Chapter 4Recalled to LifePhantasmagoria as the History of the French Revolution

Phantasmagoria as History Show

One Paris evening in December 1792, almost exactly a month before crowds would gather to witness the execution of King Louis XVI in the Place de la Révolution, a mysterious exhibition made its first appearance. At the Hôtel de Chartres, a scenic fifteen-minute stroll from the Place de la Révolution along the northern edge of the Tuileries Garden, audience members could pay three livres to enter a room draped with black curtains and lit by a single funereal lamp. At five o’clock and again at nine o’clock, the lamp was extinguished and ghosts appeared. They moved through the shadowy darkness toward the audience and then, just as spectators thought they might reach out and touch them, they disappeared into thin air. Whether any Parisians doubled up on January 21 to see Louis XVI executed in the morning and ghosts rise at night is unknown to us now. What is clear, however, is that the French writers and showmen responsible for popularizing the phantasmagoria over the course of the decade imagined its astonishingly vivid ghosts as a kind of historical return of the repressed issuing from the authoritarian violence and repression of the French Revolution's Reign of Terror. As Sébastian Mercier would later write, “The ghosts and specters that were conjured in the theaters and that we took pleasure in contemplating were the reflection of revolutionary days.”¹⁰

The phantasmagoria was a nationalist history show from its very beginnings. Paul Philidor launched the exhibition in Paris in the winter of 1792, just three months after the overthrow of the monarchy, as “PHANTASMAGORIE, apparition of Ghosts and invocation of the Shades of famous Persons.”¹¹ Phantasmagorie, or phantasmagoria, was Philidor's neologism from the Greek roots phantasma (“image,” “phantom,” “apparition”) and agora (“assembly”), a term that seems to offer a spectral equivalent to the newly formed National Constituent Assembly by defining the show as “an assembly of ghosts.” Among the “famous persons” that Philidor presented to his audiences was Mirabeau, the father of the French Revolution, who rose from the floor as a glowing white wraith and slowly grew in size as he advanced toward the audience. The phantasmagoria thus presented itself as a sort of ghostly national parade, one that reflected the unfolding events of the revolution by representing its martyrs. Philidor's show lasted a scant few months and then was shuttered, probably because his historical specters fell afoul of the newly founded Revolutionary Tribunal at the height of the Reign of Terror. One possible explanation for Philidor's disappearance, offered by the wax sculpture artist Madame Tussaud, says that he was imprisoned for projecting an image of Louis XVI shortly after the king's death.¹² The story points to the discursive relationship between the phantasmagoria's virtual images, the optical resurrection of the dead, and historical recurrence.

Five years after Philidor's phantasmagoria closed, a showman by the name of Étienne-Gaspard Robertson announced his own version of the show. Born Robert—his Anglicized last name was a bid for cosmopolitan prestige typical of nineteenth-century showmen and magicians—Robertson had come to Paris from his native Belgium in 1791, abandoning the ecclesiastical career set out for him by his father to study physics and painting. He worked as a tutor in an aristocratic family during the Reign of Terror, a period during which he later claimed to have invented the phantasmagoria, identifying himself as a new species of “physicist-philosopher” whose exhibitions aimed “to destroy the enchanted world that owes its existence solely to the magic wand of fanaticism.”¹³ In truth, he was an immensely successful plagiarist. He copied every distinguishing element of Philidor's show, from its name to its technological design, while crediting himself with inventing a legitimate scientific art of apparitions. In the winter of 1798, the Parisian press announced “Fantasmagoria at the Pavilion of the rue de l’Échiquier, by cit. E.-G. Robertson: apparitions of Specters, Phantoms, and Revenants, as they must and could have appeared throughout history, in every place and in every nation.”¹⁴ It opened at the Pavilion de l’Échiquier, a small theater that held sixty people, to wild success.¹⁵ In an uncanny doubling of the story told about Philidor, Robertson's show was also shut down by the police after a report surfaced that he was asked by an audience member to show the ghost of Louis XVI. Once again, the playful and metaphorical association between the phantasmagoria's virtual images and ghosts, between projection and resurrection, made the show the target of state censorship.

