restraints on political leaders’ ability to stage their own authority. As a result, the staging of mediated authority became part and parcel of political actors’ daily work. Increasingly, this authority needed to be staged in two senses: the performance of power had to be theatrical to appeal to mass newspapers and their audiences, and this performance needed to be more carefully orchestrated in a mass mediated environment. This, then, was the nineteenth century’s contribution to how authority was staged: the mass media radically reshaped the nature of authority into a nascent celebrity phenomenon, and that authority became staged for a broad public – rather than inner elites – that could now experience authority in increasingly intimate ways from a distance.

 Weber, Economy and Society, vol. 1, 263.

Presenting Authority on the Political Stage

Philipp Nielsen

Architecture, Space, and Emotions: Forging Connections between Government and Public Abstract: Architectural spaces are intimately connected to the staging of power and authority. The nature of both staging and of the built environment have changed over time, however. The revolutions of the late eighteenth century fundamentally reconfigured who was considered important enough to be taken into account when designing the built environment of power. Following the French Revolution, subjects increasingly became citizens, and politics became significantly more participatory. This chapter follows the effects of this change on the way that European governments envisioned the spatial encounters of politics and people, on the one hand, and how both sides experienced this encounter, on the other. It traces the crucial role that emotions and their regulations played in the emergence of these new spatial relations. Keywords: architecture, court, parliament, emotions, citizens, delegates, rostrum, public staging ✶✶✶

Architectural spaces are intimately connected to the staging of power and authority. As Deyan Sudjic stipulates in his seminal work, The Edifice Complex: “Architecture is used by political leaders to seduce, to impress, and to intimidate.”1 Although Sudjic writes mostly about the twentieth century, the emotional trifecta Sudjic offers also applies to the architectural practices of earlier centuries. Early modern rulers, too, needed to establish their authority upon laying claim to a throne or title. When Duke Friedrich III crowned himself King Friedrich I in Prussia in 1701, for instance, palatial court architecture played a significant role in establishing his legitimacy. The palaces he built in and around Berlin were designed to impress both other royal sovereigns and the local Prussian nobility, both of whom needed to be convinced of Friedrich’s self-elevated status. The emotions of non-noble subjects lacking in political influence were of lesser concern to the new king, even though they composed the bulk of the courtly population in the form of royal retainers, servants, and purveyors to the court. The revolutions of the late eighteenth century fundamentally changed who was considered important enough to be taken into account when designing the built environment of power. Following the French Revolution, subjects increasingly became

 Deyan Sudjic, The Edifice Complex: The Architecture of Power (London: Penguin, 2005), 3. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110574012-007

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citizens, and politics became significantly more participatory.2 Above all in democratic regimes, the feelings of the masses became integral to politics, to be aroused in voting campaigns, street demonstrations, parliamentary behavior, and ceremonies such as oaths to the republican order. National pride was first and foremost a sentiment, and buildings formed part of the emotional structure that bound state and people together. While political regimes in the nineteenth century continued to worry about diplomatic relations with foreign powers, domestic audiences also emerged as crucial participants in, and targets of, the techniques leaders used to stage their authority. If, following Hannah Arendt, we consider authority to be based neither on a fear of violence and outright coercion, nor on argumentation and appeals to reason, but instead on a general acceptance of existing hierarchies, the study of emotions emerges as a critical resource to understanding this acceptance, expressed and enacted in the built environment.3 But whose feelings mattered most, and which ones? The answer depended on who was asking the questions. The bourgeois man of the early nineteenth century, for instance, imagined himself to be both particularly sensitive to feelings and in control of his affects. He set himself against the nobleman, whom he imagined as embodying highly stylized, courtly affectations. In contrast, the male, bourgeois individual defined himself through his authentic feelings, whose display he controlled both in private and in public.4 This emotional control took on a distinctly gendered aspect as it was held up against the presumed irrationality of women, regardless of their class. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the political power of emotions and their public display became tied to class politics, as sociologists identified urban crowds as a political category, one that was inherently irrational and fed on the weaknesses of women and the lower classes. While unruly emotions were thought to be inherent in a person’s gender or social class, observers also agreed that they could be produced through social interactions. Even bourgeois men, those so-called beacons of rationality, could lose all reason if swept up in a crowd.5 The ideal of rational discourse between individuals within orderly spaces versus the dreaded massing of irrational crowds outside of those spaces emerged as a crucial distinction in these sociological debates. Against this backdrop, governments and architects had to take the emotions of citizens into account, both those they felt were worthy citizens and those they deemed suspect. Government buildings needed to establish authority over both sets of emotions.

 According to Sudjic, even Saddam Hussein took ordinary Iraqis’ feelings into consideration in his architectural aesthetics.  Hannah Arendt, “What is Authority?” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 93.  Ute Frevert, Gefühle in der Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandehoeck & Ruprecht, 2021), 98–99, 104–105.  Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Macmillan, 1896; French original 1895), 27.

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While it is true that seducing, impressing, and intimidating are emotional practices, they focus on the way that emotional intentions are projected from above. Sudjic’s dictum reveals little about the means by which architecture produced these emotions or whether those moving around the built spaces really felt them. Socalled ‘authentic’ feelings are notoriously difficult to study. To investigate citizens’ potential affect, this chapter will examine the ways in which architectural design took the feelings of citizens into account and how those citizens responded through their behavior and in their discussions of design practices. After all, space does not exist outside of social praxis. According to Henri Lefebvre, precisely at the turn of the nineteenth century the existing, shared language of how to read and inhabit space, which had originated in the Renaissance, collapsed.6 The new regimes based on political participation had to establish, in uneven collaboration with their citizens, new languages and sentiments of space and authority. As such, architects, their clients, and those inhabiting the built environment worked together (unconsciously and unevenly) to produce these new social and political spaces. While the practice of government occurred in physical space, a semiotics of power was slowly delineated in wider discussions of architecture and expressed through the buildings’ designs. As the architectural press in Europe expanded rapidly in the middle of the eighteenth century, design became a concern dear to an emerging bourgeois society and thus represented a crucial antecedent to the widespread discussion of architecture’s representative function in the nineteenth century.7 Access to government architecture was established on the page as well as in space. If seduction, impression, and intimidation structured the encounter between subjects and architecture before the nineteenth century, the age of participatory politics broadened the emotional palette without doing away with older colors altogether. As in the eighteenth century, built space in the nineteenth century was expected to instill feelings of respect and admiration, but the primary objects of these feelings were now the nation and its politicians rather than the monarch. Citizens were meant to feel part

 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 17.  See: Barry Bergdoll, European Architecture, 1750–1890 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 43–44, 48–49, 145–146, 158–159. For further reading see: Richard Wittman, Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France (New York: Routledge, 2007); Rolf Fuhltrott, Deutschsprachige Architekturzeitschriften: Entstehung und Entwicklung der Fachzeitschriften für Architektur in der Zeit von 1789–1918. Mit Titelverzeichnis und Bestandsnachweisen (Munich: Verlag Dokumentation Saur KG, 1975); David Raizman, History of Modern Design: Graphics and Products since the Industrial Revolution, 2nd ed. (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2010); Matthew Rampley, Markian Prokopovych, and Nóra Veszprémi, Liberalism, Nationalism and Design Reform in the Habsburg Empire: Museums of Design, Industry and the Applied Arts (New York: Routledge, 2020); Mitchell Schwarzer, “The Design Prototype as Artistic Boundary: The Debate on History and Industry in Central European Applied Arts Museums, 1860–1900,” in Design History: An Anthology, ed. Dennis P. Doordan (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 1995), 185–199.

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of the nation and thus to participate in these emotions. The emergence of participatory politics also changed the venues in which authority was enacted, as public access to political spaces became a key component in the drama of political legitimacy. Starting in the French Revolution, existent buildings including royal palaces, estate-based assembly halls, theaters, and occasionally even tennis courts were used to host elected assemblies. When the Revolution of 1848 ushered in constitutions with at least some form of elected body in many states, corresponding parliament buildings were constructed across Europe. Towards the end of the century the functions of state expanded and with them the range of buildings that represented state authority. Court houses and hospitals were erected across national territory in numbers that complimented those of municipal offices and military installations. In national capitals, ministries and other bureaucratic offices also enlarged the governments’ spatial footprint. Often a single house of parliament developed into an entire government district, for instance when the British Houses of Parliament became flanked in the second half of the nineteenth century by the Treasury Building, new buildings for the Foreign Office, the India Office, and the Government Offices on Great George Street, among others. This process of expansion continued after World War I with the emergence of the welfare state, culminating ultimately in plans for new or enlarged capital districts that drew on the examples of earlier royal courts and feudal cities. What changed here was not just architectural design, but also fundamental structures of feeling. The emergence of participatory politics and its attendant emotions were part of a newly configured social production of space, its practices, representations, and symbolism as well as the political conflicts and power relations this entailed.8 One promising way to think about the connection between emotions and space is to consider feelings as practices that occur in space. Monique Scheer outlines such an approach with her concept of “emotions as a kind of practice.”9 In establishing a praxeological as well as a cognitive understanding of emotions, Scheer focuses on habits that enable and constrain feelings as well as their constant alteration. She argues that emotions are not just passively “felt” but also “done” within social relations embedded in material arrangements.10 These social relations mold feelings and make them historically dynamic and changing.11 For instance, the architecture of parliamentary buildings, together with

 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 7–15, 31–46, 404–405.  Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (And is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012): 193–220. Benno Gammerl and Rainer Herrn have applied a similar approach to spatial history. Benno Gammerl and Rainer Herrn, “Gefühlsräume – Raumgefühle: Perspektiven auf die Verschränkung von emotionalen Praktiken und Topografien der Moderne,” in Sub|urban: Zeitschrift für kritische Stadtforschung 3, no. 2 (2015): 7–22.  Scheer, “Are Emotions,” 203–204.  For such an approach, see: Ute Frevert, Emotions in History: Lost and Found (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011), 8–12, 212; Ute Frevert, The Moral Economy of Trust: Modern Trajectories (London: German Historical Institute, 2014), 30–41.

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the rules of comportment that structured behavior within them, provided the framework within which parliamentarians and visitors experienced emotions. At the same time, these spaces and their rules also reflected the emotions of specific actors, as the parliamentarians and architects who devised the structures actively sought to evoke and experience certain emotions. Understanding emotions as instruments of politics also relies on the recognition that emotions are corporeal as well as linguistic. They are not simply terms but are also embodied practices. The linguistic and the corporeal do not entirely overlap in their expression, though. Emotions always retain a remainder of uncertainty and unintelligibility, both for the person who expresses them and for the one who perceives them.12 Emotions are subject to knowledge, reflection, and conscious alterations. They are experienced as temporary but are reified in “emotional lexicons” and stabilized in the emotional rules and expectations inherent in a given “emotionology”: the “attitudes and standards that a society, or a definable group within a society, maintains towards basic emotions and their appropriate expression.”13 Built environments have always been the product of such lexicons and rules, and the emotional appeal of architecture and its concrete effects on people’s historic bodies should be understood in the terms of their times, and not in ahistorical ones. This points to a fissure in the approaches taken by the fields that encompass affect studies – history, psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, and sociology – and which approach the historical versus the universal nature of emotions from different grounds.14 Within architectural history, debates about how authority is staged in and through architecture do not always acknowledge the historical construction of emotions, or that emotional subjects inhabit feelings in gendered, race-, and/or class-specific ways.15 Philip

 William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 63–64, 100–111.  Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards,” American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (1985): 813–836, here 813. See also: Ute Frevert, “Defining Emotions: Concepts and Debates over Three Centuries,” in Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700–2000, ed. Ute Frevert et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1–31. For a broader overview of the history of emotions and its different approaches, see: Rob Boddice, The History of Emotions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018); Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction, trans. Keith Tribe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).  As another new approach, the field of material culture has recently branched out into considering the emotions of material goods. See for example: Derek Hillard, Heikki Lempa, and Russell Spinney, ed., Feelings Materialized: Emotions, Bodies, and Things in Germany, 1500–1950 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2020); Caroline van Eck, Art, Agency and Living Presence: From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object (Boston: De Gruyter, 2015); Oliver J. T. Harris and Tim Flohr Sørensen, “Rethinking Emotion and Material Culture,” Archaeological Dialogues 17 (2010): 145–163.  Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 242–251; Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 13–20. A

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Manow’s overview of representation in democratic architecture is a notable exception and an important influence on this chapter, as it gestures toward the historically preconditioned – and thus conditional – nature of emotional responses to the built environment.16 The philosopher Gernot Böhme’s term “atmospheres” offers another way to conceptualize the connection between emotions and space. Böhme defines “atmospheres” as “spaces with a mood, or emotionally felt spaces.”17 They can be constructed, yet need not be normative, even if political actors who stage their authority often aim to create a normative emotional atmosphere.18 Mikkel Bille, Peter Bjerregaard, and Tim Flohr Sørensen’s elaboration on the “in-between-ness” of atmospheres takes the concept further, as they argue that atmospheres do not have to be felt in an ahistorical fashion, but are experienced socially. As they write: “The uncertainty about what a place feels like and when it does so, and to whom, also opens up for ambivalence, contestation, or lack of compliance.”19 This chapter will attempt to map out historically contingent ideas about emotions as fundamental to the architecture of authority and its contestation, in which the nineteenth century represents a pivotal moment. Shifts in emotional culture from aristocracy to bourgeoisie are salient in this historical narrative: if the emotionology of courtly culture rested on the cultivation of carefully delineated social distinctions, bourgeois politicians aspired to an emotional culture which established a putative, idealized community of equals. Even the legally differentiated codes of honor that applied to different estates in Ancien Régime Germany were replaced in

praxeological understanding of emotions implies integrating the history of emotions into the study of socially produced subjectivities: Andreas Reckwitz, Das hybride Subjekt: Eine Theorie der Subjektkulturen von der bürgerlichen Moderne zur Postmoderne (Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2006), 131–155; Andreas Reckwitz, “Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing,” European Journal of Social Theory 5, no. 2 (2002): 243–263, here 257–258. For a history of the body in subject formation, see: Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Routledge, 1990), 217. For a genealogy of the self and the body in relation to power relations, see: Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993); Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 208–224.  Philip Manow, In the King’s Shadow: The Political Anatomy of Democratic Representation, trans. Patrick Camiller (Cambridge: Polity, 2010).  Gernot Böhme, Christian Borch, Olafur Eliasson, and Juhani Pallasmaa, “Atmospheres, Art, Architecture: A Conversations between Gernot Böhme, Christian Borch, Olafur Eliasson, and Juhani Pallasmaa,” in Architectural Atmospheres: On the Experience and Politics of Architecture, ed. Christian Borch (Basel: Birckhäuser Verlag, 2014), 90–107, here 96.  Böhme, Borch, Eliasson, and Pallasmaa, “Atmospheres.” For a similar argument see: Nigel Thrift, “The Material Practices of Glamour,” Journal of Cultural Economy 1, no. 1 (2008): 9–23.  Mikkel Bille, Peter Bjerregaard, and Tim Flohr Sørensen, “Staging Atmospheres: Materiality, Culture, and the Texture of the In-between,” Emotion, Space and Society 15 (2015): 31–38, here 34.

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Prussia in 1848 by an honor code that encompassed all male citizens.20 The debates about who was included in that group of citizens, which continued well after 1848, suggest that distinctions between insiders and outsiders did not disappear entirely. Nonetheless, wrestling with the ideal of equality in itself had an effect on the staging of authority.21 If courtly architecture reinforced distinctions, parliamentary architecture needed to create emotional bonds representing the ideals of liberté, égalité, and fraternité. In their quest for new modes of representation, politicians, architects, and the public debated ideas of trust, empathy, humility, and pride, their relation to each other, and their gendered and class-specific dimensions. These discussions and the practices they facilitated prefigured many of the debates and practices of the twentieth century, when democratizing and decolonizing states built new government buildings and occasionally entirely new capital cities. Colonized spaces were important sites of staging authority prior to the twentieth century as well. But this chapter’s focus rests on European spaces and the ways that newly minted citizens, rather than subjects, began to confront built space in the late eighteenth century. For this reason, metropolitan rather than colonial architecture serves as the object of study, without denying that the latter was also complicit in staging authority through the built environment.

I Palaces as Public Places Prior to the nineteenth century, representative architecture in the form of courts and churches already exhibited some openness towards visitors, although churches were more widely accessible than palaces. For the latter, only specific social groups could enter, as the organization of the palace space was shaped around the presentation of the royal body. As Ernst Kantorowicz elaborates in his seminal study The King’s Two Bodies, the medieval monarch was composed of two bodies with different spatial dimensions and logics: the natural body and the body politic. While the body politic could reach far beyond the king’s actual body in spatial terms, both had to be staged in physical space to have their presence recognized.22 It was in these palaces, where the treatment of the king’s natural and political body also served to delineate public and private space, that the recognition of a distinction between monarch and kingdom first emerged in the 900s CE.23 The spatial division  Frevert, Gefühle in der Geschichte, 213–214.  For a historical account of trust, see: Ute Frevert, Vertrauensfragen: Eine Obsession der Moderne (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2013); Martha C. Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love matters for Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013) on empathy as a central emotion of democracy.  Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).  Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 188.

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of palaces into public and private quarters suggests that the monarch had a private life aside from his, and occasionally her, official duties for the state. In practice, though, both types of space were used well into the eighteenth century to stage the authority of the monarch and in this sense were also both essentially public. As Manuel Rivero Rodriguez writes about the Spanish monarchy: The king’s house (casa) means three things: his family, his servants, and his residence. His officers composed the court, supplying his entourage of ministers and counsellors. Both public and private spaces were always contiguous, because the domestic space was prolonged into the public space. This domestication of the government, i.e. the extension of family space to public affairs, was the most remarkable feature of the technical management used in the consolidation of the monarchy.24

The Spanish monarchy’s architectural expansion, originally initiated by Philip IV, served as a model for Louis XIV in France to create the palace of Versailles as the epitome of baroque court architecture and absolutist representation. Louis conceived of the palace as a complete public spectacle and a space in which “we devote ourselves entirely to the public.”25 The palace and park were popularized through published design plans and brochures. Since the park’s only requirement for entry was that one be dressed “decently,” the grounds drew a wider public of what Peter Rietberger calls tourists avant-la-lettre.26 This impersonal public joined the thousands who lived at Versailles year-round. The core household of the French king and queen numbered 2,000 people, while the staff and courtiers who lived in the town itself grew to 20,000 inhabitants by the end of the seventeenth century.27 Versailles was thus a continuously public space, even in the absence of day-trippers. It was peopled by subjects concerned with caring for the king’s physical needs, as well those who sought access to the king to beg intercession from him. The body of the king and the experience of the spaces in which he resided were thus closely bound up with each other, and also with the bodies of his subjects. These bodily practices were also emotional in nature. Versailles’ publicly accessible gardens, with their view of the palace, “were meant to impress and awe” by showcasing  Manuel Rivero Rodriguez, “Court Studies in the Spanish World,” in The Court in Europe, ed. Marcello Fantoni (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 2012), 135–147, here 144.  Quoted in: Peter Rietbergen, “The Political Rhetoric of Capitals: Rome and Versailles in the Baroque Period, or the ‘Power of Place,’” in New Perspectives on Power and Political Representation from Ancient History to the Present Day, ed. Daniëlle Slootjes and Harm Kaal (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 56–77, here 68. All translations from French and German, here and throughout, are by the author.  Rietbergen, “Political Rhetoric,” 68; Daniëlle O. Kisluk-Grosheide and Bertrand Rondot, “The Incomparable Versailles,” in Visitors to Versailles: From Louis XIV to the French Revolution, ed. Daniëlle O. Kisluk-Grosheide and Bertrand Rondot (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 2–29, here 2.  Jeroen Duindam, “Versailles, Vienna, and Beyond: Changing Views of Household and Government in Early Modern Europe,” in Royal Courts in Dynastic States and Empires: A Global Perspective, ed. Jeroen Duindam, Tülay Artan, and Metin Kunt (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 401–431, here 411; Rietbergen, “Political Rhetoric,” 72.

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the king’s absolute power.28 By emphasizing visually that all of the monarchy’s actions were conducted in one place, the palace complex turned style, space, and the practice of government into a ‘total work of art’ (Gesamtkunstwerk). Rather than fostering the functional differentiation of government offices that would become the hallmark of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Versailles offered the visitors who toured its halls an open view of state business, ranging from the issuing of passports and granting of loans to the reception of foreign ambassadors. Added to this, the private activities of the monarch, such as his meals or strolls in the park with the queen, were equally part of the public spectacle.29 When Louis XIV first planned the expansion of Versailles, he did not intend the palace to represent the public face of the monarchy. That role was reserved for the Louvre in Paris, and Versailles was to be a private palace instead. With the addition in the 1670s of the Ambassadors’ Staircase and the Hall of Mirrors, however, Versailles became the monarchy’s primary public space, anticipating the court’s official move to Versailles in 1682. While Versailles’ decorations had previously situated Louis among the gods, Charles Le Brun’s new decorations of the staircase and the Hall of Mirrors focused on the earthly exploits of Louis XIV, including depictions of foreign dignitaries visiting the king. This iconographic change mirrored the decision to open Versailles to foreign dignitaries, as Louis’ audience expanded out from France to other parts of the world.30 The presence of foreign dignitaries, whether in person or in painting, played a part in staging the king’s authority before his own subjects as well. Journeying to Versailles, they encountered the king and his actions as the only focal point, without the distraction of busy urban scenes and alternate centers of authority that existed in Paris. Instead, here Louis XIV indeed became the state, with its functions on constant display and the king at the center of governance. The design and artwork of the palace generally emphasized that the king was always at work, while a bas-relief in the Ambassadors’ Staircase depicted him as a military commander.31 The Hall of Mirrors seemed like a marvel to many visitors, as it allowed them to see not only the monarch but also themselves for the first time. Technological novelty, combined with the palace’s sheer scale, was meant to instill in visitors, both foreign and domestic, an awareness of Louis’ power.32 But while the architecture of Versailles fulfilled this function, at least until it began to fall into disrepair by the 1750s, the real reason tourists came to Versailles was to regard the king’s physical person, not the body politic. They came to see the king in his chapel, the king during dinner, the king in the park, not the king signing decrees or governing. Since his schedule was a matter of public knowledge, visitors could time

 Kisluk-Grosheide and Rondot, “Incomparable Versailles,” 2.  Kisluk-Grohseide and Rondot, “Incomparable Versailles,” 3.  Kisluk-Grohseide and Rondot, “Incomparable Versailles,” 4–5.  Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 77, 200.  Burke, Fabrication, 199–200; Robert W. Berger and Thomas F. Hedin, Diplomatic Tours of the Garden of Versailles under Louis XIV (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 4.

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their visits accordingly. As early as 1674, guidebooks prepared visitors in an act of premediation, priming visitors on what to expect and what emotions to feel once they arrived.33 In a guide published in 1681, for instance, Laurent Morellet Combes readied his readers to be surprised and ultimately overwhelmed: “Admire there the grandeur, the sumptuousness, the magnificence and the largesse of the prince; and admit that Versailles eclipses [efface] all the enchanted palaces of history and fable.”34 Not all writers were as grandiloquent as Combes. Rather than focusing on the palace’s opulence, the three most popular guides of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries counselled visitors on how to identify and interpret the palace’s artworks, interior decoration, and garden arrangements. Together with widely circulating maps and prints of Versailles, they familiarized not only French readers but other Europeans as well with the palace’s sites and its role in staging the authority of the French kings.35 Ultimately, however, not even the guides could prevent visitors from getting lost on the palace grounds, and especially in its vast gardens, which was itself a symbol of the monarch’s power to overwhelm his subjects. More importantly, the guides could not fully convey the wonder of experiencing Versailles, as one author admitted.36 All they could do was to pique their readers’ curiosity.37 While wealthier foreigners on the Grand Tour could hope, with the right introduction, to meet the king or other members of the royal family in person, for the far more numerous French subjects who flocked to the palace on weekends, a glance at the monarch in the royal chapel or the gardens had to suffice.38 Even so, both foreigners and French subjects alike recorded their passion upon seeing the sovereign. In 1779, a mere decade before the French Revolution, a British physician recorded the crowds’ “unsated curiosity” and intense satisfaction upon spotting Louis XVI.39 The

 For a discussion of the concept in relation to emotions, see: Benno Gammerl, Philipp Nielsen, and Margrit Pernau, “Introduction: Encountering Feelings – Feeling Encounters,” in Encounters with Emotions: Negotiating Cultural Differences since Early Modernity, ed. Benno Gammerl, Philipp Nielsen, and Margrit Pernau (New York: Berghahn, 2019), 1–35, here 10.  Combes [Laurent Morellet], Explication historique de ce qu’il y a de plus remarquable dans la maison royale de Versailles: Et en celle de Monsieur (Paris: Saint Cloud, 1681), 1, quoted in: Katharina Krause, “‘Vous y verrez l’Ancienne et la Nouvelle Rome’: Versailles als Summe aller Paläste,” in The Emperor’s House: Palaces from Augustus to the Age of Absolutism, ed. Michael Featherstone et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 353–364, here 353.  Elisabeth Maisonnier, “Visitors’ Guidebooks and Engravings,” in Visitors to Versailles: From Louis XIV to the French Revolution, ed. Daniëlle O. Kisluk-Grosheide and Bertrand Rondot (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 238–249, here 241–245.  Maisonnier, “Visitors’ Guidebooks,” 249.  Jean Boutier, “Grand Tourists: Noble Visitors to the Court of the French Kings,” in Visitors to Versailles: From Louis XIV to the French Revolution, ed. Daniëlle O. Kisluk-Grosheide and Bertrand Rondot (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 226–237, here 226.  Boutier, “Grand Tourists,” 229.  Boutier, “Grand Tourists,” 226.

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emotions described were those appropriate to spectacle. Curiosity and awe depend on a premediated horizon of expectations, but also on distance, appearing in this case as the audience’s remove from active participation in governance. Closing this gap would later become the aim of democratic politics. Thus, while the openness of the gardens and even parts of the palace itself seemed extraordinary to foreign visitors, they were not as accessible as it would seem. Rather than foreshadowing the idealized political participation of later nation-states, Versailles’ spectacular arrangement anticipated the ocular publicity that underpins the modern era’s personalization of politics.40 While acts of government were on display at Versailles, the primary exhibit was the monarch himself, and even the stench of refuse that plagued the palace could not undermine the feeling of elevation prompted by the royal presence.41 The staging of authority rested on the visibility of the king, not on his actions; the authority being presented was one of being as much as it was one of doing.

II Finding a New Connection between Power and People in the Nineteenth Century When on 5 October 1789, several thousand Parisian market women marched on Versailles to voice their protest, the being of the king was no longer sufficient to cement his authority. Instead, the crowd was interested in his doing. According to eyewitnesses, the appearance of Louis XVI still impressed the demonstrators – just as contemporaneous songs still overtly professed subjects’ love for the king and queen – but it ultimately took the king’s promise of political action to calm the protesters.42 Those promises included the provision of bread, the acceptance of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, and the court’s relocation to Paris to be among the people. By that point, the relationship of the monarch to his subjects was already in transition, which had started with the establishment of the National Assembly on 17 June 1789. In the weeks before that seminal event, even members of the Third Estate present at the Estates General had still praised the “paternal feelings” of the king, as well as their “love and respect” for him, using traditional terms that maintained the hierarchical structure of the Ancien Régime.43 Visitors to the palace in pre-revolutionary Versailles were thus still passive spectators, admiring or gawking at the monarch in a space that had been

 Boutier, “Grand Tourists,” 227–228.  Kisluk-Grohseide and Rondot, “Incomparable Versailles,” 27–28.  Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 280–281.  Jean-François Campmas quoted in: Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture, 1789–1790 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 151; Arendt, “What is Authority?” 93, 140.

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built to impress. Now, with the founding of the National Assembly in June, its delegates and other visitors to the palace both entered into a much more active relationship with each other and with the king. While court politics had encompassed emotions too, in the National Assembly the circle of whose emotions mattered was widened dramatically. Members of the assembly “remarked on the exhilarating effects of the spectators’ enthusiasm” that carried them in their revolutionary determination.44 The “debate became a three-way dialogue between speaker, deputies, and audience.”45 Along with active commentary from the audience present at the proceedings, delegates received a constant stream of letters from their constituents, while mayors from across France also sent lobbyists to the assembly.46 The constituents’ letters no longer professed love for a well-meaning paternal figure of authority. Instead the letter writers made increasingly passionate demands of a man who merely held delegated power.47 While the enthusiasm of the visiting citizens could hearten delegates with their revolutionary determination, not all of the feelings citizens held towards their representatives were positive. Some representatives feared their constituents’ criticism, which could escalate to the level of death threats.48 Indeed, the anger and threat of physical violence by the people left some deputies visibly shaken.49 In October 1789, angry citizens crossed over from the visitors’ section of the assembly hall into that reserved for the deputies to challenge the latter’s authority and establish their own. This in turn prompted calls by Moderates to limit and regulate the people’s presence among the delegates.50 The people, “in a state of slavery to their passions,” as it was claimed, only disturbed the course of politics.51 Such assertions met angry opposition from visitors, who were now reduced to passive spectators once more.52 The immediate outcome of the October Days of 1789 was the National Assembly’s and the royal court’s move to Paris. While the king took up residence in the Louvre, the assembly did not have a preassigned venue. Made an authority, it engaged in the search of a stage. First, the assembly resided in the palais of the archbishop of Paris. Soon thereafter, in November 1789, it moved into the Salle de Manège, the former riding hall of the Tuileries palace, and thus into close proximity to the king. Both this proximity and the National Assembly’s use of a formerly royal space underlined the importance of the people’s representatives. In the ensuing transitional period that lasted until the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793, the assembly’s delegates held  Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 141.  Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 141.  Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 235–236, 239.  Sennett, Flesh and Stone, 285.  Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 237–238.  Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 197–198.  Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 197; Jon Cowans, To Speak for the People: Public Opinion and the Problem of Legitimacy for the French Revolution (London: Routledge, 2001), 70.  Antoine-François Delandine quoted in: Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 199.  Cowans, Speak for the People, 70.

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their debates as a body politic, in direct opposition to the vestiges of power personified in the royal body next door. Four months later, in May 1793, the National Assembly finally acquired a space that was remodeled to fit its purposes, the Salle des Machines of the Tuileries, a former royal theater built under Louis XIV. In this context, contemporaries routinely compared the atmosphere in the assembly to that of the theater, where the theatricality of the speaker and the noise of the audience, be it murmuring, clapping, or shouting, prompted emotions to flow back and forth and build upon each other. The metaphor of the theater also provided participants from different political orientations a template in two ways: as a model for their own behavior and as a paradigm for interpreting the proceedings as a drama.53 In physical terms, though, the hall’s interior had been remodeled to fit its new purpose, even as it retained allusions to the classical stage.54 Following the example of the Roman theater, the redesigned Salle des Machines featured hemispherical rows descending towards a central focus, with the speaker’s rostrum and the assembly president’s seat facing the delegates. The theater’s new arrangement thus referenced ancient models, reflected trends in “democratic theater” in the run up to the revolution, and symbolically united the former separate estates into one body of parliament.55 The people continued to intervene in the assembly’s proceedings inside and outside of this new space. Located at the center of Paris, the Tuileries gardens and the adjacent galleries of the Palais-Royal provided a point of intersection between social strata.56 Deputies used their direct contact with constituents outside on the streets “to sound out the[ir] spirit,” just as they did when they canvassed them through written correspondence.57 Inside the building, Radical deputies sought to harness the noisy intervention of the crowd to their advantage as they debated rival Moderates, who consequently had to counter both the Radicals’ arguments and the “cheers, jeers, and heckling” from the gallery.58 Those same Moderates also sought to instrumentalize emotions: Mirabeau affected a “studied rage” in numerous speeches.59 The questionable quality of such playacting undermined some of its intended effect of riling up the audience. Nonetheless, concerns about the presence of visitors grew, especially as they seemed to model their reactions on the rowdy popular theater rather than on the refined Comédie-Française, the formal theater established by Louis XIV and frequented by the aristocracy. In contrast to the manicured behavior of the noble theater, the visitors’ clapping and hissing to express approval and disapproval in the assembly became “utterly destructive to the

 Angelica Goodden, “The Dramatising of Politics: Theatricality and the Revolutionary Assemblies,” Forum for Modern Languages Studies 20, no. 3 (1984): 193–212, here 194, 199–200, 202.  Manow, King’s Shadow, 21–22.  Manow, King’s Shadow, 22–23, 33–34; Bergdoll, European Architecture, 108–109.  Sennett, Flesh and Stone, 278.  Cowans, Speak for the People, 69.  Cowans, Speak for the People, 70, 109.  Goodden, “Dramatising,” 207.

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idea of freedom of debate,” according to the English traveler Arthur Young.60 In addition, deputies on the right were particularly suspicious of the presence of female visitors, claiming that Radicals used women’s more “frivolous” nature to their advantage.61 As the authorities tried to dampen these acts of disruption, they looked to spatial solutions. Already in the redesigned Salle des Machines of May 1793, the newly constructed visitors’ galleries placed citizens at a greater remove from the deputies with whom they had previously shared the floor. From their balconies they overlooked a National Assembly that was increasingly downgraded from its central position in French politics, including by the constitution of June 1793. As a result, while visitors were still present, the less heated debates between parliamentarians led to fewer and more muted interventions by spectators.62 The new constitution also included provisions for the increased physical policing of the visitors’ behavior. The president of the National Assembly, who now had command of a guard force, controlled disturbances from the galleries with increasing strictness.63 In the Constitution of the Year III, enacted in 1795, finally, women were banned from the building in order to calm discussions further, as a reflection of the growing influence of the more conservative deputies and their views about women’s susceptibility to emotional outbursts.64 While the greater policing of visitors’ behavior, and the more restrictive attitude towards free debate, played a greater role in subduing the proceedings than the exclusion of women, the accepted view about women’s unruly emotionality signaled the emergence of a new civic emotional regime, in which the male citizen, though passionate for republic and patrie, was guided by reason.65 The history of the French National Assembly presaged many of the issues that buildings designed for people’s delegates would face throughout nineteenth-century Europe: the location of the parliament building vis-à-vis other institutions of power, its accessibility to visitors and the political spectacle to which they were treated, and the manner in which citizens were allowed to interact with the parliamentary proceedings. In addition, apprehensions about the emotionality of the ‘crowd,’ its tendency to descend into a ‘mob,’ and the mob’s (presumably) negative role in democratic politics as opposed to the positive influence of ‘the people’ also emerged at in this time period.66 Concerns about democracy and order would henceforth structure attempts to stage authority within the framework of participatory politics.  Arthur Young, Travels in France during the Years 1787, 1788 and 1789 (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1889), quoted in: Goodden, “Dramatising,” 205.  Cowans, Speak for the People, 70.  Cowans, Speak for the People, 127.  Cowans, Speak for the People, 135, 172.  Cowans, Speak for the People, 165.  Sennett, Flesh and Stone, 285.  Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 197–199, 242; Cowans, Speak for the People, 34, 91, 195–198. For further theoretization of these terms, see: Sennett, Flesh and Stone, 285, and his discussion of Le Bon. See also: Le Bon, Crowd.

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Aesthetics played a role as well, and in particular the quest for an architectural expression appropriate to venues housing the people’s representatives. In France, the National Assembly answered this question by moving into the Palais Bourbon in 1798. The former palace of the Duchesse de Bourbon had been taken over by the revolutionary government and was extensively renovated for use by the parliamentarians. At the same time, the Senate, as the upper chamber, moved into another former noble palace, the Palais Luxemburg. Even though the two buildings were not entirely new – unlike the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. – they were the first to undergo sweeping renovations to house republican parliaments representing the entire nation. Until 1793, both the National Assembly and the Senate had shared repurposed spaces with the king. Now they broke away from their previous spatial proximity to the king and to each other, enhancing their visibility as distinct constitutional entities in Paris’ urban landscape. On the inside, the Palais Bourbon retained the hemispherical seating arrangement established in the Salle des Machines, with its symbolism of bringing the nation together with the speaker, rather than emphasizing the king as the head of state.67 The interior’s classical references were extended to the exterior as well when Napoleon I added a more imposing neo-classical façade in 1806, at a time when the delegates had little actual power.68 The Palais Bourbon continued to be the seat of the lower house of the French parliament throughout the nineteenth century, and up to the present day. A print from shortly after the establishment of the Second Republic in 1848 illustrates its prominent position in the Parisian cityscape (Fig. 7.1). The power held by the deputies, however, waxed and waned under the different monarchical regimes that followed the First Empire.69 With the Third Republic of 1870, the Palais Bourbon once more became the undisputed seat of sovereignty. When the Palais de Tuileries burned down that same year, a symbol of royal power was also visibly destroyed: the Bourbon monarchy had moved into the Palais de Tuileries as its royal residence in 1815 as part of the Restoration, and the building had remained a symbolic counterpoint to parliamentary authority in the center of Paris.70 After its fiery destruction,

 Manow, King’s Shadow, 34–35.  Athena S. Leoussi with George Payne and Alibor Sulak, “Language of Freedom: Democracy, Humanity, and Nationality in the Architecture and Art of the Modern European National Parliament,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism, ed. John Stone et al. (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2020), 245–276, here 253; David van Zanten, “Nineteenth-Century French Government Architectural Services and the Design of the Monuments of Paris,” Art Journal 48, no. 1 (1989): 16–22, here 18.  For a detailed review of the French parliaments’ material, spatial, and embodied history since the nineteenth century, see: Delphine Gardey, Le Linge du Palais-Bourbon: Corps, Matérialité et Genre du Politique à L’ère Démocratique (Lormont: Le Bord de L’Eau, 2015).  Philip Mansel, “The Court in the Nineteenth Century: Return to the Limelight,” The Court in Europe, ed. Marcello Fantoni (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 2012), 255–271, here 263.

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the royal palace lost its position as a rival site of power in the city, and the last vestiges of its ruined form were torn down in 1883.

Fig. 7.1: La Chambre des Députés, Paris, France, 1849. Nineteenth-century illustration.

Outside of France, the wider Restoration following the Congress of Vienna of 1814–1815 established a web of nominally constitutional monarchies in which assembly buildings played little role in the staging of authority. The construction of the British Houses of Parliament following the fire of 1832 remained an exception in this context: although political discourse in Britain, too, was influenced by demands for greater popular participation, the new building drew on older spatial traditions, including in its seating arrangements.71 The short-lived revolutions that spread across continental Europe in 1848 created parliaments but not parliament buildings. The German National Assembly met in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche, a protestant church constructed in 1789 and repurposed into a political venue. With a liturgical tradition centered around oratory, the church interior had been designed with the acoustics of speaking in mind, and thus seemed to lend itself to the work of the assembly. Still, the auditory shift from church intonation to parliamentary debate was not unproblematic: parliamentarians and

 Michael Minkenberg, “Introduction: Power and Architecture: The Construction of Capitals, the Politics of Space, and the Space of Politics,” in Power and Architecture: The Construction of Capitals and the Politics of Space, ed. Michael Minkenberg (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 1–30, here 19; Edward J. Gillin, The Victorian Palace of Science: Scientific Knowledge and the Building of the Houses of Parliament (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 25, 30, 35.

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visitors alike raised frequent complaints about the difficulty of hearing the speakers. Visually though, even in this church setting, visitors drew parallels with the theater as a performative space. Friedrich Hart, a visitor to the Paulskirche in 1848, commented on the theatricality of the assembly’s president, Heinrich von Gagern. Like many powerful men before him, wrote Hart, Gagern’s authority rested on his talent as an actor.72 As audience to the political stage, the public’s presence at the parliamentary proceedings and ability to hear the debates, or in the absence of physical presence to read about them in the press, acquired paramount significance for the successful staging, and thus presumed legitimacy, of representative politics. The presence of visitors also affected the behavior of the parliamentarians. As representatives of the people, these political actors faced a different kind of scrutiny than had monarchs such as Louis XIV. Louis’ spectacle framed him as a divine creature: as he sought to produce awe and admiration, not to represent the people, he projected those goals onto the royal setting. Representatives, on the other hand, were judged on their ability to offer a mirror image of their constituents and, by extension, the nation. Representatives had to embody both similarity with the nation and a dignity that set them apart, since their dignified behavior was a reflection of national honor. An aura of competence completed the trifecta of expectations. Dignity, in particular, was taken as a standard against which to regulate the parliamentarians’ behavior, based on assumptions about bourgeois comportment.73 With the bourgeoisie now seen as underpinning the new order, the emotional self-control of the individualist male delegate symbolized the dignity of the nation. Failure to behave in the appropriate manner was read, and policed, as a threat to the collective. When Gagern lost his temper, for instance, Hart criticized him for his lack of self-control, which he felt revealed a lack of “civic virtue” (Bürgertugend) and threatened the dignity of the president’s office and that of the chamber with it.74 In later years, Social Democrats were frequently accused both of instrumentalizing parliament as a stage and of simultaneously undermining the authority of parliamentary institutions by vocally questioning the bourgeois order. Branded as hotheads and opportunists, delegates from their caucus were repeatedly excluded from parliamentary sessions.75

 Friedrich Hart, Ein Tag in der Paulskirche: Skizzen und Porträt’s aus dem Reichstag in Frankfurt am Main (Leipzig: Otto Spamer, 1848), 12.  “Geschäfts-Ordnung für den Reichstag des Norddeutschen Bundes,” in Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Reichstages des Norddeutschen Bundes im Jahre 1867. Vol. 2, Anlagen zu den Verhandlungen des Reichstages von Nr. 1–127, 1–5. (Berlin: Verlag der Buchdruckerei der Norddeutschen Allgemeinen Zeitung, 1867), (§§ 58–59), 5.  Hart, Ein Tag in der Paulskirche, 14. On the importance of physical comportment and class in the British Parliament, see Ben Griffin’s chapter in this volume.  Jörg-Uwe Fischer, “Majestätsbeleidigung im Reichstag: ‘Eine solche Verletzung der monarchischen Gefüle der Majorität des Reichstags . . ., ’” Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen 33, no. 3 (2002): 573–588, here 577. See also: Philipp Nielsen, “Feeling Political in Parliament: Rules, Regulations,

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The accusation levelled against Social Democrats, and occasionally other politicians too, that they used the rostrum to address the wider public rather than their fellow parliamentarians – what was known as ‘speaking out of the window’ – raised concerns about the proper verbal content of parliamentary speeches and the rightful audience to whom they were addressed. Was the intended audience fellow parliamentarians, visitors in the galleries, newspaper readers, the nation as a whole, or a specific social class or group of party members? Louis XIV addressed his subjects. But whom did parliamentarians address, and how were the addressees likely to react? Such concerns were not unfounded. From the very first day that the German National Assembly met in the Paulskirche in 1848, visitors flocked to the galleries which overlooked the circular nave and could hold up to 600 spectators. The audience’s desire for spectacle was evident from the outset. Hart, one of those early visitors, was so eager to observe the deputies’ smiles and winks, as well as their rhetorical techniques of oratory, that he deliberately chose a day without important items on the agenda so as not to get distracted by the content of the debates. Annoyed that the galleries did not give him an unobstructed view, Hart pulled strings to secure a seat normally reserved for parliamentarians.76 Such expectations of participation could easily tip over into a sense of entitlement. To counteract the ever-changing audience’s unpredictable reactions, German parliamentarians gave themselves the power to regulate the public’s behavior from early on, thus learning from the challenges faced by the National Assembly during the French Revolution. To prevent delegates from ‘playing to the gallery,’ visitors were banned not only from voicing negative comments but also from expressing support by clapping, a rule still in effect in Germany today.77 This power did not go uncontested, though. A contemporary illustration of one of the National Assembly’s sessions portrays parliamentarians and visitors actively engaged – some with each other, others with the speaker at the rostrum – and only few listening quietly as the rules prescribed (Fig. 7.2). When the Frankfurt Assembly’s Vice President Alexander von Soiron was mocked by some visitors, he attempted to have the offenders removed; when this narrowly targeted gesture failed due to their refusal to leave, he had to have the entire gallery cleared instead.78 Although procedural rules allowed for such a clearing, Soiron still had to defend his actions against widespread criticism that he had not given the required preliminary warning.79 The incident highlights the contradictions at the heart

and the Rostrum, Germany 1849–1951,” in Feeling Political: Emotions and Institutions since 1789, ed. Ute Frevert et al. (London: Palgrave, 2022), 59–90, here 71–75.  Hart, Ein Tag in der Paulskirche, 7, 8, 11.  Goodden, “Dramatising,” 210.  Franz Wigard, ed., Stenographischer Bericht über die Verhandlungen der deutschen constituierenden Nationalversammlung, Zweiter Band, Nr. 34–61 (StNV 1848.2) (Frankfurt a/M: Johan David Sauerländer, 1848), 10 August 1848, 1465.  Wigard, StNV 1848.2, 10 August 1848, 1469.

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of parliamentary spectacle enacted in space: delegates had to be insulated as much as possible from the public’s (potentially unruly) presence without abandoning the idea that the proceedings were a public affair. The goal, ultimately, was to create an audience of witnesses: visitors should bear witness to the debates between parliamentarians, the argumentation of political positions, their flights of rhetoric, and the making of new laws. In this way, they were witnesses to the nation’s new body politic: not the king, but the many conversing parliamentarians. Here, too, there was an inherent conflict as the plurality of opinions and the desire for national unity often clashed. At the same time, this conceptualization of politics made the architecture of parliamentary buildings and especially their acoustics a central concern. Parliamentarians needed to be able to hear each other, and visitors needed to be able to hear the parliamentarians. Without new buildings specially built for this purpose, one way to improve the acoustics – and thus to guarantee the smooth running of debate from the delegates’ perspective – was to silence the spectators.

Fig. 7.2: A session of the National Assembly in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt am Main, depicted in a contemporaneous print.

Defeated by reactionary forces, the German parliament dissolved itself within a year, well before the procedural questions regulating comportment in parliament were settled. Yet in the following decades discussions about behavior continued, as almost all of the German states began to draft constitutions and establish more politically active

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assemblies. The question was taken up on a federal level in the constitution of the North German Confederation in 1867, the parliament of which formed the basis for the Reichstag – the German Empire’s parliament – in 1871. The German Empire’s mixed constitution, with both democratic and authoritarian elements, distinguished it from its more liberal neighbors. The German parliament was elected by general male franchise, but the emperor alone appointed the government and its ministers, including the chancellor. The parliament had neither the right to censure the government nor initiate legislation, but it did have the right to vote on laws coming from the government, so that the emperor was dependent on the parliament to pass the state’s annual budget, for instance. As such, the German Empire’s parliament is an illuminating case study of the competing trends of royal and parliamentary authority as it was staged in the nineteenth century. As in the French Second Empire under Napoleon III, in the German Empire royal pageantry continued to rival the symbolic politics of the national parliament and did so with increasingly modern means.80 Even so, the German parliament exerted greater influence than the National Assembly under Napoleon III, since the former’s wider franchise provided it with a more visible national mandate. Despite its reputation as an outlier in European politics, Imperial Germany’s debates about public access, press coverage, oratory, and the place of parliament thus mirrored similar debates in other European countries. As the predecessor to the German Empire, the North German Confederation’s parliament had already had to determine where delegates would speak. The parliament initially occupied the chamber of the Prussian House of Lords, which did not have a rostrum. While seemingly arcane, the question of whether or not to have a rostrum played an important role in the self-understanding of the parliamentarians, and whether their authority would be seen as either individual or collective. At issue was whether parliamentarians should speak standing among their follow delegates and thus from within their midst, or walk up to the stage as individuals and address the other representatives and the audience from an opposite position. Opinions diverged on the matter. Those in favor argued that speaking from the seat would allow for greater spontaneity and signal greater symbolic equality of the deputies. Opponents bemoaned the acoustic difficulties of such an arrangement, as some deputies would inevitably be sitting behind the speaker who would then have to turn around continuously to be heard. The decision fell in favor of adding a rostrum but also retaining the right to speak from one’s seat if he so chose. The new spatial arrangement became a

 Matthew Truesdell, Spectacular Politics: Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte and the Fête Imperiale, 1849–1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Frederik Frank Sterkenburgh, “Staging a Monarchical-Federal Order: Wilhelm I as German Emperor,” in German History 39, no. 4 (2021): 519–541; and Frederik Frank Sterkenburgh in this volume; Martin Kohlrausch, “Zwischen Tradition und Innovation: Das Hofzeremoniell der wilhelminischen Monarchie,” in Das politische Zeremoniell im Deutschen Kaiserreich, 1871–1918, ed. Andreas Biefang, Michael Epkenhans, and Klaus Tenfelde (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2008), 31–52; see also Edward Berenson’s chapter in this volume.

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flashpoint for demonstrations of power and opposition, as members used their spatial choices to insist on their rights. Indeed, the chamber’s poor acoustics led to frequently hostile reactions when members attempted to speak from their place. In the face of such challenges, few members responded in as civil a tone as the conservative parliamentarian Günther Keyser, who reminded his fellow delegates that in the initial debate about the rostrum it had been “expressly denied that the civil marriage between the speaker and the rostrum was an obligatory one.”81 Keyser, for one, insisted on making himself heard from his seat. Most other speakers were more tractable in the end, if only after a gentle nudge by the chairman. When in 1867 the president of the parliament Eduard von Simson appealed for silence, he evoked the acoustics but also pled for courtesy to the stenographers protocolling the proceedings.82 The presence of stenographers added another layer of participants to the parliamentary proceedings whose spatial positioning was vital to the proper functioning of the institution. The practice of stenographic recording, which originated in the French National Assembly, had become common practice in the Prussian House of Delegates in 1855, and was then carried over into the Reichstag in 1871. In the British House of Commons, in contrast, stenographers were first instituted in 1878, based on a subsidy given by parliament to a private publisher.83 The importance attributed to stenographers demonstrates how, even in a semi-authoritarian state such as Imperial Germany, parliament was regarded as a public institution and thus open to public scrutiny. The spread of newspapers and the rise of literacy by the second half of the nineteenth century meant that the parliament’s authority as a national institution rested on the act of addressing not only the visitors in attendance but the political nation as a whole. That political nation was greatly expanded following the establishment of the German Empire in January 1871 in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. The Reichstag, a focal point of national politics, initially held its early sessions in the Prussian House of Lords, as the North German Confederation had done before. In October 1871, its representatives finally moved into a new space directly next door – the hastily renovated former Royal Porcelain Manufacture – as a provisional measure until a permanent new parliament building could be constructed. Pleased with

 Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Reichstages des Norddeutschen Bundes im Jahre 1867. Band 1, Von der Eröffnungs-Sitzung am 24. Februar und der Ersten bis zur Fünfunddreißigsten und Schluß-Sitzung am 17. April 1867 (StNB 1867/70.1) (Berlin: Verlag der Buchdruckerei der Norddeutschen Allgemeinen Zeitung, 1867), 20 March 1867, 286.  StNB 1867/70.1, 9 April 1867, 671.  Manow, King’s Shadow, 59; see also: Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Preußischen Hauses der Abgeordneten: Erster Band. Von der Eröffnungs-Sitzung der beiden vereinigten Häuser des Landtages am 29. November 1855 bis zur siebenundzwanzigsten Sitzung am 15. Februar 1856 (Berlin: Druck und Verlag der Deckerschen Geheimen Ober-Hofbuchdruckerei, 1856). For a detailed discussion of reportage from the British Parliament, see Ben Griffin’s chapter in this volume.

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this initial move, the Reichstag’s president, Simson, expressed his gratitude to the architects for making it possible to leave behind the many “insalubrities” of the old building and instead to work in “these adequate rooms.”84 They were adequate, in large part, because they improved the tone of the proceedings. Having had the benefit of four years of parliamentary experience in the North German Confederation, Reichstag members had already become habituated to the procedures of parliament. Perhaps more importantly, though, the improved acoustics of the new chamber made it possible for members to hear each other, which created a calmer working atmosphere.85 There were now fewer vocal outbursts criticizing speakers who preferred to speak from their seats. When the prominent Catholic Center Party leader Ludwig Windthorst chose to remain in his place, for instance, his obstinacy elicited mere chuckles (Heiterkeit).86 The architects had apparently found the right acoustic balance, having removed at least the structural obstacles to an egalitarian emotional atmosphere between parliamentarians. Inspired by this success, the Reichstag adopted the provisional chamber’s design for its new parliament building as well, which was inaugurated in 1894 at the Königsplatz (Royal Square) in Berlin.87 The new Reichstag building was one of many new parliament buildings erected at the close of the nineteenth century, as parliamentarians in other countries also desired a more visible display of their authority. Well into the second half of the nineteenth century, most parliaments in Europe were housed in repurposed buildings that had been refurbished to a greater or lesser degree. The French parliament continued to reside in the Palais Bourbon, while from 1861 to 1883, the Imperial Austrian Council met in the building of the Lower Austrian Diet, which had previously been the seat of the estates of the Archduchy of Austria. Only after 1883 did the council move into a newly constructed building. After gaining full legislative powers in the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, the Hungarian parliament received a hastily constructed new building in

 Stenographische Protokolle über die Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags: 1. Legislaturperiode, II. Session. Erster Band. Von der Eröffnungssitzung am 16. October und der Ersten bis Sechsundreißigsten Sitzung am 1. December 1871 (Berlin: Verlag der Buchdruckerei der Norddeutschen Allgemeinen Zeitung, 1871), 20 October 1871, 17.  Arnold Körte, Martin Gropius: Leben und Wirken eines Berliner Architekten, 1824–1888 (Berlin: Lukas Verlag, 2013), 230–232; Godehard Hoffmann, Architektur für die Nation? Der Reichstag und die Staatsbauten des Deutschen Kaiserreichs 1871–1918 (Cologne: DuMont, 2000), 85.  Stenographische Protokolle über die Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags. 2. Legislaturperiode, II. Session 1874/75. Erster Band. Von der Eröffnungs-Sitzung am 29. Oktober bis Einundreißigsten Sitzung am 15. Dezember 1874 (Berlin: Verlag der Buchdruckerei der Norddeutschen Allgemeinen Zeitung, 1875), 3 December 1874, 459.  Körte, Martin Gropius, 232.

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1865, which had to last, despite its provisional nature, until it was replaced with a vast neo-gothic building on the Danube in 1902.88 German parliamentarians did not all agree, at least not at first, on the need for a monumental building. Those in favor were mostly members of the National Liberal Party, who advocated for national unity and declared the “construction of a monumental house of parliament [to be . . .] a desire of the German nation.” They proposed a location as close as possible to the royal palace.89 Those against rejected the vast expenses for such a project, most vocal among them the Catholic Center Party.90 After some debate, in 1874 a joint commission of the Reichstag and the Reichsrat, the empire’s upper chamber, affirmed the importance of constructing a building to embody “the idea of a Germany united in its parliament.” Just as the royal palace represented the dignity of the imperial crown, so the parliament as “representative of the people” needed to be centrally located and of sufficient architectural quality.91 The Reichstag’s delegates soon found themselves in conflict with Emperor Wilhelm I, though, who was both unwilling to provide a site within the old city walls and to give up part of the adjacent park, the Tiergarten, which belonged to the royal domain. The final construction site placed the Reichstag near but not in the Tiergarten, on a private lot rather than on formerly public or royal land, and just outside of the old city limits and thus in relative but not close proximity to the royal palace.92 Strikingly, the parliament was oriented away from the royal palace and instead faced the Tiergarten. Equally remarkable, the initial design competition of 1872 was tendered internationally despite the Reichstag’s relevance for national iconography. In the end a German architect won the competition, but with a proposal that was more in line with international design trends than with other contemporary architecture in Berlin.93 The competition committee failed to provide competitors with a functional profile for the parliament building, though, as the tender did not include specific guidelines for the distribution of rooms in the interior. Instead, the competition guidelines emphasized monumentality as a goal that overshadowed practicality. Due to the lack of any functional specificity, the submissions were inadequate and the competition had to be repeated in 1882. This failure demonstrated the difference between parliamentary and royal power: one cannot imagine Louis XIV having to draw up a precise functional profile for Versailles, beyond his personal preference for monumentality. Having learned from the 1872 debacle, the new competition in 1882 provided more detailed guidelines

 József Sisa, “‘Das Vaterland hat bereits sein Haus’: Das ungarische Parlament in Budapest,” in Parlamentarische Repräsentationen: Das Bundeshaus Bern im Kontext internationaler Parlamentsbauten und nationaler Strategien, Anna Minta and Bernd Nicolai (Bern: Peter Lang, 2014), 165–184, here 168.  Quoted in: Hoffmann, Architektur, 102.  Hoffmann, Architektur, 102.  Quoted in: Hoffmann, Architektur, 102.  Hoffmann, Architektur, 103.  Hoffmann, Architektur, 104.

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that stipulated the specific functions of the intended parliamentary building, while nolonger explicitly demanding that the building appear as a national monument. Even so, the second competition was de facto run along more nationalist lines than the first, as only architects from German-speaking countries were invited to participate.94 Paul Wallot won the competition with a neo-renaissance design, an aesthetic popular with the Parisian École des Beaux-Arts, the leading architectural school of the time.95 The building process took longer and was more tortuous than expected, as the architect, various parliamentarians, and the new Imperial Building Department (Reichsbauabteilung) tried to implement their disparate visions and protect their own power. This, too, was a sign of change, and in particular the evolution of the modern state and its bureaucracy throughout Europe.96 Wallot’s new Reichstag building was centered around the parliamentary chamber, which was domed with a cupola visible from the outside. The chamber was constructed with the same measurements as the former parliamentary venue, which had proven so beneficial for the acoustics. Seating arrangements also followed established patterns as did access to the building. The building’s placement on the eastern side of the Königsplatz meant that its main façade, with its ceremonial entrance, faced away from the city. The symbolic import of this arrangement could be read as problematic, as it suggested a lower status in the imperial capital’s power nexus. Since the building turned its back to the city, parliamentarians and visitors coming from the imperial center of power were more likely to approach it from behind.97 However, this spatial reversal also forced parliamentarians to create a unique choreography, as ceremonial entries did not follow in a straight line from the royal palace but instead circled the building to the enter at its front – a vantage point that hid the city and its royal emblems in the parliament’s shadow. This physical gesture provided parliamentarians with an opportunity to reassert themselves in the context of the city’s modern urbanization. Berlin’s major expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century occurred outside of the old city limits, and the independent city of Charlottenburg as well as the developing bourgeois districts of Tiergarten and Schöneberg all faced the Reichstag. The parliament thus projected its authority to the new citizens – who in this contemporaneous illustration are shown strolling in front of its main entrance – rather than to the old elites, in an echo of the French National

 Hoffmann, Architektur, 108. Hoffmann does not comment on the connection between these two developments.  Hoffmann, Architektur, 51, 109–110.  For the impact of the state bureaucracy on representative state architecture in Paris and Berlin, see: David van Zanten, Building Paris: Architectural Institutions and the Transformation of the French Capital, 1830–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Reinhart Strecke, Anfänge und Innovation der preußischen Bauverwaltung: Von David Gilly zu Karl Friedrich Schinkel (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000).  Hoffmann, Architektur, 116.

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Assembly when it established its seat in the middle of Paris rather than in Versailles (Fig. 7.3). The shift was not a complete rupture, though: in Berlin, as had been the case in Paris too, the parliament was surrounded by individual royal monuments, including the Victory Column and numerous Hohenzollern statues.98

Fig. 7.3: The new parliament building in Berlin: the Reichstag. Nineteenth-century illustration.

Within this context, the Reichstag proclaimed its political confidence through the aesthetic language of an eclectic neo-historicist style, adding neo-classical and medieval elements to its neo-renaissance aesthetics. The adoption of historical design elements was integral to the construction boom of parliament buildings that gripped Europe in these years, as representative bodies attempted to imbue parliamentary rule with a plausible legacy of authority.99 Neo-classicism was a particular favorite for its references to Athenian democracy and the Roman republic. The French National Assembly of 1806 and the expansion of the United States Capitol of 1850 had leaned on similar stylistic references, and neo-classicism was adopted outright for the Austrian parliament, which began construction in 1876, and the Swedish New Parliament building of 1905. The style continued to find favor even after World War I, for instance in the Finnish

 Thomas Mergel, Parlamentarische Kultur in der Weimarer Republik: Politische Kommunikation, Symbolische Politik und Öffentlichkeit im Reichstag (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2002), 84–85.  For the role of Roman references in particular, see: Arendt, “What is Authority?” 139–140.

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parliament in 1922 and the Australian Parliament House in 1927. Other historical models found favor too: the Swiss Federal Building was built in a neo-renaissance style akin to the Reichstag, while the Hungarian parliament mimicked the neo-gothic aesthetic.100 While neo-classicism referred directly to participatory politics and the neorenaissance tradition took the Italian city republic as its model, the political message of the neo-gothic conjured up visions of the British Houses of Parliament as much as of the medieval past. The political intent behind the adoption of these styles should not be overestimated, though. Not only were these aesthetics widely applied to non-political buildings as well, but they were also an outgrowth of generational changes in taste and its development and reproduction in prominent architecture schools, for instance the École des Beaux-Arts. When parliamentary commissions chose building designs, they put a premium on selecting aesthetics considered prestigious, representative, and modern, which was its own form of conveying authority.101 This symbolic admixture included lavish interior furnishings and modern improvements such as central heating and, more whimsically, electric cigarette lighters, as well as design elements with nationalist connotations.102 Wood paneling was used in the rooms of the Reichstag, including the large chamber, for instance, both because it was cheaper and acoustically superior to stone and because, in the words of one commentator, oak expressed the “pride of the German forest.” He went on to explain that wood exuded a sense of “contentment” that was absent in cold classical marble, a tactile difference that he claimed ancient Germanic tribes had already understood.103 To answer the challenge of this new aesthetic symbolism, the monarchy found new ways to reassert its social prominence in the urban space, as did the expanding administrative apparatus that supported the state ministers appointed by the emperor. The opening of the Reichstag in 1894 coincided with the growing assertiveness of Wilhelm II in German politics. Having ascended to the throne in 1888, the young monarch dismissed the country’s long-serving chancellor Otto von Bismarck two years later. Politically erratic, but with a sense for imperial spectacle – which was not always as enchanting to German citizens as he expected – the emperor sought to modernize the royal display of power and give it new authority, also in the built environment. While he eschewed building new royal palaces and conducted royal rituals mostly in existing edifices, he and his state ministers expanded their societal role by constructing national infrastructure, from universities to train stations to judicial buildings.104 Behind these innovations stood multiple layers of public administration. Bureaucrats in the

 Hoffmann, Architektur für die Nation, 51–53, 86.  Hoffmann, Architektur für die Nation, 51–53, 156–157.  Hoffmann, Architektur für die Nation, 130–131.  See Hoffmann, Architektur für die Nation, 135.  Eckhard Bolenz, Vom Baubeamten zum freiberuflichen Architekten: Technische Berufe im Bauwesen: Preussen/Deutschland, 1799–1931, (Peter Lang: Frankfurt a/M, 1991), 66–73.

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Prussian Building Administration (Bauverwaltung), for instance, scrutinized and vetted designs and then broadcast their decisions to the professional and the lay public. In turn, architectural associations and their journals commented on the plans, and readers chimed in as well.105 This give and take between bureaucracy and public solidified the state’s position in the national field of meaning. At the other end of the political spectrum, the emergence of organized political demonstrations in the last decades of the nineteenth century points to yet another connection between authority and built space.106 Ever since the French Revolution, large numbers of people massing together to demand rights and greater political influence had become part of democratic politics. Later in the century, the mantle was taken up throughout Europe by the increasingly organized Socialist parties, who demonstrated for workers’ rights, as well as suffragists in Britain marching for women’s rights and the emerging populist, right-wing groups such as the Boulangists in France and various nationalist associations in Germany. Socialists, women, and even the Boulangists and their crowds were regarded by elites as unable to control their emotions and therefore as dangerous.107 On the streets, competing ideas about the political order clashed quite literally, as noisy demonstrators tried to outshout each other and got into street scuffles with their opponents.108 For those who valued the status quo, street-based emotions seemed particularly unpredictable. In 1896, the French sociologist Gustave Le Bon wrote his widely influential The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, specifically in response to General Georges Ernest Boulanger’s revanchist campaigns.109 Three years later he followed up with his even more overtly political The Psychology of Socialism. With the publication of Le Bon’s books, parliamentary politicians now had research to back up their long-standing fears about the emotions of the crowd. For groups who were either not represented in parliament, like women, or who were excluded from exercising parliamentary influence despite their rising numbers, like Socialists, the streets became a staging ground for alternative sources of authority,

 See: Bolenz, Vom Baubeamten, 107–162; Fuhltrott, Deutschsprachige Architekturzeitschriften.  Ute Frevert, “Feeling Political in Demonstrations: Street Politics in Germany, 1832–2018,” in Emotions and Institutions since 1789, ed. Ute Frevert et al. (London: Palgrave, 2022), 341–371, here 353–354.  Frevert, “Feeling Political in Demonstrations,” 349–352; Patrick H. Hutton, “Popular Boulangism and the Advent of Mass Politics in France, 1886–1890,” Journal of Contemporary History 11, no. 1 (1976): 85–106, here 91; Tobias Kaiser, “Die Suffragetten als ‘Eroberinnen’ des politischen Raumes: Zur Bedeutung von Straße und Parlament als Orte der Politik in der Frauenwahlrechtsbewegung um 1900,” in Frauenwahlrecht: Demokratisierung der Demokratie in Deutschland und Europa, ed. Hedwig Richter and Kerstin Wolff (Hamburg: Hamburger edition 2018), 125–144, here 141.  For a seminal study of this conflict in the case of Berlin, see: Thomas Lindenberger, Straßenpolitik: Zur Sozialgeschichte der öffentlichen Ordnung in Berlin 1900 bis 1914 (Bonn: Verlag J. H. W. Dietz Nachfolger, 1995).  Hutton, “Popular Boulangism,” 91.

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based in particular on the impressive display of their sheer numbers. Launched by the Second International in the 1880s, May Day demonstrations became an annual show of force by the workers’ movement. Precisely because they lacked official authority, workers needed to take to the streets where they could voice their demands while also affirming their honor and expressing their rejection of the political system.110 For Socialists, street politics meant organizing and harnessing emotions to connect the streets and the parliament. It did not mean letting emotions go unchecked, though. On the one hand, workers were expected to be enthusiastic about their cause, and their leaders stoked this enthusiasm in order to make their demands more effective. On the other hand, workers’ emotions were not meant to flare up into outbursts of temper that would lead to conflict with the police and thus undermine the programmatic message of their marches. Joy and solidarity, not anger and rage, were the desired emotions.111 For the proletariat on the streets, just as for the bourgeoisie in the parliament, the ability to control passion was crucial to their effort to project power.112 Despite these challenges from the palace and from the streets, the Reichstag held its own. While the parliament’s place in the German Empire’s political power structure and the political system’s potential for further parliamentarization continue to be debated, the symbolic importance of the building and the actions performed within it is hard to dispute.113 Newspaper coverage of the Reichstag debates, demonstrations by workers in front of the building, private comments about the building by Berlin’s citizens on their walks through the adjacent royal park: all confirmed the centrality that the Reichstag had gained in the empire. Even the emperor’s ministers acknowledged the parliament’s significance by using it as a backdrop to address the nation, relying on press coverage of parliamentary proceedings to broadcast their ministerial agenda to a wider public.114 Like parliamentarians, they too ‘spoke out of the window.’ Even the fact that the German emperor did not go to parliament to open its session, as the British sovereign did, but instead commanded parliamentarians to come to the royal palace, could be read as a sign either of his grudging respect or defensive disrespect for representative institutions.115

 Heikki Lempa, Spaces of Honor: Making German Civil Society, 1700–1914 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021), 138.  Frevert, “Feeling Political in Demonstrations,” 354–355.  Frevert, “Feeling Political in Demonstrations,” 355–356.  For a summary of the most recent debate sparked by Hedwig Richter’s Demokratie: Eine Deutsche Affäre (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2021), see: Samuel Miner, “Whither Germany: Historiography and Public Reckoning with the National Past,” History News Network, accessed 15 May 2022, https://historynews network.org/article/180010. On the Reichstag’s symbolic significance, see: Wolfram Pyta, “Der Reichstag als Symbol der deutschen Nation,” in 150 Jahre Nationalstaatlichkeit in Deutschland: Essays, Reflexionen, Kontroversen, ed. Tilman Meyer (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2020), 135–166, here 142–143.  Pyta, “Reichstag,” 140–141.  See the alternate views in: Andreas Biefang, Michael Epkenhans, and Klaus Tenfelde, “Das politische Zeremoniell im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1918: Zur Einführung,” 11–30, here 12, and

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III Government Architecture in the Aftermath of Mass Death Only in matters of war and peace did Wilhelm II and the royal palace hold singular sway. The major demonstrations for and against war in 1914 occurred in front of the palace rather than in front of the Reichstag.116 The revolution in 1918 changed this. Already in 1916, the building had belatedly received the dedication ‘To the German People’ above its main portico, and the people now claimed the building as a site of power upon Wilhelm II’s abdication. On 9 November 1918, the Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann restaged his announcement of the German Republic from a window of the Reichstag – he had originally made the declaration from the chancellery building – while the Communist Karl Liebknecht pronounced a competing council republic from the royal palace. The fact that Scheidemann’s constitutional republic, centered upon the Reichstag, ultimately prevailed gave further momentum to the symbolic authority of parliament and its building.117 Mass demonstrations now occurred frequently outside of the Reichstag building. One such demonstration in January 1920, in which workers’ councils demanded more influence on business policy, resulted in the death of forty-two demonstrators when the police opened fire on them. Claiming that the workers had tried to storm the building – a claim without actual merit – the government established a ‘ban mile’ around the Reichstag as a space in which no political demonstrations could be held.118 In taking this action, the German parliament joined the French and the British ones, among others, which had for some time put limits on political demonstrations in their immediate vicinity. Although democratic, the Weimar Republic thus restricted the expression of the people’s authority within the orbit of the parliament building. In this official political space, only government acts could be staged, and not public demonstrations. Instead, workers had to take to the streets elsewhere, which ironically undermined the parliament’s position as a focal point of authority. The number of visitors allowed into the Reichstag also remained restricted, but those present found ways to heckle and unfurl protest posters on occasion. The regulation of behavior inside and outside of parliament was once again coded in the language

Josef Matzerath, “Parlamentseröffnungen im Reich und in den Bundesstaaten,” 207–232, here 214–215, both in Das politische Zeremoniell im Deutschen Kaiserreich: 1871–1918, ed. Andreas Biefang, Michael Epkenhans, and Klaus Tenfelde (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2008). See also the British monarch’s speech upon opening parliament in the House of Lords, although not in the House of Commons, in: Nirmal Puwar, “The Archi-texture of Parliament: Flaneur as a Method of Westminster,” The Journal of Legislative Studies 16, no. 3 (2010): 298–312, here 307.  Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth, and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 42.  Pyta, “Reichstag,” 145.  Mergel, Parlamentarische Kultur, 85.

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of preserving the dignity of the nation – a dignity that parliamentarians claimed to embody now more than ever.119 On a deeper level, the devastations of the Great War drove the parliament building’s symbolic expansion into mass politics in two particular ways. First, the vacuum of power left by the emperor’s abdication erupted in partisan conflicts directly after the war, which challenged the sovereignty of the parliament from both the political left and right. The newly established republican state, not yet secure in its legitimacy, sought to develop rituals of national self-affirmation in order to claim a space at the heart of the nation. These new rituals occurred within the halls of parliament as well as out in the streets and around newly erected state monuments, where they often involved crowds. Parliamentarians duly discussed the emotions involved in such public rituals; and even if liberal politicians remained skeptical about the value of public spectacles, their hands were forced by the effective experimentation with new forms of public acclamation organized by communist and fascist regimes in the Soviet Union and Italy. In this context, the Weimar Republic’s new, annual Constitution Day on 11 August was not the failure that it has long been made out to be. As scholars have recently shown, the ceremony’s democratic rituals fostered more emotional attachment than previously assumed. By the late 1920s, the anniversary’s rituals, performed both inside and outside of the Reichstag building, were well established and publicly observed, even if some of the events, such as the military defile and the ringing of church bells, harkened back to royal traditions.120 The republic’s adoption of royal tradition was accompanied by its simultaneous appropriation of royal space. On the first Constitution Day in 1921, the republic moved its symbolism out beyond the parliament building by celebrating in the Prussian State Opera, which had been the Royal Opera up to the revolution in 1918.121 To further demonstrate the displacement of royal power, the republic’s president now sat in the former royal box during the ceremony.122 In later years, the Reichstag building and the square in front of it, which was renamed from Royal Square (Königsplatz) to Plaza of the Republic (Platz der Republik) in 1925, anchored the national celebrations. The fact that the formal entrance to the parliament building did not face the palace but the square and its adjoining park no longer created a symbolic problem. Instead, after the

 Mergel, Parlamentarische Kultur, 340–343.  Manuela Achilles, “With a Passion for Reason: Celebrating the Constitution in Weimar Germany,” Central European History 43 (2010): 666–689, here 681–682. For a more critical view, see: Wolfram Pyta, “Monarchie und Republik: Zum Wandel des politischen Zeremoniells nach 1918,” in Das politische Zeremoniell im Deutschen Kaiserreich: 1871–1918, Andreas Biefang, Michael Epkenhans, and Klaus Tenfelde (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2008), 451–468, here 461–463.  Achilles, “With a Passion,” 674.  Achilles, “With a Passion,” 681–682.

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conclusion of the ceremony in the Reichstag, the republican dignitaries joined the crowds outside of the building in the newly democratic built environment.123 The Great War also ushered in the use of public buildings as sites of mourning. Governments across Europe tried to harness the rituals of mourning to demonstrate that their legitimacy arose from suffering – both in victory and defeat – on and off the battlefield. As parliaments expanded the palette of feelings they needed to acknowledge, they extended the spatial range of their rituals of grief. Memorials such as cenotaphs and ossuaries provided new sites in which to express national emotions. In the nineteenth century, the French Pantheon and the presidential memorials of the Mall in Washington D.C. had set precedents for the commemoration of republican leaders. In the aftermath of war and mass death, however, not the military leader but the unnamed fallen soldier became the symbol of the nation. The individual was absorbed into the collective, either through his unmarked bones or through symbolic enclosure in an empty tomb. In Britain, the government invoked ancient precedents with the Cenotaph, unveiled on the second anniversary of Armistice Day on 11 November 1920; the Cenotaph, was placed directly opposite the Houses of Parliament, highlighting the monument’s role in politics.124 The British parliament also adopted a minute of silence (or originally two minutes), as did the assembly in interwar France, thus projecting its participation in public grief out from the Houses of Parliament and into the streets.125 Not surprisingly, given the German defeat in 1918, the debate over a war memorial, its placement, content, and shape, proved more divisive and ultimately inconclusive. The Reichstag was less successful in using the parliamentary chamber as a stage for national affect, too contested was the memory and the meaning of the war.126 Instead, the German War Graves Commission (Volksbund deutscher Kriegsgräberfürsorge), a private initiative of nationalists and strident militarists, hosted the main commemoration events of the Day of Public Mourning (Volkstrauertag) in the parliament during most years.127 The Reichstag itself only staged the ritual once, in August 1924. That year, the commemoration was choreographed to coincide with the groundbreaking ceremony for a National Monument of Honor for fallen soldiers (Reichsehrenmal). These two measures – the commemoration and the monument – were meant to establish a more distinctly republican form of mourning than that of the conservative

 Achilles, “With a Passion,” 683.  Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 104.  Carsten Lichau, “Feeling Political on Armistice Day: Institutional Struggles in Interwar France,” in Feeling Political: Emotions and Institutions since 1789, ed. Ute Frevert et al. (London: Palgrave, 2022), 189–217, here 208.  Alexandra Kaiser, Von Helden und Opfern: Eine Geschichte des Volkstrauertags (Frankfurt a/M: Campus, 2010), 74–82; Benjamin Ziemann, Contested Commemorations: Republican Veterans and Weimar Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 145–147.  Kaiser, Von Helden und Opfern, 79–82.

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German War Graves Commission.128 But the monument was never completed; indeed no national monument was constructed under the aegis of the Reichstag during the Weimar Republic. Just as the Day of Public Mourning never gained cohesion across Germany, but remained a contested and individualized event, different partisan sites of commemoration were constructed simultaneously in the Republic. The most important monument, the Neue Wache, was located in Berlin, not in its role as national capital or under the direction of the federal bureaucracy, but as the capital city of Prussia and its Social Democratic municipal government. Its organizers once again turned a former royal site into one infused with republican aesthetics. The interior of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s classicist Neue Wache, which had been constructed between 1816 and 1818 to commemorate the War of Liberation against Napoleon I and was located close to the royal palace, was stripped bare by the architect Heinrich Tessenow, who placed a single granite cube at its center. When it was finally inaugurated in 1931, the monument garnered only a tepid response even among Social Democratic party members.129 Rather than creating a shared emotional language, Weimar’s sites of mourning fostered conflict and antagonism. Thus it was not the war dead but the untimely deaths of three of Weimar’s most influential republican politicians that provided the parliament with an opportunity to develop its own rituals of mourning. State funeral processions of the foreign minister Walther Rathenau, who died by assassination in 1922, the republic’s first president Friedrich Ebert in 1925, and the long-serving foreign minister Gustav Stresemann in 1929 memorialized the tragedy of their loss. The pageants were impressive spectacles, and images of their rituals and corteges circulated widely in the illustrated press (Fig. 7.4). Although clearly influenced by royal ritual, the processions were updated with a more somber military aesthetic that had developed during the Great War.130 The funeral rituals and the concomitant attempt to establish a national site of mourning and a national day of commemoration reflected democratic efforts to accommodate emotions previously embedded in private or in royal ceremonies. Even when the republic successfully staged ceremonies, it drew on the symbolism inherent in nineteenth-century precedents. Notwithstanding controversies over style and placement, memorials continued to be the hallmark of political architecture well into the twentieth and even twentyfirst century. From the Cenotaph in London to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. and the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, twentieth-century sites of public mourning were and are closely linked to the emergence of mass politics. More so than in the nineteenth century, twentieth-century mass politics were defined by mass death, so that political authority became rooted in the commemoration of suffering and the

 Kaiser, Von Helden und Opfern, 31–42.  Ziemann, Contested Commemorations, 180–181.  Pyta, “Monarchie und Republik,” 458–460.

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Fig. 7.4: The funeral of Walther Rathenau, Reich Minister for Foreign Affairs during the Weimar Republic, on 27 June 1922. Press photograph.

promise of its future prevention. The debates over aerial defense in West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s provide a prime example. The movement to construct bomb shelters, either by the state or by private citizens, pitted public fears of nuclear annihilation against the government’s attempt to provide reassurance and thus claim political authority as guardians of public safety. In this conflict, fear as a political emotion played a legitimizing role, linking emotions to built space as it connected the government to its citizens in a novel way.131 Yet even in the shadow of mass death, prosaic questions continued to be posed about how to stage authority within parliamentary buildings, including questions about decorum, the regulation of speech, and access by visitors or the press. Sometimes the two debates intersected, for example in postwar West Germany when humility in light of the suffering produced by the war seemed an appropriate style. West German politicians agreed that the new Bonn parliament and the behavior of its members needed to express modesty, mindful as they were of the suffering Germans had endured during the war and the material deprivations they experienced

 See, for example, effective air defense as demonstrating political authority, in: Frank Biess, “‘Everybody has a Chance’: Nuclear Angst, Civil Defence, and the History of Emotions in Postwar West Germany,” German History 27, no. 2 (2009): 215–243.

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for years afterwards. In that context, Bonn politicians felt that citizens visiting the parliament should see them as their equals and as individuals, rather than as an elevated political class. Accordingly, the government introduced measures to break down the barrier between politicians and citizens, including visitor access to the parliament’s cafeteria and advanced acoustics in the parliament’s plenary hall and meetings rooms, which were designed so that voices spoken at a normal volume could be easily heard without aid of a microphone. Overall, the result of these emotive innovations was mixed at best.132 Sometimes new building construction styles diverged from older, established patterns of behavior that restricted emotional contact.133 Large glass curtain walls were incorporated into parliamentary design as a symbol of the government’s (ostensible) transparency, while new technologies, first radio, then television, and later the internet gave the impression of greater, intimate access to public figures. But within the parliament buildings’ interiors, the basic spatial arrangements and the resultant procedural format of debate, first established in the French Revolution, proved surprisingly resilient. The semi-circular seating design, established in the French Salle des Machines in 1793, is still the most common seating plan, as are the visitor galleries surrounding it. Even states that have seen several breaks in their political and constitutional history follow the same basic behavioral design: an intense focus on the speaker’s rostrum, the general demand for silence from visitors in the galleries in the name of dignity, but also opportunities for heckling afforded by the presence of the public, giving visitors an illicit means to challenge the authority of the parliamentary body. The invention of new parliamentary design styles has been exceedingly rare in continental Europe, as these once revolutionary assemblies harnessed the power and emotion of tradition as part of staging their authority.

 See: Philipp Nielsen, “Building Bonn: Affects, Politics, and Architecture in Postwar West Germany,” in Architecture, Democracy, and Emotions: The Politics of Feeling since 1945, ed. Till Großmann and Philipp Nielsen (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 39–57.  Deborah Ascher Barnstone, The Transparent State: Architecture and Politics in Postwar Germany (London: Routledge, 2005), 116; Greg Castillo, “Making a Spectacle of Restraint: The Deutschland Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels Exposition,” Journal of Contemporary History 47, no. 1 (2012): 97–119, here 107–108.

Ben Griffin

Parliamentary Authority and British Political Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century Abstract: During Britain’s great political crisis of the 1830s, governing elites responded to radical criticisms of the constitution by reforming parliament in such a way that it made new claims to political authority. The reformed parliament claimed to be more responsive to public opinion and more genuinely representative of the nation than ever before. As a result, political elites were subjected to unprecedented scrutiny. This chapter examines how parliamentary reporting increased rapidly to meet the enormous public appetite for parliamentary news; it then examines the kinds of performances that MPs engaged in as they tried to meet public expectations. The chapter argues that this parliamentary culture rested on the exclusion of women and on the construction of certain kinds of ‘whiteness.’ It concludes by showing how parliament lost its central place in British political culture, with important consequences for British democracy. Keywords: gender, liberalism, masculinity, members of parliament, newspapers, Parliament, parliamentary reform, performance, political culture press, radicalism, Reform Acts, whiteness ✶✶✶

The immense fire that destroyed the British Houses of Parliament in 1834 marked a symbolic end to the protracted political crisis that had reshaped the constitution between 1828 and 1832. The old order had been shaken, first by the crumbling of the Anglican monopoly of political power following the repeal in 1828 of the Test and Corporation Acts (which had barred protestant dissenters from holding public office) and the removal of Catholic disabilities in 1829, and secondly by the Great Reform Act that transformed the country’s electoral system. In the course of the battles over these issues, a new party system had emerged and the public had been mobilized in an unprecedented manner, shifting the constitutional balance in favor of the House of Commons, which now asserted its supremacy over the House of Lords. At the most intense moments of the crisis the nation had been convulsed by a “hand-shaking, bowel-disturbing passion of fear”: in 1831, for example, when Nottingham Castle was burned to the ground and judges in Bristol were stoned by an angry mob; or during the ‘Days of May’ in 1832, when mass meetings of hundreds of thousands gathered to demand change and a coordinated campaign to engineer a run on the banks threatened the financial system.1

 The Rev. Sydney Smith, cited in: Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England, 1783–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 426. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110574012-008

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J. C. D. Clark has suggested that this was “the shattering of a whole social order,” as a monarchical, aristocratic, and confessional state gave way to something entirely new.2 The crisis was resolved by the creation of a Parliament that made new claims to political authority. Hereafter, it claimed to be an assembly that was more responsive to public opinion, more open to talent, and more genuinely representative of the nation’s many different interests than ever before. It now claimed the authority to assume responsibility for aspects of national life that it had previously not dared to touch: boldly interfering, investigating, and reforming as never before. But in order for the authority of Parliament to be accepted, Parliament had to be seen to be responsive to public opinion. Equally, the governing classes had to be seen as responsible guardians of the public’s trust. Consequently, public scrutiny of government reached a new pitch of intensity. As Philip Salmon has observed: “Commons speeches and the cult of the parliamentarian began to attract almost a mass following during the Victorian era” as coverage of parliamentary debates came to dominate the expanding news media.3 In 1859 The Times noted that: “They say that we have lost as a nation our theatrical taste, but the truth is that Parliament is our theatre.”4 One observer in the 1850s wrote that: “What the gladiatorial games, as a public amusement, were to Rome, our Parliament is to us.”5 The House of Commons operated as the stage on which the legitimacy of the new constitutional settlement was asserted and assessed. The stage – the new Parliament building that rose from the ashes of St. Stephen’s Chapel – could scarcely be grander. Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin’s spectacular gothic masterpiece was a gigantic, swaggering statement of political power in material form, and the tallest secular structure in the world when the Victoria Tower was completed in 1858.6 It was designed to awe, as were ceremonies like the state opening of Parliament by the monarch, reinvented in the 1830s.7 As the reporter Edward Whitty noted:  J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 409.  Philip Salmon, “Parliament,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History, 1800–2000, ed. David Brown, Robert Crowcroft, and Gordon Pentland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 86.  Cited in Angus Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture: ‘Habits of Heart and Mind’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 113.  Edward Whitty, St. Stephen’s in the Fifties (London: T. F. Unwin, 1906), 49.  M. H. Port, ed., The Houses of Parliament (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); Roland Quinault, “Westminster and the Victorian Constitution,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 2 (1992): 79–104; David Cannadine, “The Palace of Westminster as Palace of Varieties,” in The Houses of Parliament: History, Art, Architecture, ed. Christine Riding and Jacqueline Riding, et al. (London: Merrell, 2000), 11–31; Caroline Shenton, Mr. Barry’s War: Rebuilding the Houses of Parliament after the Great Fire of 1834 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Edward J. Gillin, The Victorian Palace of Science: Scientific Knowledge and the Building of the Houses of Parliament (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).  Henry Cobb, “The Staging of Ceremonies of State in the House of Lords,” in The Houses of Parliament: History, Art, Architecture, ed. Christine Riding and Jacqueline Riding, et al. (London: Merrell,

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There is no sneering at the opening of the Imperial Parliament of Great Britain and Ireland . . . The glass coaches and red harness, and the gilt, and the feathers, and the spears, and the wigs, and the beef-eaters, and the gentleman-at-arms, are sillinesses . . . It is ‘barbaric pomp,’ as plain Mr. Cobden said; and it is true that the parade might be less childish, less out of date, and be more substantially grand. But it is the greatest monarch in the world, passing through the streets of the greatest capital on God’s earth, to meet the Senate of the vastest empire under the sun; and there is no laughing at the show, for it is solemn and serious history in process.8

Such displays comprised part of what Walter Bagehot described as the “dignified” parts of the constitution which aimed to secure the consent of the masses, a function every bit as important as the tasks of administration undertaken by the “efficient” parts.9 No effort will be made here to add to the voluminous literature on such displays.10 Instead, we shall focus on how nineteenth-century political culture freighted parliamentary performance with significance. Parliament of course was not the only site of political activity in the long nineteenth century. Most obviously, contested elections led to nomination meetings, hustings, election meetings, and polls in each constituency; these generated intense (if short-lived) encounters between those claiming to lead and those demanding to be represented.11 At the same time, the years after 1832 saw the creation of new institutions of local government requiring elections, ranging from new municipal corporations in the 1830s to the creation of county councils in 1888 and parish councils in 1894. Elite authority was also visible in the courts, in Convocations of the Church of England, and in the annual gatherings of legal, medical, and political elites at the conferences of the Social Science Association.12 In many cases, patterns of social hierarchy were naturalized in a way that replaced the contests of ‘politics’ with expectations of ‘deference’ to those claiming educational, moral, or cultural superiority.

2000), 31–48; Walter Arnstein, “Queen Victoria opens Parliament: The Disinvention of Tradition,” Historical Research 63, no. 151 (1990): 178–194.  Whitty, St. Stephen’s, 47.  Walter Bagehot uses these terms throughout: Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (London: Chapman and Hall, 1865).  David Cannadine, “Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The Monarchy 1820–1977,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Andrzej Olechnowicz, ed., The Monarchy and the British Nation, 1780 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).  There is a huge literature on nineteenth-century elections. See especially: Frank O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties: The Unreformed Electoral System of Hanoverian England 1734–1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Jon Lawrence, Electing our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).  Lawrence Goldman, Science, Reform, and Politics: The Social Science Association 1857–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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The authority of local elites was broadcast in settings as mundane as the seating in local churches, the grandeur of magistrates taking their place at quarter sessions to pass judgement, or in the rich associational life of provincial middle-class clubs and societies.13 The civic gospel that transformed the urban infrastructure of Britain’s cities after the 1850s proclaimed the power of local elites in new ways, as city centers were remodeled and filled with spectacular new public buildings to rival aristocratic stately homes.14 Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, Birmingham’s Town Hall, built to resemble a gigantic Grecian temple, or – most spectacular of them all – Cuthbert Brodrick’s extraordinarily imposing Town Hall in Leeds, all spoke to the power and confidence of these new non-aristocratic local elites. Popular politics, meanwhile, persisted in finding ways for those excluded from parliamentary representation to claim political authority of their own: in parades and mock funeral processions, as well as mass meetings in what Katrina Navickas has called “spaces of making do” – “scrubland between unfinished buildings, or in the backroom of a warehouse, a meeting house or chapel.”15 In short, Parliament was just one of many sites in which alliances were built and status and resources were fought over. Nevertheless, Parliament reigned as the preeminent site for the staging of political authority, and its position in nineteenth-century British political culture was in certain respects quite unlike what came both before and after.16 This might seem strange at first; after all, Parliament had been central to British politics for centuries. But it is worth remembering that until the 1830s no sitting government had lost a general election since 1708: what came after was qualitatively different. The shift was not a change in Parliament’s function, but its place in the political imagination as a result of the Reform Crisis of the 1830s. This change can be observed in the declining use of the dichotomy between court and country to make sense of political life. The court had been displaced as a center of power and the central opposition in radical politics was not a spatial one but an opposition between the elites who had been enfranchised in 1832 and ‘the people’ who had been excluded from the franchise.17

 R. J. Morris, “Voluntary Societies and British Urban Elites, 1780–1850,” Historical Journal 26, no. 1 (1983).  Simon Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Mark Girouard, The Victorian Country House, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).  Katrina Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789–1848 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 59; John Belchem, “Henry Hunt and the Evolution of the Mass Platform,” English Historical Review 93 (1978): 739–773.  The centrality of Parliament in the Victorian political imagination is a point made forcefully in Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture, chapters 1–3.  On populism, see: Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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In the following section we shall examine why both conservative and radical politics developed a particular interest in the personal qualities of those sitting in Parliament. We shall then consider how that appetite for parliamentary news was met by a terrific expansion of parliamentary reporting, which subjected political elites to unprecedented scrutiny. This gave Parliament, and particularly the House of Commons, new kinds of significance. The second section will then examine how the Reform Crisis of the 1830s created new expectations of politicians before examining in detail the kinds of performances that Members of Parliament (MPs) engaged in on the floor of the House of Commons. It will conclude by considering how the forms of authority valorized by this parliamentary culture rested on the exclusion of women and on the construction of certain kinds of ‘whiteness.’ The final section will then explain how the position that Parliament had briefly enjoyed in British political culture since the 1830s was gradually eroded by changes in the electorate, the organization of parties, the press, the role of MPs, and a shift in the understanding of what constituted ‘politics.’ These changes led to profound consequences for those seeking positions of political authority. In pursuing this line of inquiry, the chapter aims to contribute to an effort in recent years to bridge the gulf between histories of elite politics and histories of popular politics that characterized modern British history for so long. On the one hand, studies of ‘high politics’ have principally been interested in the study of political leadership, statecraft, policy-making, and struggles for power. On the other hand, studies of popular politics – whether deriving from a concern with electoral behavior, ‘history from below,’ or labor history – have focused their attention on other questions. The result has been, as Jon Lawrence has noted, “a fundamental bifurcation of political history into two almost wholly separate sub-disciplines,” viewing each other with considerable suspicion.18 This was always unhelpful, and in recent years scholars like David Craig and Philip Williamson have shown that much of the antipathy towards the most influential school interested in ‘high politics’ rested on a series of misunderstandings about its nature and objectives. Reconciliation has also been effected by a growing realization that, in their different ways, both camps were interested in the ideas, languages, and mentalities of political actors.19 The growing hegemony of cultural history has provided new ways of bringing ‘high’ and ‘low’ politics into the same analytical frame by making the subject of political history the history of political culture; by investigating how political actors deployed cultural

 Jon Lawrence, “Political History,” in Writing History: Theory and Practice, 2nd ed., ed. Heiko Feldner, Kevin Passmore, and Stefan Berger (London: Hodder Arnold, 2010), 220.  Susan Pedersen, “What is Political History Now?” in What is History Now? ed. David Cannadine (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 42; David M. Craig, “‘High Politics’ and the ‘New Political History,’” Historical Journal 53, no. 2 (2010): 453; Philip Williamson, “Maurice Cowling and Modern British Political History,” in The Philosophy, Politics and Religion of British Democracy, ed. Robert Crowcroft, S. J. D. Green, and Richard Whiting (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2010), 108–152.

