French History

O’Brien,, Laura

doi: 10.1093/fh/craa026pmid: N/A

The July Monarchy (1830–1848) is often seen as a golden age for French visual culture, as the liberalization of censorship, technological innovations and a growing consumer market for printed images combined to create a boom in illustrated periodicals, book illustration, portraiture and fashion plates. In her recent book, Jillian Lerner argues that this ‘graphic culture’ was integral to the emergence of modernity in nineteenth-century Paris. Graphic Culture focuses on the work of a generation of artists, illustrators and editors, who helped to create a world whose saturation by visual culture has many similarities to our own. The visual world created by these cultural producers during the July Monarchy, Lerner states, ‘actively shaped the manner in which Parisian modernity was understood’. Although Lerner’s book features the work of a wide range of artists and illustrators, including Daumier, Bertall, Grandville and Traviès, she is particularly interested in Gavarni and Achille Devéria. The diversity of their artistic output, spanning fashion plates, caricature, book illustration and more, reflects the heterogeneity of Lerner’s case studies. In this respect, as Lerner notes, Graphic Culture builds on interdisciplinary research that emphasizes the intersections between art, publishing and consumer culture in Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century: for example, Hazel Hahn’s Scenes of Parisian Modernity and, more recently, Patricia Mainardi’s transnational study of nineteenth-century popular illustration, Another World. Beginning with a biographical overview that establishes the image and self-representation of the artist in the period, each chapter of Graphic Culture uses a specific genre or visual corpus as a case study, through which Lerner skilfully draws out connections to the wider cultural and social context. Chapter five uses Gavarni’s theatrical illustrations, costume designs and sketches of carnival festivities as a starting point for an exploration of gender, sexuality, performance and spectatorship. In chapter four, Lerner focuses on Achille Devéria’s Les Heures du jour (The Hours of the Day), a series of eighteen lithographs depicting a day in the life of a young, well-off Parisian woman. Echoing the medieval vogue of the time, Lerner describes Devéria’s collection as a ‘modern book of hours’, ‘a prized possession that outlines an orthodox partitioning of daily life into recommended rituals and modes of attention’. Through Les Heures du jour, Lerner examines fashion, artistic sociability, and gender norms in the July Monarchy. This latter theme is of particular importance in Graphic Culture: the world of nineteenth-century illustration and visual culture is conventionally seen as male, centred on male cultural producers and primarily (it is assumed) catering to predominantly male readers and viewers. Yet, Lerner emphasizes, women were an integral part of this new visual world, whether as subject matter or consumers. Her book, therefore, emphasizes the ‘importance of female collaborators and viewers’ in the production and consumption of the material she examines. In this respect, Graphic Culture offers a salient reminder of the importance of gender as a consideration in the study of nineteenth-century visual culture. Paris is integral to Graphic Culture as both nexus of artistic innovation and subject matter, as Lerner shows in the chapter on the ‘panoramic literature’ of the city that enjoyed considerable success in the first half of the nineteenth century. Lerner focuses on the work of Gavarni and Bertall in designing and illustrating Pierre-Jules Hetzel’s 1844 work Le Diable à Paris (The Devil in Paris), including Gavarni’s famous frontispiece depicting Hetzel as the demon Flammèche, standing astride a map of Paris. Even as the concept of modernity was emerging in the city, the idea of ‘modern Paris’ had become its own ‘cross-platform category’ and ‘a magnet of interest for the local reading public’, generating anthology works like Le Diable à Paris where artists and writers collaborated with the aim of making the modern city intelligible, through the interplay of text and image, to its inhabitants and visitors. As Lerner notes, illustrated ‘panoramic literature’ sought to move beyond a mere statistical survey of population or descriptions of monuments to offer a sense of the physiognomy of the contemporary city. Readers were offered a portrait of a changing Paris delivered through visual culture, ‘the medium of everyday experience’ in a world where visual print culture was now a part of everyday life. In a striking passage, Lerner likens the static, printed pages of an illustrated book to the early moving picture technologies of the period: ‘a kinetic viewing device akin to…a magic lantern show, a phantasmagoria, or moving panorama’. The stream of images that created the new, visual world evoked in Graphic Culture clearly has contemporary ramifications. As Lerner concludes, nineteenth-century visual culture helped to establish the context for our own ‘digital culture of celebrity, publicity, and performativity’, where images are rapidly circulated, recycled, manipulated and decontextualized. Graphic Culture makes a fascinating case for the vital importance of understanding the hyper-visual contemporary age in historical perspective. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Study of French History. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)