To understand how this nexus of virtual images, ghosts, French nationalism, and historical resurrection emerged, we must look closely at the apparatus of the phantasmagoria itself. The historian Mervyn Heard calls the phantasmagoria “the secret life of the magic lantern,” a playful phrase that captures the show's use of a comparatively commonplace optical technology for the startling and mysterious illusion that ghosts were being conjured right before the audience's eyes.¹⁶ The phantasmagoria involved the projection of glass slides in a dark room, but unlike other lantern shows, it made a “secret” of its technology. The slides were rear-projected from a mobile magic lantern hidden behind a curtain, and the complete darkness of the theater disarticulated the luminous images in space, creating the illusion that these ghostly virtual images were moving about the room. The secrecy of the phantasmagoria was more an aesthetic than an epistemic quality of the show; its use of a hidden magic lantern was well known. Rather than mere trickery or deception, the phantasmagoria embodied what Theodor Adorno would later call nineteenth-century art's triumph of illusion through the obscuring of the traces of production.¹⁷ It worked by creating an immersive virtual environment sculpted out of light and shadow, one in which ghosts seemed to soar through the room without the barrier of a stage or screen to separate them from the audience.

At the heart of the show was the use of a hidden magic lantern mounted on wheels (figure 4.1). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most magic lantern shows used front projection, with both the magic lantern and projectionist visible to the audience. The phantasmagoria used rear projection, with the magic lantern projecting onto the screen from behind it. The magic lantern could be rolled toward and away from the screen with an adjustable focus so that the projected images would remain in focus at any distance, creating the illusion that the images were moving. When the lantern was moved away from the screen, the images seemed to grow; when it was moved toward the screen, they seemed to shrink. The screen was also concealed in the complete darkness of the theater; Robertson even designed a perfectly transparent screen that he hid behind a black curtain until the lights were extinguished. The backgrounds of the slides were treated with lampblack, which removed the usual halo of light surrounding the projected images of the magic lantern and dissolved them into the unvariegated blackness of the theater. The combination of an imperceptible screen and the imperceptible boundaries of the image “had the effect of giving the ghosts a kind of independence,” as if they were autonomous beings.¹⁸ It was impossible for audiences to locate where the images really were in space: they seemed to hover and loom, approaching the audience and then retreating, appearing out of nowhere and disappearing into nothing.

Figure 4.1. Robertson's rolling magic lantern. E. G. Robertson, Mémoires récreatifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques, Librairie encyclopédique de Roret, 1840.

The aesthetic experience of the phantasmagoria was therefore one of radical proximity and intimacy between images and spectators, ghosts and living beings—what Thomas Elsaesser calls “an ambient form of spectacle and event.”¹⁹ Unlike the cinema, the phantasmagoria does not confine images to a frame. It not only creates virtual images but also virtual space, effecting a perceptual displacement of its images from the screen that supports them to the air itself. Robertson's practice of projecting on smoke made this displacement even more explicit, creating the illusion that the images were hazy floating ghosts, spectrally embodied, at once immaterial and solid. Noam Elcott calls this aesthetic “the assembly of humans and images,” a phrase that neatly revises the meaning of phantasmagoria —“an assembly of ghosts”—to reflect the way the illusion configures this spatial intimacy between spectators and projections.²⁰ Yet by creating the effect of virtual images surging toward the audience or suspended in space, the phantasmagoria did more than simply assemble humans and images in the same room. For comparison, Pepper's Ghost projected virtual images of the human body in a room with audience members, but it relied on a firm spatial separation between ghosts and spectators. The pane of glass that projected images of hidden actors onto the stage was also a barrier, imperceptibly but nevertheless physically separating stage and audience, spatially demarcating the world of spirits as part of the theatrical illusion and therefore distinct from the real world. The phantasmagoria allowed ghosts and spectators to gather even more closely together; the illusion that the images are surging into the audience violated the physical separation we associate with screen aesthetics.²¹ It challenged the boundary between ghost and human, image and referent.