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resources to mobilize support and to create shared political identities; and by postponing difficult questions about causation. The work emerging from the cultural turn, sometimes rather pretentiously identifying itself as “new political history,” has been centrally interested in precisely the intersections between elite and popular politics.20 There has been an abundance of work on elections, political meetings, and political campaigns as sites where high and low politics came into contact, while an interest in how elites communicated to the masses has produced a plethora of important work on political rhetoric and communication.21 Parliament has not featured prominently in this literature, but a new wave of work on parliamentary history and parliamentary reporting suggests that this is an unfortunate oversight.22 The argument of the present chapter is that Parliament should be seen not simply as a site of elite political maneuvering, but as a site where elite politics was made visible to the rest of the nation, allowing non-elites to engage imaginatively, practically, and critically with the governing classes.23 One effect of this is to remove some of the analytical burden often placed upon the concept of charismatic leadership. Following Max Weber’s classic analysis in 1919, a sophisticated literature has developed explaining how charismatic leaders like William Gladstone played an important part in reconciling the newly-enfranchised masses to the existing political system and, more specifically, the Liberal Party.24 In the absence of a formal party structure, Colin Matthew has noted, orators like Gladstone became “the national focal point, the unifying and determining element in what made up the Liberal Party in the late nineteenth century.” However, Matthew adds, this was not the “Caesarist plebiscitarian element” dominated by one man that Weber claimed; what we see instead in Gladstonian politics is “the means by which a university-educated, non-industrial, intellectual elite succeeded in coordinating the working of a great political movement.”25 It is the role of that wider

 The term was first used by James Vernon as part of a polemical attack on previous approaches to both high and low politics: Vernon, Politics and the People, chapter 1. Another early usage was Dror Wahrman, “The New Political History: a Review Essay,” Social History 21, no. 3 (1996): 343–354. See also: Steven Fielding, “Looking for the ‘New Political History,’” Journal of Contemporary History 42, no. 3 (2007): 515–524.  Susan Pedersen provides an excellent overview in Pederson, “What is Political History Now?” 36–56.  See the work of: Jonathan Parry, Kathryn Rix, Henry Miller, Philip Salmon, and Angus Hawkins cited in the footnotes below.  In this respect the present argument resembles the case made for the monarchy by John Plunkett, Queen Victoria: The First Media Monarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).  H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone 1875–1898 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 49–51; Eugenio Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 370–378, 392–393.  H. C. G. Matthew, “Rhetoric and Politics,” in Politics and Social Change in Modern Britain, ed. P. J. Waller (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987), 52–53. The quotation from Weber is taken from

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governing elite in maintaining Parliament’s legitimacy that concerns us here. The legitimacy of the political system and its attendant inequalities could only be upheld by corporate displays of desirable characteristics and Parliament provided a stage for such displays. As we shall see, this is what gave popular interest in parliamentary politics its significance. Taking this approach requires us first of all to investigate what kinds of qualities contemporaries sought in their politicians. Did they require that their representatives resemble them in some respect: religion, or class, for example? Or did they desire administrative competence, moral virtue, or strategic acumen? At stake was not only a particular way of conducting the affairs of the state but also a moral order and fundamental hierarchies of class, race, and gender which were embedded in the state. One of the functions of Parliament was to advertise the legitimacy of this social order to the nation. It was an arena in which men from a certain kind of background claimed authority to speak for and to rule over others: women, the poor, and those deemed racially ‘other.’ For this reason, it is insufficient to frame arguments about the legitimacy of the political system narrowly in terms of attitudes to the monarchy, or the consequences of enfranchisement; unpacking these dynamics requires us to draw on a wide range of tools in order to grasp the complexities of race, class, and gender.26 Fundamental to my approach here is to think about elite politics as performance rather than statecraft or maneuver. Although there have been many fine studies of parliamentary speech, studying the oratorical style, content, and function of speeches takes us only so far. In the course of speaking, politicians also conveyed messages of body language, age, disability, dress, and manners, all of which simultaneously signaled the presence of both class and gender.27 In this respect a politician’s performance is always influenced by what Pierre Bourdieu calls habitus – those “systems of durable, transposable dispositions” that structure social activity “in a way that is ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without in any way being the product of obedience to rules.”28 Habitus is a product of socialization into (often unspoken) norms that shape people’s “bearing, posture, presence, diction, and pronunciation, manners and usages,” producing recognizably different tastes and dispositions between classes.29 At the most basic level

“Politics as a Vocation” in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970 [1948]), 106.  I have elaborated my own theoretical framework at length elsewhere; see: Ben Griffin, “Hegemonic Masculinity as a Historical Problem,” Gender & History 30, no. 2 (2018): 377–400.  See: Ben Griffin, The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Culture and the Struggle for Women’s Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chapter 6.  Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 72.  Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge, 1984), 91.

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these dispositions are gendered, making the performance of class inseparable from the performance of gender.30 Politics therefore needs to be studied as fundamentally embodied. This has two separate aspects. First, the practice of politics was shaped by the bodies of politicians. This might be as a result of habitus, but it might also be because an individual’s bodily capacities placed constraints on the kinds of performances that he or she might undertake, a point made forcibly by recent work on the history of disability.31 As Lyndal Roper has reminded us: “Bodies have materiality . . . and are more than discourse.”32 Old men losing their hearing could not stay up all night debating into the small hours, while frail and sickly men were perceived as falling short of contemporary ideals of ‘manliness.’ Secondly, understanding politics as an embodied activity helps us to make sense of the reactions of audiences to political performances, whether those audiences were MPs in the House of Commons or working-class voters reading reports of parliamentary proceedings in the newspapers. Corporeal histories have taught us that contemporaries would have viewed politicians’ bodies through the lens of distinctive sets of historical attitudes: the Victorians thought about beards, legs, and height differently than their Hanoverian grandparents and judged their politicians accordingly.33 Thinking in terms of habitus allows us to understand why different groups could interpret the same bodily performance very differently. At various times, for example, upper-class and workingclass politicians seem to have found each other’s habitus unintelligible, creating mutual misunderstandings that undermined trust in each other’s good faith.34 Paying attention

 For critical commentary on Bourdieu’s handling of gender, see: Lois McNay, “Gender, Habitus and the Field: Pierre Bourdieu and the Limits of Reflexivity,” Theory, Culture and Society 16, no. 1 (1999): 95–117.  Stephen Mihm, “‘A Limb which Shall be Presentable in Polite Society’: Prosthetic Technologies in the Nineteenth Century,” in Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics, ed. Stephen Mihm, Katherine Ott, and David H. Serlin (New York: New York University Press, 2002); Iain Hutchison, A History of Disability in Nineteenth-Century Scotland (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007); Jennifer Esmail and Christopher Keep, “Victorian Disability: Introduction,” Victorian Review 25, no. 2 (2009), 45–51; Clare Walker-Gore, “Noble Lives: Writing Disability and Masculinity in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 36, no. 4 (2014): 363–375.  Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994). In thinking about this theme I have been greatly influenced by E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c. 1800–1947 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001).  Karen Harvey, “Men of Parts: Masculine Embodiment and the Male Leg in Eighteenth-Century England,” Journal of British Studies 54, no. 4 (2015): 797–821; Joanne Begiato, “Between Poise and Power: Embodied Manliness in 18th and 19th Century British Culture,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 26 (2016): 125–147; Joanne Ella Parsons and Ruth Heholt, eds., The Victorian Male Body (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018).  Ben Griffin, “Masculinities and Parliamentary Culture in Modern Britain,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Masculinity and Political Culture in Europe, ed. Sean Brady, Christopher Fletcher, Rachel Moss, and Lucy Riall (London: Palgrave, 2018), 410–411.

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to politicians’ bodies is therefore a necessary step in understanding both what was done in Parliament and how it was interpreted by a wider population trying to make sense of the political system’s claims to legitimacy.

I Radical Politics and Parliamentary Reporting, circa 1760–1830 British politics was fundamentally different to the politics of the other major European powers in the nineteenth century because the major contests were fought between groups who accepted the basic legitimacy of the constitutional framework, at least once the Jacobite threat receded after 1745.35 Whereas French politics was characterized by struggles between legitimists, Orléanists, Bonapartists, republicans, and socialists, all of whom disputed the fundamental basis of the constitution, British politics was a battle between groups who accepted the basic framework established by the Glorious Revolution of 1688: a constitutional monarchy that governed through ministers who were accountable to Parliament. In order to understand the place of Parliament in British political culture, then, we need to understand how the constitutionalism of late-eighteenth-century radicalism entrenched rather than undermined the place of Parliament in British politics. Eighteenth-century radicals could draw on a variety of political languages which expressed political oppositions in terms of party, court versus country, patriotism, ‘old corruption,’ and people versus aristocracy.36 Radical attention became focused on the question of how effectively Parliament represented the wishes of ‘the people’ by the agitation in support of John Wilkes’ efforts to enter Parliament in the 1760s. Wilkes was a scurrilous journalist, libertine, and wife-beater who was repeatedly elected as the MP for Middlesex in 1768 and 1769; on each occasion the House of Commons expelled him for his seditious and obscene libels against the royal family.37 Wilkes was able to mobilize a large swathe of public opinion by claiming that the House of Commons was dominated by a corrupt, self-serving elite, abusing its authority to deprive the people of their chosen MP. This critique of Britain’s political elites only intensified after defeat in  Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture, 57; David Craig, “The Crowned Republic? Monarchy and Anti-Monarchy in Britain, 1760–1901,” Historical Journal 46, no. 1 (2003); Antony Taylor, ‘Down with the Crown’: British Anti-Monarchism (London: Reaktion, 1999).  Linda Colley, “Eighteenth-Century Radicalism before Wilkes,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 31 (1981): 1–19; Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Bob Harris, Politics and the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).  I. R. Christie, Wilkes, Wyvill, and Reform 1760–1785 (London: Macmillan, 1962); J. Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); P. D. G. Thomas, John Wilkes: A Friend to Liberty (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996).

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the American Revolutionary War, which was blamed on a lack of ‘virtue’ among a governing class incapable of providing skillful, disinterested, and effective government.38 One response was to call for parliamentary reform: Christopher Wyvill’s Yorkshire Association hoped to increase the pool of talent and virtue in the House of Commons by creating more county seats, which were seen as less corrupt and more responsive to public opinion than the small boroughs. The political landscape was transformed by the French Revolution and the wars with France that followed, which produced new polarizations of opinion that were intensified by political repression, fears of domestic subversion, fears of invasion, and the new demands of the state during wartime.39 One effect of this was the creation of widespread popular loyalism that championed the virtues of Britain’s political institutions, such as Parliament.40 Another was an extensive radical movement that, for all of its occasional use of revolutionary idioms, still bore the stamp of older constitutional radical traditions. Even though in 1794 British radicals were placed on trial for trying to summon a Convention that would have threatened Parliament’s legitimacy, “the number of British radicals who saw in an extraparliamentary association a revolutionary anti-Parliament were very few indeed.”41 Genuine revolutionary Jacobinism remained marginal to popular politics.42 The radical tradition that emerged from this nexus, and which remained a potent force in British politics into the twentieth century, was centrally focused on misgovernment by unaccountable elites enmeshed in a web of ‘Old Corruption.’43 Social ills were blamed on political causes: poverty was understood as the result of high taxes imposed by a selfish aristocracy dedicated to enriching itself at the public’s expense. The remedy for this problem was not revolution but parliamentary reform, to make Parliament more accountable and more efficient. This explains why the Chartist

 Joanna Innes, “Politics and Morals: The Reformation of Manners Movement in Later 18th Century England,” in The Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century, ed. Eckhart Hellmuth (London: German Historical Institute, 1990), 57–118; Hilton, A mad, bad, 41 and chapter 3.  Mark Philp, The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).  Mark Philp, “Vulgar Conservatism, 1792–1793,” English Historical Review 110, no. 435 (1995): 42–69.  T. M. Parssinen, “Association, Convention and Anti-Parliament in British Radical Politics, 1771–1848,” English Historical Review 88, no. 348 (1973): 504–533, here 504–505.  John Dinwiddy, “Conceptions of Revolution in English Radicalism,” in The Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century, ed. Eckhart Hellmuth (London: German Historical Institute, 1990), 535–558; H. T. Dickinson, ed., Britain and the French Revolution, 1789–1815 (Basingstoke: Macmillan,1989). On the legacy of the complicated intertwining of constitutional and revolutionary discourses, see: James Epstein, “The Constitutional Idiom: Radical Reasoning, Rhetoric and Action in Early Nineteenth-Century England,” Journal of Social History 23, no. 3 (1990): 553–574.  Philip Harling, The Waning of Old Corruption: The Politics of Economical Reform in Britain, 1779–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Eugenio Biagini and Alastair Reid, ed., Currents of Radicalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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movement of the 1830s and 1840s responded to economic downturn and urban dislocation not by asking for bread but by asking for the vote, annual parliaments, and the secret ballot.44 Thus, British radical politics was fundamentally concerned with creating a Parliament that was genuinely representative of the public. To put the same point differently, British radicalism identified Parliament as the stage on which anyone wishing to claim political authority would have to establish their credentials. The Reform Crisis dramatized this point: Whig politicians claimed that they had reformed Parliament in a way that ought to satisfy radical prescriptions and promised that henceforth Parliament would be more responsive and accountable to the public. The achievement of political stability hinged on how radicals would assess those claims. Before proceeding further with that story, however, we need to consider how much information was available to radicals seeking to evaluate the conduct of parliamentarians. The perception that Parliament was unrepresentative and remote makes sense when we consider that in the middle of the eighteenth century it was illegal for anyone to report what was said in Parliament: there was a fundamental lack of transparency at the heart of the political system. Although ministerial activities frequently provided a focus for eighteenth-century political agitation, this occurred in the absence of reliable reports about parliamentary politics.45 The ban on reporting was an ancient rule, often respected in the breach rather than the observance, but reasserted with particular severity in 1738. MPs were under no illusion that this was a strategy to render Parliament less accountable to the public. In a speech in 1798, when the nation was at war and the state was mobilizing the nation’s resources on an unprecedented scale, the Secretary at War, William Windham, told the House of Commons that reporting their debates would transform the British form of government by “making it democratical.” The consequence of reporting debates, he complained, was that “the people were taught to look upon themselves as present at the discussion of Parliament, and sitting in judgement on them.”46 It was precisely this idea that took hold in the nineteenth century, transforming British political culture in exactly the way that Windham feared. Throughout the eighteenth century, expedients were adopted to get around the ban. Abel Boyer’s Political state of Great Britain of 1711, for example, reported Parliament’s proceedings in the form of a letter to a friend: it only reported speeches long after

 Gareth Stedman Jones, “Rethinking Chartism,” in his Languages of Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 90–178; Miles Taylor, “Rethinking the Chartists,” Historical Journal 39, no. 2 (1996): 487; Epstein, “Constitutional Idiom,” 555.  See for example: Paul Langford, The Excise Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); S. J. C. Taylor, “Walpole, Church of England, and Quaker Tithe Bill 1736,” Historical Journal 28, no. 1 (1985); Wilson, The Sense of the People.  Cited in: Andrew Sparrow, Obscure Scribblers: A History of Parliamentary Journalism (London: Politico’s, 2003), 3.

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they had originally been delivered and it anonymized the names of speakers in debates. From 1738 onwards the Gentleman’s Magazine presented its reports in a disguised form as Debates in the Senate of Magna Liliputia and referred to MPs only by pseudonyms, but this was not enough to protect the editor from arrest for publishing debates in 1747; reports resumed cautiously in 1752.47 Newspapers began to report parliamentary debates tentatively in 1768, prompting Parliament in 1771 to arrest eight printers who had ignored the prohibition.48 The cause of the printers was taken up by John Wilkes and the result of the battle that followed was that Parliament never again attempted to punish those reporting parliamentary proceedings.49 Even so, the House of Commons continued to remove observers from specific debates throughout the 1770s and reporters did not gain a right to a seat in the Commons Gallery until 1803.50 Nevertheless, there was a steady expansion in the number of printed reports of parliamentary debates. These included John Debrett’s Parliamentary Register from 1780–1812; William Woodfall’s Impartial Report of the Debates, which ran from 1794 to 1803 in thirty-three volumes; and the Senator: or Parliamentary Chronicle, which appeared in twenty-eight volumes from 1790 until 1801.51 The effect on political discourse was profound. Marie Peters has argued that in the 1750s “political debate in the press was still initiated and shaped by pamphlets and the political essay papers,” but within several decades, as a result of newspaper reports of parliamentary proceedings, the agenda was being set by Parliament.52 The quality of these early press reports was not good – they were not verbatim records (that did not arrive until 1909) but reconstructions produced from the journalist’s memory and notes of what had been said.53 Nevertheless, as Peter Jupp has argued:

 Sparrow, Obscure, 10–16.  P. D. G. Thomas, “The Beginning of Parliamentary Reporting in Newspapers, 1768–1774,” English Historical Review 74, no. 293 (1959): 623–636.  P. D. G. Thomas, “John Wilkes and the Freedom of the Press (1771),” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 33, no. 87 (1960): 86–98.  P. D. G. Thomas, The House of Commons in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 142–147.  R. G. Thorne, ed., The House of Commons 1790–1820, vol. 1 “Introductory Survey” (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986), 368–369.  Marie Peters, Pitt and Popularity: The Patriot Minister and London Opinion during the Seven Years War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 21; Peter Jupp, The Governing of Britain, 1688–1848 (London: Routledge, 2006), 259.  The famous editions of debates by Thomas Hansard and William Cobbett were compiled from newspaper reports. Hansard got its own reporters in 1878 but continued to rely on the press for most of its copy. H. Donaldson Jordan, “The Reports of Parliamentary Debates, 1803–1908,” Economica 11, no. 34 (1931): 437–449; J. Robson, What Did He Say? Editing Nineteenth-Century Speeches from Hansard and the Newspapers (Lethbridge: University of Lethbridge Press, 1988); Olive Anderson, “Hansard’s Hazards: An Illustration from Recent Interpretations of Married Women’s Property Law and the 1857 Divorce Act,” English Historical Review 112, no. 449 (1997): 1202–1215. Details of parliamentary reporting are given in three select committee reports on the subject, Parliamentary Papers [hereafter P.P.] 1878, XVII; P.P. 1878–1879 XII; P.P. 1880 sess. 2, VII.

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“In terms of public knowledge of parliamentary business there was something akin to an ‘information revolution’ . . . from c. 1780–1830.”54 The terrific expansion of the press made detailed accounts of MPs’ speeches and behavior accessible to the general public as never before. The number of newspapers stamped rose from 10.7 million in 1756 to 53.4 million in 1837. The number of titles increased even faster, as the number of provincial newspapers doubled between 1760 and 1790.55 London had circa twentyeight newspapers in the 1750s, but eighty-five by 1837; across the same period the number of newspaper titles in Scotland increased from around six to sixty-five, and in Ireland from seven to seventy-one.56 The mid-nineteenth century saw these trends accelerate.57 After the abolition of the newspaper stamp in 1855, the number of provincial newspapers rose from 234 in 1851 to 743 in 1860 and to 1,331 by 1886; the development of the railway and telegraph networks, especially after nationalization in 1870, and the establishment of the Press Association in 1868 allowed them to carry up-to-date parliamentary news.58 These newspapers were saturated with coverage of Parliament. As Jupp has noted: “With no sport or other media as competition, the debates and foreign relations provided the staple ‘national’ news.”59 To modern eyes no feature of nineteenth-century newspapers is quite as unfamiliar as the sheer amount of space devoted to blow-by-blow coverage of who said what in Parliament, in the Times sometimes amounting to tens of thousands of words every day. In the Morning Chronicle, already in the 1830s, “over half the space not taken up by advertisements was devoted to parliamentary debates.”60 This striking public appetite for parliamentary news also made it commercially viable for William Cobbett and Thomas Hansard to produce their serial Parliamentary Debates from 1803 onward. This makes more sense once we understand that Parliament’s activities formed the centerpiece of both radical and loyalist politics during the wars with France. The public’s interest was driven by their increasing daily interactions with an expanding central state, the new threats to property and liberty posed by the wars, the grave questions of social and economic policy posed by the transition back to peacetime after 1815, and ongoing ministerial efforts to

 Jupp, Governing, 207.  Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics, and Public Opinion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 111, fig. 4.  Jupp, Governing, table 8.4.  An essential guide is: Kathryn Rix, “‘Whatever Passed in Parliament ought to be Communicated to the Public’: Reporting the Proceedings of the Reformed Commons, 1833–1850,” Parliamentary History 33, no. 3 (2014): 453–474.  Alan J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press in England, 1855–1914 (1976), 60–63, 290. For developments after 1860 see: Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Thomas Crewe, “Political Leaders, Communication, and Celebrity in Britain, c1880c1900” (PhD diss., Cambridge University, 2015), chapter 2.  Jupp, Governing, 226.  Ellis A. Wasson, “The Whigs and the Press, 1800–1850,” Parliamentary History 25, no. 1 (2006): 76.

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suppress extra-parliamentary radicalism. Radicalism’s insistence that “the corrupt state of the representation . . . has been productive of all the calamities under which the country now labours” meant that their attention was inevitably focused on what went on at Westminster, and reports of parliamentary debates became an important source for radicals like John Wade, whose Black Book listed all of the MPs with their economic interests.61 Cumulatively, the result was a major transformation in British political culture, as press coverage of Parliament exposed the governing classes to new kinds of scrutiny, a trend reinforced from the 1830s onward by the “unprecedented publication of political diaries, letters, memoirs and biographies.”62 By the middle of the nineteenth century, Philip Salmon has written, “parliamentary debates had become one of the mass entertainments of the Victorian age, assuming a role not unlike a soap-opera.”63 It is time then to consider what difference this made to the staging of authority in what came to be known as ‘the age of reform.’ Now that the workings of Parliament were more visible than ever before, what did people see?

II Parliamentary Authority in the Age of Reform The Reform Crisis began as a high political crisis, but it soon triggered a major explosion of extra-parliamentary unrest. The Duke of Wellington’s government collapsed in 1830, too weak to carry out its preferred policies and embarrassed by its inability to resist Catholic emancipation in 1829. The question of the day was how to restore the authority of the executive. The new Whig ministry under Lord Grey proposed to do so by reforming the electoral system. A House of Commons that was more genuinely representative of the people, they thought, would have the legitimacy and authority necessary to carry out its will.64 Their Reform Bill proposed to reform the franchise, to create new parliamentary constituencies in hitherto unrepresented towns and cities, and to remove representation from a large number of small boroughs. The bill was repeatedly blocked by the House of Lords, prompting general elections that polarized the nation and triggered massive displays of public support for constitutional change. The electoral system created by the 1832 Reform Act was in no sense democratic – that had not been the Whigs’ intention. Their goal was to ensure that all of the major interests in the country were represented, not to ensure that  John Wade, Black Book; or Corruption Unmasked, 2 vols. (London: J. Fairburn, 1828), 413, 425–446.  Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture, 114.  Philip Salmon, “The House of Commons, 1801–1911,” in A Short History of Parliament, ed. Clyve Jones (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2009), 261.  Jonathan Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (Yale: Yale University Press, 1993), 67–71, 77–78.

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individual voters could express a political preference.65 The public displays of authority being broadcast by the reformed House of Commons were designed to shore up the aristocratic social order, not to inaugurate a more democratic dispersion of power.66 The size of the borough electorate increased by 67 percent, while the county electorate grew by 29 percent, but as a proportion of the adult male population, this was only an increase from 12.4 percent to 18.4 percent.67 Nevertheless the impact of the Reform Act was immense. It substantially increased the political power of dissenters who henceforth constituted 20 percent of the electorate, and the heightened partisanship during the crisis promoted new kinds of party identity that spread rapidly throughout the country.68 The battles over the reform bills also shifted the balance of power between the House of Commons and the House of Lords, such that the latter would remain relatively quiescent until the 1880s.69 Above all, the Reform Act created expectations that henceforth the House of Commons would be more responsive to public grievances.70 It was on this basis that the new system claimed legitimacy, and political stability was only possible if those claims were accepted: Parliament was now the stage for performances on which rested the new political order. Consequently, MPs had to be seen to be representing their constituents. One of the most immediate changes was that politicians began speaking more frequently in the House of Commons. In the later eighteenth century, more than half of the MPs never spoke at all in debates.71 This changed significantly in the decade before Reform and even more so after 1832: 31 percent of MPs are listed in the index of Hansard as having contributed to a debate in 1820, but 60 percent were listed in 1833 and 86 percent in 1896.72 MPs also worked harder: the number of hours each day that Parliament sat increased, as did the number of days each year that Parliament worked, mirroring the same pattern seen

 Ben Griffin, “Women’s Suffrage,” in Languages of Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. David Craig and James Thompson (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 168–190, here 173–174; Parry, Rise and Fall, 78.  Jonathan Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 51.  Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture, 88, 90; Derek Beales, “The Electorate before 1832,” Parliamentary History 11 (1992): 139–150.  John A. Phillips and Charles Wetherell, “The Great Reform Act of 1832 and the Political Modernization of England,” American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (1995): 411–436; Philip Salmon, Electoral Reform at Work: Local Politics and National Parties, 1832–1841 (Suffolk: Royal Historical Society, 2002), 238–248; Matthew Cragoe, “The Great Reform Act and the Modernization of British Politics: the Impact of Conservative Association, 1835–1841,” Journal of British Studies 47, no. 3 (2008): 581–603.  Jupp, Governing, 212–213; E. A. Smith, The House of Lords in British Politics and Society, 1815–1911 (London: Longman, 1992), 118–129.  Peter Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 150–151; Parry, Rise and Fall, 141.  Thomas, House of Commons, 229.  Salmon, “The House of Commons,” 257.

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between 1780 and 1820.73 And politicians wanted their constituents to see them at work, so after the fire of 1834 the press were provided with better accommodation than they had hitherto enjoyed.74 Kathryn Rix has argued that the 1830s saw a qualitative change in how the House of Commons engaged with ‘public opinion,’ registered in both the sale to the public of parliamentary papers from 1836 onward, some becoming bestsellers, and the publication of official lists of how MPs voted.75 This last change gave rise to publications such as Richard Gooch’s Book of the Reformed Parliament in 1834 and T. N. Roberts’ Parliamentary buff book, which collated the data to show constituents how their representatives had voted during each parliamentary session.76 In 1836 James Grant described a scene in which MPs were desperate to return home at the end of the day, but dared not leave before a House of Commons vote “lest the non-appearance of their names in the lists of the majority and minority the following morning, should lead to some unpleasant questions from their respective constituents, if not a requisition to resign their seats.”77 The new expectation that Parliament should be more responsive to the public is most obviously visible in the staggering increase in the number of petitions presented to Parliament. In 1760 the House of Commons had received fewer than 100 petitions annually; this number doubled over the next forty-five years; the following decade saw a leap to 900 and then a further increase to 2,400 by 1826.78 But following the Reform Crisis the number of petitions increased from 23,283 between 1828 and 1832 to 70,072 between 1838 and 1842. The peak for a single year was reached in 1843 with 33,989 – after that the number never dropped below 10,000 per annum.79 The number of MPs attempting to give speeches on such petitions was so great that it threatened to paralyze the institution, so in 1835 debates on petitions were abandoned, although members could still present petitions in the chamber, summarizing their contents and

 Jupp, Governing, 210.  Salmon, “Parliament,” 86.  Kathryn Rix, “Whatever Passed,” 454, 464–465, 472.  Richard Gooch, The Book of the Reformed Parliament; Being a Synopsis of the Votes of the Members of the Reformed House of Commons, upon all Important Questions; from their first Sitting of February, 1833, to the End of the Second Session, August 1834; With Lists Prefixed of the Mover’s Name, the Nature of Each Question, and the Gross Divisions thereon; To which is added, a Synoptical Appendix of the Votes, Divisions, and Protests of the House of Lords during the Same Period (London: A. H. Baily, 1834); T. N. Roberts, ed., Parliamentary Buff Book: Being an Analysis of the Divisions of the House of Commons (London: Effingham Wilson, 1869–1876).  ‘One of no party’ [James Grant], Random Recollections of the House of Commons from the Year 1830 to the Close of 1835 (London: Smith Elder and Co., 1836), 77.  Jupp, Governing, 216. On eighteenth-century petitioning see: James E. Bradley, “Parliament, Print Culture and Petitioning in Late Eighteenth-Century England,” Parliamentary History 26, no. 1 (2007): 96–111.  Parry, The Rise and Fall, 141; Jupp, Governing, 252.

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reporting the number of signatures.80 This moment could become dramatic political theater: the second Chartist petition of 1842 contained 3,317,702 signatures, was more than six miles in length when unrolled, and weighed more than six hundredweight; it was so large that the doorframe of the Members Entrance to the Palace of Westminster had to be broken in order that the petition could be delivered.81 The rejection of each of the three Chartist petitions in 1839, 1842, and 1848 demonstrated publicly the limits of Parliament’s willingness to engage with popular demands and triggered attempts to stage armed insurrectionary risings around the country by some extremists.82 It is more telling, however, that in an overwhelmingly constitutionalist movement, the dominant response to defeat in 1839 was to begin collecting signatures for new petitions.83 The scale of the Chartist protests underlines the fact that in the two decades after the Reform Act, the Whigs’ ambition to shore up aristocratic authority through parliamentary action failed. Support for the Whigs ebbed away as they repeatedly found themselves trying to implement schemes in advance of public opinion.84 Many of their policies, like the New Poor Law of 1834, served to alienate those who remained unenfranchised after the Reform Act and who concluded that the newly-enfranchised had thrown in their lot with the aristocratic state and had betrayed ‘the people.’85 The new visibility of Parliament only served to underline its remoteness, sparking new calls for a Convention elected by a more democratic franchise that would operate as an anti-Parliament.86 Working-class protests were accompanied by middle-class radicals equally determined to bring an end to aristocratic misgovernment, through pressure groups like the Anti-Corn Law League, founded 1838, and a range of nonconformist campaigns in favor of voluntarism and disestablishment of the Church.

 Henry Miller, “Popular Petitioning and the Corn Laws, 1833–1846,” English Historical Review 127, no. 527 (2012): 882–919, here 888.  Paul Pickering, “And your Petitioners &c: Chartist Petitioning in Popular Politics 1838–1848,” English Historical Review 116, no. 466 (2001): 368–388, here 368–369.  The best account of Parliament’s rejection of the petitions is Robert Saunders, “Chartism from Above: British Elites and the Interpretation of Chartism,” Historical Research 81, no. 213 (2008): 463–484. Insurrectionary Chartist plots are discussed in: Malcolm Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007) and David J. V. Jones, The Last Rising: The Newport Chartist Insurrection of 1839, 2nd ed. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013).  Pickering, “Petitioners,” 380. On Chartist constitutionalism, see: Epstein, “Constitutional Idiom.”  Mandler, Aristocratic Government, 83–84, 167–168, 193–199, 267; Richard Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics: Whiggery, Religion and Reform 1830–1841 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), chapter 7; Parry, Politics of Patriotism, chapter 3.  Stedman Jones, “Rethinking Chartism,” 145–146. The term ‘middle class’ gained purchase as a description of the newly-enfranchised, but this is not an accurate sociological description of the electorate; see: Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class 1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chapters 9 and 10.  Parssinen, “Association,” 521–530.

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The result was that “there was a concerted attack on the idea of aristocratic politics” between 1848 and 1850; the atmosphere of those years was intensely threatening, with the shadow of the continental revolutions ever-present and the state taking full advantage of its monopoly of violence.87 The deep radical suspicion of Parliament was gradually eroded over the course of the 1850s, helped by economic recovery, a series of policy shifts, the emergence of a new politics of patriotism, and, ultimately, further franchise reform in 1867.88 With the exception of the economic upturn, each of these new developments was rooted in, and advertised through, parliamentary performance. Lord Palmerston’s ostentatiously patriotic politics championing British liberties found its most famous expression in his speech in Parliament on the Don Pacifico affair in 1850, in which he proclaimed the superiority of British law and asserted the right of the British Empire to defend its subjects around the globe.89 Similarly, Gladstone’s monumental parliamentary speech on the 1853 budget was the keystone of a new fiscal settlement based on free trade, low taxes, and a small state.90 Gladstone “made finance and figures exciting, and succeeded in constructing budget speeches epic in form and performance,” which won him unprecedented popularity.91 In short, the promise of 1832 was finally fulfilled: Parliament was seen to be a venue where political elites behaved in a responsible way. The authority of the governing classes was secured in large part by their performances on the parliamentary stage. An essential feature of this reconciliation between popular radicalism and the parliamentary Liberal Party was that it conceded leadership to established elites: working men were asked to throw their support behind Palmerston and Gladstone rather than to aspire to the highest places themselves. Although the number of middle-class MPs increased in the 1830s – and especially the number of MPs from professional backgrounds – there was no significant change in the social composition of the House of Commons between 1832 and 1867. The big changes came with the sudden fall in the number of landed MPs and the increase in the number of businessmen in the 1880s

 Parry, Politics of Patriotism, 55–58, 172. On state violence see: John Saville, 1848: The British State and the Chartist Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).  Parry, Politics of Patriotism, 58–71; Jonathan Parry, “The Decline of Institutional Reform in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Structures and Transformations in Modern British History, ed. David Feldman and Jon Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 164–186.  David Brown, Palmerston and the Politics of Foreign Policy, 1846–1865 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), chapter 5; Parry, Politics of Patriotism, 199–201.  Anthony Taylor, “Palmerston and Radicalism, 1847–1865,” Journal of British Studies 33, no. 2 (1994): 157–179; Miles Taylor, The Decline of British Radicalism 1847–1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Parry, “Decline of Institutional Reform,” 164–186; H. C. G. Matthew, “Disraeli, Gladstone, and the Politics of Mid-Victorian Budgets,” Historical Journal 22, no. 3 (1979): 615–643.  Matthew, Gladstone, 121. On Gladstone’s popularity, see: Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform, 379–384.

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and 1890s.92 In government, the power of the aristocracy was undimmed: of the post1832 nineteenth-century prime ministers, all but Peel and Gladstone were either from aristocratic families or were subsequently elevated to the House of Lords. Eleven out of the fifteen ministers in Palmerston’s 1859 cabinet were territorial magnates, and half of Gladstone’s first cabinet in 1868 were drawn from the aristocracy. What did change was how this governing elite presented itself as conforming to a common culture. “Once,” Paul Langford has written, ministers “had represented the urbanity and sophistication of a metropolitan court, whereas ordinary MPs had represented the rusticity of the provinces.” But by the middle of the nineteenth century “all were united as members of a cohesive club, the gentlemen of England,” a process characterized by the convergence of dress and manners between men from different classes.93 This shared code of gentlemanliness was not confined to Westminster politicians, but rather established a common identity among a governing class otherwise divided by economic, religious, and regional differences. Aristocrats, country gentry, industrialists, soldiers, financiers, young and old men, married and single men, disabled and non-disabled men all came together as ‘gentlemen’ who read the same books and newspapers, sent their sons to the same public schools, wore the same styles of clothes, and adopted the same codes of bodily deportment and emotional control. This shared culture was vital in allowing previously marginalized groups to assimilate into the governing classes once admitted to Parliament. Thus, Catholics, Jews, and atheists made remarkably little difference to parliamentary culture once they were granted the ability to sit as MPs in 1829, 1858, and 1888 respectively. Importantly, the term ‘gentleman’ collapses the distinction between class and gender as modes of hegemonic power: it was a form of masculinity to which most men of the upper and middle classes aspired, while at the same time it was their identity as gentlemen that distinguished them as a governing class.94 In this way, the legitimacy of the governing class’s claims to political authority rested on a convincing corporate display of those gentlemanly qualities thought necessary for leadership. A Parliament full of effeminate, weak, or cowardly men would lack the authority needed to control the first industrial nation and its global empire. At an

 Generalization is hazardous due to variations in the definitions used by different authors. D. R. Fisher, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1820–1832, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); David F. Krein, “The Great Landowners in the House of Commons, 1833–1885,” Parliamentary History 32, no. 3 (2013): 460–476; W. L. Guttsman, The British Political Elite (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1963), 41, 82; Alex S. Rosser, “Businessmen in the Parliament of 1852–1857: Players or Spectators?” Parliamentary History 32, no. 3 (2013): 477–505; W. C. Lubenow, Parliamentary Politics and the Home Rule Crisis: the British House of Commons in 1886 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 365–367.  Paul Langford, “Politics and Manners from Sir Robert Walpole to Sir Robert Peel,” Proceedings of the British Academy 94 (1997): 103–125, here 113.  Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Routledge, 1987), 13.

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individual level, too, the ability to present oneself as a gentleman was a necessary qualification for political authority in a culture which understood class as much in terms of moral distinctions as economic stratification. The next part of this section will examine how MPs tried to advertise to the wider world their claims to possess those qualities that conferred political authority. Precisely because this is what Victorian observers were looking for, the source material is abundant. As a genre, the parliamentary sketch in particular specialized in humorous assessments of how far short MPs fell from ideals of gentlemanliness. “Accent, gesture, gait, dress, countenance, complexion, mannerism, were minutely delineated” in reports of Parliament, while “[r]udeness, oafishness, clownishness, any form of what might be termed low manners, were devastatingly exposed.”95 James Grant’s, Random recollections of the House of Commons in 1836 set a pattern later followed by E. M. Whitty and William White and mastered by Sir Henry Lucy.96 The commentary offered by these journalists offers a vivid insight into the ways in which authority was performed in Parliament and transmitted to the wider public outside. The most fundamental parliamentary activity in the nineteenth century was speech-making. Those listening to the speeches judged them according to a set of criteria that were changing quite rapidly in the middle of the century. Not only were the rhetorical conventions governing speeches changing, as a more conversational style replaced the brilliant oratory of the eighteenth century. There were also changes in the meanings assigned to accents and in the qualities of tone of voice that were valued.97 Josephine Hoegaerts has argued that, as the century went on, a controlled, conversational, well-modulated, and ‘natural’ tone came to be favored over sheer vocal strength, overt emotionalism, and theatrical speech. The most valued tone of voice was not simply given or natural, she argues, and “new rules of vocal management and the cultivation of controlled authenticity also created means of exclusion.” One did not have to be physically present in the House of Commons to assess these aspects of a politicians’ performance. Hoegaerts notes that in press reports of parliamentary speeches, “vivid descriptions of ‘husky,’ ‘screechy,’ ‘musical,’ and ‘deep’

 Langford, “Politics and Manners,” 123.  Compilations of sketches were published as Grant, Random Recollections; Whitty, St. Stephen’s; William White, The Inner Life of the House of Commons, 2 vols. (London: Fisher Unwin, 1897); Henry Lucy, A Diary of Two Parliaments: The Disraeli Parliament, 1874–1880 (London: Cassell & Co., 1885); Henry Lucy, A Diary of Two Parliaments: The Gladstone Parliament, 1880–85 (London: Cassell & Co., 1886); Henry Lucy, A Diary of the Salisbury Parliament, 1886–1892 (London: Cassell & Co., 1892); Henry Lucy, A Diary of the Home Rule Parliament, 1892–5 (London: Cassell & Co., 1896); Henry Lucy, A Diary of the Unionist Parliament, 1895–1900 (Briston: A. J. Arrowsmith, 1901).  Joseph S. Meisel, Public Speech and the Culture of Public Life in the Age of Gladstone (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Christopher Reid, Imprison’d Wranglers: the Rhetorical Culture of the House of Commons, 1760–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Lydia Mugglestone, ‘Talking Proper’: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

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voices abound – and the quality of a voice’s sound was frequently connected to a speaker’s appearance, his character, and his effectiveness and value as a politician.”98 Observers of Parliament were also greatly exercised by body language. Gentlemen were expected to have control over their bodies, so any signs of fidgeting or a lack of emotional control undermined one’s claims to authority. There was a whole grammar of precisely observed gestures and postures that held meaning for the trained observer: Lady Colin Campbell, for example, claimed to be able to identify a gentleman by his walk.99 Above all, the quality that reporters sought in politicians was ease: a man who was not conspicuously at ease in Parliament could not expect to be considered a statesman. George Goschen’s lack of composure was obvious for all to see in the strange gestures he made with his hands while speaking; Lucy wrote that it was as if he was washing “his hands with invisible soap in imperceptible water.”100 The press understood Richard Assheton Cross’ inability to stop biting his fingernails as politically significant because it indicated a lack of self-control, as did the inability of Sir John Gorst and Edmond Fitzmaurice to stand still.101 The ability to radiate confidence, self-possession, and poise was taken to be the sign of the true gentleman. Lucy singled out William Redmond as a potential trouble-maker the moment he entered the House of Commons because he had “swaggered up the floor with the indescribable air of an ill-bred man attempting to be perfectly at his ease, and not quite knowing what to do with his hands.”102 At the other extreme, one could appear too relaxed: White noted that “the Marquis of Hartington, as he lounges into the House with his hands in his pockets, in that easy nonchalant manner of his, does not strike the beholder as having any special capacity for governing.” Hartington had to confound expectations created by “that nonchalance of manner which would lead you to suppose that he was indolent in mind and body.”103 Bodies also indicated a range of other desirable characteristics in Parliament, like the strength and stamina associated with ‘manliness’ – a particularly important concept in the political discourse of the 1850s and 1860s.104 Although Charles Wetherell’s face was “deeply furrowed with wrinkles,” James Grant noted in the 1830s that he was “tall and athletic” and “capable of undergoing great fatigue. His

 Josephine Hoegaerts, “Speaking like Intelligent Men: Vocal Articulations of Authority and Identity in the House of Commons in the Nineteenth Century,” Radical History Review 121 (2015): 123–142, here 124–125.  Michael Curtin, Propriety and Position: A Study of Victorian Manners (New York: Garland, 1987), 114–115. See also: Griffin, Politics of Gender, 190–193.  Lucy, Disraeli Parliament, 387.  Lucy, Disraeli Parliament, 426, 187.  Lucy, Gladstone Parliament, 404.  White, Inner Life, vol. 2, 12.  Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), chapter 5: “Manly Fellows: Fawcett, Stephen and the Liberal Temper.”

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physical as well as mental exertions during the time [of] the Reform Bill . . . were extraordinary.”105 More troublingly, the failing powers of men who were elderly or ill were made visible through their bodies. In 1863 the state of the party system (not to mention the career prospects of his rivals) seemed to hinge on the health of the seventy-nine-year-old prime minister, Lord Palmerston. When he returned to the House of Commons after a bout of illness “cheers burst forth from his supporters when they saw that he walked as firmly as ever.” White reported: “He looks a shade older than he did; he did not walk quite so briskly as he did; but there is evidently ‘life in the old dog yet.’”106 In the 1870s, Benjamin Disraeli’s body was similarly scrutinized during his parliamentary activities for signs that he might be about to step down and trigger a leadership contest within his party. The criteria that observers used to assess bodies were in certain respects historically specific, as Matthew McCormack’s work on attitudes towards tall men in the eighteenth century shows us.107 The time has passed when the sight of MPs with long hair indicated the presence of nonconformist MPs in the House of Commons.108 Similarly, a modern reader might not recognize Grant’s description of Lord Althorp’s “short and corpulent,” pot-bellied body and florid complexion as exhibiting “all the indications of good health.”109 Physiognomy, the belief that people’s facial features were revealing of their character, was culturally pervasive in this period.110 Grant noted that Lord Howick’s face confounded expectations because “no physiognomist would give him credit for the strong and cultivated mind he possesses.”111 The midVictorian beard craze was another historically specific influence on politicians trying to demonstrate their ‘manliness.’112 William White described the variety of “flowing beards, and stubbly beards, and curly beards” in the House of Commons: “We have moustaches light and delicate like a lady’s eyebrow, long and pendant like a Chinaman’s, bushy and fierce like a brigand’s.”113 Such displays contrasted with the cleanshaven fashions that had been most common before the 1850s.

 Grant, Random Recollections, 92–94.  White, Inner Life, vol. 1, 174.  Matthew McCormack, “Tall Histories: Height and Georgian Masculinities,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 26 (2016): 79–101. On the nineteenth century, see: Parsons and Heholt, Victorian Male Body.  T. P. O’Connor, Memoirs of an Old Parliamentarian, 2 vols. (London: E. Benn, 1929), vol. 1: 52–53.  Grant, Random Recollections, 174.  Henry Miller, Politics Personified: Portraiture, Caricature and Visual Culture in Britain, c. 1830–1880 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 12; Lucy Hartley, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).  Grant, Random Recollections, 216.  Christopher Oldstone-Moore, “The Beard Movement in Victorian Britain,” Victorian Studies 48, no. 1 (2005): 7–34.  White, Inner Life, vol. 1, 42.

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The means by which the bodies of politicians were made public were also changing. The Wilkes agitation of the 1760s pioneered new kinds of commercially produced political artifacts, from porcelain figures of Wilkes to medallions, teapots, tobacco pipes, mugs, badges, and candlesticks adorned with images of Wilkes.114 Such items made the appearance of political elites familiar outside Westminster. The likenesses of politicians circulated in “paintings, engravings, sculpture, and even waxworks,” but one must remember that in the late eighteenth century this was largely a metropolitan phenomenon accessible only to the relatively wealthy and that even the great satirical prints of James Gillray were published in runs of only hundreds.115 Especially following the Reform Crisis, the demand for such goods expanded further, as politically-themed portraits, pottery figurines, medallions, and other paraphernalia adorned domestic interiors in ever greater numbers.116 Two major waves of technological innovation transformed the circulation of likenesses of politicians. First, between the 1820s and 1840s new technologies created a mass market for political cartoons presented in new serial publications and the expanding press. Then, from the 1850s onward, new technologies allowed voters to see photographic images of the governing classes for the first time, although it was not until the 1880s that photographs could be reproduced in newspapers with any clarity.117 This created a new political terrain, in which the public image of politicians hinged as much on depictions of their bodies as on reports of what they said. The struggle for parliamentary influence between Palmerston and Lord John Russell, for example, was simultaneously played out and reported in visual media like cartoons which presented Palmerston as physically vigorous and ‘manly’ and Russell as short, frail, and effeminate.118 Henry Miller has argued that: “The 1832 Reform Act marked a watershed . . . as a starting point for a different kind of political imagery.” His study of cartoons has shown how older traditions of satirical representation which relied on grotesque distortions of their subjects’ appearances were replaced by more realistic depictions and “a more respectful, sober and positive portrayal of politicians.”119 The clothing that concealed bodies was also important in political performances. Grant wrote that Sir Francis Burdett “dresses like a gentleman and has the manners of a gentleman.” His “blue coat, a light colored waistcoat, and light-colored knee breeches” marked Burdett out as old-fashioned, as did Sir Robert Inglis’s dress;  John Brewer, “Commercialization and Politics,” in The Birth of a Consumer Society, ed. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 238–241; see also 248–249 for precursors.  Reid, Imprison’d Wranglers, 98, 100.  Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture, 113; Miller, Politics Personified, 29–36.  Miller, Politics Personified, 6–7, 24–25.  Miller, Politics Personified, chapter 6.  Miller, Politics Personified, 15. Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in EighteenthCentury London (New York: Walker, 2006), part 4; Brian Maidment, Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order, 1820–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).

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younger politicians, like Joseph Chamberlain in the 1880s, could use dress to signal their youthful energy and fresh thinking.120 By the 1850s the dandyism and brightly colored clothing of the Regency period, not to mention the eighteenth-century Whig uniform of buff and blue, had been replaced by sober and simple black frock coats that rejected what was seen as “the corrupting field of fashion.”121 Bold sartorial statements were treated with suspicion. T. P. O’Connor, the Irish MP and parliamentary reporter, thought that the dandyish clothes worn by the future Lord Spencer undermined his claims to be “a manly fellow” because it made him appear “child-like,” “and people would never take him seriously.”122 In 1836 Grant noted approvingly that Lord Morpeth “is always smartly dressed, though not deserving the appellation of a fop.”123 Neatness indicated self-respect, but a certain carelessness in dress indicated a welcome absence of vanity. Lucy recorded that: “Ordinarily [Gladstone] is most careless in his attire, and . . . [draws] very little on the resources of his tailor. But when he proposes to make a great speech in the House of Commons he always submits himself to the control of others, puts on his very best clothes, and passively stands while a flower is pinned in his buttonhole.”124 In this account, Gladstone’s self-presentation is respectable, but any hint of vanity is dispelled by attributing a concern with appearances to others. Scruffiness, on the other hand, could be taken too far and might demonstrate a carelessness that was inconsistent with claims to leadership. Lucy wrote of one contender for the leadership of the Liberal party in 1875 that if he “would brush his hair, would refrain from buying ready-made clothing that never fits him, [and] would not sprawl in his seat” his chances of becoming leader would be greatly increased.125 In these ways the gentlemanliness of the political elite was performed in Parliament and broadcast to an attentive reading public. Precisely because the legitimacy of the political structure rested on a convincing corporate display that the governing elites were gentlemen, Parliament took pains to police the behavior of its members, heckling or ostracizing individuals who failed to conform to gentlemanly norms due to their sexual or moral transgressions.126 Disraeli, for example, took the Irish nationalist MP Joseph Biggar to task when the latter began a policy of obstructing government business, chastising him with the observation that “the House of Commons was, possibly with the fewest exceptions, an assemblage of gentlemen.”127 More

 Grant, Random Recollections, 245. On Inglis, see: John Vincent, ed., Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party: The Political Journals of Lord Stanley, 1849–1869 (Hassocks: Harvester, 1978), 36, (4 Feb 1851). I owe the point about Chamberlain to Tom Crewe.  Christopher Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life, 1860–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 251–252.  O’Connor, Memoirs, vol. 1, 59, 173.  Grant, Random Recollections, 212.  Lucy, Disraeli Parliament, 506–507.  Lucy, Disraeli Parliament, 113, 340.  Griffin, Politics of Gender, 194–196.  Lucy, Disraeli Parliament, 83.

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serious treatment was meted out to Edward Kenealy, the lawyer for the famous Tichborne claimant and later MP for Stoke. Kenealy had achieved notoriety not only for his scathing attacks on the aristocracy and the judiciary, but also for his conviction for a violent assault upon his illegitimate son in 1850. MPs set themselves to humiliating Kenealy at every opportunity to show that he had no place in an assembly of gentlemen: his attempts to speak were repeatedly met with ostentatious walkouts, or else MPs simply tried to drown out his voice with their jeers.128 It was in such ways that the authority of Parliament was defended. The models of authority recognized within this parliamentary culture were distinctively masculine forms in which codes of class and gender were mutually constitutive. The rules that made sense of the performances described above did not apply to women’s clothes, bodies, or temperaments, all of which were assessed by different standards. This parliamentary culture therefore rested on the exclusion of women from Parliament. Proposals to admit women as MPs met even greater resistance than demands for women’s suffrage.129 Women’s political authority rested on very different foundations, drawing on distinctively gendered constructions of respectable, aristocratic, property-owning, and philanthropic femininities; it was also usually performed on less obtrusive stages than Parliament, often in local or familial contexts.130 Even after women became MPs, the threat that they posed to gentlemanly politics was muted by the fact that only thirty-eight women entered Parliament before 1945, with at most fifteen sitting simultaneously.131 Such small numbers were easily ignored, so that as late as 1937 the Conservative MP Chips Channon could refer to the House of Commons as “this smelly, tawny, male paradise.”132 If the forms of authority being performed in Parliament were distinctively male, they were also unmistakably expressions of ‘whiteness.’ This took the form of both confident assertions of racial hierarchies and claims on the part of white MPs to possess authoritative knowledge about subject populations in the empire.133 Sir George

 Griffin, Politics of Gender, 195.  Griffin, Politics of Gender, 196–200.  Kathryn Gleadle, Borderline Citizens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 156, 255–256, 261–262; Linda Walker, “Party Political Women: A Comparative Study of Liberal Women and the Primrose League, 1890–1914,” in Equal or Different? Women’s Politics 1800–1914, ed. Jane Rendall (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 165–191; Patricia Hollis, Ladies Elect: Women in Local Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); K. D. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Sarah Richardson, The Political Worlds of Women (New York: Routledge, 2013).  Brian Harrison, “Women in a Men’s House: the Women MPs, 1919–1945,” Historical Journal 29, no. 3 (1986): 623–654, here 623, 626.  Robert Rhodes James, ed., Chips: the Diaries of Sir Henry Channon (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967), 128.  On Victorian racism see: Peter Mandler, “‘Race’ and ‘Nation’ in Mid-Victorian Thought,” in History, Religion and Culture: British Intellectual History, ed. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 224–244; Douglas A. Lorimer, Science,

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Campbell and Sir Richard Temple, for example, were both senior administrators in India who on their return to the United Kingdom entered Parliament claiming special authority to comment on the character and needs of the queen’s Indian subjects.134 More subtly, the construction of whiteness in British politics frequently involved a simple willingness to disregard the experiences of millions of imperial subjects or to pass over them in silence.135 These performances were facilitated by the fact that Parliament was full of white men until 1892. This reflects not just the tiny number of people of color in the United Kingdom, but also the fact that neither imperial territories nor their indigenous populations were directly represented in Parliament. White imperial subjects relied on a form of virtual representation by which men with ties to the East India Company or the West Indies stood for election in United Kingdom constituencies. Around one-fifth of MPs before 1832 had such ties, but their numbers plummeted as a result of the Reform Act, which abolished many small borough seats and created a culture in which MPs were expected to focus on the needs of their immediate constituents. For the rest of the century, plans for further reform would toy with the idea of establishing a direct representation of imperial territories at Westminster and would sometimes consider enfranchising indigenous populations for those elections, but such plans came to nothing.136 In 1888 the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, opined that “however far we have advanced in overcoming prejudices, I doubt if we have yet got to the point where a British constituency will elect a black man to represent them.” “The British House of Commons,” he claimed, “is a machine too peculiar and too delicate to be managed by any but those who have been born within these isles.”137 He was proved

Race Relations and Resistance: Britain, 1870–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). On the creation of colonial knowledge, see especially: Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).  George Campbell, Sir, Memoirs of my Indian Career, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1893); Richard Temple, Sir, India in 1880 (London: J. Murray, 1880); Richard Temple, Sir, The Story of My Life, 2 vols. (London: Cassell, 1896).  Jon Wilson “The Silence of Empire: Imperialism and India,” in Languages of Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. David Craig and James Thompson (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 218–241.  Miles Taylor, “Empire and Parliamentary Reform: The 1832 Reform Act Revisited,” in Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain, 1780–1850, ed. Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 302; Miles Taylor, “Colonial Representation at Westminster,” in Parliaments, Nations and Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1660–1850, ed. Julian Hoppit (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 210–212, quotation from 211. On schemes for imperial federation, see: Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).  Cited in: Andrew Roberts, Salisbury: Victorian Titan (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), 506.

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wrong in 1892 when the first MP of color, Dadhabi Naoroji, a former mathematics professor and President of the India National Congress, was elected for the constituency of Central Finsbury as a Liberal. The presence of a strong voice for Indian nationalism in Parliament prompted the Conservatives to put up their own Indian candidate, Sir Mancherjee Bhownaggree.138 In the general election of 1895 Bhownaggree was elected for Bethnal Green and Naoroji lost his seat; the same election also saw Woomes Bonnerjee unsuccessfully contest Barrow in Furness as a Liberal. Bhownaggree’s opponent, the working-class Liberal George Howell, complained that he had been “kicked out by a black man, a stranger from India, one not known in the constituency or in public life.”139 Despite such advances, the white monopoly of parliamentary power remained intact. The first black MPs were not elected until 1987, when Diane Abbot, Paul Boateng, and Bernie Grant first entered the House of Commons. The absence of female and ethnic minority MPs indicates the limits of the reformed Parliament’s claim to represent the whole nation. Anxieties about the composition of the House of Commons were the common coin of nineteenth-century politics. Even after the controversial admission of dissenters in 1828, Catholics in 1829, and Jews in 1858, this remained the case. The Irish worried that there were not enough Catholic MPs; Ultra Tories worried that there were too many. The mid-Victorian campaigns for religious liberty gauged their success by how many nonconformist MPs were elected (there were 70 by 1868), while Conservatives used those advances to appeal to frightened Anglican voters. Radicals worried that the aristocracy was overrepresented relative to ‘the people;’ the Anti-Corn Law League worried that there were too many agricultural producers and too few advocates of urban consumers. The Welsh and (particularly) Scottish worried that their countries were underrepresented in terms of seats and each of the English regions were keen to see that their distinctive interests were represented.140 This is why the redistribution of seats proved more contentious than extending the franchise in the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1884–1885, as many of these varied identities lost their political salience in the nineteenth century. The point that needs to be made here is that the nineteenth-century political elite’s authority did not rest on a claim that they mirrored the social, economic, ethnic, or religious composition of the nation. Their claim to authority rested on their claim to

 Matthew Stubbings, “The Partisan Nature of Race and Imperialism: Dadabhai Naoroji, M. M. Bhownaggree and the Late Nineteenth-Century British Politics of Indian Bationalism,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 44, no. 1 (2016): 48–69.  Fred Leventhal, Respectable Radical: George Howell and Victorian Working Class Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 212.  M. Dyer, “‘Mere Detail and Machinery’: the Great Reform Act and the Effects of Redistribution on Scottish Representation, 1832–1868,” Scottish Historical Review 62 (1983): 17–34; Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture, 194–202.

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possess certain desirable gentlemanly characteristics and those qualities were advertised in part by parliamentary performance.

III Parliament in the Age of Mass Politics Thus far we have been concerned with the centrality of Parliament as a stage on which various kinds of political authority were performed for a growing public audience in the nineteenth century. In the final decades of the century this position began to be eroded, creating a very different political culture. The causes of this change are complex, but most stem from the massive increase in the size of the electorate after the Second Reform Act in 1867 and the Third Reform Act in 1884, which together increased the proportion of the adult male population enfranchised from around 20 percent to around 62 percent.141 Not only did politicians have to find new ways of communicating with a mass electorate, but parties had to develop new techniques for organizing, registering, and mobilizing voters. The result was the creation of mass membership political parties for the first time, with national coordination of local constituency associations by the National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations, founded in 1867, and the National Liberal Federation, founded in 1877, and the growth of auxiliary groups of volunteers like the Conservatives’ Primrose League, which boasted one and a half million members by 1900.142 The result of these changes was an intensification of both electioneering and political activity between elections. The years after 1880 saw a massive increase in the amount of extraparliamentary public speaking by politicians, not only during election campaigns, but to encourage groups of local activists throughout the lifetime of a Parliament. Although Gladstone’s Midlothian campaigns are the most famous examples of this, he was not alone: the Conservative leader Lord Salisbury delivered seventy extra-parliamentary speeches between 1880 and 1885, having given only ten in the previous decade.143 Luke Blaxill has identified “large and sustained increases in the coverage of keynote speeches reported from ministers and shadow ministers” in the press after the Third Reform Act.144 As Tom Crewe has argued, this marked a sharp break from the midVictorian years when Palmerston and Gladstone’s extra-parliamentary speeches had tended to be non-political addresses to municipal bodies on the occasion of opening new civic facilities, or when visiting exhibitions, schools, or factories. In the early  Salmon, “The House of Commons,” 262.  The best guide to this topic is Kathryn Rix, Parties, Agents and Electoral Culture in England, 1880–1910 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2016), 16–47. On the Primrose League see: Martin Pugh, The Tories and the People, 1880–1935 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985).  Thomas Crewe, “Political Leaders,” 40.  Luke Blaxill, “Electioneering, the Third Reform Act, and Political Change in the 1880s,” Parliamentary History 30, no. 3 (2011): 361.

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nineteenth century few front-rank politicians spoke at public meetings and in the age of Peel and Russell political speeches had normally been reserved for socially exclusive audiences at party banquets.145 In the 1880s, however, this gave way to a new culture of platform oratory to large audiences, often several times a day.146 In this way Parliament became less central to political speech-making and political performance: Chamberlain and David Lloyd George were two of the most influential parliamentarians of their day, but their most famous speeches were delivered outside the Commons at Denbigh (Chamberlain’s attack on the aristocracy “who toil not, neither do they spin”) and at Limehouse in East London (Lloyd George’s defense of the 1909 budget). In this way, “Parliament was forced to accept that it was only one element of the process through which national politics was conducted.”147 This was not an accidental development. Jonathan Parry has explained how the Second Reform Act gave rise to concerns that Parliament was increasingly dominated by plutocrats incapable of representing the nation’s interests. “In 1874–80,” he writes, “the most important development in the Liberal Party was its attempt to criticize Parliament’s social complacency . . . by supporting various attempts to move the center of politics away from it.” The new party organizations were part of this. Chamberlain intended the National Liberal Federation “to be a more representative national Parliament, in which activists from all classes would debate policy issues.”148 The members of these groups were more active than their predecessors in trying to organize candidate selections for elections and increasingly expressed a desire to have a say in deciding party policy or strategy, moves that generated significant anxieties about the influence of the ‘caucus.’149 Subsequently, the party conference emerged as an important site to display and exercise political authority and the strain of writing the leader’s speech to their party’s conference has become a familiar set piece in memoirs of twentieth-century politicians.150  Lawrence, Electing, 38–41; P. Brett, “Political Dinners in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain: Platform, Meeting Place and Battleground,” History 81, no. 264 (1996): 527–552.  Crewe, “Political Leaders,” 33, 42.  Jonathan Parry, “1867 and the Rule of Wealth,” in Parliamentary History 36, no. 1, special issue ‘Shooting Niagara – and after?’ The Second Reform Act and its World, ed. Robert Saunders (2017), 46–63, here 62.  Parry, “1867 and the Rule of Wealth,” 62.  On the Liberals see: Eugenio Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 1876–1906 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 169–190; James Owen, Labour and the Caucus: Working-Class Radicalism and Organised Liberalism in England, 1868–1888 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014). For the Conservatives see: R. F. Foster, “Tory Democracy and Political Elitism: Provincial Conservatism and Parliamentary Tories in the Early 1880s,” in Parliament and Community, ed. Art Cosgrove and I. McGuire (Belfast: Appletree, 1983), 147–175; Richard Shannon, The Age of Salisbury 1881–1902 (New York: Longman, 1996), 33–45.  The best documented case is that of the Labour Party, see: Lewis Minkin, The Labour Party Conference: A Study in the Politics of Intra-Party Democracy, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980). Accounts of the role of conferences in the Blair years are particularly revealing;

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The reduction in Parliament’s status can be seen in the rapid decline in the amount of space that newspapers devoted to parliamentary debates after 1880. Verbatim reports of speeches gave way to parliamentary sketches, comment pieces, and articles about political personalities. Interest in politics remained, but as Lucy Brown has noted: “Parliamentary reporting was giving way to news about politicians.”151 As Stephen Koss has observed: “Top-ranking parliamentarians, who had been used to receiving in the press the equivalent of the columns they filled in Hansard, were fortunate to secure abbreviated reports of their speeches.”152 The resulting gap in the record prompted Parliament to hire its own staff to produce a verbatim report of debates in 1909, but this merely added an extra incentive for newspapers to reduce their reports of speeches that were now available elsewhere.153 This was a big change. The media’s engagement with Parliament in the twentieth century was much less intense than it had been in the nineteenth century, and as Koss has noted: “The effect was to shift the focus of public attention away from parliamentary politics.”154 “No longer treated as oracles whose every utterance demanded transcription,” he adds, “politicians lost a good deal of their mystique.”155 By the 1920s, provincial newspapers were following the same trend, cutting down substantially their coverage of platform speeches by local politicians.156 New media did not step in to fill the gap left by print journalism: for most of the twentieth century the broadcast media were forbidden from transmitting parliamentary proceedings. The first party election radio broadcast was in 1924, but Parliament resisted the idea of broadcasting parliamentary debates on the radio until 1975; permanent broadcasting beginning three years later.157 Film and newsreels also allowed new kinds of interaction between politicians and the public, but the public did not see moving images of parliamentary politics until November 1989, when Parliament was finally televised.158 Full television coverage of Parliament

see: Jonathan Powell, The New Machiavelli: How to Wield Power in the Modern World (London: Bodley Head, 2010), 50–51; Alastair Campbell, The Alastair Campbell Diaries, vols. 1–4 (London: Hutchinson, 2010–2012).  Lucy Brown, Victorian News, 247. The best account of late-nineteenth-century political journalism is Crewe, “Political Leaders,” chapter 2.  Stephen Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain (London: Fontana, 1990), 348.  Sparrow, Obscure, 72.  Koss, Rise and Fall, 346.  Koss, Rise and Fall, 348.  Michael Dawson, “Party Politics and the Provincial Press in Early Twentieth-Century England,” Twentieth Century British History 9, no. 2 (1998): 201–218, here 208.  Jon Lawrence, Electing, 97; UK Parliament, “Hansard of the Air,” UK Parliament (2022), accessed 27 March 2022, https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/evolutionofparliament/parliament work/communicating/overview/hansardoftheair/.  Richard Cockett, “The Party, Publicity and the Media,” in Conservative Century, ed. Anthony Seldon and Stuart Ball (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 547–578, here 559; Lawrence,

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became available via cable television in 1992 and continues as the BBC Parliament channel, but this attracts tiny viewing figures. Except at times of crisis, broadcasters have tended to focus their attention disproportionately on the gladiatorial drama of Prime Minister’s Questions, which reduces the opportunities for any but the party leaders to be seen.159 The best way for an MP to establish a public profile is now to concentrate on activities outside the chamber of the House of Commons, like media interviews, rather than making speeches in the House of Commons. Alongside these changes have been redefinitions of the role of the MP. In the nineteenth century, backbench MPs could play a major role in introducing, scrutinizing, and passing legislation, but following the procedural reforms of the 1880s, governments have exercised so much influence over the parliamentary timetable that MPs have increasingly played the role of lobby fodder, voting simply as the party whips tell them. Under such circumstances, parliamentary performance has become a poor vehicle for displaying the independence, character, or influence so valued by members of the Victorian political elite. Perhaps the biggest change in the role of the MP has been the growing importance attached to constituency casework in the second half of the twentieth century. As this work has become more important to their constituents, so it has become less important how much time MPs spend making speeches in Parliament.160 A final change serving to reduce Parliament’s place in the political imagination has been the redefinition of what counts as ‘political.’ One reason for Parliament’s centrality to political life in the nineteenth century was the fact that contemporaries operated with a circumscribed definition of ‘the political.’ Industrial disputes, for example, were lifted out of the realm of ‘the political’ by insisting that they were subject to the immutable laws of political economy: to suggest that industrial relations were a political matter was seen as committing a basic category error.161 Politics was usually understood to mean ‘party politics.’ The issues dealt with by nineteenth-century local government – poor relief, education, policing, and sanitation – were not the issues that divided Victorian political parties, so once the initial partisan surge of the 1830s burnt itself out, local government elections were usually presented as non-political affairs, even by the party organizations contesting them and well into the twentieth century.162 The politicization of the picket line and the Electing, 99. On the influence of television more generally, see: Michael Cockerell, Live from Number 10: The Inside Story of Prime Ministers and Television (London: Faber, 1988).  Ayesha Hazarika and Tom Hamilton, Punch & Judy Politics: An Insiders’ Guide to Prime Minister’s Questions (London: Biteback Publishing, 2019).  Lawrence, Electing, 118, 159–162.  Mark Curthoys, Governments, Labour and the Law in Mid-Victorian Britain: The Trade Union Legislation of the 1870s (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004), 26–28, 167–168; Goldman, Science, 226–229.  Brian Harrison, The Transformation of British Politics, 1860–1995 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 122; H. J. Hanham, Elections and Party Management (Hassocks, UK: Harvester, 1978), 387–396; Derek Fraser, Urban Politics in Victorian England: The Structure of Politics in Victorian

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council house are just two examples of how the shifting boundaries of ‘the political’ created alternatives to Parliament as spaces for staging political authority. As Parliament became just one of many sites for party politics, MPs discovered that the kinds of performance that conferred authority in the House of Commons were not necessarily valued on the picket line, at an election meeting, or in a constituency surgery.163 This was a distinctively modern political problem. In 1871, Robert Lowe was able to amuse and impress the House of Commons by punning in Latin, but different styles of performance were needed to appeal to mass meetings or later to television audiences.164 Similarly, Matthew Robert’s study of the lateVictorian Conservative MP W. L. Jackson, a leather manufacturer, has found that the ‘manly’ virtues which “marked Jackson out as a hegemonic figure in Leeds made him appear vulgar and swell at Westminster.”165 Given the persistence of deference in British political culture, it was perhaps easier for upper-class politicians to impress plebeian audiences with displays of gentlemanly characteristics than for working-class politicians to impress the House of Commons with the same qualities that had won them authority in their trade unions or on public platforms.166 Working-class Labour MPs in the early twentieth century frequently found the gentlemanly culture of the House of Commons baffling. As Richard Toye has argued, the rowdy and disruptive behavior that Labour MPs engaged in was due to the fact that many of them had grown up in working-class communities “in which vehemence rather than restraint served as the token of the required sincerity.”167 In such a context, emotional outbursts frequently seemed a more appropriate response than well-mannered gentlemanly debate and on several occasions Labour MPs invited suspension from the chamber as a way of expressing their rejection of the prevailing culture in Parliament.168 When Labour figures like Ramsay Macdonald adapted

Cities (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1976), 123–124. On the place of social reform outside party politics, see: Peter Ghosh, “Style and Substance in Disraeli’s Social Reform,” in Politics and Social Change in Modern Britain, ed. P. J. Waller and A. F. Thompson (Brighton, UK: Harvester, 1987), 59–81.  For a discussion of the gendered dimension of this problem, see: Griffin, “Masculinities and Parliamentary Culture,” 410–413. On the performances required at election meetings, see: Lawrence, Electing.  Hansard, vol. 205, col. 1416 (20 April 1871).  Matthew Roberts, “W. L. Jackson, Exemplary Manliness and Late-Victorian Popular Conservatism,” in Public Men: Masculinity and Politics in Modern Britain, ed. Matthew McCormack (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 123–142, here 135.  On the persistence of deference into the late twentieth century, see: Florence SutcliffeBraithwaite, Class, Politics, and the Decline of Deference in England, 1968–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 8–10.  Richard Toye, “Perfectly Parliamentary? The Labour Party and the House of Commons in the Interwar Years,” Twentieth Century British History 25, no. 1 (2014): 14.  Times, 16 April 1926, 9; Hansard, fifth series, vol. 194, col. 423–431 (14 April 1926); Hansard, fifth series, vol. 210, col. 1883–1957 (23 November 1927).

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successfully to gentlemanly culture, they were criticized by constituents and party activists for abandoning their roots.169 Later Labour leaders like Hugh Gaitskell or Tony Blair also struggled with this problem: they were accomplished parliamentary performers who struggled to establish their authority among working-class party activists. But the same problem might be encountered in reverse: while Neil Kinnock and Jeremy Corbyn were effective public speakers when addressing meetings of the party faithful outside Westminster, they were poor performers in parliamentary debates, a failing which cast doubts on their claims to be ‘statesmen.’ In this way, the multiplication of political sites alongside Parliament has required politicians to be able to shift between a variety of modes of political performance. It is no longer enough to be an accomplished parliamentary performer: one also has to be a good platform speaker, a good constituency caseworker, and a good television performer. As success across all of these dimensions is difficult to achieve, so it has become harder for an individual to lay claim to political authority.

Conclusion This chapter has argued that in the decades between the First and Third Reform Acts Parliament enjoyed an unusually important place in the British political imagination. In a rapidly transforming society, the governing classes used Parliament as a stage on which to demonstrate the legitimacy of hierarchies of class, religion, gender, and ethnicity. The new political settlement of 1832 required the public to accept that Parliament would henceforth be more virtuous and more responsive to public opinion than before. In the 1830s and 1840s this project seemed to falter, but after the crisis of 1848 elite authority was restored. Building and maintaining the authority of the governing classes required a convincing corporate display in which MPs conformed to historically contingent codes of gentlemanliness – codes which had been important in forging a coherent governing class from otherwise disparate aristocratic and middle-class elements. The growth of a press that was anxious to scrutinize and advertise the characteristics of MPs was an essential precondition for this political project. In the twentieth century, however, parliamentary performance ceased to be as important in upholding the authority of the governing classes. To frame the history of Parliament in this way raises two conceptual points which would repay further study. First, Parliament’s place at the heart of nineteenth-century political culture did a great deal to establish the boundaries of ‘the political.’ Parliamentary practice was influential in identifying certain relations of power and authority as appropriate matters for contestation by political parties,

 Nicholas Owen, “MacDonald’s Parties: The Labour Party and the ‘Aristocratic Embrace,’ 1922–31,” Twentieth Century British History 18, no. 1 (2007): 1–53.

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while others were social, religious, economic, scientific, or legal matters to be contested in other arenas and by other means. Understanding the role of Parliament in this process would have the happy effect of using the history of high politics to unravel the conception of ‘politics’ on which our political histories rest. To do so would allow us to see how the construction of political authority works by displacing the idea of contesting relationships or resource allocations onto other fields where contestation might be more or less possible. Secondly, and finally, it seems plausible that the public interest in Parliament privileged certain ways of making sense of politics at the expense of others. For example, it was common for people to interpret abstract questions of public policy in terms of personal rivalries between parliamentary celebrities: the famous rivalries between Castlereagh and Canning, or Gladstone and Disraeli, offered a way of making sense of arguments about foreign policy.170 Voters also formed affective and subjective allegiances to parliamentary factions long before the creation of mass-membership political parties that they could join.171 Assessments of leadership offer a further example: people identified political leadership, or ‘statesmanship,’ with the possession of sets of skills made visible and assessed through parliamentary performance, including debating ability, calmness, and stamina, for example.172 More subtly, the privileging of debate in Parliament promoted a rationalist conception of politics in which it was understood that all problems had solutions and that those solutions could be obtained through discussion. Perhaps most fragile of all was the idea that one could tell the will of the people by looking at Parliament. Recognizing the historical contingency of these ways of making sense of politics would foster a deeper understanding of democracy.

 John Campbell, Pistols at Dawn: Two Hundred Years of Political Rivalry from Pitt and Fox to Blair and Brown (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009).  Cragoe, “Great Reform Act.”  J. P. Parry, “The Quest for Leadership in Unionist Politics, 1886–1956,” Parliamentary History 12, no. 3 (1993): 296–311; David Craig, “Statesmanship,” in Languages of Politics in NineteenthCentury Britain, ed. David Craig and James Thompson (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 44–68.

Frederik Frank Sterkenburgh

Monarchical Entries in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Emperor Wilhelm I, 1848-1888 Abstract: Entry parades formed an essential part of staging monarchical political authority in nineteenth-century Germany. The practice helped monarchs to take symbolic possession of the urban environment and present it as society’s political center. As such, it served to generate popular legitimacy, at a time when monarchy as a form of government was increasingly dependent on the population’s support for its perpetuation. How this practice developed during this period is shown in this chapter through four entry parades used by German Emperor Wilhelm I to stage himself in a particular role. Drawing on Clifford Geertz’ concept of thick description, Edward Shils’ concept of center and periphery, and Alf Lüdtke’s notion of EigenSinn, this chapter shows how Wilhelm I utilized entry parades to effectuate his monarchical political agency. This chapter also demonstrates that these parades were not a one-way street. Rather, monarchical entry parades were a symbolic dialogue between ruler and ruled, in which the latter frequently deviated from the interpretation of political authority the ruler sought to project. Keywords: self-staging, entry parades, Hohenzollern, monarchy, Germany On 22 and 23 June 1868, King Wilhelm I of Prussia, who reigned from 1861 to 1888, visited the city of Hanover on a tour of his new province.1 The visit was controversial because two years earlier, with Prussia’s victory in the Austro-Prussian war, the Kingdom of Hanover had been dissolved, its ruling Welf dynasty deposed, and the state turned into the Prussian province of Hanover. Wilhelm’s visit was meant to give the population a chance to see their new ruler in person, but the event’s success was anything but guaranteed. Grievances over the dissolution of the Hanoverian kingdom still lingered among the population; artisans and craftsmen feared for their professional existence because of the introduction of the Prussian factories system; and Lutheran and Calvinist clergy were skeptical about being integrated into Prussia’s Evangelical Union. The former Hanoverian officer corps had relinquished its loyalty to the former state but not its oath to the former Welf King Georg V, while the Hanoverian aristocracy in general remained largely anti-Prussian until the German Empire’s collapse in 1918. In the city of Hanover itself, Wilhelm’s prevalent image as

 I would like to thank Eva Giloi (Rutgers University), Jan Markert (University of Oldenburg), Philipp Nielsen (Sarah Lawrence College), and Adam Storring (King’s College London) for their thoughtful comments and many suggestions for further literature. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110574012-009

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the Hohenzollern dynasty’s most conservative member and memories of his role in suppressing the Revolution of 1848 in Berlin were still current. The authorities’ organizational choices ahead of the visit and Wilhelm’s conduct during his entry were thus instrumental in overcoming these sentiments. Both sides sought to avoid too much display of Prussian dominance and instead offer gestures of reconciliation.2 As such, the royal entry into the city required a careful balancing act between respecting Hanoverian particularism and projecting the new political order with Wilhelm at its apex. In advance of his monarchical entry, Wilhelm published a statement in the Neue Hannoversche Zeitung in which he wrote that he came to “reach out his hand confidingly . . . to strengthen the bond of love between Landesherrn and subjects.” Upon his arrival at the train station on 22 June at 7:45 a.m., Wilhelm was greeted by provincial and local officials, generals, and a considerable crowd that had started gathering the day before. The city manager (Stadtdirektor) held a brief speech to which Wilhelm I replied; the king was then driven to the city’s royal palace amidst cheering crowds in an open carriage. Many buildings along the route had been decorated, as had the station’s royal waiting room where a purple baldachin stood awaiting the king. The station’s exterior was covered with flowers; a Prussian eagle was placed over its main entrance; and the flags of Prussia and Hanover fluttered on its towers. Notably absent were flags of the North German Confederation — which was founded after Prussia’s victory in 1866 — although these were flown elsewhere in Hanover. The authorities had deliberately abstained from constructing triumphal arches for Wilhelm’s entry to ensure that no triumphalist associations could be made with his arrival. Through the course of the day, Wilhelm met with local clergy, army officers, and the city’s civil servants, assuring them that he respected their former allegiances.3 His visit to the mausoleum of the Hanoverian King Ernst August and Queen Friederike also signaled reconciliation, as Friederike was the sister of Wilhelm I’s mother, the much-admired Queen Luise of Prussia. The absence of any large protests and the popular enthusiasm with which Wilhelm was greeted made his monarchical entry into Hanover a success — in terms of popular reception — and was the first of forty visits conducted by Wilhelm and his grandson-successor Wilhelm II between 1868 and 1918. What was it about this event, and particularly its constitutive symbolic parts, that allowed it to go off without a hitch? Why did the audience respond to their newly imposed ruler in this positive manner? How did the entry create a symbolic dialogue between the center of power and the Hanoverian periphery? What modes of interaction and participation did the celebration offer to the audience, and how deliberately constructed or open to spontaneous action was the event’s choreography? This chapter will examine these questions as it contends that monarchical  Gerhard Schneider, Kaiserbesuche: Wilhelm I. und Wilhelm II. in Hannover 1868–1914, eine Dokumentation (Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag, 2016), 21–22, 40.  Schneider, Kaiserbesuche, 35–50.

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entries were a crucial practice through which nineteenth-century monarchs staged their authority. Monarchical entries enabled monarchs to take symbolic possession of urban environments and position themselves at the polity’s apex at a time when the uneven extension of the franchise, growing literacy, and the rise of mass media and consumer culture fostered competition between the institutions of monarchy, state bureaucracy, and parliament as the state’s dominant force. To substantiate this claim, this chapter will draw on Clifford Geertz’s argument that monarchs took “symbolic possession of [their] realm” during their travels, thus “locating society’s center” and becoming the “point . . . in a society where its leading ideas come together with its leading institutions.”4 The chapter draws on Geertz’s methodological concept of “thick description,” specifically the detailed description of cultural practices to analyze the meanings invested in, associated with, and projected through such acts: “ . . . sorting out the structures of signification . . . and determining their social ground and import.”5 Geertz famously applied this concept in his study of nineteenth-century Bali, demonstrating that the state did not function through force but through ritual and ceremony. These symbolic acts were not simply the means to political ends, but rather the other way around: “Power served pomp, not pomp power.”6 Geertz’s thick description contributed significantly to the development of symbolic anthropology as a field by establishing the following approach: since “man . . . [is] an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”7 This chapter employs thick description as a tool to tease out the meanings invested in these occasions by their participants and the symbolic dialogue between ruler and ruled that resulted from their interactions. This approach makes us sensitive to the fact that the negotiation and mediation between competing interpretations of the existing political order, embodied through ritual and ceremonial, formed a crucial feature of Germany’s political culture, even when political authority had direct access to force as a means of power. Akin to Geertz’s identification of the royal procession as the symbolic center of the “theater state,” sociologist Edward Shils’ work on the relationship between “center” and “periphery” also locates the social center in the sphere of meaning: it is not a “spatially located phenomenon,” but rather “a phenomenon of the realm of values and beliefs. It is the center of the order of symbols, of values and beliefs,  Clifford Geertz, “Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power,” in Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics since the Middle Ages, ed. Sean Wilentz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 13–38, 13–39, here 14, 16.  Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture” in The Interpretation of Cultures, Clifford Geertz (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3–30, here 9.  Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).  Geertz, “Thick Description,” 5.

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which govern the society.” Moreover, the center is, according to Shils, “a phenomenon of the realm of action. It is a structure of activities, of roles and persons, within the network of institutions.”8 Shils’ concept of the social center is applicable to monarchical entries in the nineteenth century for two reasons. First, sovereigns made the urban environment the focus of their self-staging. This self-presentation was not confined to royal residences and capital cities but could be enacted in any metropolis as the increasing differentiation of social life, the ever-widening transnational entanglements, the expansion of traffic infrastructure, and the expanding public sphere and franchise made major cities political and social centers in their own right. The metropolises’ symbolic significance was further strengthened by the fact that monarchs often resided outside of their nation’s capital, so that royal courts no longer dominated European capitals as they had in the past.9 Secondly, constitutional curbs against royal authority in the nineteenth century confronted monarchs with new centers of political gravity, such as parliaments and ministerial heads of government in whom much political power resided. This often resulted in a competition between monarchs and other political centers over dominant status in the polity; monarchical entries could therefore be instrumental in projecting the monarch’s claim to inhabit the state’s social center. The concept of “symbolic dialogue” further suggests that the interplay between the central actors and the public at monarchical entries was not a top-down undertaking. The monarch could not project his interpretation of the political order uncontested. Instead, monarchs had to expect that municipal authorities and the local population would interpret the meaning of the events’ political symbolism in accordance with their own expectations and often in opposition to the intended effect. Alf Lüdtke’s concept of Eigen-sinn (a defiant sense of self) provides a helpful tool for analyzing this interaction. Lüdtke’s goal is to study how disempowered members of overtly authoritarian regimes sought “to carve out niches of space, time and resources” for themselves through everyday practices, for instance when factory workers in the German Empire or the Nazi regime engaged in small-scale contests over working hours and factory breaks.10 Lüdtke thus combined the study of everyday history with historical anthropology, seeking to read in ordinary people’s behavior how they positioned themselves in opposition to existing political structures. Alongside Geertz and Shils, Lüdtke’s work focuses our gaze on how local populations, authorities, and  Edward Shils, “Centre and Periphery,” in The Logic of Personal Knowledge: Essays Presented to Michael Polanyi (London: Routledge & Paul, 1961), 117–130.  Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, fifth ed. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2010), 360–365, here 395; Friedrich Lenger, “Die Stadt des 19. Jahrhunderts: Heterogenität, Modernität, Konflikt,” in Durchbruch der Moderne? Neue Perspektiven auf das 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Birgit Aschmann (Frankfurt a/M: Campus Verlag, 2019), 252–270.  Alf Lüdtke, Eigen-Sinn: Fabrikalltag, Arbeitererfahrungen, und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis in den Faschismus (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2015); Alf Lüdtke, “People Working: Everyday Life and German Fascism,” History Workshop Journal 50, no. 1 (2000): 74–92, here 83.

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associations use the materials at their disposal, such as festive decorations celebrating the royal procession, to resist the monarchy’s self-staging and instead construct images of the sovereign that accorded with their own idealized political expectations. Using the concepts of thick description, the social center, and Eigen-sinn, this chapter investigates how Emperor Wilhelm I staged monarchical entries from 1848 to 1888. Wilhelm I provides a compelling case study for two reasons. First, his life spanned the nineteenth century: born in 1797, during the last months King Friedrich Wilhelm II’s reign, Wilhelm died in 1888 with the future Wilhelm II at his bedside. As the second-born son of King Friedrich Wilhelm III, Wilhelm I first served as military commander of the Prussian army, then eventually ascended the throne as king of Prussia in 1861 and German emperor in 1871. Wilhelm’s personal biography is thus closely enmeshed with the development of the Prussian monarchy in the nineteenth century, from the collapse of the Prussian state in 1806, through the Napoleonic Wars and the Revolution of 1848, to the Hohenzollerns’ elevation and institutionalization as Germany’s imperial dynasty. Wilhelm’s involvement with these events allows us to examine how revolution, war, and nation-state-building affected the instrumentalization of monarchical entries. Second, this chapter can build on a growing corpus of scholarly literature that has begun to reassess Wilhelm I as a political actor in his own right.11 This scholarship has

 Frederik Frank Sterkenburgh, “Narrating Prince Wilhelm of Prussia: Commemorative Biography as Monarchical Politics of Memory,” in Royal Heirs and the Uses of Soft Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Frank Lorenz Müller and Heidi Mehrkens (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 281–301; Jan Markert, Wilhelm I. und die deutsche Außenpolitik nach 1871: Es ist nicht leicht, unter Bismarck Kaiser zu sein? (Friedrichsruh: Otto-von-Bismarck-Stiftung, 2019); Frederik Frank Sterkenburgh, “Revisiting the ‘Prussian Triangle of Leadership’: Wilhelm I and the Military Decision-Making Process of the Prussian High Command during the Franco-Prussian War, 1870–1871,” in Militärisches Entscheiden: Voraussetzungen, Prozesse, und Repräsentationen einer sozialen Praxis von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Martin Clauss and Christoph Nübel (Frankfurt a/M: Campus, 2020), 453–478; Jan Markert, “Wider die ‘Coalition der Jesuiten und Ultramontanen und Revolution’: Kaiser Wilhelm I. und die Zentrumspartei,” Historisch-Politische Mitteilungen: Archiv für Christlich-Demokratische Politik 27 (2020): 5–26; Jan Markert, “‘Wer Deutschland regieren will, muß es sich erobern’: Das deutsche Kaiserreich als monarchisches Projekt Wilhelms I.,” in Einigkeit und Recht, doch Freiheit? Das Deutsche Kaiserreich in der Demokratiegeschichte und Erinnerungskultur, ed. Andreas Braune, Michael Dreyer, Markus Lange, and Ulrich Lappenküper (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2021), 11–36; Frederik Frank Sterkenburgh, “Staging a Monarchical-Federal Order: Wilhelm I as German Emperor,” German History 39 (2021): 519–541; Jan Markert, “Prussia’s Road to Iron and Blood: Wilhelm I and the Nationalization of the Hohenzollern Monarchy,” in Modernizing the Unmodern: Europe’s Imperial Monarchies and their Path to Modernity in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Carolina Armenteros, Heidi Hein-Kircher, and Frederik Frank Sterkenburgh (London: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2023). The present author is currently preparing his doctoral dissertation as a monograph, tentatively titled Wilhelm I and Monarchical Rule in Imperial Germany, to be published in Palgrave’s series Studies in Modern Monarchy. Older biographies of Wilhelm I include Erich Marcks, Kaiser Wilhelm I., 9th ed. (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1943), which provides a sympathetic albeit nostalgic interpretation. Franz Herre, Kaiser Wilhelm I.: Der letzte Preuße (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1980) is anecdotic and nostalgic. Karl-Heinz Börner, Wilhelm I.:

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challenged historians’ long-standing assessment of Wilhelm I as an inept political actor who was perpetually overruled by his chancellor Otto von Bismarck or was at best an unwilling imperial figurehead who did little more than represent Prussian virtues.12 Moreover, Wilhelm I’s monarchical entries, in particular as German emperor, were undertaken at a time when the Reichstag, as the new German parliament, sought to consolidate its position as the empire’s political center of gravity through publicity in the press, the performance of elections and campaign speeches, and the design of the new parliament building as a place of social gathering.13 Wilhelm’s monarchical entries functioned as a symbolic counter-measure in competition with this rising, rival center of authority. Using Wilhelm as a lens thus contributes to an understanding of how monarchical entries were deployed to stage authority in nineteenth-century

Deutscher Kaiser und König von Preußen (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1984) offers a Marxist interpretation. Guntram Schulze-Wegener, Wilhelm I.: Deutscher Kaiser, König von Preussen, nationaler Mythos (Hamburg: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 2015) only uses edited sources and perpetuates an untenable nationalconservative viewpoint. Robert-Tarek Fischer, Wilhelm I.: Vom Preußischen König zum ersten Deutschen Kaiser (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2020) is based on a flawed understanding of political biography, fails to provide a systematic analysis, and does not engage with modern scholarship on the Hohenzollern monarchy. Valuable brief biographical portraits include Günter Richter, “Kaiser Wilhelm I.,” in Drei deutsche Kaiser: Wilhelm I. – Friedrich III. – Wilhelm II.: Ihre Leben und ihre Zeit, 1858–1918, ed. Wilhelm Treue (Freiburg: Ploetz Verlag, 1987), 14–75; Hellmut Seier, “Wilhelm I.: Deutscher Kaiser 1871–1888,” in Die Kaiser der Neuzeit 1519–1918: Heiliges Römisches Reich, Österreich, Deutschland, ed. Anton Schindling and Walter Ziegler (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1990), 395–409; Jürgen Angelow, “Wilhelm I.” in Preussens Herrscher: Von den ersten Hohenzollern bis Wilhelm II., ed. Frank-Lothar Kroll (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001), 242–264. Studies of particular problems relating to Wilhelm I, such as the rise of mass printed media and consumer culture, include: Alexa Geisthövel, “Den Monarchen im Blick: Wilhelm I in der illustrierten Familienpresse,” in Kommunikation als Beobachtung: Medienwandel und Gesellschaftsbilder 1880–1960, ed. Habbo Knoch and Daniel Morat (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003), 59–80; Alexa Geisthövel, “Nahbare Herrscher: Die Selbstdarstellung preußischer Monarchen in Kurorten als Form politischer Kommunikation im 19. Jahrhundert,” Forschung an der Universität Bielefeld 24 (2002): 32–37; Alexa Geisthövel, “Tote Monarchen: Die Beisetzungsfeierlichkeiten für Wilhelm I. und Friedrich III.,” in Das politische Zeremoniell im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1918, ed. Andreas Biefang, Michael Epkenhans, and Klaus Tenfelde (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2008), 139–161; Alexa Geisthövel, “Wilhelm I. am ‘historischen Eckfenster’: Zur Sichtbarkeit des Monarchen in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Die Sinnlichkeit der Macht: Herrschaft und Representation der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Jan Andreas, Alexa Geisthövel, and Matthias Schwengelbeck (Frankfurt a/M: Campus, 2005), 163–185; Eva Giloi, “Durch die Kornblume gesagt: Reliquien-Geschenke als Indikator für die öffentliche Rolle Kaiser Wilhelms I.,” in Das Erbe der Monarchie: Nachwirkungen einer deutschen Instituion seit 1918, ed. Thomas Biskup and Martin Kohlrausch (Frankfurt a/M: Campus, 2008), 96–116.  See for example: Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2006), 588.  Andreas Biefang, Die andere Seite der Macht: Reichstag und Öffentlichkeit im ‘System Bismarck’ 1871–1890 (Düsseldorf 2009).

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Germany, and also how his experience mirrored those of other European sovereigns, even if he was not representative for European conditions as a whole.14 This chapter concentrates on four monarchical entries between 1848 and 1888, and proceeds in three steps. The chapter’s first section discusses the early modern legacy of royal ritual upon which Wilhelm I built in the second half of the nineteenth century. It shows how monarchical entries were a common practice in the Middle Ages and in early modern Europe, including in Brandenburg-Prussia, and were also used by Wilhelm’s father Friedrich Wilhelm III, who reigned as King of Prussia from 1797–1840, and his brother Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who reigned as King of Prussia from 1795–1861. The second section discusses Wilhelm’s use of monarchical entries in four different cases, first during his return to Berlin following the Revolution of 1848; next as a means to stage himself as a military monarch in Berlin following the Austro-Prussian War in 1866; then as German emperor during visits to Dresden; and finally in his presentation as a departing ruler in his funeral procession out of Berlin, which effectively staged a reversed entry. The chapter’s third section discusses why these monarchical entries did not enter cultural memory after 1888 and how monarchical entries were continued by Wilhelm II. The chapter focuses on the theme of staging authority by examining the considerations and choices made by the political actors involved in these events, the execution of the tours’ choreography, and the effect of the entries on popular perceptions of Wilhelm’s authority. Although Wilhelm I became German emperor after the unification of Germany, for the sake of terminological consistency, this chapter will use the phrase monarchical entries rather than opting for imperial entries for the period after 1871.

 Up until now, only Bärbel Holtz has investigated how one of Wilhelm’s royal entries – in Saarbrücken in 1870 – entered national cultural memory. Bärbel Holtz, “Preußens Kunstpolitik in der Provinz: Der Saarbrücker Rathauszyklus als ‘wichtiges Element nationaler künstlerischer Erinnerung,’” in Preußen an der Saar: Eine konfliktreiche Beziehung, 1815–1914, ed. Gabriele Clemens and Eva Kell (Saabrücken: Kommission für Saarländische Landesgeschichte, 2018), 235–260. In addition, this chapter aims to help close the gap in scholarship regarding royal entries between the early modern period and the nineteenth century. For royal entries during the early modern period, see: Klaus Tenfelde, “Adventus: Zur historischen Ikonologie des Festzuges,” Historische Zeitschrift 235 (1982): 45–84; Susan Baller, Michael Pesek, Ruth Schilling, and Ines Stolpe, eds., Die Ankunft des Anderen: Repräsentationen sozialer und politische Ordnungen in Empfangszeremonien (Frankfurt a/M: Campus, 2008); J. R. Mulryne, Maria Ines Aliverti, and Anna Maria Testaverde, eds., Ceremonial Entries in Early Modern Europe: The Iconography of Power (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015).

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I The Early Modern Legacy: Monarchial Entries in Prussia until 1848 Monarchical entries originated in the Middle Ages and became a typical feature of dynastic self-staging during the early modern and modern eras. As Gaby Huch suggests, these entries drew inspiration from the processions of the Catholic Church and were meant to symbolize traditional claims to power and legitimacy, as well as to visualize changing relations of power.15 They also served to establish political order through symbolic communication. With the growing size and power of cities during the High and Late Middle Ages, monarchical entries became a means to negotiate the relationship between ruler and urban community. During the early modern era, the function of monarchical entries changed. As the relations between cities and rulers were increasingly written into law, monarchical entries served primarily to visualize the now-established political order. Once the rights and prerogatives of the state had been institutionalized, political power had been depersonalized, and an autonomous political sphere was established, monarchical entries lost their capacity to define and structure political relations but could still be used to demonstrate symbolically how political relations were organized, a function they retained into the modern era. In the nineteenth century, monarchical encounters merged monarchical cults with national consciousness; in the twentieth century, state visits were used to legitimize particular policies, such as when the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, visited Berlin in 1963 to demonstrate his support for the city during the Cold War.16 While Wilhelm I’s predecessors all employed monarchical entries to visualize their rulership, each king did so in a different way that mirrored the roots of his sovereignty. While King Friedrich II, who reigned from 1740 to 1786, was long considered an austere figure who disliked court ceremonial, historians now contend that he used great care in staging his public persona and royal authority, in particular by pursuing glory and emulating King Louis XIV of France.17 As the Enlightenment challenged  Gaby Huch, “Einleitung: Monarchenreisen zwischen Tradition und Moderne,” in Zwischen Ehrenpforte und Inkognito: Preußische Könige auf Reisen: Quellen zur Repräsentation der Monarchie zwischen 1797 und 1871, ed. Gaby Huch, vol. 1 (Berlin: De Gruyter Akademie Forschung, 2016), 1–210, here 43.  Susann Baller, Michael Pesek, Ruth Schilling, and Ines Stolpe, “Einleitung,” in Die Ankunft des Anderen: Repräsentationen sozialer und politische Ordnungen in Empfangszeremonien, in Susan Baller, Michael Pesek, Ruth Schilling, and Ines Stolpe (Frankfurt a/M: Campus, 2008), 11–32, here 21–23.  Johannes Kunisch maintains the conventional image of Friedrich II as an austere figure with a dislike of court ceremonial. Johannes Kunisch, Friedrich der Große (Munich: Beck, 2004), 452–453. Recent historians have argued that Friedrich II was driven by a quest for glory in emulation of France’s Sun King. See: Jürgen Luh, Der Große Friedrich II. von Preußen (Munich: Siedler, 2011); Tim Blanning, Frederick the Great: King of Prussia (London: Allen Lane, 2015); Adam Storring, Frederick the Great and the Meanings of War, 1730–1755 (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2018); Adam

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the concept of the divine right of kings and thus undermined the advantage of royal birth, many monarchs relied on military glory to buttress their authority and employed a range of means, from published writings to architecture to ceremonies such as monarchical entries, to communicate their victory in war.18 For Friedrich II, such a moment came at the end of the Second Silesian War in 1744–1745, for which a monarchical entry was organized in celebration in December 1745 by the city of Berlin. In official publications, this entry was described in triumphant tones and the event included a choir praising Friedrich II publicly as Frederick the Great. The king, for his part, accepted both ceremony and epithet as proffered by his subjects. Still, as Thomas Biskup has argued, it would be wrong to assume that these popular attributions were spontaneous. Rather, they were the result of a careful process of negotiation between the event’s participants. Given that this was the king’s first public appearance after the war, the court must have been closely involved in its organization as well as its on-going publicity: the publisher who printed the event’s commemorative books was closely affiliated with the Prussian monarchy. For his part, Friedrich II had already previously cultivated the adjective “the Great,” and here it served to mask the fact that the “victory” did not actually signify the end of the conflict: Prussia had only withdrawn from hostilities and a general peace would not be established until 1748.19 Nevertheless, his 1745 monarchical entry was instrumental in establishing Friedrich’s royal authority, with the king, the court, and the municipal authorities working together to shape a cult around Friedrich II’s persona as a “great” king. Friedrich Wilhelm III attached less value to such ceremonial, but still knew how to use it on an incidental basis. Monarchical entries formed part of his annual travel itinerary, which included spa visits and inspections of the Prussian provinces. These entries followed a typical pattern: the king was welcomed by city officials; young women handed him bouquets of flowers; and finally he was presented with the key to the city. The local populace lined the streets as he passed along to the royal residence or local palace; once there, the king received local clergy, the civil service, and military officers, followed by a parade that, after 1815, also included the militia and patriotic associations (Kriegervereine). Still, despite visualizing the breadth of Prussia’s political order, monarchical entries under Friedrich

Storring, “The Age of Louis XIV: Frederick the Great and French Ways of War,” German History 38 (2020): 24–46.  Thomas Biskup, Friedrichs Größe: Inszenierungen des Preußenkönigs in Fest und Zeremoniell 1740–1815 (Frankfurt a/M: Campus, 2012); Andreas Pečar, Die Masken des Königs: Friedrich II. von Preußen als Schriftsteller (Frankfurt a/M: Campus, 2016); Martin Wrede, “Einleitung: Die Inszenierung der mehr oder weniger heroischen Monarchie: Zu Rittern und Feldherren, Kriegsherren und Schauspielern,” in Die Inszenierung der heroischen Monarchie: Frühneuzeitliches Königtum zwischen ritterlichem Erbe und militärischer Herausforderung, ed. Martin Wrede (Munich: De Gruyter, 2014), 8–39.  Biskup, Friedrichs Größe, 74–76. See also: Luh, Der Große, 60–61.

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Wilhelm III were often frugal affairs in accordance with the king’s preferences. Municipal authorities scrambled to keep the events within bounds by ensuring that no one was forced to attend but only willing participants were present, and that the population did not bear the costs of the events (something that had happened during his entry into Erfurt in 1803). Such frugal entries helped project an image of bourgeois modesty that matched Friedrich Wilhelm III’s self-staging as a bourgeois king (Bürgerkönig). Although the image corresponded little with the actual reality of how he lived, it corresponded to his refusal to hold “Napoleonic reception ceremonies,” as he rejected his nemesis in the age of the Napoleonic Wars.20 On the one hand, Friedrich Wilhelm III had a well-developed instinct for the use of signs and symbols in royal ceremonies, such as the introduction of a new military decoration, the Iron Cross, and new chorales.21 On the other hand, on occasions when cities demonstrated their Eigen-sinn and held grand receptions anyway, as was the case in Bonn in 1815, the king expressed his annoyance at their scale and effort.22 Likewise in 1814, Friedrich Wilhelm III avoided taking a central position in an entry organized to celebrate his return to Berlin at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Arriving hours before the start of a military parade meant to pass through the Brandenburg Gate, he permitted a Te Deum to be held in honor of the victory, but otherwise objected to any decorations that referred to him personally, insisting instead that the troops be placed in the foreground of the ceremony.23 He thus denied himself the chance to cultivate the image of a victorious military monarch, leaving it to the troops and the church to invest meaning into the event. With Prussia at peace, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV lacked the opportunity to stage his own triumphant return from war but proved no less adroit at utilizing monarchical entries. As David E. Barclay has shown, Friedrich Wilhelm IV sought to modernize the monarchy by introducing new forms of ceremony that drew on art, architecture, religion, and music to present the monarchy as a conservative alternative to democratic revolution.24 His monarchical entry into Berlin on 21 September 1840 was exemplary in this manner. Having carried out troop inspections for the previous nine days, Friedrich Wilhelm IV was received at Berlin’s Frankfurt

 Thomas Stamm-Kuhlmann, “War Friedrich Wilhelm III. von Preussen ein Bürgerkönig?” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 16 (1989): 441–460.  Thomas Stamm-Kuhlmann, König in Preußens großer Zeit: Friedrich Wilhelm III. der Melancholiker auf dem Thron (Berlin: Siedler, 1992), 578–580; Huch, “Einleitung,” 49.  Huch, “Einleitung,” 29–30, 43–44, 56–57.  Biskup, Friedrichs Größe, 222–223; Karen Hagemann, Revisiting Prussia’s Wars against Napoleon: History, Culture, and Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 163–164.  David E. Barclay, “Das ‘monarchische Projekt’: Friedrich Wilhelm IV. von Preußen,” in Inszenierung oder Legitimation? Monarchy and the Art of Representation: Die Monarchie in Europa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Ein deutsch-englischer Vergleich, ed. Frank-Lothar Kroll and Dieter J. Weiß (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2015), 35–44.

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Gate by the mayor and other representatives in a ceremony which had been choreographed in advance in a document of forty sections, stipulating in great detail the marching sequence of the citizenry, the religious service, oaths of allegiance, and dinners. Befitting his new style of monarchy, Friedrich Wilhelm IV also held a spontaneous speech — albeit to the skepticism of his heir and brother Wilhelm — in which he underlined the unity between throne, altar, and population.25 As such, this entry foreshadowed Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s romantically-inspired vision of an organic Prussian polity which he sought to stage during his reign. Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s entries also reveal the role of local Eigen-sinn in visualizing the king’s authority. Some scholars argue that after 1848 the monarchy and various guilds lost their singular power to organize monarchical entries; after that point, the local citizenry and municipal authorities became more assertive in staging these events. In fact, though, manifestations of urban Eigen-sinn were in evidence well before 1848. During the king’s visit to Erfurt in 1845, the city council evaded the ban on loyalist decorations and instead covered the city’s towers with flags. When Friedrich Wilhelm IV entered his newly acquired principality of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen on 23 August 1851, the ceremony was planned with great emphasis on local identities and customs. Since Prussia’s new constitution eliminated the traditional oath of allegiance to the king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV now found it in his interest to generate popular legitimacy and was therefore willing accept such local displays of Eigen-sinn. As a result, the entry included a reception by the mayor; a processional lineup of guilds, artisans, and schoolchildren; the sounding of church bells; and a royal carriage ride to the palace where the king received the addresses of local officials.26 Thus, by the middle of the nineteenth century, cities had gained much autonomy vis-à-vis the monarchy in staging their local identity. As competitors to the royal house over interpretations of the polity in the urban environment, municipalities effectively challenged the monarchy.27 At the same time, the monarchy had acquired a series of legitimizing strategies with which it could justify its elevated position, including references to its success in wartime and idealized projections of

 Huch, “Einleitung,” 90–94.  Huch, “Einleitung,” 45.  However, Eva Giloi points to numerous instances in which municipal authorities and local populations crafted their own image of the monarch through relics, souvenirs, popular literature, and museums in the early nineteenth century, and with origins in the eighteenth century, suggesting that the reemergence of this practice around 1850 may have been less absolute than I contend. Eva Giloi, Monarchy, Myth, and Material Culture in Germany, 1750–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 23–131. Hubertus Büschel likewise notes the tendency of local authorities and populations, including those from the lower social strata, to craft their own image of the monarch, and that these practices were relatively unaffected by the upheavals of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. Hubertus Büschel, Untertanenliebe: Der Kult um deutsche Monarchen 1770–1830 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006).

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unity between state and population. The problem facing both political entities was how to accommodate each other or else how to gain interpretative dominance in the urban environment when the dramatic events of the second half of the nineteenth century – revolution, wars of unification, nation-building, and the public funerals of deceased rulers – led to monarchical entries.

II Monarchical Entries in the Nineteenth Century Monarchical Entries and Revolution: Wilhelm I’s Return to Berlin in 1848 Within the European context, Wilhelm I’s return to Berlin following his flight from the Prussian capital after the March 1848 revolution was unique. In some countries upheavals had forced monarchs from their thrones and into political exile, as happened in France to King Louis-Philippe I. In other states, the revolution had compelled monarchs to abdicate in favor of their successors: in Austria, Emperor Ferdinand I made way for his nephew Franz Joseph, while King Ludwig I of Bavaria abdicated in favor of his son Maximilian II. In yet other European countries, monarchs retained their sovereignty but were forced to accept constitutions that curbed their powers, such as in the Netherlands. In Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm IV likewise had to accept a constitution in 1849, although he retained considerable prerogatives. Prussia was alone among European powers, though, to have the royal heir, the future Wilhelm I, flee the country while the monarch remained on the throne. The reason for Wilhelm’s flight lay in the fact that, as the king’s brother, he was no young prince with an unwritten slate, but an experienced military commander with a decidedly conservative outlook and commitment to upholding the monarchy’s political powers. Prince Wilhelm’s public persona had come to represent the anti-democratic reaction both at court and in wider Prussian politics.28 The impression that Wilhelm embodied the forces of reaction rested largely on the way that the Berlin uprising was suppressed: it was commonly assumed that the troops, who used force against the populace, were under Wilhelm’s direct command, while in reality they were led by General Karl Ludwig von Prittwitz. Wilhelm’s presumed orchestration of this violent suppression elided the fact that, on the eve of revolution on March 17, the prince had willingly cosigned his brother’s patent announcing Prussia’s transition towards a constitutional system. In consequence, angry crowds gathered in front of Wilhelm’s palace, threatening to seize

 Karl Haenchen, “Flucht und Rückkehr des Prinzen von Preußen im Jahre 1848,” Historische Zeitschrift 154 (1936): 32–95; Börner, Wilhelm I., 72–75; Rüdiger Hachtmann, Berlin 1848: Eine Politik- und Gesellschaftsgeschichte der Revolution (Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz, 1997), 184–187.

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the building as national property and demanding that the prince give up his position as heir. The outrage against Wilhelm was amplified by a propaganda campaign, including a brochure from the radical political circle of the journalist Gustav Julius that depicted Wilhelm as the embodiment of Russian political absolutism, initiator of the military violence against the citizenry, and cause of the revolution.29 In this light, Wilhelm’s flight to London in March 1848 was one of the iconic events of the period. His return to Berlin two months later, however, is of greater significance for understanding his use of monarchical entries. Wilhelm’s decision to go into exile was partially prompted by the Prussian cabinet, for whom the heir to the throne’s absence was expedient for the time being: it reconciled the king and population to each other and lessened the chance of a military intervention by reactionaries. The king and his brother reluctantly agreed that the latter’s departure would calm the population. When Friedrich Wilhelm IV soon thereafter expressed an emotional need for his brother’s return, his cabinet declined this suggestion in the interest of first reestablishing the king’s acceptance by a radicalized population. The installation of a new cabinet under Ludolf von Camphausen, which appealed to both Liberals and Democrats and thus gave it latitude to risk more unpopular decisions, allowed the king to revisit his desire to recall his brother to his side. It had also become clear that the prince’s return was necessary to stabilize the monarchy’s authority, which would have been severely weakened if Wilhelm had surrendered his position as heir in favor of his politically more liberal son.30 Even a lengthy sojourn in London would have threatened to undermine the power of the monarchy, as an absent heir would have thrown the long-term continuity of the dynasty into question. Given Wilhelm’s formal position as heir, the monarchy had an interest in reestablishing his presence in Prussia. The possibility of his return from exile constituted a political act and became a major debate in Prussian domestic politics.31 The question remained, however: how could Wilhelm’s return to the Prussian capital be orchestrated so soon after his departure in the face of popular fury? Privately Wilhelm accepted that he was seen as the epitome of Prussia’s old regime, even taking pride in the fact as he argued that Prussia’s monarchs had forged the state.32 Nor did his conservative commitments trouble his reception in London, where Wilhelm was met with deference and joined by others who had fled the revolution, including Klemens von Metternich.33 Back in Prussia, however, Wilhelm’s

 Haenchen, “Flucht,” 43–47.  Börner, Wilhelm I., 78.  Haenchen, “Flucht,” 32, 87.  Ernst Berner, ed., Kaiser Wilhelms des Großen Briefe, Reden und Schriften, vol. 1: 1797–1860 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler und Sohn, 1906), 177.  Johannes Schultze, Kaiser Wilhelms I. Weimarer Briefe, vol. 1 (Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1924), 179.

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reactionary persona continued to be a problem. Conservatives and radical democrats alike recognized that Wilhelm’s return would strengthen the dynasty, especially in Prussia’s rural territories. Indeed, Wilhelm’s absence had exposed a deep rift between the capital and the countryside, where the prince still enjoyed considerable popularity as the embodiment of the military monarchy. The court thus found an initial solution by conceding to constitutional-parliamentary expectations and electing Wilhelm to represent the Wirsitz district in the Prussian National Assembly. Even so, the situation in the Prussian capital remained fraught, not least as Berlin newspapers were reluctant to publicize any support for the prince.34 Thus, while the logistical grounds for his return were set, its symbolic signification required sensitivity and attention. Clearly, the event had to be carefully choreographed to refute long-held perceptions about Wilhelm’s reactionary persona, as well as reaffirm his position as a viable heir to the throne and present him as a relevant part of the political order in the capital. Beyond a mere semantic exercise, this event was crucial for the monarchy to reestablish Wilhelm’s public profile in accordance with its political interests. A grand ceremonial entry, with its trope of triumphalism, was out of the question. On the other hand, Wilhelm’s popular image as the monarchy’s ‘first soldier’ offered the possibility of appointing him as commander of the Prussian troops in Schleswig and Holstein. These troops had intervened in Denmark as part of the First Schleswig War (and ultimately stayed there from 1848 to 1851). If it were possible to wage a short and victorious campaign, Wilhelm could enter Berlin as a successful military commander at the head of his troops – or so thought the king. When Friedrich Wilhelm IV suggested this option to his cabinet, conservatives and radicals alike rejected the idea. The Prussian general and diplomat Joseph von Radowitz argued that Wilhelm’s return at the head of victorious troops would be interpreted as an attempt to lead a counter-revolution. Even the commander of the troops in Schleswig and Holstein, Prince Friedrich of Sonderburg-Augustenburg, argued that this would turn the conservatives into radicals, with unpredictable consequences for the situation in northern Germany. To make matters worse, given Danish numerical superiority, a military victory was unlikely. By midApril, Britain had taken on the role of mediator in the conflict between Denmark and the German states, forcing Wilhelm to recognize that there was little opportunity for him to play a military role in the conflict in any case. Standing by passively as commanding officer while Britain carried out its mediation would only have led to further defamation by the press.35 In this scenario, as Wilhelm himself recognized, the prince’s lack of any formal role or actionable instructions from the foreign minister would have denied him the necessary legitimacy in the first place.36  Hachtmann, Berlin 1848, 322–324.  Haenchen, “Flucht,” 83–85.  See also: Winfried Baumgart, ed., König Friedrich Wilhelm IV. und Wilhelm I.: Briefwechsel 1840–1858 (Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 2013), 194–195.

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Against this backdrop, Wilhelm’s consort, Princess Augusta, argued that the prince’s return could only be preceded by a full rehabilitation, which implied that Wilhelm would have to affirm his allegiance to constitutionalism. Wilhelm concurred: as a military entry was no longer a feasible option, he chose to publicize his allegiance to the new constitutional arrangements. On 28 April 1848, Wilhelm conveyed his conditions to Friedrich Wilhelm IV: his departure from Prussia must not be presented as a flight, but as having been undertaken at the king’s orders to calm popular unrest. His stay in England must also be presented as a diplomatic “mission” rather than exile, so that the completion of the mission now allowed him to return to Prussia.37 The cabinet, under pressure from the king, sent a formal request to shorten Wilhelm’s stay in England stating that, given his support for the patent of 17 March, his presence as heir to the throne was now required. Although the decision caused popular unrest, the king and the cabinet held firm to their decision, even launching a press campaign to restore Wilhelm’s public image. Louis Schneider, Wilhelm’s future biographer and court reader, ensured the support of the local militia, with whom he was in contact as editor of Der Soldatenfreund, a magazine aimed primarily at soldiers.38 Next followed a public statement by Wilhelm in which he confirmed his acceptance of the new constitutional arrangements before returning to German soil. The cabinet used a text drafted by Wilhelm and heavily influenced by Augusta, although it did not genuinely reflect his opinions.39 The removal of any overly enthusiastic language in support of the new constitutional arrangements was also a political calculation meant to give the impression of authenticity because of Wilhelm’s previous conservative stance. The statement specifically alluded to Wilhelm’s role as heir to the throne — and thus future king — in pledging his acceptance to the constitutional changes, showing how he and the king sought to reaffirm his role as successor. To further cement his claim to that role, Wilhelm insisted to his brother that he would not return until the Prussian Assembly had stopped debating his position as heir to the throne.40 This insistence came on top of Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s argument to Camphausen that any delay in Wilhelm’s return would endanger the succession.41 These efforts were designed to forge a consensus on Wilhelm’s future and to sweep out of the way any lingering questions about the prince’s suitability to represent the monarchy.

 Haenchen, “Flucht,” 52–55, 86; Baumgart, Briefwechsel, 196–200.  Haenchen, “Flucht,” 88–89; Ernst von Natzmer, ed., Unter den Hohenzollern: Denkwürdigkeiten aus dem Leben des Generals Oldwig von Natzmer: Aus der Zeit Friedrich Wilhelms IV, vol. 1: 1840–1848 (Gotha: F. A. Perthes, 1888), 219.  Erich Brandenburg, ed., Briefwechsel mit Ludolf Camphausen (Berlin: Gebrüder Paetel, 1906), 122–124, 141–143; Baumgart, Briefwechsel, 201; Berner, Kaiser Wilhelms, 183; Haenchen, “Flucht,” 91.  Baumgart, Briefwechsel, 205–209.  Brandenburg, Briefwechsel, 77–78.

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Wilhelm’s route into Berlin had been a matter of dispute between the prince, the king, and the cabinet. The king and his brother argued for a direct and speedy route to dispel any doubts about the monarchy’s determination to reinstall Wilhelm in his former position. The cabinet argued for a slower pace, fearing that any obvious haste would appear menacing — as a rush to dominate the capital city — and thus spur a renewed uproar. In the face of these profound concerns, the cabinet threatened to resign if the king ignored their counsel. Friedrich Wilhelm IV rejected both the counsel and the resignations, and Wilhelm subsequently travelled via Ostende, Antwerpen, and The Hague, spending time privately with King Leopold of the Belgians and Prince Frederick of the Netherlands before heading to Germany. On much of his route, especially in the countryside, Wilhelm enjoyed warmth and acclaim. In Westphalia, for instance, large crowds of civilians and peasants had independently organized themselves as citizen militias (Bürgerwehr) in order to receive Wilhelm in a festive manner.42 Still, cities remained a node of concern, since the urban public’s reactions were not entirely predictable. A grand public arrival in Aachen and Cologne was rejected by the regional president and Prussian minister of the interior, Franz August Eichmann, presumably to avoid popular unrest. Instead, Wilhelm travelled via the less assuming cities of Emmerich, Wesel, and Duisburg, then proceeded to the more significant city of Hanover where he attended the birthday of King Ernst August. From there, he planned to travel through Magdeburg to Potsdam, the residence of the Prussian king and other members of the dynasty. The route thus gradually raised the significance of Wilhelm’s journey and his return to the monarchy’s fold.43 Magdeburg posed one last obstacle, however. From Camphausen’s perspective, a stay in Magdeburg, a mid-size city near Berlin, would be symbolically advantageous as it eased Wilhelm’s way into the capital city. Friedrich Wilhelm IV, however, urged Camphausen that Wilhelm should pause in Hamm, which was further from Berlin than Magdeburg, specifically to avoid having to pause in the latter: stopping so near to the final goal would suggest hesitancy or, even worse, fear. Wilhelm likewise initially rejected the Magdeburg plan, stating that he had conceded enough already. Augusta weighed in on Camphausen’s side, believing that Wilhelm’s future standing depended on support from the cabinet.44 In the end, the prince relented and stayed one day extra in Magdeburg, which did not have any consequences for popular perceptions of his return. The stay did present Wilhelm with a prime opportunity, though, to communicate his persona along multiple popular axes. On the one hand, he was not able to use the Second Regiment of foot guards’ presence in Magdeburg to burnish his image as the monarchy’s first officer: he had been stripped of its command and had not been reinstated, even though  Karl-Heinz Börner, ed., Prinz Wilhelm von Preußen an Charlotte: Briefe 1817–1860 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1993), 264.  Haenchen, “Flucht,” 93; Baumgart, Briefwechsel, 209–215.  Brandenburg, Briefwechsel, 134–135; Haenchen, “Flucht,” 93.

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he protested that this act was politically motivated.45 On the other hand, since Wilhelm was reunited with his wife and children again for the first time since his exile, he was able to cultivate an image of family bliss that appealed to the domestic values of the emerging middle class. After a reception by civilian and military officials, Wilhelm held a speech to the gathered audience in which he stated that his mission to England had instilled in him a love of free institutions and a recognition of the law as the highest authority, publicly suggesting his adherence to constitutionalism. According to Ernst Curtius, tutor to Wilhelm’s son, the speech was simple and contained no personal or emotional components, thereby ensuring that the public’s attention was not diverted to his person but was centered on his acceptance of the new constitutional arrangements. Wilhelm then greeted the crowds waiting outside of the station, at first alone and then later with his wife and children, again highlighting his reunion with his family. The crowds reassembled the next morning and Wilhelm was woken up by a choir that sang at his departure.46 After Magdeburg, Wilhelm’s personal presence was submerged in the Hohenzollern dynasty’s memory culture, demonstrating to the public that he was once again an active part of the monarchy in the political center. Wilhelm travelled with his family to Potsdam’s Wildpark station, where he was received by Friedrich Wilhelm IV, Queen Elisabeth, his brother Prince Albrecht, and officers of the guard. From there the group travelled by carriage to Charlottenburg, where they participated in an annual family ritual commemorating their father’s death at the palace garden’s mausoleum. Wilhelm’s return was thus coded as reverence for the customs of family piety and tradition, as of old. The party returned to the palace of Sanssouci in Potsdam in the evening, with Wilhelm’s arrival in Berlin scheduled for the next day.47 Wilhelm’s arrival in the capital was the culmination of the efforts to reconcile the exiled heir to the throne with Prussia’s new constitutional arrangements. His arrival in the National Assembly had been announced by Camphausen while Wilhelm was travelling through Hanover Wilhelm’s attendance in the assembly was meant to signal solidarity between the population and the monarchy and the assembly’s positive response suggested that no opposition would come from its members.48 Nonetheless, no grand monarchical entry was planned, neither by Wilhelm nor for him, to avoid popular unrest. Instead, the authorities decided that Wilhelm would have a low-key arrival in the city. By Wilhelm’s own account, the city guards made a poor impression on him, while those parts of the population who did recognize him were friendly, thus tacitly suggesting the importance of his return to a prominent position Prussia’s military. A key dispute between Wilhelm and the cabinet had been whether he would wear a uniform,

 Baumgart, Briefwechsel, 213–215; Börner, Wilhelm I., 85.  Friedrich Curtius, ed., Ernst Curtius: Ein Lebensbild in Briefen (Berlin: J. Springer 1903), 382–383.  Börner, Wilhelm an Charlotte, 301.  Hachtmann, Berlin 1848, 341; Haenchen, “Flucht,” 92.

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with the latter arguing against the idea. Doing so would have signaled Wilhelm’s continued position as the monarchy’s first soldier and embodiment of conservatism. Wilhelm refused to budge, believing that if he chose civilian dress, more concessions would be demanded by the population or the assembly.49 Wilhelm therefore appeared in his general’s uniform and had to accept a number of discourtesies from members of the assembly, but overall his arrival went without protest. In a brief speech, Wilhelm again declared — as “first subject of the king” — his allegiance to his brother’s choice to institute a constitutional monarchy. Wilhelm then requested of the assembly’s president that a replacement take his seat representing the Wirsitz district, as he claimed that his other tasks prevented him from regular attendance; and with that, the prince left the assembly.50 The measures seemed successful: although Berlin’s Armory was stormed by a group of people six days later, no further popular unrest followed the prince’s return.51 Some scholars have questioned the effectiveness of Wilhelm’s monarchical entry following the Revolution of 1848. Rüdiger Hachtmann argues that Wilhelm’s conservatism remained essentially intact. Public perception in this regard was strengthened by Wilhelm’s conduct one year later, when he commanded an expeditionary force to suppress an uprising in Baden. Moreover, the designation of Wilhelm as the Shrapnel Prince (Kartätschenprinz), dating from the summer of 1848, remained a fixture of Wilhelm’s public persona in contemporary culture, especially within the political left.52 Despite the persistence of this image in cultural memory, historians have challenged it: as Karl Haenchen argued already in 1936, Wilhelm’s return was the most important act during the three months following the outbreak of the Revolution of 1848, regardless of the political positions he took. Haenchen credits Camphausen’s efforts for Wilhelm’s return and its reconciliatory effects, demonstrated by the fact that the storming of the Armory was not supported by the majority of the population. Above all, the king’s position had been strengthened, with the heir to the throne now standing firmly behind him.53 Because of his extended return journey, Wilhelm had shown himself to large parts of the population, in particular in the countryside, which helped to reaffirm his popular standing ahead of his arrival in the capital. Moreover, Wilhelm had played an active role in staging his own return to Prussia’s social center: he had set out his conditions in his letter

 Börner, Wilhelm an Charlotte, 301–302.  Börner, Wilhelm I., 85; Berner Kaiser Wilhelms, 185–186.  Ernst Curtius suggests that the storming of the Zeughaus happened as a result of Wilhelm’s return, although Rüdiger Hachtmann disputes this. See Curtius, Lebensbild, 384–385; Hachtmann, Berlin 1848, 553–573.  Hachtmann, Berlin 1848, 342. See also: Karl-Heinz Börner, “Wilhelm I.: Vom Kartätschenprinz zum deutschen Kaiser,” in Gestalten der Bismarckzeit, ed. Gustav Seeber (Berlin [East]: AkademieVerlag, 1978), 58–78.  Haenchen, “Flucht,” 95.

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to Friedrich Wilhelm IV of 28 April, agreed to the delay in Magdeburg, and was firm in his decision to wear his general’s uniform in the assembly. This last decision illustrates the importance Wilhelm attached to his military role as an inherent feature of his public persona. Indeed, in subsequent years Wilhelm would increasingly seek to present himself as the epitome of the Prussian military monarchy.54 It was this preferred public persona that would become central to his next major monarchical entry: the victory parade after the Austro-Prussian War of 1866.

Monarchical Entries after War: The Victory Parade of 1866 Wilhelm was not alone in wanting to present himself as a military leader in his public appearances. While military prowess was an important source of political legitimacy already in the early modern era, after 1789 the appearance of military success became imperative for monarchs across Europe.55 Since the French Revolution called the divine right of kings into question and demonstrated that political alternatives to monarchy existed, monarchs who lost military conflicts could find themselves forced to abdicate. Such was the case with Napoleon III, whose overwhelming defeat at the Battle of Sedan during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 forced him to abdicate and flee into exile. Conversely, successful leadership in wartime could prove to be a source of legitimacy of considerable endurance. In 1815, the heir to the throne and future king of the Netherlands Willem II played a vital role in the Battle of Waterloo. His exploits lent him an aura of military heroism that his father, King Willem I, cultivated to buttress the Dutch monarchy’s authority in the Southern Netherlands during the 1820s.56 Monarchs could also harness the power of nationalism to shore up their sovereignty and keep democracy at bay, or they could produce national unity through war, as happened in Italy in 1861 and Germany in 1871.57 As military prowess became especially

 Sterkenburgh, “Narrating Prince Wilhelm.”  On the importance of military leadership as a source for political legitimacy for monarchs in the nineteenth century, see: Volker Sellin, Gewalt und Legitimität: Die europäische Monarchie im Zeitalter der Revolutionen (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2011), 105–143.  Jeroen Koch, “The King as Father, Orangism, and the Uses of a Hero: King William I of the Netherlands and the Prince of Orange, 1815–1840,” in Royal Heirs and the Uses of Soft Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Frank Lorenz Müller and Heidi Mehrkens (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 263–280. On Willem II’s cultivation of his military background and defense of his record, see: Jeroen van Zanten, Koning Willem II 1792–1849 (Amsterdam: Boom Uitgevers, 2013), 74–147, 203–236. On his application of his military background to intervene in Dutch defense policy, see: W. Bevaart, “Koning Willem II en de geconcentreerde defensie,” Mededelingen van de Sectie Militaire Geschiedenis Landmachtstaf 13 (1990): 5–42; W. Bevaart, “Koning Willem II en de verdediging van Nederland, 1840–1849,” in Jaarboek Oranje-Nassau Museum 1994 (1994): 92–118.  Dieter Langewiesche, Die Monarchie im Jahrhundert Europas: Selbstbehauptung durch Wandel (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2013), 12–19. On war as a source for legitimacy and a

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important in an age of state formation, monarchical entries after a successful war were an important means for monarchs to stage their authority. Against this broader European background, Wilhelm I, who had become king of Prussia in 1861, had his first significant opportunity to present himself as conquering hero with Prussia’s victory over Austria in 1866.58 Once again, though, Wilhelm had to approach such martial symbolism with care: the symbolic transformation of success on the battlefield into a triumphal entry into Berlin was complicated by the twin specters of civil war and civil conflict. As Jasper Heinzen notes, the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 was in essence a “German Civil War.” As an inner-German conflict, it required postwar state-building policies to forge a shared identity between Prussia and its former adversaries in order to integrate them into the expanded Prussian kingdom.59 Wilhelm’s preference was to present himself as a victorious king at the head of his troops in accordance with his identity as the Prussian monarchy’s first soldier, which he had fostered since the 1850s, and in anticipation of the fact that North German unification would be effected under Prussian leadership.60 Such an unambiguous presentation as Prussian military monarch was at odds with the character of the conflict, however, since it highlighted Prussian particularism over the broader national community. It was not clear, therefore, how this particular self-staging would resonate with the wider population and what consequences that would have for Wilhelm’s authority. On the other hand, projecting himself as a victorious military monarch could help Wilhelm to consolidate his monarchical authority within Prussia itself after his conflict with the Prussian Diet over military reform. That dispute, which had raged from 1859 to 1866, escalated into a struggle over whether the Diet or the monarch was the dominant entity in Prussia’s political order, ending with the defeat of the Diet once Bismarck

driving force behind the founding of nation-states, see: Dieter Langewiesche, Der gewaltsahme Lehrer: Europas Kriege in der Moderne (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2019), 261–336.  On the Austro-Prussian War see: Gordon A. Craig, The Battle of Königgrätz: Prussia’s Victory over Austria, 1866 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1964); Geoffrey Wawro, The Austro-Prussian War: Austria’s War with Prussia and Italy in 1866 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Dennis Showalter, The Wars of German Unification (London: Oxford University Press, 2004), 161–200; Winfried Heinemann, Lothar Höbelt, and Ulrich Lappenküper, eds., Der preußisch-österreichische Krieg 1866 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2018).  Jasper Heinzen, Raising Prussians, Making Germans: A Cultural History of Prussian StateBuilding after Civil War, 1866–1935 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).  Sterkenburgh, “Narrating Prince Wilhelm.” Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, but in particular after 1848, he voiced support for German unification, and increasingly under Prussian leadership, as evident in his private correspondence. Johannes Schulze, ed., Kaiser Wilhelms I. Briefe an Politiker und Staatsmänner, vol. 1: 1830–1853 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1930), 7–8, 132, 142, 195, 223. For Wilhelm’s decision to support German unification under Prussian leadership after 1848, see: Markert, “Prussia’s Road;” Karl Hampe, Kaiserfrage und Kölner Dom (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1936), 16–60. Lothar Gall argues that Wilhelm wanted the stronger variant of the imperial title, i.e. Emperor of Germany, as opposed to German Emperor, in order to demonstrate the growing power of the Hohenzollern dynasty. Lothar Gall, Bismarck: Der weisse Revolutionär (Frankfurt a/M: Ullstein Sachbuch, 1980), 451.

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was appointed minister president.61 His victorious return to Berlin, marching with his troops through the Brandenburg Gate, would see the city’s central avenue, Unter den Linden, turned into a via triumphalis and confirm Prussia’s capital as the social and political center of a monarchical state, rather than a parliamentary one. All parties involved understood the entry’s symbolic significance. While the municipal authorities were responsible for the decorations on city buildings, the Prussian cabinet was in charge of assigning seats for civilian and military officials on Unter den Linden, a vital task since the officials’ location along the route signified their importance in Prussia’s political hierarchy. Such symbolic designation was complicated by the fact that the space in front of the university building, a central node in the triumphal route, was reserved for members of the academic community.62 For his part, Wilhelm decided on other central aspects of the monarchical entry, including the date of the event, which troops would participate in the parade, and the sequence of the program.63 Above all, the king wanted to honor Prussian soldiers, especially the guards regiments, who had fought in the war; the monarchical entry thus had to be divided into two parts so that the event would not drag on over the course of many hours. Wilhelm also wanted to include a Te Deum to echo his father’s entry into Berlin following

 On the constitutional conflict, see: Wolfram Siemann, Gesellschaft im Aufbruch: Deutschland 1849–1871 (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1980), 200–203; Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1800–1866: Bürgerwelt und starker Staat (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1983), 749–768; Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995), 253–264; Clark, Iron Kingdom, 515–517; Hartwin Spenkuch, Preußen: eine besondere Geschichte: Staat, Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft und Kultur, 1648–1947 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019), 212–213. For particular issues in the constitutional conflict, see: Ludwig Dehio, “Die Pläne der Militärpartei und der Konflikt,” Deutsche Rundschau 213 (1927): 91–100; Ludwig Dehio, “Die Taktik der Opposition während des Konflikts,” Historische Zeitschrift 140 (1929), 279–347; Adalbert Hess, Das Parlament das Bismarck widerstrebte: Zur Politik und sozialen Zusammensetzung des preußischen Abgeordnetenhauses der Konfliktzeit, 1862–1866 (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1964); Jürgen Schlumbohm, ed., Der Verfassungskonflikt in Preussen 1862–1866 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck u. Ruprecht, 1970); Karl-Heinz Börner, Die Krise der preußischen Monarchie 1858–1862 (Berlin [East]: Akademie-Verlag, 1976); Hans-Christof Kraus, “Militärreform oder Verfassungswandel? Kronprinz Friedrich von Preußen und die ‘deutschen Whigs’ in der Krise von 1862/63,” in Adel und Bürgertum in Deutschland, ed. Heinz Reif, vol. 1 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2000), 207–232. On the military reform that caused the conflict, see: Dierk Walter, Preußische Heeresreformen 1807–1870: militärische Innovationen und der Mythos der ‘Roonschen Reform’ (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2003).  Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz (GStA PK), I. HA. Rep. 90A. Staatsministerium, jüngere Registratur. No. 4591. Deutscher Krieg im Jahre 1866. 57v., Unknown to the Staatsministerium, 26 August 1866; 58v., Bismarck to Mühler, 27 August 1866; 59v., Bismarck to Eulenburg, 29 August 1866; 60v-r., Mühler to Bismarck, 2 September 1866.  GStA PK BPH. Rep. 51J. Kaiser Wilhelm und Kaiserin Augusta. No. 509b. Briefe (Abschriften) Kaiser Wilhelm I. an seine Gemahlin Augusta. Band 12. 1866; 92v-93v., Wilhelm to Augusta, 25 August 1866.

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the Napoleonic wars in 1814.64 With these two considerations in mind, Wilhelm settled on 20 and 21 September as the dates for the monarchical entry, which ensured that all troops could participate; the event would be rounded out with a speech by the king and the Te Deum in the Lustgarten opposite the royal palace.65 Along with the event programming, Wilhelm also had the final say on whether the troops would wear field or dress uniform for the parade.66 The first day’s events placed Wilhelm front and center in his role as military monarch.67 To start the celebrations, Wilhelm rode on his horse Sadowa, named after the decisive battle of the Austro-Prussian War, from his palace to the Brandenburg Gate accompanied by his son Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm and other military staff. Once there, he greeted soldiers wounded in the conflict and then rode through the gate at the head of his troops. The procession was led by Field Marshal Friedrich von Wrangel, followed by War Minister Albrecht von Roon, Bismarck, Helmuth von Moltke, and two other generals. Next came Wilhelm, followed by the princes of the royal house and the army’s commanding generals, the guards’ regiments, the cavalry, and the artillery (Fig. 9.1). At the Pariser Platz, Wilhelm was greeted by dozens of ceremonial maidens. The poet Christian Friedrich Scherenberg read a poem aloud and Berlin’s mayor Karl Theodor Seidel offered the city’s greetings, with Wilhelm delivering replies to both. The procession then marched down Unter den Linden, passing the Opernplatz and the Lustgarten opposite the palace. While Wilhelm took care to acknowledge the gathered crowds, he asked officers of various units to come forward to greet him personally, highlighting the importance of the military over the non-military population. Having arrived at the Opernplatz, Wilhelm took up his position next to Queen Augusta and saluted the troops as they marched past to the Lustgarten.68 The choreography on the second day was essentially a repeat of the previous one, except that it highlighted Protestantism as a key feature of the Prussian state. Once again, Wilhelm positioned himself at the head of his troops at the Brandenburg Gate and paraded down Unter den Linden. This time the troops advanced to the Lustgarten for the Te Deum, where grandstands had been constructed for local authorities and a stage for a choir consisting of one thousand singers and hundreds of musicians. Wilhelm, Augusta, members of the Prussian royal family, royals from other dynasties including the Netherlands and Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and Berlin’s municipal authorities  GStA PK BPH. Rep. 51J. Kaiser Wilhelm und Kaiserin Augusta. No. 509b. Briefe (Abschriften) Kaiser Wilhelm I. an seine Gemahlin Augusta, Band 12, 1866; 98v., Wilhelm to Augusta, 31 August 1866.  GStA PK BPH. Rep. 51J. Kaiser Wilhelm und Kaiserin Augusta. No. 509b. Briefe (Abschriften) Kaiser Wilhelm I. an seine Gemahlin Augusta, Band 12, 1866; 106v., Wilhelm to Augusta, undated.  Karl Kraft zu Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen, Aus meinem Leben: Aufzeichnungen des Prinzen Karl Kraft zu Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen, vol. 3 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler und Sohn, 1906), 350–351.  Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen, Leben, 349.  Theodor Fontane, Der deutsche Krieg von 1866, vol. 2 (Berlin: R. v. Decker, 1871), 324–331; Preußische Sieges-Chronik 1866 und feierlicher Einzug der Sieger in Berlin am 20. und 21. September (Berlin: Königl. Geheime Ober-Hofbuchdr., 1866), 52–99.

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Fig. 9.1: Entering Berlin as victor: Wilhelm’s monarchical entry in Berlin via the Brandenburg Gate following the 1866 Austro-Prussian War served to project him to the population as victorious military monarch.

were all grouped together in a special tent. The service was led by the Prussian army chaplain Peter Thielen and drew on Psalm 118:23 to explain how Wilhelm, a faithful Christian, miraculously led the Prussian army to a swift victory against the Austrian forces. Wilhelm then led the congregation in prayer, followed by the sounding of church bells, a gunfire salute, and the singing of the hymn Nun danket alle Gott.69 Wilhelm’s insistence on this extended Te Deum ceremony is significant for two reasons. First, it demonstrates that Wilhelm perpetuated his use of religion as a strategy to legitimize his rule, just as he had done in 1861 during his coronation. In both ceremonies, Wilhelm invoked religion to counter demands for constitutional restrictions on his prerogatives, insisting he was king by the grace of God.70 Secondly, Wilhelm consciously adopted the

 Preußische Sieges-Chronik, 99–112.  Sellin, Gewalt und Legitimität, 95–97. For Wilhelm’s coronation, see: Walter Bussmann, “Die Krönung Wilhelms I. am 18 Oktober 1861: Eine Demonstration des Gottesgnadentums im preußischen Verfassungsstaat,” in Politik und Konfession, ed. Dieter Albrecht, Hans Günter Hockerts, Paul Mikat, and Rudolf Morsey (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1983), 189–212; Reinhard Elze, Die zweite preußische Königskrönung, Königsberg 18. Oktober 1861 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001), 10–36; Matthias Schwengelbeck, “Monarchische Herrschaftsrepräsentationen zwischen Konsens und

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Te Deum in reminiscence of Friedrich Wilhelm III’s monarchical entry into Berlin following Prussia’s victory in the Napoleonic Wars in 1814. Wilhelm had been at his father’s side at this event, which had also included a Te Deum in the Lustgarten with its prayers, church bells, and gun salute.71 Wilhelm thus ensured that his monarchical entry in 1866 harkened back to Prussian memories of the Napoleonic Wars and established a dynastic association between himself and his father as successful martial monarchs. However, much of this monarchical entry’s effectiveness was a product of other elements organized by the municipal authorities, including the festive decorations and symbolic references to Brandenburg-Prussian history. At Berlin’s Schlossbrücke stood a 25-foot statue of Borussia flanked by eagles, with the words Vom Fels zum Meer / 1415 / Vom Meer zum Fels / 1866 (From the mountains to the sea / 1415 / From the sea to the mountains / 1866) inscribed on its pedestal. The first part of the phrase referred to Friedrich VI of Nuremberg’s elevation to Margrave of Brandenburg and his journey in 1415 from Konstanz in southern Germany to Brandenburg in northern Germany; the second part suggested that Wilhelm had now made his triumphant journey in roughly the opposite direction. Borussia’s base also listed the names and years of victorious Prussian battles, including Fehrbellin in 1675, Hohenfriedberg in 1745, Rossbach in 1757, Leuthen in 1757, Leipzig in 1813, Paris in 1814, Belle Alliance in 1815, Düppel in 1864, Alsen in 1864, and finally Königgrätz in 1866. Next to Borussia stood statues of Wilhelm’s ancestors as rulers of Brandenburg and Prussia, with pedestals stating their names, the years of their reign, and mottos that demonstrated their piety, benevolence, or willingness to die on the battlefield. As a recurring motif within the festivities, Wilhelm was praised for needing only seven days to defeat the Austrian army. Thielen alluded briefly to this fact in his address, and Scherenberg made it explicit in his poem in a line that compared Wilhelm I with Friedrich II: “in seven days Friedrich’s seven years.”72 These historical references presented Wilhelm as yet another in a long line of victorious Hohenzollern commander-kings, imparting his military prowess with historical depth and even suggesting that he surpassed Frederick the Great. Such bold historical statements corresponded with the growing “preoccupation with history” in Prussian and German culture, which tended to see all modern phenomena through an historical lens and a ubiquitous obsession with heroic figures.73 Konflikt: Zum Wandel des Huldigings- und Inthronisationszeremoniells im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Die Sinnlichkeit der Macht: Herrschaft und Repräsentation der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Jan Andreas, Alexa Geisthövel, and Matthias Schwengelbeck (Frankfurt a/M: Campus, 2005), 123–162, here 143–160; Matthias Schwengelbeck, Die Politik des Zeremoniells: Huldigungsfeiern im langen 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt a/M: Campus, 2007), 247–281; Huch, “Einleitung,” 94–101.  Albert von Bamberg, ed., Friedrich Gustav Kießling: Eine Auswahl seiner Joachimsthalschen Schulreden (Berlin: Springer, 1886), 96.  Fontane, Deutsche Krieg, vol. 2, 326–328, Sieges-Chronik, 72–75, 110.  Matthew Jefferies, Imperial Culture in Germany 1871–1918 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 99–128.

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But these strategies of legitimization were at odds with the 1866 conflict’s character as a civil war, a discrepancy felt by Wilhelm as he took measures elsewhere to ease the blow for the vanquished German states. During the Crown Council meeting of 15 August, 1866, with Wilhelm presiding over the Prussian cabinet, the king agreed with reluctance to a full annexation of Hanover, Hessen, Nassau, and Frankfurt, arguing that the respective sovereigns of these states should be financially compensated for the loss of their thrones.74 This foreshadowed his later efforts to find reconciliation with the other German princes, for instance by funding the court theatres of Hanover, Kassel, and Wiesbaden from his private purse and insisting that older administrators in Hanover remain in office alongside new civil servants.75 Yet no reconciliatory gestures were present in Wilhelm’s 1866 monarchical entry. No available sources suggest any considerations to include representatives from the defeated states in the proceedings, suggesting that the key decision-makers involved agreed that the event foremostly was to display Prussian political and military supremacy. The one-notedness of this display did not pass unnoticed. Prussian General Karl Kraft zu Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen recalled in his memoirs that public enthusiasm for the monarchical entry was considerable on both days, but that jokes circulated that the second day was a “reheated entry” (aufgewärmten [sic] Einzug) of the previous day, suggesting that its purpose was primarily functional, meant to drive home the message of monarchical victory which might not be fully absorbed by the population if the troops returned to their barracks after only one day.76 The monarchical entry to Berlin in 1866 demonstrates that Wilhelm I sought to stage his authority based on military and religious legitimacy, largely from a dynastic-historical perspective. Prussia’s victory in the 1866 war enabled the king to underline his military role in a manner that his 1848 entry could not. Moreover, in the latter event, Wilhelm explicitly aligned himself with the Prussian and German

 Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Jürgen Kocka, and Wolfgang Neugebauer, eds., Acta Borussica, Neue Folge, I. Reihe: “Die Protokolle des Preußischen Staatsministeriums 1817–1934/38,” ed. Rainer Paetau, V: 10 November 1858 bis 28 Dezember 1866 (Hildesheim: OlmsWeidmann, 2001), 255–256.  Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Jürgen Kocka, and Wolfgang Neugebauer, eds., Acta Borussica, Neue Folge, I. Reihe: “Die Protokolle des Preußischen Staatsministeriums 1817–1934/38,” ed. Rainer Paetau and Hartwin Spenkuch, VI/I: 3 Januar 1867 bis 20 Dezember 1878 (Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 2004), 67–68, 87–88, 106–107, 120–121. For the full protocol, see: Hans Philippi, Preußen und die braunschweigische Thronfolgefrage 1866–1913 (Hildesheim: Lax, 1966), 187–190. On the general problem of monarchical state-building after the 1866 civil war and Hohenzollern self-legitimization, see: Jasper Heinzen, “Monarchical State-Building through State Destruction: Hohenzollern Self-Legitimization at the Expense of Deposed Dynasties in the Kaiserreich,” German History 35 (2017): 525–550.  Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen, Leben, 350. Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm noted in a tepid manner that the first day of the royal entry only featured the guards. See: Winfried Baumgart, ed., Kaiser Friedrich III. Tagebücher 1866–1888 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2012), 43.

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cultural interest in historical figures, as seen in the decorations installed by the municipal authorities, meaning that in this instance their Eigen-sinn was limited by the Hohenzollern monarchy’s intentions for the event. As the other German states were disregarded in the ceremony and sidelined from its historical narrative, it is clear that the monarchical entry was intended to consolidate Wilhelm’s monarchical authority following his victory in the conflict with the Prussian Diet over military reform and to project Prussian military power abroad. Berlin was, for these purposes, a stage; not just a social center, but specifically the core of Prussia’s military and monarchical power, a process which also overcame the memory of Wilhelm’s flight from Berlin in 1848. Still, while popular interest in the monarchical entry suggested enthusiasm for the event, the doubts expressed by Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen indicate that the entry was received with some reservations. Indeed, the limitations of the monarchical entry become clear when juxtaposed with Wilhelm’s moves towards reconciliation behind the scenes. It suggests that he was increasingly willing, following his proclamation as German Emperor after 1871, to appeal to a wider German public beyond Prussia, as the following section will show.

Monarchical Entries and Nation-State Formation: Wilhelm I’s Entries into Dresden, 1872 and 1882 After 1815, the territorial reorganization of Europe in the Congress of Vienna and the rise of nationalism forced monarchs to present themselves as national figureheads, supplying a renewed incentive to reinforce their authority through monarchical travel to unify their polities. The immediate impetus for monarchical travel and the ceremonious arrival in a city could range widely: official visits; mediatized “private” visits including hunting parties and spa vacations; participation in local and regional celebrations; support missions to regions struck by disaster; and military inspections. These events also left room for local dignitaries and regional authorities to express their interpretation of the political order, both in their use of ceremony and in the production of commemorative artifacts from decorations to souvenirs to official brochures. While a king like Wilhelm had the power to determine the course of an entry into his capital city, his movement through cities and towns in other (non-Prussian) parts of the empire was largely left to their municipal administrations, allowing broader participation in crafting the symbolic relationship between center and periphery. While monarchical travel was a European-wide phenomenon, it took considerably different forms in nations with different state structures. Much depended on the willingness of the monarch to present him or herself, as well as on how the state’s organization regulated the relationship between the polity’s central authority and its more outlying regions. As highly composite polities that faced the challenge of integrating a multitude of former states and nationalities, Europe’s continental empires —

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the Austro-Hungarian, German, Russian, and Ottoman Empires — were especially marked with a lack of centralized concentration. Within this group, the German Empire stood apart, as many German states had undertaken intensive state-building activities to forge a particularistic identity during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. Expecting that German unification under Prussian leadership might well follow in the near future, these principalities worked proactively to carve out a regional identity that would help to forestall their loss of political independence in a future Prussian-led empire.77 Even after German unification in 1871, many of these formerly independent states and dynasties were left structurally intact. The result was that German nationhood was an amalgam and the Empire distinctly federal in nature. As German emperor, Wilhelm I now had to acknowledge the dignity of the individual states and dynasties whenever he traveled through their realms; they, in turn, could use their reception of the emperor to demonstrate their interpretation of the German Empire. Against this background, Wilhelm’s travels provide insights into how his monarchical presentation changed to reflect his imperial role after 1871. These travels were an integral part of Wilhelm’s annual rhythm, as he journeyed across the German Empire to visit spas and family, attend military maneuvers, and participate in other events.78 The arrival in each city allowed Wilhelm to take symbolic possession — in the sense described by Geertz — of each region that he visited. Even so, such entries could not be organized solely from within his offices and court, but had to acknowledge the region’s particularistic identity to ensure that the ceremony resonated with the local population. Given the intensity of his Prussian focus in 1866, it should come as no surprise that Wilhelm adapted his ceremonial iconography to acknowledge the composite nature of the German Empire only gradually over the course of his reign as emperor. This section will demonstrate how Wilhelm’s monarchical entries into

 Werner K. Blessing, “Der monarchische Kult, politische Loyalität und die Arbeiterbewegung im Deutschen Kaiserreich,” in Arbeiterkultur, ed. Gerhard A. Ritter (Königstein: Verlagsgruppe Athenäum, Hain, Scriptor, Hanstein, 1979), 185–208; Abigail Green, Fatherlands: State-building and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Manfred Hanisch, “Nationalisierung der Dynastien oder monarchisierung der Nation? Zum Verhältnis von Monarchie und Nation in Deutschland im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Bürgertum, Adel und Monarchie: Wandel der Lebensformen im Zeitalter des Bürgerlichen Nationalismus, ed. Adolf M. Birke and Lothar Kettenacker (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1989), 71–91; Manfred Hanisch, Für Fürst und Vaterland: Legitimitätsstiftung in Bayern zwischen Revolution 1848 und deutscher Einheit (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1991).  Börner, Wilhelm I., 236–237; Gerhard Besier, ed., “Die Persönlichen Erinnerungen des Chefs des Geheimen Zivilkabinetts Karl von Wilmowski, 1817–1893,” Jahrbuch für Berlin-Brandenburgische Kirchengeschichte 50 (1977): 131–185, here 168–169; Karl Hammer, “Die preußischen Könige und Königinnen im 19. Jahrhundert und ihr Hof,” in Hof, Kultur und Politik im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Karl Ferdinand Werner (Bonn: Röhrscheid, 1985), 87–98, here 94–95; Bogdan Graf von Hutten-Czapski, Sechzig Jahre Politik und Gesellschaft, vol. 1 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler, 1936), 37.

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Dresden in 1872 and 1882 reflected this change. The visits to Dresden — the capital of the state of Saxony — offer a particularly good case study. Saxony was one of many German states to develop a pronounced particularistic identity before 1871. After his defeat in 1866, King Johann of Saxony sided with Prussia in order to avoid outright annexation, thus securing some Saxon independence and ensuring his right to the Saxon throne, which he held until his death in 1873.79 Wilhelm’s monarchical entries into Dresden could thus build on Saxon dynastic allegiance to him, while also having to acknowledge Saxony’s particularism. Wilhelm visited Dresden in 1872 on the occasion of the golden wedding anniversary of the king and queen of Saxony, which he used to demonstrate that, as emperor, he presided over a monarchical federation rather than dominating the other German princes. Similar to his intervention in the monarchical entry into Berlin in 1866, Wilhelm expressed his stance only once preparations for the visit were underway. Initially, the city of Dresden had planned a grand reception, including the construction of triumphal arches and stands for Saxon officials. When municipal officials communicated this to the court in Berlin, they were informed that Wilhelm firmly rejected such plans, even quoting his words: “At the given festive occasion everything should be about the golden wedding couple.”80 Writing to Augusta in advance of the journey, Wilhelm recognized the symbolic significance of his arrival: “The King of Saxony finds it perfectly natural that we will not stay for the ball. The city wanted to welcome us in an imperial manner, which I have decidedly rejected for this occasion.”81 The emperor objected well in advance of his arrival to any display of Eigen-sinn on the part of Dresden city officials, demonstrating that he retained the final word on such matters. The journey itself was a low-key affair in order to downplay Wilhelm’s status as imperial master. As Johannes Paulmann argues, border crossings became a significant symbolic component of monarchical visits during the nineteenth century: as monarchs became the embodiment of their respective nation-states, the act of entering the realm of another sovereign required particular rituals to turn a potential intruder into a welcome visitor.82 Paulmann’s insight applies to Wilhelm’s inner-German travels as well because of the German Empire’s structure as a monarchical federation. Since the other German dynasties kept their thrones after the unification of the German Empire in

 James Retallack, Germany’s Second Reich: Portraits and Pathways (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), chapter 4: “King Johann of Saxony and the German Civil War of 1866,” 107–137.  Stadtarchiv Dresden 2.1-G.XXVIII.39. Die Anwesenheit Seiner Majestät des Deutschen Kaisers in Dresden. Vol. I. 1872 und 1882. 3v. Unknown to the Stadtbauamt, 15 October 1872 and 9v. Kammeritz to Pfatenhauer, 25 October 1872.  GStA PK BPH Rep. 51J. No. 509b. Band 17–1872. 129v., Wilhelm to Augusta, 25 October 1872. Emphasis in the original.  Johannes Paulmann, Pomp und Politik: Monarchenbegegnungen zwischen Ancien Régime und Erstem Weltkrieg (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2000), 221.

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1871, Wilhelm was by definition bound to acknowledge their sovereignty and territoriality when travelling within Germany.83 This explains why Wilhelm avoided any official stops in Prussia near the border with Saxony; instead, it was at Röderau, the first stop in Saxony, that he was joined by the Prussian envoy to Saxony and the Saxon officers who would serve in an honorary position to accompany him and act as aides during his visit.84 By refusing any ceremony on Prussian territory and participating in the welcoming ritual on the Saxon side of the border instead, Wilhelm demonstrated his willingness to be received as a visitor and not a victor invading his Saxon counterpart. Wilhelm’s monarchical entry into Dresden used an iconographic syntax similar to the example of the passage across the Saxon border, beginning with his formal arrival at Dresden’s Leipzig Station, where he was received by the Saxon king and queen. This was in stark symbolic distinction to his entry into Berlin in 1866. In Berlin, the Brandenburg Gate framed Wilhelm as a military monarch returning in victorious splendor, with the city gate itself invoking his monarchical antecedents. By contrast, Wilhelm’s entry through Leipzig Station in Dresden announced a sense modernity. The station building itself served as the “spatial gateway” for entry, simultaneously marking the transition from the industrialized world of the railroad into the early modern world of the royal residence.85 Wilhelm acknowledged Saxony’s status within the German Empire by wearing the uniform of his namesake Saxon guards regiment — the grenadiers Kaiser Wilhelm — as well as the Heinrich Order of Saxony. In turn, King Johann wore a Prussian uniform, decorated with the Order of the Black Eagle.86 Following the sovereigns’ official exchange of greetings, the monarchical party passed through the station’s royal salon and into the forecourt where Wilhelm inspected soldiers of his Saxon regiment. The monarchical party then rode in carriages to the royal residence. At the forefront rode the mounted guards, followed by the carriage carrying Augusta and the Saxon queen. Next came the carriage with Wilhelm and Johann, followed by the respective crown princes and other members of the Saxon royal house. Although the city was not permitted to stage a grand reception, large sections along the route into Dresden’s inner city were decorated with flowers and flags; the considerable crowds lining the route also demonstrate that popular interest in the emperor’s arrival was  On the German Empire as a monarchical federation, see in particular: Hans-Christof Kraus, “Das Deutsche Kaiserreich als monarchischer Bundesstaat,” Zeitschrift für Neuere Rechtsgeschichte 37 (2015): 227–239.  GStA PK BPH Rep. 113. Oberhofmarschallamt. No. 637. Einzelne Reisen der Könige und der Königliche Familie, Bd. 54. 1872–1873. Bl. 287 “Reise Ihrer Kaiserlichen und Königlichen Majestäten nach Dresden 1872,” Bl. 272. Von Eichmann to von Pückler, 5 November 1872; Bl. 275. Von Pückler to von Eichmann, 6 November 1872, Bl. 255. Von Eichmann to unknown, 2 November 1872.  Paulmann, Pomp und Politik, 219; Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 174.  Dresdner Nachrichten, 10 November 1872.

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considerable, even if interest was not necessarily the same as outright support.87 Wilhelm had thus succeeded in entering the Saxon capital in a manner that corresponded to his self-consciously limited conception of his imperial role and without overshadowing his hosts. Over time, Wilhelm became more willing to merge his self-staging with the demands of local and regional Eigen-sinn, hoping to increase his popular acceptance.88 In 1882, Wilhelm again visited Dresden, this time for annual military maneuvers. As Jakob Vogel explains, Wilhelm initiated annual military exercises for the Prussian army in the 1860s, held partly outside of Prussia from 1876 onwards. As different regional army corps were drawn into the maneuvers, all of the German states eventually received a visit by the emperor. Advances in military technology meant that these maneuvers gradually lost their military purpose and instead became an annual ritual celebrating the empire’s political order, federal structure, and imperial figurehead. Wilhelm contributed to the symbolic inclusiveness by wearing a combination of Prussian uniform and the host state’s orders and medals.89 While the maneuvers were usually held outside of the metropolitan center to guarantee adequate space for the army corps and the attending public, Wilhelm frequently arrived at, left from, or otherwise visited the host state’s capital city. This not only gave him another opportunity to acknowledge the empire’s dynastic-federal structure, but also to take symbolic possession of the city with a monarchical entry. The custom of holding military maneuvers partially outside of Prussia thus signaled Wilhelm’s desire to project his imperial role onto the German nation-state as a whole; paradoxically, it also meant that he now gave greater freedom to these cities to stage a reception for him, allowing them to participate in constructing the imperial cult. Thus, when in 1882 the Dresden mayor presented his plans for a grand reception to mark Wilhelm’s arrival, the Berlin court informed him that the emperor had no objections to his plans.90 As in 1872, Wilhelm again travelled by train to Dresden and was accompanied by the same officers as previously. He was received at Dresden’s Silesian Station by King Albert of Saxony, members of the Saxon royal house, other German princes, Saxon cabinet ministers, the Prussian envoy, diplomats, civil servants, and generals. At the train station, Wilhelm and Albert inspected troops before boarding carriages bound for Dresden’s royal residence (Fig.9.2). This time multiple civic associations, schools,

 Königlich Privilegirte Berlinische Zeitung / Vossische Zeitung, 10 November 1872.  Angelow, “Wilhelm I.,” 261, argues that Wilhelm embraced the role in his later reign, even flirting with the cult.  Jakob Vogel, Nationen im Gleichschritt: Der Kult der ‘Nation in Waffen’ in Deutschland und Frankreich 1871–1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997), 29–56.  Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden. 10006 Oberhofmarschallamt. No. Nachtrag 37. Bl. 122. Von Frabrice to the Royal General Command, 9 September 1882; Bl. 127. Von Fabrice to the Court Marshal, 8 September 1882; Bl. 128. List.

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Fig. 9.2: Staging a monarchical-federal empire: Wilhelm was often accompanied by the state’s monarch during entries in non-Prussian cities, which helped to underline the monarchical-federal nature of the German Empire, as seen here during his entry into Dresden in 1882.

and other organizations greeted the two monarchs along the route. Upon entering Dresden’s Albertplatz, Wilhelm was greeted by a choir of one thousand children who sang So sei gegrüßt viel tausendmal unseres Reiches Krone (“Be greeted many thousand times, crown of our Empire”). At the edge of the Albertplatz, Wilhelm was greeted by local officials including Dresden’s mayor, who gave an address and led three cheers for the emperor. After this, church bells sounded as Wilhelm arrived in the royal residence. Between the Augustusbrücke and the royal residence a large triumphant arch had been constructed, consisting of four Corinthian pillars, topped by crowns.91 Other decorations along the route included a large W and A on the façade

 Königlich Privilegirte Berlinische Zeitung / Vossische Zeitung, 15 September 1872.

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of the Hotel Bellevue.92 The British envoy in Saxony, George Strachey, wrote back to London that “the reception of the Emperor William by all classes, was from first to last, of a nature to satisfy any sovereign, however exorbitant of popularity, testifying, on the part of the people of Saxony, to a profound attachment to the venerable head of the Empire.”93 Wilhelm’s direct engagement with Dresden’s populace in 1882 indicates a greater level of comfort with his imperial role and centered the symbolic dialogue between monarch and subjects. Through this give-and-take, the entries located Germany’s social center, for that brief moment, in the receiving city, suggesting that the symbolic center was not geographically bound to Berlin as imperial capital and illustrating the flexible nature of the empire’s monarchical federation. At the same time, Wilhelm’s willingness to accommodate municipal Eigen-sinn in the receptions strengthened his capacity as a figurehead to integrate the nation and therewith the population’s acceptance of him in this role. This integrating capacity would culminate in the funeral procession following his death in March 1888.

Monarchical Entries as Monarchical Departures: Wilhelm I’s Funeral Procession in 1888 Funeral processions can be understood as reversed entry parades. While entry parades serve to stage a monarch’s authority by taking symbolic possession of a city, funeral processions serve the opposite function: they commemorate the monarch as he departs the city at a time when his death creates a political vacuum that needs to be addressed in order to perpetuate the existing political order. This reversed monarchical entry also marks the moment at which the public persona of the monarch enters the realm of memory, so that the monarchy now has to engage in a competition with other cultural actors over how the deceased sovereign should be remembered.94 This tension was at the heart of all monarchical funeral processions in nineteenth-century Europe. Finally, funeral processions were also important for visualizing the departing ruler, since sovereigns did not always die in their capital cities, their funeral services were not always held there, and they were often laid to rest elsewhere. The growing importance that monarchs attached to being seen by the public in order to generate popular legitimacy meant that courts learned to instrumentalize monarchical funerals to visualize their respective political orders. For example, in Britain the funerals of King George IV in 1830 and King William IV in

 Dresdner Nachrichten, 18 September 1882.  Markus Mösslang and Helen Whatmore, eds., British Envoys to the Kaiserreich 1871–1883 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 384.  On how the population created images of Hohenzollern monarchs and deviated from the institution’s preferred image, see in particular: Giloi, Monarchy, Myth, and Material Culture.

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1837 were considered public events since they included a lying-in-state ceremony accessible to the public; however, they were held in Windsor Castle, away from the capital, in an unceremonious fashion that garnered severe public criticism.95 By the early twentieth century, the court had adjusted to public expectations: King Edward VII’s funeral in 1910 was held in London, where he had died, and included a lyingin-state ceremony in Westminster Hall. His grand funeral procession carried him through central London to Paddington Station, from where he was brought to Windsor for the burial, thus ceremoniously staging his departure from the British capital and its social center. The Hohenzollern dynasty followed a similar development, although the process was less even-handed than in Britain. Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s funeral in 1861 was a modest affair, with the coffin carried from Potsdam’s Sanssouci Palace through the surrounding park to the nearby Friedenskirche for the burial.96 This lack of pomp and circumstance reflected the ailing king’s withdrawal from public life after 1857, when he had handed the government over to his brother Wilhelm as regent. Even though he was still nominally king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV had slipped from public consciousness long before his death and no longer represented Prussia’s social center. When emperor Friedrich III died after a long battle with throat cancer on 15 June 1888 at Potsdam’s Neues Palais, his funeral was held within days of his death; without a public lying-in-state ceremony, the funeral procession moved directly from the palace to the Friedenskirche for the burial. This swift and unceremonious disposal was done largely at the behest of Wilhelm II who, as the new German emperor, sought to dispense with his father as quickly as possible out of political expediency.97 In neither case was the monarch staged as a departing sovereign, thus foregoing the final opportunity to stage their public personas. In contrast, Wilhelm I died in 1888 in his palace on Berlin’s Unter den Linden and his funeral service was held at the nearby Berlin Cathedral, all of which garnered considerable popular interest. Wilhelm’s elevated position as German emperor, his personal popularity, and the imminence of two successions because of the advanced illness of Friedrich III meant that Wilhelm’s funeral procession was vital to the image of continuity for the Prussian monarchy. The convergence of an expanding cult around Wilhelm’s persona and the growing role that cities played in

 David Cannadine, “The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: the British Monarchy and the ‘Invention of Tradition,’ c. 1820–1977,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 101–164, here 118.  Barclay, Frederick William IV, 282.  Hannah Pakula, An Uncommon Woman: The Empress Frederick, Daughter of Queen Victoria, Wife of the Crown Prince of Prussia, Mother of Kaiser Wilhelm (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 543–544. On Friedrich III’s funeral, see: Geisthövel, “Tote Monarchen,” 147–151.

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organizing entry parades opened up his ceremonial departure to a multitude of contesting interpretations of the king and the order he represented.98 Even before his death, Wilhelm sought to invest his funeral and its procession with a dynastic-historical and Prussian meaning. While he left no detailed instructions on how his funeral was to be carried out, Wilhelm did decide on how his persona was presented in the ceremony, such as his choice of uniform and the location of the burial. In accordance with his wishes, Wilhelm was attired in the uniform of the First Guards Regiment on foot along with an overcoat and field cap. In addition, he wore the star of the Order of the Black Eagle, the Pour le Mérite, the grand cross of the Iron Cross, the first class of the Iron Cross, the Russian Order of St. George, the war medals for the wars of 1814–1815, 1864, 1866, 1870–1871, and Russian orders from the Napoleonic Wars. Both at the lying-in-state ceremony and in the funeral procession, Wilhelm’s coffin was flanked by regalia including the Prussian crown, scepter, banner, and orb.99 The coffin itself was far more than a merely practical component of the ceremony: it was the visual centerpiece of the event, modelled on the coffin of Elector Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg, who reigned from 1640 to 1688 and was considered the founder of Brandenburg’s military power.100 The ceremony’s material elements wedded Wilhelm’s military background to a dynastic precedent, highlighting the ascent of the Hohenzollern dynasty from electors of Brandenburg to German emperors. This reference to the dynasty’s elevation sought to generate political legitimacy by pointing to its rise over the course of several centuries, which was, as Wolfgang Neugebauer has argued, a key feature of early modern monarchical funerary culture.101 Wilhelm’s funeral service was held in the Berlin Cathedral, from where the procession moved down Unter den Linden to Charlottenburg, where he was laid to rest in the mausoleum of the palace gardens. By marching via Unter den Linden, as the newspaper Die Post noted, the procession followed the reversed route of Wilhelm’s previous monarchical entry in 1866 and the victory parade of 1871.102 The court also sought to choreograph the funeral procession as a mobile depiction of Germany’s social order and political hierarchy. Wilhelm’s coffin was placed on a carriage and was visible for all to see, further befitting its status as the event’s visual centerpiece. The Prussian regalia were carried by members of the government and the court, the  Christoph de Spiegeleer, “The Nationalization and Mediatization of European Monarchies in Times of Sorrow: Royal Deaths and Funerals in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” in The Routledge History of Monarchy, ed. Elena Woodacre, Lucinda H. S. Dean, Chris Jones, Russell E. Martin, and Zita Eva Rohr (London: Routledge, 2019), 229–248.  Die Post, 13 March 1888.  Die Post, 16 March 1888.  Wolfgang Neugebauer, “Die Domgruft – Bedeutung des historischen Ortes,” Berliner Dom, accessed 4 December 2019, https://www.berlinerdom.de/besuchen-wissen/ueber-den-dom/hohenzol lerngruft/die-domgruft-bedeutung-des-historischen-ortes/.  Die Post, 17 March 1888.

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sword of state by Minister of War Paul Bronsart von Schellendorf, and the scepter by Culture Minister Robert von Puttkamer. Covering this part of the procession was a baldachin, as a reference to monarchical funerals of the early modern era in which baldachins were commonly used, but in this case updated to feature decorations of Prussian eagles. However, because unforeseen circumstances intervened, the funeral procession was incomplete in its representation of the political order. Absent from the procession were Bismarck and Moltke, who abstained from attending because of the winter weather.103 Nor did Augusta or the new Emperor Friedrich III participate in the ceremonial, as the former was too frail and remained in the couple’s palace at Unter den Linden, while the latter was dying from throat cancer and observed the procession from his apartments in Charlottenburg Palace as it wound its way to the mausoleum. On the one hand, as Volker Ackermann argues, the procession was organized to express the power of the state and to visualize the political principle that nations were best led by dynasties. As the population was given a passive role in this ceremonial, the processional tableau proclaimed that the monarch was sovereign and not the people.104 The theme of monarchical authority and public deference continued throughout the remainder of the procession. Its leading party was made up of units from all three branches of the Prussian army. The second part of the procession was composed of court officials, including Wilhelm’s personal physicians; following the court personnel came the high officials of the civil government, including the cabinet minister and state secretaries carrying the regalia of Brandenburg and Prussia. The mourning party followed the coffin and was led by Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia — the future Wilhelm II — followed by King Albert of Saxony, King Leopold II of the Belgians, King Carol I of Romania, and other male members of the Hohenzollern dynasty. These were followed by the heirs of Austria-Hungary, Great Britain, Russia, Sweden, Italy, and Denmark; rulers from the smaller German states; and the mayors of Germany’s free cities. The King of Württemberg and Prince Regent of Bavaria also sent representatives. The procession ended, finally, with parliamentary representatives and members of the state bureaucracy, of diminished importance in a monarchical procession.105 On the other hand, the decorations along the procession’s route tell a different story: they show that Berlin’s municipal authorities and population were increasingly self-confident and assertive in creating an image of Wilhelm’s public persona and authority. The Prussian cabinet’s decision to save costs by reducing the number

 Angelow, “Wilhelm I.,” 263.  Volker Ackermann, Nationale Totenfeiern in Deutschland: Von Wilhelm I. bis Franz Josef Strauß: Eine Studie zur politischen Semiotik (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1990), 284–287. See also: Michael L. Hughes, “Splendid Demonstrations: The Political Funerals of Kaiser Wilhelm I and Wilhelm Liebknecht,” Central European History 41, no. 2 (2008): 229–253.  Geisthövel, “Tote Monarchen,” 146.

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of its own decorations on state buildings increased the available space for local authorities and the urban population to demonstrate their Eigen-sinn.106 Most of the decorations along the processional route were organized by the Berlin Association of Architects and Engineers (Architekten- und Ingenieur-Verein zu Berlin). The court was responsible only for the decorations at the Berlin Cathedral and the Lustgarten, which included a purple baldachin decorated with the letter W, the imperial crown, and gilded palm leaves. As Ackermann notes, the court’s decorations stood in clear contrast to those of the association. The former sought to suggest glory through its decorations, while the latter sought to project mourning. This also determined the choice of colors that were meant to express mourning: the association opted for green and black, while gold and other colors were used at arms and in the flags. The obelisks, temple-façades altars, flag poles, and wreaths set along the route by the association provided a celebratory aesthetic, while individual decorations highlighted different motifs from Wilhelm’s life, including his military career and his role as a figurehead unifying the new German nation-state. Near the Cathedral, the association installed flag poles bearing the Christian homilies spoken at Wilhelm’s deathbed, making reference also to the emperor’s Christianity. The multiplicity of meanings projected onto Wilhelm increased once the procession moved away from the Cathedral. From that point onwards, the Christian motifs diminished, while symbols of urban and state power came to the fore. Near the Armory, Berlin’s former arsenal, Iron Crosses and arms pointed to Wilhelm’s military role. The mottos displayed on the opera houses along Unter den Linden expressed mourning for the “German Empire’s founder, who cared even in death for peace among the populations,” denoting Wilhelm’s national role and presence on the international stage and thus deviating from the court’s emphasis on Wilhelm’s Prussian dynastic background. At the crossing of Unter den Linden and Friedrichstrasse, a baldachin graced with an imperial crown and illuminated by electric light — a novelty at the time — suggested the continuity of the German Empire and that the Imperial Crown would continue to exist after Wilhelm’s death. The Brandenburg Gate was conceived as the end point of the processional route and marked the point at which Wilhelm moved out of contemporary public life (Fig.9.3). The base of the quadriga that topped the gate was draped with the motto “Farewell, Old Emperor” — VALE SENEX IMPERATOR — at the request of Berlin’s liberal magistrate as a reference to Wilhelm’s role as “emperor of peace” (Friedenskaiser). On the other side of the gate stood mourning genii and goddesses of victory.107

 Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Jürgen Kocka, and Wolfgang Neugebauer, eds., Acta Borussica, Neue Folge, I. Reihe: Die Protokolle des Preußischen Staatsministeriums 1817–1934/38, ed. Hartwin Spenkuch, VII: 8 Januar 1879 bis 19 März 1890 (Hildesheim: OlmsWeidmann, 1999), 226.  Ackermann, Nationale Totenfeiern, 241–245.

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Fig. 9.3: A reversed monarchical entry: Wilhelm’s funeral procession in 1888 passed through the Brandenburg Gate on its way to Charlottenburg, signifying that the procession was staged as a monarchical departure.

The divergence between the authority that the court sought to project at Wilhelm’s last, albeit reversed, monarchical entry and that which the urban population constructed foreshadowed future contests over the memorialization of his persona. Two variations emerged in the years immediately after Wilhelm’s death. Soon after his accession to the throne in 1888, Wilhelm II initiated a cult that stylized his grandfather as Wilhelm the Great, a heroic imperial figure who had led German unification and thereby relegated Bismarck to a secondary role. This cult served both to underline the monarchy’s dominant role in the German Empire’s political structure and to offset the emerging cult around Bismarck following his departure from office in 1890.108 The cult subsequently found its expression in hundreds of statues of Wilhelm erected across Germany, the most prominent of which was the neo-baroque equestrian monument in

 Robert Gerwarth, The Bismarck Myth: Weimar Germany and the Legacy of the Iron Chancellor (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005), 11–24; Otto Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, vol. 3 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 420–421.

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Berlin, constructed on the occasion of the centenary of Wilhelm’s birth in 1897.109 This image of Wilhelm never resonated with the wider German public, since it did not conform to their image of the first German emperor as a mild-mannered patriarchal figure.110 Instead, it prompted a nostalgic reaction that depicted Wilhelm as the epitome of Prussian virtues, such as self-discipline, thrift, soberness, and hard work, and evoked a more tranquil era that contrasted with the rapid social and economic changes and international crises of the later Wilhelmine era. The protagonists of Theodor Fontane’s novel Der Stechlin, for instance, compared Wilhelm’s more “human” features favorably to the era that came after him.111 Nowhere in this cultural memory did Wilhelm’s monarchical entries appear posthumously in any meaningful form. Rather, both sides drew on an essentialist depiction of the emperor’s personal traits to befit their political and cultural objectives, the contents of which Wilhelm had only ever partially projected in his entries. Wilhelm’s monarchical entries apparently did not leave long-term traces in the landscape of cultural memory, demonstrating that the ceremony was most effective as it was instrumentalized within the political constellations at the time of the event.

III Monarchical Entries after Wilhelm I Wilhelm II continued to stage his own monarchical entries as a political practice, albeit for different purposes than his grandfather. Wilhelm II did not need to use carefully calibrated ceremony to counter the aftermath of revolution, nor could he draw on a successful war to stage his military role. However, although further research into his use of this form of ceremony is still needed, one can discern at least two categories of monarchical entries in his case. First, Wilhelm II continued to use monarchical entries to stage his military authority during the annual military maneuvers, both in Berlin and in other German states. Unlike his grandfather, though,  Reinhard Alings, Monument und Nation: Das Bild vom Nationalstaat im Medium Denkmal: zum Verhältnis von Nation und Staat im deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1918 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1996), 212–224; Bernd Nicolai, “Das Nationaldenkmal für Kaiser Wilhelm I. auf der Schloßfreiheit,” in Hauptstadt Berlin: Wohin mit der Mitte? Historische, städtebauliche und architektonische Wurzeln des Stadtzentrums, ed. Helmut Engel and Wolfgang Ribbe (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1993), 115–123; Hans-Jörg Jechel, “Die Reiterdenkmäler für Kaiser Wilhelm I.” (PhD diss., Universität Bonn, 2010); Jürgen Klebs, “Das Nationaldenkmal für Kaiser Wilhelm I.,” in Begas – Monumente für das Kaiserreich, ed. Jutta von Simson and Esther Sophia Sünderhauf (Dresden: Sandstein, 2010), 88–101.  Giloi, Monarchy, Myth, and Material Culture, 266–324.  Klaus Peter Möller, ed., Theodor Fontane: Grosse Brandenburger Ausgabe: Das erzählerische Werk, vol. XVII: Der Stechlin, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 2011), 348–349. On Fontane’s assessment of Wilhelm II, see: Willy Schumann, “Wo ist der Kaiser? Theodor Fontane über Kaiser Wilhelm II.,” Monatshefte 71 (1979): 161–171; Gordon A. Craig, The End of Prussia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 48–69.

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Wilhelm II favored grander entries, which accorded with Wilhelm II’s wider efforts to popularize the imperial monarchy by drawing on lavish ostentation.112 In the case of the annual military maneuvers, the emperor placed himself at the head of the troops upon their arrival and departure from the parade grounds, leading the parade. The placement of local associations along the route was common when such parades were held in the countryside, but not in Berlin because of the frequency of parades in the city. However, this lack of associational involvement was compensated by the spontaneous participation of the local population.113 Second, Wilhelm II’s monarchical entries played an even more important role in monarchical encounters than in the past. Monarchical entries were increasingly politicized for both domestic and foreign audiences and the population was more directly involved in this diplomatic spectacle in an organized, hierarchical manner, effecting what George L. Mosse describes as the “nationalization of the masses.”114 As such, the city gate as an urban entrance no longer sufficed for a monarchical entry. When Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I visited Berlin in 1900, Berlin’s municipal authorities constructed a triumphal arch that was eight meters higher than the Brandenburg

 John C. G. Röhl, “Hof und Hofgesellschaft unter Wilhelm II.,” in Hof, Kultur und Politik im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Karl Ferdinand Werner (Bonn: Röhrscheid, 1985), 237–289; Hans Philippi, “Der Hof Kaiser Wilhelms II,” in Hof und Hofgesellschaft in den deutschen Staaten im 19. und beginnenden 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Karl Möckl (Berlin: Oldenbourg, 2016), 361–394; Isabel V. Hull, “Der kaiserliche Hof als Herrschaftsinstrument,” in Der letzte Kaiser: Wilhelm II. im Exil, ed. Hans Wilderotter and Klaus-Dieter Pohl (Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum, 1991), 19–30; Giloi, Monarchy, Myth, and Material Culture, 267–274; Martin Kohlrausch, “Hof und Hofgesellschaft in der Kaiserzeit,” in Schloß und Schloßbezirk in der Mitte Berlins: Das Zentrum der Stadt als politischer und gesellschaftlicher Ort, ed. Wolfgang Ribbe (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2005), 119–135; Martin Kohlrausch, “Zwischen Tradition und Innovation: Das Hofzeremoniell der wilhelminischen Monarchie,” in Das politische Zeremoniell im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1918, ed. Andreas Biefang, Michael Epkenhans, and Klaus Tenfelde (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2008), 31–51. On Wilhelm II’s attempts to cultivate the memory of the Roman Empire for his own self-staging, see: Martin Kohlrausch, “A Second Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation? Rome and the Imperial Visions of Kaiser Wilhelm II,” in Renovatio, Inventio, Absentia Imperii: From the Roman Empire to Contemporary Imperialism, ed. Wouter Bracke, Jan Nelis, and Jan De Maeyer (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 215–238. On the relation between the Hohenzollern monarchy under Wilhelm II and the mass media, see: Martin Kohlrausch, Der Monarch im Skandal: Die Logik der Massenmedien und die Transformation der wilhelminischen Monarchie (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2005); Martin Kohlrausch, “The Workings of Royal Celebrity: Wilhelm II as Media Emperor,” in Constructing Charisma: Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 52–66. On Wilhelm II’s use of speeches, see: Michael Obst, ‘Einer nur ist Herr im Reiche’: Kaiser Wilhelm II. als politischer Redner (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2010). On the ideational changes of the imperial office during the reign of Wilhelm II, see: Elisabeth Fehrenbach, Wandlungen des deutschen Kaisergedankens 1871–1918 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1969), 89–200.  Vogel, Nationen im Gleichschritt, 70–75.  George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (New York: H. Fertig, 1975).

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Gate, flanked by grandstands for the public. The execution of the entries was likewise organized ever more tightly, resulting in a loss of spontaneity and the exclusion of opportunities for protest and Eigen-sinn. Staging monarchical entries in this manner put monarchs firmly on display as representative of the nation-state, while the presentation of visiting princes as equal partners placed dynastic claims to authority on a pan-European stage.115 It is doubtful, though, that Wilhelm II was effective in utilizing ceremonial in this way. In another context, Bernd Sösemann argues that Wilhelm II’s insensitive conduct, his refusal to follow his advisers’ recommendations regarding public and media performances, and the increasingly politicized masses who withdrew their support for the monarchy meant that Wilhelm II’s ceremonial performances no longer helped him fulfill his integrative role as imperial monarch.116 It is reasonable to assume that this failure of symbolic legitimacy extended to Wilhelm II’s use of monarchical entries as well. The variation in monarchical entries from Wilhelm I to Wilhelm II reflects a transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries and provides an appropriate point at which to ask what Wilhelm I’s use of monarchical entries demonstrates about staging authority in the nineteenth century. First, this chapter has shown that monarchical entries had their origins in the early modern period and that they were appropriated in the modern period to fit the specific political goals of various political actors. As a continuity between the early modern period and the nineteenth century, monarchical entries allowed sovereigns of both eras to take symbolic possession of a city and to assert monarchical authority through grand spectacle, with the urban environment as the preferred political arena. A second element of continuity concerns the negotiation between the monarch and his or her court, who together sought to stage the sovereign’s authority, and the municipal authorities, who sought to ensure their position in the socio-political order. During both the time periods, these entities had to reach an agreement about the monarchical entry, without which the event’s execution would not have been possible. As a final element of continuity, in both cases monarchs used similar strategies of legitimization, in particular the trope of military prowess and wartime success, or at least the illusion of victory.

 Paulmann, Pomp und Politik, 363–385.  Bernd Sösemann, “Hollow-Sounding Jubilees: Forms and Effects of Public Self-Display in Wilhelmine Germany,” in The Kaiser: New Research on Wilhelm II’s Role in Imperial Germany, ed. Annika Mombauer and Wilhelm Deist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 37–62. See also: Wolfram Pyta, Hindenburg: Herrschaft zwischen Hohenzollern und Hitler (Munich: Siedler, 2007), 79–84. Pyta argues that Wilhelm II’s restless and impulsive manner undermined the stability that would have been necessary for him to become a central figure of identification and integration in the German Empire. However, Martin Kohlrausch argues that Wilhelm II’s travels were an ideal means to stage himself as a modern monarch and that public opinion responded accordingly. See: Martin Kohlrausch, “Der öffentliche Monarch: Kaiser Wilhelm II. und die neuen Medien seiner Zeit,” in Kaiser Wilhelm II. und seine Zeit, ed. Friedl Brunckhorst and Karl Weber (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2016), 89–105, here 96.

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However, this broad temporal framework also illuminates distinct changes between the early modern period and the nineteenth century. Most noticeably, cities and urban spaces rose in significance over the course of the nineteenth century, even if the importance of rural areas did not diminish entirely. In 1848, for instance, Wilhelm’s self-presentation to the rural populace who lived between the DutchPrussian border and Berlin was crucial to reestablishing his authority with a supportive segment of society and thus offered an enthusiastic counterweight to his subdued entry into Berlin. Nonetheless, municipal Eigen-sinn and the emergence of other centers of political gravity made urban space an arena in which contests over the political order were increasingly played out through a competing utilization of symbols, explaining the growing importance that the court attached to these entries. At the same time, monarchical entries in the nineteenth century were constituted by a growing number of legitimization strategies. Despite its origin in the early modern period, the image of the successful military monarch became more acute for ensuring continued legitimacy after the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, when failure in wartime could result in the active overthrow of dynasties. Wilhelm was a prime case in point: his soldierly background led him to attach great importance to his military prowess, as evident in his insistence on highlighting military imagery in his return to Berlin in 1848. Not only did the deployment of military symbolism change, but new iconographies of power arose to supplement traditional authority. Both the court and the municipality adopted the tropes of the nation-state in Germany after 1871, in what was a pan-European development with the rise of nationalism. As Wilhelm’s monarchical entries into Dresden demonstrate, these ceremonies became a careful balancing act, presenting the new head of state as the national and unifying figurehead while also accommodating particularistic identifications. Had monarchical entries been managed solely from the Prussian royal court, their success would have been much more limited, as Wilhelm II would subsequently find out.117 Appeals to history were another rising motif in the nineteenth century, reflecting the growing importance of the past in popular culture and thus making history an additional source of legitimacy. Wilhelm’s 1866 victory parade provides a striking example of how he, the court, local authorities, and the general population all placed him into an ancestral lineage that combined dynastic narratives with the invocation of recent collective experiences such as the Napoleonic Wars. This historical depth was intended to overcome the caesura of the French Revolution, instead connecting the early modern period with the nineteenth century. A final change concerns the limits to what the court could achieve with these monarchical entries, as German cities became increasingly assertive in the second half of the century in organizing ceremonial decorations and the reception of the monarch. This enabled them to visualize their idealizations of power, which often differed from the court’s preferred political representations, and aligns  Giloi, Monarchy, Myth, and Material Culture, 266–324.

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with scholarly arguments that nineteenth-century cities became increasingly assertive in their self-presentation and demonstration of local customs and economic power.118 Finally, in regard to the concepts of Eigen-sinn and the social center, this chapter has argued that during his reign, Wilhelm I was initially more assertive in staging monarchical entries in accordance with his wishes, as was evident during the 1866 monarchical entry. Gradually, however, he became more willing to merge his self-staging with the popular cult that emerged around his persona. Municipal Eigen-sinn was not antithetical to the central authority embodied by Wilhelm I as German emperor. Instead, monarchical entries offered cities and regions the opportunity to display their understanding of the political order. Wilhelm didn’t entirely resist such projections because it enabled the local population to identify more strongly with him, thus aiding the acceptance of his persona in the imperial office after 1871. The increased symbolic vibrancy of Wilhelm’s imperial role was facilitated by his withdrawal from the day-to-day involvement of the government from 1877 onwards, which shifted his public role from active rule to symbolic leadership.119 However, the simultaneity of multiple meanings, making any given entry a contested affair, demonstrates that the actors involved viewed monarchical entries as loci of the empire’s social center for the duration of the events. For the sovereign, monarchical entries were occasions to underline the primacy of the monarchy within Germany’s political order and thus to challenge the emergence of other centers of political gravity. While Wilhelm was successful in accommodating the composite state of German nationhood at such ceremonial events, there should be no doubt about his intention to use these occasions to locate the empire’s social center wherever he was present. Thick description demonstrates that Wilhelm was an assertive and astute political actor, operating within Germany’s webs of meaning as he sought to stage his interpretation of political authority – a fact that has often been overlooked by scholars of the period but is amply demonstrated by this case study of the richly-textured interplay of ceremonial symbols.

 Huch, “Einleiting,” 15, 54, 74.  Hartwin Spenkuch and Wolfgang Neugebauer argue that Wilhelm I’s decision not to attend meetings of the Prussian cabinet any longer from 1877 onward was an indication of this withdrawal. See: Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Jürgen Kocka, and Wolfgang Neugebauer, eds., Acta Borussica, Neue Folge, I. Reihe: “Die Protokolle des Preußischen Staatsministeriums 1817–1934/38,” ed. Hartwin Spenkuch, VII: 8 Januar 1879 bis 19 März 1890 (Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 1999), 24; Wolfgang Neugebauer, “Funktion und Deutung des ‘Kaiserpalais’: Zur Residenzstruktur Preussens in der Zeit Wilhelm I.,” Forschungen zur brandenburgischen und preussischen Geschichte 18 (2008): 67–95, here 83. However, Jan Markert argues that this withdrawal did not come about until Wilhelm’s conflict with Bismarck over the Dual Alliance in 1879. See: Markert, Es ist nicht leicht.