The shared space in which humans and images assemble—at once the real space of the theater and the virtual space constructed by the apparently mobile and unbounded spectral images—also compelled an uncanny sense of time. After all, the phantasmagoria does not just project images but a specific kind of image that represents and simulates a ghost. This was evident in two ways. First, while the lantern slides depicted varied types of material, including comic and pastoral scenes, the dominant subjects were dead historical figures, ghosts rising from graves, and women turning into skeletons (figures 4.2 and 4.3). Robertson specialized in adapting gothic painting and literature for the phantasmagoria, such as his representation of the Bloody Nun from Matthew Lewis's novel The Monk, and in trick slides that allowed him to project movement and visual transformation, like a dead man emerging from a tomb full of flames.²² Second, both Philidor and Robertson presented the phantasmagoria as a demystified séance, which positioned it within a genealogy of necromantic ghost raisings. To be clear, the phantasmagoria never claimed to be a ghost raising but rather an entertaining representation of a ghost raising. Nevertheless, by assembling the living with apparently free-floating and metamorphosing virtual images of the dead, the phantasmagoria anchored the spectator perceptually and sensorially in the present while seeming to bring them into contact with the past.²³ In the phantasmagoria, time collapses—it becomes as malleable, as strangely sculpted, as space.

Figure 4.2. Engraving of Robertson's phantasmagoria. E. G. Robertson, Mémoires récreatifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques, Librairie encyclopédique de Roret, 1840.

Figure 4.3. Phantasmagoria lantern slide. Courtesy of the National Science and Media Museum/Science and Society Picture Library.

The Parisian phantasmagoria's assembly of ghosts and spectators, images and audiences, made it an apt technological medium for producing national consciousness and articulating a shared national identity. The show reflected the violence of the revolution. Its mobile, metamorphosing specters seemed to reverse-engineer temporarily the mass death of the Terror and the revolutionary wars, replaying the birth of the republic as a history of collective loss. At the same time, the show's creation of a space and time in which the living and the dead can assemble turned it into a spectral counterpart to the nationalist populism of the revolution. I want to be clear that when I describe the phantasmagoria's nationalist aesthetics, I am not suggesting that the phantasmagoria was an authorized expression of republican nationalism or that it was endorsed by the government. The phantasmagoria offered a new medium for imagining and visualizing the effects of the Terror on individuals and the nation at large precisely at the moment when explicit representations of the Terror were censored by the authorities.²⁴ As Ronen Steinberg argues, the trope of ghosts returning from the dead was pervasive in the aftermath of the Terror precisely because of the political project of historical erasure that sought to remove evidence of mass killings from public view.²⁵

My argument that the phantasmagoria acted as a virtual theater for nationalist history and identity is prefigured in an oft-quoted 1798 editorial written for the republican journal L’Ami des lois by François Martin Poultier d’Elmotte, a member of the National Constituent Assembly, about a night at Robertson's show. Often mistaken by scholars as a reliable eyewitness account of the phantasmagoria, it is actually a political satire that uses the show's apparent resurrections of revolutionary historical figures to portray the phantasmagoria as a riposte to the repressive logic of the Terror.²⁶ Take the opening line of the essay: “A decimvir has said that only the dead do not return, but go to Robertson's and you will see that the dead return like anyone else” (“Un decimvir a dit qu’il n’y avait que les morts qui ne revenaient pas; allez chez Robertson, vous verrez que les morts reviennent comme les autres”).²⁷ This line has been mistranslated in English for over 150 years and, as a result, its political context has been lost.²⁸ The term “decimvir,” or member of the commission established by the Roman Republic for the codifying of laws, refers to Bertrand Barère, a powerful Jacobin member of the National Convention and champion of the Reign of Terror known for his memorable aphorisms. “Only the dead do not return” (il n’y a que les morts qui ne reviennent pas) is one such phrase. Originally from a speech to the National Convention of 1794, it formed part of Barère's call for a stronger national defense: he argued that France should have annihilated British troops so they would not “return” in future conflicts. As Barère would later complain in his memoirs, however, the phrase was also taken out of context during that same period as a justification for the massacres of the Terror.²⁹ This new application was not exactly a stretch: Barère was a founding member of the Committee on Public Safety and responsible for the propaganda that condemned many aristocrats to the guillotine.