Nationalism and Empire as Modes of Hegemony

Matthew Unangst

Mapping Empire Abstract: Maps are among the most important sources for understanding the history of European empires since the early modern period. Even as European sovereignty remained limited in many parts of colonial empires, maps presented a view of complete European authority for European audiences. They served to establish Europeans’ rational-legal authority over other parts of the globe. New technologies in printing and distribution made maps ubiquitous in nineteenth-century Europe. European identity was formed as much through these encounters and mappings of the Other as were societies in Europe’s colonies. Specifically, maps provided a visual representation of the superiority of Europeans and of individual European nations as imperial powers. Keywords: geography, imperialism, colonialism, cartography, space, exploration, Europe, Africa, decolonization, geopolitics Open any textbook chapter about the New Imperialism or the Scramble for Africa, and you will find maps representing the expansion of European authority. There might be a political map of Africa, with the colonies of European nations marked in corresponding colors, or perhaps a more figurative map, such as the one here showing a gargantuan Cecil Rhodes straddling the African continent and promoting British plans for control from the “Cape to Cairo” (Fig. 10.1).1 The primacy of maps for the New Imperialism is obvious; these representations of European authority purposefully dispensed with the complexities of non-European societies, instead representing a single continental mass, ripe for conquest. The development of the science of cartography, which in its modern form was developed by Europeans in the nineteenth century, generated maps as scientific proof, and these became the most widespread and powerful assertions of European states’ authority over colonial empires. As such, these maps reveal important aspects of the culture of empire. Although maps may appear simply to reflect objective reality, the territories and images they display are highly politicized versions of topography and human activity. The evolution of cartography over the last two hundred years has been closely related to the development of what Max Weber defines as the rational-legal authority of the modern state, in which European nations established their authority through supposedly rational rules that governed society. Cartographic bureaucracies and professional

 Edward Linley Sambourne, “The Rhodes Colossus,” Punch, 10 December 1892, Wikimedia Commons, accessed 4 April 2022, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Punch_Rhodes_Colossus. png. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110574012-010

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Fig. 10.1: The Rhodes Colossus.

organizations endowed maps with status as representations of truth, pursuant to strict guidelines. This chapter examines the maps produced by European empires from the sixteenth through the twentieth century, wherein they were employed as a means of establishing Europe’s rational-legal authority over the globe. Early modern European states adopted cartography as a tool to supplement monarchs’ traditional authority with bureaucratic rule. As European states developed their colonial empires, mapping adapted from a descriptive undertaking to an illustrative one. Imperial maps made legible colonial authority primarily for European audiences rather than colonized populations, and were used to assert European sovereignty and superiority where claims to traditional authority were difficult to establish. This process reached its apogee in the nineteenth century’s New Imperialism as European states asserted their dominance even over regions with little European presence and used maps to build imperial identities at home. While the threat, and all too often the reality, of violence kept colonies under European control, those unequal power relations were naturalized, visually and symbolically, through maps and the authority they seemed to convey.

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This chapter draws on research into the power of maps and the evolution of ideas about space from both geography and history. Beginning with the work of J. Brian Harley in the 1960s, geographers have developed a critical vocabulary for understanding the role of maps in establishing and securing authority. Harley argues that maps need to be understood as “part of a persuasive discourse, and they intend to convince.”2 Cartographers turn ontological proposals into locations in space as “postings” on the surface of a map.3 John Pickles describes the modern world as a “geo-coded world,” a world where boundaries have been inscribed and coded on maps so often that they constitute our understanding of the world around us.4 For Martin Heidegger, “the fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture,” envisioning modernity as the age of maps that frame the world.5 In the modern era, people have developed a “spatial consciousness” that they use to relate to the spaces around them.6 Marxist theorists have been especially influential in shaping urban geography concepts to explain how people make “places.” Henri Lefebvre traces stages of spatial production that match Karl Marx’ stages of economic evolution, culminating in the capitalist space of the modern age.7 Maps turn abstract space into place as they “endow it with value.”8 Maps are one of the three parts of the spatial triad that Lefebvre and Edward W. Soja designate as “representations of space.”9 With this term, they mean depictions of space used to organize societies, even as people continue to contest state control. The knowledge expressed through the creation of maps lies at the core of the state’s authority over the territory depicted on them. Imperial maps were such representations of space. They offered clear-cut visions of European sovereignty and authority over extra-European spaces and peoples, concealing the contested nature of authority on the ground. From the sixteenth century, maps “anticipated empire” across the globe as European nations used them to promote

 J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 37. In a similar vein, see: Denis Wood, Rethinking the Power of Maps (New York: Guilford, 2010).  Wood, Rethinking, 52.  John Pickles, A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded World (London: Routledge, 2003).  Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Perennial, 1977), 133.  David Harvey, Social Justice and the City, revised ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 23–24.  Henri Lefebvre, La production de l’espace (Paris: Anthropos, 1974).  Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 6.  Lefebvre, La production de l’espace; Edward W. Soja has developed this concept further in Seeking Spatial Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

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and depict conquests before they happened.10 Per Harley, maps “employ invocations of authority” in order to convince their readers of their claims.11 He describes maps as a “spatial panopticon” that allow states to observe and control the national space.12 States have used maps to order the world, create territoriality, and assert their authority over space. Through cartography, spaces became properties to be taxed and national territories to be defended.13 Historians and historical sociologists have adopted insights from geography into their work in the so-called ‘spatial turn,’ frequently using maps as visualizations of Europe’s self-assured dominance over the rest of the world. The most influential scholar in this vein is Immanuel Wallerstein, whose world systems theory explains global economics through spatial relationships.14 World systems theory is based around the concepts of core and periphery. Core areas are the centers of financial power where decisions about the global economy are made. Peripheral areas are located away from the seats of power and are subject to the whims of people in the core. Although some scholars critique the specifics of Wallerstein’s model, a number of them have adopted the basic framework for understanding global history. World systems theory is, however, just one example of a “metageography,” a “set of spatial structures through which people order their knowledge of the world.”15 A vision of the world as a set of neatly ordered continents justified European claims to superiority over people from other regions, who were then marked as fundamentally different. The distinction between metropole and periphery is at the heart of Ronald Grigor Suny’s influential definition of empire as “a particular form of domination or control between two units set apart in a hierarchical, inequitable relationship, more precisely a composite state in

 Harley, New Nature of Maps, 57.  Harley, New Nature of Maps, 37.  Harley, New Nature of Maps, 165.  In addition to the already-cited works, see: Geoff King, Mapping Reality: An Exploration of Cultural Cartographies (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996); Michael J. Shapiro, Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Jeremy Black, Maps and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, The Power of Projections: How Maps Reflect Global Politics and History (Westport: Praeger, 2006); Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography throughout History, ed. Edward H. Dahl, trans. Tom Conley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); and Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013) for the connections between maps and the development of the modern state.  Wallerstein first laid out the historical framework of world-systems theory in: Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European WorldEconomy in the Sixteenth Century (San Diego: Academic Press, 1974). He published three subsequent volumes, taking his narrative into the twentieth century and up through 2011.  Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), ix.

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which a metropole dominates a periphery to the disadvantage of the periphery.”16 The imperial maps discussed in this chapter were used to depict and enable that hierarchical relationship. The discussion of mapping empire here begins with the early modern development of maps as tools of state power. As state bureaucracies emerged and grew, official maps became an increasingly prominent device for governance in the early modern period. These official maps asserted the monarch’s authority over a bordered space and bolstered his or her right to manage economic and political affairs within that space. While they set limits on formal royal authority at national borders, maps also established a seemingly omniscient knowledge of territory, expanding the core of bureaucratic authority. Maps were especially important for the projection of European power overseas. Even as European sovereignty remained functionally limited in many parts of colonial empires, maps presented it as complete for European audiences.17 Maps came into their own as important tools of state power and national unity in the nineteenth century as Weberian rational-legal authority became more important to European states than the traditional authority of monarchs. But maps did more than assert the power of state bureaucracy over territory. Cartographers attempted to use maps in ways that would gift relatively new nation-states elements of traditional authority. They provided one of the primary means to communicate belonging in the so-called “imagined community” of the nation – “imagined” because most members will never meet each other in person.18 New ideas about the world were reinforced with new mapping techniques, as European states expanded techniques used to assert national claims in Europe to establish and rule colonies. The growth of a mass consumer public, combined with new technologies for map printing and distribution, made geography “the science of imperialism par excellence.”19 Though relatively few Europeans were directly involved with mapping empires (the main actors in mapping

 Ronald Grigor Suny, “The Empire Strikes Out: Imperial Russia, ‘National’ Identity, and Theories of Empire,” in A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 23.  Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in the European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).  Wood, Rethinking, 19.  David N. Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992), 160; Morag Bell, Robin Butlin, and Michael Heffernan, eds., Geography and Imperialism, 1820–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith, eds., Geography and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Robin A. Butlin, Geographies of Empire: European Empires and Colonies c. 1880–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Michael Friendly and Dan Denis, “Milestones in the History of Thematic Cartography, Statistical Graphics, and Data Visualization,” DataVis.ca, accessed 15 July 2019, http://www. datavis.ca/milestones/; Brian Hudson, “The New Geography and the New Imperialism: 1870–1918,” Antipode 9, no. 2 (1977): 12–19.

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were explorers, members of trading companies, surveyors, and cartographers), broad publics participated in imperial culture through maps, witnessing formerly wild territories remade into recognizable colonial spaces for European consumption.20 As was the case with other attempts to master knowledge of colonial spaces and peoples, European identity was formed as much through these encounters and mappings of the Other as were societies in Europe’s colonies. Specifically, maps provided a visual representation of the superiority of Europeans and of individual European nations as imperial powers.21 This chapter concludes with a discussion of the cultural role of imperial maps in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the interwar period, maps became more important in the colonies themselves as colonial states attempted to replace coercion with bureaucratic and legal structures that regulated nearly every aspect of life. At the same time, some European mapmakers produced more explicitly propagandistic depictions of empires for metropolitan consumption. Such maps supported the charismatic authority of dictators on both the right and the left. After the end of empire, maps retained their power as political tools for postcolonial states and as symbols of Europe’s authority over the globe.22 Their power was such that they became one of the main legacies of the colonial state. Today’s borders in Africa almost exactly match the borders drawn by European colonial powers, as postcolonial leaders drew on the rationallegal authority of the colonial state to justify unity among diverse populations and across divisions created and exacerbated by colonial rule.

I Maps and the Early Modern Expansion of State Power and New World Empires By the dawn of the nineteenth century, maps had become essential for asserting European authority over empire. Cartography had developed into a crucial element in the arsenal of European states from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries as monarchs expanded their bureaucracies and attempted to exert authority over their economies. States undertook mapping projects initially as a means to solidify property regimes and national territories. They then adapted these methods

 Nicholas Blomley, “Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence: The Frontier, the Survey, and the Grid,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93 (2003): 12–41.  Matthew H. Edney, Cartography: The Ideal and its History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 8, 229–230; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India: Words, People, Empires, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017).  Matthew H. Edney, “The Irony of Imperial Mapping,” in The Imperial Map, ed. James R. Akerman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Carsten Graebel, Die Erforschung der Kolonien: Expeditionen und koloniale Wissenskultur deutscher Geographen, 1884–1919 (Bielefeld: Transfer, 2015).

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to the colonies in an attempt to improve administration and taxation regimes. In the eighteenth century, state and non-state actors further pursued projects to map extra-European spaces in search of exact knowledge of the world, inspired by the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. These new imperial maps became propaganda tools as Great Britain and France competed for control of North America. Scholars largely agree that the Renaissance was a point of transformation in how Europeans made and used maps. Whereas medieval maps had mixed historical, religious, and mythological elements with geography, early modern cartographers “disenchanted” the map, creating maps that foregrounded exact distance and temporality as the most important attributes.23 Spurred by technological advances, between 1400 and 1600 maps became the primary means through which Europeans saw the world beyond their immediate vicinity. The invention of the printing press and refinements in the visual arts also made maps a more common aspect of many people’s lives as consumer items.24 The interest in realistic maps was fostered by the exploration of the globe and the founding of European overseas empires: Bartolomeu Dias’ journey around the Cape of Good Hope, for instance, marked a “revolutionary moment” in geographic consciousness among Europeans as they began to focus on oceans as much as on land and began to stress accuracy for long-distance sea travel.25 But maps of empire, often illustrated with ethnographic imagery, also shaped how Europeans imagined human difference. For instance, maps of Brazil featured a decorative iconography of cannibalism, correlating indigenous Brazilians with the practice in the European  Alessandro Scafi, Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); John Rennie Short, Making Space: Revisioning the World, 1475–1600 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004); Jeffrey N. Peters, Mapping Discord: Allegorical Cartography in Early Modern French Writing (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004); W. G. L. Randles, Geography, Cartography and Nautical Science in the Renaissance: The Impact of the Great Discoveries (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000).  P. D. A. Harvey, Maps in Tudor England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Svetlana Alpers, “The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art,” in Art and Cartography: Six Historical Essays, ed. David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 91; David Buisseret, “Introduction,” in Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Buisseret (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 1–4.  The Dutch Empire was especially avid in its use of cartography to claim territory. Jerry Brotton, Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); Kees Zandvliet, Mapping for Money: Maps, Plans and Topographic Paintings and Their Role in Dutch Overseas Expansion during the 16th and 17th Centuries (Amsterdam: Batavian Lion International, 1998); Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Jerry Brotton, “Printing the Map, Making a Difference: Mapping the Cape of Good Hope, 1488–1652,” in Geography and Revolution, eds. David Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 137–159; James R. Akerman, “Finding Our Way,” in Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, ed. James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 54; Franco Farinelli, “Subject, Space, Object: The Birth of Modernity,” in Mathematizing Space: The Objects of Geometry from Antiquity to the Early Modern Age, ed. Vincenzo de Risi (Basel: Birkhauser, 2015), 143–155.

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mind.26 Colonial needs also prompted technological advances: the need for a clear border to divide the New World between Spain and Portugal in the Treaty of Tordesillas led to attempts to fix lines of longitude, which had previously been approximations. Cartographers developed new projection systems to display distance accurately as navigational maps were required to manage empire and transoceanic trade. The most influential of these was Gerhard Mercator’s projection, which became the most common way for Europeans to picture the globe. The Mercator projection retains its power as the basis for Google Maps and other online map providers today.27 Back in Europe, political leaders also attempted to create clear, fixed boundaries for their nations in the second half of the seventeenth century following the creation of the Westphalian system of state sovereignty.28 National maps became important for representing and imagining state borders. They also became some of the first national symbols, rendering states as natural physical forms rather than recent human creations. As Thongchai Winichakul puts it: “A modern nation-state must be imaginable in mapped form.” Maps create what Winichakul calls a national “geobody” with borders that cut across cultural, language, and religious divides to determine national belonging by physical location.29 European governments instrumentalized maps and cartographic language to articulate identities as members of the national community. Indeed, by the nineteenth century national maps had become so prevalent as symbols of the nation, displayed in communal venues such as schools and other public spaces, that the physical contours of the nation were recognizable to all subjects or citizens.30 The most well-known example is the French

 Surekha Davies, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps, and Monsters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).  Barbara E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 13–14. For an overview of mapping in the early modern Spanish Empire, see: Raymond B. Craib, “Cartography and Power in the Conquest and Creation of New Spain,” Latin American Research Review 35, no. 1 (2000): 7–36.  Though many scholars have complicated the simple narrative of a transition to a world based around nation-states after 1648, an increased focus on drawing clear national borders and the territorialization of authority is apparent in the activities of European monarchs and statesmen. The literature on the Peace of Westphalia is too extensive to cover in much detail here. For the traditional narrative of Westphalia as the birth of a world of nation-states, see: Leo Gross, “The Peace of Westphalia, 1648–1948,” American Journal of International Law 42 (1948): 20–41. A more recent formulation can be found in Derek Croxton, “The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 and the Origins of Sovereignty,” The International History Review 21, no. 3 (1999): 569–591. For the critique, see: Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations (London: Verso, 2009); Andreas Osiander, “Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth,” International Organization 55, no. 2 (2001): 251–287.  Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), 76. Italics in original.  Tom Conley, The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan

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“hexagon,” a form of the nation supposedly determined by natural features and recognizable as “France” to French citizens in the nineteenth century.31 Equally important for the development of maps as symbols of authority were economic changes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in northern Europe. Not only did the emergence of capitalism and the importance of private property require maps to mark off the property of one person from that of another, but European states increasingly adopted elements of German cameral science and/or French physiocracy to make places and populations legible and subject to enlightened administration.32 Though their frameworks for doing so differed, both cameralists and physiocrats promoted the application of scientific management to governmental administration and economics. Cartography became an important technique for rationalizing territory and developing rulers’ authority over areas with disputed ownership or that had previously been held in common.33 For instance, as governments became especially concerned about shrinking forest resources and the need to control timber for economic and naval uses, they introduced cadasters, or comprehensive delineations of landed property for tax purposes. Beginning with Gustav II Adolf of Sweden in 1628,34 states across Europe adopted cadasters to document their nations’ natural resources and

Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Ricardo Padrón, The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Christine Marie Petto, Mapping and Charting in Early Modern England and France: Power, Patronage, and Production (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington, 2015), 25–28; D. K. Smith, The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England: Rewriting the World in Marlowe, Spenser, Raleigh and Marvell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).  Jordan Branch, The Cartographic State: Maps, Territory, and the Origins of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 4–6; Daniel Clayton, “The Creation of Imperial Space in the Pacific Northwest,” Journal of Historical Geography 26, no. 3 (2000): 327–350; Michael Biggs, “Putting the State on the Map: Cartography: Territory, and European State Formation,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 2 (1999): 374–405; Pickles, History of Spaces, 97–100; Peters Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976).  Pickles, History of Spaces, 100. This change can be contrasted with the ‘wealth in people’ paradigm that made control of territory relatively unimportant in Africa before European colonialism. See: Jane I. Guyer and Samuel M. Eno Belinga, “Wealth in People as Wealth in Knowledge: Accumulation and Composition in Equatorial Africa,” Journal of African History 36, no. 1 (1995): 91–120.  James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Harley, New Nature of Maps, 133; Andre Wakefield, The Disordered Police State: German Cameralism as Science and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); David Lindenfeld, The Practical Imagination: The German Sciences of State in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, The Origins of Physiocracy: Economic Revolution and Social Order in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976).  Kain and Baigent, Cadastral Map, 332–333.

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regulate land claims through the creation of permanent records of precisely-defined land ownership.35 The power of centralized cadasters as tools of state power was widely recognized by both the monarchs who instigated their creation and their political rivals, especially in northern European states (in the south, the power of the Catholic Church and the nobility was great enough that they were able to limit the reach of imperial mapping projects until the nineteenth century). Dutch polder boards mapped land ownership to assess taxes in order to raise the revenue to build necessary infrastructure for land reclamation on the coast of the North Sea.36 Further north, Gustav II Adolf of Sweden used his national mapping project, the production of geometriska jordeböckerna, in a bid to develop a political vision of Sweden answering its destiny of expansion, specifically through cadasters of Sweden’s Baltic colonies which extended Swedish authority over taxation and land use.37 Mapping had become one of the primary means by which the central state sought to project its power and assert its prerogatives over space.38 Absolutist France soon became the model for other European states in their use of maps as tools for political administration, centralization, and consolidation.39 The Cassini family, whom Louis XIV of France hired away from Bologna, transitioned cartography from an artistic to a scientific discipline with new methods and increased professionalism. The Cassinis’ Carte générale et particulière, which became a model for combining local surveys into one national map, produced the greatest early modern step towards solidifying state power through the use of centralized mapping.40 The introduction of new instruments allowed surveyors to make more exact topographic measurements, and as such instrumental data replaced travelers’ tales as the main source of information for maps. With the shift to a more scientific cartography that aimed for absolute knowledge, geography became one of the sciences represented in the French Academy.41 When the cartographer Guillaume Delisle became a  Roger Kain and Elizabeth Baigent, The Cadastral Map in the Service of the State: A History of Property Mapping (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 263.  Kain and Baigent, Cadastral Map, 11–24.  Kain and Baigent, Cadastral Map, 53–57, 70–75.  Kain and Baigent, Cadastral Map, 203–204.  Branch, Cartographic State, 142–143.  From the seventeenth-century reign of Henri IV, French kings had been trying to draw clearer borders and use maps to define the geographic extent of their authority. David Buisseret, “The Cartographic Definition of France’s Eastern Boundary in the Early Seventeenth Century,” Imago Mundi 36 (1984): 72–80.  Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, Christian Licoppe, and Heinz Otto Sibum, “Introduction,” in Instruments, Travel, and Science: Itineraries of Precision from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. MarieNoëlle Bourguet, Christian Licoppe, and Heinz Otto Sibum (London: Routledge, 2003), 9; Monique Pelletier, La carte de Cassini: L’extraordinaire aventure de la Carte de France (Paris: Presses de l’École nationale des ponts et chausées, 1990); Marie-Noëlle Bourguet and Christian Licoppe, “Voyage, instruments et mesures: Une nouvelle expérience du monde au Siècle des lumières,” Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales 52, no. 5 (1997): 1115–1151; Anne Godlewska, Geography Unbound: French Geographic

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tutor to the young Louis XV and published a book (under the younger Louis’ name) on the riverine geography of Europe, Louis XIV promoted Delisle to a position as his “first geographer” with a large annual pension.42 Scientific advances fed into political goals as well. Under Louis XIV’s rule, geography became a popular means of communicating the power of the natural world over human affairs.43 Louis attempted to use maps to regulate French society and control movement by maintaining tight control over geographic information.44 Across the Channel, in contrast, English cartography developed not out of a statedirected drive for absolutist centralization, but in response to the commercialism that had emerged through the previous centuries. Even with this commercial bent, though, maps became an important element in the formation of English identity. Maps were memory devices, serving to systematize and visualize details about the English nation, and allowing the English to learn about their country and focus on commonalities among people across its territory. Descriptions of foreign landscapes helped English people identify what was ‘English’ about their own realm.45 Responding to the demands for economic growth fostered by the eighteenth century’s political theories, cartography likewise supported a culture of colonial expansionism that developed first in Spain and then spread across Western Europe.46 Europeans justified taking land from indigenous communities based on the idea that those communities were ‘wasting’ the land’s capacity. The British Empire, with its general lack of valuable mineral resources, adopted the principle of dividing and distributing land as a tradeable asset as the basis for economic development: it became the first state to pursue a formal process of confiscating and redistributing

Science from Cassini to Humboldt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); Christine Marie Petto, When France was King of Cartography: The Patronage and Production of Maps in Early Modern France (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007); Petto, Mapping and Charting, 148. A digital reproduction of the Cassini map can be navigated at: https://www.geoportail.gouv.fr/carte, République Française Géoportal, accessed 4 April 2022.  The book was titled Cours des principaux fleuves et rivières de l’Europe and was published so that Louis could also learn the book trade. Michael Heffernan, “Courtly Geography: Nature, Authority and Civility in Early Eighteenth-Century France,” in Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds: Geography and the Humanities, ed. Stephen Daniels, Dydia DeLyser, and J. Nicholas Entrikin (London: Routledge, 2011), 94–105.  Michael Heffernan, “Geography and the Paris Academy of Sciences: Politics and Patronage in Early 18th-Century France,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39, no. 1 (2014): 62–75.  Roche, France in the Enlightenment, 73–74.  Rhonda Lemke Sanford, Maps and Memory in Early Modern England: A Sense of Place (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 22–23; Lesley Cormack, Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580–1620 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).  Padrón, Spacious World; Mundy, Mapping of New Spain, 214–215.

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land from indigenous communities to white settlers. This process required mapping as a means to define and allot the territory in question.47 Russian tsars pursued similar policies as they expanded their empire eastwards into Asia, marking territory for conquest and division.48 While asserting authority abroad, maps of empire also served an important role in promoting imperialist goals within Europe by domesticating far-flung, exotic spaces for European audiences. Maps of the New World made colonial territory appear simply as an extension of Europe: clearing colonial landscapes of people and natural obstacles became preliminary to the inscription of European property and social relations onto them.49 In Brazil and New Amsterdam, Dutch cartographers produced illustrations of docile, industrious slaves working Dutch colonial fields (and ignored competing land claims from other European nations) to promote Dutch settlement in the New World.50 John Smith’s map of Virginia relied on local informants but replaced native names with English designations, making the landscape appealingly familiar to English readers.51 British maps of India normalized the British conquest of Bengal by making the new colony look much like a country estate back home, using the familiar conventions of cadastral maps of England. These maps effaced competing claims to land and placed Indian territory into a conventional visual framework, so that wresting land from Indian communities ultimately looked no different than the system of land ownership to which British subjects were accustomed.52 Imperial maps also impelled European states to conquer more territory and thereby make rivals appear weak. By adjusting perspective, coloration, and projection, British and French cartographers produced competing maps of their North American claims meant to make the other’s territory look insignificant and less valuable.53 This competition became particularly fierce in the 1750s in disputes over the Acadia/Nova Scotia border. Map sellers in London and Paris sold maps to the

 John C. Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–1900 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 25, 44.  Valerie Kivelson, Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and its Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).  Harley, New Nature of Maps, 135–138; King, Mapping Reality, 66, 146.  Elizabeth A. Sutton, Capitalism and Cartography in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).  Gregory Waselkov, “Indian Maps of the Colonial Southeast: Archaeological Implications and Prospects,” in Cartographic Encounters: Perspectives on Native American Mapmaking and Map Use, ed. Malcolm Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 205–221, here 207, 213.  Ian J. Barrow, Making History, Drawing Territory: British Mapping in India, c. 1756–1905 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004).  William P. Cumming, The Southeast in Early Maps (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 23–25.

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public depicting their respective nations’ claims, opening another front in the border dispute.54 In the Russian Empire, likewise, defining the Ural Mountains as the border between Europe and Asia eased the state’s aims both to claim connections with Europe and to make Siberia a colonial space.55 Imperial mapping projects further enabled colonialism by combining state authority with claims to the superiority of European frames of knowledge. Scientific exploration of other parts of the globe became the subject of great public interest from about 1750 onwards. As European power made itself felt across the globe, maps intersected with larger projects to reform scientific inquiry.56 From that point on, European mapmakers systematized nature, portraying both explorers and cartographers like themselves as people who produced order from chaos.57 Justified by the rational logic of the scientific method, mapmakers undertook the erasure of indigenous spatial knowledge, replacing it with verifiable, ostensibly empirical findings that prioritized European perspectives.58 European governments continued to use these new scientific advances in cartography to better administer their empires as the eighteenth century neared its end. The British government produced more maps of North America between 1763 and 1783 than during the entirety of the existence of British colonies there up to that point. Victory in the Seven Years’ War prompted a state-sponsored project to map the entirety of the New World empire to encourage settlement that would protect the frontier. Maps of Caribbean colonies were produced to help limit plantation size, which officials believed would reduce slave uprisings by allowing non-slaveholding farmers to own land and limiting large gatherings of enslaved people. These maps would remain the basis for British governance in the region well into the following century. In the case of the Thirteen Colonies, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 forbade white settlement to the west of the Appalachian Mountains to reduce conflict and defense costs.59 This territorial delineation aggravated tensions with London with its clear limits on territorial expansion.

 Mary Pedley, “Map Wars: The Role of Maps in the Nova Scotia/Acadia Boundary Disputes of 1750,” Imago Mundi 50 (1998): 96–104.  Lewis and Wigen, Myth of Continents, 27.  Neil Safier, Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 59–80.  Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 23, 30.  David Lambert, Mastering the Niger: James MacQueen’s African Geography and the Struggle over Atlantic Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 44; Harley, New Nature of Maps, 146. There were tensions between explorers and ‘armchair geographers’ who produced maps in Europe. Dane Kennedy, The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 50; Numa Broc, La Géographie des philosophes, géographes et voyageurs français au 18e siècle (Paris: Editions Ophrys, 1975).  S. Max Edelson, The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017); Alexander Johnson, The First Mapping of America: The General Survey of British North America (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017).

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Maps’ role in European empires evolved significantly over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Building on the fact that early modern maps had already become the primary venue through which Europeans viewed the extra-European world, European states developed new cartographic techniques to divide and administer territory in the seventeenth century. In the New World and South Asia, European colonial states brought those same technologies to bear to regulate colonized populations and divide land for European settlers to exploit. European maps elided indigenous people and knowledge from landscapes, making land appear empty and awaiting European exploitation. Imperial maps thus served as important propaganda for national and imperial identities. The audience for imperial maps, however, remained limited to the relatively small reading public, and mapmakers had yet to perfect techniques of persuading audiences.

II Maps and the New Imperialism of the Nineteenth Century In the nineteenth century, imperial maps reached their pinnacle as a means of staging authority for mass audiences. Maps of empire became part of a wider culture of exploration that evolved around the middle of the century and permeated many corners of European society. As the primary means of depicting and viewing imperial expansion and rivalries, maps served as potent symbols for nationalist political mobilization. Europeans of all classes could rally behind maps as signs of both national glory and the threats posed by the nation’s rivals. New national maps codified rational-legal authority along the familiar lines of traditional authority, summoning up the same inherited and symbolic power that undergirded monarchical states, which relied on claims both about the antiquity and the historical progress of the nation. To this end, mapmakers created new kinds of maps and developed new technologies for printing and distribution to wider audiences. The institutionalization of geography provided cartography with additional support, as states and private actors alike established theories of societal evolution to justify the extension of national authority overseas. Imperial maps turned claims to sovereignty based on dubious treaties and violence against indigenous peoples into objective images that naturalized European expansion as a divinely-ordained national mission. While Europeans formulated identities around imperial maps as symbols of the nation, in the colonies maps played a variety of roles depending on the structure of settlement and administration: different forms of colonialism produced different forms of map.

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Changes in Cartographic Production and Use Before the nineteenth century, maps had been expensive to produce and had appeared only rarely in most forms of publication. The invention of lithography in the late 1790s paved the way for wider distribution; by the 1860s, mechanical lithography made it possible even for daily newspapers to include maps to illustrate stories. Responding to demand, publishers developed genres of map dissemination, such as the historical atlas, and authors in many fields, most prominently engineering and statistics, began incorporating maps in their texts. These new publications reached wide audiences, and European states soon built libraries featuring cartographic collections and decorated reading rooms with large-scale maps. In schools, libraries, and private homes, globes also became common as a means to depict new steamship, railroad, and telegraph lines as signs of the progress of European modernity.60 Although the technologies and genres that made maps so widespread mostly developed later in the nineteenth century, world maps had already become the primary means of viewing European conflicts and overseas expansion during the Napoleonic Wars. James Gillray’s The Plumb-Pudding in Danger;–or–State Epicures Taking un Petit Souper depicted Napoleon I and William Pitt dividing the globe at a dinner table, choosing which regions of the world they would be able to exploit (Fig. 10.2).61 The division of the globe shown humorously here became the basis for seizing territory more assertively elsewhere. European cartographers explicitly apportioned the world into separate regions, making a visual argument for Europe’s superiority over the rest of the world and for its right to make spatial arrangements everywhere.62 For instance, British cartographers consolidated India into a single territorial entity, turning societies with many different political allegiances and polities into bordered sovereign states that British readers could recognize on a map. This mapping depicted a unified

 Arthur H. Robinson, Early Thematic Mapping in the History of Cartography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 57; Mark Monmonier, Maps with the News: The Development of American Journalistic Cartography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 32, 39–47; Gilles Palsky, Des chiffres et des cartes: Naissance et développement de la cartographie quantitative français au XIXe siècle (Paris: Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1996); Michael Friendly and Gilles Palsky, “Visualizing Nature and Society,” in Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, ed. James Akerman and Robert Karrow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 207–254, here 231–233; Martin Brückner, The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Jeremy Black, Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Steven Seegel, Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 5, 14; Pickles, History of Spaces, 126, 140.  Christiane Banerji and Diana Donald, eds., Gillray Observed: An Artist in the Pages of London and Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 215–221. See: Caricature gillray plumpudding, Wikimedia Commons, accessed 4 April 2022, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caricature_ gillray_plumpudding.jpg.  Lewis and Wigen, Myth of Continents, 29, 162.

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South Asian landmass bordered by natural features that made it appear as though Britain had simply taken control of a territory that had existed since time immemorial. The British conquest thus looked like it had brought political unity to a region that already had geographic unity.63 On British Guyana’s disputed border with Venezuela, Robert Schomburgk likewise named and attributed cultural or ecological meaning to various landscape features. He then used those features to anchor his mapping of the region to make the area appear as a coherent, unified space that shared features with the British colony rather than with Venezuela. Schomburgk’s maps served as Great Britain’s primary evidence in resolving the disputed border in its favor.64

Fig. 10.2: The Plumb-Pudding in Danger: Napoleon and Pitt divide the globe.

The Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 marked the culmination of these processes of dividing the globe, as European diplomats claimed spheres of influence in Africa based entirely on printed maps of the continent. What was unique about the process in Berlin was that mapping territory was not an attempt to reflect authority on the ground at all, but to set borders of authority for future exploitation. Conference attendees drew territorial borders using only lines of latitude and longitude, which promised to prevent

 Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 15, 25; Barrow, Making History; Lucy P. Chester, Borders and Conflict in South Asia: The Radcliffe Boundary Commission and the Partition of Punjab (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009).  D. Graham Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

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conflict among European nations but gave little thought to existing territorial and social structures already in place. Indeed, the European statesmen who marked out claims on a map of Africa invited only the Sultan of Zanzibar among all African rulers to send a delegation. Instead of consulting indigenous perspectives, France and Germany insisted that lines of latitude and longitude be used to fix territory on Africa’s coasts, with future surveys to determine interior boundaries. Following a German proposal, attendees agreed to follow the “Hinterland Theory,” according to which European colonial claims would extend inland along lines of latitude or longitude from the coasts they were allotted by international agreement. The latitude-longitude grid was enshrined as the means of determining authority in Africa.65 The borders drawn in the Berlin Conference may have been abstract and overt representations of European authority, but they soon became practical documents of colonial administration to local representatives. These new borders were used to determine to whom African communities were subject, create points to regulate commerce and pathogens, and channel labor for economic projects.66 European states attempted to clarify borders between disparate African tribes, ethnicities, and chieftaincies as a pretext for administrators to conduct business through indigenous officials rather than paying for a large bureaucracy. In cases where African rulers’ authority was not territorial, mapmakers often invented borders to fit European expectations of bounded sovereignty.67 But despite European claims of omniscience, imperial maps depended on the work of local intermediaries across many different colonial contexts. Colonized Africans and Asians did much of the labor of land surveying and staffed the bureaucracies

 H. L. Wesseling, Divide and Rule: The Partition of Africa, 1880–1914, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), 364–365; Simon Katzenellenbogen, “It Didn’t Happen at Berlin: Politics, Economics and Ignorance in the Setting of Africa’s Colonial Boundaries,” in African Boundaries: Barriers, Conduits and Opportunities (London: Pinter, 1996), 21–34. For a useful overview of the conference, see: M. E. Chamberlain, The Scramble for Africa, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2010); for in-depth discussions of elements of the conference, see: Stig Förster, Wolfgang Mommsen, and Ronald Robinson, eds., Bismarck, Europe and Africa: The Berlin Africa Conference, 1884–1885, and the Onset of Partition (London: Oxford University Press, for the German Historical Institute, 1988).  Paul Nugent and A. I. Asiwaju, “Introduction: The Paradox of African Boundaries,” in African Boundaries: Barriers, Conduits and Opportunities, ed. Paul Nugent and A. I. Asiwaju (London: Pinter, 1996), 1–17, here 2–4.  Eric Worby, “Maps, Names and Ethnic Games: The Epistemology and Iconography of Colonial Power in Northwestern Zimbabwe,” Journal of Southern African Studies 20, no. 3 (1994): 371–392; Barrie Sharpe, “Ethnography and a Regional System: Mental Maps and the Myth of States and Tribes in North-Central Nigeria,” Critique of Anthropology 6 (1986): 33–65; Sara Berry, ‘Chiefs Know Their Boundaries’: Essays on Property, Power and the Past in Asante, 1896–1996 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2001); Olufemi Vaughan, Nigerian Chiefs: Traditional Power in Modern Politics (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2000).

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responsible for mapping.68 In Nigeria, the first professional training programs developed by the British colonial state were surveying programs to staff government posigtions.69 British surveys of Central Asia were carried out almost entirely by native surveyors using prayer wheels and rosaries rather than British surveying equipment.70 Local elites also exercised authority by using maps in areas where there was little European presence. For instance, in southwestern Africa, European cartographers trying to map watercourses that dried up or flowed underground unwittingly took sides in political disputes by favoring the descriptions of some local leaders over others.71 British maps of the Middle East were possible only through the assistance of sheikhs, most of whom participated in these projects in order to use Great Britain as a check on Ottoman power.72 These intermediaries were able to, however lightly, modify imperial maps to fit their own claims. In addition to their function as tools of administration in the colonies, maps played an equally important role as propaganda tools within Europe itself.73 Territorial phraseology became common in discussions of colonialism, most famously in the line: “The sun never sets on the British Empire.”74 This map of the British Empire has several important propaganda elements and can be considered representative of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century popular cartographic genre (Fig. 10.3). British territories are shaded pink, showing the vast territory to which it laid claim. Lines of trade and communication connect imperial possessions to each other and to Great Britain, indicating the linkages created by empire. Around the edge of the map, viewers can see the various peoples of the empire, united around

 Local intermediaries made up the vast majority of the colonial administration, as they were much cheaper to employ than Europeans. Heather J. Sharkey, Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 2–3; Lindsay Frederick Braun, Colonial Survey and Native Landscapes in Rural South Africa, 1850–1913 (Leiden: Brill, 2015).  Jamie McGowan, “Uncovering the Roles of African Surveyors and Draftsmen in Mapping the Gold Coast, 1874–1957,” in Decolonizing the Map: Cartography from Colony to Nation, ed. James R. Akerman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 205–251; O. Y. Balogun, “The Training of Nigerian Surveyors in the Colonial Era,” Surveying and Mapping 45, no. 2 (1985): 1159–1167; O. Y. Balogun, “The Native Surveyor: The Nigerian Surveyor under British Administration,” Surveying and Mapping 48, no. 2 (1988): 81–87.  Kapil Raj, “La Construction de l’empire de la géographie,” Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales 52, no. 5 (1997): 1153–1180.  Meredith McKittrick, “Making Rain, Making Maps: Competing Geographies of Water and Power in Southwestern Africa,” Journal of African History 58, no. 2 (2017): 187–212.  Daniel Foliard, Dislocating the Orient: British Maps and the Making of the Middle East, 1854–1921 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 41.  Thomas Bassett, “Cartography and Empire Building in Nineteenth Century West Africa,” Geographical Review 84, no. 3 (1994): 316–335; Arthur Mees, “The Flags of a Free Empire,” 1910, Wikimedia Commons, accessed 4 April 2022, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arthur_Mees_ Flags_of_A_Free_Empire_1910_Cornell_CUL_PJM_1167_01.jpg.  Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 39.

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Fig. 10.3: Map of the World Showing the Extent of the British Empire in 1886: The Sun Never Sets.

the figure of Britannia and the values of “freedom,” “fraternity,” and “federation.”75 Imperial maps were also, on occasion, used to demand action from domestic governments. Social reformers in Great Britain used imperial maps as a negative point of comparison to British cities and suggested applying administrative models from the colonies to working-class Britons. Most notably, William Booth’s In Darkest England depicted London’s poor as morally degenerated through their experience of proletarianization. Booth discerned a solution in the Empire: Britain could “colonize” its own working class, bringing them spiritual and economic progress through greater governmental control of their lives.76 By the end of the century, maps also provided evidence for the new field of geopolitics, which animated interstate relations across Europe. The leading theorists of geopolitics, Alfred Thayer Mahan and Halford Mackinder, both based their theories around readings of human history as portrayed on maps. Mahan, the president of the United States Naval War College, argued that naval power was the most important

 Walter Crane, “Imperial Federation Map of the World Showing the Extent of the British Empire in 1886,” Cornell University Library Digital Collection, accessed 1 April 2022, https://digital.library. cornell.edu/catalog/ss:3293793.  Driver, Geography Militant, 194.

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factor in national greatness. He provided a historical narrative from Ancient Greece through the nineteenth century that he claimed proved that any polity that controlled the seas was victorious over its rivals, from Athens through the contemporary United Kingdom. Mackinder’s Heartland Theory held that whichever power held the “pivot area,” a space roughly corresponding with the borders of contemporary Russia, would be able to dominate the globe. Though Mahan’s theory was based on naval power and Mackinder’s on continental territory, both used global maps as key argumentative devices. Mackinder included a world map with a projection that highlighted the pivot area, making it appear the center of the world’s landmass.77 Mahan’s maps focused on large bodies of water and coastlines, with landmasses appearing as undifferentiated gray space.78 His theories thus justified massive naval buildups on both sides of the Atlantic as national leaders accepted the dictum that they needed stronger navies to compete with their rivals.79 Similarly, Friedrich Ratzel developed his theory of geopolitics around historical maps of imperial expansion. Ratzel argued in favor of the Triple Alliance because it would solve the inherent instability created by Germany, AustriaHungary, and Italy’s central position in Europe. To show its potential, he juxtaposed the borders of the participants in the alliance to the borders of the Holy Roman Empire under the Hohenstaufens, when the empire reached its greatest extent.80 Maps carried such political weight that challengers to imperial rule found themselves forced to adopt the maps’ implicit narratives of authority to communicate alternative political formations. The ability to create maps following European models was regarded as proof of a nation’s achievement of rationality and ability to stand on its own, and maps that adopted a mode of rational scientific principles became signifiers of historical progress.81 Independence leaders in the Spanish Americas adapted the language of imperial cartography to make independence appear natural and to argue for their vision of South America’s future. Their national atlases highlighted the geographic unity of the new nations and set them apart from their neighbors, so

 Halford Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” The Geographical Journal 23, no. 4 (1904): 421–444, here 435.  Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company, 1890).  Dirk Bönker, Militarism in a Global Age: Naval Ambitions in Germany and the United States before World War I (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012).  Friedrich Ratzel, Politische Geographie (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1897), 286–287. Ratzel further developed his geographic explanation for history in Lebensraum, published four years later. See: Woodruff Smith, “Friedrich Ratzel and the Origins of Lebensraum,” German Studies Review 3, no.1 (1980): 51–68; Woodruff Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 83–105.  Antonio Crespo Sanz and Alberto Fernández Wyttenbach, “Cartografía antigua o Cartografía histórica?/Old Cartography or Historical Cartography?” Estudios geograficos 72, no. 271 (2011): 403–420, here 407–408; Sumathi Ramaswamy, Terrestrial Lessons: The Conquest of the World as Globe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

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that national borders seemed set by nature rather than the product of continued contestation.82 They included such maps in publications promoting independence, and then later adapted them to create national atlases for their newly independent countries.83 Later in the nineteenth century, rulers in Asia also adopted maps to prove their modernity and national unity. The clearest example of this was in Siam, where rulers and activists used maps of their nation to avoid European colonization. Siamese cartographers depicted Siam as a nation with a long history of unified political action in which Siamese kings exercised clear sovereignty. Siam avoided direct colonial control even as the United Kingdom and France conquered much of Southeast Asia.84 Both the Qajar and Pahlavi dynasties in Iran promoted geographic study among military officers and diplomats to protect their sovereignty against European incursion.85 Still, although maps could be used to challenge European authority, the need to utilize them in such challenges also served to reinforce European authority over places where such maps were absent.

Maps and a Culture of Exploration The new modes of imperial mapping gained greater power to shape European ideas about the world as they were formally institutionalized over the course of the nineteenth century: membership in geographic societies, for instance, rose across Europe over the course of the century to reach its peak around 1910.86 Of the geographical societies that sprung up across the continent in the first half of the century, the most prominent was the British Royal Geographical Society, with a membership of over three thousand people.87 This made it the largest scientific society in London, enabled in part by the wide range of interests that it addressed, from economic matters to missionary work, science, and simple adventure. It served as the hub of a wider obsession with cartography that flourished from the 1850s through the Scramble for Africa in the 1880s and 1890s. The fascination with the geography of exploration included scientific study, but it also encompassed many other ways of researching and

 Jordana Dym and Karl Offen, eds., Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Lina del Castillo, “Cartography in the Production (and Silencing) of Colombian Independence History, 1807–1827,” in Decolonizing the Map: Cartography from Colony to Nation, ed. James R. Akerman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 110–159.  Godlewska, Geography Unbound, 236.  Winichakul, Siam Mapped.  Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804–1946 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).  Norman J. W. Thrower, Maps and Civilization: Cartography in Culture and Society, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 154.  R. C. Bridges, “The R.G.S. and the African Exploration Fund 1876–1880,” The Geographical Journal 129, no. 1 (1963): 25–35, here 25.

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writing about travel, from adventure books for children through detailed studies of geology in places new to European audiences.88 While many members of European geographic societies were interested in scientific mapping by itself, celebrity explorers were important for popularizing geography and imperial maps for the general population. Alexander von Humboldt’s expeditions to South America, as well as James Cook’s to the South Pacific, inspired generations of other European men (and some women) to take up exploration of the non-European world.89 The mid-century search for the source of the Nile River caused enthusiasm for exploration and mapping to reach a peak, with Richard Burton’s and John Speke’s expedition of 1857–1858 sparking great public interest across the continent. So great indeed was public interest that, to gain acclaim, Speke exaggerated the extent of his explorations: his published maps asserted that he had personally conducted scientific measurements in places where he had in fact relied on African informants. Roderick Murchison, president of the Royal Geographical Society, likewise exploited public interest in the search for the Nile source through a variety of publications and public lectures, making geography in general “something of a national obsession in the United Kingdom,” a trend further highlighted by the cases of David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley.90 Audiences in both the UK and elsewhere followed the progress of their expeditions closely, and Livingstone’s Missionary Travels sold over 70,000 copies.91 Stanley became perhaps the most famous person in the world after finding Livingstone and publishing widely about his adventures.92 Nor was the celebrity of exploration limited to men. Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa likewise became a best-seller in the 1890s, and Kingsley’s success was notable for her synthesis of the genres of scientific expedition with travel writing, appealing to the audiences of both genres.93

 Driver, Geography Militant, 10.  Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 170; Kennedy, Last Blank Spaces, 25–26; Jeffrey C. Stone, A Short History of the Cartography of Africa (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1995), 28; John Rennie Short, Cartographic Encounters: Indigenous Peoples and the Exploration of the New World (London: Reaktion, 2009), 68.  Driver, Geography Militant, 78.  Clare Pettit, Dr. Livingstone, I Presume? Missionaries, Journalists, Explorers, and Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 32; Tim Jeal, Livingstone, revised ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Driver, Geography Militant, 182 .  Edward Berenson, Heroes of Empire: Five Charismatic Men and the Conquest of Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (London: Faber and Faber, 2007); Robert I. Rotberg, “Introduction,” in Africa and Its Explorers: Motives, Methods, and Impact, ed. Robert I. Rotberg (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 1–11; Matthew Unangst, “Men of Science and of Action: The Celebrity of Explorers and German National Identity, 1870–1895,” Central European History 50, no. 3 (2017): 305–327.  Alison Blunt, Travel, Gender, and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa (New York: Guilford, 1994).

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Stories about exploration depended heavily upon maps to represent Africa to readers, while new ways of depicting African spaces made exploration appear necessary and colonization possible. Whereas earlier cartographers had used information from non-white informants to map areas where no Europeans had been, nineteenthcentury mapmakers simply faded out regions from their maps if no Europeans had verified the topography.94 Speke’s disingenuous claims of direct knowledge was a prime example of the erasure of local informants. While later explorers soon disproved some of Speke’s supposed findings, those same challengers adopted Speke’s methods themselves, collecting geographic information while hiding their sources.95 Though explorers were dependent on indigenous people for information, access, and logistics, admitting that dependence undermined an explorer’s credibility, and explorers and cartographers colluded to hide the role of indigenous informants and instead to highlight explorers’ use of scientific instruments.96 Previously ‘blank’ spaces were given European names, meaning they were “transformed symbolically into a place . . . a space with a history.”97 The globe was thereby cleared of politics in order to ready it for European rule, such as in Winwood Reade’s 1873 map of Africa (Fig. 10.4). The outline of the continent is clear, and Reade included rivers. But other terrain features are absent, and the only people on the map are European explorers: Reade labeled African territories according to the first Europeans who traveled there, asserting European authority over Africa.98

 Lawrence Dritsas, “Expeditionary Science: Conflicts of Method in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Geographical Discovery,” in Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science, ed. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 268–272; Kennedy, Last Blank Spaces, 12; Peter J. Yearwood, “From Lines on Maps to National Boundaries: The Case of Northern Nigeria and Cameroun,” in Maps and Africa: Proceedings of a Colloquium at the University of Aberdeen April 1993, ed. Jeffrey C. Stone (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University African Studies Group, 1994), 36.  Adrian Wisnicki, “Charting the Frontier: Indigenous Geography, Arab-Nyamwezi Caravans, and the East African Expedition of 1856–59,” Victorian Studies 51, no. 1 (2008): 103–137; “Skizze einer Karte eines Theils von Ost u. Central Afrika mit Angabe der wahrscheinlichen Lage u. Ausdehnung des See’s von Uniamesi nebst Bezeichnung der Grenzen u. Wohnsitze der Verschiedenen Völker sowie der Caravanen Strassen nach dem Innern,” Mittheilungen aus Justus Perthes’ Geographischer Anstalt über wichtige neue Erforschungen auf dem Gesammtgebiete der Geographie von Dr. A. Petermann 2 (1856): plate 1; Isabel Voigt, “Die ‘Schneckenkarte’ – Mission, Kartographie und transkulturelle Wissensaushandlung in Ostafrika um 1850,” Cartographica Helvetica 45 (2012): 27–38.  Wisnicki, “Charting the Frontier,” 103–137; Kennedy, Last Blank Spaces, 51–52; Kathrin Fritsch, “‘You Have Everything Confused and Mixed Up . . . !’ Georg Schweinfurth, Knowledge and Cartography of Africa in the 19th Century,” History in Africa 36 (2009): 93; Allen F. Roberts, A Dance of Assassins: Performing Early Colonial Hegemony in the Congo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Graebel, Erforschung der Kolonien, 127; Camille Lefebvre, Frontières de sable, frontières de papier: Histoire de territoires et de frontières, du jihad de Sokoto à la colonisation française du Niger, XIXͤ -XXͤ siècles (Paris: Sorbonne, 2015).  Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (New York: Knopf, 1988), xxiv.  Winwood Reade, The African Sketch-Book, vol. 2 (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1873), np.

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Fig. 10.4: Winwood Reade: Inscribing Europeans on the map of Africa.

Such maps were not limited to scientific publications; they became the basis of what Felix Driver describes as a “culture of exploration” that permeated society.99 The combination of public obsession with exploration and the rise of the periodical press made up-to-the-minute reports from African expeditions an important draw for selling newspapers and magazines. As explorers were not in a position to send illustrations with their dispatches, maps became an expedient way to show audiences an explorer’s progress. In the same way that maps became a common feature of

 Driver, Geography Militant, 10.

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the new public library reading rooms, book-length travelogues now conventionally included fold-out maps and late-nineteenth-century publications, both fiction and non-fiction, were replete with maps as key plot devices. The European obsession with maps was so extreme, in fact, that some African communities used it to their advantage in negotiations with European travelers, exchanging topographical information for rare luxury goods such as musical instruments.100 Maps were also important in shaping young peoples’ ideas about empire. Across Europe, schools adopted maps and globes as teaching tools from the early nineteenth century onwards. Geography became a regular school subject as countries democratized education and moved away from the classical curriculum.101 Maps were deemed especially important in girls’ education, as educators believed that women were better able to comprehend images than they were texts.102 Students regularly took part in mapping the world themselves as part of their schoolwork. When traditional textbooks proved too boring to hold students’ attention, publishers developed primers with exciting colonial narratives.103 Maps of exotic locales, whether real or fictional, became equally common in children’s literature. Perhaps the clearest example is Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, published in 1885, the plot of which revolves around a map leading the way to treasure in South Africa. Many other books featured maps as important plot devices as well.104 Marlow, the narrator in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, describes a childhood passion for maps, saying that he used to find blank spaces on maps and remark that he would one day go there. Among those blank spaces “there was one yet – the biggest, the most blank, so to speak – that I had a hankering after.” This was the Congo, which the Belgian King Leopold would turn into his private empire. In an autobiographical anecdote Carl Peters, the founder of German East Africa (today’s Tanzania), attributed his enthusiasm for colonial exploration to a memory of a childhood teacher pointing to a world map and asking his students why Germany lacked colonies. Peters’ father further stoked his son’s colonialist impulses by presenting a map of Africa to Carl and, pointing to East Africa, the place of recent explorations by Europeans like Burton, Speke, and James Augustus Grant, told his son that “here lies the future of Africa.”105 In the 1870s, another map of colonial possessions made him feel ashamed to be German, as even the Danes and the Dutch had colonies.106  Voigt, “Schneckenkarte,” 34.  Thrower, Maps and Civilization, 125.  Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 61.  Foliard, Dislocating the Orient, 164.  Raphael Zähringer, “X Marks the Spot – Not: Pirate Treasure Maps in Treasure Island and Käpt’n Sharky und das Geheimnis der Schatzinsel,” Children’s Literature in Education 48, no. 1 (2017): 6–20.  Carl Peters, Die Gründung von Deutsch-Ostafrika (Berlin: C. A. Schwetschke und Sohn, 1906), 2.  Peters, Gründung von Deutsch-Ostafrika, 122.

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Peters was not alone in such sentiments, as maps inspired other figures, both real and fictional, to pursue their own colonial interests. Leopold II’s project of creating a Belgian colony in Central Africa began with observations of blank spaces in maps of the Congo basin.

Different Kinds of Colonies – Different Kinds of Maps While maps continued to depict African spaces as wilderness for muscular, masculine adventure, the introduction of formal colonialism promoted another strand of representation that focused on the economic potential of Africa as “an immanent space awaiting new development and integration that would benefit colonizers and colonized alike.”107 These maps “created a sense of dynamic, expanding empires; of imperial frontiers advancing into unclaimed and unexplored lands.”108 What was at stake, in this vision, was the untapped resource potential that could be won for European economic development. Even so, cadastral mapping was less extensive through most of Africa than in Europe’s other colonies, as exact borders for property were less important to colonial administrations than were mineral resources or transportation networks. The situation looked different in colonial territories populated by European settlers, where the impetus behind the allocation of colonial land shifted between the 1820s and 1890s. Early in the century, land distribution was driven by the need for revenues to fund the central colonial administration, but electoral politics, a doctrine of improvement, and jurisdictional competition democratized land distribution among white settlers across the globe. Administrative schemes for mapping land to clarify boundaries among European claims and ease the buying and selling of land developed in the middle of the century.109 In Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada, British surveyors developed maps to clear territory – mentally – of any indigenous presence in order to justify displacements and make way for European arrivals. In these cases, the work of land surveys and their role in shaping property relations was readily apparent.110 Maps provided visual evidence of the superiority of white settlers to indigenous communities, which were depicted as stuck in the human past. In South Africa, maps of ethnicity illustrated the narrative that white settlement had brought an end to conflict among Africans. Ethnic maps depicted precolonial African communities

 Michael Heffernan, “The Cartography of the Fourth Estate: Mapping the New Imperialism in British and French Newspapers, 1875–1925,” in The Imperial Map, ed. James R. Akerman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 271. See also: Unangst, “Men of Science,” 305–327.  Heffernan, “Cartography of the Fourth Estate,” 284.  Weaver, Great Land Rush, 218–220, 242.  Norman Etheringon, ed., Mapping Colonial Conquest: Australia and Southern Africa (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2007); Giselle Byrnes, Boundary Markers: Land Surveying and the Colonisation of New Zealand (Wellington: Bridget Williams, 2001).

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as scattered and riven by warfare. In contrast, maps showing the situation under white rule presented neatly sorted African ethnicities, living side-by-side in peace.111 Closer to home, the British government extended its Ordnance Survey to Ireland, conducting surveys of the Irish population, and then translated and erased their geographical knowledge onto maps that Anglicized Irish territory and people. Maps worked together with ethnography and translation to domesticate Ireland and make it look more like Great Britain.112 Due to Ireland’s colonial status, British mapping of Irish spaces shared more in common with maps of the United Kingdom’s settler colonies than with maps of Great Britain. The situation in India was similar to that in Britain’s settler colonies, largely because both depended on overtly delineated property borders. English East India Company officials demarcated clear borders with Gorkha (today’s Nepal) following a series of territorial disputes that culminated in war in the 1810s. The war established a template for the British colonial state’s maps, imitating the visual organization of maps of Europe and ignoring the complexities of sovereignty on the ground in favor of neatly bordered states.113 Indian mapping surged ahead of most colonial mapping, and even much mapping within Europe, in terms of the allocated budget and the extent of surveying, in part because the colony’s revenue was more dependent on land taxes than was typical of colonial economies. Whereas the other British colonies in the region derived revenue primarily from export taxes, levies on India’s regulated agricultural system provided the bulk of the Raj’s income. This was in contrast, for instance, even to British colonies elsewhere in South Asia, where surveying was oriented more toward producing profitable plantations than tax assessment.114 The cartographic apparatus of the British Raj was so powerful that it extended its influence to the Middle East, which was subject to European imperial mapping even though Europeans did not have colonies there until after the nineteenth century’s end. As the Raj attempted to control trade routes between India and Europe, maps of the region highlighted its antique history, placing biblical sites alongside modern ones and illustrating narratives of decline from the civilizational heights of the ancient world.115 As elsewhere, cartographers largely ignored modern-day populations living in the areas they mapped; mapping the ancient world connected  Norman Etherington, “Putting Tribes on Maps,” in Mapping Colonial Conquest: Australia and Southern Africa, ed. Norman Etheringon (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2007), 79–101.  Stiofán Ó Cadhla, Civilizing Ireland: Ordnance Survey 1824–1842: Ethnography, Cartography, Translation (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007).  Bernardo A. Michael, Statemaking and Territory in South Asia: Lessons from the Anglo-Gorkha War, 1814–1816 (London: Anthem, 2012).  Ian J. Barrow, Surveying and Mapping in Colonial Sri Lanka: 1800–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 5.  Foliard, Dislocating the Orient, 26.

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contemporary European viewers with a narrative of civilization and culture stretching back thousands of years, justifying their demand for territory held by the declining Ottoman Empire. These maps also made European intervention seem necessary in order to make the land productive again. The British Palestine Exploration Fund served as cover for British imperial goals in the region, publicizing the area to the British public while it was still part of the Ottoman Empire. Anglo-Indian officials used such maps to convince the Foreign Office of their plans for the expansion of British influence. Cartographers from India depicted the Persian Gulf as a strategically vital space that the British navy could tightly control through additional territorial acquisitions along its shores. Their maps were influential in shaping British attempts to control the region during and after World War I.116 The Russian and Ottoman Empires, which controlled parts of the region, participated in similar processes of mapping, though they had less extensive bureaucracies to manage it and much smaller public spheres interested in geography. Still, cartography was especially important as a tool of governance in such multiethnic empires, as census maps became integral to language and confessional policies, in addition to the many governance purposes for which other European states used maps. For the Russian Empire, “cartography was a means of control used by governments to conquer and then engineer territorial space,” as Russian maps constructed visual arguments for Russian connections to Europe and for the unity of the empire.117 Ottoman cartographers adapted European models for their own atlases, dividing the world according to schema developed in western Europe in an attempt to demonstrate the Empire’s modernity.118 Later in the century, the Ottoman Empire participated in imperial mapping projects in cooperation with German geographers. Such maps served both Ottoman and German imperial interests: their detailed maps demonstrated Ottoman power and established German knowledge of the region’s topography that eventually served as the basis for planning the Berlin-Baghdad railway.119 In sum, over the course of the nineteenth century, maps became increasingly important to European authority in empire. Although mapping varied across different kinds of colonies, maps became the primary means through which Europeans envisioned their power over other parts of the world. Imperial maps provided the  Foliard, Dislocating the Orient, 116–120; Zayde Antrim, Mapping the Middle East (London: Reaktion, 2018), 113–150; Felix Schmutterer, Carl Ritter und seine ‘Erdkunde von Asien’: Die Anfänge der wissenschaftlichen Geographie im frühen 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 2018); John James Moscrop, Measuring Jerusalem: The Palestine Exploration Fund and British Interests in the Holy Land (London: Leicester University Press, 2000); Haim Goren, Jutta Faehndrich, and Bruno Schelhaas, Mapping the Holy Land: The Foundation of a Scientific Cartography of Palestine (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017).  Seegel, Mapping Europe’s Borderlands, 2.  Antrim, Mapping the Middle East, 64–65.  Schmutterer, Carl Ritter; Ségolène Débarre, Cartographier l’Asie mineure: L’orientalisme allemand à l’épreuve du terrain, 1835–1895 (Paris: Peeters, 2016).

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justification for theories of European dominance over the globe. They became the basis for a “culture of exploration” across Europe, largely through the celebrity of explorers. Imperial maps, both real and fictional, were ubiquitous by the middle of the century and became symbols around which to formulate identities and the basis for European ventures to found colonies in Africa. Most famously, the Berlin Conference division of Africa was based entirely upon European maps of the continent.

III Maps and the End of Empire: Postcolonial States Colonial maps remained important to empires into the twentieth century and their derivations are still powerful in today’s world. European nations continued to use imperial maps to spur nationalism in World War I and the interwar period. Colonial administrations developed improved cartographic methods of assessing and monitoring colonized populations as they attempted to establish rational-legal authority in place of the overt coercion on which colonialism depended. Maps also became a means to critique and challenge colonialism. Anticolonial activists developed national maps as alternatives to maps of empire and countermapped European geographies. Even after independence, however, borders drawn by Europeans remained in place as a key element in postcolonial sovereignties. Postcolonial leaders, faced with diverse populations with split loyalties, used maps to assert rational-legal authority over national territories that mostly replicated colonial boundaries. Maps created to show European imperial power over Africa remain dominant in views of the continent even today and continue to shape political possibilities. Thus, as European empires disintegrated, imperial maps retained their power as political symbols in both Europe and former colonies. The fact that imperial maps aimed to persuade their audiences, rather than being straightforward representations of territory, became more apparent in World War I when they were utilized as wartime propaganda to reveal threats posed by the enemy and to promise future territorial gains. Geographical societies produced maps to help the war effort, both for planning operations and to convince the public that the war was worth fighting. The Royal Geographical Society, so central to the mapping of Africa in the nineteenth century, now became the British War Office’s technical and cartographic branch. Its maps of the Middle East were decisive in opening a new front against the Ottoman Empire in 1915, as they illustrated proponents’ arguments that the new front would benefit British Mediterranean interests.120 Moreover, as the United Kingdom and France increasingly mobilized soldiers and labor from across

 Michael Heffernan, “Geography, Cartography and Military Intelligence: The Royal Geographical Society and the First World War,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 21, no. 3 (1996): 504–533.

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their colonies, depictions of a unified empire became especially important for convincing colonized people that a war for European territory was worth fighting.121 On the level of high diplomacy, the Survey of India created maps of much of the Middle East that supported British plans for the region and served as the basis for political changes imposed on the region during World War I. The 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement between the United Kingdom and France was the culmination of earlier trends in imperial mapping. It took territory previously recognized as belonging to a legitimate state in the international system, the Ottoman Empire, and planned out the area’s new division even before developing a strategy for how physically to conquer the region. In the agreement’s final form, the two powers agreed that France would exercise control over Syria and Lebanon and that the United Kingdom would exercise control over Iraq, Palestine, and Jordan. It was now possible, in European eyes, to create new countries based entirely on maps resting on more exclusive versions of sovereignty than the spheres of influence created at the Berlin Conference.122 During the interwar period, divisions in African colonial space were fixed in place and European authority was extended to distant colonial areas. European empires thus increased the scale of their cartographic efforts, establishing survey departments in individual colonies and providing increased funding for cartography as they reoriented African colonies to “development,” by which they meant centrally managed export economies. Colonial administrators developed increasingly complicated methods of assessing and monitoring colonized populations with maps, though much mapping remained ad hoc and some regions were never mapped by colonial states. Although political authority remained contested, ethnographic maps became more elaborate and refined as a means of marking off tribes as territorially discrete and politically subordinate to the colonial state. Such maps allowed for more efficient systems of channeling and controlling African labor. Development projects induced, or also forced, African communities to produce cash crops, most prominently groundnuts, for export. Colonial administrations centralized authority and directed the majority of their resources to putting developmentalism into practice. The result was greater intrusion into the daily lives of African subjects and increased economic integration across regions within individual colonies.123 While the interwar period saw new innovations in cartography, it also heralded new critiques within Europe of a map’s claims to represent reality. Imperial maps

 Heffernan, “Cartography of the Fourth Estate,” 293.  Antrim, Mapping the Middle East, 115; Michael Heffernan, “The Spoils of War: The Société de Géographie de Paris and the French Empire, 1914–1919,” in Morag Bell, Robin Butlin, and Michael Heffernan, eds., Geography and Imperialism, 1820–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 221–264; Foliard, Dislocating the Orient, 195.  Monica van Beusekom, Negotiating Development: African Farmers and Colonial Experts at the Office du Niger, 1920–1960 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002); Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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began to lose some of their authority as new means of representing the empire replaced them. Audiences trusted photographs as more accurate representations of reality that did not include the distortions of maps. Photographs became more common as the means of depicting colonial scenes, and aerial photography eventually eliminated the need for local participation in mapping projects. New ways of thinking about space developed out of aerial photography and the new physics of the interwar period; the idea of space and time as permanently linked did not fit Albert Einstein’s model of relativity.124 In this context, the German cartographer Karl Haushofer founded a new school of German cartography, which became the vanguard in developing what Haushofer called “suggestive maps.” In the belief that the maps’ geopolitical message was paramount, and scientific accuracy only secondary, these cartographers abandoned the previous centuries’ pretense at scientific exactness in order to articulate political arguments more overtly. Haushofer’s maps, for instance, depicted a Germany under threat from the many nations that surrounded it and often highlighted the number of ethnic Germans living outside of German borders, thus making an argument for German expansion.125 Such cartographic propaganda continued into World War II, when imperial maps served to criticize the extent of the Allies’ empires. This German map, for instance, inverts the symbolic meaning of the nineteenthcentury map of the British Empire (Fig. 10.5). No longer are colonies a sign of the glory of British culture and democracy, but rather are “stolen” from their inhabitants. In German eyes, the extent of the British Empire demonstrated that British imperialism was to blame for the war.126 American cartographers heavily criticized German persuasive mapping as propaganda, while themselves utilizing projections of the globe that depicted the Allied effort as justified.127 In the colonies, too, anticolonial activists deployed maps as a means of challenging existing power structures. Recognizing the work maps had done in justifying political dominance under European rule, activists used maps to construct national identities and argue for national independence. Egyptians and Persians

 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 3: “From Modernity to Modernism” (London: Verso, 2005), 46; Mark Dorrian and Frédéric Pousin, eds., Seeing from Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013); Matt Dyce, “Canada between the Photograph and the Map: Aerial Photography, Geographical Vision and the State,” Journal of Historical Geography 39 (2013): 69–84; Caren Kaplan, Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).  Guntram H. Herb, Under the Map of Germany: Nationalism and Propaganda, 1918–1945 (London: Routledge, 1997); David Thomas Murphy, The Heroic Earth: Geopolitical Thought in Weimar Germany, 1918–1933 (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1997).  “Das geraubte Weltreich,” postcard, approximately 1940, Cornell University Digital Library, accessed 4 April 2022, https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/ss:19343268.  William Rankin, After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87–112.

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Fig. 10.5: Das geraubte Weltreich: Relativizing Nazi conquests.

mapped their national spaces similarly to each other to assert independence from European rule.128 Indian nationalists adopted British cartographies of India wholesale, arguing for a three-thousand year history of cultural unity on the subcontinent as they negotiated with other nations about borders with Pakistan and China.129 Early Soviet cartography depicted proletarian revolutionaries shattering imperial maps before Stalin articulated Soviet imperial politics.130 Other kinds of political activists also utilized maps to make political declarations against the colonial state. In Kenya, for example, Luyia activists articulated claims for territory and resources using maps that showed ethnic unity where the colonial and then the postcolonial state asserted there was none. They used maps as a means to define their claims in the ethnic terms that British colonial officials recognized as legitimate, manipulating colonial ideas about Africans as tribal to their own advantage.131 After independence, postcolonial states used maps to articulate new identities freed from colonial control. Maps became cultural tools to decolonize not only politics but also ideas. Nations renamed cities and landmarks to remove the European designations that colonial powers had used to dominate landscapes. Even so, the new nations often continued the same kinds of surveying and cadastral work that

 Karen Culcasi, “Multiscalar Nations: Cartography and Countercartography of the Egyptian Nation-State,” in Decolonizing the Map: Cartography from Colony to Nation, ed. James R. Akerman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 252–283; Kashani-Sabet, Frontier Fictions.  Edney, Mapping an Empire, 16.  Nick Baron, “World Revolution and Cartography,” in The History of Cartography, vol. 6, “Cartography in the Twentieth Century,” part 2, ed. Mark Monmonier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 1766–1770.  Julie MacArthur, Cartography and the Political Imagination: Mapping Community in Colonial Kenya (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2016).

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colonial governments had done before, as development projects required state infrastructure and a clear delineation of property. As they issued national atlases that enshrined borders as the markers of the nation, surveyors perceived little to no change in their work and continued the same practices they had used under European supervision.132 The continuation of cartographic staff meant that many postindependence maps look nearly the same as colonial maps.133 National borders, drawn by European states at the Berlin Conference in the 1880s, are the most durable aspect of postcolonial African nations, surviving international and domestic conflicts largely unchanged since independence. Despite the arbitrariness of many colonial borders – an arbitrariness that has become even more apparent since the end of colonial rule – the member states of the Organization of African Unity agreed that they would respect all national borders and avoid assisting groups that proposed redrawing borders in other member states. The international community’s recognition of African juridical statehood in forms that followed colonial borders meant that those borders continued into the postcolonial period. Eighty percent of African borders follow lines of latitude or longitude that split communities that are otherwise unified, making it more difficult for states to develop national identities. Postcolonial maps made it appear that African nations were unified politically, even in situations where the main support for national unity was anchored primarily in international recognition of national sovereignty rather than local reality.134 In the same way in the Middle East, colonial borders became the basis of national mapping after independence and served to silence alternative political identities.135 Colonial property maps have also retained significant power to shape postcolonial politics. In most cases, independence agreements did not affect land tenure, meaning that the maps of property ownership drawn up under colonial rule continued to  Raymond B. Craib, “Cartography and Decolonization,” in Decolonizing the Map: Cartography from Colony to Nation, ed. James R. Akerman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 11–71; Mark Monmonier, “The Rise of the National Atlas,” in Images of the World: The Atlas through History, ed. John A. Wolter and Ronald E. Grim (New York: McGraw Hill, 1997), 369–399, here 369.  McGowan, “Uncovering the Roles,” 240–247.  Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Nugent and Asiwaju, “Introduction: Paradox;” Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg, “Why Africa’s Weak States Persist: The Empirical and the Juridical in Statehood,” World Politics 35, no. 1 (1982): 1–24; Pierre Englebert, Africa: Unity, Sovereignty, and Sorrow (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2009), 61; Saadia Touval, The Boundary Politics of Independent Africa (Harvard University Press, 1972); Georges Balandier, “The Colonial Situation: A Theoretical Approach,” in Social Change: The Colonial Situation, ed. Immanuel Wallenstein (New York: Wiley, 1966), 44; Alberto Alesina, William Easterly, and Janina Matuszeski, “Artificial States,” Journal of the European Economic Association 9, no. 2 (2011): 246–277; A. I. Asiwaju, ed., Partitioned Africans: Ethnic Relations across Africa’s International Boundaries 1884–1984 (London: C. Hurst & Company, 1985); Shapiro, Violent Cartographies.  Antrim, Mapping the Middle East, 175–179.

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regulate property relations after independence. Europeans or settlers of European descent in many cases remained in control of the vast majority of land. Land redistribution therefore became an important political issue in many postcolonial states, where political leaders faced demands from their populations for land on which they could farm. It has periodically been a political flashpoint, most prominently in Southern Africa, which had a larger white settler population than most of Africa and through apartheid maintained white-minority rule after most of the continent had achieved independence. Activists continue to challenge the role of imperial maps in shaping today’s economic relations.136 The later twentieth century thus saw further refinements of the imperial map following processes begun in the nineteenth century. New ideas about authenticity and reality began to undermine the power of state maps and anticolonial activists used imperial maps to demand independence in the interwar period. After independence, postcolonial states adopted imperial maps wholesale as their means of depicting new nations. Such maps were the strongest elements of postcolonial states against international and domestic challenges. Imperial maps have also retained power in Europe, where they form an important element in imperial nostalgia. Right-wing politicians from the United Kingdom to Hungary have promoted their resurgent nationalisms using maps of former imperial domains to illustrate claims that national glory has been undermined by international institutions. British imperial maps even spread to the United States in the early years of the Global War on Terror as neoconservative pundits suggested the United States recreate the Pax Britannica to “civilize” the non-western world.137

Conclusion Maps in the imperial tradition maintain significant cultural power today. Explorers remain heroic figures and part of educational curricula, tourism, and popular media. Nineteenth-century “myths of heroic exploration . . . are regenerated in new, often camped-up guises.” Geographical magazines grew in popularity in the twentieth century and schoolbooks continue to teach many of the same narratives

 Arthur J. Ray, Aboriginal Rights Claims and the Making and Remaking of History (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016); Cherryl Walker, ed., Land, Memory, Reconstruction, and Justice: Perspectives on Land Claims in South Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010); Abdon Rwegasira, Land as a Human Right: A History of Land Law and Practice in Tanzania (Oxford: Mkuki na Nyota, 2012); James L. Gibson, Overcoming Historical Injustices: Land Reconciliation in South Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Onias Mafa et al., ed., Gender, Politics and Land Use in Zimbabwe 1980–2012 (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2015).  See, among others: Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (London: Penguin, 2002).

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of exploration and present imperial maps with only minor critique.138 In a former colony, the Islamic State conducted a performance in June 2014 in which a bulldozer “smash[ed] the Sykes-Picot Borders” to claim an anticolonial legacy as it challenged borders in the Middle East.139 Nonetheless, Google Maps, as well as the many other digital mapping products that have largely replaced paper maps, continue to rest on the Mercator projection that was initially developed to aid in Europe’s conquest of the rest of the world. Maps have been an essential tool in the development of European authority over other parts of the globe from the sixteenth century through the twenty-first. Imperial maps communicated European territorial claims more clearly than any other media. The nineteenth century saw the peak of imperial maps as symbols of European authority. New production and distribution technologies, new ideas about the world, and the expansion of European empires combined to make imperial maps widely available and enormously influential. Imperial maps staged European authority over colonized populations for European audiences desirous of belonging to powerful national empires.

 Driver, Geography Militant, 201; Teresa Ploszajska, Geographical Education, Empire and Citizenship: Geographical Teaching and Learning in English Schools, 1870–1944 (England: Historical Geography Research Group, 1999).  Antrim, Mapping the Middle East, 260.

Sally Totman

Imperial Reach: European Explorers and Imperial Agents in the Middle East Abstract: The impact of late-eighteenth- to early-twentieth-century explorers in the Middle East, through their public and mediated personas, was profound. Their influence transformed the region’s geopolitics, economies, and cultures in various ways. Essentially operating as imperial agents in the region, these explorers represented their own interests but also those of European nations. They can be seen as brands and agents of the Imperial Reach that attempted to civilize, from a European perspective, the cultures of the Middle East over the past two centuries. Exemplified through a series of highly visible and renowned figures, this chapter links how these empowered and visible ‘explorers’ engaged in a range of activities and helped to define the modern, often-conflicted dimensions and perceptions of the Middle East. Keywords: persona studies, Middle East, explorers, civilization, imperial, VARP ✶✶✶

Western culture has long had a mixed reading of exploration and the value of explorers. On one level, explorers were seen as providers of knowledge pathways into what Europeans categorized as uncharted or unknown lands. These explorers also operated, however, as direct agents of economic and state-derived power as Europe and eventually the United States extended their reach over large expanses of the world. This chapter maps the influence of late-eighteenth- to early-twentieth-century European explorers onto the profound transformations in the region categorized as the Middle East.1 Within this chapter, the term ‘explorer’ broadly refers to archeologists, scientists, writers, and traders, among others – all European – who travelled to the Middle East on a journey of discovery of some kind. These agents of transformation were captivating personalities who lived in the media spotlight, and at the same time were often strongly aligned with European states’ geopolitical and economic objectives. Collectively they served as visible proxies of the political and spatial structures imposed by European colonizers onto the Middle East, producing long-term instability there. This chapter investigates these personas, with “persona” understood to be “an identity that is used to navigate the social world” and

 The term ‘Middle East’ has multiple definitions and in this context is used to refer to the lands around the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, inhabited by Arabic-speaking populations including the areas known today as the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, and the Maghreb, as well as Iran, Turkey, and Israel. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110574012-011

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“a performance of the self . . . to be used in some public settings.”2 The chapter focuses specifically on the personifying agency of these highly visible explorers: how they were celebrified through news, visual media, and other publication reportage of their imperial exploits, and how the prestige of that visible agency led to personalized interventions within the region during the long nineteenth century and into the twentieth century.3 This chapter takes, as its analytical lens, the conceptual frameworks developed in the related fields of Persona Studies and Celebrity Studies, which understand agency to be a personalized and individualized presentation of the self, designed to lead to transformation. In this sense, the term ‘agent’ goes beyond the military connotation which would link these explorers to espionage and other military tactics. It also takes a different approach from the analysis of discourse represented most famously by the work of Edward Said. In his seminal work Orientalism, which has been fundamental in shaping post-modern discourse for the past forty years, Said critiques in detail the work and impact that many of these early explorers had on scholarship about the Middle East.4 The present chapter, however, is not as concerned with the content of these explorers’ texts and findings, but more with their media presence and the tangible impact they had on the politics and history of the region. It focuses on the explorers’ value and agency, and how those were integrated with their perceived reputation (often linked to their expertise) and their celebrity-like prestige into personas that had influence on how the Middle East is structured today. These four elements – value, agency, reputation, and prestige – are key concepts developed in Persona Studies in recent years. Combined under the acronym VARP, these elements represent how individuals are privileged in the media to make them “visible for some form of economic value.”5 VARP focuses on how personas are simultaneously personalized, commodified, and managed in public, both  P. David Marshall, Christopher Moore, and Kim Barbour, Persona Studies: An Introduction (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), 238.  The term ‘persona’ has been investigated by a number of scholars including the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. This chapter’s analysis of individuals enacting change in the Middle East integrates the recent research in Persona Studies (Marshall, Moore, and Barbour, Persona Studies) to help explain how personalities were performed and represented through their actions, visibility, and presence, and thereby shaped the structure of the Middle East. For the celebritization of explorers in the media, see: Berny Sèbe, “Exhibiting the Empire in Print: The Press, the Publishing World and the Promotion of ‘Greater Britain,’” in Exhibiting the Empire: Cultures of Display and the British Empire, ed. John McAler and John M. MacKenzie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017); Edward Berenson, “Charisma and the Making of Imperial Heroes in Britain and France, 1880–1914,” in Constructing Charisma: Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 21–40.  Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).  Marshall, Moore, and Barbour, Persona Studies, 72–79, quote on 79. For further related background see: P. David Marshall, “The Commodified Celebrity-Self: Industrialized Agency and the Contemporary Attention Economy,” Popular Communication 19, no. 3 (2021): 164–177; Christopher

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by the individuals behind the personas and by other commercial entities who use the value of those personas for their own branding strategies. Prestige is the most potent of the four elements in determining a persona’s potential for influence and commodification. It is defined as “the capacity for an individual to gain widespread respect and admiration through the development and use of a persona.”6 Prestige is further reliant on the interrelated elements of value, agency, and reputation. While prestige has a longer-term temporal dimension and extensive geographical reach, reputation is more ad-hoc and changeable: it is the projection and performance of a wished-for image, used to engage with and manage one’s place within the attention economy.7 Both reputation and prestige can “morph” into a brand and become “a pathway for commodifying elements of the self that ultimately may prove one’s value to others.”8 The “replication and recirculation” of a persona’s image creates and enhances its value as a commodity, while the agency of media personas lies in their ability to use that value to advocate for social and political action. Agency today is captured in the “pedagogical power of celebrities,” for instance Scarlett Johansson and Sandra Bullock campaigning for AIDS awareness and Angelina Jolie doing the same for breast cancer screening.9 The power of the mediated persona thus rests in its alignment with consumer culture, and the way that celebrity personas are further appropriated as part of the self-branding strategies of consumers through the expressive and indexical nature of their consumer choices. While the VARP framework was originally developed for understanding online personas, earlier traces of such branding can be seen in the explorers of the nineteenth century. They curated their personas in the media and managed their prestige in ways that unlocked funds for their personal projects. But their international prestige, often highlighted in the value of their expertise, also reflected back on their home countries, which enabled their state governments to brand themselves through association with the explorers’ personas. This branding could have a secondary, but very real, financial benefit, as European states presented themselves in ways that legitimized their claimed rights to colonies. France’s so-called ‘civilizing mission’ is a prime example: resting on the public prestige of French explorers, it was employed as justification (in European eyes) for all manner of abuses inherent in France’s imperial project. Those colonial branding strategies, both on the part of the explorers and their European homelands, led to concrete political action in the twentieth century, specifically in redrawing state borders in the Middle East. Renowned figures such as Sir Richard

Moore, Kim Barbour, and Katya Lee, “Five Dimensions of Online Persona,” Persona Studies 3, no. 1 (2017): 1–12.  Marshall, Moore, and Barbour, Persona Studies, 78.  Marshall, Moore, and Barbour, Persona Studies, 77–78; for a definition of the term attention economy: 224.  Marshall, Moore, and Barbour, Persona Studies, 78.  Marshall, Moore, and Barbour, Persona Studies, 74–77.

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Francis Burton, William Gifford Palgrave, Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, and perhaps most significantly Gertrude Bell and T. E. Lawrence, along with a host of others, inhabited an intermediary space as agents both of transformation and of empire. In the political act of redrawing boundaries, the mediated construction of personas like Bell and Lawrence created the foundation for this willful act of domination and the extension of European spheres of influence in the colonial space. Their prestige was based on their (perceived) expertise and ability to express their findings with scientific clarity, just as their ability to identify what was valuable in the region laid the groundwork for the theft of artifacts out of the region and into Europe. The forceful extension of their own national interests into areas that were in no way linked to their nations, as well as their naturalized and embedded sense of racial superiority, helped to lay the groundwork for the physical domination of the Middle East. This chapter links the complex and constructed personas of these imperious agents with the imperial project. Linking these explorers to political, economic, and cultural transformations helps to illuminate the origins of the tension-filled history of post-colonization, as the United States’ current hegemonic involvement in the region replicates this past in ways that are no longer immediately visible.

I Great Powers: Great Rivalries To make sense of how imperial agents acted to transform the Middle East in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, some background history of how the region intersected and exchanged with the West helps to understand how their later, staged roles played out. Historically, there were two important trade routes connecting the East and the West: the Silk Road from East Asia and the Spice Trade Route, which connected the Middle East and North Africa, as well as India and Indonesia, to Europe.10 Both routes were economically important and brought spices and herbs (as well as opium, incense, and later coffee) from the East to Europe. These commodities were in high demand for medicines, cosmetics, perfumes, and religious rituals. When the Spice Trade was interrupted by the Seljuk Empire in the late eleventh century, this formed part of the impetus for the First Crusade.11 As an intermediary, La Serenissima, often referred to as the Republic of Venice, held a monopoly over the spice trade from the eighth to the fifteenth century. These established trade relations changed after 1453 with the fall of Constantinople and the rising dominance of the Ottoman Empire over the Middle East, spurring an increased drive for exploration on the part of Europe’s coastal monarchies. Their voyaging began in earnest during the fifteenth century and

 The Silk Road refers primarily to the land routes connecting East and South-East Asia with South Asia, Persia, the Arabian Peninsula, and East Africa to Southern Europe.  Charles Corn, The Scents of Eden: A History of the Spice Trade (New York: Kodansha, 1999).

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coincided with technological advances in sea travel. Financial incentives were not alone in prompting exploration, as European princes sought to demonstrate their power through the conquest and domination of foreign lands. Explorers from all parts of Europe began crisscrossing the globe, claiming new discoveries and new territories for their homelands. By the end of the eighteenth century, maps of the known world had changed dramatically, as they now included both North and South America and much of the South Pacific too. The term ‘Middle East’ is itself a reflection of its geographical relationship to Europe – as defined by Europe.12 Today the term has various geographical definitions but usually is said to include the Arab world plus Iran, Israel, and Turkey.13 This spans the area from Morocco in the west to Iran in the east, Turkey in the north to Sudan in the south.14 Interestingly, the definition of the Arab World used today is also of imperial European provenance, based on membership in the League of Arab States, an organization set-up by the British in 1945. As has always been the case when it comes to great-power rivalries, the dominant European powers of the time saw these discoveries (and rediscoveries in some cases) as a physical demonstration of their reach and their great power supremacy. It should be noted, however, that European knowledge and interactions with the Middle East date back to the Greeks and the Romans. Accounts of this exchange can be found in the writings of ancient historians, such as Herodotus and Tacitus.15 Arguably the best-known work of classical antiquity on the Middle East is Periplus of the Erythraean Sea from the first century, which describes the trade and the coasts of the Red Sea and southern Arabian Peninsula.16 During the Middle Ages, much of this knowledge was temporarily lost to Europe and it was not until the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese circumnavigated the Arabian Peninsula and occupied Muscat and various other points on the Gulf coast, that mainland Europeans reestablished their knowledge of the region through their physical presence there.17 It was Napoleon Bonaparte’s conquest of Egypt in

 Related terms: ‘Far East’ designates East Asia and is used to refer to the areas further east than the Arab world. ‘Near East’ originally was used to refer to Anatolia, East Thrace (modern day Turkey), and Egypt but was replaced by the broader term ‘Middle East’ in the early twentieth century.  The Arab World refers to the twenty-two Arabic-speaking countries which are members of the League of Arab States.  Middle East countries by this definition are: Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Iran, Israel, and Turkey.  Herodotus, Herodotus: The Histories (London: Penguin Classics, 1954); Cornelius Tacitus, Tacitus: The Annals of Imperial Rome (London: Penguin Classics, 1956).  The author is unknown, but the work was most likely written or compiled by an Alexandrian Greek. See: G. W. B. Huntingford, ed., The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, by an unknown author: With some Extracts from Agatharkhides ‘On the Erythraean Sea’ (London: Hakluyt Society, 1980).  A notable exception during this period is the city of Cordoba in Spain, which was under the rule of the Umayyad’s. It was renown as a center of learning with knowledge of medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and botany far exceeding the rest of Europe at the time.

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1798–1801, however, which marked the start of Europe’s modern rediscovery of the Middle East. In the process of conquest, Napoleon constructed a persona of himself that expressed France’s (and Europe’s) world leadership and centrality and coincided with the rise of imperialism. Britain and France were most active in colonizing the Middle East, but explorers from all over Europe were instrumental in establishing Europe’s dominance over the region, operating as intermediating agents representing European values and interests. This lasted until shortly after the end of World War II, when the balance between the great world powers shifted in favor of the United States and the Soviet Union, although to a lesser extent for the latter in the Middle East and North Africa.18 Today the presence and influence of the United States in the Middle East is ubiquitous. Whether it is physically through troops stationed in Iraq, near-daily drone strikes in Yemen, assassinations of foreign adversaries in other sovereign nations, or the “Deal of the Century,” which once again desires to redraw the map, the authority of the United States and its power in the region is unquestionable.19 The antecedents for this hegemony are rooted in nineteenth-century Europe’s exploration and domination of the region, activated by key personalities and the strategic personas they developed.

II Knowledge, Conquest, and Control Outside powers have always been fascinated by the Orient and especially the Holy Land because of the religious significance of the city of Jerusalem. The Crusades, driven by a parade of prominent kings, knights, and their armies, represent a good example of this attraction: capturing Jerusalem was a goal of every Crusade, although more often than not an unfulfilled one. Here we see a first legendary set of constructed leadership personas, from Richard the Lionheart and Frederick Barbarossa to Philip II of France, which linked the Middle East to Western European religious consciousness.20

 See: James Barr, Lords of the Desert: Britain’s Struggle with America to Dominate the Middle East (London: Simon & Schuster, 2018).  This question is covered in more detail in section III of this chapter. The deal is officially called: United States Government, Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People. The details were released in January 2020. See the plan as archived on the White House Archives website, accessed 10 April 2022, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/peacetopro sperity/.  Sidney Painter, “The Third Crusade: Richard the Lionhearted and Philip Augustus,” in A History of the Crusades, ed. Kenneth M. Setton, vol. 2 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 45–86; Edgar N. Johnson, “The Crusades of Frederick Barbarossa and Henry,” in A History of the Crusades, ed. Kenneth M. Setton, vol. 2 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 87–122.

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As noted above, Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt was a turning point in Europe’s relationship with the Middle East. Alongside the conquest’s military aims, the French expedition pursued research goals as well: 167 scientists and scholars traveled with the expeditionary forces and, upon arrival in Egypt, founded the Institut d’Égypte. Their research in Egypt produced the four-volume series Memoirs Relative to Egypt Published During the Campaign of General Bonaparte in the Years 1798 and 1799, and was the first scientific research on the Middle East by Western scholars in the emerging field of Egyptology.21 The institute later published a more comprehensive work over the course of twenty years entitled Description of Egypt, or the collection of observations and researches which were made in Egypt during the expedition of the French Army on Napoleon’s orders. This work contained a series of publications cataloguing all aspects of ancient and modern Egypt including its natural history. The work brought together over 160 scholars and scientists as well as over 2,000 artists and technicians. Among them were a wide range of scientific luminaries, such as the chemist Claude Louis Berthollet, the engineer Nicolas-Jacques Conté, the botanist Alire Raffeneau Delile, the archaeologist Vivant Denon, the geologist Déodat de Dolomieu, physicist Étienne-Louis Malus, the naturalist Étienne Saint-Hilaire, and mathematicians Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier and Gaspard Monge.22 In its own day, the publication fueled the growing fascination with Ancient Egypt and its culture, creating the foundation for Egyptology in Europe, and the work has continued to receive significant praise from historians for its ground-breaking insights. The Institut d’Égypte continues to thrive in Cairo today. This initial foray linked knowledge to French military power in a literal sense, giving motivation to other explorers to take conceptual possession of the region by gathering foundational knowledge that could enhance their prestige back in Europe. It is important to note that travel and exploration during this period were not easy. Travel was expensive and time consuming, and explorers faced physical privation and the possibility of death on their uncertain wanderings. But they explored nonetheless, becoming value agents in both senses: shoring up their own prestige, accruing social capital that they could trade on back in Europe, and providing value to their home governments by association. Indeed, explorers were often directly motivated by national or imperial concerns. The French invasion of Egypt in 1798 is a prime example: alongside its overtly stated aim of defending France’s trade interests, it also sought to weaken British influence and limit its rival’s access to colonies in India. As a result, explorers on both sides were quite literally intelligence agents or

 Original title: Mémoires sur l’Égypte, publiés pendant les campagnes du Général Bonaparte dans les années 1798 and 1799, published in 1798–1801. The English translation of volume 1 was published in 1800.  Original title: Description de l’Égypte, ou Recueil des observations et des recherches qui ont été faites en Égypte pendant l’expédition de l’armée française. The first volume was published in 1809 and the final volume in 1829.

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spies trying to increase the power of their own country by subverting the interests of rival powers. At mid-century, Palgrave became a prime example of such interwoven motivations, as he was simultaneously a British priest, explorer, author, and diplomat, and a spy for France.23 In 1862, he traveled to Arabia, supposedly to begin missionary work, but in reality went at the behest of Napoleon III. Journeying into southern Nejd as far as Aflaj, farther than any of his predecessors, Palgrave also conducted scholarship that, while containing numerous exaggerations, was considered exceptional in his time, to the extent that his contemporaries relied on it for their own understanding of the area. At other times, explorers were economic agents who constructed themselves in the Western media as agents of imperial reputational power by opening up new markets and bringing riches to their empires through trade. India was initially ‘opened up’ by a trading company. The adage that ‘trade follows the flag,’ which gained popularity in the mid- to late nineteenth century, aptly captures this economic and potential wealth motivation. Personal greed was also a dominant motivation for the explorers-cum-treasure hunters, although they often hid the venal nature of their exploits behind a more idealized adventurer persona interested only in selflessly representing the interests of their imperial homeland. Successful exploration also brought them financial rewards back home, in the form of book contracts and government jobs, as well as social capital that could be translated into the accolade of knighthood. As a result, some of the better-known explorers like David Livingstone and Lawrence, the latter often referred to as Lawrence of Arabia, became national icons, migrating from government reports and news reportage into the social imaginary of Britain’s youth through its educational system. Some explorers, such as Livingstone and Burton, traveled as missionaries or pilgrims, or for some other religiously inspired motivation, while others were genuinely motivated by scientific enquiry. This last group were often members of the Royal Geographical Society, founded in 1830.24 Both religious and scientific public identities projected a virtuous persona, occluding the selfishness and exploitative qualities of their missions. Despite their differences, the one thing all of these explorers had in common

 Palgrave Press (now called Palgrave Macmillan) was named after the Palgrave family including Sir Francis Palgrave and his four sons, who all published with Macmillan Publishers in the nineteenth century. William Gifford Palgrave published with Macmillan his two-volume work describing his travels and adventures: William Gifford Palgrave, Narrative of a Year’s Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia (London: Macmillan, 1865). It was the most widely read book on the region until the account by T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (New York: Doubleday, 1991 [1926]), was published in 1926. Palgrave’s espionage found echoes, in a remarkably similar way, in the twentieth century in Kim Philby and then in Kermit (Kim) Roosevelt. See: Barr, Lords of the Desert; Kermit Roosevelt, Countercoup: The Struggle for Control of Iran (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979).  See: Clements R. Markham, The Fifty Years’ Work of the Royal Geographical Society, Cambridge Library Collection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2009 [1881]).

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was an assumption of their own superiority and, as a corollary, the inferiority of those among whom they were traveling. The belief in racial superiority was the bedrock of a communal form of European prestige, which the explorers embodied as they presented their personas both in European and in the Middle East. This cultural development reflects the changed power balance that the nineteenth century brought about, in which inhabitants of the Middle East and North Africa were seen not as individuals but as objects – and inferior ones at that. It should also be noted that there was little exploration in the other direction: very few Muslims explored Europe during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, aside from some isolated visits. It was also during this time period that religion became subordinate to rational inquiry, and this had important implications for the nature of exploration and, of course, colonialism, imperialism, and the uses (and misuses) of knowledge. This transformation changed the relationship of Europeans to the Middle East at a fundamental level. Instead of viewing the Middle East as the birthplace of religion(s), as ancient and medieval Europeans had done, nineteenth-century scholars viewed the region with a more ‘scientific’ understanding, which allowed them to translate these lands into a region ripe for intellectual penetration and physical exploitation. Examples of this nexus of knowledge and power are myriad. They were embodied by the explorers’ personalized personas, and their self-presentational strategies – and the prestige that those conferred – deserve an in-depth survey here. Following Napoleon’s campaigns in Egypt, France experienced a resurgence in interest in Egyptian history and culture. Undoubtedly some of this increased interest was due to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 during the campaign, which in large part led to the creation of Egyptology as a field of scholarship. One of the key figures in terms of scholarly interest in this area was Jean-François Champollion, who, along with the British Egyptologist Thomas Young, deciphered the Rosetta Stone, making it possible for ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics to be deciphered accurately. Champollion was also close friends with Ippolito Rosellini, who is considered the founder of Egyptology in Italy. Together they undertook the FrancoTuscan Expedition in 1828–1829, which is best remembered for bringing back to Paris from Egypt the obelisk from the entrance of the Luxor Temple that now stands on the Place de la Concorde. Delving further into knowledge about Egypt, the Prussian archaeologist Karl Lepsius led an expedition in 1842 that resulted in the publication of Monuments from Egypt and Ethiopia, a twelve-volume compendium of nearly 900 plates of ancient Egyptian inscriptions with accompanying commentary and descriptions. These plans, maps, and drawings of temple and tomb walls remained the chief source of information for Western scholars well into the twentieth century and are still used today, as they are often the sole record of monuments that have since been destroyed or reburied. Possibly the most famous, and certainly the most notorious, explorer of the mid-nineteenth century was Burton, the British translator, linguist, diplomat, and amateur pornographer. In the 1860s, Burton made a well-documented journey to

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Mecca and, alongside John Hanning Speke, was the first European to visit the Great Lakes of Africa in search of the source of the Nile.25 Burton was a prolific writer and his translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night in 1885 and The Perfumed Garden of the Cheikh Nefzaoui: A Manual of Arabian Erotology in 1886 are enlightening for their insight not just into the region but into the mind of the explorer.26 Burton’s writings, like those of his fellow countryman Charles Montagu Doughty, author of the timeless classic Travels in Arabia Deserta, were a major influence on explorers who followed.27 Doughty travelled in north-central Arabia by himself for almost two years in 1877–1878. He made no attempt to conceal his identity as a Christian and an Englishman, unlike Burton and many others who cultivated different personas strategically while navigating Arabian cultures. Doughty was especially interested in Bedouin life, ancient inscriptions and ruins, and in hydrography. He explored and correctly determined the headwater areas of both the Wadi Hamdh, which flows into the Red Sea, and the Wadi ar Rumma, which originates in the Harrat Khaybar. Bell, a British explorer, author, archaeologist, and diplomat, was one of the most intriguing, visible, and, in terms of gender, unique Western identities to circulate through the Middle East. She played a major role in the creation of Iraq and Jordan and was instrumental in helping to position Western power and authority throughout the Middle East. Born in 1868 to an extremely wealthy upper-class family with major connections to power and influence, Bell established many firsts. She was the first woman to earn a first-class degree from Oxford in modern history and was only the third woman ever to be elected to the Society of Antiquaries of London. Bell’s love of the Middle East began in 1892 when she travelled to Iran where her uncle was British ambassador. While in Iran, Bell wrote her first travel book, Persian Pictures, and

 Richard Burton, A Secret Pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina (London: Folio Society, 2004 [1865]).  Richard Burton, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, vols. 1–10 (1885–1888), in: Burtoniana, ed. Gavin Tredoux, accessed 10 April 2022, http://www.burtoniana.org/books/1885-Ara bian%20Nights/; Richard Burton, The Perfumed Garden (Dodo Press, 2005 [1886]). Burton published over forty books and numerous articles. Many of his journals and correspondences have also been published. Interestingly Burton’s tomb, which was designed by his wife, is in the shape of a Bedouin tent. For more information see: “Mausoleum of Sir Richard and Lady Burton, Churchyard of St Mary Magdalen,” Historic England, accessed 10 April 2022, https://historicengland.org.uk/list ing/the-list/list-entry/1065392. Edward Rice, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: The Secret Agent Who Made the Pilgrimage to Makkah, Discovered the Kama Sutra, and brought the Arabian Nights to the West (New York: Scribner, 1990).  Charles Montagu Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta, vols. 1–2 (Adamant Media, 2000 [1888]). See also: T. J. Assad, Three Victorian Travellers: Burton, Blunt, Doughty (London: Routledge, 2016, [1964]); Fawn M. Brodie, The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967); Byron Farwell, Burton: A Biography of Sir Richard Francis Burton (New York: Penguin, 1990 [1963]); Jon R. Godsall, The Tangled Web: A Life of Sir Richard Burton (Leicester: Matador, 2008); Dane Kennedy, The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).

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subsequently taught herself Persian and translated the Persian poet Hafez.28 Bell travelled extensively in Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Egypt, Palestine, and Arabia, spending long days in the saddle in difficult terrain. Her fortitude under taxing conditions clearly predated but ultimately resembled the actions and agency of Lawrence.29 In later years, she also undertook several archaeology-related journeys, including a trek along the course of the Euphrates River in 1909. Bell often documented the sites she found by taking photographs and worked with archaeologist Sir William Mitchell Ramsey on the publication in 1909 of The Thousand and One Churches. Her work as a value agent extended beyond cultural knowledge, however. During her career in military intelligence and civil service, Bell was the only woman working for the British government in the Middle East. She collaborated with Lawrence in the Arab Bureau during World War I when she was based in Cairo. She gathered and analyzed information to help the British oust the Ottoman Empire from the region. After the war, confident in her perceived (and now widely accepted) expertise, Bell sought to help the Arabs. Her policy paper Self-Determination in Mesopotamia earned her a seat at the Peace Conference in Paris in 1919. Bell continued to explore related political and social issues in her 1920 work Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia, which further cemented her renown and knowledge in the region.30 Bell subsequently established the Baghdad Archaeological Museum, now known as the Iraq Museum, in order to preserve the country’s artistic heritage. In 1922, she was named the director of antiquities by King Faisal and, in this capacity, worked assiduously until her death in 1926 to keep important artifacts in Iraq.31 In the same spirit, Bell aided in crafting the Law of Excavation in 1922.32 Bell’s persona has long outlived her lifetime. She is possibly one of the bestdocumented women in history. In the Bell Archive at Newcastle University, there is

 Bell’s English translations of these poems are still considered some of the finest versions of these works today. In 1897, Bell also learned Arabic.  While Lawrence’s 480 km camel journey in June 1917 is renown and even immortalized in the 1962 Academy Award winning film Lawrence of Arabia, it is interesting to note that Bell’s journeys were in many ways far more remarkable. For example, in 1913, Bell completed her last and most arduous Arabian journey, traveling about 2900 kms from Damascus to the politically volatile Ha’il, then back across the Arabian Peninsula to Baghdad, and from there returning to Damascus. Bell was only the second foreign woman after Lady Ann Blunt to visit Ha’il and, having arrived during a period of instability, was held captive in the city for eleven days.  Georgina Howell, Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006); Liora Lukitz, A Quest in the Middle East: Gertrude Bell and the Making of Modern Iraq (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006).  Bell is buried in the British Cemetery in Baghdad, Iraq.  Amanda Adams, Ladies of the Field: Early Women Archaeologists and their Search for Adventure (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2010).

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almost twenty-five meters of shelving containing sixteen diaries, seven archaeological field books, over sixteen thousand letters, as well as dozens of notebooks and other writings.33 This does not include the more than seven thousand photographs taken on her travels. As is evident from this array of activities, there is no question that Bell was a unique, unusual, and incredibly influential and authoritative figure – a finely developed persona who, despite her own extensive use of photography, was rarely ever captured on camera, unlike her male counterparts. While some have posited that Bell’s political authority resulted primarily from her privileged background, this is not the entire story. There is much evidence to support the view that it was Bell’s character and persona that enabled her to achieve all that she did at a time when women were rarely imbued with political authority. Along with Bell, there were other contemporaneous British notables who exerted their influence and authority in the Middle East. And like Bell, they were value agents who interacted with the government in opening up territories to knowledge as a form of domination. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, a British poet and writer, undertook a number of journeys to the Middle East with his wife Lady Anne Blunt, the granddaughter of Lord Byron. Like Bell, Lady Anne relied on her explorer’s persona on foreign soil to circumvent gender expectations that would have restricted her actions back home, thus benefitting from the scaffolding of imperialism that made tools of dominance available to her. As the first European woman, in 1879, to enter the Arabian Peninsula, Lady Anne’s journals contain fascinating geographic information about the region and Bedouin life.34 Another explorer couple were British Egyptologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie and his wife Hilde Petrie, who together excavated many important archaeological sites in Egypt.35 Petrie traveled to Giza in Egypt in early 1880 and was the first archaeologist to investigate properly how the pyramids were constructed, providing much of the basic data regarding the pyramid plateau to this day.36 Petrie also carried out archaeological work in Palestine, which was the first scientific excavation of an archaeological site in the Holy Land.37 Thousands of artifacts recovered during excavations led by Petrie can be

 Newcastle University, Gertrude Bell Archive, accessed 10 April 2022, http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/.  The couple brought Arabian horses to Europe and today the vast majority of purebred Arabian horses trace their blood line to their Crabbet Arabian Stud. Elizabeth Longford, A Pilgrimage of Passion: The Life of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979).  Margaret S. Drower, Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology, 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); Margaret S. Drower, Letters from the Desert: The Correspondence of Flinders and Hilda Petrie (Oxford: Aris and Phillips, 2004). Flinders Petrie’s grandfather was the famed explorer Captain Matthew Flinders who circumnavigated New Holland (now Australia), identified it as a continent, and gave it the name Terra Australis.  Anthony Sattin, Lifting the Veil: British Society in Egypt 1768–1956 (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1988).  William Matthew Flinders Petrie, Seventy Years in Archaeology (New York: H. Holt, 1932).

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found in museums worldwide.38 Based on his expertise in the field, Petrie trained many of the best archaeologists of the day, including Howard Carter, and held the first chair of Egyptology in the United Kingdom.39 In 1923, Petrie’s renown was publicly presented: he was knighted for services to British archaeology and Egyptology. His explorer persona was further accentuated when he retired ten years later, in 1933, and moved to Jerusalem for the last twelve years of his life.40 Similarly involved in major excavations in Egypt was Carter, the British archaeologist, Egyptologist, and one-time Petrie protégé, who is most famous for discovering the intact tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922. Carter, who was appointed Chief Inspector of the Egyptian Antiquities Service in 1899, supervised a number of excavations at Luxor and was celebrated for his advances in the protection and accessibility of excavation sites, as well as his development of a grid-block system for searching for tombs.41 In 1907, Lord Carnarvon employed Carter to supervise various excavations in Egypt and in 1914, after Carnarvon received the concession to dig in the Valley of the Kings, Carter was charged with leading the project.42 In November 1922, Carter and his team stumbled upon the tomb of Tutankhamun, which was the best-preserved and most intact pharaonic tomb ever found in the Valley of the Kings. Carter’s detailed cataloguing of the thousands of items in the tomb continued until 1932. Unlike many of his counterparts, Carter received no honor from the British government for his extraordinary finds, even though his reputation has toured with his discoveries to a level of world renown. Even for explorers who were not directly involved in state colonization projects, their personas brought prestige to their European homelands as advanced cultural nations, which reinforced the explorers’ status as value agents. The German mathematician and surveyor Carsten Niebuhr led a five-person expedition known as the Royal Danish Arabia Expedition from 1761 to 1767, through the Arabian Peninsula to what is now Yemen and Oman and back via Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq). He was the only member of the party to survive, and his writings of the trip were influential for future explorers. Similar to Niebuhr, Johann Ludwig Burckhardt described his explorations in the early nineteenth century in minute detail. While the Swiss explorer is best known for ‘discovering’ the ancient Nabatean site of Petra (in present-day Jordan), he lived for many years in the Levant and was an influential scholar and Arabist who subsequently  See: Alice Stevenson and Emma Libonati, “Distribution Destination of Artefacts from British Excavations in Egypt,” Artefacts of Excavation: British Excavations in Egypt 1880–1980, accessed 10 April 2022, http://egyptartefacts.griffith.ox.ac.uk/?q=destinations-index; Drower, Flinders Petrie.  Petrie was the first Edwards Professor of Egyptian Archaeology and Philology at University College in London.  Petrie died on 28 July 1942.  Barbara Ford, Howard Carter: Searching for King Tut (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1995), 19. At the time, Luxor was known as Thebes.  Bill Price, Tutankhamun: Egypt’s Most Famous Pharaoh (Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2007), 121–122.

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converted to Islam. Following this visible conversion, he was one of the first Europeans to enter the cities of Mecca and Medina. His description of the Hajj and of everyday life in the two holy cities left little to be added by those following him.43 Burckhardt also collected significant material about other parts of the Middle East, which he incorporated in his Travels in Arabia in 1829 and Notes on the Bedouins and Wahábys: Collected During His Travels in the East in 1831. All of these explorers also harbored an intrinsic assumption of their own superiority and, as a corollary, the inferiority of non-Europeans. The British spoke of the “White Man’s Burden” and the French touted their mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission) as legitimation for colonization, as they argued it was their duty to bring civilization to backward and uncivilized indigenous populations.44 One manifestation of this bias was that explorers did not approve of, and did not trust, the way the local inhabitants treated archaeological sites and artifacts. This was one of the main impetuses behind taking the finds back to Europe for ‘safe-keeping,’ as the explorers felt that local governments could not be trusted with the task of preservation and future custody. This inherent racism, to use a twenty-first century view of the situation, is the reason so many of the antiquities collected by the British, French, and other Europeans throughout the Middle East, but especially in Egypt and Mesopotamia, ended up in European museums.45 At times the European powers did not trust each other either, for example when the antiquities collected by the French during the 1799–1801 expedition in Egypt were seized by the British navy and delivered to the British Museum. Only about fifty of the Louvre’s 5,000 Egyptian objects today were collected during this expedition.46 As part of this distorted view of the local populace, many explorers developed and held theories about the indigenous populations that colored the lens through which they recorded their exploits. Petrie, for example, held intensely pro-eugenics opinions and strongly believed that cultural and social innovations in indigenous societies were due to factors such as migration and foreign conquest, which resulted in interbreeding, rather than emerging from the people themselves. Petrie believed himself to be part of the “fine Caucasian” race which entered Egypt around 3000 BCE and, having conquered the “inferior” race inhabiting Egypt, interbred with them, producing the Dynastic civilization of Pharaonic Egypt and the cultural  The Hajj is the annual pilgrimage to Mecca that all Muslims are expected to make at least once in their lifetime (if they can afford to do so).  The White Man’s Burden was a poem by Rudyard Kipling written to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria on 22 June 1897. It centers on the imperialist idea that the “white man” is morally obligated to civilize the “non-whites” as they are primitive and incapable of selfgovernment or developing a civilized culture without external help. Rudyard Kipling, The White Man’s Burden (1899), Fordham University, Modern History Sourcebook, accessed 10 April 2022, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/Kipling.asp.  Modern-day Iraq and Syria.  Juan Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

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and technological advances of that period.47 Burton likewise held some idiosyncratic, but highly influential, views of indigenous societies, for instance postulating the existence of a geographically-defined Sotadic Zone in which pederasty was prevalent. According to Burton: “The Sotadic Zone covers the whole of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia now occupied by the ‘unspeakable Turk,’ a race of born pederasts. . . . The Kurd population is of Iranian origin, which means that the evil is deeply rooted: I have noted in The Nights that the great and glorious Saladin was a habitual pederast.”48 Such was Burton’s fascination with the Sotadic Zone that he wrote a 14,000-word essay about it, in which he went into great detail about the depravity found in the region and how it corrupted Europeans who spent time there.49 Burton’s novel exposé of Middle Eastern culture further reaffirmed the widely held belief in Western Europe of its authoritative superiority throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century.

III Old Wine in New Bottles As the previous section has shown, in the years following Napoleon I, explorers and travelers to the Middle East laid the intellectual foundations for the armies, administrators, and bankers who followed. Trade played a key role in the European economic dominance of the Middle East as did colonialism, often in a linear fashion. Knowledge of extra-European territories facilitated trade between European countries and those newly colonized regions, which further led to the outright economic exploitation of colonizer over colonized. Projects such as the Suez Canal became important strategically for the French and later the British, as the canal provided a short-cut between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean.50 This assisted the colonial powers in governing their colonies and increasing trade, as well as feeding into military strategies. When Britain invaded and occupied Egypt in 1882, it took de facto control of the canal zone, which played an important part

 This may also have been part of the reason why Petrie donated his head (and brain) to science, which is now stored at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. See: Neil Asher Silberman, “Petrie’s Head: Eugenics and Near Eastern Archaeology,” in Assembling the Past: Studies in the Professionalization of Archaeology, ed. Alice B. Kehoe and Mary Beth Emmerichs (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000), 69–79.  Richard Burton, “Pederasty” in “Terminal Essay,” in The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, vol. 10 (1886), 232. The full text of the essay can be found at: Burtoniana, ed. Gavin Tredoux, accessed 10 April 2022, http://www.burtoniana.org/books/1885-Arabian%20Nights/.  Burton, “Pederasty.”  The Suez Canal opened in 1869 and was financed by the French and Egyptian governments. The British acquired the Egyptian share of the canal operating company in 1875 when the Egyptian government became insolvent.

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in World War I as Britain and France were able to close the canal to non-Allied shipping.51 Just as European explorers laid the groundwork for the trade and colonial acquisitions that followed them, this economic expansion laid the foundation for the political, social, and military developments in the Middle East and North Africa from the early twentieth century until today. During World War I, British forces used their knowledge of the Middle East and its inhabitants, gained during the nineteenth century, to defeat the Ottoman forces. This in turn hastened the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1922 and led to the eventual carving up of the region by the British and the French. British victories in Palestine during the war also meant that they were the ones most concerned with what was called the Eastern Question: what would happen to the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ – the declining Ottoman Empire – once it collapsed. The answer to the question would determine which European powers would gain control of former Ottoman territory. Figures like Bell were critical to this geopolitical decision-making process. Her established persona as an expert, advocate, and agent in the region positioned her as an intermediary between cultural prestige and politics, and gave her a significant role in answering the Eastern Question. To understand the complexities of this situation, and its influence on events in the Middle East today, it is first important to understand what occurred in those circumstances, since the roots of almost all the major issues in the region stem from that period. In 1916, at the height of the British campaign against the crumbling Ottoman forces, British military commanders incited indigenous tribes to form the nucleus of a revolt against the Ottomans. This strategy played into animosities between the Turk-centric Ottomans and the Arabs of the wider Middle East: years of Turkish nationalism and racial and ethnic prejudices had motivated Turks to mete out harsh treatment against their Arab populations. The British sought to capitalize on this existing enmity by fostering a guerrilla uprising against the Ottomans, deploying liaison officers across the region to organize and direct the Arab tribes in their campaign.52 Lawrence of Arabia was the most famous example of such a liaison officer, and, given developments in the later twentieth century, it is certainly an historical irony that it was the British who recognized, early on, the value of asymmetrical warfare in the Middle East as a way of tying down the otherwise overpowering resources of an occupying power. In fact, Lawrence’s words of wisdom on fighting an insurgency are still used today in the introduction of the United States Army Field Manual on counter-insurgency. Lawrence’s pearls of wisdom include:

 Britain’s control of the Suez Canal lasted until the Suez Crisis in 1956. Another example of such European control is Britain’s conquest of Aden in 1839 and subsequent protectorate status of the area.  Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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If you wear Arab things at all, go the whole way. Leave your English friends and customs on the coast, and fall back on Arab habits entirely. It is possible, starting thus level with them, for the European to beat the Arabs at their own game, for we have stronger motives for our action, and put more heart into it than they.53

Even when providing advice to others, Lawrence’s underlying assumption of European superiority is clearly apparent. Integral to this arrangement was the British government’s support for an Arab homeland in return for the Arab revolt against the Ottomans. The British promise was cemented in the McMahon–Hussein Correspondence, composed of an exchange of letters between the British High Commissioner in Egypt and the Emir of Mecca.54 Soon after the exchange, however, the British also announced support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. As the Balfour Declaration, an official statement of policy of the United Kingdom, stated in 1917: His Majesty’s government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.55

In the end, the British kept neither promise because they had simultaneously entered into the Sykes-Picot agreement with France and Russia. This secret agreement

 See Article 20 in: United States Army, “Appendix D: Twenty-Seven Articles of T. E. Lawrence,” Tactics in Counterinsurgency, March 2009. FMI 3–24.2 (FM 90–8, FM 7–98), 275. A copy of the manual can be found at: Federation of American Scientists, Intelligence Resource Program, accessed 10 April 2022, https://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fmi3-24-2.pdf.  One of the biggest confusions stems from this section of the text: “. . . portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo cannot be said to be purely Arab, and must on that account be excepted from the proposed limits and boundaries. Subject to the above modifications, Great Britain is prepared to recognize and support the independence of the Arabs within the territories in the limits and boundaries proposed by the Sharif of Mecca,” which indicates British reservations about the lands west of Damascus, Hama, Homs, and Aleppo as these lands were not purely Arab and therefore could not be included in any future Arab state. The confusion is over the area of Palestine, which is far south of this general area. The Arabs think this includes Palestine, but the British do not. Many believe the British were being intentionally vague or arrogant in their dealing with ‘natives.’ The interpretation of ‘independence’ was also different between the two sides. Full text available here: McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, 14 July 1915 to 10 March 1916, Wikisouce, accessed 10 April 2022, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/McMahon%E2%80% 93Hussein_Correspondence. See also: Elie Kedouri, In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth: The McMahon-Husayn Correspondence and its Interpretations 1914–1939 (London: Frank Cass, 2000).  The Balfour Declaration, 2 November 1917, written by the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Zionist leader Lord Rothschild. The text of the declaration was published in the press on 9 November 1917 and is now located in the British Library. For full text see: “The Balfour Declaration,” British Library, Digitised Manuscripts, accessed 10 April 2022, http://www.bl.uk/ manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Add_MS_41178_A&index=0.

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carved up the Middle East between France and Britain into zones of influence, in which compliant local rulers would keep things in line for the European powers. By the terms of the Sykes-Picot agreement, Britain reserved the area which became Transjordan, as well as half of modern Iraq and Saudi Arabia, while France was to get the other half of Iraq plus Syria and Lebanon. The controlling powers were left free to decide on future state boundaries within these areas. Even though SykesPicot never quite came into being as it was envisioned, it did influence how the map of the modern Middle East was determined following the war. The campaign in Palestine lasted almost to the end of the war, with most of the big victories coming only in the last few weeks. By 30 October 1918, the Ottomans had been forced to sign an armistice and this surrender included the occupation of Istanbul by the Allies and the partitioning of the empire. It was now time to answer the Eastern Question: what to do with the former dominions of the Ottoman Empire. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was instrumental to these developments and the way the lines were drawn on the map. Most of the decisions were made and deals negotiated at the Cairo Conference in 1921, which was a veritable who’s who of politics.56 Churchill presided as Secretary of State for the Colonies; Lawrence attended as Special Advisor to Colonial Office; Bell, the only woman present, was there as the Oriental Secretary for High Commissioner of Iraq; Sir Percy Cox went as High Commissioner of Iraq; and Field Marshal Edmund Allenby participated as High Commissioner of Egypt. With only two Arabs present at the conference, Churchill aptly referred to the group as “The 40 Thieves”! The conference was a defining moment for both Bell and Lawrence as their perceived personas of effective expertise were called upon in configuring the ‘new Middle East’ by an external imperial power.57 This is where borders were drawn, countries invented, kings nominated and endorsed, and the results foisted onto the residents of the Middle East. This is also when the decision to create Iraq, as well as Jordan’s bizarre boundary shapes, were established. These momentous changes were done so casually at the time that even today no one quite knows why or how some of the borders were decided. Churchill himself boasted that he had created Jordan with the stroke of a pen one afternoon in the back of a taxi after a “particularly liquid lunch.”58 But the repercussions of these boundary decisions were there to stay. It was also agreed that Lebanon and Syria should remain under French control, and that Britain should maintain its mandate over Palestine and continue to support

 Karl E. Meyer and Shareen B. Brysac, Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).  Lawrence James, The Golden Warrior: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (New York: Skyhorse, 2008); Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorized Biography of T. E. Lawrence (New York: Atheneum, 1990).  Frank Jacobs, “Winston’s Hiccup,” The New York Times, 6 March 2012, accessed 10 April 2022, https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/winstons-hiccup/.

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the establishment of a Jewish homeland there. As a result of meetings between Churchill, Bell, and Abdullah bin Hussein, it was agreed that the latter would administer Transjordan, the territory east of the Jordan River.59 It was on Bell’s recommendation that Faisal was to become king of a newly created Kingdom of Iraq, while Hussein bin Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, was to be recognized as King of the Hejaz. In addition, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud was to be left in control of the Nejd in the heart of the Arabian Desert.60 Bell was also responsible for modern-day Iraq’s territorial shape, as she advocated for a state founded on the three Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra. Bell’s design was intended to create a state too weak to be independent of Britain.61 In a letter to her father in 1920, Bell wrote about a future Iraq: no administration can exist without force behind it. I think you have seen enough of the country to know that it’s correct. Mesopotamia is not a civilized state. . . . That is why it needs force for the maintenance of internal order.62

Bell’s policies aimed to retain, through violence if necessary, the Kurdish mountains as a buffer against Turkey and Russia; to promote Sunni Muslims and other minorities over the Shi’a majority; to repress the Shi’a clergy or expel them to Iran; to buy off the big landowners and tribal elders; to stage disreputable plebiscites; and to deploy air power as a form of political control.63 In fact, much of what happened in Iraq in the past century has its origins in Bell’s 1920 White Paper titled Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia.64 While historians today downplay Lawrence’s influence at the Cairo Conference, they maintain that the decisions that led to many of the conflicts and wars in the region can be laid squarely on Bell’s shoulders.65 The French colonial authorities were equally involved in drawing arbitrary borders, for instance carving the area that is now Lebanon out of their mandate of greater Syria. The rationale for this maneuver was that the area that was to become Lebanon

 Abdullah bin Hussein’s great-grandson Abdullah II of Jordan is the King of Jordan today.  David Howarth, The Desert King: The Life of Ibn Saud (London: Collins, 1964).  It was these same policies that were developed by Bell and Sir Percy Cox, which were later taken up by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party in ruling Iraq in the 1970s.  Gertrude Bell, letter to her father Sir Hugh Bell, 18 December 1920, Newcastle University, Gertrude Bell Archive, accessed 10 April 2022, http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/letter_details.php?letter_id= 444.  For example, Saddam Hussein was a Sunni (the minority group in Iraq), but he dominated the majority Shi’a population through increasingly repressive measures.  It was the first White Paper written by a woman.  Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East (New York: Doubleday, 2013); H. V. F. Winstone, Gertrude Bell (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1978).

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was populated predominantly by Maronite Christians. The French regarded these Christians as ‘superior Arabs’ in comparison to the larger Muslim Arab population, and thus deserving of their own territory. This decision is one of the factors that underlies the sectarian tensions in the country today and was a leading cause of the fifteen-yearlong Lebanese Civil War.66 The Kurdish quest for statehood was another result of the way the foreign powers determined regional borders. Before the twentieth century, the Kurdish peoples had been physically divided as subjects of both the Ottoman Empire and the Iranian state. Riding the wave of nationalist thought in the late nineteenth century, Kurds began to seek independence and the right of self-determination to create their own nation-state. In exchange for their assistance in fighting against the Ottomans in World War I, the British promised to assist them with these goals. When the postwar Treaty of Sèvres carved the Ottoman heartlands into zones of influence in 1920, it created a Kurdish state in what is roughly now eastern Turkey.67 Although falling short of unifying all Kurds into one state, this represented an initial framework for such unification. Due to the Turkish War of Independence in 1919–1922, however, this agreement was superseded in 1924 by the Treaty of Lausanne, in which plans for a Kurdish state vanished.68 For Britain and France there was no reason to continue a military campaign on behalf of a theoretical Kurdish state, and since then the Kurds have been split between Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran as a nation of people without a state.69 Following the division of the region by Britain and France, these new countries continued to be dominated by colonial powers, whose authority extended over economic, political, and social policies, including education and the judiciary.70 The ramifications of this colonial authority are still evident today. For example, the legal system in Egypt is based on the British legal system and the educational system in Syria on the French school system. Likewise, attitudes towards Arab populations evinced by the United States and other outside powers today are reminiscent of the views of nineteenth-century- and early-twentieth-century explorers. President Donald

 The Lebanese Civil War started in 1975 and was not formally resolved until 1989. For a comprehensive coverage of the history of Lebanon including the civil war see: William Harris, Lebanon: A History, 600–2011 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).  The full text of the Peace Treaty of Sèvres, 1920, can be found at: ed. Jane Plotke, Hellenic Resources Network, accessed 10 April 2022, http://www.hri.org/docs/sevres/.  The full text of the Peace Treaty of Lausanne, 1923, can be found at: ed. Jane Plotke, Hellenic Resources Network, accessed 10 April 2022, http://www.hri.org/docs/lausanne/.  Although the Kurds are Muslims (and almost always Sunni Muslims) they are not Arabs or Turks, so their conflicts are along ethnic lines rather than religious ones.  To a lesser extent Italy as the colonial power in Libya.

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Trump’s so-called ‘Deal of the Century’ to bring peace to the Middle East and ‘solve’ the Israeli-Palestinian impasse lacked any consultation with the Palestinians themselves.71 This arrogance bears striking similarities to those of the nineteenth-century explorers and colonial powers towards the region and its inhabitants. There are also longer-term political consequences where the impact has been felt beyond the region itself. An important, if complex, example is the establishment of Israel in British-mandated Palestine following World War II. At the end of the war in 1945, and in light of the newly revealed atrocities of the Holocaust, there was an increased drive to create a Jewish homeland. Over the previous decades, various ideas for the location of this homeland had been mooted: Argentina, Russia, Madagascar, and Australia had all been touted as potential options. By the end of World War II, though, Jewish migration to the Palestine region had swelled to an inexorable tide, and it was more a question of how a Jewish homeland would be created there, rather than if or where. Moreover, with Britain beggared by the war, the British Labour government was not as eager to maintain colonies, especially ones as troublesome as Palestine.72 This led to the British decision to hand the mandate of Palestine over to the newly created United Nations, which proceeded to partition the area into Jewish and Arab areas. This in turn led to the various Arab-Israeli Wars and the dispossession of the Palestinians.73 The ramifications of these developments are still being felt on a daily basis today, with the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. A decade after the end of World War II, the Suez Crisis of 1956 led to the physical removal of Britain and France from Egypt, but consequently also increased the involvement of the Soviet Union and the United States in the Middle East.74 This was the start of the Cold War power struggle between the superpowers in the region. The Iran-Iraq War, from 1980 to 1988, was in part a proxy war between the Soviets and the United States, as was the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the United States’ funding of the Mujahedeen to fight them. Ironically, the Mujahedeen developed into al-Qaeda, who carried out attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001, and which further instigated the so-called War on Terror. Similarly, many political scientists and historians regard the present troubles in Iraq as a legacy of the political boundaries imposed by the British based on Bell’s counsel. Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi Ba’ath Party used Bell’s 1920 White Paper as a blueprint for

 Officially called: United States Government, Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People. The details were released in January 2020. See the plan as archived on the White House Archives website, accessed 10 April 2022, https://trumpwhitehouse.ar chives.gov/peacetoprosperity/.  For example, the British Headquarters in Palestine located at the King David Hotel was bombed on 22 July 1946 by the Irgun who were a Zionist paramilitary organization.  In 1948, 1967, and 1973.  Derek Varble, The Suez Crisis 1956 (Oxford: Osprey, 2003).

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controlling the populous.75 Much of the ongoing sectarian violence in Iraq today has its genesis in the rivalries stoked first by the puppet monarchies installed by the British and later by the Ba’ath Party. In addition, the British decision to create Kuwait as a separate country from Iraq led to ongoing border disputes between the neighbors, culminating in the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990.76 This, in part, led to the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003, the overthrow of the Ba’ath Party, and the ongoing sectarian bloodshed. In an ironic twist, the current conflicts relate to another long-term consequence of nineteenth-century explorers’ and archaeologists’ travels to the Middle East, in that the museums of Europe, and particularly the British Museum, hold large collections of Egyptian and Mesopotamian artifacts. The British Museum houses the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of Egyptian antiquities outside of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, with over 110,000 items of immense variety and excellent quality in its catalogue. The collection includes the Rosetta Stone, which the British army confiscated from the French in 1801, and several of the original casing stones from the Great Pyramids of Giza, designated as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The British Museum’s Department of the Middle East collection contains over 330,000 pieces and is the world’s largest and most important collection of Mesopotamian antiquities outside of Iraq. Following the looting of the Iraq Museum in 2003 and the destruction of ancient archaeological sites such as Palmyra during the Syrian Civil War in 2015, the collections at the British Museum have been integral in preserving the cultural heritage of the Middle East and its antiquities. This has been cynically interpreted by some as proving that the explorers were ‘right’ to take artifacts back to Europe for ‘safe-keeping,’ thus ignoring Europeans’ responsibility for creating the current conflicts and their threats to those artifacts in the first place. The explorers and imperial agents of the long nineteenth century shaped not only the West’s understanding of the Middle East, but also the political, social, and economic destiny of the region. Their exploits have been immortalized not only in their own writings, but in books, documentaries, and films about them, which often neglect to recognize their role in fostering colonialism. Moreover, nineteenthcentury explorers continue to influence current variations of European agency by serving as clear and openly acknowledged sources of inspiration for their twentyfirst-century counterparts. Recently and prominently, the former British military officer Levison Wood, inspired by Speke, Burton, Stanley, and Livingstone, walked

 Gertrude Bell and W. A. Talbot, Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia (London: H. M. Stationary Office, 1920), at: Internet Archive, accessed 10 April 2022, https://archive.org/de tails/reviewofciviladm00iraqrich/page/n2/mode/2up.  The area of Kuwait had been a British Protectorate from 1899 until 1961 when it was granted independence.

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the length of the Nile and detailed his exploits in a Channel 4 documentary series Walking the Nile.77 Later, and this time inspired by Lawrence, Wood undertook an 8,000 km journey to circumnavigate the Arabian Peninsula and documented the experience in the Arabia with Levison Wood documentary series on the Discovery Channel.78 This chapter has identified the long history of how explorers have reformed massively complex parts of our contemporary world, and in particular the Middle East, through their intermediary reading of a particular region. Their visible agency has shaped the Middle East’s continuing tensions and conflicts. As such, explorers were highly visible personas who represented, imbued, and performed Western imperial authority and power.

 Levison Wood, Walking the Nile, four-part series on Channel 4, 2015; Levison Wood, Walking the Nile (London: Simon & Schuster, 2015).  Levison Wood, Arabia with Levison Wood, five-part series on Discovery Channel, 2019; Levison Wood, Arabia: A Journey Through the Heart of the Middle East (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2019).

Darin Stephanov

Modern Monarchic Visibility in Eurasian Empires Abstract: The purpose of this chapter is to introduce a new conceptual framework to facilitate the analysis of central power embodied by the ruler/dynasty and the changing patterns of its public staging in the nineteenth century. Originating in the Ottoman imperial experience and extending to the Russian context as well, the heart of this analysis lies in the concept of modern monarchic visibility, which can be subdivided into ruler visibility and dynastic visibility. It then becomes possible to explore and reconstruct the mechanics of abstract (macro) identification, i.e. the transition from a local/regional to a global/imperial and finally a global/national consciousness. Keywords: modern monarchic visibility, ruler visibility, dynastic visibility, public ruler celebrations, Russian Empire, Ottoman Empire, popular belonging ✶✶✶

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce a new conceptual framework to facilitate the analysis of central power embodied by the ruler/dynasty and the changing patterns of its public staging in the nineteenth century. Originating in the Ottoman imperial experience and extending to the Russian context as well, the heart of this analysis lies in the concept of modern monarchic visibility, which can be subdivided into ruler visibility and dynastic visibility. I define ruler visibility as a combination of direct elements, including the ruler’s physical presence at public ceremonies and the degree of his/her personal exposure to the public gaze, and indirect elements, consisting of a set of symbolic markers, such as his/her monogram, architectural monuments such as figural statues (in the Russian case) or fountains (in the Ottoman case), churches/mosques, palaces, and tombs, either newly constructed or restored by the ruler.1 Modern ruler visibility combines projected traits of personal character with short-term and long-term policy imperatives, both domestically and abroad. It incorporates not only actual bodily comportment and its symbolic dimensions, but also the more frequent occurrence of references to and discussions of the ruler’s particular person in the press. In the absence of a genuine, consistent, and credible effort on the part of the pre-modern ruler to reach out past elite circles or the confines of the royal capital, along with the lack of a significant periodical press and mass

 This and other definitional sections of this chapter draw on my book: Darin N. Stephanov, Ruler Visibility and Popular Belonging in the Ottoman Empire, 1808–1908 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110574012-012

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culture to popularize his/her ‘good works,’ both the direct and indirect types of ruler visibility were quite limited before the nineteenth century. Once modern ruler visibility found traction in the nineteenth century, its main vehicles in the Russian and Ottoman Empires, as in other contemporary empires, were the systematic, pan-imperial annual public ruler celebrations. These included the royal birthday and accession day, coronation day, royal name day, and even holidays celebrating Russian Emperor Alexander II’s survival of assassination attempts.2 These festivities had a widely felt impact until the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, respectively. While such celebrations had taken place on a smaller scale and less regularly in the Romanov realm before the nineteenth century, they were entirely transformed – both broadened and intensified – in the aftermath of the ill-fated Decembrist Revolt of 1825 against the accession of Nicholas I and in favor of constitutional monarchy.3 Within the Ottoman realm, these festivities commenced in the imperial capital, the provinces, and abroad in 1836 by order of Mahmud II, a fact that has until today received little scholarly attention. Reinforced by technological improvements (telegraph, railways, electricity, etc.) and advances in print media, these proliferating and escalating ceremonial events ushered in a new era of ruler visibility, helping to create a modern public space/sphere and forging credible direct vertical ties of subject loyalty, irrespective of language, location, creed, or class. The modern public space/sphere arose very gradually. Beginning from a zero point, at which time the ruler had no physical presence and only a minimal symbolic presence outside of the imperial capital, it expanded first through the ruler’s major but sporadic tours of the imperial domains, and then, in a more significant and lasting manner, through the annual ruler celebrations. Thus, the public space/sphere developed out of a public, communal place in which the people welcomed the ruler or gathered and organized in groups to celebrate him, such as in the town/village square or a similarly designated area. These celebrations recurred regularly, grew in scale, and got more intricate over time. Gradually, they delineated a public sphere of wider boundaries of what was desirable/permissible/acceptable in the symbolic interaction between the ruler and the ruled. Thus, they ultimately set the stage for a  The royal name day is the feast day of the royal namesake saint. As for assassinations, there were attempts on the life of Emperor Alexander II in 1866, 1867, 1879 (twice), 1880, and 1881. The last one, finally, achieved its dark purpose.  Upon his untimely death in late 1825 in Taganrog, South Russia, Emperor Alexander I had left neither a natural progeny, nor a publicly designated successor. This delicate situation created a split in elite loyalties between Alexander’s younger brothers Constantine and Nicholas, who were in Warsaw and St. Petersburg, respectively. To make matters worse, Constantine was allegedly sympathetic to the promulgation of a constitution for the empire, whereas Nicholas very clearly was not. By the time it became widely known that Constantine had definitively given up the throne, a constitutionally minded portion of the aristocracy and a few elite military units had committed open rebellion in the capital, which was bloodily squashed by the eventual ruler, Nicholas I.

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modern type of belonging.4 The second component of monarchic visibility – dynastic visibility – in each empire was closely related to the reigning monarch’s ruler visibility. In subsequent sections, I will situate my reflections on dynasty along temporal and spatial axes, as well as with reference to (dead or living) royal relatives and inanimate objects which served as dynastic proxies. Rapidly expanding monarchic visibility also facilitated the formation of ruler personality cults in both the Russian and the Ottoman Empires. In the absence of parliaments, well-publicized forms of popular infatuation with the ruler became a crucial source of validation and legitimacy until the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Young Turk Revolution of 1908.5 This popular infatuation is usually identified as a ‘cult of personality.’ For the purposes of this chapter, a ruler personality cult is composed of a set of ritual practices and attendant rhetoric signifying an extreme power/ status differential between the celebrant/ruled/subject and the celebrated/ruler/object. Specifically, the cult is generated through acts of homage related to the object’s body and persona, especially in his/her absence, often involving higher degrees of creative abstraction over time. While not a strictly modern phenomenon, ruler personality cults received a major boost from the centralization of power in the modern era; the enlargement, acculturation, and homogenization of the imperial public; the territorial expansion of infrastructure; and technological consolidation. The origins and nature of modernity and nationalism remain hotly debated topics in the humanities and the social sciences. There are roughly three main approaches to the study of ethnonational consciousness: perennialist (ethno-symbolist), constructivist, and instrumentalist. The first one, as its name suggests, assumes that nations today have ethnic origins in the past and that tribes, clans, and families of yesteryear share many forms of collective belonging with present-day nations.6 As a second type, the constructivist analysis is a complete opposite of the first. It posits that nations are created for particular reasons at particular points in time. The most theoretically rigorous and influential scholar to write on nationalism, the sociologist Ernest Gellner, belongs to the socio-economic branch of this approach. According to him, nations were called for and shaped by technological changes in industrial societies and by capitalist

 For a similar approach, see: James Brophy, Popular Culture and the Public Sphere in the Rhineland, 1800–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For a different conceptualization, based on a different notion of socialization and social control, see: Cengiz Kırlı, “Surveillance and Constituting the Public in the Ottoman Empire,” in Publics, Politics, and Participation: Locating the Public Sphere in the Middle East and North Africa, ed. Seteney Shami (New York: Social Science Research Council, 2010). For the most influential formulation of the concept of the public sphere, see: Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 1989).  An Ottoman experiment with parliamentarism lasted less than a year, from 19 March 1877 to 14 February 1878.  See the works of Anthony Smith, beginning with: The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).

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pressures towards the homogenization and convertibility of labor.7 A different sort of capitalism – print capitalism and the creation of reading cultures in Europe – lies at the heart of Benedict Anderson’s cultural explanation for the rise of ethnonationalism and his famous catchphrase: “imagined communities.”8 The numerous field-shaping contributions of Rogers Brubaker, an historical sociologist who took up the torch from Gellner, include the disaggregation of nationalism into continuous and discontinuous elements, that is, nationness and nationhood; the devaluation of the concept of identity; and a sustained criticism of reified groups in the direction of studying “everyday ethnicity” or ethnicity as a contingent event.9 Finally, the instrumentalist line of thought, as its name suggests, views nationalism somewhat cynically as a means to the end of gaining and maintaining political power. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger coined another famous catchphrase – “invented traditions” – to describe how empowered elites use the seal of venerable antiquity to lend credibility to newly introduced ideas about governance and other reform acts in order to appease the populace.10 Also in this vein, John Breuilly has produced a massive study combining historical perspectives with theoretical analyses to categorize states across the globe in terms of the ways that nationalist movements gained and maintained power.11 The simple classifications I have adopted here – perennialist, constructivist, and instrumentalist – have clear limitations, especially when it comes to the treatment of modernity. Modernization theory, as a brainchild of the bipolar ideological world of the Cold War, largely viewed nationalism as part of the inexorable linear trajectory of progress from traditional to modern societies.12 It dominated the social sciences for decades until it crumbled under severe criticism for its conflation of modernization with Westernization. As its inherent Eurocentric bias came increasingly under attack, so too did the monolithic notion of modernity itself and the monologic nature of its top-down, core-to-periphery dissemination. The school of

 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983).  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991).  In other words, in everyday life people’s actions are not strictly determined by their formally ascribed ethnicity; on the contrary, they may swing widely, based on varying circumstances and situational role-playing. Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Rogers Brubaker, “Myths and Misconceptions in the Study of Nationalism,” in The State of the Nation, ed. John Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 272–306; Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); among others.  Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). See also: Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).  John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).  For an overview, see: Dean Tipps, “Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 15, no. 2 (1973): 199–226.

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subaltern studies, in particular, did much to splinter apart the established conceptions of modernity and nationalism. As a form of ‘history from below,’ subaltern studies aims to reconstruct the voice of the ruled and endow them with agency, including the capacity for resistance. Originally focused on the experience of colonization in South Asia, the school grew to have a global impact and substantially contributed to critiques of modernization theory that included postcolonialism and postmodernism.13 In this context, Michel Foucault’s “governmentality” must be highlighted as a broad yet tremendously useful concept, especially in the context of the birth and the rapid, open-ended growth of the modern state in tandem with the nation.14 By the early twenty-first century, the concepts of alternative and multiple modernities appeared, demonstrating the need to distinguish between social modernization and cultural modernity, as well as the uniqueness of every instance of their intersection in any given nation.15 These developments led to modernity’s loss of meaning as an analytical tool and its wholesale conversion into a pathological condition in recent scholarship, both when studied from the perspective of the colonized and of the colonizer. Thus, Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper commented on ‘modernity’ only in passing, devoting a single paragraph to it in over five hundred pages of their award-winning book on empires in world history.16 For the purposes of this chapter, modernity is understood to be a complex, historically salient phenomenon that consists of a ‘bundle’ of parallel economic, political, and sociocultural processes (a general definition). More precisely, I perceive nationalism and modernity to be intimately related phenomena that set a mass-scale sociocultural precedent and permanently altered the contours of public space/sphere along

 As examples, one might consider: Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963); Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).  Michel Foucault developed “governmentality” in his lectures at the College de France between 1977 and 1984. As its name suggests, this concept draws attention to a tendency that seems beneficial, at least at the outset, but becomes increasingly perilous over time, namely the tendency of modern authorities to centralize and accumulate power over the bodies and minds of their subjects-cum-citizens, aided by advances in technology, and at the expense of individual rights, liberties, and personal privacy. The reality of this open-ended process hardly needs clarification to anyone living in the year 2023.  Dilip Gaonkar, Alternative Modernities (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Shmuel Eisenstadt, Multiple Modernities (Cambridge: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2000). For more recent variations on the theme, see: Dominic Sachsenmaier and Jens Riedel, Reflections on Multiple Modernities: European, Chinese and Other Interpretations (Leiden: Brill, 2002); Atsuko Ichijo, Nationalism and Multiple Modernities: Europe and Beyond (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Gerhard Preyer and Michael Sussman, Varieties of Multiple Modernities: New Research Design (Leiden: Brill, 2016).  Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 328.

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with the discourse and practices of power. As such, modernity cannot be traced earlier than the French Revolution. Within the Russian realm, these phenomena had an initial impact during and after the Napoleonic Wars, specifically in the reign of Emperor Alexander I from 1801 to 1825, and a second, more momentous effect following the Decembrist Revolt of 1825. Within the Ottoman realm, these phenomena were announced in a most lasting, multilayered manner by the Greek Revolution of 1821–1829 and the abolition of the Janissary Corps on 16 June 1826 – known in Ottoman history as “the Auspicious Event” – during the reign of Sultan Mahmud II.17 In each of these two contexts, the new imperial policies of ruler and dynastic celebration, along with the discourses and practices spun around them, unlocked a complex process that extended long-standing, localized micro forms of belonging and linked them to the political center to create a new imperial macro form of belonging at the popular level. In my view, this shift signaled the advent of modernity (a special definition). We see this process at work, for instance, in the communal trajectories of the Finns in the Grand Duchy of Finland, which belonged to the Russian Empire from 1809 to 1917, and the Bulgars in the Ottoman province of Rumelia.18 The basis for comparing these two communities does not lie in any pre-existing direct connections between them, but rather in the comparable, contemporary cultural stimuli that originated from their Russian and Ottoman monarchs, respectively, leading over time to cycles of symbolic interaction between rulers and ruled. Each community was at one point considered exceptionally loyal to its ruler and a pillar of the imperial order before veering off and going its own way towards ethnonationalism, measured by claims for and actions towards political independence. There are certain common, key constituent elements in this open-ended process of modern belonging – seen in the Finnish and Bulgar cases as this chapter will show – that open an avenue to further investigation in other settings across the globe. In each of these cases, macro belonging began as a popular cult of the emperor/dynasty, set in motion by the above-mentioned ceremonies and their attendant cultural production, before transforming into the nation-centered mentality still alive today. These common elements include: 1. new practices of naming oneself and a rising value of the blood connection; 2. new practices of naming the Other; transition from enemies of the ruler/dynasty to enemies of the community to enemies of the nation; 3. evolving notions of a social pact and social (organic and familial) metaphors;

 The Janissary corps, founded in the fourteenth century, consisted of elite infantry units. It formed the first modern standing army in Europe and supplied the Ottoman Sultan’s household troops. In a manner reminiscent of the Pretorian Guard in the Roman Empire, the Janissary corps was a key power player in domestic politics and the source of many regal depositions and installments to the throne.  The Finns were Finnish- or Swedish-speaking Protestant (Lutheran) subjects of the tsar. The Bulgars were South Slavic Orthodox Christian subjects of the sultan.

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4. innovative notions of a temporal continuum backward and forward; timelessness of the ‘in’-group; 5. extension of the micro fatherland into a macro fatherland; (sometimes) conversion into motherland; 6. personification, victimization, and sanctification of the motherland; 7. veneration of an abstract, faraway, imaginary center (first, ruler/dynasty, then fatherland/motherland, then nation); 8. faith-based notions of community; transition from loose local forms of religious belonging to integrative practices of universalized faith and on to religious particularism and exceptionalism of the ‘in’-group; 9. increased tendency towards mental geographic mappings of the fatherland/ motherland; 10. innovative concepts of necessity, duty, and sacrifice (first, for the ruler/dynasty, then for the ‘in’-group); 11. rising importance of group unity and loyalty; 12. accelerating processes of group mobilization and totalization; 13. intensification of images of and justifications for militarism and violence. One immediate take-away from this flood of ethnonationalist elements is that they all arose previous to, and outside of, nationalist discourse, and were instead connected to the figure of the monarch, the living embodiment of the dynasty. Thus, this framework allows us to establish a continuous temporal account linking the late imperial and the early ethnonational eras, which have long been treated as completely and irreconcilably different. To aid in this analysis, this chapter lays the groundwork for understanding the development of an ethnonational mentality as it arose in the public space/sphere carved out for ruler visibility; it does so by examining the manifestation and growth of that visibility via new forms of ceremonial directed at both subjects and foreigners. This framework also allows us to situate various religio-linguistic groupings in their proper imperial contexts, which are often obscured by the black-and-white palettes of national historiographies. Thus, it becomes possible to explore and reconstruct the mechanics of abstract (macro) identification, i.e. the transition from a local/regional to a global/imperial and finally a global/national consciousness. Over time, under the guise of commemorating the ruler and the dynasty, monarchic celebrations provided a fertile ground for the expression of communal interests and the advancement of intercommunal rivalries, leading to gradual group mobilization and the resultant hardening of previously porous group boundaries. In this complex, repetitive interplay of image, rhetoric, and practice – a key factor in the creation of a modern public space/sphere – Russian and Ottoman subjects developed and reinforced new, more abstract ties of allegiance and experiences of groupness, both real and imagined.

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The Russian and the Ottoman Empires have rarely been paired up in historical scholarship, outside of comparative studies concerned with their mutual wars.19 A prevalent, long-term perception of a “civilizational divide” between the two has long persisted. However, there are many structural similarities between the two entities neighboring each other in Eurasia: both were contiguous, autocratic empires that experienced simultaneous periods of profound vulnerability in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. In addition, both empires implemented cycles of reforms inspired by the West at roughly the same time throughout the century. In sum, the theoretical and methodological apparatus outlined in this chapter offers a number of advantages. First, it presents a platform of explicit and rigorous definitions of key concepts that are then employed consistently throughout the main body of analysis. In particular, by introducing the term ‘ruler visibility’ and casting its net widely, this line of research transcends the rather narrow purview of standard monarch-centric and court studies. In the Russian and Ottoman contexts, scholars of late imperial ceremony, ideology, and symbolism have previously been overwhelmingly preoccupied with the political center.20 By contrast, this new model allows one to connect developments in the metropole to its provinces, opening avenues for the investigation of local effects and responses in a way that includes all social strata. Popular belonging on a macro scale emerges largely as a function of, rather than entirely in opposition to, cultural policies and practices initiated by the political center. As suggested above, this framework allows us to study monarchic patriotism and ethnonationalism in continuity. In the cases of the Finns and the Bulgars, as with many other imperial communities, this approach allows us to retrieve entire chapters in the history of national projects that are presently missing from mainstream narratives

 For warfare between the empires, see: Michael Reynolds, Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Omer Bartov and Eric Weitz, Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); among others. For examples of comparative works, see: Marsha Siefert, “‘Chingis-Khan with the Telegraph’: Communications in the Russian and Ottoman Empires,” in Comparing Empires: Encounters and Transfers in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Jörn Leonhard and Ulrike von Hirschhausen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 78–108; Dina Khoury and Sergey Glebov, “Citizenship, Subjecthood, and Difference in the Late Ottoman and Russian Empires,” Ab Imperio 1 (2017): 45–58; Adrian Brisku, Political Reform in the Ottoman and Russian Empires: A Comparative Approach (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017); Yasir Yılmaz, “Confessionalisation or a Quest for Order? A Comparative Look at Religion and State in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman, Russian and Habsburg Empires” in Ottoman Sunnism: New Perspectives, ed. Vefa Erginbaş (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 90–120.  Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995–2000); Hakan Karateke, Padişahım Çok Yaşa! Osmanlı Devletinin Son Yüz Yılında Merasimler (Istanbul: Kitap Yayınevi, 2004); to a lesser extent, Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998).

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and public consciousness.21 What is also missing thus far is an explicit connection between nineteenth-century ruler personality cults and their twentieth-/twenty-firstcentury counterparts. Methodologically speaking, this chapter demonstrates the usability and practical utility of the new model by applying techniques of close textual analysis to a wide range of sources (archival documents, newspaper articles, songs, speeches, etc.). The findings here have significant implications for a broader study of the transition from imperial to national mentalities and ultimately for analyzing the constituent elements of modernity itself.

I From Court Ceremonies to the Common Wo/man The evolution of royal ceremonies is a barometer for important sociocultural and sociopolitical changes. As the Ottoman state grew from being a frontier principality in northwest Anatolia in the early fourteenth century, its bureaucratic structures became more complex and so did its ceremonial projections of power.22 At first, the Ottoman bey (chieftain) had a primus inter pares (first-among-equals) status, fought alongside his allies, and was generally highly visible and accessible across the board. Over time, the gradual territorial expansion and administrative consolidation of the Ottoman domains brought about conflicting visions of the distribution of power and the future of the state. As the status of the Ottoman ruler grew so did his attempts to centralize power at the expense of the alliance of frontier ghazi warriors who had made Osman, the dynasty’s founder, and his descendants’ conquests possible in the first place. Not surprisingly, the timing of the Ottoman acquisition of imperial status, with the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, coincided with the drafting of an imperial order by Mehmed II, which was codified into a book of ceremonies by the late 1470s.23 Clearly, the sultan was by this time no longer primus inter pares and the dramatic rise of his power was reflected in, and in part justified by, a newly crafted personal mystique. According to Gülru Necipoğlu-Kafadar:

 For a similar attempt in the case of the Latvians, see: Evgenia Nazarova, “Obraz monarkhov v vospitanii malyh narodov imperii (latyishi v XIX – nachale XX veka),” in 400-letie Doma Romanovyih, 1613–2013: Politika Pamyati i Monarkhicheskaya Ideya, ed. Vladimir Lapin and Yulia Safronova (St. Petersburg: European University in St. Petersburg Press, 2016), 104–131.  For a complex, masterful study of the transformations of Ottoman power in the pre-modern period, see: Rhoads Murphey, Exploring Ottoman Sovereignty: Tradition, Image and Practice in the Ottoman Imperial Household, 1400–1800 (London: Continuum, 2008). For the global context, see: Jeroen Duindam, Dynasties: A Global History of Power, 1300–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).  See: Gülru Necipoğlu-Kafadar, “Framing the Gaze in Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Palaces,” Ars Orientalis 23 (1993): 303–342, here 303.

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This rule book stipulated that the monarch remain aloof; he would no longer sit at banquets or appear regularly at public audiences as he used to do. Except for the two religious holidays in which he agreed to give public audiences, he would remain in seclusion, only receiving privileged dignitaries and ambassadors in his private audience hall four times a week.24

Thereafter, as the empire gained power and international prestige, the sultan’s title became longer and more magnanimous while his visibility and accessibility, from the standpoint of the general populace, gradually decreased. Descriptions of audiences and processions of Süleyman I and Selim II in the second half of the sixteenth century provide a window into ‘classic imperial’ Ottoman conceptions of the ruler and the terms of his interaction with his own and foreign subjects. His face showed little or no emotion. He rarely spoke. When he did, he employed intermediaries.25 Audience halls and processions were arranged to preclude direct contact of any kind. The processions themselves did not target the people and were therefore not publicized, while foreigners were more often than not excluded from them.26 The general trend was for sultans to partake only rarely in public ceremonies. When they did, they engaged in restrained and strongly ritualized behavior, usually sharing ceremonial space with few outside the capital’s elite. The ruler’s direct visibility was so low in the seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries that the sultan could leave the palace in disguise (tebdil-i kıyafet) without much fear of being recognized.27 Foreign diplomats, on the other hand, could not move freely throughout the capital – they needed special permits to proceed from one point to the next and were accompanied by a Janissary guard at all times. As late as the turn of the nineteenth century, foreign emissaries had to make special provisions prior to staging any more or less public event or celebration in the Ottoman capital. For example, in preparation for a fête and public promenade at the Russian legation in Istanbul on the occasion of the Russian Emperor Paul I’s  Necipoğlu-Kafadar. “Framing the Gaze,” 303. See also: Gülru Necipoğlu-Kafadar, Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power: the Topkapi Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (New York: Architectural History Foundation, 1991), 3–30.  See: Charles Thornton Forster and Francis Henry Daniell, ed. The Life and Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, vol. 1 (London: C. K. Paul, 1881), 152–156, 158–160, 281–285. See also: “The visit of Sultan Selim II in solemn state to the mosque of Sultan Beyazet (Beyazet Aga Camii), in the sixteenth century,” from Le Voyage du Levant by Philippe du Fresne-Canaye, quoted in: Laurence Kelly, ed., Istanbul: A Traveller’s Companion, (London: Constable, 1987), 179–182.  For the highly elaborate and restrictive protocol of foreign ambassadorial processions in Istanbul, see: Michael Talbot, “Accessing the Shadow of God: Spatial and Performative Ceremonial at the Ottoman Court,” in The Key to Power? The Culture of Access in Princely Courts, 1400–1750, ed. Dries Raeymaekers and Sebastiaan Derks (Leiden: Brill, 2016).  By the term ‘direct visibility’ I mean the exposure of the ruler or faithful reproductions of his visage to the public gaze. On the implications of the sultan’s withdrawal to the Harem and thus further diminution of his visibility and accessibility for domestic politics in the seventeenth century, see: Leslie Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Gender and Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1520–1656 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

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accession in 1796, the legation’s chief interpreter, Joseph Fonton, had to request security arrangements from the Ottoman authorities in order to avoid the occurrence of “quarrels and disputes.”28 Not only the Janissaries, but the capital’s populace as a whole was still unaccustomed and hostile to the celebration of foreign sovereignty on Ottoman soil. Memoirs of Western travelers, written well into the nineteenth century, corroborate this state of affairs.29 The most notable exception to this overall pattern came during the reign of Ahmed III from 1703 to 1730, which became known as the Tulip Period. It was characterized by a more ostentatious style of elite entertainment which included large open-air parties with poetry, music, and royal promenades along the shores of the Bosporus. This age introduced new practices of indirect ruler visibility as well. It inaugurated the passion for lavish fountains with poetic inscriptions eulogizing the ruler and it made the open format of waterfront palaces highly appealing and fashionable.30 The emergent Ottoman Rococo architecture captured the exuberance of the age and left a lasting mark on the Ottoman capital. At this time, the ruler’s monogram (tuğra) began to appear on the façades of public buildings, a public statement enhancing his indirect visibility.31 Yet these changes, some more lasting than others, affected neither the ruler’s direct visibility significantly in the long run nor the manner of his connection to public spaces outside the capital. Selim III, who reigned from 1789 to 1807, took the ruler’s indirect visibility a step further as part of his reform measures. Abroad, he broke new ground with the establishment of Ottoman legations in the early 1790s.32 At home, he engaged in the type of lavish elite entertainment introduced by Ahmed III. Inspired by Napoleon I’s gift – his miniature portrait – which was conveyed to him by the French ambassador in Istanbul, Selim III procured his own version and sent it back as a

 HAT 1412/57520 in the Turkish President’s Ottoman Archives in Istanbul.  Josiah Brewer, A Residence at Constantinople, in the Year 1827, with Notes to the Present Time, (New Haven, CT: Durrie & Peck, 1830); Charles White, Three Years in Constantinople, or Domestic Manners of the Turks in 1844 (London: H. Colburn, 1845); among others.  See: Shirine Hamadeh, “Splash and Spectacle: The Obsession with Fountains in EighteenthCentury Istanbul,” Muqarnas 19 (2002): 123–148; Shirine Hamadeh, The City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008); Tülay Artan, Architecture as a Theatre of Life: Profile of the Eighteenth-Century Bosphorus (PhD diss., MIT, 1989). For more recent work on the architecture of eighteenth-century Istanbul, see: Rüstem Ünver, “Architecture for a New Age: Imperial Ottoman Mosques in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2013).  Hakan Karateke, “Legitimizing the Ottoman Sultanate: A Framework for Historical Analysis,” in Legitimizing the Order: The Ottoman Rhetoric of State Power, ed. Hakan Karateke and Maurus Reinkowski (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 13–52, here 51.  See: J. C. Hurewitz, “The Europeanization of Ottoman Diplomacy: The Conversion from Unilateralism to Reciprocity in the Nineteenth Century,” Belleten XXV/99 (1961): 455–466, as well as Stanford Shaw, Between Old and New: The Ottoman Empire under Sultan Selim III, 1789–1807 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 248.

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token of his appreciation of Napoleon’s friendship.33 On the other hand, his attempt to make a lasting mark at home with the establishment of a new military corps – the ‘new order’ troops that would be directly associated with and loyal to the ruler – was short-lived, as a Janissary rebellion led to the deposition of the sultan in 1807. In terms of ruler visibility, Selim III was thus both the last representative of the pre-modern age and the harbinger of the modern one.34 This should hardly come as a surprise given that his reign began in the fateful year of 1789, which left no part of the European continent unchanged. Although Russia rose to imperial status a century after the Ottomans, ruler visibility in the Russian Empire followed a similar trajectory up to the nineteenth century. For example, Ivan IV “the Terrible,” who assumed the title of ‘tsar’ in an elaborate coronation ceremony in 1547 and to whose reign the Russian imperial experience is classically dated, still presided in person over military campaigns and remained accessible to boyars and high clerics.35 As in the Ottoman Empire, the early to mid-seventeenth century brought about a reduction in direct ruler visibility in Russia too.36 When Peter I “the Great” officially assumed the title of emperor in 1721, he oversaw a renewed growth in ruler visibility based on thorough reforms in all spheres of public life and a shift to a Western system of values, rituals, and trappings. For example, in a major departure from all previous domestic practice, Peter the Great had his consort, Catherine I, crowned as co-ruler in 1724. He also introduced the Western-style celebration of ruler festivities such as the royal birthday and name day, which were marked with public prayers by the church.37 However, these ceremonies catered mostly to the top echelon of society – a relatively small coterie in the imperial capital – and so these instances of ruler visibility remained of the pre-modern variety.38 Given that there was little to no emphasis on symbolic continuity from ruler to ruler, and that often the opposite – symbolic ruptures – took place between reigns and their respective scenarios of power, one can conclude that there was little overall dynastic visibility to speak of prior to the second quarter of the nineteenth century.39

 Edhem Eldem, Pride and Privilege: A History of Ottoman Orders, Medals and Decorations (Istanbul: Ottoman Bank Archives and Research Center, 2004), 58.  Not surprisingly, Stanford Shaw’s major study of Selim III was entitled “Between Old and New.”  See: Nancy Kollmann, The Russian Empire: 1450–1801 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 55.  Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power, vol. 1, 34; Robert Crummey, “Court Spectacles in Seventeenth-Century Russia: Illusion and Reality,” in Essays in Honor of A. A. Zimin, ed. Daniel Clarke Waugh (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1985), 130–158, here 130–131.  Wortman, Scenarios of Power, vol. 1, 62–63.  See the definition of ‘pre-modern ruler visibility’ on the first page of this chapter. According to Kollmann: “The court elite was the principal target of visual displays of legitimacy, for their loyalty to the regime was essential.” Kollmann, The Russian Empire, 141.  For a different view centered on Ivan IV, see: Sergei Bogatyrev, “Reinventing the Russian Monarchy in the 1550s: Ivan the Terrible, the Dynasty, and the Church,” The Slavonic and East European Review 85, no. 2 (2007): 271–293.

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A brief recapitulation of the ruler-ruled connection leading up to the nineteenth century can serve as a point of entry into the subject of popular attachments. Until the 1830s, the Ottoman sultan, much more so than the Russian emperor, was a very distant and rather vague figure in the minds of the vast majority of his subjects throughout the far-flung imperial domains. Playing no role whatsoever in their day-to-day lives, his image was almost non-existent. Since over the course of the previous century and a half the ruler had rarely left the palace complex, and had even less frequently ventured beyond the capital, most subjects were not only thoroughly unaccustomed to being in his presence, but were not even aware of his countenance. Correspondingly, ordinary people formed notions of themselves as a community that made no reference to the ruler. Instead, as I theorize, pre-modern popular belonging in these two empires ran along the lines of loose confessional terms (Muslim, Christian, Jewish, etc.) and strict professional terms (artisan, peasant, merchant, etc.). These people were further defined regionally by reference to a village and its surroundings up to, but rarely beyond, the nearest town. This limited circle was the zone of habitation and movement for most people, and natural features such as mountains, valleys, and rivers often played a key role in setting boundaries. The terrain also shaped everyday life in a number of ways, via climate, types of livelihood available, and hence types of clothing, tools, customs, regional dialects, and other specificities. When it comes to the differences between the dynastic legacies of the respective empires, several considerations may be in order. First, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century – this chapter’s point of departure – the Ottoman ruling family, dating back to 1299, was more than twice as old as the Romanov dynasty, which originated in 1613. The former was also, unlike the latter, the sole constructor of its imperial realm. Thus, the Ottoman family was arguably stronger as a source of legitimacy, both vis-à-vis its reigning monarch and in the eyes of the subjects. Although Ottoman rulers lost their thrones more often (twelve versus three to four), they all came from the same royal house, and its legitimacy was never in any doubt. Perhaps this helps to explain a key difference between the two empires regarding royal succession. In the Russian Empire, primogeniture (right of the first-born son) reigned supreme, while the principle of seniority, always present in the Ottoman Empire, affected one power transfer even in the nineteenth century. After Sultan Abdülmecid’s death in 1861, his eldest son Abdülhamid was passed over and the reins of power were handed to the deceased sultan’s younger brother Abdülaziz. In Russia, this would have been unthinkable. There was also a substantial difference between the respective values/degrees of ruler visibility in absolute terms, i.e. the amount of overall exposure to the public gaze, with the Ottoman sultan being far less visible, much like the Japanese Emperor.40 In 1810, according to John Hobhouse, a British traveler who attended the

 See: Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Donald Keene, Emperor of Japan: Meiji and his World, 1852–1912 (New York:

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British ambassador’s farewell audience with Mahmud II, the sultan still cut an aloof figure who did not engage in any eye contact with his foreign guests. The ceremonial setting in which the two sides met – the Reception Room in the Topkapı Palace’s Third Court – was entirely non-Western, including the sultan’s attire, made of yellow satin. The sultan’s hands were “glittering with diamond rings” and he had an “air of indescribable majesty.” Foreigners were incorporated into this setting by having to don Ottoman clothes (“pelisses”) over their own outfits. The audience was difficult to arrange and brief, subject to the will of the Janissaries, and the treatment of the visitors was anything but deferential, with them being whisked out of the room in short order.41 Clearly, in this tendentiously non-reciprocal manner of communication, the symbolic balance of power between the two types of sovereignty was still tilted towards the hosts.

II Explosion of Ruler and Dynastic Visibility and Spectacles for the Masses Due to the socially traumatic circumstances of Nicholas I’s sudden rise to the throne amidst an acute deficit in legitimacy, it comes as no surprise that he relied much more than Mahmud II on both his nuclear and his extended royal family for symbolic support. Similarly, in order to consolidate power, he created many more ceremonial roles and public images for members of the royal household and, by extension, the dynasty. His first such act took place on the very day of the Decembrist Revolt. The emperor brought out his 8-year-old son Alexander (the future Alexander II) and had members of the loyal Sapper Battalion, who had saved the imperial family, hold the boy, kiss his hands and feet, and accept him as the heir to the throne.42 The scene was later memorialized in a bas-relief. Nicholas I also drew on the enormous popularity of his deceased elder brother and predecessor, turning that acclaim into what might have been the first modern ruler personality cult in Russia. In a departure from precedent, Nicholas I staged a 2000-km-long funerary procession, lasting several months, from the town of Taganrog in the south of Russia, where Alexander I had died, to St. Petersburg. The procession was followed by a week-long lying-in-state and a grand funeral. During the lying-in-state in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan, the lower rank of the Life Guard regiments were brought in every day at specially appointed morning hours, battalion

Columbia University Press, 2002); Morris Low, Japan on Display: Photography and the Emperor (London: Routledge, 2006); Kenneth Ruoff, Imperial Japan at its Zenith: The Wartime Celebration of the Empire’s 2600th Anniversary (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010).  John C. Hobhouse, A Journey through Albania and Other Provinces of Turkey in Europe and Asia, to Constantinople, during the Years 1809 and 1810 (London: J. Cawthorn, 1813), 367–371.  Wortman, Scenarios of Power, vol. 1, 269.

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by battalion and squadron by squadron, “for the fulfillment of this holy duty.”43 The rest of the day was apportioned to civilian subjects from all walks of life who could enter the church and pay obeisance by touching their heads and/or kissing the coffin in a manner normally reserved for icons. Twice a day, a memorial service was held in the presence of the royal family. The same commitment to Alexander I’s memory, on the part of the military and civilian population, was on display at the first anniversary of his death, with memorial services held in all regimental and parish churches in St. Petersburg. On the actual day of the funeral, all buildings along the entire processional route were decked with festoons made of black cloth bearing the late emperor’s monogram. Several days later Nicholas I held a major military review in St. Petersburg, crossdated to begin on 19 March (OS).44 This date was carefully chosen to coincide with the anniversary of Alexander I’s entry into Paris in 1814 at the head of the victorious anti-Napoleonic alliance. During the funeral, all Russian troops who had taken part in that feat – from soldier to general – wore silver medals with the image of Alexander illuminated by the rays of the Eye of Providence on one side and the phrase “For taking Paris, 19 March 1814” on the reverse. Nicholas I clearly wished to partake of his dead brother’s glory, if only ceremoniously, and to bond with his own subjects while basking in the reflected light of Alexander I’s accomplishments.45 There followed a mass-scale commercialization of Alexander-centered mourning paraphernalia, including monogram-, portrait- and bust-bearing rings, medallions, and medals, as well as artistic renditions of Alexander’s deathbed in travelling exhibitions (kosmorama). Going forward, the marriage of monarchic, military, and religious motifs became one of the most prevalent trends in royal public ceremony. It was also projected onto other members of the royal family as Nicholas I imposed a host of ceremonial duties onto the empress and dowager empress, the grand dukes and grand duchesses, centered on their birthdays and namesake saint days but extending far beyond. In this manner, Nicholas I introduced a series of cyclical monarchic festivities that radiated out from the imperial center and gradually reached the utmost peripheries of the empire, engaging ever-larger numbers of subjects on a regular basis. Nicholas I’s utilization of ruler visibility affected the composition of groundbreaking Ottoman policies centered on Mahmud II. The first stage of trans-imperial impact took place during the Russo-Ottoman War of 1828–1829 when Russian

 Severnaya Pchela, 16 March 1826 (OS).  Cross-dating refers to the act of combining one ceremonial occasion (such as, for example, the inauguration of a building) with another (such as, for example, the royal accession anniversary) on the same day for an accumulated effect on the public mind. This was a major strategy for autocratic legitimation in many late empires.  Although Grand Duke Nicholas was first permitted to travel abroad in 1814 and even reached the army arrears at Vesoul, France, Alexander I only allowed him to come to Paris after the city’s fall and Napoleon I’s exile.

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troops on both the European and the Asian fronts lavishly celebrated not only a number of Nicholas’ own occasions (birthday, name day, and coronation day) and the deceased Alexander’s name day, but also the name day of their living brother, Grand Duke Michael Pavlovitch. This type of royal celebration was without precedent on Ottoman soil, especially as the festivities were not isolated, small-scale ceremonial events, but instead engaged and impressed local Ottoman populations of all creeds and drew them en masse into feasts of genuine, mixed popular rejoicing.46 The second opportunity for trans-imperial – Russian to Ottoman – impact was even more spectacular, not to mention central. In early to mid-1833, Russian troops decamped on the upper Bosporus per Mahmud II’s express invitation in order to provide security against the advancing troops of Ibrahim Pasha, son of Mehmed Ali, the rebellious governor of Egypt, following the Ottoman defeat at Konya. In their four-month stay, the Russians staged dazzling festivities on land and at sea, and enjoyed unprecedented access to the sultan, who himself visited them on several occasions and took part in joint military and naval reviews as well as elaborate ceremonial exchanges. While these lavish public celebrations were new to the Ottoman Empire, the sultan had already begun shifting towards modern ruler visibility in other ways. Only a few weeks following the abolition of the Janissaries, Mahmud II had two thousand soldiers “arranged in European order and going through the new form of exercise” in the outer court of the Topkapı Palace. Even more striking was Mahmud II’s openness to the public gaze at the occasion: “The sultan, who was at first stationed at the window within sight, descended after a time and passed the men in review.” It is no coincidence that the British Ambassador, Sir Stratford Canning, who meticulously related the scene, felt obliged to emphasize the fact that the sultan was “within sight,” so unusual was this act of ruler visibility. Just as striking was the sultan’s physical appearance: “Dressed in the Egyptian fashion [i.e. in a modern military uniform] armed with pistols and sabre and on his head, in place of the Imperial turban, was a sort of Egyptian bonnet.”47 Equally unusual was the fact that non-Muslims were allowed to watch the new troop’s parade through the city at all. At the beginning of previous military campaigns they were often attacked by the Janissaries for desecrating the sacred banner of the Prophet Muhammad, among other supposed offenses.48  Although festivities usually took place in towns in the Transcaucasus and Eastern Anatolia, the crowds involved almost certainly included a large number of visitors from the countryside.  Stanley Lane-Poole, The Life of the Right Honourable Stratford Canning, vol. 1 (London: Longmans, 1888), 421; Stratford Canning to George Canning, 20 June 1826, as quoted in: Philip Mansel, Dressed to Rule: Royal and Court Costume from Louis XIV to Elizabeth II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 103.  According to established protocol, whose guardians the Janissaries claimed to be, the sacred banner of the Prophet was brought out of the Topkapı Palace on the eve of military campaigns, all of which were formally presented as directed against non-Muslims. Hence, the occasional insult to innocent non-Muslim bystanders in the heat of the moment. As self-professed preservers of the

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The Western influence went further: in a manner reminiscent of Peter the Great, to whom some contemporary observers compared him, Mahmud II founded new elite regiments such as the Lancers. This novel practice continued under the next three sultans. Mahmud II’s Friday prayer processions became more accessible to foreigners than ever before. They signaled the type of spectacle and source of publicity that would only grow in size in the future. As related by the British traveler John Auldjo in 1833, at least one of Mahmud II’s Friday prayer processions lacked any visual barriers between the sultan and the common people on the street. Moreover, during this procession, an Ottoman officer politely addressed foreign ladies in fluent French and provided refreshments for them. Most strikingly, when the foreigners took off their hats, the sultan looked “earnestly” at them “without turning his head” and went so far as to acknowledge the salute “by a slight inclination of his body.”49 The act of the sultan’s initiation of eye contact with foreigners and his response to their greeting are indicative of the speed of Ottoman integration into the Western system of signs and symbols after the “Auspicious Event.” What makes this case even more remarkable is the fact that the visual exchange occurred in the context of a public procession, which by nature carries lower expectations of eye-contact than a personal audience. After a lapse of about two decades, following Sultan Selim III’s deposition in 1807, Mahmud II returned to using the ruler’s visage as a diplomatic tool, a tactic spearheaded by his predecessor (see section I above), only now with a much broader purpose and target audience. After reportedly examining with great care the portraits of Tsar Nicholas I and Tsarina Alexandra Fyodorovna hung in a Russian ship’s cabin in 1829, the sultan created a medallion bearing his own portrait in a Western-style military uniform. Known as “the Imperial Portrait,” it quickly became a most coveted domestic award, demonstrating its holder’s rare proximity and high loyalty to the sultan.50 Even more radical was the public display of royal portraits. In the early 1830s, Mahmud II commissioned portraits of himself wearing the new military uniform. In 1835, he began to distribute them to schools and official buildings.51 They were hung

status quo, the Janissaries always stood in the way of radical reforms of almost any kind in the Empire. See: Virginia Aksan, “Military Reform and its Limits in a Shrinking Ottoman World, 1800–1840,” in The Early Modern Ottomans, ed. Virginia Aksan and Daniel Goffman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 117–133, here 129, with reference to Charles Macfarlane, Constantinople in 1828 (London: Saunders and Otley, 1829).  John Auldjo, Journal of a Visit to Constantinople, and some of the Greek Islands, in the Spring and Summer of 1833 (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green & Longman, 1835), 94–95, 98.  Eldem, Pride and Privilege, 126.  See: Kırlı, “Surveillance,” 294, with reference to Ahmet Lütfi, Tarih-i Lütfi, ed. M. Aktepe, vol. 5 (Chicago: Middle East Document Center, 2003), 50–52; Uriel Heyd, “The Ottoman Ulema and Westernization in the Time of Selim III and Mahmud II,” Scripta Hierosolymitana: Studies in Islamic History and Civilization 9 (1961): 63–96, here 70. For the most detailed exposition, see: Edhem Eldem,

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in army barracks and were saluted by the troops as if he were present.52 Various sheikhs would bless them before their placement in government offices and other public places. A twenty-one-gun salute greeted them as a guard of honor marched past.53 In flagrant violation of Ottoman Muslim mores proscribing human depiction of any kind, Mahmud II even gave away his portrait to the Şeyhülislam, Yazıncızade Abdülvehab Efendi.54 This was an act of deliberate provocation on the part of the sultan, followed by an exercise of blunt authoritarian force. The top cleric’s staunch opposition to portraits soon led to his dismissal as well as the appointment of a permanent portrait artist in the palace service.55 Over a period of eight years from 1830 to 1837, Mahmud II made no fewer than five trips to the provinces.56 As Cengiz Kırlı insightfully points out, each trip reached further from the capital, and the majority of them were designed with the empire’s non-Muslim population in mind.57 Despite the official purpose of the trips, which was to examine the living conditions of his subjects and provide charity to the poor, Kırlı convincingly argues that Mahmud II’s real purpose was “to be seen rather than to see his subjects.”58 During these trips, the sultan consistently provided funding for churches, synagogues, and other historic sacred sites, setting an example for high-ranking Ottoman officials to follow.59 The sultan also distributed monetary payments to individuals – fifty-one guruş to each Muslim and thirty-one guruş to each non-Muslim – and to entire towns

“Pouvoir, modernite et visibilite: l’evolution de l’iconographie sultanienne a l’epoque modern,” in Le Corps du Leader: Construction et Representation dans les Pays du Sud, ed. Omar Carlier and Raphaelle Nollez-Goldbach (Paris: L’Harmattan , 2008), 175–186.  Mansel, Dressed to Rule, 103–104, with reference to conversations with Hakan Erdem and Caroline Finkel, and quoting Julia Pardoe, The City of the Sultans, and Domestic Manners of the Turks in 1836 (London: Routledge, 1854), 256.  Selim Deringil, Well-Protected Domains, 22, referring to Irfan Gündüz, Osmanlılarda DevletTekke Münasebetleri (Ankara: Seha Neşriyat A.Ş., 1984), 150–151.  See: Cengiz Kırlı, The Struggle over Space: Coffeehouses of Ottoman Istanbul, 1780–1845 (PhD diss., SUNY-Binghamton, 2001), 271, with reference to Lütfi, Tarih-i Lütfi [Lütfi’s History], vol. 4, 65.  Kırlı, Struggle over Space, with reference to Tuncer Baykara, Osmanlılarda Medeniyet Kavramı ve Ondokuzuncu Yüzyıla dair Araştırmalar (Izmir: Akademi kitabevi, 1992), 55.  This section is based on Kırlı, Struggle over Space, 263–268, who drew on Abdulkadir Özcan, “II. Mahmud’un Memleket Gezileri,” in Prof. Dr. Bekir Kütükoğlu’na Armağan (İstanbul: Edebiyat Fakültesi basımevi, 1991), 361–379.  “Although he travelled extensively in the Rumelian provinces where Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians and Jews lived predominantly, the only Anatolian province that he [Mahmud II] visited where Muslims constituted the majority of the population was the imperial seat’s neighboring town of Izmit.” Kırlı, Struggle over Space, 266.  Kırlı, Struggle over Space, 263–264.  Bernard Lory has analyzed such a case of charitable donation by the Grand Vizier for the repairs of a Christian Church in Manastir (Bitola) in 1830. Bernard Lory, “The Vizier’s Dream: ‘Seeing St. Dimitar’ in Ottoman Bitola,” History and Anthropology 20, no. 3 (2009): 309–316.

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to compensate them for hosting his receptions.60 Even small villages on his route received gifts from him. According to Kırlı, “in an attempt to captivate the sentiments of his subjects Mahmud II constantly downplayed his godlike figure and presented the image of an invincible yet human and earthly ruler.”61 True to the clothing regulations of 1829, which eliminated headgear as the chief marker of class and confession, the sultan wore the new-style cap (fez) and trousers as he was walking among his subjects.62 The sultan’s last trip was the longest and is the best documented. Over the course of thirty-nine days in April and May 1837, Mahmud II visited more than a dozen towns on or near the Danube River in Ottoman Rumelia. Helmuth von Moltke, a Prussian officer who accompanied him on this trip, noted how people who did not believe that the sultan was visiting them crowded into town squares to see him.63 In a speech that Mahmud II had Vassaf Efendi read at Şumnu (Shumen in present-day Bulgaria), the sultan declared: “I distinguish the Muslims among my subjects only in the mosque, the Christians – in the church, the Jews – in the synagogue; there is no other difference among them. My love and justice are strong for all, and all are my true sons.”64 This statement presented the relations between the ruler and the ruled through a universalizing father-children metaphor common to many contemporary empires. Such a metaphor had been employed by Ottoman rulers in the past, but in Mahmud II’s time it gained a new meaning and urgency. Its use reflected the sultan’s attempt to preempt the rise of religio-linguistic claims inspired by novel notions of popular sovereignty; to maintain unity irrespective of cultural affinities; and to reorient weakened subject loyalties back to the imperial center in the aftermath of the disastrous Russo-Ottoman War of 1828–1829. Furthermore, the entire 1837 trip was timed around the Russian withdrawal from the fortress of Silistre (Silistra in presentday Bulgaria) in late 1836.65 The familial metaphor and its mutations would continue

 Kırlı, “Surveillance,” 293, with reference to Helmuth von Moltke, Lettres du maréchal de Moltke sur l’Orient (Paris: Sandoz et Fischbacher, 1872), 144.  Kırlı, “Surveillance,” 292.  According to Donald Quataert, Mahmud II thus legally “offered non-Muslims and Muslims a common subjecthood/citizenry.” See: Donald Quataert, “Clothing Laws, State and Society in the Ottoman Empire, 1720–1829,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 29, no. 3 (1997): 403–425, here 413.  Kırlı, Struggle over Space, 266, with reference to Moltke, Lettres du maréchal, 140.  Maria Todorova, Anglia, Rossia i Tanzimat: Vtoraya Chetvert’ XIX Veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1983), 46, with reference to Enver Ziya Karal, “Gülhane Hatt-ı Hümayununda Batının Etkisi,” Belleten XXVIII, no. 112 (1964): 581–602, here 595. This act of delegation seems to have been a deliberate nod to the sultan’s past invisibility and inaccessibility, especially vis-à-vis provincial crowds utterly unaccustomed to experiencing the sultan’s physical presence in any way whatsoever.  Ever since the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, which concluded the Russo-Ottoman War of 1768–1774 and led to the Ottoman loss of the Crimea, the Russian Empire effectively asserted protectorship over Ottoman Christians. Over time, as Russia encroached more than ever on long-held Ottoman

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to play a key role for Mahmud II’s successors as a symbolic buffer against attempts to invoke principles of constitutionalism and self-determination. The trope of love towards a ruler’s subjects, regardless of their faith, seems to predate a similar development in the Russian Empire by about two decades.66 Mahmud II’s speech further announced: “You Greeks, Armenians, Jews, you are all servants of God, and you are all my subjects – just as good as the Muslims. Your beliefs are different, but you all obey the laws and my imperial orders.” In another speech during the same trip, the sultan addressed the leaders of non-Muslim communities directly: It is our wish to ensure the peace and security of all inhabitants of our God-protected great state, both Muslim and reaya [non-Muslim].67 In spite of all difficulties, we are determined to secure the flourishing of the state and the population under our protection. You [the leaders of non-Muslim communities] bearing in mind our wish, ought to believe us in this deed.68

The repeated invocation of God and faith in the above passages, with emphasis on their universal and authority-upholding rather than particularist and potentially divisive functions, constituted the single most important thread in the sultan’s legitimating strategies throughout his late reign. It was religion, in the form of a carefully composed set of integrative messages and practices, that underwrote Mahmud II’s attempts at ceremonial penetration, consolidation, and centralization of his domains, well underway by the time of this trip. A report dated 8 May 1836 by Mustafa Reşid Paşa, the Ottoman ambassador to Paris, announced a decision made recently to initiate annual celebrations of the sultan’s birthday and accession day. As the report declared, “the eternal performance of this comprehensive auspicious procedure is most beautiful and desirable” and thus “as it went into effect in Istanbul and the other imperial domains so it should in the Embassies of the Sublime State, located in Europe.”69 Both the Ottoman center’s intention to enforce this decision universally and the profoundly religious terms framing it are worthy of note, as is the fact that there was no mention whatsoever of the foreign origins of these annual ritual practices. On the contrary, this innovation was carefully enveloped in Muslim rhetoric. The sultan’s birthday and accession day were “bestowed solely by the grace of God to the entire Islamic

territories, it became increasingly clear that Ottoman Christians, densely populating some of the new borderlands, could be used as a fifth column, a powerful tool in diplomacy as well as war-making.  See: Wortman, Scenarios of Power, vol. 2, especially part I: “Alexander II and the Scenario of Love.”  Literally “flock,” a common appellation for the non-Muslim subjects of the sultan.  Ruben Safrastjian, “Ottomanism in Turkey in the Epoch of Reforms in XIX C.: Ideology and Policy I,” Etudes Balkaniques 24, no. 4 (1988): 72–86, here 74–75, with reference to Halil Inalcık, Tanzimat ve Bulgar Meselesi (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1943), 28.  HAT 676/33014 in the Turkish President’s Ottoman Archives in Istanbul.

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community and Muslim people.” In addition, “God’s sublime will” and “acts of divine favor” were also invoked with reference to the planned sultanic celebrations. That the sultan should order these celebrations as soon as he set up the Ottoman Foreign Ministry, which reestablished the Ottoman foreign legations, first in Paris and London, followed by Vienna and Berlin, is a testament to their perceived importance. By 1838, the sultanic celebrations abroad gained significant momentum. A report from the Ottoman legation in Vienna, unique for its length and elaborate detail, deserves particular attention. Here, the sultan’s direct visibility functions as the deliberate epicenter of both the actual ceremonial event at the embassy and the narrative thereof.70 The description of the royal birthday celebration began (1) and ended (2) with a reference to the royal portrait: 1. . . . the circle of manifest majesty around the virtuous portrait of his imperial majesty was decorated fittingly and at that circle, under the graceful auspices of his majesty the sultan, a ceremonial social gathering in the European style, a soirée was prepared with serious attention, and the three hundred greatest Austrian ladies and gentlemen as well as all ambassadors of friendly states were invited. 2. . . . and the portrait was entered into a place of fitting superiority, with the awe-inspiring virtues of his majesty, the show of sublime praise for the padishah, the remembrance and reminiscence of his glorious exploits, and after an hour or two the invitees took leave, delighted and honored.71 These excerpts delineate the experimental nature of modern Ottoman ruler visibility, including the fascinating hybridity between Western form and Ottoman content harnessed for the cause of state. Particularly intriguing are the efforts to represent the sultan in absentia, which opened the door to improvisation and abstraction. A similar trend was well underway in the Russian Empire. The extant detailed descriptions of the 1833 royal name day festivities in Helsinki, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Finland, illustrate this well. In an act of cross-dating, the inauguration of the newly constructed Society House in Helsinki was purposely scheduled to coincide with the royal name day.72 The building served as the venue for the holiday’s pivotal celebration in town: the evening ball. Furthermore, a rendition of the newly composed “God Save the Tsar,” performed with Swedish verses written for the occasion, was a poignant expression of subject loyalty to the emperor that

 HAT 1200/47094.  HAT 1200/47094.  Here is another example of cross-dating. In 1835, the Empress’ Stone – the monument commemorating the spot where Nicholas I’s royal consort first set foot in Helsinki in 1833, thereby becoming the first empress ever to visit the city – was inaugurated. The ceremony took place on the emperor’s name day. See: George C. Schoolfield, Helsinki of the Czars (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1996), 33.

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evening.73 The lyrics were printed on 400 pamphlets and sung by the cream of local society with “tears of tender emotion and a slight quiver of the choir.”74 Last but not least, a novel ceremony took place, most likely inspired by Nicholas I’s most recent visit only six months earlier. Its description is worth quoting at length: In the large hall [of the Society House], a bust of the beloved Monarch could be seen [lit. “presented itself to the eye”], on a stage covered in red cloth. Above it, an image of the monogram of His Majesty’s name, circled by laurel and oak leaves in shining splendor. On top hovered the Russian double-headed eagle with the coat of arms of Finland in its shield. The coats of arms of the Grand Duchy’s eight Governorates were displayed on four pillars on both sides of the bust. With the blinding light of four magnificent chandeliers and marvelous lights, placed before the bust, all these had a majestic appearance. And when at the appearance of General Teslev, who stood still, along with the persons accompanying him, before the bust, thundered the sound of trumpets from the choirs, the common feeling of awe filled those present, as though they were seeing the most beloved Father of the Fatherland with His firmness and serenity.75

Centered as it was on a bust – a proxy of the monarch – this fascinating stylized homage in absentia provides an early indication of the rising importance of ruler visibility in reaching out to the hearts and minds of imperial subjects near and far. It opened the door to a personality cult, which did indeed form and grow successfully for many decades thereafter. We can already observe here the careful and complex interweaving and staging of various motifs, be they of heraldic nature, color/ light, or sound. These motifs tied the ruler to the people and Russia to Finland and forged a shared public space for them both symbolically and physically, whereby each was at least to some degree exposed to influences from the other. This giveand-take of increased symbolic interaction and consequent nascent cultural integration meant that Finnish hosts could welcome the emperor in the newly invented Russian folkways – with bread and salt – as did the merchants and leading citizens of Vyborg (in present-day Russia) or the town notables and elders of Helsinki on Nicholas I’s inaugural trip in 1830.76 Conversely, the emperor could appear in Finnish uniform when reviewing elite local military units, an act which became a fixed feature of his visits to the Grand Duchy.77

 Astonishingly, the Helsinki performance took place on the same day as the anthem’s Moscow premiere. Johan Ludvig Runeberg, one of the poets, penned a poem thirteen years later that eventually became the Finnish national anthem. The other author was Bengt Olof Lille.  Russkiy Invalid ili Voennyiia Vedomosti, 21 December 1833.  Russkiy Invalid, 21 December 1833. Alexander P. Teslev served at the time as Assistant (Civil) Governor-General and Vice Chancellor of the Imperial Alexander University (today University of Helsinki).  Severnaya Pchela, 5 August 1830 and 7 August 1830, respectively.  One example dates from the emperor’s second trip to Helsinki in 1833. See: Russkiy Invalid, 19 June 1833.