Poultier d’Elmotte's use of the phrase “only the dead do not return” plays on these layered meanings. It depicts Robertson's phantasmagoria not just as a return of the dead but as a refutation of the Jacobin justification for the mass violence of the Terror—that the only way to ensure the past does not return is to murder it. Robertson answers Barère's ne reviennent pas with his revenants, as if to say that murder cannot kill history—it always returns. This idea comes back later in the essay, when the author claims that Barère and his fellow Jacobin Pierre-Joseph Cambon are in the audience. This is impossible—both men were in exile when the essay was written. They were thrown out of the National Assembly after the Thermidorean Reaction, the parliamentary revolt against Jacobin rule that saw the overthrow of Robespierre. Readers would thus have understood the editorial not as an eyewitness report but as a witty parable of internecine republican battles during the Reign of Terror. For instance, Poultier d’Elmotte describes Robertson throwing the proceedings of the National Convention of May 31, 1793, onto the fire—the date when Jacobins purged the more moderate Girondists from the revolutionary leadership—to conjure ghosts “in bloody veils” that encircle Barère and Cambon until they run screaming out of the theater.³⁰ There is no evidence that Robertson ever performed such theatrics. Instead, the author creates a fictional scene that replays the events of the Thermidorean Reaction by imagining the phantasmagoria as a counterforce to the violent authoritarian radicalism of the Jacobins. He shows Barère surrounded by the ghosts of those he has murdered—ghosts that, counter to his own claim, return like anyone else. Those purged by Barère now purge him.

In spite of its fictional elements, the editorial's political commentary relies on a sophisticated understanding of the phantasmagoria's medium-specific visual and technological effects. More than just identifying the show's virtual images with the revolutionary dead, Poultier d’Elmotte uses the phantasmagoria's capacity to create a space and time in which people and ghosts assemble as a metaphor for an imaginary form of national assembly that would challenge the state policy of censorship to engage in a collective process of political repair. The victims of the Terror are revealed to Barère and Cambon by the “almost universal acclaim” (une acclamation presque génerale) of the “assembly,” diction that turns the audience into a political body whose cheers constitute a democratic action.³¹ The victims themselves are a “mob of shadows” (la foule des ombres), or shadow assembly, who join the assembly of the living to run the Jacobins out of the theater.³² In this imaginary, the phantasmagoria is a political assembly in which the dead and living work together to form a collective that can overcome historical repression.

Robertson preserved Poultier d’Elmotte's editorial on the phantasmagoria by reprinting it in its entirety more than thirty years later in Mémoires récreatifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques (1831), his two-volume memoir of his scientific exploits. He considered it an important part of the history of the phantasmagoria because he believed that it was responsible for the police shutting down his show. Toward the end of the article, Poultier d’Elmotte wrote that an audience member asked Robertson to conjure the ghost of Louis XVI. It was in response to this claim, Robertson believed, that his show was closed and his equipment confiscated later that year. Beyond its value as a historical artifact, it is clear that Robertson favored the article. While he recognized it as “almost entirely a work of the imagination,” it neatly complemented the account of the phantasmagoria that Robertson developed in his memoir.³³ His story about the invention and popularization of the phantasmagoria emphasized its use of gothic aesthetics and optical magic to bring the repressed histories of the monarchy and the early years of the French republic to life through the conjuring of ghosts.

Volume I of Mémoires récreatifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques is an anecdotal history of the French Revolution—a narrative of an Enlightenment hero's scientific and artistic triumphs during and after the dark days of violence and unrest. The phantasmagoria is his apotheosis, an invention that he credits as a source of enlightenment for a superstitious and uneducated public even as he clearly revels in its aura of the supernatural. For instance, Robertson echoes Poultier d’Elmotte's language when he celebrates his phantasmagoria as a “kingdom of the dead” that turns the theater into a portal between the ordinary world and an otherworld of ghosts and skeletons.³⁴ This gothic aesthetic can be understood within the framework of rational magic that I have called the “pedagogy of disenchantment,” exemplified in the scientific treatises and showmen's exposés I discussed in chapter 1, such as David Brewster's Letters on Natural Magic (1832) and Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin's Confidences d’un prestidigateur (1858). Mémoires récreatifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques shares with both Brewster's treatise and Robert-Houdin's memoir a conviction that even the most supernatural-seeming visual illusions and technological magic possess a rationalizing pedagogy that will liberate audiences from base superstition. Much of the volume is taken up with narrating the history and technology of the phantasmagoria, with Robertson scrubbing Philidor's existence from the historical record and claiming for himself—at times defensively—full credit as the illusion's singular inventor. At the same time, Robertson develops an account of the historical and affective relationship between the French Revolution and the phantasmagoria by constructing the phantasmagoria's technologically mediated encounter with the dead as a virtual haunting that serves the purpose of historical representation. By appearing to bring the dead back to life, the phantasmagoria enables audiences to experience the suppressed historical past of the ancien régime and the Terror as present.