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The rapid growth of modern Ottoman ruler visibility, already underway by 1833, pulled the royal relatives, both male and female, in the same direction, even though none of them were accorded public celebrations of their own.78 With Mahmud II’s relaxation of the Cage (Kafes) rules in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Ottoman princes gained an unprecedented freedom of movement, socialization, and knowledge – as did the princesses, although to a lesser extent.79 By the 1850s, the princes began to appear on the streets of Istanbul by the side of their father en route to theatrical performances or industrial expositions. Much more than in the Russian case, the guiding motive was to establish reciprocity with the West and to be accepted as part of the modern international order, albeit from a relatively weaker position of geopolitical power.80 An interest in dynastic history accompanied the changing image of the royal family and increasingly found a place in ceremonial activity. Sultan Abdülaziz’s reign, from 1861 to 1876, represented a watershed in this respect. The wave of enthusiasm for all things foreign, so characteristic of the previous two sultans, began to be tempered by a return to the native. Whereas Sultan Abdülmecid, reigning from 1839 to 1861, had chosen to restore Hagia Sophia, Sultan Abdülaziz turned his attention to Söğüt, the cradle of the Ottoman dynasty, just as Nicholas I had done with Kostroma since 1834.81 Sultan Abdülhamid II, who reigned from 1876 to 1909, expanded his uncle’s tomb restoration work tremendously. As he became fascinated with the dynasty’s roots, more than any other sultan before him, he utilized the names of dynastic personages of mythic status, beginning with Ertuğrul, Osman’s father, in an unprecedented range of ceremonial ways. Going ever further back in time, in an attempt to capture his subjects’ fancy and shore up his legitimacy, Abdülhamid II used the same techniques as his contemporaries, Tsar Nicholas II and the Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph I: the role of Ertuğrul was equivalent to that of Michael Romanov or Rudolf, respectively.82

 As already mentioned, dynastic visibility tended to oscillate in rhythm with ruler visibility.  The Cage was the part of the Imperial Harem of the Ottoman palace where possible successors to the throne were kept under a form of house arrest and constant surveillance by the palace guards.  It goes without saying that the Ottoman sultan embodied the Western concept of a timeless and generally inferior Orient much more closely than the Russian tsar, and was therefore on the receiving end of a much more intense ‘Othering’ by the West.  Hagia Sophia was a sixth-century Byzantine church in Constantinople, which for about a millennium was the largest shrine in all of Christendom. When the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453, they converted it into a mosque, Aya Sofya.  Banerjee, Backerra, and Sarti continue the list of relevant (real or legendary) monarchs with “King Arthur in Britain, Frederick Barbarossa in Germany, Shivaji in India, Amir Timur in Uzbekistan, and Emperor Jimmu in Japan.” See: Milinda Banerjee, Charlotte Backerra, and Cathleen Sarti, “The Royal Nation in Global Perspective,” in Transnational Histories of the ‘Royal Nation,’ ed. Milinda Banerjee, Charlotte Backerra, and Cathleen Sarti (New York: Nature Books, 2017), 5.

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As a point of difference, though, due to Islamic injunctions against anthropomorphic images, reforming Ottoman sultans of the mid-nineteenth century had far fewer options for using ruler-visualizing objects – portraits, statues, busts, etc. – than their Russian counterparts, while also having to cope with adverse reactions from their Muslim subjects. For example, after Mahmud II’s death in 1839, many of his portraits were covered or hidden, especially in the Arab lands. The one sultanic equestrian statue cast in bronze – of Abdülaziz – was never exhibited in public. Thus the avenues for public socialization and the direct stimulation of popular veneration were more numerous in Russia, opening a path to an imperial personality cult. In the manner and spirit of the above-discussed Helsinki ceremony, it would soon become common for student choirs to take busts made of plaster or bronze as full proxies of the ruler and sing songs of praise and prayer as if in his physical presence. Ottoman ruler celebrations, on the other hand, were designed from the outset with the non-Muslim population at home and abroad in mind, and in these settings royal portraits continued to flourish. For example, there is evidence that thirty years after the inception of annual Ottoman public ruler celebrations in 1836, royal portraits painted by local amateur artists were still on display at Bulgar school ceremonies in the provinces, such as in the town of Pazardzhik.83 What did not differ much between the two empires is the use of medals and orders that did not bear the explicit royal visage. Originating as a regular component of diplomatic exchange in meetings of heads of state – both royalty and nobility – medals and orders spread to new spheres of public life over time. In Russia, for example, acts of charity by members of the middle classes as well as feats of courage and heroism by commoners at the bottom of the social pyramid were rewarded early on in the nineteenth century with medals bestowed directly by the ruler. The front pages of prominent newspapers in both empires bear witness to how the distribution of medals was coupled with official royal holidays in myriad instances of cross-dating. In such ways, the desirability of these ruler objects was maintained and expanded.84 In both empires, medals and orders were distributed down the social ladder with a corresponding degree of variety and complexity and, not surprisingly, in increasing quantities, thus helping to coopt ever broader segments of the imperial public symbolically. Alongside royal intentions, the rise of the periodical press and the beginnings of modern mass culture fueled both popular craving for individual markers of distinction and a fascination with illuminations and fireworks; these, too, were occasioned by annual royal festivities and were replete with royal objects. What began as a voluntary impulse and loose expectation grew into a litmus test of loyalty,

 Vremia, 28 May 1866.  I define ‘ruler objects’ as objects carrying images and/or symbols of the respective rulers, such as portraits, monograms, and related regal/heraldic imagery.

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enacted through open competition in privately arranged decorations, illuminations, and fireworks. The royal monogram and heraldic imagery – double-headed eagle and crown in the Russian case versus crescent and stars in the Ottoman case – drew in the moneyed and moneyless alike. For example, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Nicholas I’s coronation in 1826 was marked in Åbo (Turku), Finland with decorative arrangements ranging in complexity from elaborate sets of monograms, royal busts, and portraits engulfed in exotic tropical vegetation down to two burning candlesticks on the window ledges of poor, small huts.85 Similarly, in Istanbul newspapers reported in great detail on individual residential decorations and illuminations set out on official days, and often received vehement complaints for any involuntary omissions, which were commonly perceived as leading to a loss of face.

III Ruler Personality Cults in the Nineteenth Century It is not difficult to grasp the potential consequences of the sustained application of ruler and dynastic visibility, especially in the autocratic settings of the Ottoman and the Russian Empires where open competition for public loyalties was minimal or non-existent. Under such conditions, the sacralization of the sovereign and the dynasty took hold in both empires, but it did so as part of the process of modernization. The connection of sacralization with modernization may seem counterintuitive at first, especially since Western Europe was at the time becoming increasingly secularized and its kings were generally stripped of their traditional charisma. Nonetheless, this confluence of sacrality and modernity, a development that began by the mid-nineteenth century, best describes the reality of the Ottoman and the Russian Empires.86 In 1846, Sultan Abdülmecid undertook an extensive tour of Ottoman Rumelia. Everywhere along his route he was treated to elaborate welcoming ceremonies hosted by elated local populations of all creeds. In the first of two excerpts from Bulgar songs of praise and prayer, inspired by this rare encounter, the closing lines convey a popular rapture that can be qualified as nothing less than a personality cult: Wherever he stepped and sat And whichever way he looked We kiss that place And commemorate him

 Severnaya Pchela, 7 September 1851.  Alexander II’s survival of five assassination attempts and Alexander III’s survival, in 1888, of a major train crash by holding up the collapsing roof of his train car with his bare hands added further dimensions to their auras in the eyes of the populace.

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With joy we were all weeping And on the trees we were climbing And for the sultan we watch Whence will we see him again Oh, will we prove worthy For him to twice appear to us In the year of 1846, He passed through Ternovo [the town of Veliko Tarnovo in present-day Bulgaria] Most merciful he appeared to us . . . 87

The theme of visibility and the act of visual exchange between ruler and ruled carries the popular embrace of the emperor – as one belonging to the people – to such an intense conclusion.88 As the poem makes clear, the cult of the monarch is centered on the space inscribed by the sultan’s movement (“wherever he stepped and sat”), vision (“whichever way he looked”), and visibility. Among all the song’s elements, perhaps most telling is the shift from past to present tense, which signals the shift in point of view from the sultan’s visit to the account of popular behavior afterwards. While the visit was a one-time event, the popular response to it is presented as a repetitive occurrence, unbounded in time: “We kiss that place and commemorate him.” Based on this evidence, poetically enhanced yet largely grounded in reality, it may not be farfetched to say that the common people treated the sultan as they would a saint.89 This impression is only made stronger by the use of the verb “to appear” with reference to the sultan. This verb has a mystic, otherworldly connotation, often employed in relating supernatural, dream-like, or visionary experiences. Thus, the song ends on a high point of ruler sanctity. In some respects, the second song goes even further: In the coach he sat, To the reaya he turned his eyes, As a father to [his] children, That is how he looked, Outside of town he came, And told all of them: I hereby depart, To God I thee entrust, To God I thee entrust, My shadow I leave here,

 Hadzhi Nayden Yoannovich, Almanac or Calendar for the Year 1847 (Bucharest: Yosif Copaynig, 1847).  Interestingly, throughout the song, there are more references to Abdülmecid as ‘tsar’ (7) than ‘sultan’ (6, including the title).  After all, this encounter between the ruler and the ruled did indeed take place and the author witnessed it first-hand. Other ceremonial descriptions, in prose, from this imperial tour also justify a quite literal interpretation of these poetic lines.

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So you may not be sad And of me grievous90

The last five poetic lines contain references to a universalized God and – just as striking – the invocation of the shadow of God (zil-i allah), a profoundly Muslim title of the sultan, to keep his Christian subjects from grieving his departure. One would be hard-pressed to find a passage that better illustrates the syncretic/hybrid nature of the integrationist project at the intra-imperial (especially, commoner) level and the inclusive notion of faith (a modern sacralization type 1) on which it largely rested. In other words, new and decisively modern are the instances, increasingly frequent in this period, of a direct engagement and interpenetration of the two religio-cultural symbolic systems. The symbolic separation of the shadow of the ruler from his body is an early signal for a trajectory of abstraction, which would gradually lead to a full-blown personality cult by the end of the nineteenth century under Sultan Abdülhamid II.91 By that time, the two empires had once more entered equivalent phases, only then characterized by a renewed withdrawal from direct ruler visibility. In the Ottoman case, this followed the depositions of two sultans – Abdülaziz and Murad V in 1876 – and Abdülhamid II’s consolidation of power by 1880.92 In the Russian case, the triggering event was the assassination of Emperor Alexander II on 1 March 1881. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, as Sultan Abdülhamid II sought to strengthen the Ottoman imperial position abroad, he oversaw two concomitant processes, which were also taking place in other contemporaneous monarchies: the further extension and complication of what may be called a dynastic pantheon and the ceremonial immersion of foreign dignitaries into this pantheon during state visits. A dynastic pantheon is a set of signifiers, ranging from physical objects such as tombs, shrines, and flags to abstract concepts such as music, colors, monograms, and mottos. Its purpose was to convey a positive image of a monarch and his/her dynasty, stressing their legacy, stability, and grandeur. Curiously, in Russia, a similar term was used in the title of a book in 1850 (permitted by the censor in 1846), entitled “Pantheon of the Fatherland, or the Life of Grand Dukes, Tsars and Emperors.”93 As the latter part of the title suggests, the pantheon in question was really that of the dynasties ruling Russia over the course of the centuries, beginning with

 Hadzhi Nayden Yoannovich, Novo- Bulgarski Pesni s Tsarski i Drugi Novi Pesni ili Pohvali. . . (Belgrade: Knigopechatnya Knyazhestva Serbii, 1851).  Abstraction is another key component of the process of modernization (in this case, in terms of glorification of the sultan, especially as far as ordinary subjects were concerned).  The year 1876, ‘the year of the three sultans,’ in which Abdülaziz and Murad V were deposed by the bureaucracy over a period of three months, became one of the most traumatic years in Ottoman history.  Otechestvennyiy Panteon, ili Zhizn’ Velikih Kniazey, Tsarey i Imperatorov, s 64 portretov, chast’ I (Moscow: Tipografia Avgusta Semena, 1850).

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the mythic figure of Ryurik, who reigned from CE 862 to 879. At the time of the book’s publication in Russia, the Ottomans had already embarked on a quest for ceremonial reciprocity with the West, a sine qua non for a more complex symbolic interaction with foreign royalty in what eventually shaped up as a dynastic pantheon by the end of the century. Facilitated by the events of the Crimean War of 1853–1856, this goal was largely completed by the late 1860s, with the visit of Sultan Abdülaziz to Europe, on the one hand, and the visits of the French Empress Eugenie and the Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph I to Istanbul, on the other. By the 1880s and 1890s, as the Ottoman and Russian Empires turned inwards in search of sources of and models for renewal, the interaction of the latter type began to take place. It is interesting to observe what constituted a dynastic pantheon during these encounters, but even more to examine how sacred space and meaning was shared between royal host and royal visitor, especially when they espoused different faiths. The Persian Shah’s visit to St. Petersburg in 1889 can best illustrate the interimperial nature of this phenomenon. Visiting Alexander II’s tomb in the Cathedral of Peter and Paul on Alexander III’s coronation anniversary, Nasser al-Din Shah Qajar performed a series of reverent acts. First, he took off his shoes at the church’s door. Then, at the tomb itself, the shah placed his hands on his chest in prayer and obeisance. This was followed by the placement of “a gigantic wreath, made from magnificently executed porcelain flowers, decorated with small diamonds” on top of the tomb. As it turned out, this was just one of an entire array of finely crafted and jewel-studded wreaths laid at Alexander II’s grave, arranged in the manner of a museum exhibit. The shah paused again to pray before Empress Maria Aleksandrovna’s tomb before visiting Peter the Great’s tomb.94 He was then shown the imperial regalia – scepter, crown, and orb – and allegedly “long marveled at the massive diamonds, with which they were decorated.” Then the shah visited the site of Alexander II’s assassination where once again he prayed. That same day, Nasser al-Din Shah reviewed the construction of the Holy Resurrection Church. Earlier, while still in Moscow, he had been presented with an album of watercolor drawings of Mikhail Romanov’s coronation in 1613 by the Director of the Moscow State Archive.95 In sum, during his brief visit, Nasser al-Din Shah was brought into some form of contact with at least four deceased Romanov rulers: the former royal couple, Peter the Great, and Mikhail Romanov, the dynasty’s founder. The Shia Muslim shah, head of a sovereign state, prayed for these Orthodox Christian rulers on three occasions and was even present at a church construction site. Other state leaders visiting St. Petersburg in subsequent years went through the same routine: a mandatory visit to the royal burial

 Maria Alexandrovna was Alexander II’s wife and Alexander III’s mother.  Novoe Vremia, 13 May and 15 May 1889.

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complex of St. Peter and St. Paul and to Alexander II’s assassination grounds on the Ekaterininskii Canal. The list of visitors included the French president, the Habsburg emperor, and even the Siamese king. Even though they exhibited varying degrees of exuberance in their demonstrations of faith and ceremonial cooptation at these sacred sites, all heads of state played the roles seemingly expected of them.96 It appears that faith, when projected onto a dynastic pantheon, was becoming a universalized tool and symbolic prop of monarchy in the late nineteenth century, and no divide of faith or denomination at the top level was too wide to be bridged. One could refer to the syncretic/hybrid nature of this integrationist project at the inter-imperial (especially, royalty) level as a modern sacralization type 2. In both the Russian and the Ottoman Empires, acts of charity and generosity also reflected the ruler’s increasingly sacred aura in the late period. The main difference from the past was the degree of monarchic usurpation of ceremonial space, with more celebrations tied to the ruler than ever before. In the late Ottoman Empire, mercy seems to have been a chief prerogative of the male ruler, predictable in its cyclicality and expanding both in its impact across the domains and in its press coverage. The reassertion of norms of faith-based moral propriety, after a period of relatively more relaxed social rules in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, demanded yet again that female members of the dynasty be kept largely out of the public eye. Rules of succession and the troubling events of 1876 translated into a long shadow cast over the ruler’s male relatives. Therefore, on his accession anniversaries, the sultan was the cynosure. There was one major obstacle, however. Sultan Abdülhamid II’s self-imposed withdrawal from society meant that, unlike his Western counterparts, he had fewer opportunities to preside over the process of his own image-making in public.97 Therefore, his acts of mercy had to speak louder. The posting of plaques commemorating them in public certainly helped in this respect, as did the widespread publication of their photographs in the press and the accompanying flowery, formulaic language glorifying the monarch. Hospitals were prominent among the institutions founded by Sultan Abdülhamid II and attesting to his piety. Judging by announcements in the periodical press, most of them were institutions for children (especially, orphans), the poor, refugees and strangers, social outcasts, and, increasingly, religious minorities. Thus, hospitals for the poor

 For his part, the Catholic Habsburg emperor prayed very attentively at Alexander II’s tomb.  Unlike the Russian Empire, where physical security was the paramount motivation for Alexander III’s withdrawal from society, in the Ottoman Empire the paramount motivation had to do with the royal mystique. As soon as Abdülhamid II had consolidated his grip on power, he sought to regain a measure of invisibility and, by extension, inviolability for the ruler and the dynasty, which had inadvertently been lost due to overexposure to the public gaze over the course of the previous fifty years. Consequently, Abdülhamid II prohibited the domestic circulation of his portraits and substituted them with imperial banners embroidered with the acclaim ‘Long Live the Sultan!’.

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opened in all corners of the Ottoman Empire, from Yanya in the Balkans through Çankırı in Anatolia to Sana’a in Yemen.98 The target patients included ever more narrowly defined and often socially marginalized segments of the population, not because the monarch so desperately needed their loyalty, but because he wished to present himself as an all-encompassing, all-merciful figure, both at home and abroad. Thus, a “Special Hospital for Poor Men and Women” opened in Konya (in present-day Turkey), as well as a poorhouse in Istanbul with separate quarters for Muslims and Christians.99 The overwhelming majority of these inaugurations took place on or around the sultan’s accession anniversary or his birthday and, just as importantly, usually carried the name of their august patron: Hamidiye.100 Along the same lines, a myriad of charitable and other institutions in Russia were called Aleksandrovskii or Nikolaevskii, the difference being that Grand Dukes and Grand Duchesses were also allowed to give their names to such institutions. The resultant personality cults in both empires set regional precedents for the use of techniques of mass appeal (today known as public relations), which have since been repeatedly employed and are largely still with us today. As ruler ceremonies came to affect and involve ever larger segments of each respective imperial population, the range of improvisational possibilities regarding the ruler’s image shrank and came under ever stricter control, while the emotional intensity and abstraction from reality of the reference terms increased. This trend mirrored contemporary European and global processes of redefinition of monarchic sovereignty. The mental centralization carried out through ruler celebrations, as outlined in this chapter, paralleled, by deliberate design, other ongoing forms of centralization: fiscal, administrative, infrastructural, and so on. In the end, it inscribed the fields of modern public space/sphere and modern politics, which ruler celebrations had helped to forge in the first place. Neither the end of the Russian and the Ottoman Empires in the aftermath of World War I nor the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 put an end to this style of autocratic symbolic politics. On the contrary, national authoritarian regimes of the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries first adopted the power choreography and propaganda apparatuses of their imperial predecessors wholesale and then harnessed them in a reinvigorated push for the ever-elusive nation.

 Servet-i Fünun, 1316, Ağustos 19 (1 September 1900); 1312, Ağustos 1 (13 August 1896). The towns in question are Ioannina in present-day Greece, Çankırı in present-day Turkey, and Sana’a in present-day Yemen.  Servet-i Fünun, 1316, Temmuz 27 (9 August 1900) and Ağustos 19 (1 September 1900); 1309, Temmuz 15 (27 July 1893).  See: François Georgeon, “Le Sultan cache: Réclusion du souverain et mise en scène du pouvoir à l’époque de Abdülhamid II, 1876–1909,” Turcica 29 (1997): 93–124, here 116–117; Murphey, Exploring Ottoman Sovereignty, 12–13.

Taking Possession of Public Spaces

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Civil Society and the Embodiment of Authority Abstract: Authority is embodied. In this chapter, I pay special attention to authorization practices represented by the bodies of those in power and those seeking power, the specialists who developed those practices and provided training in them, and the forms of knowledge employed to justify these practices. The long nineteenth century, I argue, saw the erosion of traditional authority centered at the royal and imperial courts. In the nineteenth century, structures of civil society emerged as new spaces of authority. The proliferation of spaces for gymnastics and dancing entailed the rise of a new type of specialists as authorities of the body. It is with them that the competing strategies of authority and authorization gained in momentum over the course of the nineteenth century. It is also in the spaces of civil society that the agents of charismatic authority found resonance with the masses in the twentieth century. Keywords: body and authority, gymnastics, dancing, body specialist, Sokol, Turnen, Gutsmuths, Jahn, charisma and the body ✶✶✶

Authority is power but not all power is authority. Authority exists only, as Max Weber points out, when there is obedience to follow an order.1 In short, whereas power can appear as pure linear imposition of one’s will without any regard to the resistance from those who are ordered to follow, authority always assumes there exists a certain compliance and motivation in those following those orders. Yet this docility does not happen on its own. In her classic analysis, Hannah Arendt reminds us that the compulsion to follow an authority figure does not stem from mere rational conviction but rather takes a third position between coercion and persuasion.2 Weber also distinguishes between three ideal types of authority, each of which produces its own mode of following orders: legal, traditional, and charismatic.3 Legal authority expresses its motivational power in norms, laws, regulations, and their rational justification, while traditional authority rests on the rulers’ tangibility, on their being personally felt and experienced as a figure of authority, and on being raised from childhood to be a lord or a servant within a community. Charismatic authority is centered on the personal, magical, and

 Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Paderborn: Voltmedia, 2006), 62, 214.  Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking, 1965), 92–93.  Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 218. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110574012-013

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heroic qualities of a leader.4 In the study of traditional and charismatic authority, more so than within legal authority, the body appears as an important category of analysis. Without ignoring legal codes, public discourses, and news media as important spheres and sources of authority, a focus on the body grounds analysis in the materiality of authority – the spaces, practices, and performances it occupies during its production and reproduction. How does the body serve to enhance authority? In her analysis of traditional authority, Arendt argues that central to its justification is the creation of continuity, stretching back to a specific origin. This lineage of power is reinforced in remembrance and reenactment, no matter if it is the foundation of the City of Rome, the Catholic Church, or the Protestant Reformation, or any other auspicious event.5 Authority is built on acts of reminding and providing further narration to the tradition. I call these acts authorization. Authorization builds on existing tradition and is neither a trait of an individual nor an argument, but a strategy of enforcing domination and accruing a following which avoids brute coercion or simple argumentative persuasion. Since the Middle Ages, the body has been increasingly recognized as the premier tool of executing the strategy of authorization; the performance, symbols, and representation of the body became vital to the justification of authority. Authority is embodied. It is articulated upon the body in a process which Pierre Bourdieu calls hexis, or one’s “durable manner of standing, speaking, and thereby of feeling and thinking.”6 Authority has to be felt, seen, and experienced by the dominated in order to be effective – not merely heard, read, or intellectually comprehended. The body is used as an experiential canvas which allows almost unlimited opportunities to exercise the strategies of authority. This canvas is used in paintings and portraits, in dressing and dress codes, formal table seating, theater seating, in short, in settings in which a person is staged as a figure of authority. The body serves in these settings as a tool to evoke obedience among those who are exposed to the authority. Routines of reminding and reenacting secure and maintain the efficiency of traditions once they are established. These acts may be simple gestures and poses, or complicated procedures which require learning and training. At higher degrees of complexity, authorization may be mediated by professionals who master specialized knowledge with relation to practices of the body. In his groundbreaking work, Michel Foucault highlights the close connection between domination and knowledge of the body, not only as a strategy of repression but also in its productive capacity as it impels collaboration in its subjects.7 In this chapter, I will pay special

 Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 219–243.  Arendt, Between Past and Future, 124–128.  Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 93–94.  See especially: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 25–29, where the exercise of authority and the compliance of its subject is

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attention to authorization practices represented by the bodies of those in power and those seeking power, the specialists who developed those practices and provided training in them, and the forms of knowledge employed to justify these practices. The long nineteenth century, I argue, saw the erosion of traditional authority, leading to a crisis in which multiple centers of power proliferated and notions of authority competed. Towards the end of the century, this competition opened up more space for practices of charismatic authority.8 To be clear, Weber’s models of traditional and charismatic authority are not descriptions of historical reality but ideal types that can intersect and appear simultaneously. Such an overlap was inherent, as we shall see, in the way that traditional forms of body authorization shifted toward charismatic uses of the body in imposing one’s authority. The erosion of the traditional mode of authority, its crisis, and its ultimate displacement by charismatic forms of authority is also signified by a shift in the socio-political spaces that made those modes possible. The embodiment of traditional authority found its home in the court and court society, as Norbert Elias indicates in his investigation of the parallels between state formation and individuation in early modern Europe. Although Elias’ work is not primarily on authority – the term hardly appears in his texts – it shows the importance of the body and its practices in the social relationships of the court, be it in dancing, everyday conduct, eating habits, or hygiene.9 The erosion of traditional authority follows from the erosion of the court as the center and model of authority. In its absence, not one space but multiple spaces emerged, meaning authorization could now happen simultaneously. The courts and courtly life did not disappear in the nineteenth century but faced competition from structures of civil society which occupied a variety of social and physical spaces. Clubs, associations, plazas, streets, and parks were complemented by schools, news media, and, later in the nineteenth century, women’s and labor movements.10 It is here that the competing strategies of authority and authorization gained in momentum over the course of the nineteenth

analyzed. There is clearly a difference in nuance between Weber and Arendt on the one hand and Foucault on the other. For Foucault, the subjectivity and the resultant compliance of the subject of authority is also produced, a result of a set of strategies and thereby not genuinely independent from authority. See for instance: Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 26–27.  Frank Furedi, Authority: A Sociological History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 250, argues that the sense of authority was lost in the nineteenth century. See also: Arendt who is convinced that we cannot understand the meaning of the notion of authority due to our deepening sense of a crisis of authority since the turn of the nineteenth century. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 91–92.  Norbert Elias, Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation: Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1997).  On civil society, see: Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Civil Society 1750–1914 (Houndsmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 25–77. I use the term civil society (Zivilgesellschaft) here to signify civic, often voluntary engagement in spaces that were public and outside of direct official control. On civil

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century. It is also in these spaces that the agents of charismatic authority found resonance in the twentieth century.

I From the Royal Touch to the Crisis of Authority Before the French Revolution, the body served authorization in multiple ways, from dressing to table settings to theater seating. My focus will be on two practices, the so-called royal touch and courtly dance, both of which demonstrate the importance of the body for traditional authority. Both illuminate the forces that shaped the embodiment of authority, the seemingly magical qualities used to authorize the ruler as a charismatic figure, and the arrangements that established the customs and traditions of the body as it bolstered positions of authority. The preeminent French historian, Marc Bloch, traces the beginnings of the royal touch to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as a miraculous healing practice mainly applied to scrofula patients by French and English monarchs. Most of the documentation on the royal touch relates to kings, but there is clear evidence of queens having the same gift. Touched by the ruler, the patients were expected to recover from this tormenting disease, and sometimes they did. By manifesting the touch, rulers demonstrated their possession of higher, sacred powers and thereby reenforced their entitlement to the throne. For subjects the act of healing and its narration were visible signs of the rulers’ good will toward the poor and demonstrations of the sacredness of regal bodies (Fig. 13.1). Although previously an irregular show of royal power, under Louis XI the royal touch in France became a ritualized, weekly ceremony. Assisted by the royal doctor, the monarch focused only on healing scrofula, while royal authorities explained the inevitable lack of positive outcomes as stemming from the fact that the patient did not have the disease.11 In England, too, rulers busied themselves with demonstrating their royal touch, healing nearly five hundred patients a year on average in the mid-fourteenth century.12 For French monarchs in particular, miraculous healing became a tool for expanding their territorial reach to northern Italy and Spain where faith in the royal touch was common.13 Miracle cures by royal or noble agents were also familiar to the Holy Roman Empire, both in Austria and in the North German territories.14 Across Europe, the royal touch remained a known and variably common practice into the eighteenth century.

society as space, see: Ian F. McNeely, The Emancipation of Writing: German Civil Society in the Making, 1790s–1820s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 3–4, 245.  Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1973), 54–55.  Bloch, Royal Touch, 57.  Bloch, Royal Touch, 63.  Bloch, Royal Touch, 86–87.

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Fig. 13.1: Charles II touching a patient for the king’s evil (scrofula) surrounded by courtiers, clergy, and the general public. Engraving by Raymond White, 1684.

As late as 1825, the reactionary king of France, Charles X, decided to make use of royal healing powers. Marching to the Hospice of St.-Marcoul, he touched the sick and enunciated the traditional words: “The King touches thee, may God heal thee.” The nuns of the hospital then wrote certificates of healing to ratify the event. However, by this time the general public saw nothing but a butt of jokes in the act.15 Clearly a practice had come to its end, and in the nineteenth century, finally disappeared. Dance was an equally important and even more widely performed authorizing practice. Adopted by an expanding circle of noble, patrician, and even commoner families, dance centered on what we might call Nahbeziehungen, the web of politically and socially intensive close contacts.16 In its courtly variation, dance underlined and  Bloch, Royal Touch, 227–228.  On the concept of Nahbeziehungen (close contacts) in early modern politics, see: Jan Hirschbiegel, Nahbeziehungen bei Hof–Manifestationen des Vertrauens: Karrieren in reichsfürstlichen Diensten am Ende des Mittelalters (Cologne: Böhlau, 2015), 21, 56–60.

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expressed the authority of the ruler, reaching back to the Middle Ages, as Rudolf zur Lippe has shown in his magisterial analyses of the Italian courts in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.17 Queen Elizabeth I of England, too, made extensive use of court dances to stage her authority.18 The classical age of courtly dance, though, is most closely associated with Louis XIV. The king and his first minister, Cardinal Jules Mazarin, understood early on the importance of establishing royal authority through courtly dance. The young Louis performed personally in ballets, establishing his authority both through his superb performance and through the use of choreography to present himself as central to the dance, the court, and the realm. After the completion of Versailles in 1678, the most famous of these authorizing dances were perfected and woven into the rituals and ceremonies of the royal court. Appearing before 1660 in the court of Louis XIV, the minuet soon became one of the two standard dances of the court repertoire–the courant was the other.19 The nobility was requested to join the dances as a mark of the king’s special favor; in consequence, the dances became effective in disciplining the nobility, who were cast in the choreographies that demonstrated and performed the unlimited power of their king.20 Yet the dance performances also worked more indirectly. First, by styling himself as the Sun (Ra) or Apollo, Louis gave the dances a sense of continuity to past traditions. This was authorization in a traditional sense, as an act of remembering or reminding audiences of the ancient Egyptian or Greek legacy. Secondly, the choreographies positioned the king in the geometric center of the proscenium’s central axis, the absolute position directly at the audience end of the stage. Authority was thereby ascribed to the royal body geometrically.21 The sheer physicality and spatiality of the king’s body underlined his authority. In the same way, Louis’ geometric choreography visualized his royal power as central to the state. Le gran bal du roi is a good example. The ballet was a magnificent performance by courtiers and professional dancers who danced in couples, with the audience positioned on either side of the dance and the king seated above everyone else. In this central location, he could observe everyone and “also understand and anticipate” everything.22 Louis also converted courtly dances into public spectacles in which courtiers, king, and

 Rudolf zur Lippe, Naturbeherrschung am Menschen, vol. 1: “Körpererfahrung als Entfaltung von Sinnen und Beziehung in der Ära des italienischen Kaufmannskapitals” (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1974), esp. “Teil II. Die Möglichkeit einer Einheit von Metrik und Mimesis.”  Rudolf Braun and David Gugerli, Macht des Tanzes – Tanz der Mächtigen: Hoffeste und Herrschaftszeremoniell 1550–1914 (München: Beck, 1993), 15–34.  Taubert also mentions the bourrée as a standard dance. Gottfried Taubert, Rechtschaffener Tanzmeister, oder gründliche Erklärung der Frantzösischen Tanz-Kunst, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Friedrich Lankischens Erben, 1717), 10.  Sarah R. Cohen, Art, Dance, and the Body in French Culture of the Ancien Régime (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 35–41.  Cohen, Art, Dance, 46–47.  Braun and Gugerli, Macht des Tanzes, 150.

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professional dancers performed to the public. The Carousel, organized in 1662 in Paris for instance, was a highly choreographed ballet aimed at the general public, including commoners. In this public spectacle, the king was staged in the center of the arena as the sun around which groups of people circulated, while the king’s brother, Philippe d’Orléans, was portrayed as the moon reflecting the rays of the sun.23 In the eighteenth century, formalized balls and spectacles as well as formal dance instruction spread into all regions of Europe. Not only did other European courts adopt the practices honed at Versailles, but these practices also trickled down into the ranks of the bourgeoisie. By the early eighteenth century the minuet, the standard dance of the Versailles repertoire, had established itself as the leading dance of European ballrooms. By the middle of the century, it had become the most popular ballroom dance in the repertoires of European nobility and also increasingly among the upper crust of the bourgeoisie. In Germany, the minuet was adopted as the signature dance of formal balls and remained so until the second decade of the nineteenth century.24 From its beginning, the minuet gained the reputation of being a complicated and difficult dance. Its combinations of steps and figures were almost inexhaustible and each of them required meticulous attention to following a complex set of rules. Why, then, did it remain dominant and resistant to changes of style and fashion for so long? One explanation, supported by current scholarship, sees the minuet as a paradigmatic dance of court society. As the dance of the nobility, the minuet demonstrated the cultural hegemony of this class over the upper segments of the bourgeoisie. But during the second half of the eighteenth century, it was also commonly taught to children of burgher families. The young Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had minuet lessons in Frankfurt: From my early childhood, my father taught me and my sister to dance. For such a serious man, that was in itself something extraordinary. My father did not let this bother him but taught us in the most exact way how to take correct positions and steps. Once he had introduced us to the secrets of the minuet, he took his flûte-douce and played us something in three/four time, and we tried to follow as well as we could.25

The dance’s diffusion was based on several social factors. For one thing, the minuet was an educational dance, figuring prominently in the moral education of noble

 Cohen, Art, Dance, 69.  According to Fink, the Viennese court nurtured the minuet. Monika Fink, Der Ball: Eine Kulturgeschichte des Gesellschaftstanzes im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 1996), 117. Witzmann indicates, however, that during the era of Maria Theresia the Habsburg court preferred German dances. Reingard Witzmann, Der Ländler in Wien: Ein Beitrag zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des Wiener Walzers bis in die Zeit des Wiener Kongresses (Wien: Arbeitsstelle für den Volkskundeatlas in Österreich, 1976), 25.  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Werke, vol. 9 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1974), 389.

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and patrician youth as many of its configurations were identical with standards of social conduct. Its initial pose, for instance, was a standard gesture of aristocratic and patrician greeting.26 Moreover, the increasing complexity and applicability of such social dances raised the importance of the dancing instructor’s profession. These instructors became the arbiters of what Johann Pasch calls the first impression of the body: “the first thing that we see in a person.”27 Dancing instructors who upheld high professional standards were thus gatekeepers to social recognition. Molière, the unofficial playwright of the royal court, depicted in The Bourgeois as Nobleman how professional dancers and instructors were employed by those wanting to join the noble ranks.28 Learning to dance was not easy but the payoff was the acquisition of grace, aura, and the physical skills associated with authority. The dance master had become the guide to authorizing bodies. In the body politic of the Ancien Régime, techniques for expressing authority through the medium of the body were constantly expanding, be it in the rituals of royal dressing and undressing, processions, and fashion. The French Revolution gave a clear pause to this development.29 The decapitation of Louis XVI on 21 January 1793 interrupted the long duration of the royal body that was not only divine by its origin but also considered immortal: “The king is dead, long live the king!” By the end of the eighteenth century, there was an increasing sense that authority was in crisis and that this crisis would not be resolved with the return of royal balls, processions, and courtly rituals after the Napoleonic Wars.

 In fifteenth-century Italian dancing, the compliments, such as beautiful and graceful walking and reverence, were standardized in view of their practical use. Volker Saftien, Ars Saltandi: Der europäische Gesellschaftstanz im Zeitalter der Renaissance und des Barock (Hildesheim: Olms, 1994), 108. For their characteristics by the early nineteenth century, see: Ernst Christian Mädel, Anfangsgründe der Tanzkunst oder genaueste Angabe zur Erlernung und Wiederholung aller jezzo üblichen Tänze, ohne Beihülfe eines Tanzmeisters (Erfurt: Ernst Christian Mädel, 1801), 26, 33, 41–49. Normally the compliment was based upon a combination of positions two and three, but a combination of one and four was also used, as Bartholomay points out in describing the compliment forward (Vorkompliment), Bartholomay, Tanzkunst, 265–274.  Johann Pasch, Beschreibung wahrer Tanz-Kunst, nebst einigen Anmerckungen über Herrn J. C. L. P. P. zu G.: Bedencken gegen das Tanzen (Frankfurt a/M: Johann Michahelles und Johann Adolph, 1707), 103.  Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Molière, “Der Bürgerliche Edelmann: Ballett-Komödie in drei Aufzügen,” in Sämtliche Werke, trans. H. Conrad, vol. 5 (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1917).  See especially: Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 40, in which she argues that the French Revolution created a “public space defined by the public dignity of embodied individuals,” meaning that the Revolution created a new, body-centered form of authority. On the body and the French Revolution, see also: Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 93–97.

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II Civil Society and the Authority of the Body Specialists in the Nineteenth Century The Ancien Régime had perfected the techniques of body authorization, the royal touch, the bodily rituals of the court, dress codes, and especially dance. The crisis of traditional authority, accentuated by the French Revolution, did not cause the demise of most of these techniques, but it changed their agents. With the death of the transcendental king as absolute authority figure and the decline of the court as the preeminent space for power, civil society became the seminal terrain in which authority was performed.30 The occupants of this civic space were the people, or nation, recently discovered and now imagined as an agent able to bestow authority. Just as a variety of tribal and ethnic narratives arose as foundation myths for the nation, the body was rapidly incorporated into these new narratives of nationhood. The conscription of commoners to fight in the Napoleonic Wars called for physical training and it is this training, known as Turnen or Sokol, gymnastik or gymnastique, that first placed the body in public in schools, training, marching, and gymnastic performances. By the second half of the nineteenth century, gymnastics became a mass movement in multiple European countries not only for the middle class but also for the working class, with large annual conventions, parades, and gatherings. The training of the body was codified into a new kind of expert knowledge. Dance and fencing masters had once schooled the sons of aristocratic families in the Ancien Régime; gymnastics teachers now grasped for political authority through their engagement with the nation as a whole, as did Francisco Amoros in France and Spain, Pehr Henrik Ling in Sweden, Franz Nachtegall in Denmark, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn in the Germanic world, Miroslav Tyrš in Bohemia and Moravia, and Charles Kingsley in the United Kingdom. At the end of the nineteenth century, physical education was not limited to boys only: an increasing number of European countries saw girls performing gymnastics as well. The body was also used to authorize the individual members of the ethnos. Even before all men were awarded full political rights, in many countries – England being a major exception – they were given the right to defend their honor by dueling. This practice, earlier a noble privilege, was now sanctioned for and practiced by an increasing circle of men; in France, it was the legal right of all men. And it is here that men’s and women’s bodies separated ways: European women were not allowed to duel or invoke its rituals of honor. In each of these instances, civil society became a contested terrain in which bodies could participate in rituals of authority. As a pivotal moment in the French Revolution, the execution of the king not only put an end to a lineage and an individual reign but also profoundly shattered the belief in political authority justified by a transcendental being. The royal body  Here I build on Outram’s work, Body and French Revolution, esp. chapter 5.

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was a divine body and with its execution this body ceased to exist, both materially and transcendentally. The authorization by transcendental being was replaced by a new narrative that relied on common ground described as tribal unity: this narrative was a story about foundations, as it had been with the ancient Romans. It told the origin story of the nation or, as in the Germanic realm, of a tribe or several tribes. In music, in poetry, in paintings, in theater we see the same pattern: narratives of the people’s beginning justified the authority of new figures who embodied and represented this authority. The national authorization narrative was also strikingly corporeal: its premier field was physical exercise, especially gymnastics, as we find it in its early German representatives, Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths and Franz Anton May. In 1786 GutsMuths took his pupils at the Philanthropinum of Schnepfenthal, an experimental boarding school near Gotha, on a long walking tour to Frankfurt am Main. It is in the detailed description of this tour that we find one of the first images of ancient Germans as a model for physical education. During a visit to an armory in Hanau, the sight of medieval weaponry conjured GutsMuths’ sentimental pledge for the new German man who combined acquired mental powers with physical strength: Live with discipline and honesty; let your greatest enemy be softness of any kind. From early hours to late at night, exercise your physical strength and train your mind in a variety of activities. Once again, live with discipline and honesty and you will become a German man of whom your ancestors need not be ashamed in their forgotten graves.31

In the fall of 1792, when French revolutionary troops invaded German territory, these older images suddenly gained new urgency. GutsMuths rediscovered them and in his Gymnastik of 1793 penned a powerful patriotic pledge for the emulation of strong German tribesmen. Without specifying the particular tribes or their customs – they were commonly known in his time and readily accessible in Zedler’s Universallexicon, for instance – GutsMuths broadly referred to “our ancestors.”32 Two years later Der Bote, a magazine geared to a popular audience, began publishing an extensive and more  “Lebe züchtig und ehrlich, deine größte Feindin sey Weichlichkeit jeder Art, übe deine Körperkraft von früher Dämmerung, unter abwechselnden Beschäftigungen deines Geistes bis an den Abend – noch einmal lebe züchtig und ehrlich; so wirst du ein deutscher Mann werden, dessen sich deine Voreltern, wenn sie unter ihren längst vergeßnen Grabhügeln hervorträten, nicht zu schämen brauchten.” Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths, Reisen der Salzmannischen Zöglinge, vol. 4 (Leipzig: Siegfried Lebrecht Crusius, 1787), 135–136.  “Unsere Voreltern.” Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths, Gymnastik für die Jugend: Enthaltend eine praktische Anweisung zu Leibesübungen: Ein Beitrag zur nöthigsten Verbesserung der körperlichen Erziehung (Schnepfenthal: Verlag der Buchhandlung der Erziehungsanstalt, 1793), 53; “Das Beyspiel unsrer ältesten Vorfahren,” in: GutsMuths, Gymnastik, 383. On ancient Germans, see the term “Teutsche” in Johann Heinrich Zedler, Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon Aller Wissenschaften und Künste, Welche bishero durch menschlichen Verstand und Witz erfunden und verbessert worden, vol. 42 (Halle & Leipzig: Johann Heinrich Zedler, 1744), 1680–1731.

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detailed history of the ancient Germans. In a series of issues spanning several months, it educated its readers about the heroic nature of their ancestors, beginning with Tacitus and moving systematically through the Ottonian Empire, the Reformation, and the Great Elector of Prussia.33 GutsMuths was not alone in his oath. In 1793 May, a medical doctor and antirepublican from Mannheim, gave public lectures on the Dietetics of the Body and Soul. Disguised under this rather harmless title was a defiant rejection of the new regime in Paris as nothing but “popular insubordination.”34 Anything positive and constructive, or “what the state and fatherland can expect from the activities of its residents,” so argued May, “is the outcome of the dietetics of the body and soul, the outcome of a healthy, robust population.”35 The real dietetics and order of life, he cried, could be found only in the heroic past of the ancient Germans.36 During the Napoleonic Wars, many more German authors embraced these tribal authorization narratives. Jahn, one of the founders of German gymnastics, was commissioned by the Prussian government to write a book on German folklore, Deutsches Volksthum, in 1810. This groundbreaking, rambling work connected old German myths, legends, and beliefs into a narrative of the German people, its origins, and its mores. Jahn then continued this theme in his famous Die deutsche Turnkunst of 1816, a manual of gymnastics with a potent Germanic mission and emphasis on manliness – women were explicitly excluded from Jahn’s gymnastics.37 The nationalistic/tribalistic authorization narrative became a commonplace for Jahn and his disciples, such as Ernst Eiselen and Hans

 Der Bote aus Thüringen (Schnepfenthal: Im Verlage der Erziehungsanstalt, 1795).  “Volkszügellosigkeit.” Franz Anton May, Medicinische Fastenpredigten oder Vorlesungen über Körper und Seelen-Diätetik, zur Verbesserung der Gesundheit und Sitten, vol. 1 (Mannheim: Schwan und Götz, 1793), “Vorbericht.”  “Was der Staat und das Vaterland von der Würksamkeit seiner Bewohner erwarten kann, ist Resultat der Körper- und Geistes-Diätetik, Resultat einer gesunden körnigen Bevölkerung.” May, Medicinische Fastenpredigten, vol. 1, 4.  May, Medicinische, vol. 1, 5. On nationalism as validation of authority by Herder, see: Furedi, Authority, 258.  On Jahn and his tribal-nationalistic project, see: Daniel Alexander McMillan, “Germany Incarnate: Politics, Gender, and Sociability in the Gymnastics Movement, 1811–1871” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1997); Edmund Neuendorff, Geschichte der neueren deutschen Leibesübung vom Beginn des 18. Jahrhunderts bis zur Gegenwart, vol. 1: “Geschichte der deutschen Leibesübung vom Beginn des 18. Jahrhunderts bis zu Jahn: mit einem Grundriss der Geschichte der deutschen Leibesübung von den Urzeiten bis zum Beginn des 18. Jahrhunderts” (Dresden: Limpert, 1930), esp. 81–102; Carl Euler, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn: Sein Leben und Wirken (Stuttgart: Karl Krabbe, 1881). On Jahn’s emphasis on masculinity, see: Karen Hagemann, “Of ‘Manly Valor’ and ‘German Honor’: Nation, War, and Masculinity in the Age of the Prussian Uprising Against Napoleon,” Central European History 30 (1997): 187–220; George Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 42–60. See also: Teresa Sanislo, “Models of Manliness and Femininity: The Physical Culture of the Enlightenment and Early National Movement in Germany, 1770–1819” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2001).

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Ferdinand Massmann, who actively spread Jahn’s ideas and practices in the German lands in the first half of the nineteenth century (Fig. 13.2).

Fig. 13.2: Württembergisches Turnfest Reutlingen 1845 (Württemberg Gymnastics Festival 1845).

The intense association between nationalism and body culture was a German peculiarity, but Jahn also inspired followers in other parts of Central and Eastern Europe to follow his lead. In Bohemia, Moravia, and other Slavic regions, the Sokol movement drew inspiration from his work. With precursors in gymnastic schools and clubs in Prague in the 1840s and 1850s, the movement gained momentum during the general political liberation of the early 1860s. After Tyrš, a Czech nationalist, founded a gymnastics club in Prague, where civil society organizations were growing rapidly, the Sokol clubs became the most important and largest nationalistic organization in the Czech lands within a few years.38 In their use of nationalistic authorization narratives, they resembled the German gymnastics clubs (Turnvereine) that in the early 1860s recruited more members than ever before and aligned themselves increasingly with a nationalistic agenda.

 Claire Elaine Nolte, The Sokol in the Czech Lands to 1914: Training for the Nation (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 56–89.

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A peculiar feature of both the Sokol and the Turnvereine was their heightened sense of manliness, their understanding of themselves as the rediscovery of true masculinity.39 This had been the case in GutsMuths’ projects in the 1780s and 1790s, but now, in the middle of the nineteenth century, it found an increasing number of variations. Britain’s muscular Christianity was one of them. It was promoted and widely publicized by Kingsley and especially Thomas Hughes in his 1857 novel Tom Brown’s School Days, which depicted the protagonist’s experiences at an English boarding school. Both Kingsley and Hughes had attended the Rugby School where the headmaster, Thomas Arnold, had promoted the practices of muscular Christianity as they began to take shape.40 Half a century earlier, the Napoleonic Wars had refashioned the imagined sturdiness and physical vigor of British upperclass men into the figure of the muscular and sporting hero capable of fighting wars. Kingsley and Hughes’ muscular Christianity transformed this tradition further, combining Christian ideals with the emphasis on physical manliness and leadership. Widely popular, this masculine vision was embraced by conservatives as well as liberals and even Christian socialists.41 Nationalistic and religious authorization narratives and the increased interest in the body and its training gave rise to a new type of knowledge and a class of experts who demonstrated mastery of exercising the body.42 Unlike their precursors – the dance masters who were mostly employed by private families – these physical trainers were employed by governments, military authorities, and civil society organizations. They also published widely in the press. The German gymnastics master GutsMuths had already been keenly aware of the importance of specialized knowledge production. His Bibliothek der pädagogischen Literatur, published from 1800 to 1819, became the leading educational journal in Germany and his many books on physical education, games, swimming, mechanical work, and geography were reprinted and some, especially the Gymnastik, were translated into several European languages over the course of the nineteenth century. Jahn was less successful in this

 Sanislo, “Models of Manliness and Femininity,” 179–182; Ute Frevert, “Das Militär als ‘Schule der Männlichkeit’: Erwartungen, Angebote, Erfahrungen im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Militär und Gesellschaft im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Ute Frevert (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1997), 145–151; Mosse, Image of Man, 42–60.  David Rosen, “The Volcano and the Cathedral: Muscular Christianity and the Origins of Primal Manliness,” in Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, ed. Donald E. Hull (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 17–44, here 39–40.  Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1985), 10–17. On the Christian Socialist embrace of muscular Christianity, see: Donald E. Hull, “On the Making and Unmaking of Monsters: Christian Socialism, Muscular Christianity, and the Metaphorization of Class Conflict,” in Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, ed. Donald E. Hull (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 45–65, here 46–50, 63.  On knowledge and expertise as validation of authority, see: Furedi, Authority, 260.

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regard, but his ideas also traveled out from Berlin with his many students and associates. The expansion of both literacy and the literary market extended this expert knowledge to a growing audience. New mid-century masters created and reproduced authorization narratives, as GutsMuths and Jahn had done, but also offered their leadership services on the rapidly expanding marketplace of physical training. Crossing national boundaries, the new expert knowledge of the body found international agents in Amoros, a Spanish officer who later established himself as the main authority of physical education in France, and Phokion Henrich Clias, who was born in Boston, moved to Switzerland, tried his trade in physical education in France, before finally landing in England where he exercised significant influence on physical training in private schools.43 In Scandinavia, expertise in physical training was traveling rapidly as well. Danish educators were the most successful. Influenced by German educational reformers, especially by Peter Villaume, an early German author of physical education, Danish educators established a strong culture of bodily exercises in the early 1790s.44 In 1799, Nachtegall opened a Gymnastic Institute in Copenhagen that provided training in a variety of exercises popularized in GutsMuths’ and other German authors’ works.45 By 1814 Denmark had adopted physical training as a mandatory subject of the new curriculum for primary schools.46 One of Nachtegall’s early disciples was the young Swedish poet and author Ling who studied at the Gymnastic Institute in 1804. Ten years later, Ling managed to convince the Swedish authorities of the importance of physical training. Kungliga Gymnastiska Centralinstitutet (The Royal Gymnastic Central Institute) opened in 1814, providing training for physical education teachers and also services in military and medical gymnastics. Ling was the director of the Institute for the next twenty-five years, exercising remarkable authority in physical education both in schools and in the military. His book, Gymnastikens allmänna grunder (General Foundations of Gymnastics), became one of the leading works on the subject not only in Sweden but all of Europe. By the second half of the nineteenth century, physical education expertise had become one of the best-selling fields of knowledge within the publishing world. While the works of Ling and his followers continued to find large audiences, new authors and authorities, such as German Moritz Schreber and French François Delsarte,

 On Amoros and Clias, see: Jacques Defrance, L’excellence corporelle: la formation des activités physiques et sportives modernes, 1770–1914 (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes 2, 1987), 51–100. On Clias, see also: Jan Todd, Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful: Purposive Exercise in the Lives of American Women, 1800–1870 (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1998), 37–44.  Niels Kayser Nielsen, Krop og oplysning: om kropskultur i Danmark 1780–1900 (Odense: Odense Universitetsforlag, 1993), 56.  Nielsen, Krop, 63–65.  Jens Ljunggren, Kroppens bildning: linggymnastikens manlighetsprojekt, 1790–1914 (Stockholm: Brutus Östlings bokförlag symposion, 1999), 42; Nielsen, Krop, 65–66.

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entered the stage. Schreber was a medical doctor whose work and literary production combined physical exercises with medical healing. An avid gymnast (Turner) since the late 1820s, Schreber was one of the founders of the gymnastics club in Leipzig, the Allgemeine Turnverein, and in 1846 became its president.47 The following year he was elected to the city parliament as a representative for the liberal faction.48 In less than ten years, Schreber had become one of the notables of Leipzig, but as a result of a severe accident in 1851, he was forced to resign from the city parliament.49 He then embarked on another career, becoming a prolific writer whose best-selling tracts on home gymnastics preached “education to beauty through the natural and balanced promotion of normal bodily development.”50 Schreber died in 1861, but his Zimmergymnastik (Chamber Gymnastics) sealed his legacy. The twenty-seventh German edition of his work saw daylight as late as 1899. Several editions in English, Dutch, French, Japanese, Swedish, Danish, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and modern Greek came out, turning Schreber into a household name with respect to European physical exercise in the latter half of the nineteenth century.51 In France, the influence of Delsarte reflected the manner in which body expertise also opened up more opportunities for women by making the same physical forms and movements available to both genders. A composer and singer, Delsarte developed an interest in teaching the techniques of singing and performing. Although he never published any systematic presentation of his method, many of his students and disciples did. By the 1880s a so-called Delsarte system had emerged, becoming hugely popular among singers, actors, ministers, politicians, and dancers: essentially, all who went out to the public and used their bodies to make a statement. Delsarte believed that the movements and postures of the body should convey the emotions of the performer and that the emotions “reliably generated uniform, essential, eternal, and specific physical movements.” Delsarte’s greatest accomplishment was his taxonomic chart of bodily motions of limbs, appendages, and the face and

 Rudolf Gasch, Festschrift zur fünfzigjährigen Jubelfeier des Allgemeinen Turnvereins zu Leipzig (Leipzig: Allgemeiner Turnverein, 1895), 5.  Páll Björnsson, “Making the New Man: Liberal Politics and Associational Life in Leipzig, 1845–1871” (PhD diss., University of Rochester, 1999).  The accident was a head injury that he suffered while exercising. Han Israëls, Schreber, Vater und Sohn: Eine Biographie (Munich: Verlag Internationale Psychonalyse, 1989), 60–61.  Schreber’s ultimate bestseller was the Zimmer-Gymnastik (Home Gymnastics) which was reprinted more than forty times and translated into seven languages. Gerhard Busse, Schreber, Freud und die Suche nach dem Vater: Über die realitätsschaffende Kraft einer wissenschaftlichen Hypothese (Berlin: Peter Lang, 1991), 77. See also: Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber, Kallipädie oder Erziehung zur Schönheit durch naturgetreue und gleichmäßige Förderung normaler Körperbildung, lebenstüchtiger Gesundheit und geistiger Veredelung: Für Aeltern, Erzieher und Lehrer (Leipzig: Fleischer, 1858).  The data for editions and translations is from the WorldCat library database.

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their exact connections to specific emotions.52 Delsarte died 1871 and his disciples, especially in North America, soon abandoned the emotional impetus of the original system, developing it instead into a set of techniques for attractive and artistic performances.53 Thus Delsarte’s ideas continued to circulate, having a profound impact, among others, on the leading figures of modern dance, especially Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis.54 Knowledge production had also served to codify one’s expertise in the practices of the body within court society. Dance masters and choreographers, many from southern Europe and France, had been flooding the market with manuals since the seventeenth century. With the rise of gymnastics, Turnen, Sokol, and other forms of physical training, the center moved to the North, to the Germanic lands, Scandinavia, and England. In the northern regions, we find a keen interest in incorporating new forms of body authorization into a rising civil society, for example in Jahn’s project of Turnen. The new gymnastics was profoundly civic, based on a network of voluntary organizations that spilled out into public places through their performances. Although the Danish, Swedish, and to some extent French advocates of gymnastics successfully pinned their projects to state-sponsored education and military training, the goal shifted from training a military elite to all who were capable of claiming citizenship. A notable expression of the civic authorization of the body was the increasing popularity of dueling in many European countries. Frank Furedi has argued that in the nineteenth century deference, respect, and recognition became important forms of validation of authority.55 In England, as well as elsewhere, these forms of deference came to be enshrined in the social codes and etiquette of the rising middle class. But with the passage of the Act of 1819, dueling, one of the most pronounced and definitive forms of recognition, was made illegal.56 In the following two decades dueling almost vanished from Britain and its customs of recognition. The British were the outliers, though.57 In many European countries, dueling spread as a practice outside of its original aristocratic confines. Russia, where dueling had not become an aristocratic custom until the late eighteenth century, saw a major increase in the numbers and social diversity of duelists in the nineteenth

 Robin Veder, “The Expressive Efficiencies of American Delsarte and Mensendieck Body Culture,” Modernism/modernity 17, no. 4 (2010): 820–821.  Veder, “Expressive Efficiencies,” 823.  Edward Ross Dickinson, Dancing in the Blood: Modern Dance and European Culture on the Eve of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 26.  Furedi, Authority, 261.  The literature on British middle-class etiquette is expansive. See for instance: Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette and the Season (London: Croom Helm, 1973); Cas Wouters, “Etiquette Books and Emotion Management in the 20th Century: Part One: The Integration of Social Classes,” Journal of Social History 29 (1995): 107–124, and the literature indicated there.  V. G. Kiernan, The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 204–222.

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century.58 In the German lands, dueling remained a common practice of aristocratic affairs of recognition, while also spreading among the middle class to those who were able to ‘give satisfaction,’ which included university students and military recruits. Both pistol and sword were used, but among the student fraternities a specific form of ritualized fencing, the Mensur, became common. The student duelists used rapiers and padded their bodies carefully but left their faces exposed. This feature allowed the typical facial mark of the dueling student to develop. Multiple scars, the more conspicuous the better, on different parts of his face testified to the dueler’s courage to take the blows and thereby his ability to defend his honor and also his manliness. By the end of the nineteenth century a scarred face became the emblem of authority for the German university-trained civil servant.59 In France, authorization through dueling was even more widespread. Unlike in many other European countries, in France there was no law limiting dueling to those able to ‘give satisfaction,’ and by custom all adult French men were entitled to honor and also personally to defend it.60 In France, dueling became the right of every man, a gender-based definition of authorization, and also a statement of masculine authority and privilege that replaced earlier status and class-based privileges. Politicians and journalists often dueled over a line in an article or a statement in a speech perceived as offensive. Rarely were these duels lethal, since a duel would be considered completed at the first sign of blood and the duelists’ courage and determination was proven by their sangfroid.61 By the end of the century, to claim and defend his authority, regardless of his party affiliation, a French politician could not but engage in dueling. The long-term prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, engaged in twenty-three duels, though many more were likely not publicly reported.62 In the nineteenth century, civil society was a network of spaces, organizations, and movements, rife with opportunities to gain public agency and thereby establish one’s authority, as well as to contest the authority of others.63 A multitude of practices of the body were used in facilitating these aspirations. Not all spaces and practices were

 Irina Reyfman, Ritualized Violence Russian Style: The Duel in Russian Culture and Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 73–94.  There is a growing body of scholarship on dueling and especially on German student dueling. Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker’s Dueling Students: Conflict, Masculinity, and Politics in German Universities, 1890–1914 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011) is a detailed study of student duels and their function in Imperial Germany. See also: Ute Frevert, Ehrenmänner: Das Duell in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Munich: dtv, 1995), esp. chapter 5; Kevin McAleer, Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-siècle Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), esp. chapter 4.  Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 133–136.  Nye, Masculinity, 161–163, 183–187.  Nye, Masculinity, 185.  On civil society as a network of spaces, see: Heikki Lempa, Spaces of Honor: Making Civil Society in Germany 1700–1914 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021).

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equally open to all, however, ultimately modifying the contestations in which bodies could participate in rituals of authority. While civil society and state institutions made physical training available to many men, certain forms of embodiment, including dueling, were legally closed to women, thus maintaining the gendered hierarchy of a maledominated society. Experts and specialists of the body gave civic leaders tools to perform their newly gained status effectively, to convey their message, and also to further cement their place as authorities. Yet these tools also prevented the extension of that performance, as the case of dueling so clearly demonstrated, to women. Civil society was not a democratic space, although it was a space for democrats. However, it was also a space for anti-democrats, who increasingly started to enter the European political and civic arena in the late nineteenth century. Many of these anti-democratic movements and organizations were looking for more personal, transformative, and emotional forms of authority. It is here that we find the rise of what Weber calls charismatic authority.

III Charisma and Strategies of Authority in the Early Twentieth-Century In the first decades of the twenty-first century, it has become a global ritual that, sometime in August or September, the news media displays images of a wellknown political leader with his body exposed, half-naked, or flexing muscles in a sportive action. The Russian President Vladimir Putin, for instance, has become both a household name of authority and an authoritarian leader for whom his body is the canvas of power. This image serves as the starting point of investigating some important features of bodily authority that began to take shape in the late nineteenth century. At that time, the body became an important marker of redefined authority in emerging mass societies, which in the last decades of the nineteenth century had developed universal male suffrage, mass media, mass movements, and imperialistic ambitions. The charismatic turn of authority, often enabled by rapidly expanding civil societies in early-twentieth-century Europe, accelerated this development. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck is a good example, both in his lifetime and in the continuing veneration after his death in 1898. Bismarck was often portrayed as a man with exceptional physical powers, intended to further legitimize his position as a leader of the nation. He was also highly conscious of his health; upon encountering a medical problem, he would aggressively seek treatment, even if only for headaches or sleeplessness.64 Weber argues that Bismarck was a quintessential

 “Bismarcks Persönlichkeit, Ungedruckte persönliche Erinnerungen,” Süddeutsche Monatshefte 19 (1921): 114–115. Cited in Otto Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, vol. 2: “The Period of Consolidation, 1871–1880” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 51.

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example of the charismatic leader. “Nowhere else in the world,” wrote Weber in May 1918, “has admiration – not even where it has been most unbounded – for the personality of a political figure led a proud nation to sacrifice its own essential convictions to him so completely.”65 To be charismatic, a person had to display superior characteristics, but that alone was not enough. To truly possess charismatic authority something more was needed, as we can see in two of the twentieth century’s seminal authority figures: Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. In his social theory, Weber discerns three forms of legitimate authority: legal, traditional, and charismatic. We have seen how the Ancien Régime used the body to enforce traditional authority, as well as witnessed how the development of civil society gave rise to forms of authority that rested on professional, expert knowledge of the body. For traditional leaders the body remained an important tool and platform. In the early twentieth century and especially after the Great War, mass society called for “exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person” to legitimize authority.66 How was the body used to enforce this new form of authority? As Claudia Schmölders correctly observes, Weber does not give us any hints about the relationship of the body to forms of authority – in fact, the body does not play any role in his analysis of charisma.67 And yet some of the most bodycentric charismatic leaders emerged only a few years after Weber made his observations. The political circumstances behind this development varied greatly from one country to another. Whereas older, more stable democracies, such as England, France, and Sweden, gave only a limited space for authoritarian figures to emerge, many of the countries reconstituted after World War I showed a remarkable penchant for authoritarianism. Not only Russia/Soviet Union but also Poland, Hungary, Germany, and Italy saw political and cultural figures arise who exercised a magic appeal on their followers, Mussolini and Hitler being the most notorious. Mussolini was a man whose political strategies systematically defied political doctrines and stated policies. It was his persona that stood at the center of his strategy. By exploiting the features of popular culture and systematically manipulating the media, especially film, he established a cult of personality at the center of his power. For this cult, the body was important, often displayed shirtless, muscles bulging, chest out, and shoulders stretched (Fig. 13.3).68 Yet, Mussolini also had a

 Max Weber, “Parlament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland,” in Gesammelte Politische Schriften, ed. Johannes Winckelmann, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1958), 299.  Max Weber, “The Three Pure Types of Legitimate Authority,” in The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), 328.  Claudia Schmölders and Rachel MagShamhráin, “Facial Narratives: The Physiognomies of Charisma, 1900–1945,” New German Critique 114 (2011): 115–132, here 116.  Stephen Gundle, “Mass Culture and the Cult of Personality,” in The Cult of the Duce: Mussolini and the Italians, ed. Stephen Gundle, Christopher Duggan, and Giuliana Pieri (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013) 78, 82.

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Fig. 13.3: Mussolini, Battle for Grain, 1925.

strong element of dandyism, especially in his attire, which combined different pieces of clothing in uncommon ways.69 His most important feature was, however, his keen interest in performative gesturing, a product of his many years of love of the theater and of choreography.70 The masses, to whom he performed and whom he saw as female in character, often perceived his personality and its physicality in a highly eroticized manner.71 In Hitler’s rise to power, the body played an equally important role. Like Mussolini, Hitler came from a modest background and this fact became an important element of his authorization narrative: he was a corporal who became a leader not by virtue of his lineage or even meritocratic achievements but as the embodiment of the people. From 1923 onwards, Hitler engaged a personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, who registered on film his movements and appearances in public and at private events.72 Like Mussolini, Hitler’s physicality helped ground his political authority. That the imagery of power and authority became such an effective political tool was based on the increasing conviction among German authors of all political stripes that one’s power was associated with the shape of one’s body and especially one’s face. In an earlier era, this conviction was the offspring of the older science of

 Gundle, “Mass Culture,” 80.  Gundle, “Mass Culture,” 81.  Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 24–26.  Schmölders and MagShamhráin, “Facial Narratives,” 125–127.

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physiognomy. This pseudo-science is the thread that runs continuously from court society to a modern era beyond traditional authority: to read one’s power in the physicality of one’s body and face was a simple alternative to the increasingly complex, discursive, and frail forms of democratic authority. One’s authority was in one’s physiognomy. Physiognomy differs from mere physicality, however. Since authority is not simply the direct imposition of one’s power or the coercion of followers, the body must represent something more than a tool. To be a figure of authority, it is not enough to be tall, muscular, and strong in exercising physical power. One must also be accepted as a body that deserves to be followed. Followers must be convinced that the muscles, strength, and other features of the body correspond directly to the ethical qualities of its carrier. This was the focus of physiognomy, as well as a common assumption between the actors of court society, the body experts of the nineteenth century, and the followers of charismatic authority figures in the twentieth century. The theory of physiognomy goes back to the old pseudo-Aristotelian studies, Parva Naturalia. It went through a tremendous revival at the end of the eighteenth century when the Swiss author Caspar Lavater popularized the theory in his richly illustrated volumes, Physiognomische Fragmente, published from 1775 to 1778. Physiognomy remained popular throughout the nineteenth century, proliferating in civic organizations and projects that centered on the body as the locus of authority in the eyes of one’s peers. In fin-de-siècle Vienna, as Alys George documents, physiognomy was tremendously popular among artists, including such leading figures as Egon Schiele, who in the first decades of the twentieth century was engaged in physiognomic drawing.73 In the early twentieth century, physiognomy was widely shared and accepted by European literati and also the reading public. Yet it was also made available to politicians who wanted to make an immediate impact on the masses, as Giuseppe Bottai, a fascist administrator and ideologue in Italy, mentioned in 1936 in his diary: In mass politics, great leaders can only make an impression in general terms through the means of communication that shape the fantasies and sentiments of millions. It is necessary to propose a physiognomy, gestures and words with the sort of reiteration that is typical of photography and cinema. Repeat, repeat, repeat – just like with commercial advertising. The politician who thinks he can get himself noticed with a book, a newspaper article, a speech or through his learning and diligent preparation is deceiving himself. In this delusion he will be

 Alys X. George, The Naked Truth: Viennese Modernism and the Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 32–33. On eighteenth-century physiognomy, see: Barbara M. Benedict, “Reading Faces: Physiognomy and Epistemology in Late Eighteenth-Century Sentimental Novels,” Studies in Philology 92, no. 3 (1995): 311–328. On the impact of Lavater’s physiognomy on nineteenth-century culture, literature, and art, see: Graeme Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel: Faces and Fortunes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).

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consoled by the high regard of the few. Even the man of high principle must find the stomach to ‘make an impression’ otherwise he will be condemned to silence and impotence.74

In physiognomy, politicians had found an old tool to serve their aspirations for power and authority in the age of the masses and mass media. In the long nineteenth century, the European image of authority rested not only in the authority of the image but how and whether the image embodied authority.

 Giuseppe Bottai, Diario 1935–1944, ed. G. B. Guerri (Milan: Rizzoli, 1982), 112. Quoted in Gundle, “Mass Culture,” 76.

Eva Giloi

Cultural Tourism and Royal Tours: Possession and Place-Making Abstract: This chapter examines bourgeois cultural tourism and royal tours of the realm as two forms of place-making. In both cases, sovereigns and private citizens sought to take possession of space and demonstrate their authority over the urban landscape through the habitus that guided their movements. The chapter examines three distinct types of tourism. First, it illuminates the transformation of early modern royal tours from territorial possession to national patronage as part of the nationalization of monarchy in the nineteenth century. Next, it focuses on cultural tourism as a form of cultural hegemony that reinforced the dominance of educated middle-class men. Epiphanic tourism and the family vacation, as two particular modes of middle-class tourism, developed a habitus that reinforced the cultural capital of the bourgeoisie. Finally, the chapter turns to armchair tourism as it developed in the growing consumer economy at the beginning of the twentieth century, which drew on browsing and ‘sampling’ as modes of experience. In this last development, new publications and visual technologies turned royals into metonyms for foreign places, a transformation that still influences the role that monarchies play in the tourist industry today. Keywords: cultural tourism, royal tours of the realm, place-making, habitus, cultural capital, cultural hegemony, nationalization of monarchy, armchair tourism, bricolage, Certeau, Bourdieu, Wilhelm II ✶✶✶

In 1897, the German Empire’s Culture Ministry set out a cease-and-desist ordinance: municipalities should stop buying so many equestrian statues of Emperor Wilhelm I. Or to be precise: they should stop purchasing large galvanized bronze statues, which were popular because of their reasonable price. That same year, which was the centenary of Wilhelm I’s birth, communities across the country were ordering statues to commemorate the Hero of Sedan, and foundries were ready to capitalize on their patriotic enthusiasm. For the municipalities, the pre-cast models were a boon: not only were they affordable, but the end result was predictable because it could be ordered out of a catalogue. Commissioning a new, original work from a freelance sculptor instead could lead to unwanted results and expensive mistakes. Despite these features, the statues were unwelcome to the royal house. Galvanized bronze did not weather well; the same models were used too often and were blandly unimaginative; and the public was bored with the repetition. To resolve this conflict of interest, the Culture Ministry suggested that, if municipal funds were tight, the towns should content themselves with a small bust or bas-relief made of marble, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110574012-014

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rather than a grand statue made of galvanized bronze. For the municipalities, this was unsatisfactory: since the monuments graced their town squares, and were often publicized in tourist guidebooks, a mere bust or bas-relief would make their community look pitiful in comparison to towns with grander monuments. While the monarchy worried that corroding metal would tarnish its dignity, the municipal authorities hoped the size of the object would put their town on the map.1 Both sides of the conflict claimed the right of authority over public space. The monarchy had long expressed its spatial domination through royal tours of the realm and festive entries into cities and towns. In the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie also used public commemoration to celebrate its ideals in the name of the nation. Monument unveilings, beginning with the Ludwig van Beethoven statue in Bonn in 1845, provided prime opportunities for bourgeois notables to vaunt their prominence before an audience of thousands.2 In the 1870s Sedan Day, the German Empire’s national holiday, equally became a stage show for authorities to highlight their predominance over political, religious, and social rivals.3 At times, competing towns fought openly over a local hero’s legacy: who should be allowed to erect a statue in his honor or lay claim to his bones, for instance.4 The galvanized bronze statues of Wilhelm I were thus embedded in an existing commemorative praxis: royal prestige was an iconographic subset of a broader strategy of self-assertion for these municipalities. Representational strategies implemented by monarchies and municipalities have been well researched and constitute a large field of scholarship.5 This chapter examines the third, implicit element in the conflict over the galvanized bronzes: the tourists who would see the statuary.6 Similar to the municipalities, travelers interacted with sovereigns as a subset of a broader tourist experience, which had its

 Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz (GStA-PK): I HA, Rep 76, Ve Sekt. 1 Abt. 1 Nr. 5 Bd. 1, Nr. 851, Blatt 24, 29, 64, 77–98, 143, 149, 158, 183, 312–313. I would like to thank the Martin L. and Sarah F. Leibowitz Membership Fund at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton for the generous support in aiding the completion of this essay.  Alexander Rehding, Music and Monumentality: Commemoration and Wonderment in NineteenthCentury Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 58–71, quote on 60.  Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), esp. 27–28, 44–45, 58–60, 73–93.  Confino, Nation, 44.  The field of monarchy studies is too large to be reviewed here. A good starting point, for the British monarchy, is: Andrzej Olechnowicz, “Historians and the Modern British Monarchy,” in The Monarchy and the British Nation, 1780 to the Present, ed. Andrzej Olechnowicz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 6–46.  Philip Long, “Introduction,” in Royal Tourism: Excursions around Monarchy, ed. Philip Long and Nicola J. Palmer (Clevedon, UK: Channel View, 2008), 1–25, here 2–3.

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own history, internal logic, and technical developments. Tourism, too, is a way of taking possession of space. It is a performance for others as much as it is enriching or entertaining for the self. When tourists embarked on ‘cultural tourism’ in the nineteenth century – visiting museums, monuments to great men, and other sites of culture – they showcased their cultural capital: the cultural knowledge and etiquette that demonstrated their (superior) class status.7 But showcased it to whom? Certainly to themselves and to their fellow travelers, but also to the recipients of their tourist tales back home.8 This chapter places royal tourism into the context of tourism as a form of placemaking.9 A key term in the field of human geography, place-making grapples with the distinctions between place and space.10 Stated briefly: if spaces are empty of emotional attachment, places are “spaces which people have made meaningful,” and place-making encompasses the actions that create that meaning.11 While some people become attached to a certain place because of the meaning projected onto it, they find that others, too, may lay claim to that same space, perhaps for other reasons. Place-making thus means engaging in acts and rituals of possession, as places are continually “being made, maintained, and contested.”12 The actions that go into making a place can be part of a regular social or work routine, or they can be ritualized in exceptional social events. They can also be mobile: the way people move through a place lends definition to its contours. In the nineteenth century in particular, with improved transportation and access to foreign locales, travelers sought to make those spaces their own through tourism.

 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 241–258.  John Baxendale, “The Construction of the Past and the Origins of Royal Tourism in 19th-Century Britain,” in Royal Tourism: Excursions around Monarchy, ed. Philip Long and Nicola J. Palmer (Clevedon, UK: Channel View, 2008), 26–50, here 29. For the performative nature of tourism see: Jonas Larsen, “Performance, Space, and Tourism,” in The Routledge Handbook of Tourism Geographies, ed. Julie Wilson (London: Routledge, 2012), 67–73.  For the history of tourism: John Towner, An Historical Geography of Recreation and Tourism in the Western World, 1540–1940 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996); John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 1990). For tourism in Germany in particular: Rudy Koshar, German Travel Cultures (Oxford: Berg, 2000); Hasso Spode, “Der Aufstieg des Massentourismus im 20 Jahrhundert,” in Die Konsumgesellschaft in Deutschland 1890–1990, ed. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Claudius Torp (Frankfurt a/M: Campus, 2009), 114–128.  Some useful starting points into the field include: Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004); Doreen Massey, For Space (Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2005); Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977); Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, ed., Thinking Space (London: Routledge, 2000); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1992); Chris Rojek and John Urry, ed., Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory (London: Routledge, 1997).  Cresswell, Place, 6.  Cresswell, Place, 5.

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Three types of spatial possession form the basis for this chapter: the early modern royal tour as it changed shape in the nineteenth century; cultural tourism – or what I call epiphanic tourism – as a characteristic of the nineteenth century, and how it reinforced the cultural dominance of the educated middle-class male; and armchair tourism as it developed in an advanced consumer economy, leading into the twentieth century. The story told here is not directly linear, since these phenomena developed independently; nonetheless, they intersected at critical junctures. In each case, Wilhelm II, who ruled as German Emperor from 1888–1918, serves as an example to illustrate the section’s themes. In the first section, monarchy is a central agent devising strategies of place-making, which were countered and modified by other actors. The result was a transformation of royal tours from territorial possession to national patronage. The second section examines a parallel development: epiphanic tourism as a form of cultural hegemony. In this section, monarchy is tangential to the development of epiphanic tourism, which grew out of the spirit of Romanticism as a quest for heightened, authentic emotion experienced through contact with nature and culture.13 Tourists often engaged in royal tourism as well, though, seeking sightings of sovereigns in their quest for cultural capital, for instance the Americans who crossed the Atlantic in increasing numbers to soak up Europe’s cultural heritage. In the third section, monarchy is neither central nor tangential, but a fragment shuffled in among others in the consumerist bricolage that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. New visual technologies turned royals into metonyms for foreign places, a transformation that still governs the role that monarchies play in the tourist industry today.14

Strategies, Tactics, Hegemony, and Habitus This chapter draws on three main analytical approaches to place-making: strategies and tactics, cultural hegemony, and the orchestration and synchronization of habitus. In his landmark work on “Walking in the City,” Michel de Certeau distinguishes between strategies and tactics.15 Strategies are composed of the overt intentions of those who inhabit a position of socio-cultural power. Those who have a steady spatial or institutional location from which they can see or imagine the surrounding environment devise strategies that enforce their preferred social use of the space.16 Urban planners, for instance, impose a city grid to organize the flow of traffic, limiting it to predetermined  For Romanticism and its attachment to epiphany, see: Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), esp. chapter 9: “The Romantic Ethic.”  Long, “Introduction,” 3.  Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), esp. “General Introduction” for a concise summary of his arguments.  Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xix.

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paths. Counterposed to strategies, Certeau defines tactics as the reappropriation of space by individuals, as pedestrians adapt their walking styles and routes to suit their interests. However fleetingly, they resist the paths laid out for them: jaywalking, cutting through ornamental lawns, crossing through back alleys, or avoiding main arteries out of preference. As Certeau argues, thanks to these “errant trajectories,” the urban order is “torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning.”17 Although transitory, spontaneous, and opportunistic, these actions define the urban space as much as do the planners’ strategies, since places are made through inhabitation and use. Certeau emphasizes that users of space are not simply passive or docile, even if they must “make do” with what is given to them in the built environment.18 To return to the example of royal statuary: some Germans attended the monuments’ unveiling and supported the social hierarchies they embodied. Others used monuments for unauthorized purposes, though. Children climbed and played on the statues; conmen and card sharps lured victims into their shadows; and lovers used them as a shelter for trysts. In Berlin’s central park, the royal statues of the Avenue of Victory (Siegesallee), meant to glorify Prussia’s kings, were so popular as a meeting place after dark that the police placed hedges and chain-link fences around them to keep out eager paramours.19 Similarly in Britain, Baedeker’s guidebook began its description of Hull with the Wilberforce Monument, tying the city’s identity to the abolitionist legacy of its most prominent citizen, but when Joachim Ringelnatz, as a young man, traveled through Hull as a tourist, he used the monument merely as a landmark for a romantic rendezvous with a stranger.20 Certeau defines tactics as a form of micro-resistance against the imposition of authority from above, or a type of “poaching” on the symbolic representations produced by elites.21 For Certeau, cultural practices – walking, reading, talking, dwelling – are “like a rented apartment”: the basic forms (the four walls) are given and impose certain constraints, but the activities and décor are determined by individual users, giving them agency.22 Other scholars, though, have focused more on the given walls’ constraints, which often work on a deeper, preconscious level to limit the users’ freedom and agency. In their classic essay “The Universal Survey Museum,” Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach analyze the hegemonic power of white walls in public art museums. Cultural hegemony, as articulated by Antonio Gramsci, naturalizes domination by prompting a  Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 107; for tactics in particular: xviii-xx, 34–39.  Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xi–xii.  Landesarchiv Berlin (LA), A Rep 00-02-01, Nr 1635, Blatt 10; Ferdinand Friedensburg, Lebenserinnerungen (Frankfurt a/M: Athenäum, 1969), 61–62; GStA-PK I HA Rep. 77 Abt. 2 Sekt 7 Tit. 235 Nr. 44, Blatt 12–14.  Karl Baedeker, Grossbritannien: England (ausser London) Wales, Schottland und Irland (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1899), 366; Joachim Ringelnatz, Mein Leben bis zum Kriege (Berlin: Rowolt, 1966 [1931]), 147–152, 181.  Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xiv, xix.  Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xxi.

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subordinate group to adopt the ideals of the dominant group. Those ideals are presented as universal but are in fact only accessible in full measure to the dominant group. Members of the subordinate group, who seek to fulfill these seemingly universal ideals but can not, blame themselves for their failure and thus are moved to accept their ‘inferiority.’ Unlike overt exploitation, cultural hegemony enlists the (seemingly) willing participation of subordinates in the structures that dominate them.23 In Duncan and Wallach’s example, large-scale, prominent collections of artworks, owned and exhibited by the state as a national treasure, reinforce bourgeois hegemony by celebrating the genius of the solitary artist. Rising to prominence in the nineteenth century, public art museums were opened to all citizens and thus fostered “the illusion of a classless society.”24 By removing works of art from their original setting, though, and putting them into a ‘neutral’ display setting – neutral in terms of the unobtrusive uniformity of the walls and picture frames – the art museum accentuated the individual artist who created the work, rather than the labor, production process, or context in or for which the work was designed. The image of the lone artist contained two implicit, bourgeois ideals: individual genius and cultural achievement. Taken together, these ideals reinforced the belief that artistic genius is one of humanity’s highest values. Since artistic pursuit is based on social independence and release from subsistence labor, however, it is practically unattainable for the working classes. By emphasizing the ideal that artistic genius is a universal good and placing it into a space claiming to represent all classes, the public art museum “prompts the visitor to identify with an elite culture at the same time it spells out his place in the social hierarchy.”25 Cultural tourism, which sought epiphany in high culture, performed an equally hegemonic role. As John K. Walton observes, cultural venues, visited on holiday, privilege the cultural capital of those with the means and training to engage in a “more satisfying, contextualized appreciation of architecture or evocative landscapes or artistic endeavors.”26 This kind of tourism is also touted as a universal good, namely as a way to experience emotional fulfillment, self-improvement, and “an adventure of the self.”27 Even Thomas Cook’s mass package tours, from his

 The concept of cultural hegemony is not without its critics, but it serves well to moderate the celebratory bent of Certeau’s conception of consumer tactics as weapons of the weak. T. J. Jackson Lears, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities,” American Historical Review 90, no 3 (1985): 567–593.  Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, “The Universal Survey Museum,” Art History 3, no. 4 (1980): 448–469, here 457.  Duncan and Wallach, “Universal Survey Museum,” 457.  John K. Walton, “British Tourism Between Industrialization and Globalization: An Overview,” in The Making of Modern Tourism: The Cultural History of the British Experience, 1600–2000, ed. Hartmut Berghoff, Barbara Korte, Ralf Schneider, and Christopher Harvie (Cham: Palgrave, 2002), 109–132, here 113.  Chloe Chard, “From the Sublime to the Ridiculous: The Anxieties of Sightseeing,” in The Making of Modern Tourism: The Cultural History of the British Experience, 1600–2000, ed. Hartmut Berghoff, Barbara Korte, Ralf Schneider, and Christopher Harvie (Cham: Palgrave, 2002), 47–68, here 60.

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outings to the Great Exhibition in 1851 to later visits to cathedrals, royal palaces, and other sites of cultural heritage, were organized as opportunities “for ordinary people culturally to enrich and morally to uplift themselves through excursions.”28 These same lower-middle-class tourists, whose limited time and money led them to seize on package tours as a reasonable solution, were stigmatized for the quickened pace and cursory manner of their tourism.29 Habitus, as defined by Pierre Bourdieu, fortified the cultural hegemony of art appreciation. As the Introduction to this volume notes, habitus works on a preconscious level to naturalize social hierarchies, largely through the habitual movement of bodies through spaces. Habitus creates what Bourdieu calls ‘doxa,’ which can roughly be defined as the grid of unstated assumptions that seem universally true or natural in any given culture. Doxa is social knowledge that is taken for granted because it seems common-sensical, but the self-evident nature of a culture’s doxa is, for Bourdieu, reinforced and reproduced by what he terms the “orchestration of different but structurally homologous practices” and the “synchronization of identical practices.”30 Through practices of coordination, the activities and habits of different social groups are orchestrated so as not to overlap, and their occupation of space is synchronized to avoid symbolic collision. Bourdieu uses the example of men and women in a traditional rural village, where work might be orchestrated so that men are at the plow and women at the loom, while their activities are synchronized so that men inhabit the village square at certain times of day, and women fill the same space only once the men have departed for the fields. The cyclical regularity of these spatial rules – every day, every planting season – makes the group’s gender hierarchy ‘feel’ normal.31 The hegemonic nature of such orchestrated and synchronized actions is clear: everyone is ostensibly encouraged to participate in seemingly universal cultural goods, but in actuality they can only do so at certain times and with a given habitus, positioning them outside of and auxiliary to the dominant group.32 In the nineteenth century, for instance, museums lowered prices on certain days of the week to give workers access to their galleries, but that practice also confined workers’ attendance to specific days while the bourgeoisie had access at all times. In tour groups, visitors led by a single guide reinforced the prestige of canonical knowledge: the visual contrast of a herd of bodies following the authoritative individual reflected the superiority of the

 James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 49.  Koshar, German Travel Cultures, 32.  Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 163.  Bourdieu, Outline, 167.  For a similar example, applied to youth rebellion in Germany: Eva Giloi, “Socialization and the City: Parental Authority and Teenage Rebellion in Wilhelmine Germany,” Radical History Review 114 (2012): 91–112.

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knowledgeable, bourgeois traveler over lower-class mass tourists in need of guidance. The common sight, in hotels, train stations, and steamships, of women traveling with chaperones and extensive accoutrements – luggage, porters, servants – made men’s claims to be uniquely suited for independent travel seem self-evident.33 Not all women or working-class tourists held to those norms, but the fact that they were celebrated as exceptional reinforced the definition of what was ‘normal’ in comparison.34

I The Royal Tour: From Possession to Patronage In 1840, the newly enthroned King of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, embarked on a series of tours of the realm. Royal tours were a prime opportunity for a new king to take symbolic possession of his territory, but they were also wearying and monotonous. The king’s entourage openly commiserated with him as a “martyr” enduring the “torment” of public demands, not least the “drudgery” of having to listen to his subjects sing the same loyalist song, “Hail Thee in the Crown of Victory” (Heil Dir im Siegerkranz), for hours on end as he passed through successive towns on his route.35 The anecdote reflects the dual nature of tours of the realm, which had long been both a tool of royal domination and an opportunity for contestation by local subjects. As Jennifer Mara DeSilva elaborates in a special issue on “Taking Possession” in the Royal Studies Journal: “By employing specific words and gestures that projected images implying ownership or authority, one could take possession of cities, churches, offices, and streets in ways culturally understood and accepted in Early Modern Europe.”36 Dating back to the Middle Ages, rulers in the Netherlands, for instance, used Joyous Entries to bind the urban corporation to the sovereign in a ritual enactment of their mutual obligations.37 In the sixteenth century, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles

 For the large amounts of luggage used by traveling families, see: Harvey Levenstein, Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France from Jefferson to the Jazz Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 145. For a review of gender analysis in tourism, see: Jacqueline Tivers, “Tourism, Space and Gender,” in The Routledge Handbook of Tourism Geographies, ed. Julie Wilson (London: Routledge, 2012), 90–96.  Koshar, German Travel Cultures, 31.  Eva Giloi, Monarchy, Myth, and Material Culture in Germany 1750–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 99.  Jennifer Mara DeSilva, “Taking Possession: Rituals, Space and Authority,” Royal Studies Journal 3, no. 2 (2016): 1–17, here 2, accessed 11 June 2022, http://doi.org/10.21039/rsj.v3i2.109.  Ellen Wurtzel, “The Joyous Entry of Albert and Isabella in Lille: History, Conquest and the Making of Belgium,” Royal Studies Journal 3, no. 2 (2016): 18–47, here 19, accessed 11 June 2022, http:// doi.org/10.21039/rsj.v3i2.104.

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V engaged in almost continuous royal tours of his vast regions to impress his rule on his subjects.38 These tours continued even into the age of enlightened absolutism, for instance when King Frederick the Great roamed around Prussia on inspection tours to ensure that his subjects were suitably productive.39 DeSilva also notes that, “while the phrase ‘taking possession’ assumes active success,” in fact royal tours “initiated conversations about authority and power that were far more flexible in their scope, practice, and participants than expected.”40 Entries into a city or town were choreographed only imperfectly from above, instead revealing “conflicts, alliances, expectations, fears, simultaneous spatial proximity, and class separation, as well as a plethora of cultural norms.”41 The Netherlands’ Joyous Entries provided opportunities for local residents to stage themselves, their expectations, and even their discontents.42 In the eighteenth century, too, municipalities greeted touring sovereigns with lavish festivals and triumphal arches with a range of motives in mind: to honor the king, but also to compete with other municipalities, to highlight the social dominance of certain community members over others, and to press for economic and political concessions.43 Arising in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Grand Tour presented its own form of taking possession, specifically of cultural goods. Mimicking the royal tour in reverse, cavaliers on the Grand Tour traveled to various royal courts to be inducted into the dominant networks of power. Young nobles and sons of patrician families also visited Europe’s major cultural centers to gain the polish necessary for future careers in diplomacy and high government service.44 When the educated classes began to embark on their version of the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century, the older aristocratic

 Aidan Norrie and Sophie Shorland, “Introduction: Performing Royal Power in Premodern Europe,” Royal Studies Journal 8, no. 1 (2021): 1–8, here 2, accessed 11 June 2022, http://doi.org/10.21039/ rsj.316. For a bibliography of the extensive scholarship on early modern tours, see: Robert Aldrich, “Visiting the Family and Introducing the Royals: British Royal Tours of the Dominions in the Twentieth Century and Beyond,” Royal Studies Journal 5, no. 1 (2018): 1–14, accessed 11 June 2022, http://doi.org/ 10.21039/rsj.141.  Tim Blanning, Frederick the Great: King of Prussia (New York: Random House, 2016).  DeSilva, “Taking Possession,” 1–2.  DeSilva, “Taking Possession,” 9.  Wurtzel, “The Joyous Entry,” 19.  Giloi, Monarchy, Myth, 32; Hubertus Büschel, Untertanenliebe: Der Kult um deutsche Monarchen 1770–1830 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 307–313; Hannah Smith, Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture, 1714–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 151–152; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 222.  Towner, Historical Geography, 45–51; Winfried Siebers, “Ungleiche Lehrfahrten: Kavaliere und Gelehrte,” in Reisekultur: Von der Pilgerfahrt zum modernen Tourismus, ed. Hermann Bausinger, Klaus Beyrer, and Gottfried Korff (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1991), 47; Hartmut Berghoff, “From Privilege to Commodity? Modern Tourism and the Rise of Consumer Society,” in The Making of Modern Tourism: The Cultural History of the British Experience, 1600–2000, ed. Hartmut Berghoff, Barbara Korte, Ralf Schneider, and Christopher Harvie (Cham: Palgrave, 2002), 159–180, here 162.