Playful allusions to historical resurrection coursed through Robertson's phantasmagoria. The show was divided into two parts, the first representing “imaginary specters” and the second “known shadows.”³⁵ The latter included a combination of historical figures like Mirabeau, Henry IV, and Voltaire and audience requests, with Robertson adapting a technique first used by the German necromancer Johann Schiller of inviting audience members to submit in advance detailed requests for “ghosts” that they wished to see and then rapidly commissioning portraits on glass slides. The show ordinarily culminated with a climactic apparition that reflected “some event of the day”; examples included Robespierre hit by lightning as he climbs out of his tomb and the crowning of Napoleon beneath a star bearing the words “18 Brumaire.”³⁶ The spatial illusion of the bright moving images soaring through the dark room styled these “known ghosts” as temporary resurrections of the dead, the lantern's mobility turning the projections into, in Robertson's words, “the veritable proceedings of ghosts.”³⁷ This imaginary of historical resurrection was enhanced by Robertson's incorporation of galvanic demonstrations into his show. Galvanism, which Robertson called “a new fluid . . . which temporarily restores movement to bodies which have ceased to live,” was part of his earliest concept for the phantasmagoria and served a dual function.³⁸ It established the phantasmagoria within the genre of the scientific lecture-demonstration rather than that of the necromantic séance, all the while “planting subliminal messages” about the reanimation of the dead “in the minds of his audience.”³⁹ Spectators watched the showman first apply an electrical current to the legs of dead frogs to make them twitch as if alive, and then unfurl phantoms and revenants. The galvanic demonstration and the projection of “known shadows” mirrored each other, both “temporarily restor[ing] movement to bodies which have ceased to live.” Audiences might rightly ask, as David J. Jones puts it, “If dead frogs could move again, could Robespierre rise?”⁴⁰

As we know, this question really was asked—not about Robespierre but instead about Louis XVI. After a temporary exile in Bordeaux while his show was closed down by police, Robertson launched a new and improved Parisian phantasmagoria that seemed calculated to defy state censorship by making the metaphoric association between his optical ghosts and historical resurrection even more explicit. Instead of appearing at the Pavilion de l’Échiquier, Robertson moved his exhibition to a larger and more dramatic location: the Couvent des Capucines, or Capuchin convent. Occupied by the Order of the Capuchin Poor Clares, the Couvent des Capucines was built in 1602 by Henry IV to house the remains of Queen Louise de Lorraine. In 1698, it became the site of Place Vendôme, constructed by Louis XIV, who rebuilt the convent as part of his renovations. The convent was abandoned in 1790 after the National Constituent Assembly seized the properties and lands held by the Catholic Church, and later it was used to interrogate perceived royalists, including Robertson.⁴¹ In 1793, the National Assembly renamed the square Place des Piques, after the pikes used to impale the heads of victims of the guillotine during the Reign of Terror.

By staging the phantasmagoria anew at the Couvent des Capucines, Robertson turned it into what Jones calls “the first totally self-contained entertainment.”⁴² Although the architectural style was Baroque, the crumbling ruins and garden studded with the tombstones of dead nuns fit in with the gothic aesthetics of the show. In the dark of night, audience members had to cross the garden and walk among the graves to reach the two-story cloisters that Robertson had rented. They entered a long corridor painted with fantastical images; passed into the salon de physique, where Robertson now housed his demonstrations of galvanism; and then opened a door decorated with Egyptian symbols to reach the theater. Not only was the phantasmagoria now an immersive and site-specific experience, but the site itself also associated the spectacle of optical projection and its imaginary of ghostly resurrection with Catholic religious belief. At the same time, the convent embodied the revolutionary history that Robertson's slides portrayed. The convent was not only built during the ancien régime, a monument to its splendor, but it was also associated with the violent excesses of the revolutionary republic. In this space, the phantasmagoria became a site-specific performance of historical resurrection that was meant to exploit the audience's lived historical experience of the Terror as part of its affective charge.

In Mémoires récreatifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques, Robertson portrayed the phantasmagoria's optical ghosts as emanating from the convent's material traces of the ancien régime and making visible the convent's historical connection to the mass violence of the Terror. He begins by attempting to justify his choice of site as part of the rationalizing project of the phantasmagoria. To replace blunt credulity and fear of ghosts with philosophical skepticism and disenchantment, Robertson claims that he must first inspire in his audience “a kind of religious terror,” for which “a vast chapel in the middle of a cloister” is the ideal location.⁴³ However, he goes on to specify that the cloister not only inspires religious contemplation but also evokes the historical memory of the revolutionary exhumations. In 1793, the National Convention ordered the exhumation and destruction of ancient royal tombs, the majority of which were in the basilica of St. Denis, a shocking ritual meant to consolidate the new republic symbolically.⁴⁴ The cadavers were deposited in a trench and covered with quicklime; those that were not already pure ash, as the most ancient were, were dismembered and corroded. Robertson claims that the Capuchin convent, which held the remains of Louise de Lorraine, inspired memories of these exhumations, waxing poetic about “the tombs expelled from this sanctuary, as they had been from all the temples, from all the convents, and which we had seen piled up by the hundreds on the steps of the church squares.” These memories conspired with “the ancient belief in shadows” to make it seem as if the optical ghosts he projected issued “from real sepulchers” and fluttered around the “mortal remains which they had animated.”⁴⁵ In other words, Robertson imagines his Capuchin phantasmagoria as an exhumation and resurrection of the dead. Rather than trying to convince his audiences that they are witnessing a supernatural event, he describes how the show played on the audience's conceptual associations to manufacture a site-specific and medium-specific experience of national history. By evoking both the audience's primal ghost belief—“the ancient belief in shadows”—and their historical memory of the Reign of Terror's exhumations, the phantasmagoria would create the illusion that the revolutionary dead were emanating from the Capuchin crypt. The phantasmagoria is thus not only a visual illusion but also an imaginative fiction that works by activating a chain of associations between churches and the afterlife, relics and souls, the Capuchin Church and the National Assembly, tombs and the Reign of Terror.

This passage exemplifies Robertson's tendency to exaggerate his accomplishments. The tombs of the Capuchin Church were not actually exhumed by the revolutionary authorities—the remains of Louise de Lorraine lay peacefully in their crypt until they were rediscovered and relocated to the Basilica of Saint-Denis in the early nineteenth century. But whether the phantasmagoria succeeded in exploiting historical trauma for aesthetic effect is immaterial to my argument. What interests me is how Robertson imagines himself as manipulating an audience's collective perceptual experience to portray the phantasmagoria as itself a kind of exhumation and resurrection—an unearthing and making visible of a history that has been buried and killed by the revolution through the optical aesthetics of moving virtual images. Because the exhumation of tombs occurred in 1793, in one instance as a prelude to the public execution of Marie Antoinette, Robertson clearly ties this aesthetic to the public acts of violence and historical erasure that marked the Terror and its aftermath.⁴⁶ He imagines the phantasmagoria as a show that can cultivate national consciousness through an optical return of the repressed.

Robertson's imaginary of the phantasmagoria as a historical ghost show that rebuilds the nation in the wake of mass violence aligns with that of Poultier d’Elmotte in his editorial of more than thirty years earlier. Poultier d’Elmotte fictionalized the phantasmagoria as a political assembly in which the raising of ghosts challenged the state policy of historical repression. Robertson portrays the phantasmagoria as a form of perceptual and technological magic that represents the process of historical memory itself and, by extension, parallels the construction of the nation from collective acts of historical memory. In this sense, Robertson returns us to Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and the “dead generations” that haunt the French Revolution of 1848. He imagines the phantasmagoria as a history show not only because of its “known shadows” but, more importantly, because its medium-specific effects of creating a virtual space and time of encounter with the dead expressed a postrevolutionary national condition of living with ghosts.