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practice was divided into two variants.45 One variant comprised the professional tour, in which middle-class civil servants, pastors, physicians, and academics traveled to maintain contacts.46 The other variant adopted the Enlightenment goal of “finishing the traveler’s education” in taste, sensitivity, and cultural capital by touring Europe’s artistic treasures.47 In some cases, those same travelers brought artistic education back to their home countries, as when northern antiquarians collected classical sculptures and medallions from the European south.48 Royal palaces became a destination as well, even for those who had no hope of being introduced at court. Late-eighteenthcentury travelogues recommended palace grounds and gardens to those on the educational tour; as commoners took up this advice, they often hoped to catch a glimpse of the royals in residence.49 While such royal tourism might seem an insignificant phenomenon, it was a first step in what Johannes Paulmann calls “the nationalization of monarchy”: a profound transformation in which possession was reversed.50 Unlike the municipalities of earlier times, which had waited for the monarch to pass through their community as an opportunity to press their claims, tourists traveled to royal sites to incorporate them into their sense of national identity. As John Baxendale explains, by the mid-nineteenth century, tourists in Britain visited royal palaces primarily for their historical and aesthetic value rather than out of loyalism or even interest in the currently reigning dynasty. Their interest in history was not necessarily politically conservative, either, but took on a democratic tenor by fostering “a sense of collective ownership over national culture and history.”51 What had once been the exclusive practice of the monarch – the symbolic possession of territory through the tour of the realm – was now taken up by subjects, who appropriated national symbolism by touring royal sites. As part of this nationalization, royal appearances shifted from possession to patronage, with royals demonstrating their utility to the nation. On an international level, as Paulmann demonstrates, royal visits after the 1840s became a regular tool of European diplomacy, with monarchs as representatives of their nations. Monarchs retained a great deal of control over the protocol of their meetings with other sovereigns and were not simply national figureheads. Nonetheless, their identification with the nation

 Towner, Historical Geography, 96–116; Chard, “From the Sublime,” 47.  Koshar, German Travel Cultures, 21, 34–39, 55.  Hartmut Berghoff and Barbara Korte, “Britain and the Making of Modern Tourism: An Interdisciplinary Approach,” in The Making of Modern Tourism: The Cultural History of the British Experience, 1600–2000, ed. Hartmut Berghoff, Barbara Korte, Ralf Schneider, and Christopher Harvie (Cham: Palgrave, 2002), 1–20, here 4–5.  Towner, Historical Geography, 100.  For Germany: Giloi, Monarchy, Myth, 93–103; for France: Philipp Nielsen’s chapter in this volume; for Britain: Baxendale, “Construction of the Past.”  Johannes Paulmann, Pomp und Politik: Monarchenbegegnungen in Europa zwischen Ancien Régime und Erstem Weltkrieg (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2000), 19.  Baxendale, “Construction of the Past,” 28.

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was strong enough within the public that they were chastised by the press if they failed to represent national interests.52 Domestically, as chapters nine and twelve in this volume demonstrate, European sovereigns still staged royal entries to possess their realm symbolically. But as Edward Berenson demonstrates in chapter three, Napoleon III pioneered a new form of royal presence at mid-century as he turned himself into a ‘people’s king.’ Along with staging traditional festivals and military reviews, the emperor visited French cities to promise urban improvements and to show himself to the public, much like a celebrity, to stoke public enthusiasm for his reign. As Matthew Truesdell elaborates, Napoleon III’s appearances focused heavily on cornerstone-setting ceremonies and other inaugurations, especially of modern urban infrastructure such as railroads, bridges, ports, marketplaces, hospitals, and even sewers. These ceremonies were intended to highlight the prosperity of Napoleon III’s empire and to cement his authority as a representative of good governance, a role that suggested service to the nation.53 Nor was Napoleon III alone: dynasties across Europe adopted “civic publicness” and care for public works as a hallmark of their political legitimacy.54 Already in the 1840s, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert embarked on extensive public engagements and regional tours, emphasizing the primacy of economic and industrial progress and featuring the inauguration of the Royal Exchange, the Grimsby docks, and the Great Exhibition in 1851.55 These public engagements continued to define the royal couple up until Albert’s death in 1861; as John Plunkett observes about the 1850s: “Foundation stones continued to be laid with monotonous regularity and patronage continued to be given to the arts and manufacturing.”56 In sum, the British royal family became a “welfare monarchy” dedicated to the “cult of benevolence.”57 In the German Empire, too, royal women performed philanthropy in the civic space through “elaborate ceremonies in and around . . . hospitals, sanatoria, asylums, and orphanages.” As royal women coordinated their philanthropic efforts with bourgeois women’s associations, their civic publicness served as a fulcrum for both nation-building and dynastic legitimacy.58 Not just in Prussia, but in Saxony, Hanover, Württemberg, and other smaller German states, princes presented urban

 Paulmann, Pomp und Politik, 15–17, 195–196, 349.  Matthew Truesdell, Spectacular Politics: Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte and the Fête Impériale, 1849–1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), chapter four.  The term is from: John Plunkett, Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 13.  Plunkett, Queen Victoria, 43–46.  Plunkett, Queen Victoria, 53.  Frank Prochaska, Royal Bounty: The Making of a Welfare Monarchy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).  Jean H. Quataert, Staging Philanthropy: Patriotic Women and the National Imagination in Dynastic Germany, 1813–1916 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 3.

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improvements from railways to art museums as gifts to the people, and choreographed grand ceremonials to emphasize the point.59 While the public appearance of royals became nationalized, national pageants adopted the iconography of the royal tour to express the power of the nation. This was the significance behind the festival of the German Choral Association in Stuttgart in 1896, as outlined briefly in this volume’s Introduction. In the reactionary decades before the Revolution of 1848, German choral associations became a vehicle to voice nationalist sentiments while eluding government repression. With the founding of the German Empire in 1871, the associations’ goals shifted to the cultivation of patriotic feelings among the lower orders – workers and peasants – in the belief that they needed to be trained to love the new fatherland.60 In the festivities of 1896, which marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of German unification, the associations adopted the scale and lavish display of the traditional royal parade, but draped in the colors of cultural nationalism, with eighteen music corps, choirs from across Germany in historical costume, and parade floats with themes such as Germania, Poets, and Folksongs (Fig. 14.1). While the festival celebrated the nation, it did not exclude monarchy, instead placing it in a position of patronage by recruiting King Wilhelm II of Württemberg to act as official protector. Parading through the city streets, the festival procession passed the royal palace on the way to its final destination: the festival hall where 8,000 chorists participated in a singing competition. Standing on the palace balcony, King Wilhelm II became a stop along the route, hailing the paraders and their symbols of cultural nationalism.61 In the parade, though, the nation was represented almost exclusively by middle-class men, a paradox that the Choral Association papered over by claiming unity under the eyes of the royal arbiter. By representing the system of single rule (monarchy) as a counterpoint to the democratic nation (represented by the Germania float at the center of the parade), the king as viewer bolstered the fiction of a unified, democratic nation of equals. The ‘democracy’ in question here was not one of constitutions, suffrage, and other institutions of political representation, which would have raised pointed questions about access and exclusion. As the chorist and constitutional

 Abigail Green, Fatherlands: State-Building and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 259–261; James J. Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World: From the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. 98–137.  Dieter Langewiesche, Nation, Nationalismus, Nationalstaat in Deutschland und Europa (Munich: Beck, 2000), 132–169; Barbara Eichner, History in Mighty Sounds: Musical Constructions of German National Identity, 1848–1914 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2012), 163–228; Celia Applegate, The Necessity of Music: Variations on a German Theme (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), esp. 89–98.  “Das V. Deutsche Sängerbundesfest in Stuttgart,” Die Gartenlaube Beilage Heft 34 (1896): 580a.

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Fig. 14.1: Photomontaged illustration, circa 1896, showing the Germania parade float at the German Choral Association festival of 1896 in Stuttgart.

lawyer Viktor Ritter von Schmeidel explained, the Choral Association represented democracy “in its purest and clearest form” because it promised participation in the cultural nation, which crossed all territorial boundaries and erased social divisions as it opened a path to sublime emotions.62 Even those cheering from the side-lines could participate, although in an ‘orchestrated’ (read: subordinate) manner. With the king as a benevolent on-looker, the hegemony of middle-class masculinity merged with the hegemony of the cultural nation. In Berlin, the German Empire’s capital city, Emperor Wilhelm II also participated in the nationalization of the monarchy, while simultaneously attempting to revive the opulent display of earlier royal tours. Ascending the throne in 1888, at twenty-nine years of age, Wilhelm II showed great interest in science and technology, participated in philanthropic works, and had himself filmed unveiling statues and laying cornerstones.63 He also indulged his taste for grand spectacle with pompous court ceremonial, lavish historical costume balls, stricter dress codes, and

 Viktor Ritter von Schmeidel, Der deutsche Sängerbund 1862–1912: Aus Anlaß des fünfzigjährigen Bestandes (n.p.: Verlag des Deutschen Sängerbundes, 1912), 7–14, quote on 9–10.  Wolfgang König, Wilhelm II. und die Moderne: Der Kaiser und die technisch-industrielle Welt (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2007); Martin Loiperdinger, “‘Kaiserbilder’: Wilhelm II als Filmstar,” in

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even state portraiture depicting him in the style of Louis XIV.64 Traveling around the German Empire, he staged impressive military reviews and grand parades, while adopting a more modern, glamorous stance at the annual Kiel naval regatta, where he mingled with European socialites and American plutocrats.65 This combination of technological modernism and ornate pomp and circumstance defined Wilhelm II’s attempts to possess space in Berlin as well. The emperor was known for speeding from the royal palace down the city’s main promenade, Unter den Linden, in an automobile, while also parading daily, on horseback and in military uniform, down the same street. On ceremonial occasions, the emperor instructed police to cordon off Unter den Linden so that pedestrians could not cross through the central part of the city, and instead had to wait for hours while the formal processions passed through. For many pedestrians, seeing the emperor and his royal guests in full plumage was an exhilarating, entertaining spectacle. For others, it was immensely annoying, as the monopolization of the cityscape hindered them in their own use of the space. Berlin’s newspapers regularly complained about the inconvenience as well as the authoritarian nature of the police cordon that upheld the social hierarchies of space.66 The effect of Wilhelm II’s pageantry was thus highly mixed. Whether it caused pleasure or outrage was not only a matter of political preference, but was also influenced by what one was doing at the moment, whether one was visiting as a tourist with a desire for grand spectacle or engaged in important personal or financial business. Wilhelm had the power to choreograph his authority through domination of Berlin’s central axis; how that choreography was received was up to the individual viewer. In this sense, the presentation of royal legitimacy had grown beyond “ocular sovereignty” as Milinda Banerjee defines the term for British rule in India: beyond the hope that “the prince, by his mere appearance . . . would receive the acclaim of his subjects, embodying their affectionate loyalty.”67

Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland: Band 1: Kaiserreich 1895–1918, ed. Uli Jung and Martin Loiperdinger (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 2005), 253–268, here 256, 258.  One such portrait was hung in the German embassy in Paris, creating a public scandal in France. Eva Giloi, “The Magic Mirror: Supplicant Letters and the Role of False Equivalences in Shaping Ruler Dominance,” in Ruler Personality Cults from Empires to Nation-States and Beyond, ed. Kirill Postoutenko and Darin Stephanov (London: Routledge, 2020), 104–119, here 104.  Giloi, Monarchy, Myth, 269–270, 308–309. On Wilhelm II as a dandy: Koshar, German Travel Cultures, 39.  Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 165–168. For conflict in the streets of Berlin more generally: Thomas Lindenberger, Straßenpolitik: Zur sozialgeschichte der öffentlichen Ordnung in Berlin 1900 bis 1914 (Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz Nachfolger, 1995).  Milinda Banerjee, “Ocular Sovereignty, Acclamatory Rulership and Political Communication: Visits of Princes of Wales to Bengal,” in Royal Heirs and the Uses of Soft Power in NineteenthCentury Europe, ed. Frank Lorenz Müller and Heidi Mehrkens (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 81–100, here 82.

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Fig. 14.2: Official portrait of Wilhelm II in his famous eagle helmet. Cabinet-size photograph, circa 1905.

There is nothing to indicate that Wilhelm II harbored any qualms about annoying Berliners with his domination of space. The German emperor was generally eager to present himself in imperious poses to his subjects (Fig. 14.2), in contrast to his attitude towards foreigners, to whom he was often friendlier.68 His occupation of the capital city’s central axis accompanied by soldiers as avatars of the military monarchy, relegating all other subjects to the sidelines, was a form of habitus, orchestrating the ‘work’ of different social groups in space: the work of the monarchy and aristocracy being to rule, by literally setting the rules, and the work of subjects being to acclaim and obey. Wilhelm II’s parades further synchronized the city center by allowing the military monarchy to monopolize space at certain times of the day, at its own choosing, and then turning that space over to other social demographics in between the royal processions. The regular nature of the emperor’s movements when in Berlin, in particular his ride on horseback at the same time every day, lent his domination of space the inevitability

 See: Eva Giloi, “Copyrighting the Kaiser: Publicity, Piracy, and the Right to Wilhelm II’s Image,” Central European History 45, no. 3 (2012): 407–451.

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of cyclical recurrence, as did the more lavish state parades tied to annual military maneuvers and festive anniversaries. Ironically, it was the ever-recurring nature of Wilhelm II’s habitus – at those times of the year when he was present in the city – that turned him into a tourist attraction of comic proportions, undermining the gravity of his self-presentation, as we shall see at the end of the next section.

II Epiphanic Tourism and the Family Vacation: Cultural Capital and Cultural Hegemony To help American passengers pass the time on their transatlantic crossings, the Norddeutscher Lloyd provided promotional literature in the cabin rooms of its steamers, including facsimiled letters of endorsement by Mark Twain and Emperor Wilhelm II. The pamphlets were intended as testimonials from two world famous tourists who knew quality travel when they saw it. Twain was an obvious choice, as author of bestselling travel books including Innocents Abroad.69 The emperor was chosen as head of state, but also as yachting enthusiast and avid tourist, a role that had earned him the nickname Reisekaiser, or travelling emperor, in Germany. The dual endorsements also posited an imagined equivalence between German emperor and American citizens as paying customers of tourist services.70 This wishful thinking was not exclusive to American democrats traveling with the Norddeutscher Lloyd. In Germany, too, the tourist magazine Die Welt auf Reisen imagined the emperor as an ordinary traveler, going on vacation to get away from it all “just like every other tourist.”71 There was a kernel of truth to this sanguine vision. On his yachting vacations to the Norwegian fjords, popularly known as the Nordlandreisen, Wilhelm occasionally invited tourists onto his yacht, the Hohenzollern. On one particular journey, he gave all of the passengers of the steamer Viktoria Luise a tour of his yacht and exposed himself to a crossfire of amateur photographers.72 Wilhelm II was also known to travel on steamships, for instance boarding a HAPAG liner halfway into its Mediterranean route, which began its journey in New York, then sailed to Greece, Egypt, and the Holy Land.73

 Twain also wrote a testimonial for Thomas Cook’s travel company. Levenstein, Seductive Journey, 159.  Norddeutscher Lloyd, Guide through Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Holland and England (J. Reichmann and Cantor, 1896), xxi-xxiii.  J. Selbst., “Der Kaiser auf Reisen, I,” Die Welt auf Reisen 2, no. 2 (1902): 24–26, here 26.  Klaus-D. Pohl, “Der Kaiser im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit: Wilhelm II. in Fotographie und Film,” in Der Letzte Kaiser: Wilhelm II. im Exil, ed. Hans Wilderotter and Klaus-D. Pohl (Berlin: Bertelsmann Lexikon, 1991), 12.  Rudolf Nadolny, Mein Beitrag: Erinnerungen eines Botschafters des Deutschen Reiches, ed. Günter Wollstein (Köln: dme-Verlag, 1985), 50–51. HAPAG was the commonly used acronym for the Hamburg-Amerikanische Packetfahrt-Aktien-Gesellschaft.

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Even official diplomatic tours were interlaced with tourism, for example when the emperor’s brother, Prince Heinrich, Grand Admiral of the German navy, was sent on a goodwill tour of the United States in 1902. Heinrich’s overt purpose was to attend the christening by Alice Roosevelt of the yacht Meteor, built for his brother in the United States. Heinrich was also given a political brief to court the United States government as a potential ally against Britain.74 Amidst rising political tensions, the political mission was scrapped: the emperor directed his brother not to talk politics and instead to show the American public Germany’s kinder, gentler face.75 On his whistlestop tour through New York, Boston, and the Midwest – Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, Louisville, Toledo – Heinrich also visited Niagara Falls and the battlefield of Chattanooga, both of which he and his brother had read about as boys. Heinrich’s stops at Chattanooga and Niagara Falls might seem too insignificant to merit attention: of course the prince would want to visit tourist sites that he had dreamt about as a child. But it is precisely the seemingly self-evident quality of the desire that marks its role in upholding cultural hegemony. The ‘universal’ nature of the tourist desire made tourism seem to be a universal good that could be accessed by (almost) everyone. It was held up as a cultural good because it enabled individuals to see beyond their immediate domestic circumstances and thus develop empathy and a greater knowledge of the human condition. As such, tourism bound even ruler and subject together in common humanity. Growing transportation networks and package tours reinforced this seeming universality. Seaside resorts in particular catered to an intermingling of visitors, including “middle-class families, bachelors, respectable working classes, rowdy excursionists [and] fashionable society.”76 Many visitors came for a short stay, even just for a day, as a way to align their visits with their budgets.77 The result was a gradation of access, with all social classes mixing in the resorts’ open spaces, while the towns’ private spaces retained their exclusive entrée based on price, official membership, and personalized invitations. Tourism’s combination of universal idealism and graduated access made it effective as a tool of cultural hegemony. It reinforced the cultural capital of the educated bourgeoisie through two main forms of tourism that developed in the nineteenth  Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase, “The Uses of ‘Friendship’: The ‘Personal Regime’ of Wilhelm II and Theodore Roosevelt, 1901–1909,” in The Kaiser: New Research on Wilhelm II’s Role in Imperial Germany, ed. Annika Mombauer and Wilhelm Deist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 143–175.  Oskar Prinz von Preussen, Wilhelm II und die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika: Zur Geschichte seiner ambivalenten Beziehung (Neuried: ars una, 1995), 155–175.  Towner, Historical Geography, 211.  Walton, “British Tourism,” 115; David Blackbourn, “‘Taking the Waters’: Meeting Places of the Fashionable World,” in The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War, ed. Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 435–457, here 450.

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century: epiphanic tourism and the family vacation. Epiphanic tourism represented the gold standard of tourism. Growing out of Romanticism, it promised contact with the sublime, in all its magnificent and fearsome manifestations.78 Traveling to Switzerland’s majestic peaks or the Rhineland’s medieval landscapes promised emotional catharsis and longing for beauty fulfilled.79 This Romantic sensibility also fostered a new kind of ‘celebrity tourism,’ which, unlike professional networking, sought an emotional engagement with cultural heroes. Not only great works of art, but the artists themselves, from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Franz Schubert to Richard Wagner and Gerhart Hauptmann, found themselves beset by fans, ecstatic at having found an artistic soulmate.80 While conjuring sublime emotions, epiphanic tourism was more individualized than the traditional pilgrimage, which was embedded in religious rituals and fixed structures of sociability. Epiphany focused on the singular, feeling soul instead. True art was overwhelming, intoxicating, verging on the “hysterical,” as the American preacher Henry Ward Beecher noted approvingly.81 Merely gaining cultural knowledge by seeing canonical works in an art museum was insufficient for touching the sublime. Epiphanic tourism moved beyond “an opportunity for gathering and ordering knowledge of the world” to “an adventure of the self.”82 As such, epiphanic tourism dovetailed with the literary and artistic culture that undergirded the educated bourgeoisie’s cultural capital. Bourgeois culture celebrated the artist as a genius and the arts as the very definition of what it meant to be human. Public art museums, concerts, sheet music, and cheap editions of literary classics, which flourished over the course of the nineteenth century, extended that cultural ideal down the social ladder, but with unequal levels of access in terms of leisure time and aesthetic training. Even for the bourgeoisie, epiphany had to be earned to retain its value as a profound experience, prompting travelers to go off the beaten track. Faced with Thomas Cook’s “aspiring and adventurous clerks, shopkeepers, and even frugal women who felt safe in organized groups,” those with more financial and cultural capital distinguished themselves from their inferiors by drawing a line between travel and mere tourism.83 Even to this day, travel writers continue to make this distinction, romanticizing the Renaissance tradition of ‘exploration’ in which the explorer “seeks the undiscovered” and Romantic ‘travel’ in which the traveler seeks out challenging routes for the “adornment of the

 Berghoff and Korte, “Britain,” 5; Levenstein, Seductive Journey, 43; Berghoff, “From Privilege,” 161. On Romantic travel more generally: Towner, Historical Geography, 124–140.  Towner, Historical Geography, 108–126, 138.  Giloi, Monarchy, Myth, 94; Eva Giloi, “Introduction,” in The Cultural History of Fame, vol. 5: Age of Industry, ed. Eva Giloi, gen. ed. P. David Marshall (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2022).  Levenstein, Seductive Journey, 112–114.  Chard, “From the Sublime,” 60.  Walton, “British Tourism,” 116. See also: Berghoff and Korte, “Britain,” 5–6.

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mind,” while denigrating modern ‘tourism’ because of its pre-packaged destinations and cultural clichés based on “instant recognition.”84 In the nineteenth century, the need to create such a distinction became acute for the educated bourgeoisie when the expansion of railway networks and steamships facilitated greater contact between lower and higher orders. Steamships in particular fostered intimacy between strangers through the suspension of a fixed social routine.85 As the South Carolinian John Bell Henneman noted in a letter to his father, after meeting a young woman traveling unchaperoned to Europe in 1886: “Acquaintances made on the boat are always intimate.”86 Enforced proximity relaxed social boundaries, as when W. E. B. DuBois, who studied at the Berlin University in 1892, found conversation partners in a Dutch woman and her teenage daughters on board their ship. Freed from the segregationist laws that governed his social interactions at home, DuBois and the women were “happy companions, laughing, eating and singing together.”87 Generational boundaries could be breached as well: on a family tour to Italy, the sixteen-year-old Leo Lania spent a night carousing with the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, a fellow cruise passenger whom he had met by chance.88 First class travel and the price of hotels drew lines between classes to some extent, but financial strictures often failed to differentiate between the multiple tiers of middle-class travelers, most of whom could afford the same modes of transportation and accommodation. To set a boundary against the economic middle class, the educated bourgeoisie required cultural means of distinction.89 They turned to “savage satire,” deriding their rivals as ‘mere tourists’ who consumed pre-digested package tours and guidebook itineraries.90 In contrast, they cast their own, less accessible and more resource intensive itineraries as more original, authentic, and requiring “superior emotional-aesthetic sensitivity.”91 Travel writers simultaneously  Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 39–43. For a critique of this dichotomy and the class prejudice it contains, see: Walton, “British Tourism,” 113–116; Berghoff, “From Privilege,” 172–173.  Levenstein, Seductive Journey, 158.  Letters by John Bell Henneman to his father, in August 1886. John Bell Henneman, Jr., An American Graduate Student in Bismarck’s Germany: The Letters of John Bell Henneman to his Family in South Carolina, 1886–1889, ed. John Bell Henneman Jr. (Princeton: self-published, 1995), 10–15, 22–26.  W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of its First Century (New York: International Publishers: 1968), 159–162.  Leo Lania, Today We Are Brothers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942), 40–42.  These different middle-class tiers are similar to the distinction in Germany between Wirtschaftsbürgertum (economic middle class) and Bildungsbürgertum (educated middle class). See: Jürgen Kocka, “Bürgertum und Bürgerlichkeit als Probleme der deutschen Geschichte vom späten 18. zum frühen 20. Jahrhundert,” in Bürger und Bürgerlichkeit im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Kocka (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck, 1987), 21–63.  Walton, “British Tourism,” 116.  Buzard, Beaten Track, 6.

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exhorted lower-class tourists to emulate the idealized goal of cultural fulfillment, lest they miss out on this valuable human experience, while knowing that the lower orders’ participation in this cultural ritual would necessarily remain a mere approximation of the platonic ideal of the epiphanic traveler. When, inevitably, package tourists failed to show independence, or what upper-class travelers derided as their “conspicuous failures of taste,” their failure underlined their ‘natural’ subordination and need for more guidance to reach the ideal.92 At best, the imitators were lauded for trying; more commonly, they were ridiculed by those who had set up an impossible standard. The family vacation, with its distinct gender habitus, reinforced the superiority of epiphanic travel as an educated bourgeois male ideal. Family vacations, increasingly common among all social classes, centered on seaside resorts and spas, both of which offered entertainments for all ages. The settled nature of these spaces separated the family vacation from epiphanic travel, since the latter required stamina and physical self-discipline in pursuit of the sublime, which was often out of reach for younger family members. By carving out a separate space for women and children on holiday, the seaside and spa visit orchestrated travel between men and women, establishing a gendered tourist habitus inferior to the male ideal of epiphanic travel.93 This implicit inferiority worked on multiple levels. With their medical treatments and fresh air cures, spas and seaside resorts were spaces of common humanity, not in the sense of epiphany, but in common suffering. From their earliest days, spas with a reputation for healing waters attracted both aristocrats and commoners; although socially distant, these classes mingled in their collective physical distress.94 In the nineteenth century, the increasing professionalization of balneology construed the visitor as a victim of modern ailments, including weak nerves and neurasthenia.95 The emphasis on illness separated the supplicant seeking rejuvenation in the spas and resorts’ wholesome waters, bracing sea air, and gentle amusements from epiphanic travel’s promethean genius, struggling with god and nature on the mountaintop. Both epiphany and gentle rejuvenation were fully accessible to bourgeois male tourists, albeit at different times and in different settings, but the former was only marginally open to middle-class women (and even less so to the lower orders, male or female).

 Buzard, Beaten Track, 8.  See: Towner, Historical Geography, chapter four on spas and chapter seven on resorts. Also: Blackbourn, “Taking the Waters;” John K. Walton, The English Seaside Resort: A Social History 1750–1914 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983).  Heikki Lempa, Spaces of Honor: Making German Civil Society, 1700–1914 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021), 94.  Blackbourn, “Taking the Waters,” 437–440.

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As fixed, settled spaces of domesticated pleasures, suitable for children, spas and resorts also emphasized women’s role as mothers. The venues’ visual emphasis on motherhood and its aura of comfort and shelter helps to explain why spas welcomed unchaperoned women: almost half of the visitors to the spa at Pyrmont, for instance, were women unaccompanied by male relatives.96 Even though women also engaged in epiphanic tourism, their visible massing at family resorts created a visual orchestration of vacation spaces that linked women to the settled, superficial nature of spa amusements. This visual massing was reinforced by the package tours organized by Thomas Cook and other travel companies, where women tourists were equally conspicuous. While individual and unaccompanied women did go touring through Europe’s cultural landmarks, their larger presence in group tours associated them with the protected and less authentic curated tour, rather than the heroic challenges of chasing the sublime.97 Summer vacations also highlighted the importance of the family, which experienced togetherness in leisure time in contrast to the separation of work, school, and housework that regulated everyday life.98 Family tourism thus mitigated the internal contradictions of the bourgeois family ideology, which pitted authoritative patriarchy against an idealized vision of family bliss and sentimental attachment. Reconciling these two contradictory ideals required moments in the everyday routine that emphasized the sentimental mode over the authoritarian reality. The annual reaffirmation of the loving family at Christmastime served to stabilize the patriarchal order during the rest of the year.99 In the same way, family vacations acted out rituals of intimacy temporarily, without endangering the usually strict, patriarchal hierarchy. On the family vacation, adults were often more relaxed and inclined to play with their children than in the rigid routines of ordinary life. For Toni Sender, her father became positively “jolly” on their family trips, in contrast to the usual “gloomy days of submission and obedience” at home. Lania, who adored his mother, found that she became a “playmate” to him on their vacations in the mountains, while back in Vienna, his access to his mother was far more restricted.100 Family vacations reinforced bourgeois cultural hegemony because they allowed for tactics in Certeau’s sense, while ultimately reinscribing children back into dominant cultural values. As the family vacation brought the domestic unit out into the  Lempa, Spaces of Honor, 108. On spas generally: Towner, Historical Geography, chapter four; also the various chapters in: Martin Kohlrausch, Peter Heyrman, and Jan De Maeyer, ed., Leisure and Elite Formation: Arenas of Encounter in Continental Europe, 1815–1914 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020).  Buzard, Beaten Track, 59.  Spode, “Aufstieg,” 114–128, here 119–120.  David D. Hamlin, Work and Play: The Production and Consumption of Toys in Germany, 1870–1914 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 28–30.  Toni Sender, The Autobiography of a German Rebel (New York: Vanguard, 1939), 10; Lania, Today, 17.

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public sphere, it tested the socialization process by allowing for greater social mingling.101 Even in spas restricted to an elite clientele, ballrooms, promenades, and gambling tables allowed guests to acquire status “through fashion and accomplishments,” rather than relying on the established reputation of their family lineage, wealth, or office.102 Within this world of liminal contacts, older children, both sons and daughters, were able to break free temporarily from the strictures of parental domination by making acquaintances with strangers. Parents had to trust their children to live up to bourgeois norms of propriety – a significant assumption, given that spas and resorts were known as sites of social mixing and flirtation.103 As Heikki Lempa writes, spas were spaces “where the men and women of the crowd, hailing from all corners of the world, would become friends and belongers” in a set of “emotional communities.”104 The spas’ emotional communities coalesced around the ritual of drinking the waters in the morning; they spent the afternoons reinforcing those affective bonds by roaming around the spa grounds, rambling in the countryside, or finding other sources of group amusement.105 For the educated bourgeoisie in particular, emotional connections were cemented through a common interest in the arts, which licensed contact between strangers, even for teenagers. When Ina Seidel visited Baden-Baden, she was pursued by a young man hoping to win her favor by introducing her to a local circle of poets.106 The fourteen-year-old Ludwig Marcuse likewise flirted with young girls on his beach vacations by writing poems for them, as did the teenage Friedrich AhlersHestermann, who also followed young women around the spa’s public concerts. These youths’ forwardness towards girls to whom they had not been officially introduced stood in marked contrast to how they acted back home, where they mostly met girls in awkward, restricted settings such as (mother-chaperoned) dance lessons that were “anything but a pleasure.”107 The family vacation thus provided a space for tactics in Certeau’s sense: bourgeois children used the cultural capital impressed upon them by their elders to appropriate resort spaces for their own needs.108 Parents’ greater tolerance for their children’s interactions with strangers can be explained by several factors, though, which ultimately undercut the liberatory effects of their tactics. In the liminal

 Lempa, Spaces of Honor, 108, 111–114; Levenstein, Seductive Journey, 130.  Walton, “British Tourism,” 116–117.  See: Koshar, German Travel Cultures, 43, on the ‘eroticization’ of travel.  Lempa, Spaces of Honor, 101.  Lempa, Spaces of Honor, 104.  Ina Seidel, Meine Kindheit und Jugend: Ursprung, Erbteil und Weg (Stuttgart: Deutsche VerlagsAnstalt, 1935), 155.  Ludwig Marcuse, Mein Zwanzigstes Jahrhundert: Auf dem Weg zu einer Autobiographie (Munich: Paul List, 1960), 32; Friedrich Ahlers-Hestermann, Pause vor dem Dritten Akt (Hamburg: Gebr. Mann, 1949), 23–26.  For cultural socialization of youth in Germany: Giloi, “Socialization.”

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spaces of spa and resort, parents assumed that their children’s cultural training would serve as an informal form of vetting to ensure that the strangers were social equals and therefore felt inhibitions – either psychologically ingrained, or out of fear of scandal in the relatively small world of the educated elite – to keep them from improper conduct. In the spas and resorts’ restaurants, hotel lobbies, and park grounds, contacts could also be overseen by parents, who pulled strangers into conversations to test their social background. A similar cultural vetting of strangers was more difficult to accomplish in the streets of the big city. Finally, parents found vacation friendships tolerable because they were finite moments: they ended when the holiday was over, unless the adults made a concerted effort to keep the connection alive. The result was that, during the relative freedom of the family vacation, youths used tactics to subvert the strictures of everyday family life, but because these tactics were based on the cultural materials provided to them by their elders, those tactics became an individualized rehearsal of the cultural rituals they would later adopt as adults. The ideal of cultural epiphany, which reinforced the dominance of the bourgeois male as paterfamilias, was so hegemonic that the tactics of the (subordinate) children reinscribed them into the dominant ideology.

Americans in ‘Kaiserville’ In 1905, word went out in newspapers around the world that Emperor Wilhelm II was an avid postcard and stamp collector. In response to this minor news item, over a hundred people from various countries – Australia, Ecuador, France, Canada, among many others – sent the German emperor picture postcards of their hometowns.109 The postcards were collected by the imperial Civil Cabinet, regardless of who wrote them or what the cards said; they were kept purely for their tourist motifs and stamps, which were removed and incorporated into the emperor’s collection. As a result, the postcards reflect an unsorted, uncensored sample of how foreigners presented themselves and their hometowns to the emperor as a fellow tourist.110 Americans, from towns big and small, sent the largest number of postcards (12 percent of the total). The language and spelling of the American cards indicates that the senders were, for the most part, not overly educated or wealthy. Many American senders took a boldly independent stance in the face of royalty but were unsure

 The full list of countries: Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Ecuador, England, France, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, and the USA. GStA-PK I HA, Rep 89, Nr. 851, “Dem Kaiser übersandte Ansichtspostkarten,” 1905–1908.  Postcards from the USA came from: Los Angeles, California; Jacksonville and Orlando, Florida; Chicago, Elgin, and Streator, Illinois; Baltimore, Maryland; Medford, Massachusetts; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Kansas City, Missouri; Rensellaer and East Aurora, New York; Canton, Cleveland, Columbus, Fostoria, and Hartwell, Ohio; Charleston, South Carolina; Tacoma, Washington.

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of the niceties of royal etiquette. To overcome this insecurity, they piled up multiple greetings in the hope that they might amount to something sufficient, or composed awkwardly brief or clichéd salutations: “Your Imperial Majesty, Greetings” and “Emperor of Germany. Dear Sir.” The postcards also emphasized the writers’ republican identity: “With true American democracy, I take the liberty to send you two postcards.” Many senders used their cards to make an equivalence with the emperor as fellow collector: “I am a post card collector. Will you please exchange cards with me.” They also emphasized their pride in being American. As one woman from Charleston, South Carolina wrote: “Saw where you were collecting postals, so send one with best wishes from the best place on earth.” The cards’ visual motifs featured points of national pride, for instance the house where “Yankee Doodle was written,” or the tombs of various presidents. Most often, though, the patriotism was local, showing hometown monuments, town squares, or main hotels.111 The postcards confirm Hartmut Berghoff and Barbara Korte’s point that: “Despite its transnational character tourism plays a prominent role in the formation of national identities and stereotypes.”112 In this case, the postcard writers’ earnest political tone rectified their deficit in cultural polish, a stance with a long history among American democrats. Reaching back to the late eighteenth century, American travelers had taken a disapproving view of European kingdoms and their inequalities, asserting that the Old World would do well to take lessons from the new Republic.113 After recovering from the Civil War and emerging as an industrial power, Americans – northerners in particular – arrived in Europe with moral and economic self-confidence, but without the cultural polish that allowed their integration into high society. Twain thematized this conflict in his travelogues, in which he adopted both self-effacing humor in the presence of European aristocracy and an ironic, amused tolerance (at best) for Europe’s benighted elites, or “rapscallions” as Huck Finn described Europe’s crowned heads. Twain played the Connecticut Yankee at the Old World’s courts, traveling in the spirit of bumbling but sincere democracy, unimpressed with royalty.114 This stance worked well enough for the lower-middle-class armchair tourists who sent postcards to Wilhelm II, but it was inadequate to the needs of the American educated bourgeoisie, who linked their dominance back home to Europe’s intellectual and cultural legacy. These educated American bourgeois, or ‘educated upper-middle class,’ were sandwiched between the very wealthy upper class of plutocrats and brahmins, and a much more sizeable, semi-educated entrepreneurial class, or ‘median middle class,’ who were summed up in the stereotype, common at

 GStA-PK I HA, Rep 89, Nr. 851, “Dem Kaiser übersandte Ansichtspostkarten,” 1905–1908.  Berghoff and Korte, “Britain,” 8.  Levenstein, Seductive Journey, 48–50; Baxendale, “Construction of the Past,” 30.  Alfred Vagts, “Mark Twain at the Courts of the Emperors,” Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien 9 (1964): 149–151, here 149; Andreas Austilat, A Tramp in Berlin: New Mark Twain Stories (New York: Berlinica, 2013).

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the time, of “middle-class businessmen and their wives from ‘Main Street, USA’”: provincial, naïve, and culturally unlettered.115 Advances in steamship technology, which reduced the transatlantic crossing from fifteen days in 1870 to six days in 1890, intensified the educated upper-middle class’ predicament. Benefiting from enhanced transportation options, the numbers of transatlantic travelers rose from 50,000 in 1880, to 125,000 in 1900, to almost 250,000 in 1913. For the median middle class, a European vacation meant frenetically sampling the continent’s many treasures in as little time, with as much ease, and with as little interference with their work back home as possible. The wealthy upper class compensated for the unwelcome influx of fellow tourists by isolating themselves in shipboard private suites and luxury hotels.116 Educated upper-middle-class Americans could only partially afford to follow the wealthy upper class’ lead, but they nonetheless wanted to avoid association with the median middle class. They found a solution in a renewed commitment to cultural travel at a time when the upper class had abandoned itself to hedonism at the gambling tables of Europe’s luxury spas. Cultural epiphany, lauded as “refinement,” therefore remained key for these educated Americans.117 As Lafayette Loomis averred in 1906 in The Index Guide to Travel and Art-Study in Europe: “The American public has become aware that, to the intelligent visitor, the supreme attraction of the old world centers in its great collections of art – a source equally of pleasure and culture which his own country cannot bestow.”118 The tourist habitus complicated how culture could be absorbed, though. On the surface, the American tourist itinerary remained in line with traditional epiphanic travel. Already in the early nineteenth century, wealthy American travelers had followed the typical Romantic circuit through the Rhineland, the alps, and the southern lands of antiquity in search of the sublime, stopping to appreciate Europe’s museums, palaces, and cathedrals along the way.119 Memoirs written by American tourists at the end of the nineteenth century likewise recounted visiting the usual “notable spots”: Dutch museums to see the Old Masters, a trip down the Rhine river, over the alps and into Italy’s ancient glories, with side trips to Paris and London.120 Those who wished to extend their stay in Germany beyond the Rhine included stops at

 Levenstein, Seductive Journey, xii.  For the extravagance of first-class luxury travel, see: William Roka, “Building Luxurious Ocean Liners for the Traveling Transatlantic Elite in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Yearbook of Transnational History, vol. 1, ed. Thomas Adam and Austin E. Loignon (Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2018): 115–138.  Levenstein, Seductive Journey, 125–126, 129, 163, 166.  Lafayette C. Loomis, The Index Guide to Travel and Art-Study in Europe (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), vii. Also: Levenstein, Seductive Journey, 163.  Levenstein, Seductive Journey, 42–46, 61, 93–95; Towner, Historical Geography, 138.  Edward M. Bassett, Autobiography of Edward M. Bassett (New York: Harbor Press, 1939), 145–149, 167. Also: Ray Lyman Wilbur, The Memoirs of Ray Lyman Wilbur 1875–1949, ed. Edgar Eugene Robinson and Paul Carroll Edwards (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960); William Carlos

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Heidelberg University, Dresden’s Zwinger art museum, and the city of Weimar, or what the New York Times called “Goethe and Schiller country.”121 The educated upper-middle class found to their dismay, though, that members of the median middle class increasingly occupied the same spaces. As the wealthy upper class jettisoned cultural tourism in favor of opulent spa casinos, the educated upper-middle class lost the former’s presence as a cultural alibi, and instead found themselves grouped together, alone, with the median middle class at Europe’s cultural heritage sites.122 Following the wealthy upper class to increasingly exclusive, expensive spa resorts was one solution to the problem. Not least, it promised proximity to the glamour of European high society, which continued to patronize spas such as Marienbad, Baden-Baden, and Carlsbad. As the American essayist Henry Stoddard Ruggles noted tartly about Baden-Baden in the 1880s, it would be difficult to “swing a cat” in the spa’s streets without hitting a royal.123 Even Queen Victoria spent vacations in Biarritz in the 1880s and Nice in the 1890s, catapulting them to tourist fame.124 For the educated upper-middle class, though, spending one’s entire European visit at various spas was not only expensive, but also precluded the kind of cultural travel that bestowed cultural capital. As sites of repose, spas and resorts were intentionally located away from urban centers, while cultural monuments and artistic collections tended to be located in capital cities. Adding to the problem, while travel was becoming cheaper, the leisure time required for the traditional cultural tour was hard to come by. In 1800, when transatlantic travel was dominated by wealthy upper-class Americans, the average tour lasted at least a year. By the 1850s, the middle and uppermiddle classes more typically spent a month on tour.125 For anyone but the very wealthiest, it was not feasible (for men in particular) to spend so much time away from one’s occupation back home. This did not prevent middle-class Americans from traveling to Europe, but it tended to make the European vacation a rare event. One needed to make the most of it as a result, and not restrict oneself solely to spa vacations. One common strategy to solve the problem was to undertake a European tour as a university student, before being tied to a steady job or marriage. Between 1814 and 1914, 10,000 American students matriculated at German universities and spent

Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: Random House, 1951); Samuel W. Pennypacker, The Autobiography of a Pennsylvanian (Philadelphia, PA: John C. Winston, 1918); William Lyon Phelps, Autobiography with Letters (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939).  “Record Contingent on Cuxhaven Train,” New York Times, 5 October 1913.  Levenstein, Seductive Journey, 137–139.  Henry Stoddard Ruggles, Germany seen without Spectacles (Boston, MA: Lee and Shepard, 1883), 58. See also: Giloi, Monarchy, Myth, 260.  Levenstein, Seductive Journey, 146.  Levenstein, Seductive Journey, 95.

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their years of study roaming around Europe.126 In later life, once established in a career, the complications of travel could be overcome in other ways. One could claim that the tour was a professional research trip, and one could appease the family by bringing it along: F. M. Huntington Wilson was taken to Europe four times by the time he was nine years old.127 Bringing the family did not mean spending the entire trip at family resorts, though, since that diminished the opportunity for cultural epiphany. Instead, the whole family came along on the cultural circuit: Ray Lyman Wilbur’s infant son traveled 10,000 miles around Europe in his first ten months.128 Educated upper-middle-class Americans used those European trips to impart cultural capital to their children. Edward Bassett, for instance, made a point of touring “Shakespeare country” for the benefit of his three children, even though he had visited the area before.129 Bringing the family along on an extended cultural tour meant, though, that the motifs of the family vacation hovered over what was meant to be a refined and authentic epiphanic experience. Traveling through Europe’s capital cities with spouse, children, and servants in tow, the American educated male was trapped in an ‘inferior’ type of tourism, as the gendered habitus of the spa and resort was injected into serious cultural travel. In this, the American educated male was at a disadvantage in comparison to his European counterpart, who had separated these two types of travel into family vacations versus epiphanic tourism to be pursued alone. By moving through standard cultural itineraries, the educated paterfamilias further risked descending into a cultural cliché that cheapened the vaunted authenticity of his epiphanies. Numerous American accounts recall chance encounters with friends and colleagues from home, all traveling along the same routes. At times, these encounters were welcome: William Lyon Phelps was delighted to find his favorite high school teacher, whom he had not seen in a decade, sitting in front of him at the Paris opera.130 At other times, the encounters smacked of unimaginative imitation: purely by coincidence, Wilbur met his Stanford colleague John Casper Branner (and family) at four different points on their European vacation. As Wilbur remarked laconically: “They evidently wanted to see about the same things we did.”131

 Waldemar Zacharasiewicz, Images of Germany in American Literature (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007), 18.  F. M. Huntington Wilson, Memoirs of an Ex-Diplomat (Boston, MA: Bruce Humphries, 1945), 17. Also: Levenstein, Seductive Journey, 107–108. As Levenstein notes about Paris in 1888, “there were almost twice as many women unaccompanied by men as there were men unaccompanied by women.” Aside from confirming how tourism had become a universal desideratum, it shows how many American men were traveling with their families; the family vacation had become the norm. Levenstein, Seductive Journey, 185.  Wilbur, Memoirs, 147.  Bassett, Autobiography, 147–148.  Phelps, Autobiography, 235.  Wilbur, Memoirs, 146–147. See also: Levenstein, Seductive Journey, 102.

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To make matters worse, the educated upper-middle class found themselves surrounded in the more popular tourist locales by groups of median middle-class Americans, conspicuously displaying their membership in the national community. On steamships coming over, passengers sung the Star-Spangled Banner together. On vacation in Berlin, they celebrated the Fourth of July together by the thousands.132 These rituals of patriotism functioned to strengthen Americans’ self-conscious republican sensibilities and their rejection of Central European authoritarianism. In the process, American political superiority was projected onto cultural customs as well, visibly so in hospitality venues that catered to American tastes. A good number of Parisian hotels adopted American names and featured American-style bars for transatlantic tourists who preferred to avoid the French café.133 Certain Berlin hotels also advertised themselves as American-style, which largely meant installing bathtubs in their suites and equipping barber shops with stools.134 In shipboard promotional literature, these hotels lured patrons with promises of “a good broiled beefsteak, fried tomatoes and real icecream soda.”135 The same promotional literature boasted about Berlin’s “First-class American Dental Institute,” its “American Drug Store” with “American Specialties,” and even the Imperial Post Office’s exclusively English-language window.136 It was therefore difficult to avoid one’s fellow Americans while traveling in Europe, even if the New York Times was exaggerating when it claimed that “Germans who strayed in [to Berlin hotels] by mistake wondered whether they were in Broadway or Unter den Linden.”137 From the educated upper-middle-class perspective, those fellow Americans stood out as loud, vulgar, and “screeching.”138 Even worse, their belief in their political superiority led them to commit philistine faux pas. They pedantically sipped “more ice water than Rhine wine” as a moral statement on American integrity versus European decadence.139 They took offense at nude sculptures and paintings in the Louvre in their uncultured artistic ignorance.140 This hayseed moralism was unwelcome to the educated upper-middle class because it smacked of provincialism and equated republican political integrity with officious moralism. Yet they could not avoid being in the same spaces as those cultural ‘inferiors’ as they sought out cultural epiphany.

 “Independence Day Observed in Berlin,” New York Times, 4 July 1909.  Levenstein, Seductive Journey, 91–92, 105–106, 171.  “Fear Americans Won’t Come,” New York Times, 9 February 1908.  Norddeutscher Lloyd, Guide through Germany, 13; Hamburg-Amerikanische Packetfahrt-Actien -Gesellschaft (HAPAG), Guide through Germany, Austria-Hungary, Switzerland, Italy, France, Belgium, Holland, the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, Spain, Portugal (Berlin: J. H. Herz, 1905), 69, 78.  HAPAG, Guide, 70a, 98. Also: “Berlin full of Americans,” New York Times, 2 July 1911.  “Berlin’s High Tide of American Travel,” New York Times, 2 August 1908. See also: Levenstein, Seductive Journey, 100–105, 161–163, 166–169, 177–183.  Quote from an article in Harper’s Weekly in 1905, in: Levenstein, Seductive Journey, 181.  “Arrivals in Berlin Beat All Records,” New York Times, 26 June 1910.  Levenstein, Seductive Journey, 114.

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Caught in this quandary, the educated upper-middle class found a new tactic in urbane travel, which combined the epiphany of visiting cultural heritage sites with the debonaire attitudes of glamorous spa culture. Rather than the bumbling innocent abroad, they styled themselves as urbane consumers of European spectacle, adopting an amused detachment that demonstrated their social polish. A similar ironic distance had come to distinguish Romantic tourism by mid-century. As ecstatic effusions about the sublime sights of nature had become increasingly hyperbolic and commonplace, those who regarded themselves in the vanguard of good taste adopted a “counter-rhetoric of irony, bathetic intervention and humour” – in other words a “‘cool,’ understated reaction.”141 Royal tourism played a key role in this process, as the educated upper-middle class applied the same alternation of epiphany (when seeing art works) and detached irony (when seeing royals), which they could do simultaneously in the same urban spaces. Describing his trip to the Zwinger art museum in Dresden in 1898 as a moral awakening, Van Wyck Brooks attached himself firmly to a long-standing European tradition.142 The literary trope of epiphany in the Zwinger reached back to the Romantic writings of the Schlegel brothers and Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit.143 The King of Saxony, on the other hand, merely amused Brooks because he looked “like Santa Claus himself with his long white whiskers.”144 For Brooks, the Saxon king was as picturesque as the peasants at Dresden’s annual Christmas market. Likewise, Phelps recalled the “rapture” of his first voyage to Europe in 1890. Europe’s museums, the Rhineland, the Cologne Cathedral, and hearing Kuno Fischer lecture at Heidelberg University gave him a “succession of thrills.”145 During his stay in Paris, Phelps also stood out in the streets during the Italian royal couple’s visit and shouted “vive le roi!” as the royal carriage drove past. When a French bystander questioned him about his actions, given that he was an American and a committed democrat, he simply said: “That is just the reason; I have never had a chance before,” and let out another whoop.146 To Phelps, viewing royalty was a form of play and leisure time consumption, rather than a comment on political institutions. Monarchs became part of the entertainment landscape for American tourists largely due to their continued possession of space in Europe’s capital cities. In “Kaiserville,” as the New York Times liked to call Berlin, Wilhelm II’s parades down

 Quote in: Berghoff and Korte, “Britain,” 11. For hyperbole, humor, and tourism: Chard, “From the Sublime.”  Van Wyck Brooks, An Autobiography (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1965), 85–93.  Susan A. Crane, “Story, History and the Passionate Collector,” in Producing the Past: Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice 1700–1850, ed. Martin Myrone and Lucy Peltz (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 3.  Brooks, Autobiography, 73–74, 92–93.  Phelps, Autobiography, 227–229.  Phelps, Autobiography, 434.

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Unter den Linden could be consumed like any other tourist experience.147 Ray Stannard Baker gave his guidebook readers instructions for where to see the emperor, specifically to look out for the fall of the royal flag that signaled his departure from the palace by car. Likewise, if one heard the clatter of hooves and saw a flash of white plumes, one should “crowd up” to the street because the emperor was about to pass by.148 The New York Times, too, ran features suggesting where American tourists might see the emperor up-close: hinting when he might pop up at the Hofbräu Haus, with stein in hand, and noting at what time of day he drove through Berlin’s royal park, blaring his automobile horn with the Donner theme of Wagner’s Rheingold.149 The American traveler to Berlin could thus go into rapture in its museums, but balance out those effusions with wry appraisal of the royal spectacle. Robert Haven Schauffler, for instance, mused with detachment on whether it was worth waiting to see Wilhelm II drive down Unter den Linden. Too brief to be of significant value, the sighting was over in a “cloud of dust in the wake of the emperor’s automobile, which had whizzed, at the emperor’s speed limit, through the royal entrance.” The sighting might still be worth it, though, if taken in self-referential terms. As Schauffler explained the emperor’s speed to his readers: “In freshness, in youthful energy and initiative, the Hohenzollerns and the Berliners are more like Americans than like Germans.”150 Urbane and self-referential entertainment converged at the Kieler Woche, the German Empire’s annual naval review, yachting competition, and “premier Summer social event.”151 Here, the emperor was known to hobnob with high-status Americans on his yacht: Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, U.S. Ambassador Charlemagne Tower, and multi-millionaires Robert and Elsie Goelet.152 With American plutocrats within the emperor’s social orbit, educated upper-middle-class Americans could enjoy “glamour” by proxy by participating in the “glittering spectacles” of the Kaiser’s military reviews (Fig. 14.3), without giving up the cultural capital of epiphany or, so they thought, their political integrity.153

 “Germans Are Rare in Berlin Hotels,” New York Times, 25 July 1909.  Ray Stannard Baker, Seen in Germany (New York: McClure, Phillips, 1901), 41–42.  A ‘Veteran Diplomat,’ “Monarchs who are Shrewd Captains of Industry,” New York Times, 6 August 1911; James Huneker, “Huneker Prowls Around Kaiser’s Jubilee City,” New York Times, 22 June 1913.  Robert Haven Schauffler, Romantic Germany (New York: Century, 1909), 41–42, 93, 95.  “Fewer Americans at Kiel this Year,” New York Times, 26 June 1910; “A. V. Armour was in Kiel Accident,” New York Times, 30 June 1907.  ‘Veteran Diplomat,’ “Monarchs.”  “Military Displays for Berlin Visitors,” New York Times, 30 June 1909.

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Fig. 14.3: “Greetings from the Parade: Arrival of Her Majesty the Empress at the Parade Grounds.” Postcard of Empress Auguste Viktoria, circa 1900.

III The Armchair Tourist: Fragments and Metonyms In 1910, the New York Times gave a “hint to the Kaiser” that, instead of leaving the city for the summer months, “he ought to stay in Berlin to attract American tourists.” At present, “hundreds of tourists go away disconsolate because they were not favored with a glimpse of the War Lord riding down Unter-den-Linden on horseback or scorching along in one of his cream-colored 130-horse-power motor cars.”154 The emperor had become a major attraction in Kaiserville. As Americans flocked to Berlin in the closing decades of the century, largely to enjoy its curfew-free nightlife – some claimed it surpassed Paris as “the Continent’s Gayest City” – they hoped, even expected, to see the emperor as part of Berlin’s urban attractions.155 That expectation was so pervasive, in fact, that the emperor was simply pasted into the tourist imaginary if he did not oblige with his actual presence, for instance in the two postcards pictured here. The first, with the caption “Greetings from Berlin” (Gruss aus Berlin), shows Berlin’s university on Unter den Linden, with multiple figures photomontaged into the scene (Fig. 14.4). In the background are bourgeois pedestrians

 “A Hint to the Kaiser,” New York Times, 31 July 1910.  “Americans Flock to German Capital,” New York Times, 29 June 1910; “Berlin in Favor as Tourist Centre,” New York Times, 7 August 1910.

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and carriages; the foreground contains soldiers in parade uniforms and plumed helmets. At the center stands the emperor, seemingly interacting with a respectably dressed businessman. The second postcard bears the caption “Berlin – Life in the Metropolis. ‘Cathedral.’ Kaiser Wilhelm.” (Berlin – Weltstadtleben. ‘Dom.’ Kaiser Wilhelm). Here, too, all the figures are photomontaged into the image, although this time without soldiers (Fig. 14.5). Both postcards position the emperor at the center of the tourist experience; both show the fantasy of an accessible, unguarded royal figurehead.

Fig. 14.4: “Greetings from Berlin.” Photomontage postcard showing Wilhelm II (central figure) and soldiers in front of the Berlin University, circa 1890s.

There is no specific indication when the postcards were produced, although it is safe to assume that they were created before the beginning of World War I. Significantly, though, they both used photomontage, even though photographic techniques had clearly advanced between the moments in which each was produced. In the first case, photomontage was a matter of necessity. Until the development of snapshot photography around 1900, long exposure times made it difficult to capture movement outdoors.

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Fig. 14.5: “Berlin – life in the metropolis. ‘Cathedral.’ Kaiser Wilhelm.” Photomontage postcard showing Wilhelm II (central figure, saluting) in front of the Berlin Cathedral, circa 1910.

Photographic companies kept catalogues of stock figures and vehicles that could be pasted into street scenes since actual moving carriages, horses, and pedestrians would be too blurry to show up properly. (The same technical problem prompted the use of photomontage in the German Choral Association’s festival image.) The second postcard is different, though, as the people are clearly in motion, indicating that the postcard dates from after the development of snapshot photography, after which photomontage was no longer technically necessary for outdoor scenes. Nonetheless, the postcard producer opted to use photomontage to create a wished-for image, pasting the emperor into the picture as a tourist destination.156 Both postcards, although from different decades, make the same declaration: Berlin would not be Berlin without the emperor moving through its streets. Certeau uses the term ‘superstition’ for this type of metonymic device, in which a single object or ritual can define a place and its mood. Certeau defines superstitions as “supererogatory semantic overlays that insert themselves ‘over and above’ and ‘in excess’” to the physical location. In earlier times, people placed a claim on space by projecting legends onto local sites, giving them supernumerary value and therefore uniqueness. Legends annexed spaces to the poetic realm and made them habitable, as Certeau writes. After the rationality of modern life erased local legends, traveling became a  On postcards and photomontage: Giloi, “Copyrighting the Kaiser.”

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substitute by projecting “wordless stories” onto foreign locales, conjuring up exotic emotions in the tourist imagination. Certeau thinks, here, of “fleeting visions of the French countryside,” which can be translated for us, perhaps, as the affect conjured up by terms such as ‘the Riviera’ or ‘the South of France.’157 The Kaiser had the same metonymic effect for Berlin as the gondoliers and the pigeons of St. Mark’s Square for Venice, or the Eiffel Tower and Pont Neuf at dusk for Paris. As metonyms for place, they invoked a mood and begged to be experienced. Spatial metonyms can be produced through different modes of the imagination, though. This is where we see a transformation at the end of the nineteenth century, away from deep involvement in legends that circulate through a culture, towards the fragmentation of consumer culture with its promiscuity of allegiances. In consumer culture, the ephemeral, affective nature of the metonym remained, but without the depth characteristic of legends. Instead, the metonym now rested on browsing, on alternating between attention and distraction in everyday life.158 Reading the era’s tourist magazines, the armchair tourist consumed a mélange of places as individual emotive fragments, perhaps finding inspiration for an actual journey, but mostly flipping through the magazines’ visual metonyms in casual succession. The tourist magazine was a new addition to the entertainment industry in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Earlier in the century, armchair tourists had learned about foreign locales from novels, forming expectations of the places they visited before embarking on their journeys. Even Wilhelm II, as a twelve-year-old, read James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, a gift from his childhood friend Poultney Bigelow, with whom he also played “cowboys and Indians.”159 Just as Germans grew up on stories about the Wild West by Cooper and Karl May, so Americans developed a picture of Germany from a range of high literature and romance novels, including Cooper’s The Heidenmauer of 1832, based on his visit to the Rhineland.160 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Hyperion of 1839 “was later used almost like a guidebook by American tourists.”161 In the same way, Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels inspired sentimental journeying to Scotland, just as William Wordsworth’s descriptions of the Lake District and his celebrated poem on Tintern Abbey turned these regions into tourist attractions. Novels supplemented tourist guidebooks in making epiphanic tourism possible. While guidebooks such as Baedeker’s gave practical tips to tourists on how to realize their itinerant goals,

 Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 106–107.  Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900; Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 1999); Campbell, Romantic Ethic.  Preussen, Wilhelm II und die Vereinigten Staaten, 30. See in general: H. Glenn Penny, Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians since 1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).  Zacharasiewicz, Images of Germany, 22–23.  Zacharasiewicz, Images of Germany, 23, 25, 30.

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the goals themselves – communion with the sublime and the adventure of the self – were fostered by novels and their deep involvement in the imagined landscapes. Novels were a form of cultural preparation, so that “visitors could say, ‘Yes, that’s Italy’ or ‘that’s Paris’ or even ‘that’s Europe’” based on their reading.162 While novels obviously did not disappear at the end of the nineteenth century, they were supplemented by tourist magazines, which broke up longer narratives into small, easily consumable fragments. The German tourist magazine Die Welt auf Reisen, founded in 1900 by the Central Organization for Tourism and Global Traffic (CentralOrgan für Touristik und Weltverkehr), is a typical example. The magazine announced its kaleidoscopic intentions in the title of its most regular feature, the “Travel Mosaic” (Reise-Mosaik), which presented multiple travel-related stories, each a few paragraphs long, with no specific themes connecting them. A typical example, from 1905, juxtaposed a poem written by a travel agent with advice on photography, the history of the town of Nimmersatt and its post office, a warning against a certain Danish tour operator, anecdotes about weddings of American heiresses and European aristocrats, and a poem about the European Timetable Conference of 1904. Travel notices were generally organized into discrete segments – “News from Spas and Resorts,” “News from the Mountains,” “Transportation Chronicle,” “Travel Humor” – but the content within each of those segments ranged widely. The segment “Traveling by Picture Postcard” might contain, for instance, short notices on the World Postcard Congress, musical postcards as a new technology, statistics on the number of postcards sent worldwide, how postcards were used in Japan, the introduction of postcards to Hawaii, and postcard jokes.163 Tourist magazines such as Die Welt auf Reisen created desire in a fragmented way, offering small snippets of everything that might be amusing or raise feelings of longing. Within this kaleidoscope, the emperor appeared as another fragment, as royals, aristocrats, and other celebrities were sprinkled into the notices without special comment. A second issue’s “Travel Mosaic” reported on the emperor’s private train car alongside developments in shipbuilding, the appeal of living in a mobile home, British admiration of German business acumen, and the rescue of a Canadian shipwreck. Even the longer articles within any given issue reflected the same sense of collage: “Breaking Through the Simplon Tunnel,” “Ship Turbines and Steam Piston Engines,” “Kaiser Wilhelm II and Herwegh [the poet].”164 Travel magazines thus imitated the organization of the humor magazine, the feuilleton, and the political bullet point to provide quick and momentary affective pleasure, based on expendability, ironic distance, and mildly interesting trivia. These fragments were the literary equivalent of what Richard Thomas defines as

 Buzard, Beaten Track, 10.  Die Welt auf Reisen 5, no. 1 (1905): 10–12.  Die Welt auf Reisen 5, no. 3 (1905): 50–52; and no. 5 (1905): 82–85, 88–89.

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kitsch in the material realm: objects that reduce gigantic topics into a manageable miniature, making the public sphere fit for private consumption.165 Writing about Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, Thomas argues that the celebration’s photographs, commemorative mugs, and royal biscuit tins condensed the meaning of Victoria’s reign and the empire as a whole into an easily digestible tidbit for guilt-free absorption.166 The tourist fragment was another type of kitsch, condensing the larger meaning of places into manageable metonyms. New media technologies and a developing consumer economy ushered in this innovation. The exponential growth of the news media, as Betto van Waarden describes in chapter six of this volume, created a vast expansion of what was considered newsworthy. As publishers fought for the limited attention of the reading public, they gave more color and sensation to their news offerings. Feuilletons, devoted to fiction and light entertainment, introduced stories of far-away places with a more sentimental, emotive touch than straightforward news stories about those same locales. The tourist fragment, as a metonym for place, found its most significant boost, though, from the development of new visual techniques. From the 1850s onwards, photography made it possible to collect the world in the family album, as part of family history and identity.167 Illustrated newspapers, which sold millions of copies per week by 1914, offered readers a collage of foreign places in large, glossy format.168 The short picture reels of early cinema, which emerged at the end of the century, combined exotic locales with colorful ceremonial, stoking the desire to participate in these spectacles in person.169 Like the tourist magazine, film shorts blended traditional travel itineraries with newer colonial fantasies, mixing short films about Rhineland cathedrals or journeys “across the alps in an automobile” with tours of the Fiji Islands and “buffalo hunts in Indo-China.”170 Public appearances by celebrities, in film strips such as “With Roosevelt in Africa,” heightened tourism’s exoticism, as did film strips showing Prince Heinrich’s visit to the United States and Wilhelm II arriving at his vacation home on the island of Corfu.171 More often, Wilhelm II was filmed in Berlin on parade, for instance in Thomas Edison’s

 Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle 1851–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 88.  Richards, Commodity Culture, 5, 84–99.  Giloi, Monarchy, Myth, 250–265.  Anton Holzer, “Nachrichten und Sensationen,” in Die Erfindung der Pressefotografie: Aus der Sammlung Ullstein 1894–1945, ed. Stiftung Deutsches Historisches Museum and Axel Springer Syndikation (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2017), 26.  Uli Jung, “Städtebilder und Lokalaufnahmen,” and Annette Deeken, “Geschichte und Ästhetik des Reisefilms,” both in Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland: Band 1: Kaiserreich 1895–1918, ed. Uli Jung and Martin Loiperdinger (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 2005), 275–297 and 299–323, respectively.  Jung, “Städtebilder,” 282; Deeken, “Geschichte und Ästhetik,” 304, 306, 309.  Deeken, “Geschichte und Ästhetik,” 317.

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Vitascope film “The German Emperor Reviewing His Troops,” shown in 1896 in Koster & Bial’s Music Hall in New York.172 As a popular film subject, both because of his celebrity status and because his distinctive appearance was well suited to early film’s technological constraints, Wilhelm II became identified with Berlin as the city provided a frequent backdrop for the emperor’s lavish self-styling.173 Although imperious, the parade scenes were not necessarily experienced as magisterial, though. Place played an important role here too, namely the venues in which the films were screened. The film shorts were shown as often in varieté cinemas and fairgrounds as in actual theaters, as the choice of Koster & Bial’s Music Hall suggests. Nor were the shorts shown as single clips to be watched attentively, but as part of a larger sequence of spectacular images. The emperor on parade appeared alongside automobile races, train wrecks, acrobats and other circus performers, westerns, and gangster films: anything that might capture the attention of the audience.174 The film scholar Martin Loiperdinger suggests that this “cinematographic variety-potpourri” could not help but undermine the monarchy’s regal aura, even as it turned Wilhelm II into Germany’s first film star.175 It is difficult to say exactly what directly political effect this comingling of monarchy with spectacle might have had at the time: whether consumption was a form of micro-resistance, in Certeau’s sense of tactics, or whether it prompted subjects to accept the political status quo more readily because they had the illusion of agency in their consumption habits. In the bigger picture, cultural ‘sampling’ as practiced by the armchair tourist did present a challenge to traditional authorities. The culture of sampling, which has grown to full-blown proportions in our own time, is based on the solipsism of consumer choice. If solipsism means imagining oneself with singular focus at the center of social narratives, then consumerism is solipsistic in that consumer choices exist in vast variation without a unifying referent other than the consumer’s desires. Infinitely interchangeable, disposable, and non-committal, the only thing tying consumer objects together is the individual’s desire to consume them, rather than deference for social hierarchies or a desire to uphold traditional allegiances.176

 Loiperdinger, “Kaiserbilder,” 254.  Jung, “Städtebilder,” 288. On Wilhelm II’s suitability for film: Uli Jung, “Aktualitäten und Wochenschauen,” in Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland: Band 1: Kaiserreich 1895–1918, ed. Uli Jung and Martin Loiperdinger (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 2005), 230–252, here 231; Loiperdinger, “Kaiserbilder,” 254. Also: Martin Kohlrausch, “The Workings of Royal Celebrity: Wilhelm II as Media Emperor,” in Constructing Charisma: Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 52–66.  Jung, “Aktualitäten und Wochenschauen,” 236–237; Loiperdinger, “Kaiserbilder,” 267.  Loiperdinger, “Kaiserbilder,” 267.  For the solipsism of consumption in the nineteenth century, see: Eva Giloi, “How Public Figures became Glamorous Accessories: Affect Worlds, Consumer Culture, and Visual Technologies in the Long Nineteenth Century,” Media History 28, no. 1 (2022): 85–110.

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In this way, the early-twentieth-century armchair tourist represents the forerunner to what John Urry calls the post-tourist. Urry aligns the post-tourist with postmodernism as a regime of de-differentiation, in which groups and individuals seek to cross boundaries and resist segmentation. By mixing things that are mismatched, the post-tourist “is aware of change and delights in the multitude of choice” at his or her disposal.177 Like Certeau, Urry interprets consumer choice as an act of agency and self-expression: being able to disassemble and reassemble with confidence enables the consumer to elude the pressure to conform to social norms. In this vision, consumption, as an expressive act, becomes a form of active self-branding.178 Urry and Certeau’s desire to recapture the agency of ordinary people, by valuing consumption and ‘making do’ as creative acts, no doubt comes from noble intentions, specifically to avoid the arrogance of dismissing ordinary individuals as mere dupes of the advertising industry and their tourist practices as inauthentic. Still, we should not be too quick to celebrate consumerist bricolage, even in the form of post-tourism, as an unqualified and universal good, since any seemingly ‘universal’ good has the potential to be a pillar of hegemony. Even today, royal sightseeing and epiphanic tourism, now in the form of getting ‘off the beaten track,’ still maintain a habitus that privileges some tourists over others. Armchair sampling is no different. The ability to mix and match, with a stance of ironic distance, may seem to give us some sort of power over elites, including royals and other celebrities, specifically the power to ignore them or pass them over in favor of other kitsch. But a closer look at the habitus involved in such sampling – who gets to participate in the mixing and matching, when and under what conditions – can provide clues about who benefits most from cultural bricolage today.

 Urry, Tourist Gaze, 84–85, 100–101, quote on 100.  On self-branding, see: Aeron Davis, Promotional Cultures: the Rise and Spead of Advertising, Public Relations, Marketing and Branding (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2013).

Juan Fernando Velásquez Ospina

Uncivilized and Noisy: Disciplining Listening in Nineteenth-Century Colombian Cities Abstract: Noise elicits response. On an urban level, those responses include mechanisms of social control and legal reform that intertwine marginality, criminality, public morality, hygiene, comfort, and poverty. Scholarship on noise and noise control suggests that listening and sound interacted to establish an aural sphere crucial to shaping modern Latin America. This chapter contributes to this discussion by focusing its attention on Colombian cities between 1886 and 1930, a period of state formation and urban modernization. I argue that listening was drawn into institutionalization processes in postcolonial Colombia, producing an aural regime that aimed to discipline individuals and create citizens in accordance with values adopted by local elites. Listening and sounds labeled as noise became articulated within an institutional logic of discipline that was projected onto changing urban, public spaces. This process reinscribed colonial distinctions of race and class into postcolonial cities. Keywords: aurality, noise, aural regimes, sound studies, discipline, public spaces, urban geography ✶✶✶ In June of 1911, readers of the newspaper La Época were scandalized by a commotion that had forced an abrupt end to the Banda de Cartagena’s recent retreta. Popular, biweekly outdoor concerts performed in Cartagena’s plazas and parks, retretas treated the public to selections from operas, national music by local composers, and polkas, waltzes, and other dances. On this particular day, noisy children playing around the bandstand disrupted the concentration of listeners and musicians alike: It is entirely impossible to enjoy the retreta played by the military band in the Madrid Park due to the scandal produced by the screams of the ‘cultured babies’ of the San Diego neighborhood in the center of the park, playing the bull, jumping, etc. The under-appreciated master of Sanctis’ outstanding efforts [to conduct the band] are useless, to the point that, as he said, he will exempt himself from conducting classical music in the park [in the future], because it is impossible to do so due to the whistles and screams. We, knowing the exquisite benevolence of the Commander of the Police, ask and beg him, in the name of art and civilization, to send an agent to prevent the disorders mentioned above.1

 “Se hace completamente imposible asistir a la [retreta] que ejecuta la Banda militar en el parque Madrid, debido a la escandalosa gritería que forman los “cultos” bebés del barrio de San Diego en el centro del parque, jugando al toro, dando saltos, etc. Resultan inútiles los meritorios esfuerzos del nunca bien apreciado maestro de Sanctis, quien se verá en el caso, según lo manifestó anteanoche, de eximirse de tocar música clásica en aquél lugar, pues con los silbidos, los gritos es del todo imposible. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110574012-015

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Ending with an appeal to the local authorities, the complaint highlights several themes connecting noise and space in nineteenth-century Colombian cities. First, public sites became spaces owned by the state and its institutions, where citizens could expect to be subjected to surveillance and control whenever it was deemed necessary. Second, although public spaces were normally noisy, under certain conditions silence could be enforced by the authorities to facilitate the attentive listening necessary to enjoy the music being performed, especially when it involved a musical repertory prized as an expression of good taste and civility. This involved a categorization: some sounds became noise when they made audible the so-called improper behaviors of the uncivilized members of lower classes. The artisans of the San Diego neighborhood were producers of noise, not sound. Unwelcome at the retreta, their presence and their noise challenged the municipal authority’s control over urban space. From this standpoint, noise, conceived as a pejorative negation of orderly sound, can be seen as the sonic embodiment of both the failure of the model of an imagined order of the city and the state’s limited power to reify that model. Indeed, a close reading of several complaints about urban noise suggest that there was a significant distance between the city as imagined by elites and institutions and the material and sonic realities that many Colombians experienced in their daily lives. These issues also raise a question about praxis: how were the act of listening and the labelling of some sounds as noise articulated within an institutionalized disciplinary logic and projected onto public spaces? To answer this question, it is necessary to investigate the construction of sound/noise, its effect on social stratification, and its imbrication in social change. This chapter examines the special case of Colombian cities between 1886 and 1930, as local elites navigated sonic space and established their cultural hegemony vis-à-vis both the local population and their former European colonizers. Following the ideas of Henri Lefebvre, who proposed that space is both a producer and a product of social relations – connecting economic and political processes that reproduce relations of power in the urban space – I explore listening as a malleable cultural practice that links sound, cities, class privilege, and governance, revealing hegemonic class structures.2 In the process, my analysis explores how the notion of noise emerged through processes of institutionalization, as postcolonial urban elites both positioned themselves against the European metropole and disciplined their citizens during a period of state formation and urban modernization.3

Nosotros, conocedores de la exquisita benevolencia del señor Comandante de Policía, le pedimos y le suplicamos, en nombre del arte y de la civilización, envíe aunque sea un agente que evite los desórdenes de los que hemos hecho mención.” “Retretas,” La época (1911): Cartagena., np.  See: Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991.  As theorized by Michel Foucault, disciplining is a process that coerces individuals into accepting the standards of behavior that they believe constitute a norm. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Verso, 1995).

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The question of how historical institutions produced an aural regime that disciplined individuals in accordance with local elites’ expectations and values aligns with pivotal discussions in sound studies today. In recent decades, sound studies and urban studies have approached sound as a category of analysis from a variety of perspectives, ranging from Marxist structuralism to the history of science in order to illuminate the discrepancies between official expectations regarding the use of space and the actual activities performed in those same spaces.4 Scholars in different fields have also examined how noise prompts mechanisms of social control and legal reform that interlaced marginality, criminality, public morality, hygiene, comfort, and poverty.5 However, these inquiries have remained predominantly concentrated on North America and Western Europe. Moving the geographical focus to the postcolonial world, as scholars have begun to do in recent years, yields many novel and nuanced insights. The institutionalization and functioning of aurality in modern Latin America illuminate how traditional authority and power relations were structured under the guise of modernization, with a peculiar tension between claims to national independence and a desire to maintain an aesthetic relationship to the musical legacy of the European metropole.6 Throughout nineteenth-century Latin America, in fact, the sonic sphere contributed to the constitution of unequal and unfinished modernity. Much of this sonic drama was played out, and therefore justified, through class conflict within city spaces. Labelling certain sounds as noise was a practice instrumentalized

 Following the ideas of Douglas North, in this text I refer to institutions to describe associations of people who seek to establish and follow rules of conduct and customary practices that govern a society. Douglas North, “Institutions,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 5, no. 1 (1991): 97–112. See also: Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 2002); Karin Bijsterveld, Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 2008).  Samuel Llano, “The Sacred in Madrid’s Soundscape: Toward an Aural Hygiene, 1856–1907,” in The Sacred and Modernity in Spain: Beyond the Secular City, ed. Antonio Córdoba and Daniel García Donoso (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 1–20; Samuel Llano, Discordant Notes: Marginality and Social Control in Madrid, 1850–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016); Daniel Morat, ed., Sounds of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in 19th- and 20th-Century Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014).  In this text I define ‘aurality’ as a thick field of production of knowledge that establishes ontologies by intertwining sound, listening, and physical space. As such, I depart somewhat from Ana María Ochoa Gautier’s analysis of aurality. See: Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). I remain in dialogue, though, with her analysis that the establishment of these forms of aurality entailed both processes of recontextualization that transformed the cultural nature of the oral/aural divide, and processes of entextualization that transformed music into an object of study by capturing it in different ways, including the written word. For further information see: Ana María Ochoa Gautier, “Sonic Transculturation, Epistemologies of Purification and the Aural Public Sphere in Latin America,” Social Identities 12, no. 6 (2006): 803–825, here 816.

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by different institutions to shore up social classification from above but could also be used strategically by local communities and social movements to resist domination. This binary tension transformed noise into a target of state intervention and political bargaining throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Leonardo Cardoso’s study of São Paulo, for example, illuminates the complex network of actors, including technicians, governmental agencies, the private sector, lawmakers, and enforcement agencies, who participated in the design and execution of noise control policies. These actors often established an unstable series of associations mediated by the state during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Cardoso explains how in the twentieth century Brazilian technicians and acousticians meeting at the Brazilian Technical Standard Association (ABNT) crafted standardized acoustic frameworks that later informed three anti-noise bills passed in São Paulo between the 1990s and 2010, a process that brought together technicians and politicians to reach a consensus that fostered government action.7 Natalia Bieletto-Bueno’s study of sound-cartographies shows a similar process at work in Mexico, where institutions like the National Sound Archive and the Ministry of Tourism crafted “Mexico’s Sound Map,” an interactive database of environmental sounds plotted onto a map of the Mexican nation, intended to educate citizens while managing discourses of aurality to serve the interests of the state.8 On the other hand, in his study of the Colombian Black Pacific, Michael Birenbaum-Quintero explains how historically marginalized Afro-Colombian communities embraced sonic expressions of blackness articulated around the Currulao, a marimba-based traditional music, often labeled as noise by local authorities, to resist hegemonic models of assimilation and discipline expressed through aspirational respectability. These “other ways of being” – as idiosyncratic local appropriations of modernity – were articulated to embody an alternative modernity that calls into question the hegemonic notion of a “monolithic modernity” in the North Atlantic fashion.9 The shaping of the aural sphere thus became a significant part of the state-building process, as it allowed institutional orders to introduce and perform ideologies that established aural regimes. These regimes configured different listening practices and preferences, while at the same time providing fissures through which subaltern groups could practice symbolic forms of resistance. As theorized by Bieletto-Bueno, aural regimes are cultural and socio-political structures that predispose people toward specific reactions to certain sounds. Such regimes shape both the contours of individual and

 For further information, see: Leonardo Cardoso, Sound-Politics in São Paulo (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).  Natalia Bieletto-Bueno, “Noise, Soundscape and Heritage: Sound, Cartographies and Urban Segregation in Twenty-First-Century Mexico City,” Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 4, no. 1–2 (2017): 106–126, here 109.  Michael Birenbaum-Quintero, Rites, Rights and Rhythms: A Genealogy of Musical Meaning in Colombia’s Black Pacific (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 116–117.

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collective perceptions of sounds and how those assessments are used to determine different categories of sound classification.10 The analysis of such institutionalization reveals a “typification of habitualized actions by types of actors,” as concepts such as progress, privilege, race, and social class mediated how people made sense of urban experiences and social relations within the cities.11 The connection between noise production and authority, citizenship, and governance was instrumental to the shape imposed onto modernity from above, through active and conflictive state-building and nation formation, both in Latin America and in Europe. The imbrication of these forces took shape through what can be termed the imagined city, intended as a counterpoint to Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities.” In his study of nationalism, Anderson argues that nations, as communities, are socially constructed by people who perceive themselves as equals despite differences imposed by issues like social class. Through the medium of print-capitalism and a shared sense of diachronic destiny, the nation is “imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deeply horizontal comradeship.”12 By the same token, an imagined city represents an arrangement of space containing a series of values that aim to create a sense of utopic citizenship and belonging within a broad community of peers. However, such a utopic arrangement of space also ignores the reified spatial segregation and differential access to power and public administration experienced by different groups of citizens. I explore these themes in three parts. First, I examine how Colombian postcolonial cities inherited the colonial era’s arrangement of spaces and sounds, in an imagined city founded on an aural geography that echoed older notions of race, social class, and privilege. Next, I explore how noise emerged from the contradictions between a revised imagined city which followed the path of progress set against the actual lived city in which patterns of spatial segregation limited different groups’ access to the benefits introduced by the modernization process. Finally, I analyze how ideologies introduced in private spaces were projected onto public spaces, establishing an aural regime that inserted sound and listening into a discipline dispositif that was central to the period’s urban transformation and state organization.13

 Natalia Bieletto-Bueno, “Regímenes aurales a través de la escucha musical: ideologías e instituciones en el siglo XXI,” El oído pensante 7, no. 2 (2019): 111–134, here 118.  Martina Löw, “The City as Experiential Space: The Production of Shared Meaning,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37, no. 3 (2013): 894–908, here 899.  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), 7.  Foucault’s notion of ‘dispositif’ (apparatus) describes a multimodal ensemble of means for controlling people that produces singular processes of unification, totalization, verification, objectification, and subjectification. See: James Faubion, ed., Aesthetics, Method, and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984 (New York: The New Press, 1997).

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I The Imagined City The process that shaped the modern Colombian nation-state began in 1810 when local elites established the Junta de Gobierno in Bogotá. As in other Spanish-American independence movements, the influence of the Enlightenment, inspiration from the French, Haitian, and American Revolutions, and the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula fed into the Colombian War of Independence.14 Conflicts between Realistas loyal to the Spanish Crown and Criollos aiming for autonomy continued in Colombia until 1819 when Simón Bolivar’s army defeated the Spanish colonial army at the Battle of Boyacá. This crucial victory led to the end of the Viceroyalty of New Granada and the establishment of the new independent republic of Great Colombia. In 1830, internal divisions led to the fragmentation of Great Colombia into three independent states: New Granada, Venezuela, and Ecuador. A series of civil wars led to further changes in New Granada in the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1858, it became the Grenadine Confederation. In 1863, the Grenadine Confederation changed its name officially to the United States of Colombia, a federal republic composed of nine sovereign states. The United States of Colombia was the last Latin American republic to be recognized as an independent state by the Spanish government, after both countries renewed their diplomatic relations in 1881. With this change, the authority of the local elites had to be staged simultaneously for the local population as well as for the nation’s former colonizers, based on a framework of ‘creole nationalism’ which looked to colonial era creole functionaries as a precedent. Born in the colonies to parents who claimed European descent, creole administrators identified with the European metropole and thus regarded themselves as natural rulers over indigenous populations. Despite being racially white, they were not accepted by their Spanish counterparts and thus barred from reaching the higher levels of administration within the colonial regime. Sharing the “fatality of extra-Spanish birth,” they experienced themselves as a community that sought authority over indigenous populations and parity with European elites after independence.15 As Anderson notes about the colonial period, this combination of desires encouraged creole elites to pursue political, economic, and cultural independence from the metropole based on their claims to lead and represent their peoples, thus mixing racial and class domination with narratives of national modernization, popular representation, and liberty (at least for some). The republic’s inaugural federal government enjoyed only limited political and military strength, though, due to the discord between the liberals at its head and the conservative regional elites who controlled several of its states. The increasing  Natalia Sobrevilla Perea, “Wars of Spanish-American Independence,” Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Latin American History, 2015, accessed 15 November 2021, https://oxfordre.com/latinameri canhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.001.0001/acrefore-9780199366439-e-66.  Anderson, Imagined Communities, chapter 4: “Creole Pioneers,” 47–65, quote on 63.

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influence of radical liberals in the federal government led to a new civil war in 1884–1885, which ended in the defeat of Colombia’s Federal Republic in 1886 at the hands of an alliance of conservatives and moderate liberals. Their military victory ushered in the Regeneración political movement led by Rafael Núñez and Manuel Antonio Caro, which also engendered a profound institutional and social transformation. Provisions to ensure the movement’s political dominance were built into Colombia’s new constitution, which ended the federal regime and set the framework for a centralized public administration, economic protectionism, the prevalence of conservative ideas, and the strengthening of ties connecting the state and the Catholic Church. While some liberals resisted these changes in another civil war between 1899 and 1902, known as the Guerra de Los Mil Días (War of a Thousand Days), official conservative forces ultimately prevailed. This military victory not only guaranteed the survival of the new constitution but reinforced the so-called Hegemonía Conservadora, or conservative hegemony, establishing an uninterrupted series of conservative governments that shaped the country and its institutions until 1930, when liberals took control of the state for the first time in the twentieth century.16 To ensure its hegemony, the Regeneración movement drew on the cultural legacy of the European colonial past, but in a complicated way that distanced itself from French republicanism and British liberalism, and their influence on Colombian radical liberals, by attributing the introduction of Western civilization to Colombia to Spanish conquest and colonial rule.17 This legacy took on a peculiar cast after the defeat of the Colombian republic. In other Latin American countries, liberal elites led the early process of state modernization; in Colombia, a conservative elite did so from 1886 onward. Yet, in the absence of a caudillo, or strong man, such as Porfirio Díaz in Mexico or Antonio Guzmán Blanco and Juan Vicente Gómez in Venezuela, Colombian conservatives had to find alternative means for establishing

 For further information about La Regeneracion and the Hegemonía Conservadora, see: Eduardo Posada Carbó, Colombia: La Apertura Al Mundo, 1830–1930 (Madrid: Fundación Mapfre, 2015).  The debate between Manuel Murillo Toro and José María Vergara y Vergara exemplifies the differences between radical liberals and conservatives in the interpretation of the Iberian legacy’s role in shaping the modern Colombian nation. In 1859, Murillo Toro, a radical liberal, argued that the Spanish influence encouraged the economic protectionism that hampered private entrepreneurship, the censorship that threatened the press, and the excessive intervention of the Catholic Church in politics. In his opinion, an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ colonial regime would have been better for the country, as it would have introduced values crucial for the development of a modern nation, such as pragmatism and entrepreneurship. Vergara y Vergara, a conservative, responded by affirming that Murillo Toro’s contempt of the Iberian legacy ignored that local elites descended from Spanish conquerors and colonizers, who had introduced Latino civilization to the Americas. In Vergara y Vergara’s opinion, Murillo’s words spread the ‘Black Legend’ supporting Anglo-Saxon imperialism. José María Vergara y Vergara, La cuestión española: Cartas dirijidas al doctor M. Murillo (Bogotá: Imprenta de la Nación, 1859).

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their hegemonic position other than autocratic domination. Instead, they often relied on the influence of institutions, including the Catholic Church, and on collective bonds among peers established by family, business, and class identity. Thus, they envisioned the path forward to cultural independence through an uneasy definition of civilization that incorporated tradition and modernity, legacy and progress. The former relied on the cultural capital of the elites’ European heritage. The latter was nationalist in nature, expressing a pride in progress which appropriated European models while challenging their claims to superiority. Colombian conservative elites often affirmed that Colombian society and culture resulted from the constructive interaction between “the old and the new Europe” that also had shaped other HispanoAmerican countries, and particularly, their non-aristocratic elites, as stated by Tulio Ospina in his Protocolo hispanoamericano de la urbanidad y el buen tono in 1917:18 In the Hispano American countries, the social culture is based on Castilian courtesy, characterized by its chivalrous and frank spirit and its traditional rigor regarding domestic relations. However, the somewhat formalistic and complicated French savoir vivre has modified such a social culture. All this [process] is tempered by both the simplicity of customs that the colonial life left us and the absence of the rentier and unemployed social class.19

As Colombian elites considered which elements of European political culture to emulate and which to jettison, they had to be careful not to break too dramatically with the past for fear of undermining the traditional justifications that underpinned elite rule and inadvertently opening up paths to power for the local lower classes. Here, in particular, the legacy of European culture was both instrumental and ambivalent for conservative elites, and Spain played an especially pivotal role as the former colonial metropole. The influence of Cadiz’s constitutionalists was crucial in shaping the Colombian liberal party during the first half of the nineteenth century. Later, the victory of the Spanish Restauración inspired Colombian conservative elites who envisioned Catholic Spain as a suitable model for the Colombian modernization process, in which Catholic morality would guide behavior and encourage  Tulio Ospina, 1857–1921, was a Colombian politician and engineer, and a member of one of the most prominent conservative families in the country. His father, Mariano Ospina Rodriguez, and his son, Mariano Ospina Pérez, were Colombian presidents in 1857 and 1946, respectively. Like other members of the Ospina family, Tulio also participated in political and intellectual activities: he served as a congressman, founded the Academy of History of Antioquia, and was chancellor of the School of Mines, the first school of engineering in Medellín, and of the University of Antioquia, the oldest and biggest public university in Medellín. Ospina published his manual in 1917.  “Todos estos países se ha constituido una cultura social, que teniendo por base la cortesanía castellana caracterizada por su espíritu caballeresco y franco y su tradicional rigor en cuento a las relaciones domésticas, ha sido modificada por el savoir vivre francés, un tanto formalista y complicado. Todo ello atenuado por la sencillez de costumbres que nos legó la vida colonial y por la ausencia de la clase rentista y desocupada, cuya principal preocupación suele ser el refinar la etiqueta.” Tulio Ospina, Protocolo hispanoamericano de la urbanidad y el buen tono (Medellín: Félix de Bedout e Hijos, 1917), 3–4.

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citizens to accept the status quo in the new republic. After 1870, José María Guitiérrez de Alba’s promotion of Spanish literature in Bogotá, alongside tours staged by Spanish artists, including zarzuela and theatrical companies, led Colombian elites to call attention to the many similarities that supposedly made Colombia an heiress to “white Iberian culture.”20 Local conservative elites also established bonds with Europe through new narratives of the Spanish Conquest and the colonial period, using the “Iberian legacy” – grounded in the Spanish language, Catholicism, and whiteness – as a means for validating hegemonic political, economic, and cultural positions.21 Still, as a rhetorical project, the Regeneración went beyond a single historical model and appropriated other European discursive references as well, albeit in a profoundly transformed manner. The elites who led the Regeneración admired France and England as models of modernity and civilization, specifically as they had developed political systems that supported economic growth and industrial expansion. But while they prized French republican values and English industrialism, they also feared that continental ideologies could introduce European mistakes to Colombia. Conservatives feared, for example, that the country would follow the excessive laicism characterizing the “failure of the French liberal utopia.”22 In this sense, France was an ambivalent model. Although it exemplified the risks inherent in uncontrolled individual freedom and the social unsteadiness that utopian liberalism could foster, its educational institutions, including those dedicated to the arts and music, were seen as an illustrious model to be emulated and adapted to the idiosyncrasies of the local context. England seemed somewhat more palatable as an ideal: during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, especially after the victory of the Regeneración, Colombian conservative elites increasingly envisioned English liberal-conservatism as a blueprint for a pragmatic industrialism. The English model was crucial in the development of the textile industry in cities like Medellín, for instance. England also provided an attractive template in its two-party political system, in which individual

 Frédéric Martinez, El Nacionalismo Cosmopolita. La Referencia Europea en la Construcción Nacional en Colombia, 1845–1900 (Bogotá: Banco de la República and Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, 2001), 462. Gutiérrez del Alba was a Spanish writer and politician. In 1869, the Spanish government appointed him as confidential agent and sent him to accomplish an ‘unofficial and reserved mission’ to the former territories of New Granada in 1870. His mission was to investigate the status of Spanish immigrants in New Granada, study routes for an indirect trade between Colombia and Spain through Cuba and Puerto Rico, and inquire why New Granada had not resumed relations with Spain. Gutiérrez del Alba decided to stay in Colombia after the Spanish government ended his appointment in 1875 and resided in the country for thirteen years, participating actively in the intellectual and cultural life of Bogotá.  Rafael Rubiano, Prensa y tradición: La imagen de España en la obra de Miguel Antonio Caro (Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre, 2011).  Martinez, Nacionalismo Cosmopolita, 435.

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freedom did not seem to affect the nation’s sense of law and order, the authority of governmental institutions, or the political and economic interests of its hegemonic social classes. Still, Britain was not without its dangers. Conservatives worried that the influence of British working-class ideas on Colombian liberals could erode Catholic values, which demanded a resignation to the status quo, respect for moral and religious authorities, and obedience to the will of the church and governmental institutions.23 To cement their cultural hegemony in the idealized space of the imagined city, Colombia’s conservative authorities thus drew upon the spatial layout of the old colonial city grid to express their position as successors (and rivals) to their European forebears, as well as vectors of civilization and progress within their new nation. In the former colonial era, Spanish and Portuguese authorities had envisioned the new Latin American cities as administrative centers vital for the exploitation of raw materials and the circulation of goods and people moving to and from the imperial metropolitan centers; the cityscape was devised to control residents’ behaviors as they crossed through these urban spaces, thus creating loyal subjects.24 The colonial legacy positioned these cities, symbolically, as centers that concentrated and spread civilization and order. As illustrated by figure 15.1, maps, urban plans, and other visual representations depicted colonial cities and towns as structured spaces whose organization contrasted with the emptiness and wilderness of the surrounding areas, but that were also connected to other cities, towns, and villages through a network of roads and fluvial and oceanic routes (Fig. 15.1). People moving throughout these networks tended to congregate in the cities’ plazas upon arrival, making this characteristic feature of Latin American cities a point of convergence. As in other American viceroyalties, many colonial cities in New Granada, including Bogotá, Caracas, Cartagena de Indias, Popayán, and Quito, developed around a plaza following the Spanish cuadrícula, or grid pattern.25 The plaza – also known in Latin America as Plaza de Armas – was an open square around which stood the cathedral, the city hall, the military barracks, and the houses of distinguished families. This design had a double symbolic value: it established the plaza as the focal center from which the city spread throughout the surrounding rural areas, and its design was intended as a representation of the matrix of institutional power.26  Martinez, Nacionalismo Cosmopolita, 442, 461.  Leonardo Waismann, “La Música en la Definición de lo Urbano: Los Pueblos de Indios Americanos,” in Música y Cultura en la Edad Moderna, ed. Andrea Bombi, Juan José Carreras, and Miguel Ángel Marín (Valencia: Editorial Universitat de Valencia, 2005), 159–175, here 160–161.  The viceroyalty of New Grenade comprised the territories of today’s Colombia, Ecuador, Panamá, and Venezuela. After independence from Spain, those territories became La Gran Colombia until 1830, when internal divisions led to the creation of Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela. Panamá separated from Colombia in 1903.  Setha Low, On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000).

Fig. 15.1: Plan of Guayaquil, An., 1779. This map shows the grid pattern within the city walls. Lines traced from the coast illustrate the reach of the batteries and forts. Meanwhile, depictions of ships sailing and roads show how the city projected its influence on the surrounding areas.

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The plaza further extended the ordering of space, power, and governance to the social realm of racial segregation. The closer to the plaza (Fig. 15.2, circle) the houses were located, the closer were their residents to institutional power and the ideal of Pureza de Sangre, or ‘purity of blood.’ The transatlantic expansion of the Spanish empire and the necessity of organizing the public administration to establish control over people and territories configured a particular notion of Pureza de Sangre in the Spanish colonies, conjoining skin color with the “quality” of people, which was used to define people’s place within the colonial social fabric and restrict access to political rights and the levers of public administration.27 In colonial villages and cities, this hierarchical arrangement of buildings shaped an idealized social geography in which prominent families, racially defined as white, lived at the center of the city while members of other racial groups and social classes occupied the periphery according to their place in the caste system, establishing a spatial segregation which reflected the caste system adopted by the Spanish Crown.28 This social segregation also shaped the urban soundscape. Cathedrals’ bells resonated across the plaza but were distant echoes in the urban periphery. Sunday’s outdoor markets brought voices of vendors coming from rural areas to the plazas, and the sounds of carriages and horses across the streets accompanied the transit of people and goods. Afro-Colombian drums resounded in the slums of the Caribbean cities, mestizo musicians played guitars in bars and cantinas in middle-class neighborhoods, and the bands played retretas in selected plazas and parks close to affluent neighborhoods. Later, in the nineteenth century, pedestrians could listen to the sounds of pianos played by young ladies in the neighborhoods where the new urban bourgeoisie lived. The adaptation of the colonial template to the physical organization of the new nation’s urban spaces served to combine a vision of material modernity with traditional social power, allowing Colombian elites both to align themselves with European notions of superiority and to take a nationalist stance in their independence from the metropole. The “colonial footprint” served as a foundation upon which new ideas about the shape and function of the modern city were introduced and developed, although Latin American cities continued to segregate residents by a conjoined notion of race and social class hidden behind the veil of “progress.”29 This vision found its physical embodiment in the transposition of aesthetic and technological modernity onto the older city grid in the manner of a palimpsest, with the older grid providing the framework onto which elites now grafted ‘cosmopolitan improvements’ inspired by cities like Paris and London. During the 1890s, for example, parks and squares with gardens,

 Nikolaus Böttcher, Bernd Hausberger, and Max S. Hering Torres, El peso de la sangre: Limpios, mestizos y nobles en el mundo hispánico (Mexico City: Colegio de Mexico, 2011), 9–10.  Geoffrey Baker, Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 25.  Susan Parnell, “The Urban: Past, Present, and Future,” in The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South, ed. Susan Parnell and Sophie Oldfield (New York: Routledge, 2014), 73–74.

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Fig. 15.2: Plan of Medellín, José María Giraldo, 1791. In Giraldo’s map, the cathedral and some buildings surround a plaza at which several streets converge. The map thus presents the plaza as a focal point from which civilization and institutional order radiates outwards via a network of roads. In Colombian Andean cities, living in the ‘marco de la plaza’ (the plaza’s neighborhood) was still a mark of social distinction up into the first decades of the twentieth century.

bandstands, benches, and ornate fences inspired by French models replaced the older open colonial plazas, while outdoor markets moved into new buildings and citizens’ associations promoted the construction of theaters and clubs.30 Between the 1890s and the 1910s, new public services such as new water supplies, systems of public transit, telegraphs, telephones, and electric power changed affluent neighborhoods and extended leisure time into the night in cities like Bogotá and Medellín, where symphonic bands began in 1895 to play concerts in the evenings on a weekly basis.31 Local elites and governmental institutions often presented these transformations as evidence of the progress of Colombian cities. Thus, the association between

 In some cases, as in the Parque de Bolívar in Medellín and the Parque Nacional in Bogotá, elites imported fences and bandstands from France as ‘special gifts’ for the citizens.  For the impact of these changes on musical practices in Colombia, see: Egberto Bermúdez and Ellie Anne Duque, Historia de la Música en Santa Fé y Bogotá (Bogotá: Fundación de Música, 2000); Fernando Gil Araque, “La Ciudad que En-Canta: Prácticas Musicales en Torno a la Música Académica en Medellín, 1937–1961” (PhD diss., Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2009).

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modernization processes and progress became, as suggested by Robert A. Nisbet, a narrative of linear evolution towards a hypothetic future in which citizens would experience the city as a comfortable and aesthetically sophisticated space.32 This urban narrative served several functions. It continued to promote a shared sense of cultural closeness to European urban centers, still valued as sources of civilization, which was vital to elites as they sought to establish postcolonial power.33 European models were crucial precedents for the reconfiguration of Colombia’s imagined cities into new cosmopolitan spaces. Here, the prior hierarchical arrangement of buildings, institutions, and people adopted new notions of modernity in a European fashion – not in the spirit of imitation but as an assertion of equality, seeing the former metropole as a peer. At the same time, the narrative reinforced the image of the imagined city as a metonym for the imagined community of the nation, in which the most civilized parts of that nation – the conservative elites – spoke for the rest of the community. Parallel to the binary link between imagined and lived city, the new metropolis also actively pursued an imagined spiritual progress dependent upon concrete actions developed in the material world.34 The relationship between material and spiritual progress ultimately transformed the pursuit of progress into a crusade for collective wellbeing, the implementation and success of which demanded a general adoption of order and civilization just as much as the physical transformation of the cities. The imagined city thus became a node for a complex set of external referents used by conservative elites to construct favorable imaginaries of social class and distinction. The aural regime of the imagined city, imposed from above, made further explicit the connection between race and civilization regime. One might call to mind here Pierre Bourdieu’s model of habitus, and how bodies moving through space can, below the level of active consciousness, help to naturalize social hierarchies. For Bourdieu, a group’s habitus is its common code of conduct, which takes the form of unquestioned dispositions and ways of acting. The routines of this habitus, which make up the well-practiced actions of everyday life, constitute what Bourdieu terms “doxa”: knowledge that is taken-for-granted and common-sensical,

 Robert A. Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994).  See: Anibal Quijano, Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2000); Oscar Hernández Salgar, “Colonialidad y Poscolonialidad Musical en Colombia,” Latin American Music Review 28, no. 2 (2007): 242–270; Santiago Castro-Gómez, Tejidos oníricos: Movilidad, capitalismo y biopolítica en Bogotá, 1910–1930 (Bogotá: Editorial Pontifica Universidad Javeriana, 2009).  Arguably, this interpretation of progress was also in concordance with the separation between spirit and body central to the Catholic faith, which became the official religion of the country after the 1887 concordat. This interpretation of progress should therefore also be considered, from an epistemological perspective, as a discursive form of production of subjective and collective identities driven by modernization processes.

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beyond the realm of questioning.35 The social reproduction of doxa takes place through bodily experience, so that habitus is “history embodied” and history is the social construction of hierarchies. Two processes of physical experience, in particular, serve to normalize disparities between different social groups: the “orchestration of different but structurally homologous practices” and the “synchronization of identical practices.”36 In the imagined city, the occupation of common city spaces by different social groups was orchestrated to emphasize the social superiority of elites, and sound played its part in that differentiation. On the plaza, for instance, wind bands provided a sonic embodiment of the military’s and civilian authorities’ institutional presence during special occasions and the retretas.37 The lower orders were to respect the social center by maintaining distance, not only in how closely they dwelt and worked in relation to the plaza, but also by enjoying the music of the retreta at a respectful remove, ringed around the social gathering of the central elite. In the realm of everyday life, the differentiated orchestration of class-related activities – workers performing manual labor versus elites occupied with politics and higher culture – was covered over by the synchronization of church bells, which created a supposed unity as all social groups heard the bells at the same time. Since all inhabitants marked time according to the same sonic schedule as they moved about the city, thus linking time with space, their respective tasks seemed appropriate in their respective spaces.38 With the bells chiming at the same time every day, creating the perception of an ever-recurring cycle, people were led to feel that they were meant to be in their particular space, doing their particular activity, at that particular time of the day.39 Indeed, this is why the disorder of the retreta that opened this chapter seemed so shocking: quite in defiance of this orchestration, the artisans’

 Bourdieu elaborates these concepts at length in: Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), and the concept of doxa specifically in chapter 4. See also: Kim Dovey, “The Silent Complicity of Architecture,” in ed. Jean Hillier and Emma Rooksby, Habitus: A Sense of Place (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 267–280.  Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory, 163.  Juan Fernando Velasquez, “From the Plaza to the Parque: Transformations of Urban Public Spaces, Disciplining, and Cultures of Listening and Sound in Colombian Cities, 1886–1930,” Latin American Music Review 38, no. 2 (2017): 150–184, here 170–171.  Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory, 167.  In Colombia, the practice of having clocks on public and religious buildings started in the late nineteenth century. For example, Cartagena’s Clock Tower got its clock in 1874, while the tower of St. Ignace’s Church in Medellín did so in 1885. However, the relationship between church, state, and modernization positioned the bells as a key sound marking time cycles even before the arrival of public clocks. In many ways, this role was inherited from the colonial era, exemplified by the Toque del Angelus played three times a day in the morning, noon, and evening, marking the time to open and close for a noon-time rest and at the end of the day.

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children competed with established hierarchies by noisily usurping spaces that were not meant for them.

II Crowded Spaces and Aural Regimes in the Nineteenth Century But why were the children in the Madrid Park at all? Why did they not know their ‘proper’ place? Their apparent misplacement was based chiefly on changes in urbanization that began in the late nineteenth century. Between the 1880s and the 1920s, civil wars and industrialization conjoined to accelerate the number of migrants moving from rural areas and small towns to the main Colombian cities. Increased global trade further pushed domestic production into factory-scale industry that required a large labor force and was therefore mainly based in cities. This mass mobility had destabilizing effects. In his study of nationalism, Anderson highlights the role played by early modern print-capitalism, and in particular the invention of the newspaper, in giving graphic shape and emotional content to territorial administrative units called nations.40 Internal migration, industrial capitalism, and the urbanization that they engendered in the late nineteenth century created fissures, however, that broke through the purportedly harmonious utopian ideal of the imagined city. The influx of labor into the cities broke down the previous orchestration and synchronization of class-determined activities, which no longer coordinated with the upper class’ spatial dominance of the urban space. This was particularly strongly felt through sound, both because sound travels and thus crosses boundaries to penetrate illicit or excluded spaces, and because the primary element of upper-class aural culture was silence, representing elegant leisure and the lack of a need to labor. That silence was increasingly broken by the growing amount of sound, or noise, that came from the lower classes. Before the influx of urban laborers, the orchestration of activities in Colombia’s cities mirrored the spatial organization of domination laid out by the old colonial grid. As theorized by Tess Knighton and Geoffrey Baker, the relationship between the imagined and the material city played out in the arrangement of sounds which produced a “resounding city” arising from two superimposed grids: a physical plane and a symbolic plane that interpreted the former as a meaningful structure of order.41 The imagined city thus encompassed an imagined soundscape, producing an aural organization of space and time in which some sounds were associated  Anderson, Imagined Communities, esp. chapter 3: “The Origins of National Consciousness,” 37–46.  Although Geoffrey Baker and Tess Knighton coined the term “resounding city” to describe colonial Latin American cities, the multiple binaries analyzed in this study suggest that such a model could be

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with certain spaces and accomplished specific functions or revealed the intended use of such spaces. As already noted, pre-existing colonial sonic practices continued during the postcolonial era. Wind bands reinforced the presence of the military authorities even at festive civilian events like the retretas.42 Church bells revealed the prominence of the Catholic Church as an institution that established standards of morality, at the same time that they provided a sense of lineal time that guided the succession of activities in daily life.43 The cacophony of voices in the markets and the sounds of artisans working in their workshops indicated the prosperity of the local economies, while silence was expected to differentiate the more affluent neighborhoods. Finally, musicians sang and played guitars and tiples in the bars of the outskirts, providing leisure to members of the lower classes as a spectacle barely tolerated by elites as a necessary evil, and often condemned for its association with alcohol and incivility.44 New technologies and forms of urban behavior disrupted this spatial order in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With the arrival of the phonograph in the 1890s, complaints appeared in the newspapers about rowdy songs played in houses and businesses at night, which disturbed neighbors and annoyed pedestrians walking through the streets. There were similar objections to young men smoking and peasants cracking jokes during concerts, both counting as unruly behavior which broke the silence necessary for enjoying an aesthetic experience in the modern space of the theater. In contrast, between 1864 and 1904 newspapers in Barranquilla, Bogotá, Bucaramanga, Cartagena, and Medellín celebrated the opening of new indoor markets as evidence of the progress of these cities, pointing out that moving the markets out of the plazas improved public health at the same time that it removed many cacophonous sounds from the center of the city.45

adapted to a postcolonial logic more generally. Geoffrey Baker and Tess Knighton, Music and Urban Society in Colonial Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).  Velasquez, “From the Plaza to the Parque,” 170–171.  For the role of bells in nineteenth-century French villages, see: Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).  The Colombian tiple is an instrument of the guitar family, similar in appearance although slightly smaller than a standard classical guitar. The typical fretboard scale is about 530 mm, and the neck joins the body at the 12th fret. There are twelve strings, grouped in four tripled courses. Traditional tuning from lowest to highest course is C E A D, although many modern players tune the instrument like the upper four strings of the modern guitar: D G B E. Ana María Paredes García and R. M. Mottola, “Construction of the Colombian Tiple,” American Lutherie 90 (2007): 40.  The first of these indoor markets was the Plaza de Mercado in Bogotá, constructed in 1864, followed by the Mercado Público in Barranquilla in 1880, the Plaza de Mercado Cubierto in Medellín in 1892, the Casa de Mercado de San Mateo in Bucaramanga in 1896, and the Mercado Público in Cartagena in 1904.

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These contrasting reactions to changes in the urban soundscape suggest that within the resounding postcolonial city, each sound occupied – or more precisely, was intended to occupy – a designated place in time and space. This interaction between sound and intended use of space was an ongoing process that assigned sounds representing certain social activities and class tastes to specific spaces. For example, sounds of children playing belonged to the school or the park, except when a band was playing the retreta. In contrast, the silence interrupted by someone playing the piano characterized the night in affluent neighborhoods. Such a relationship between sound, place, and time not only produced a changing sonic geography but transformed listening and sounding into a means for constructing subjective and collective identities. Sonic practices created and recreated sensory experiences that transformed urban spaces into places of meaning for the urban population. As theorized by Yi Fu Tuan, in contrast to the openness and freedom of movement that characterize spaces, places are delimited containers of meaning constructed through individuals’ physical senses, which establish relationships between bodies, objects, locations, values, and feelings. This interaction between body, mind, and affect ultimately locates place and space as different but complementary components of the “lived world.”46 Sound and listening thus became central in the construction of postcolonial modern subjects, as the civilizing agenda of state-building and urban modernization delineated the self in postcolonial venues. This was a characteristically latenineteenth- and early-twentieth-century development, as industrialization and the urban migration that it required changed the aural encounters that were diffused throughout the city. Indeed, the gap separating the lived and the imagined cities grew dramatically between the 1880s and the 1920s due to changes in the city fostered by demographic transformations. As in many European countries, where internal migration overshadowed emigration, in Colombia migration was also mainly an internal and transregional phenomenon, fostered by the expansion of land use for large-scale agriculture in the country’s southwest to accommodate the coffee exportation boom, and by an increase in commercial and industrial activities in cities such as Bogotá, Medellín, Barranquilla, Cartagena, and Cali.47 A comparison of the 1918  Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).  This phenomenon represents a significant difference between the processes of urbanization in Colombia and countries like Argentina, Mexico, and Peru, where big metropolitan capitals received the majority of the migrants. Meanwhile, in Colombia, the historical isolation of the regions and the presence of strong regional elites dispersed the processes of urbanization, industrialization, and migration between different cities, which became significant regional centers that concentrated political, economic, and cultural activities. Nancy Appelbaum, Muddied Waters: Race, Religion and Local History in Colombia, 1846–1948 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Nancy Appelbaum, Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

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and 1928 censuses indicates that, by the 1920s, migrants arrived at multiple regional cities rather than at one primary metropolitan city. As illustrated by Fig. 15.3, Bogotá was the most populated Colombian city by far. However, cities that became regional hubs for industrial and commercial activities like Barranquilla, Cali, Cartagena, Manizales, and Medellín also experienced nearly similar or at times even higher proportional population growth within those ten years.48

Fig. 15.3: Population growth in the main Colombian cities between 1918 and 1928.

Hence, many peasants and artisans looking for jobs came to urban spaces that had not been prepared to receive them. This demographic change transformed Colombian cities into overcrowded spaces where marginality, poverty, and insalubrity became common phenomena in many lower-class neighborhoods. The soundscape of these populated cities was often described as boisterous, stressful, and noisy, even by their inhabitants. In many accounts, noise appears as a series of sounds that revealed both the arrival of new technologies and the failure of the utopian city to follow the path of progress imagined by colonial and postcolonial authorities. As Carlos Arturo Soto complained in the magazine El Gráfico: We, living in a city that barely has 250,000 inhabitants, are noisier than necessary. Our city [Bogotá] is beyond the category of ‘boisterous city’. Here, the [screams of] outdoor vendors, horns, phonographs, trolley cars, bells, carts, and old vehicles with metallic wheels, hurt the nervous system [of the citizens].49

 See: Dirección Nacional de Estadística, Censo de población de la República de Colombia levantado el 14 de octubre de 1918 y aprobado el 19 de septiembre de 1921 por la Ley 8va del Mismo Año (Bogotá: Imprenta Nacional, 1924); Contraloría General de la República, Memoria y cuadros del censo de 1928 (Bogotá: Editorial Librería Nueva, 1930).  “Nosotros, no siendo más de doscientos cincuenta mil habitantes, hacemos más ruido del necesario. Nuestra ciudad ya ha pasado a la categoría de ciudad estrepitosa, en donde el sistema nervioso se resiente considerablemente a consecuencia de esa terrible tortura que de sol a sol nos someten los vendedores al aire libre, los pitos, las victrolas, los tranvías, las campanas, los

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As suggested by this text, some members of the elite conceptualized noise as a byproduct of the contradictions separating the imagined and the lived cities, a dissonance between the conceptual blueprint and the material reality that they listened to in their daily lives. Other descriptions of this urban soundscape insisted that the cities’ progress also created a new sonic geography of urban expansion. Here, old and new coexisted, often in contradictory ways. In an acute description of the sounds that a pedestrian could listen to while walking throughout the streets of Bogotá in 1912, Alberto Sánchez de Iriarte illustrated these two different soundscapes.50 To the south of Jiménez Avenue, “the bells from the cathedral chiming, the steps of some grey servicemen, or the pasillo that somebody played on the piano, killing some time in a café” resembled the “melancholic ethos” of the colonial village.51 Meanwhile, in the newer neighborhoods to the north of Jiménez Avenue, “the electric trolley, carts, vendors, cars, and the music of an infernal mechanism coming from cafés and theaters” prevailed.52 This contrast between the sounds of the colonial village and the frantic cacophony of the modern city presents noise as a byproduct of urban modernization while underlining that it also made audible flaws and contradictions inherent in the discourses of progress promoted by local elites and official institutions. Noise made manifest both the increasing mechanization of daily life and citizens’ unequal access to the benefits introduced by urban modernization processes.

III Aurality and Discipline These new noises served as heralds, trumpeting the arrival of social changes that threatened to up-end the previously naturalized orchestration of class and racial roles. As the aural regime of the imagined city became increasingly undermined by shifts in sonic culture, new techniques were required to reinforce the dominance of traditional elites. Both political authorities and social elites used sound to create a

carreteros, y los viejos carros de llanta metálica.” Carlos Arturo Soto, “Un Poco de Ruido Sobre El Ruido,” Cromos 25, no. 684 (1929): 13.  Sánchez de Iriarte was member of the Gruta Simbólica, one of the most influential intellectual groups in Bogotá, whose activities spanned the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth centuries. Sánchez de Iriarte, who often published his texts as Dr. Mirabel, was one of the pioneers of the modern chronicle in Colombia.  “Campanadas graves de la Basílica, el volver de algunos militares grises, o el piano de un café en donde alguien para matar la hora toca un pasillo lento.” Alberto Sánchez de Iriarte, “Bogotá Nocturno,” El Gráfico 25, no. 97 (1912): 3–4.  “Al norte de la Avenida Jiménez puede oírse el tranvía eléctrico, carruajes, vendedores, carros y música de infernal mecanismo saliendo de teatros y cafés.” Sánchez de Iriarte, “Bogotá Nocturno,” 4.

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binary, civilized/uncivilized aural regime that conjoined race and social class to perpetuate the marginality created by patterns of spatial segregation. On the most immediate level, the mass of peasants, artisans, and laborers who lived in the cities’ outskirts, slums, and poor neighborhoods and were racially related with indigenous and African ancestors became known as the populacho by local elites. Members of the populacho, who often came from rural areas, possessed a habitus that diverged from the hegemonic standards of good taste, and they soon became deemed as an uncivilized and barbaric Other that impeded the development and progress of the city. Thus, the notion of the populacho reinscribed the colonial caste system in a way that perpetuated the previous disregard for and policing of the lower classes, allowing and encouraging elites and institutions to discipline their members, especially the new laborers, as a necessary step toward the progress of the modern cities. Eugenics influenced this reinterpretation of the colonial past to explain the postcolonial social order and the country’s biopolitics in the early twentieth century, as exemplified by the influential politician, medical doctor, and Harvard alumnus, Luis López de Mesa. In 1920, López de Mesa warned that the “black influence” in the Colombian racial mix was pernicious because it would replace the “nobility” and “superior morality” that characterized white people of European origin, especially in the tropical lowlands. Moreover, the increasing prevalence of “black blood” led to the “infantilization” of Colombian mestizos by introducing a lack of “self-control.” Following a Lamarckian rather than a Mendelian logic, López de Mesa argued that to overcome such “obstacles” the country needed to enforce policies and adopt new technologies of surveillance that would create control over insalubrious environments.53 From an institutional perspective, the discipline of the populacho aimed to ameliorate the “harmful presence” of “inferior racial influences” inherited from the colonial past. In practice, this was an effort to establish a form of governance that, since the late nineteenth century, has constrained social circulation and political participation and reinforced the status quo against the challenges arising from the uneven distribution of the benefits of the modernization process. It is not surprising, then, that music and other sounds associated with the populacho’s taste and habitus became objects of sonic control by local authorities aspiring to soften uncivilized behavior. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the goal of “softening behavior” was a recurrent topic in discussions about the role of the arts and art education within the modern city.54 Often, authors of such educational tracts referred to softening as a process through which the lower classes,

 See: Luis López de Mesa, ed., Los problemas de la raza en Colombia, Segundo Volumen de Biblioteca de la Cultura (Bogotá: Imprenta Linotipos de El Espectador, 1920); Luis López de Mesa, El factor étnico (Bogotá: Imprenta Nacional, 1927); Luis López de Mesa, Cómo se ha formado la nación colombiana (Bogotá: Editorial Bedout, 1934).  For “softening behaviors,” see: Juan Bautista Montoya y Flórez, “Algo sobre Sociotecnia,” La Miscelánea 8, no. 4–5 (1906): 132–144.

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especially blacks, indigenous peoples, and others coming from rural areas, could be made to learn and adopt proper behavior patterns while acquiring the cultural capital that modern urban contexts demanded. From this standpoint, softening can be interpreted as an educative process of disciplining subalterns that aimed to transform them into well-behaved and law-abiding citizens.55 And indeed, the discipline of bodies and subjects into civilized citizens went beyond a mere idealization projected by the lettered elites: local authorities enforced codes of behavior through physical and violent intervention in theaters, streets, and parks when necessary. For the authorities, sounds labelled as noise were not only disruptive but a threat to public order. The association of noise with threats to the political order was reflected in Decree No. 83, approved by the Council of Medellín in December 1900.56 As a prime example of how proper behavior was enforced by punishing those who produced disruptive sounds, the decree assigned the surveillance of local theaters to the municipal police, stating that enforcement officers should guarantee the composure of the audience, and spelling out the officers’ mandate to restrain purported troublemakers from “screaming, stating disgusting phrases, hitting chairs, and producing annoying noises.”57 Article 1 of the decree determined that repeat offenders would be fined and, if they refused to obey, forced to serve a six day jail sentence. The severity of the punishment reflected the fact that the decree also aimed to establish control over public order at a moment of dramatic political turmoil, when liberal rebels were fighting against the conservative army in the War of a Thousand Days, the last major uprising against the Conservative government. Although Medellín and its surrounding areas did not become battlefields, men from the region were recruited and participated actively in combat in other Colombian regions, bringing their experiences home when on leave from the front. As a public space of social interaction, the theater was a potential flashpoint of protest and vocal discontent within the wartime context. Controlling behavior in the theater was intended to minimize the possibility of political uproar within the city and to facilitate the censorship and imprisonment of any potential political agitators. New aural technologies that amplified an unruly habitus, making audible the racialized Other within the modern city, further contributed to the biopolitical reinterpretation of colonial notions of race and social class. Since the late 1880s, industrialization and the country’s entrance into transnational markets introduced new mechanical forms of recording, reproduction, and transmission of sounds, such as player pianos, phonographs, gramophones, and eventually radios. The first accounts of phonographs in Colombian newspapers appeared in the 1890s, often promoting them as a technological novelty. In 1897, for example, Gustavo Navia offered a new phonographic service in

 Montoya y Flórez, “Algo sobre Sociotecnia.”  This decree was pusblished in the Revista Musical, a magazine edited by Gonzalo Vidal.  Concejo de Medellín, “Decreto no. 83 del 1 de diciembre de 1900: Sobre representaciones teatrales,” Revista Musical 1, no. 1 (1900): 10.

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an announcement published in the newspaper El Ferrocarril in Cali. According to the announcement, Navia offered to visit families interested in listening to his phonograph, which reproduced a selection of “speeches, sermons, and pieces of instrumental and vocal music,” in exchange for “fair economic compensation.”58 By the 1910s, phonographs and gramophones were not a technological rarity anymore. A variety of newspapers featured advertisements from different companies that promoted these devices, especially gramophones, as an essential piece of furniture in the modern home. At the same time, these advertisements illustrate the increasing prominence of companies from the USA in the Colombian market, including the Victor Talking Machine. The shift towards products from the USA began in the last decade of the nineteenth century and gained momentum during the Atlantic blockade in World War I. In 1895, the United States was the fourth source of Colombian imports after France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Only two years later, in 1897, companies from the USA had become the main suppliers of “electric apparatuses” and only second behind Germany in piano sales.59 By 1920, the USA had replaced all European countries as the main source of Colombian imports. Although the cost of player pianos remained prohibitive for most consumers, the commercial expansion of companies from the USA made gramophones increasingly affordable between the 1910s and 1920s. Local representatives of the Victor Talking Machine and Columbia Records introduced a broad repertory of strategies to sell these devices: payment through monthly fees, the trade-in of old devices and records as part of the payment process, customer discounts and promotions, rental, leasing, and even raffles. Affordability increased gramophones’ consumption, linking the new urban proletarian masses to these new mass-produced technologies. Authors like Gonzalo Vidal Pacheco used the term música populachera to denote this relationship, as a critique of the “bad taste” and “uncivility” spread widely by the new devices: Nowadays in Medellín, everywhere and at every time, it is impossible to listen to anything other than boring populachera [sic] music. Easily composed, banal, and uninteresting, this music is spread through gramophones, pianolas [player pianos], and other devices.60

To elites, these technologies of sound reproduction were not progressive but regressive, as they threatened to supplant elite civilization with low-brow culture. Eventually, these critical views made the new technologies targets of the first anti-noise wave, which spread throughout several Colombian cities in the 1920s. In this new

 “Advertisement of G. Navia,” El Gráfico, 9 December 1897: 20804.  Bureau of American Republics, Commercial Directory of American Republics, vol 1. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1897), 512.  “Ya en Medellín, por todas partes y a todas horas, no se oye otra cosa que música aburridora, populachera, de fácil composición, de género banal, sin halago, sin interés. Los grafófonos (sic) realizan esta labor, con las pianolas y otros elementos.” Gonzalo Vidal Pacheco, “Música nacional,” Revista Progreso 36 (1928): 578.

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field of governance, lawmakers, scientists, technicians, and enforcement officers worked together to discipline the urban population into aural reticence, pushing authorities to enforce silence by legal means.61 Even so, undisciplined sound continued to usurp the urban soundscape, with newspapers in Bogotá and Medellín publishing articles complaining about the noise produced by gramophones as late as the 1920s. Elites thus found other means to reinforce their aural superiority by linking civilized sound to urbane embodiment in urban public spaces. Techniques of bodily discipline were transferred, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from semiprivate spaces such as bourgeois salons to public theaters, musical conservatories, parks, cafés, and cinemas. This gesture drew civilized behavior out from the visually veiled sanctuary of upper-class sociability into the public space of entertainment; it confronted the modern age of mechanical reproduction with an openly visible yet physically exclusive enactment of sonic taste, imbricating the “civilizing process” as described by Norbert Elias with the emergence of the modern culture industry.62 In Elias’ analysis, codes of etiquette and good taste were central to the civilizing process that arose in royal courts in the early modern period. Changes in behavior from the sixteenth century onwards shaped the courtly class and extended the power of centralized courts in European states after the decline of feudalism. The enactment of etiquette reflected the internal hierarchy of the court, as proper behavior was rewarded with greater proximity to the king as the main figure of power, raising the social status of individual courtiers according to their civilized manners.63 Starting in the last decades of the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment salon became the venue in which superior embodiment and etiquette were performed, first among the aristocracy and then, increasingly into the mid-nineteenth century, among the urban bourgeoisie as well. Initially, the ballet of etiquette was performed in the bourgeois salon, situated inside the upper-class home close to the living room. This spatial arrangement conjoined private and public spheres inside the home. On the one hand, the house walls separated private life from the streets, which were only visible from the living room through open doors and windows. The family’s rooms were located around the interior patio, while the kitchen was in  As theorized by Leonardo Cardoso, noise control and anti-noise discussions often come in different series of waves that intertwine a series of actors like lawmakers, scientist, technicians, enforcement officers, and members of groups representing diverse economic, religious, and political interests. Cardoso, Sound-Politics in São Paulo. On the first anti-noise wave in Colombia, see: Zandra Pedraza, “La tenaz suramericana,” in Genealogías de la colombianidad: Formaciones discursivas y tecnologías de gobierno en los siglos XIX y XX, ed. Santiago Castro-Gómez and Eduardo Restrepo (Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2008), 173–203; Juan Fernando Velasquez, “(Re)sounding Cities: Urban Modernization, Listening, and Sounding Cultures in Colombia, 1886–1930,” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2018).  Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978).  Elias, Civilizing Process.

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the back of the house, so that the private spaces were oriented away from the public street. The salon, as an exception, opened the private family space to the outside: as visiting guests and friends gathered in the salon, they created a liminal space between the domestic and the public worlds.64 In the second half of the nineteenth century, specific notions of etiquette, urbanity, and acceptable behavior were crucial for the formation of class identity and belonging among the urban lettered elites, and were acted out in the salons accordingly.65 As in Europe, Colombian elites highlighted their knowledge of and obedience to a series of bodily norms in order to distinguish themselves as cosmopolitan and civilized subjects with the cultural capital required to attend a salon. The similarities between European codes of behavior and the rules presented in Colombian etiquette manuals were vital in producing a sense of social distinction and collective identity with cosmopolitan undertones that echoed the template of the imagined city within the private sphere. Indeed, in Colombia the salon retained the elitist associations that it had in France and did not achieve the democratic character of the American parlor.66 Normative expectations of etiquette further transformed salons and ballrooms into scenarios in which a clear set of rules and conventions controlled social interaction, often described as buen tono, or good taste. Having buen tono meant that an individual had cosmopolitan sophistication, obeyed the law and social norms, and cultivated a particular aesthetic taste and sensibility toward beauty. Thus, the main aim of buen tono was to reveal, in the individual’s daily life, the pulimiento (polish) that education in school, church, and the home had provided, as an essential requirement for participating in the structures of power and public administration.67 Two influential urbanity manuals used in Colombian private and public schools during the last two decades of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century were the Manual de urbanidad y buenas maneras (Manual of Urbanity and Good Manners) by the Venezuelan Manuel Antonio Carreño and the Protocolo hispanoamericano de la urbanidad y el buen tono (Hispanic American Protocol of Urbanity and Good Taste) by Ospina, mentioned above.68 In the former, Carreño defined urbanity as “decency,

 Katherine Preston, “Music in the McKissick Parlor,” in Emily’s Songbook, ed. Mark Slobin, James Kimbal, Katherine K. Preston, and Deane Root (Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2011), 14–20.  Bermúdez and Duque, Historia de la Música.  Marcia J. Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 104–108.  Elías Pino Iturrieta, “La Urbanidad de Carreño: El Corsé de las Costumbres en el Siglo XIX,” in Música Iberoamericana de Salón, ed. José Peñín, vol. 1 (Caracas: Fundación Vicente Emilio Sojo y Ministerio de Educación Cultura y Deportes, 2000), 1–10.  Manuel Antonio Carreño, 1812–1874, was a Venezuelan musician, teacher, and diplomat who founded the prestigious Colegio Roscio. Carreño was also the father of the Venezuelan pianist Teresa Carreño. This manual was published in 1857 and printed many times throughout Latin America. Schools for boys and girls also used both manuals, but did so differently, as Carreño and Ospina’s urbanity rules varied according to gender roles.

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moderation, and propriety in our actions and words, expressed in the gentleness and gallantry of all our movements, revealing soft manners.”69 Meanwhile, Ospina recognized that the laws of urbanity regulating social interaction in private spaces were crucial for promoting civismo, a public spirit that should characterize sociability among citizens in public spaces.70 Through the medium of etiquette manuals, urbanity was linked to the containment of the body and self-restraint in private and semi-private spaces, and later projected onto the public sphere as necessary and natural requisites to becoming a law-abiding citizen. Both manuals presented a series of prescriptive rules resembling the normative language used in municipal codes, laws, and the catechism used to teach the moral principles of the Catholic Church.71 These manuals’ sets of rules aimed to discipline the body by establishing a series of behaviors which were presented as natural within modern societies, and as being in concordance with a broader civilizing project which local elites promoted within the Colombian cities. To acquire good taste, an individual had to learn, perform, and obey the rules of etiquette compiled in urbanity manuals. These manuals naturalized a series of behaviors through rules that fulfilled the need for “mutual coordination, and the establishment of common codes of conduct that anticipate the response of others” in cities that were rapidly growing and changing.72 As such, salons became crucial in spreading and promoting the adoption of behavior patterns associated with urbanity and good taste among Colombian urban, lettered elites, not least by promoting a division between high music and low popular music. On the one hand, salons privileged a musical repertoire based on adaptations of operatic excerpts and short pieces over fashionable dances like the contredanse, the waltz, the polka, and the mazurka. These sonic referents of stylized cosmopolitanism positioned the taste of the locale elites closer to the imagined sources of European civilization.73  “La decencia, moderación y oportunidad en nuestras acciones y palabras, y aquella delicadeza y gallardía que aparecen en todos nuestros movimientos exteriores, revelando la suavidad de las costumbres.” Manuel Antonio Carreño, Manual de urbanidad y buenas maneras: para uso de la juventud de ambos sexos (New York: D. Appleton, 1857), 30.  Ospina, Protocolo hispanoamericano de la urbanidad, 7.  After the beginning of the Regenación in 1886 and the concordat in 1887, Catholic morality, the Catholic Church, and Catholic ministers held influence over institutions like the family and the school. The relationship between codes of behavior and morality rules indicates that this era saw the “sacralization of the Colombian society.” José David Cortés, Curas y Políticos: Mentalidad Religiosa e Intransigencia Religiosa en la Diócesis de Tunja (Bogotá: Ministerrio de Cultura, 1998).  “La coordinación mutual, el establecimiento de códigos comunes de conducta y la previsibilidad del comportamiento del otro.” Jorge Orlando Melo, “Medellín 1880–1930: Los Tres Hilos de la Modernización,” Revista Universidad Nacional, no. 37 (1998): 11–28, here 17.  Ellie Anne Duque, El Granadino: La Música en las Publicaciones Periódicas Colombianas, 1848–1860 (Bogotá: Fundación de Música and Banco de la República, 1998); Rondy Torres, “Las miradas cruzadas en la ópera: Reflexiones sobre cuerpo e identidad en Bogotá en el siglo XIX,” Cuadernos de Música Iberoamericana 32 (2019): 245–268.

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On the other hand, the introduction of national airs like the bambuco and the pasillo in the salon provided a sonic embodiment of the white-mestizo identity central to the narratives of nation and nationhood, which shaped a sense of Colombianness articulated around the cultural production of Andean cities, especially Bogotá.74 As in other Latin American countries like Chile and Venezuela, the music performed in the salons became a critical sonic instrument for social differentiation during the Regeneración, a period when local urban elites were reformulating their own collective identity.75 Adopting specific musical repertoires and connecting sound, listening, and the body into a series of shared tastes and values served to distinguish urban elites from both the rural squirearchy and the urban lower social classes during years characterized by a dramatic reformation of the state and its institutions. The entanglement between musical repertoires, bodily restraint, and the control of social behavior produced a particular type of “acoustic knowledge,” aligned with a civilizing agenda, that was later extended to other urban spaces as well.76 Theaters, for instance, were among the public spaces in which such standards became projected onto the public sphere.77 As they mediated the transition of naturalized codes of behavior to the public sphere, theaters also became the locus of the transformation of listening and music into instruments used to discipline citizens. Between the 1890s and 1930s, theaters were built in several Colombian cities, often thanks to the initiative and active involvement of members of the local elite who valued them as symbols of local pride and material expressions of the progress of their cities. In some cases, the architects of these new theaters came from Europe, such as the Italians Pietro Cantini, who designed the Theater Colón in Bogotá, built from 1885 to 1892, and Mario Lombardi, who designed the Municipal Theater Guillermo Valencia in Popayán, built from 1892 to 1927, and the Belgian Agustin Goovaerts, who designed the Theater Junin in Medellín, built from 1922 to 1924. In other cases, like the Municipal Theater in Cartagenal, built 1906–1911, the Theater Bolívar in Medellín, built 1917–1919, or the Municipal Theater in Cali, built 1918–1927, local architects designed the buildings based on European models. Placing these new

 Jaime Cortés Polanía, La Música Nacional Popular Colombiana en la Colección Mundo al Día, 1924–1938 (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2004); Carolina Santamaría Delgado, Vitrolas, Rocolas y Radioteatros: Hábitos de Escucha de la Música Popular en Medellín, 1930–1950 (Bogotá: Editorial Pontifica Universidad Javeriana y Banco de la República, 2014).  For Chile, see: Manuel Vicuña Urrutia, El París Americano: La Oligarquía Chilena Como Actor Urbano en el Siglo XIX (Santiago de Chile: Museo Histórico Nacional, 1996); for Venezuela, see: Juan Francisco Sans, Los Bailes de Salón en Venezuela (Caracas: Fundación Bigott, 2016).  As theorized by Steven Feld, “acoustic knowing” is an experiential knowledge based on the intimate relations between sound, space, and place. Steven Feld, “From Ethnomusicology to EchoMuse-Ecology: Reading R. Murray Schafer in the Papua New Guinea rainforest,” The Soundscape Newsletter 8 (1994), accessed 15 April 2020, https://aeinews.org/aeiarchive/writings/echomuseecol ogy.html.  Torres, “Las miradas cruzadas.”

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buildings in the cities’ downtown areas brought the music performed in them closer to the ears of the authorities and to the elites residing in the centers of the traditional geography of power.78 When attending concerts performed in these theaters, audiences experienced sonic representations of cosmopolitanism and modernity. Like the waltzes, polkas, and mazurkas performed in private salons, the seasons of Italian opera and Spanish zarzuela provided a sense of proximity to the European centers of ‘sonic modernity’ and cosmopolitan good taste. Furthermore, since theatergoers could see other audience members as well as they could see the performers on stage, they experienced a form of surveillance and permanent registration that resembled the panopticon.79 But concerts and other sonic social functions also separated musicians from audiences, introducing the notion of the musician as a professional artist. This also set the conditions for a “presentational performance,” in which the clear separation between performers and audiences enabled listeners to rationalize music as an aesthetic experience.80 The rationalization of music promoted a form of listening in dialog with modern and cosmopolitan sensibilities meant to characterize the gentlemen and ladies of the world (hombres and mujeres de mundo) celebrated in the urbanity manuals. Such a listening model demanded an attentive, passive, and disinterested attitude towards music in the audience, in other words the “decorous silence” necessary to enjoy the music properly. Listening as a subjective aesthetic experience in the theaters was an instance of the use of sound in the process of social formation, encouraging the restraint of the body and control in social interaction.81

 For example, the Teatro Colón is located in front of the Palacio de San Carlos, the official residence of the President of Colombia from 1827 to 1908, and 200 meters to the west of the Plaza de Bolivar, where the National Congress, the Cathedral, and Bogotá’s town hall are located. Pietro Cantini, the Italian architect who designed the theater was also involved in the design and construction of the Colombian Capitol.  As theorized by Foucault, the panopticon is more than a prison, it is a “symbolic and generalizable” model of functioning that exemplifies how disciplinary technology operates in everyday life. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 205. For examples of surveillance in cultural spaces, see: Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” in Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. Nicholas Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry Ortner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 123–154; Torres, “Las miradas cruzadas,” 267.  Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 23–66. From this standpoint, it is not a coincidence that the construction of these new theaters overlapped with the creation of the first Conservatories in Colombia, including the Academia Musical of Eusebio Celio Fernández in 1873, the Academia Nacional de Música in Bogotá in 1882, the Escuela de Música de Santa Cecilia in Medellín in 1888, and the Conservatorio de Ibagué in 1909.  The naturalization of silence as a prerequisite for enjoying music was a means to promote a calm and reflexive attitude which, as suggested by Larry Shiner, characterized a “modern sensibility” toward artistic objects. Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). As theorized by Robert Stecker, the aesthetic experience introduces a

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As illustrated by this chapter’s opening example, the restraint and consequent silence promoted in the theaters was also expected and enforced in the parks during the retretas. In contrast to the debates about social order that prevailed from the 1880s to 1910s, the experts leading the new anti-noise movement of the 1910s and 1920s connected technical knowledge with political action. They adapted preexisting notions of the surveillance and social control of specific classes with new narratives that identified noise with pollution and illness. Jorge Bejarano Martínez was among these experts. Bejarano Martínez was a physician who specialized in pediatrics and public hygiene in France before returning to Colombia in 1921. He created the first course of hygiene at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, was a municipal councilor, senator, Director of National Health, and the first Minister of Hygiene.82 He was also among the first Colombian physicians to denounce noise as a public health problem. In a series of articles published in the newspaper El Tiempo, Bejarano Martínez depicted noise as the sonic equivalent of waste polluting the streets: a dangerous source of diseases that should be controlled and, if possible, removed from urban public spaces. For example, in 1929, he warned that noise produced “the deterioration of the nerves and surmenage [chronic fatigue].”83 Therefore, noise was as much a threat to the citizen’s health and well-being as it was a severe menace for business productivity and prosperity. Bejarano Martínez often ended his articles demanding the intervention of the authorities to enforce a form of sonic hygiene based on silencing some sources of noise. For him, institutional intervention was the only effective means for guaranteeing such sonic hygiene, and as such he insisted that new laws, taxes, and enforcement actions were necessary to improve the modern spaces in which citizens lived their daily lives, following standards introduced by technoscientific discourses. Authorities reacted to such demands by enforcing sonic control through police codes and tax policies. Two cases exemplify their approach. The first was a proposed, but ultimately rejected, new “orthophonic [sic] tax” in Bogotá, which would have required a monthly fee of two hundred and fifty Colombian pesos from “any business or public establishment that uses gramophones and promotes public auditions that convoke clients by spreading sound to the neighboring streets.”84 The second, successfully implemented, policy was the prohibition in some Colombian Caribbean cities of chigualos or velorios de angelitos (wake of the little angels): funeral music and rites for

form of abstraction that engages the individual with an object, creating a value that resides in both the qualities attributed to the object and the experience for its own sake. Robert Stecker, “Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Value,” Philosophy Compass 1, no. 1 (2006): 1–10.  Zandra Pedraza, “Jorge Bejarano Martínez,” in Pensamiento colombiano del siglo XX, ed. Millán de Benavídes, Carmen Rosa, Santiago Castro-Gómez, and Guillermo Hoyos Vásquez (Bogotá: Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2013).  Jorge Bejarano Martínez, “El Flagelo del Ruido,” El Tiempo, 7 September 1929: 3.  K-Margo (pseud.), “Victrolas Grabadas En Bogotá,” El Bateo 17, no. 1031, 8 June 1929: 3.

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children usually performed by members of the lower social classes, especially those informed by Indigenous and African traditions. In 1931, the Police Code of the Departamento del Atlántico implicitly prohibited the chigualos in its Article 471: “In no case is any dance or other amusement permitted in an infant funeral, even if it has a private character.”85 This prohibition was so effective that this musical practice disappeared from the main urban centers in the Colombian Caribbean – such as Cartagena, Barranquilla, and Santa Marta – although it survived in some rural areas and other regions with significant Afro-Colombian presence like the Patía Valley and the Pacific Coast. As in the Spanish case analyzed by Samuel Llano, Colombian elites and official institutions used noise control as a means to survey and control groups that they regarded as posing a threat to public morality and order, based on both the colonial legacy and the emerging logic of eugenics.86 This case also illustrates how race underpinned noisy citizens’ criminalization. As in the Brazilian case, studied by Guilerme Gustavo Simões, policies of silencing and censorship aimed to restrict the visibility and audibility of Afro-Colombians and indigenous people in Colombia’s public spaces.87 Imposing silence functioned as a form of discipline that aimed to reduce black and indigenous people’s cultural influence in a new urban culture. In short, silence was used as an effective tool for the whitening of urban soundscapes necessary for the establishment of a mestizo city. This process of prohibition also created an ontology of sounding and listening that equated race with barbaric Otherness, mixing race and social class while making standards of citizenship audible so as to facilitate the social control and containment of laborers, craftsmen, and rural migrants. The act of silencing certain sonorous identities through law enforcement policies was an instrument of social control designed to mute the voices of dissent that questioned the hegemonic narratives of progress and civilization and protested the lower classes’ limited access to the benefits of urban modernization. The turn from civilizing in semi-private spaces in the 1880s to disciplining citizens in public ones during the 1910s and 1920s enabled Colombian elites to retain hegemonic control over public spaces during a period of rapid urban transformation and state formation. It adapted colonial notions of race and social class, which had shaped the imagined colonial city through sonic representations of European modernity, to the newer interpretations of nationhood through a eugenicist lens. At the

 En ningún caso es permitido baile alguno u otra diversión con motivo de la muerte de un párvulo, aún cuando tenga carácter de función privada o particular.” Asamblea Departamental del Departamento del Departamento del Atlántico, Código de policía (Barranquilla: Imprenta Departamental, 1931), 179.  See: Llano, “The Sacred in Madrid’s Soundscape;” Llano, Discordant Notes.  Guilerme Gustavo Simões, “Samba outsider: Música, historia y territorialidades en São Paulo, Brasil, 1950,” in Ciudades vibrantes: sonido y experiencia aural urbana en América Latina, ed. Natalia Bieletto-Bueno (Chile: Ediciones Universidad Mayor, 2020).

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same time, this turn also set the proper conditions for textualizing and retextualizing sound and listening as instruments in a dispositif that introduced, channeled, and reinforced hegemonic notions of urban space, citizenship, and personhood. This instrumentalization of sound triggered an early form of what Leonardo Cardoso describes as sound-politics, a process that transforms some sounds, especially those labeled as noise, into an object of state intervention.88 Labelling sounds as noise became an ontological action as it constructed the subaltern Other within the postcolonial order. The study of the Colombian case thus suggests that sound and listening contributed both to the construction of postcolonial modern subjects and to the efforts by elites to reinforce their hegemonic position through forms of governance in the centralized public administration. As sound and listening became part of the civilizing agenda, they were utilized to model the ideal citizen in postcolonial venues. It was only in the twentieth century, as the containment of sound became imbricated with hygienic and eugenic discourses due to new sonic technologies, that the Regeneración’s sound politics and its aural regime of discipline changed dramatically. Children playing and shouting during the retretas were problematic in 1911, but not as omnipresent as gramophones a decade later. The appropriation of these new technologies by members of the subaltern classes shows how mass consumption transformed the aural sphere into a site of contestation, as it created contradictions between the imagined city’s layout, its system of racial segregation, and the urban spaces in which citizens lived their daily lives. Sounds labeled as noise thus also became an index of the modernizing state’s failure to deliver on promises of providing well-being and civilizing the populacho, calling into question its teleological narrative of progress. In sum, these unruly sounds became instruments that made the new popular classes audible, not as passive subalterns but as prominent cultural actors in the new urban venues.

 Cardoso, Sound-Politics in São Paulo, 9.

List of Illustrations Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6 Fig. 5.1

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Fig. 7.4

Fig. 9.1

The Marriage of Emperor Napoleon III. Lithograph From L’Illustration, vol. 21, 5 February 1853. Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo. D867DN 76 Napoleon III Marriage With Eugenia de Montijo Condessa de Teba. Wood Engraving. 19531853. Interfoto / Alamy. B3YPW4 77 The Imperial Family Late 1850s. Photograph. Smith Archive / Alamy. WHAEKN 78 The Imperial Family. Photograph. 1860. Fondation Napoleon. Alamy. 2FKB9DM 79 Braun, Clément. The Imperial Family. Photograph by Clément Braun. Paris. Fondation Napoleon. Alamy. 2FKB9CO 80 Argentin, Alain. “Tombe of the maréchal Vauban.” Musée de l’Armée, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. ART445429 96 Charles Darwin as “Man of the Day,” Vanity Fair, 30 September 1871. British Library / bpk 50183140 106 “Victorian men of achievement.” British Library / bpk 50183621 109 Luque, Manuel. “Carricature de Gustave Eiffel.” RMN - Grand Palais / bpk 50136661 112 “Festbankett zu Ehren der Cholerakommission im Wintergarten des Centralhotels zu Berlin,” 1884. Katz, Dietmar / bpk 00003503 113 Jehu Junior. “Marie Curie and Pierre Curie portrayed as ‘People of the Day.’” Vanity Fair, 22 December 1904. National Portrait Gallery / bpk 70550853 119 Benouville, François-Léon. “Pope Pius IX Imparting the Blessing Urbi et Orbi.” Drawing/Graphite. 1847. Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET, 1984.249), https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/334374 (accessed 17 May 2022) 127 “Elisabetta Canori Mora” Devotional card. Antwerp, library of the Ruusbroec Institute, Begenadigden, engelen en heiligen. Ruusbroec Institute 139 “Billy Graham in the Netherlands, meeting at the Olympic Stadion, 22 June 1954.” Glass negative. 1954. Nationaal Archief, Fotocollectie Anefo, http://hdl. handle.net/10648/a9242262-d0b4-102d-bcf8-003048976d84 (CCO) (accessed 17 May 2022) 150 Papal memorabilia at the Museum voor Volksdevotie (Kortenaken). Photograph. 2021. © author 153 La Chambre Des Députés, Paris, France, 1849. Duncan1890 / DigitalVision Vectors / getty images 206 “Eine Sitzung der Nationalversammlung in der Paulskirche in Frankfurt am Main” (A session of the National Assembly in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt am Main). Illustration from the nineteenth century. clu / DigitalVision Vectors / getty images 209 “Das neue Parlamentsgebäude in Berlin - der Reichstag” (The new parliament building in Berlin – the Reichstag). Illustration from the nineteenth century. clu / DigitalVision Vectors / getty images 215 “During the funeral of Walther Rathenau (1867-1922), Reich Minister for Foreign Affairs under the Weimar Republic, in Berlin (Germany). On June 27, 1922.” bpk / adoc-photos 223 Schaal, A. “Der Empfang der heimkehrenden Krieger in der Residenz.” Die Gartenlaube, 1866. Münchener Digitalisierungszentrum / Digitale Bibliothek,

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110574012-016

488

Fig. 9.2

Fig. 9.3

Fig. 10.1

Fig. 10.2

Fig. 10.3

Fig. 10.4

Fig. 10.5

Fig. 13.1

Fig. 13.2

Fig. 13.3

Fig. 14.1

Fig. 14.2

Fig. 14.3

List of Illustrations

https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/en/view/bsb10498410?q=%28Garten laube+1866%29&page=272,273 (accessed 1 May 2022) 281 Lüders, Hermann. “Die Kaisertage in Dresden: Kaiser Wilhelm’s Einzug in Dresden am 14. September.” Illustrirte Zeitung, 1882. Hathi Trust, https:// babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=chi.50058512&view=1up&seq=323 (accessed 2 May 2022) 289 Wittig, F. “Der Leichenwagen Kaiser Wilhelms am Brandenburger Tor vom Thiergarten aus gesehen.” Die Gartenlaube, 1888. Wikisource, https://de.wiki source.org/w/index.php?title=Seite:Die_Gartenlaube_(1888)_216.jpg&oldid=-, (accessed 1 May 2022) 295 Sambourne, Edward Linley. “The Rhodes Colossus.” Punch, 1892. Print. Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Punch_Rho des_Colossus.png (accessed 4 April 2022) 304 Gillray, James. “The Plumb-pudding in danger – or – State Epicures taking un Petit Souper.” Print, est. 1818. Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikime dia.org/wiki/File:Caricature_gillray_plumpudding.jpg (accessed 4 April 2022) 318 Crane, Walter. “Imperial Federation Map of the World Showing the Extent of the British Empire in 1886.” Graphic, 1886. Map. Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Imperial_Federation,_Map_of_the_ World_Showing_the_Extent_of_the_British_Empire_in_1886_(levelled).jpg (accessed 4 April 2022) 321 Reade, William Winwood. “Map of African Literature.” The African Sketch-Book, v. 1, London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1873. Map. Smithsonian Institution. https:// library.si.edu/image-gallery/106330 (accessed 4 April 2022) 326 “Das geraubte Weltreich.” Postcard est. 1940. Cornell University – PJ Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography. https://digital.library.cornell.edu/cata log/ss:19343268 (accessed 4 April 2022) 334 White, Raymond. Charles II touching a patient for the king's evil (scrofula) surrounded by courtiers, clergy and general public. 1684. Wellcome Collection. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/vkkwb683/images?id=ueg6h6sv (accessed 16 May 2022) 399 “Württembergisches Turnfest Reutlingen 1845” (Württemberg Gymnastics Festival 1845). Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg. https://www.leo-bw.de/ documents/10157/45802/42_09+HStA+E+146+B%C3%BC+8468+Turnfest_ voll/7390f860-981f-4b92-aa94-fd6ceecf317f?t=1491378854142 (accessed 16 May 2022) 406 Benito Mussolini, “Battle for Grain,” 1925. www.pierluigitombetti.com. https:// www.pierluigitombetti.com/mussolini-visto-un-bambino/ (accessed 16 May 2022) 414 “Stuttgart: 5. Deutscher Sängerbund-Fest, Germania mit Bundesflagge auf dem Marktplatz.” Photomontaged illustration from the nineteenth century, circa 1896. clu / DigitalVision Vectors / getty images 429 “Kaiser Wilhelm II in uniform of the guards (Regiment Garde du Corps).” Photograph by Reichard & Lindner, 1905. bpk Bildagentur / Art Resource, NY. ART388356 431 “Gruss von der Parade. Ankunft Ihrer Majestät der Kaiserin auf dem Paradefeld.” (Greetings from the Parade. Arrival of Her Majesty the Empress at the Parade Grounds). Postcard circa 1900. Author’s collection 447

List of Illustrations

Fig. 14.4

Fig. 14.5

Fig. 15.1

Fig. 15.2

Fig. 15.3

“Gruss aus Berlin” (Greetings from Berlin). Photomontage postcard showing Wilhelm II (central figure) and soldiers in front of the Berlin University. Circa 1890s. Author’s collection 448 “Berlin – Weltstadtleben. Dom. Kaiser Wilhelm.” (Berlin – life in the metropolis. ‘Cathedral.’ Kaiser Wilhelm.) Photomontage postcard showing Wilhelm II (central figure, saluting) in front of the Berlin Cathedral. Circa 1910. Author’s collection 449 Plan of Guayaquil, An., 1779. Anonymous, “Ciudad de Guayaquil,” Map, 1779. Courtesy, Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Bogotá, Colombia. CO.AGN. SMP.4,REF. 188A. http://consulta.archivogeneral.gov.co/ConsultaWeb/image nes.jsp?id=3253541&idNodoImagen=3253542&total=1&ini=1&fin=1 (accessed 15 May 2022) 465 Plan of Medellín, José María Giraldo [?], “Cabildo de Medellín,” 1791. Courtesy, Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Bogotá, Colombia. CO.AGN.SMP.4, REF.256A Bis. http://consulta.archivogeneral.gov.co/ConsultaWeb/imagenes. jsp?id=3253789&idNodoImagen=3253790&total=1&ini=1&fin=1#fakelinkc (accessed 15 May 2022) 467 Population growth in the main Colombian cities between 1918 and 1928. © author 473

489

Authors’ Biographies Edward Berenson is Professor of History and French Studies at NYU. He is a cultural historian interested in France, Britain, and the United States. His most recent books include The Statue of Liberty: A Transatlantic Story (2012), Europe in the Modern World (2016 and 2020), and The Accusation: Blood Libel in an American Town (2019). He is at work on a book tentatively entitled, Levittown International: Suburbanization and Its Discontents. Eva Giloi is Associate Professor at Rutgers University-Newark. Her publications include Monarchy, Myth, and Material Culture in Germany, 1750–1950 (2011) and Constructing Charisma: Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe (edited with Edward Berenson, 2010). Her research topics include material culture, visual culture, and consumer culture; photography, copyright, and trademark law; persona studies, fame, and charisma; and urban geography. She is currently working on a book entitled Authors and Epigones: Navigating Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Ben Griffin is Associate Professor in Modern British History at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Girton College. He is the author of The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Culture and the Struggle for Women’s Rights (2012), which won the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize for the best first book on British history. He has also published on how the history of masculinity has shaped political processes, and how we should write the history of masculinity. He is currently working on a book entitled The Gender Order and the Judicial Imagination: Law, Liberalism and Governmentality in Modern Britain. Martin Kohlrausch is Professor of European Political History at KU Leuven, Belgium. His publications include Der Monarch im Skandal: Die Logik der Massenmedien und die Transformation der wilhelminischen Monarchie (2005), Building Europe in Expertise: Innovators, Organizers, Networkers (with Helmuth Trischler, 2018), and Brokers of Modernity: East Central Europe and the Rise of Modernist Architects (2019). His research focuses on the relationship between mass media and politics as well as the role that technical experts and architects played in modern European history and urban history more generally. Heikki Lempa is Priscilla Payne Hurd Chair in the Arts and Humanities and Professor of Modern European History at Moravian University. He is the author of Spaces of Honor: Making German Civil Society, 1700–1914 (2021), Beyond the Gymnasium: Educating the Middle-Class Bodies in Classical Germany (2007), and Bildung der Triebe: Der deutsche Philanthropismus, 1768–1788 (1993). He is currently working on a book-length monograph on The Bodies of the Others: German Sports, Medicine, and Dance in a Global Context, 1700–1914. Xavier Márquez is Associate Professor in Political Theory and Political Science at Victoria University of Wellington. His recent research focuses on non-democratic politics, including authoritarianism, dictatorship, and non-democratic political thought. He is also interested in the history of democracy and democratic thought and has published on Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, John Rawls, and ancient Greek and Roman thought. Heidi Mehrkens is Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Aberdeen. She was a postgraduate research fellow at the University of St. Andrews for the AHRC-funded project Heirs to the Throne in the Constitutional Monarchies of Nineteenth-Century Europe 1815–1914 and has

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110574012-017

492

Authors’ Biographies

published in the fields of political cultural history, military history, monarchical history, history of emotions, and media history in the long nineteenth century. Philipp Nielsen is Associate Professor for Modern European History at Sarah Lawrence College, NY, and Associate Researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. His publications include Between Heimat and Hatred: Jews and the Right in Germany, 1871–1935 (2019) and Architecture, Democracy and Emotions: The Politics of Feeling since 1945 (edited with Till Großmann, 2019). His research interests include German-Jewish history, German political and architectural history, and the history of emotions. Kevin Rogan is a Ph.D. candidate living in New York City and attending Rutgers University-Newark, studying in Global Urban Studies. His academic work focuses on urban and regional development on large historical scales, with major themes including the administration of private property, labor and class relations, business cycles, and macroeconomic change. Darin Stephanov is a Kone Foundation Fellow in Helsinki, Finland. His publications include Ruler Visibility and Popular Belonging in the Ottoman Empire, 1808–1908 (2018) and Ruler Personality Cults from Empires to Nation States and Beyond (edited with Kirill Postoutenko, 2021). His research interests in comparative (Ottoman and Russian) empires, especially in ruler visibility, public space, and popular forms of belonging, have led to a new model of the modern/ethno-national mindset. Frederik Frank Sterkenburgh is Assistant Professor at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His publications include the forthcoming monograph Wilhelm I and Monarchical Rule in Imperial Germany and the forthcoming co-edited volume Modernizing the Unmodern: Europe’s Imperial Monarchies and their Path to Modernity in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century. His research interests include the staging of political authority in modern German history. Sally Totman is Professor at Charles Sturt University, Australia. Her publications include How Hollywood Projects Foreign Policy (2009) and Global Crises and Risks (2008). Her research interests include Middle East politics, persona studies, political leadership, and the depiction of the Middle East and North Africa in Hollywood film and popular culture. Matthew Unangst is Assistant Professor of History at SUNY Oneonta. Among his publications are the monograph Colonial Geography: German Colonialism, Race, and Space in East Africa, 1884–1905 (2022) and articles in the Journal of Global History, the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and Central European History. His current research analyzes the ways that Tanzania, West Germany, and East Germany managed the historiography of German East Africa for geopolitical goals from the 1960s through the 1980s. Tine Van Osselaer (https://religiousbodies.com) is Associate Professor in the history of mysticism, devotion, and spirituality at the Ruusbroec Institute of the University of Antwerp. She has published on gender and Catholicism, the history of emotions, charisma, religious celebrities, and religion and exceptional corporeal phenomena, including the book Between Saints and Celebrities: The Devotion and Promotion of Stigmatics in Europe, c. 1800–1950 (2020). Betto van Waarden is Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Lund University. His research on the history of politics and mass media has appeared in the English Historical Review and European Review of History, among other publications. He is co-editor of a special issue on “The Mediatization of Political Personae, 1880s-1930s” in Media History (2022). His interests include

Authors’ Biographies

493

transnationalism, imperialism, celebrity politics, parliaments, democratization, and the attention economy. Juan Fernando Velásquez Ospina is Chair of Graduate Studies at the School of Arts of the University of Antioquia and member of its Grupo de Investigación en Músicas Regionales. His publications include Los Ecos de La Villa: La Música en Los Periódicos y Revistas de Medellín, 1886–1903 (2012) and Inscribing Sounds: Music Technologies and Aural Culture in Late-Nineteenthand Early-Twentieth-Century Colombia (forthcoming). His research interests include sound studies, material culture, consumer culture, postcoloniality, decoloniality, cultural geography, and urban geography.

Index Aachen 274 Aalto, Alvar 123 Abbot, Diane 251 Abdul Aziz ibn Saud 357 Abdülaziz of the Ottoman Empire 375, 385, 386, 389, 390 Abdülhamid II of the Ottoman Empire 385, 389, 391 Abdullah bin Hussein of Jordan 357 Abdülmecid of the Ottoman Empire 375, 385, 387 Åbo/Turku 387 Ahlers-Hestermann, Friedrich 438 Ahmed III of the Ottoman Empire 373 Albert (Albrecht) of Prussia 275 Albert I of Belgium 182 Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Prince Consort of Queen Victoria 85, 427 Albert of Saxony 288, 293 Albertplatz, Dresden 289 Alexander I of Russia 101, 368, 376–378 Alexander II of Russia 364, 376, 389–391 Alexander III of Russia 43, 390 Alexander Leopold of Hohenlohe-WaldenburgSchillingsfürst 148 Alexandra Fyodorovna 379 Allenby, Edmund 356 Ambassadors’ Staircase, Versailles 199 Amoros, Francisco 403, 408 Antwerpen 274 Appalachian Mountains 315 Arc de Triomphe, Paris 60, 73 Arendt, Hannah 1, 6, 8, 9, 15, 192, 395, 396 Arenenberg 57, 58, 61, 62 Arnold, Thomas 407 Augusta of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, German Empress 273, 274, 280, 286, 287, 293 Auldjo, John 379 Baden-Baden 438, 442 Bagehot, Walter 15, 172, 227 Baker, Ray Stannard 446 Barghash bin Said of Zanzibar 319 Barranquilla 471–473, 484 Barrot, Ferdinand 64 Barrot, Odilon 64 Barry, Charles 226 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110574012-018

Bassett, Edward 443 Baudelaire, Charles 87 Bazalgette, Joseph 113 Beauharnais, Hortense de 56–58, 61 Beaverbrook, Lord, William Maxwell Aitken 167 Bebel, August 172, 176 Beecher, Henry Ward 434 Beethoven, Ludwig van, statue in Bonn 418 Behring, Emil von 120 Bejarano Martínez, Jorge 483 Bell, Gertrude 10, 22, 342, 348–350, 354, 356, 357, 359 Béranger, Pierre-Jean de 59 Bergadieu, Marie (Berguille) 144 Berlin 113, 115, 117, 151, 173, 178, 191, 213–215, 218, 222, 260, 265–272, 274–276, 278–284, 286, 287, 290–297, 299, 383, 408, 421, 429–432, 435, 444–450, 452, 453 Berlin Cathedral (Berliner Dom) 291, 292, 294, 448, 449 Bernard of Clairvaux 137 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 126 Berthollet, Claude Louis 102, 345 Bhownaggree, Mancherjee 251 Biarritz 442 Bigelow, Poultney 450 Biggar, Joseph 248 Bismarck, Otto von 37, 53, 55, 117, 165, 216, 264, 278, 280, 293, 295, 412, 413 Bjørnson, Bjørnsterne 146, 147 Blair, Tony 257 Blunt, Lady Anne 350 Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen 350 Boateng, Paul 251 Bogotá 460, 463, 464, 467, 471–474, 478, 481, 483 Bolivar, Simón 460 Bologna 131, 312 Bonn 223, 268, 418 Bonnerjee, Woomes 251 Booth, William 321 Bordeaux 67, 144 Bosporus 373, 378 Boston 13, 408, 433 Bottai, Giuseppe 415 Boulanger, Georges Ernest 217

496

Index

Boulogne 61 Bourdieu, Pierre 1, 9, 21, 231, 396, 423, 468 Brandenburg Gate, Berlin 268, 279–281, 287, 294, 295, 297, 298 Branner, John Casper 443 Braun, Wernher von 19, 121, 123 Brise, Adele 140, 141 Bristol 225 Brodrick, Cuthbert 228 Brooks, Van Wyck 445 Brunel, Marc Isambard 101 Bucaramanga 471 Bülow, Bernhard von 169, 175 Burckhardt, Johann Ludwig 342, 351, 352 Burdett, Francis 247 Burke, Edmund 163 Burton, Richard Francis 324, 327, 342, 346–348, 353, 360 Byron, Lord, George Gordon 350 Cabet, Etienne 54 Cairo 345, 349, 356, 357, 360 Cali 472, 473, 477, 481 Campbell, George 249, 250 Camphausen, Ludolf von 271, 273–276 Cannes 56 Canning, George 101, 174, 258 Canning, Stratford 378 Canori Mora, Elisabetta 138, 139 Canterbury 147 Cantini, Pietro 481 Caracas 464 Caribbean 55, 315, 466, 483, 484 Carlsbad 442 Carlyle, Thomas 100 Carnarvon, Earl of 351 Carnegie, Andrew 446 Caro, Manuel Antonio 461 Carol I of Romania 293 Carreño, Manuel Antonio 479, 480 Cartagena de Indias 464 Carter, Howard 351 Cassagnac, Granier de 63 Cassagnac, Paul de 63 Cassini family 312 Castlereagh, Lord, Robert Stewart 258 Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan, St. Petersburg 376 Cathedral of Peter and Paul, St. Petersburg 390

Catherine I of Russia 374 Cavaignac, Louis-Eugène 67 Cavour, Count of, Camillo Benso 85 Cenotaph, London 221, 222 Certeau, Michel de 420, 421, 437–450, 453, 454 Chamberlain, Joseph 155, 167, 171, 173, 175, 176, 248, 253 Champion (Wisconsin) 140 Champollion, Jean-François 347 Champs Elysées, Paris 73 Channon, Chips 249 Charlemagne 72 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor 424, 425 Charles X of France 59, 399 Charleston 440 Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin 275, 292, 293 Charlottenburg, Berlin 214, 275, 292 Chateaubriand 60 Chattanooga 433 Chicago 433 Church of the Madeleine, Paris 73 Churchill, Winston 356, 357 Cincinnati 433 Circus Rentz, Berlin 115 Clemenceau, Georges 411 Clias, Phokion Henrich 408 Cobbett, William 237 Cobden, Richard 227 Cologne 274 Cologne Cathedral 445 Combes, Laurent Morellet 200 Comédie-Française, Paris 203 Comte, Auguste 104, 105 Conde, Francisco Javier 37 Conrad, Joseph 327 Conservatoire national des Arts et Métiers (National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts), Paris 109 Constant, Benjamin 56 Constantinople 82, 342, 371 Conté, Nicolas-Jacques 345 Cook, James 324 Cook, Thomas 422, 423, 434, 437 Cooper, James Fenimore 450 Corbyn, Jeremy 257 Corfu 452 Cox, Percy 356 Cross, Richard Assheton 245

Index

Crystal Palace, Great Exhibition, London 102, 103, 423, 427 Curie, Marie see Skłodowska-Curie, Marie Curie, Pierre 118 Curtius, Ernst 275 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 435 Danube River 213, 381 Darwin, Charles 19, 105, 106 Davy, Humphry 103 De Gaulle, Charles 186 De Maistre, Joseph 131 Delile, Alire Raffeneau 345 Delisle, Guillaume 312, 313 Delsarte, François 408–410 Den Bosch 169 Denon, Vivant 345 Dernburg, Bernhard 173 Descartes, René 122 Deutsches Museum, Munich 109 Dias, Bartolomeu 309 Díaz, Porfirio 461 Disraeli, Benjamin 173, 176, 246, 248, 258 Dolomieu, Déodat de 345 Dôme des Invalides, Paris 102 Doughty, Charles Montagu 348 Dresden 265, 285–290, 299, 442, 445 DuBois, W. E. B. 435 Duisburg 274 Duma 43 Duncan, Isadora 410 Ebert, Friedrich 222 Edison, Thomas 452, 453 Edward VII 179, 291 Edward VIII 181 Efendi, Vassaf 381 Efendi, Yazıncızade Abdülvehab 380 Ehrlich, Paul 120 Eichmann, Franz August 274 Eiffel, Gustave 19, 94, 111, 114, 118 Eiffel Tower, Paris 450 Einstein, Albert 20, 121, 333 Eiselen, Ernst 405 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 182 Ekaterininskii Canal 391 Elba 56 Elisabeth of Bavaria, Queen of Prussia 275

497

Elizabeth I of England 400 Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom 181 Emmerich 274 Engels, Friedrich 102 Erfurt 268, 269 Ernst August of Hanover 260, 274 Ertuğrul 385 Eugénie de Guzman, Empress of France 75, 77, 84, 390 Faguette, Estelle 144 Faisal I of Iraq 349, 357 Faraday, Michael 108 Fayol, Henri 122 Federal Palace of Switzerland, Bern 216 Ferdinand I of Austria 270 Fiji Islands 452 Fischer, Emil 120 Fischer, Kuno 445 Fitzmaurice, Edmond 245 Fontainebleau 132 Fontane, Theodor 296 Fontet 144, 145 Fonton, Joseph 373 Ford, Henry 122 Foucault, Jean-Bernard-Léon 102 Foucault, Michel 9, 367, 396 Fourier, Charles 54, 63 Fourier, Jean-Baptiste Joseph 345 Franco, Francisco 37, 48 Frankfurt am Main 401, 404, 206, 283 Franklin, Benjamin 159, 163 Franz Joseph I of Austria 270, 297, 385, 390 Frederick of the Netherlands 274 Frederick the Great see Friedrich II of Prussia Free Trade Hall, Manchester 228 Friedenskirche (Peace Church), Potsdam 291 Friederike of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Queen of Hanover 260 Friedrich I of Prussia 191 Friedrich I, ‘Barbarossa’ 344 Friedrich II of Prussia, ‘Frederick the Great’ 97, 163, 266, 267, 282, 425 Friedrich III of Prussia (Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm), German Emperor 280, 291, 293 Friedrich of Sonderburg-Augustenburg, Prince 272 Friedrich VI of Nuremberg 282 Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia 263

498

Index

Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia 101, 263, 265, 267, 268, 279, 282 Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia 265, 268–277, 291, 424 Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg, ‘Great Elector’ 292, 405 Gagern, Heinrich von 207 Gaitskell, Hugh 257 Garibaldi, Guiseppe 15, 16, 85, 175 Garnier, Charles 86 Garvey, Marcus 13 Georg V of Hanover 259 George III of the United Kingdom 20 George IV of the United Kingdom 101, 290 George V of the United Kingdom 185 George VI of the United Kingdom 181 George, Stefan 17 Gillray, James 247, 317 Girling, Mary Ann 19, 142–144, 147, 148 Giza 350, 360 Gladstone, William 17, 43, 172, 175, 176, 230, 242, 243, 248, 252, 258 Goebbels, Joseph 184, 185 Goelet, Elsie 446 Goelet, Robert 446 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 401, 434, 442, 445 Golfe-Juan 56, 59 Gómez, Juan Vicente 461 Goovaerts, Agustin 481 Gorst, John 245 Goschen, George 245 Gotha 404 Graham, Billy 149–152 Grandi, Francesco 126, 134 Grant, Bernie 251 Grant, James 240, 244, 246–248 Grant, James Augustus 327 Grenoble 56, 60, 74 Grey, Lord, Charles 238 Groningen 169 Gropius, Walter 123 Guitiérrez de Alba, José María 463 Guizot, François 54 Gustav II Adolf of Sweden 311, 312 GutsMuths, Johann Christoph Friedrich 404, 405, 407, 408 Guzmán Blanco, Antonio 461

Haber, Fritz 121, 123 Hafez 349 Haggard, Rider 327 Hagia Sophia, Istanbul 385 Hahn, Otto 120 Hall of Mirrors, Versailles Palace 199, 211 Ham Fortress 51, 62, 64 Hamburg 112, 115 Hamm 274 Hanau 404 Hansard, Thomas 237 Hartington, Marquis, Spencer Cavendish 245 Hauge, Hans Nielsen 146 Hauptmann, Gerhart 434 Haushofer, Karl 333 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène 5, 86, 87, 113 Hawaii 451 Hawking, Stephen 122 Heidegger, Martin 305 Heidelberg University 442, 445 Heine, Heinrich 60 Heinrich of Prussia (brother of Wilhelm II) 433, 452 Helsinki 383, 384, 386 Henneman, John Bell 435 Henry V (Bourbon pretender) 60 Herod 146 Herodotus 343 Herwegh, Georg 451 Hitler, Adolf 34, 35, 182, 184, 185, 413, 414 Hobhouse, John 375, 376 Hobrecht, James 113 Hoffmann, Heinrich 414 Holocaust Memorial, Berlin 222 Holy Resurrection Church, St. Petersburg 390 Hospice of St.-Marcoul, Reims 399 Howell, George 251 Howick, Lord 246 Hughes, Thomas 407 Hugo, Victor 55, 59 Hull 421 Humboldt, Alexander von 324 Hussein bin Ali of Hejaz 357 Hussein, Saddam 359 Huxley, Thomas Henry 105 Ibrahim Pasha 378 Inglis, Robert 247

Index

Istanbul 356, 372, 373, 382, 385, 387, 390, 392 Ivan IV ‘the Terrible’ 374 Jackson, Andrew 174, 175 Jackson, W. L. 256 Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig 403, 405–408, 410 Jefferson, Thomas 158, 175 Jenner, Edward 108 Jerusalem 344, 351 Jiménez Avenue, Bogotá 474 Johann of Saxony 286, 287 John the Baptist 146, 147 John XIII, Pope 152 Julius, Gustav 271 Kenealy, Edward 249 Kennedy, John F. 185, 266 Kent 147 Keyser, Günther 211 Khrushchev, Nikita 45 Kiel 430, 446 Kingsley, Charles 403, 407 Kingsley, Mary 324 Kinnock, Neil 257 Kitchener, Lord, Herbert 177 Koch, Robert 94, 114–120 Königsplatz (Royal Square), Berlin 212, 214, 220 Konya 378, 392 Kossuth, Lajos 16 Koster & Bial’s Music Hall, New York 453 Kostroma 385 Kuyper, Abraham 165, 169, 176 Labouré, Catherine 144 Lafayette, Marquis de, Gilbert du Motier 60 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 475 Lania, Leo 435, 437 Las Cases, Emmanuel de 58 Lavater, Caspar 415 Lawrence, T. E., ‘of Arabia’ 22, 342, 346, 349, 354–357, 361 Lazzeri, Maria Domenica 138 Le Bas, Philippe 57, 58 Le Bon, Gustave 36, 217 Le Brun, Charles 199 Le Corbusier 123 Leeds 228, 256

499

Lefebvre, Henri 193, 305, 456 Leipzig 282, 409 Leipzig Station, Dresden 287 Lely, Cornelis 114 Leo XIII, Pope 126, 131, 134 Leopold II of Belgium 175, 274, 293, 327, 328 Lepsius, Karl 347 Lesseps, Ferdinand de 94, 114, 118 Liebig, Justus von 120 Liebknecht, Karl 219 Ling, Pehr Henrik 403 Linnaeus, Carl 105 Livingstone, David 324, 346, 360 Lombardi, Mario 481 Lomonosov, Yurj 113 London 15, 20, 61, 65, 102, 108, 112, 113, 142, 151, 167, 178, 183, 222, 237, 253, 271, 291, 315, 321, 323, 383, 441 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 350 López de Mesa, Luis 475 Louis IX of France, ‘Saint Louis’ 72 Louis XI of France 398 Louis XIV of France 1, 14–16, 19, 20, 41, 72, 95, 198, 199, 203, 207, 208, 213, 266, 312, 313, 400, 430 Louis XV of France 313 Louis XVI of France 162, 200–203, 402 Louis XVIII of France 56, 57 Louis-Philippe I of France 51, 59–61, 64, 65, 270 Louisville 433 Lourdes 143, 144 Louvain 120 Louvre Palace, Paris 86, 199, 202, 352, 444 Lowe, Robert 256 Lucy, Henry 244, 245, 248 Ludwig I of Bavaria 102, 270 Luise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Queen of Prussia 260 Lustgarten (royal park), Berlin 280, 282, 294 Luxor 347, 351 Lyautey, Hubert 177 Lyon 56, 58, 74, 85 Macdonald, Ramsay 256, 257 Machiavelli, Niccolò 186 Mackinder, Halford 321, 322 Madrid Park, Cartagena 455, 470 Magdeburg 274, 275, 277

500

Index

Mahan, Alfred Thayer 321, 322 Mahmud II of the Ottoman Empire 364, 368, 376–382, 385, 386 Malus, Étienne-Louis 345 Manchester 16, 228 Mannheim 405 Mannix, Daniel 13–15 Mao Zedong 8, 48, 49 Marchand, Jean-Baptiste 177 Marconi, Guglielmo 115 Marcuse, Ludwig 438 Maria Aleksandrovna, Empress of Russia 390 Marie Antoinette, Queen of France 163 Marienbad 442 Marx, Karl 45, 55, 64, 69, 305 Massmann, Hans Ferdinand 406 Maximilian II of Bavaria 270 May, Franz Anton 404, 405 May, Karl 450 Mazarin, Cardinal, Jules 400 McKinley, William 169, 178 Mecca 348, 352, 355, 357 Medellín 463, 467, 471–473, 476–478, 481 Medina 352 Mehmed Ali Pasha 378 Mendel, Gregor 475 Mercator, Gerhard 310, 337 Mercier, Cardinal, Désiré-Joseph 153 Merimée, Prosper 83 Metternich, Klemens von 271 Michael I of Russia (Michael Romanov) 385 Michael Pavlovitch, Grand Duke 378 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 123 Mill, John Stuart 11, 12 Mills, C. Wright 181 Mirabeau, Count, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti 159, 203 Molière 402 Mollinger, Suitbert 148, 149 Moltke, Helmuth von 280, 293, 381 Monge, Gaspard 345 Montgolfier, Jacques-Étienne 93 Montgolfier, Joseph-Michel 93 Morgan, J. P. 446 Morpeth, Lord, George Howard 248 Moscow 390 Munich 109 Municipal Theater Guillermo Valencia, Popayán 481

Municipal Theater, Cali 481 Municipal Theater, Cartagenal 481 Murad V of the Ottoman Empire 389 Murchison, Roderick 324 Musk, Elon 123 Mussolini, Benito 37, 182, 413, 414 Mustafa Reşid Pasha 382 Nachtegall, Franz 403, 408 Naoroji, Dadhabi 251 Napoleon I (Napoleon Bonaparte) 11, 17, 18, 22, 42, 51–61, 63, 64, 66–68, 72, 73, 79, 80, 83, 84, 100, 101, 131, 132, 159, 205, 222, 263, 268, 282, 299, 317, 343–345, 347, 353, 368, 373, 374, 402, 403, 405, 460 Napoleon II 60 Napoleon III (Louis Napoleon Bonaparte) 5, 17, 18, 42, 44, 46–48, 51–55, 429 – as Louis Napoleon Bonaparte 56–73 – as Napoleon III 42–43, 74–87, 97, 210, 277, 346, 429 Nasser al-Din Shah Qajar of Persia 390 National Mall, Washington D.C. 221 Nelson, Horatio 101, 108 Neue Wache, Berlin 222 Neues Palais, Potsdam 291 New Forest Lodge, Hampshire 142, 143 New York City 13 Niagara Falls 433 Nice 53, 84, 442 Nicholas I of Russia 364, 376, 377, 379, 384, 385, 387 Nicholas II of Russia 43, 385 Niebuhr, Carsten 351 Nieuwenhuis, Ferdinand Domela 166 Nile River 324, 348, 361 Nimmersatt 451 Nixon, Richard 1, 150, 185 Northcliffe, Lord, Alfred Harmsworth 167 Notre Dame, Paris 71, 72, 76, 82, 84, 86 Nottingham Castle 225 Nova Scotia 314 Núñez, Rafael 461 Nuremberg 48, 282 O’Connor, T. P. 248 Ollivier, Emile 84 Olympia Stadium, West Berlin 151 Opernplatz (Opera Square), Berlin 280

Index

Osman of the Ottoman Empire 371, 385 Ospina, Tulio 462, 479, 480 Ostende 274 Ostwald, Wilhelm 120 Paddington Station, London 291 Palais Bourbon, Paris 205, 212 Palais de Tuileries, Paris 56, 72, 86, 202, 203, 205 Palais Garnier, Paris Opera 86 Palais Luxemburg, Paris 205 Palais-Royal, Paris 203 Palgrave, William Gifford 342, 346 Palmerston, Lord, Henry John Temple 174, 242, 243, 246, 247, 252 Palmyra 360 Pantheon, Paris 102, 221 Paris 5, 54–56, 60, 61, 65–74, 82, 83, 86, 87, 109, 113, 144, 199, 201–206, 215, 282, 314, 347, 349, 377, 383, 401, 430, 441, 443–445, 447, 450, 451, 466 Pariser Platz, Berlin 280 Parliament Building (Bundeshaus), Bonn 223, 224 Parliament House (Riksdag), Stockholm 215 Parliament House, Canberra 216 Pasteur, Louis 94, 111, 114, 115, 117, 119, 120 Paul I of Russia 372, 373 Paulskirche (parliament building), Frankfurt 206–209 Pazardzhik 386 Pearson, Arthur 167 Pecci, Cardinal, Joachim 125 Peel, Robert 243, 253 Pellevoisin 144 Penzance 13 Pericles 39 Persian Gulf 330 Peter I, ‘the Great’ 374, 379, 390 Peters, Carl 327, 328 Petit, Jean-Martin 68 Petrie, Hilde 350 Petrie, William Matthew Flinders 350, 351 Phelps, William Lyon 443, 445 Philip II of France 344 Philip IV of Spain 198 Philippe d’Orléans 401 Pier 60, New York City waterfront 13 Pio Nono, Pope 133

501

Pitt, William 317 Pius IX, Pope 125, 133, 135 Pius VI, Pope 131, 132 Pius VII, Pope 131, 132 Pius XI, Pope 126 Pius XII, Pope 125, 134, 152 Place de la Concorde, Paris 73, 347 Planck, Max 120 Platz der Republik (Plaza of the Republic), Berlin 220 Pont Neuf, Paris 450 Popayán 464, 481 Port of Grimsby, docks 427 Portsmouth Royal Dockyard 101 Potsdam 274, 275, 291 Pouilly-le-Fort 115 Prague 406 Prittwitz, Karl Ludwig von 270 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 54 Prussian House of Lords (Preussisches Herrenhaus), Berlin 210, 211 Prussian State Opera 220 Pugin, Augustus 226 Putin, Vladimir 412 Puttkamer, Robert von 293 Pyrmont 437 Quito 464 Radowitz, Joseph von 272 Ramsey, William Mitchell 349 Rasmussen Nordgården, Knut, ‘Wise Knut’ (VisKnut) 146–148 Rathenau, Walther 222, 223 Ratzel, Friedrich 322 Ravenna 131 Reade, Winwood 325 Redmond, William 245 Regensburg 102 Reichstag (parliament building), Berlin 210–221 Rhineland 34, 434, 441, 445, 450, 452 Rhodes, Cecil 175, 303 Richard the Lionheart 344 Rigaud, Hyacinthe 41 Ringelnatz, Joachim 421 Riviera 450 Robespierre, Maximilien 57 Rome 84, 132, 133, 135, 396

502

Index

Röntgen, Wilhelm 120 Roon, Albrecht von 280 Roosevelt, Alice 433 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 184, 185 Roosevelt, Theodore 17, 158, 165, 168–171, 178, 452 Rosellini, Ippolito 347 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 162 Royal Exchange, London 427 Royal Institution, Westminster 107, 108 Royal Palace, Berlin 260, 280, 213, 214, 218, 219, 222, 430 Royal Porcelain Manufacture, Berlin 211 Rudolf of Habsburg 385 Rue du Bac, Paris 144 Ruggles, Henry Stoddard 442 Russell, Lord, John 247, 253 Ryurik 390 Saarinen, Eero 123 Sagan, Carl 122 Saint Anthony of Padua 149 Saint Augustine 30 Saint Paul 27, 29–31, 137, 150 Saint Peter 126, 134 Saint-Arnaud, Jacques Leroy 74 Saint-Hilaire, Étienne 345 Saint-Léger-Vauban 97 Saint-Simon, Henri de 54 Saladin of Egypt and Syria 353 Salisbury, Lord, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil 176, 250, 252 Salle de Manège, Tuileries Palace, Paris 202 Salle des Machines, Tuileries Palace, Paris 203–205, 224 San Juan Hill, Cuba 178 Sánchez de Iriarte, Alberto 474 Sand, George 64, 71 Sanssouci Palace, Potsdam 275, 291 Schaepman, Herman 166 Schauffler, Robert Haven 446 Scheidemann, Philipp 219 Schellendorf, Paul Bronsart von 293 Scherenberg, Christian Friedrich 280, 282 Scherl, August 167 Schiele, Egon 415 Schiller, Friedrich 45, 442 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich 222 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 445

Schlegel, Friedrich 445 Schmeidel, Viktor Ritter von 429 Schneider, Louis 273 Schomburgk, Robert 318 Schreber, Moritz 408, 409 Schubert, Franz 434 Science Museum, South Kensington, London 108 Scott, Sir Walter 450 Seidel, Ina 438 Seidel, Karl Theodor 280 Selim II of the Ottoman Empire 372 Selim III of the Ottoman Empire 373, 374, 379 Sender, Toni 437 Serra, Maria Rosa 138 Seurre, Emile 60 Siberia 315 Siegesallee (Avenue of Victory), Berlin 421 Silesian Station, Dresden 289 Silicone Valley 123 Silistre/Silistra 382 Simson, Eduard von 211 Skłodowska-Curie, Marie 118, 119 Smith, John 314 Smith, Joseph 17 Society House, Helsinki 383, 384 Söğüt 385 Soiron, Alexander von 208 Soubirous, Bernadette 144 South Kensington Museum, London 108 Speer, Albert 121 Speke, John Hanning 324, 325, 327, 348, 361 Spencer, Herbert 106 Spencer, Lord 248 St. Denis, Ruth 410 St. Helena 57, 58, 62 St. Louis 433 St. Mark’s Square, Venice 450 St. Paul’s Cathedral, London 104 St. Peter’s Square, Rome 126, 149 St. Petersburg 131, 376, 377, 390 St. Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster Palace, London 226 Stalin, Joseph 45, 48, 334 Stalingrad 35 Stanley, Henry Morton 177, 324, 360 Stead, W. T. 169, 183 Stendhal 59

Index

Stephenson, Robert 108 Strachey, George 290 Strasbourg 61 Strauss, Richard 45 Stresemann, Gustav 222 Stuttgart 3, 428 Sue, Eugène 65 Suez Canal 94, 353, 359 Süleyman I, ‘the Magnificent,’ of the Ottoman Empire 372 Şumnu/Shumen 381 Sunday, Billy 149, 151 Svatsum 146 Swiss alps 441, 452 Tacitus 343, 405 Taganrog 376 Tarascon 86 Taylor, Frederick W. 122 Temple, Richard 250 Ternovo/Veliko Tarnovo 388 Tessenow, Heinrich 222 Thatcher, Margaret 1 The Hague 274 Theater Bolívar, Medellín 481 Theater Colón, Bogotá 481 Theater Junin, Medellín 481 Thérèse of Lisieux 130 Thiers, Adolphe 60, 64 Thom, John, ‘Canterbury Messiah’ 147, 148 Thucydides 39 Tiergarten (royal park), Berlin 213, 214, 218, 421, 446 Tintern Abbey 450 Tirpitz, Alfred von 178 Tocqueville, Alexis de 67 Toledo 433 Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe 85 Topkapı Palace, Istanbul 376, 378 Tower, Charlemagne 446 Town Hall, Birmingham 228 Town Hall, Leeds 228 Trafalgar Square, London 108, 151 Tristan, Flora 54 Troelstra, Pieter Jelles 166, 176 Tuileries Palace, Paris 56, 72, 86, 202, 203, 205 Turing, Alan 120 Tutankhamun 351

503

Twain, Mark 432, 440 Tyrš, Miroslav 403, 406 United States Capitol, Washington D.C. 151, 205, 215 Universal Exhibition, Paris 85 Unter den Linden, Berlin 279, 280, 291–294, 430, 444, 446, 447 Valence (citadel) 131, 132 Valley of the Kings 351 Vatican City State 126, 127, 130, 132, 134, 135 Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre de 19, 95–97, 102 Vendôme Column, Paris 60, 73 Venice 342, 450 Verne, Jules 114 Versailles Palace 198–201, 211, 213, 215, 400, 401 Victor Emmanuel II of Italy 85 Victoria, Queen, of the United Kingdom 14–16, 39, 43, 85, 173, 179, 427, 442, 452 Victoria Tower, London 226 Vidal Pacheco, Gonzalo 477 Viel Castel, Horace de 83 Vienna 383, 415, 437 Vietnam Memorial, Washington D.C. 222 Villaume, Peter 408 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène 72, 76, 84 Virchow, Rudolf 19, 94, 114–117, 119, 120 Virgin Mary 130, 133, 138, 140, 144 Voltaire 162 Vyborg 384 Wade, John 238 Wagner, Richard 3, 434, 446 Walhalla, Bavaria 102, 120, 121 Wallot, Paul 214 Washington D.C. 151, 205, 221, 222 Washington, George 20, 159, 163 Watt, James 19, 101, 102 Weber, Max 7, 8, 17, 18, 27, 28, 30–33, 36–41, 43, 48–50, 91, 93, 117, 118, 128, 136, 137, 150, 156, 186, 187, 230, 303, 307, 395, 397, 412, 413 Weimar (city) 442 Wellington, Duke, Arthur Wellesley 101, 238 Wembley Stadium, London 151 Westminster Abbey, London 101

504

Index

Westminster Hall, London 291 Westminster, Palace of, London 194, 206, 216, 221, 225, 241, 256, 291 Wetherell, Charles 245 Wilberforce Monument, Hull 421 Wilbur, Ray Lyman 443 Wilhelm I of Prussia, German Emperor 14, 21, 179, 259, 263–265, 298–300, 417, 418 – Prince of Prussia (to 1861) 270–277 – King of Prussia (to 1871) 259–260, 277–284 – German Emperor (to 1888) 14, 213, 284–296 Wilhelm II of Prussia, German Emperor 4, 14, 17, 43, 46, 47, 116, 171, 172, 178, 179, 181, 216, 219, 260, 263, 265, 291, 293, 295–299, 420, 429–433, 439, 440, 445–453 Wilhelm II of Württemberg 4, 428, 429 Wilhelmina of the Netherlands 171 Wilkes, John 233, 236, 247 Willem I of the Netherlands 277 Willem II of the Netherlands 277

William IV of the United Kingdom 290, 291 Wilson, F. M. Huntington 443 Wilson, Woodrow 170 Windham, William 235 Windsor Castle, Berkshire 291 Windthorst, Ludwig 212 Wordsworth, William 450 Wrangel, Friedrich von 280 Wright, Orville 93, 115 Wright, Wilbur 93, 115 Wundt, Wilhelm 121 Wyvill, Christopher 234 Young, Thomas 347 Zeppelin, Ferdinand von 93, 111, 115, 117 Zeughaus (Armory), Berlin 276, 294 Zola, Emile 85 Zudersee 114 Zwinger Museum, Dresden 442, 445