History as Phantasmagoria Show

I have offered a detailed media history of the phantasmagoria to demonstrate that its practices of optical magic and cultivation of a new form of virtual mass spectatorship were discursively and imaginatively connected to the rise of nationalism and representation of national history. In the second half of this chapter, I will consider the work of two British writers whose narratives of the French Revolution reveal the persistence of this structure in Victorian culture. Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution: A History and Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities draw on existing French discourses of the phantasmagoria to develop a phantasmagorical metaphorics that describes and evokes the lived experience of the Reign of Terror. As it did for Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, phantasmagoria offers these writers a framework for representing historical copresence—the way the past haunts the present like a ghost. For Carlyle and Dickens, the phantasmagoria of the French Revolution serves as a dramatic scene of exigency and crisis out of which English national identity can be forged and renewed.

Before I turn to an analysis of the texts in question, I would like to address three methodological problems that scholars confront when tracing the influence of the phantasmagoria on Victorian literary culture. References to the phantasmagoria abound in Victorian literature. The first problem scholars encounter is that the phantasmagoria was not a Victorian media spectacle; in fact, its legacy in nineteenth-century Britain was early and brief. It arrived in England in 1801 with Paul de Philipstahl's phantasmagoria show at the Lyceum Theater in London, but its popularity peaked just a few years later, and it died out as a headline entertainment by the 1830s.⁴⁷ Its technology and visual effects were adapted or absorbed into new media spectacles that outstripped the phantasmagoria in popular appeal, such as dissolving views, Pepper's Ghost, spirit photography, and theatrical special effects. For instance, in the 1820s, Philipstahl's one-time assistant Henry Langdon Childe used a magic lantern dissolve to create theatrical special effects of the ghost ship the Flying Dutchman and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius on the London stage.⁴⁸ Known as a dissolving view, this effect is created when light is slowly stopped down on one lantern lens and raised on the other to create the illusion that one image dissolves into another on the screen. At the Royal Polytechnic Institution, which housed London's premier optical theater, Henry Dircks named his original patent for what would become Pepper's Ghost the “Dircksian Phantasmagoria,” positioning his free-floating, realistic, spectral simulacra as a technological update of Robertson's magic lantern show.⁴⁹ When a writer like Thomas Hardy describes Eustacia Vye in The Return of the Native (1878) as “a figure in a phantasmagoria—a creature of light surrounded by an area of darkness,” he is not drawing on his direct experience with a show like Robertson's; Hardy was born long after the phantasmagoria's heyday.⁵⁰ Hardy is more likely ascribing to the phantasmagoria the media effect of a luminous, spectral moving body engulfed in darkness that he knew from cultural discourse and from the later media forms that the phantasmagoria inspired. A luminous image “surrounded by an area of darkness” describes many Victorian magic lantern slides, which were often composed of circular paintings against black backgrounds, while the emphasis on Eustacia as a “creature of light” recalls Pepper's Ghost's creation of spectral bodies made of light. As a result of this chronology, literary allusions to the phantasmagoria can reflect a cultural imaginary of the show that does not align with its actual media effects or that reinterprets its media effects through a contemporary framework. To say that Hardy is influenced by the phantasmagoria is to miss the critical mediating role of Victorian projection formats in his visual imagination.

A second related problem is that, as cultural memory of the phantasmagoria show waned, the term “phantasmagoria” assumed new meanings, referring to an evolving set of visual effects and perceptual experiences with which the show was broadly associated in the cultural imagination.⁵¹ Take Reuben Sachs (1889), in which Amy Levy's Judith Quixano reflects that emotions are treated as “mere phantasmagoria conjured up by silly people, by sentimental people, by women.” The term “phantasmagoria” has not entirely lost its association with the ghost show, but it is being used to refer more broadly to a regime of visual deception. Levy deploys “phantasmagoria” to evoke marginalized and feminized superstitious belief in immaterial or spectral illusion, not unlike the “magic panic” in Elizabeth Gaskell's 1853 novel Cranford, contrasting it with the sober, serious, and masculine realm of “material relationships.”⁵² Reuben Sachs shows us that phantasmagoria does not always refer reliably to the media format it was invented to describe, one characterized not by the shallow trickery of women but by the masculine and disenchanted realm of rational recreation.

The third problem is that reliable media histories of the phantasmagoria are hard to come by and are skewed by the prominence of Robertson's Mémoires récreatifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques in archival records of the show. Nineteenth-century literary scholars and historians continue to attribute the invention of the phantasmagoria incorrectly to Robertson, circulate mistranslated passages from his memoir, and misinterpret key primary sources like Poultier d’Elmotte's editorial.

I have come to understand these features of the archive not as obstacles but as opportunities. The phantasmagoria operated as an imaginary virtual medium for Victorians. They related to the phantasmagoria through cultural discourse about the show, sometimes more boastful and bombastic than strictly correct; its reconstruction in newer media formats; and the transforming meanings of the term “phantasmagoria” as it came to be attached to new media technologies, forms of spectacle and illusion, and psychological states. It is in this spirit that I consider the work of Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens. These writers are not necessarily responding to the phantasmagoria's “actual” media history but to its mythologization by French writers like Poultier d’Elmotte and Robertson and the reimagination of some of its key effects in contemporary projection formats like the dissolving view. Rather than viewing the phantasmagoria as a media spectacle that had a true history and a metaphoric afterlife, I propose that the phantasmagoria was always an imaginary medium for thinking about the haunted and ghostly condition of national history, memory, and identity. Its metaphoric uses are inextricable from and constitutive of its media history.

The imaginary of the phantasmagoria as national haunting formalized in Mémoires récreatifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques was not lost on the Victorians. If Robertson and Poultier d’Elmotte proposed the phantasmagoria as a revolutionary history show, nineteenth-century theorists of history reflected this back by describing the history of the French Revolution as a phantasmagoria. I began this chapter with a brief discussion of Marx's theory of historical-psychological copresence in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, arguing that his account of national history as a phantasmal haunting was structured by a metaphorics of the phantasmagoria. Marx's interest in tropes of spectrality, haunting, and optical technology can be found across his oeuvre, from the “specter haunting Europe” in The Communist Manifesto (1847) to the description of ideology as a camera obscura in The German Ideology (1845), to the account of the commodity as a “phantasmagorical form” in Capital, Volume 1 (1867). The specific connections that The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte makes between history and haunting, phantasmagoria and the French Revolution, are prefigured in the historical writings of Thomas Carlyle.⁵³ Six years after Robertson's Mémoires récreatifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques was released, Thomas Carlyle published his monumental The French Revolution: A History (1837), which traced the revolution from 1789 to the height of the Reign of Terror. While I cannot prove that Carlyle read Mémoires récreatifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques, I believe it is likely. The French Revolution seems to respond directly to Robertson in its articulation of revolutionary history in a way that Terry Castle calls “a kind of spectral drama—a nightmarish magic-lantern show playing on without respite in the feverish, ghostly confines of the ‘Historical Imagination.’”⁵⁴ The language of phantasms and phantasmagories, specters and spectrality, and magic lantern slides pervade Carlyle's grandiloquent, dramatized, and intensely visual descriptions of historical actors, sites, and events.

Like Robertson in Mémoires récreatifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques, Carlyle draws a metaphoric equivalence between the lived experience of the French Revolution and phantasmagoria spectatorship. To bear witness to the unfolding of revolutionary history, whether as an actor or a reader, is to be a spectator at a “Scenic Phantasmagory.” Before the storming of the Bastille, when the Jacobin leader Thuriot enters the prison to negotiate with its governor, Carlyle portrays him looking down into the street at the thronging masses ready to lay siege: “Such vision (spectral yet real) thou, O Thuriot, as from thy Mount of Vision, beholdest in this moment: prophetic of what other Phantasmagories, and loud-gibbering Spectral Realities, which thou yet beholdest not, but shalt!”⁵⁵ Of the September Massacres at the Prison de l’Abbaye, Carlyle speaks directly to “the Reader, who looks earnestly through this dim Phantasmagory of the Pit” but “will discern few fixed certain objects.”⁵⁶ Thuriot looks down from one prison, the reader looks into another, but both are confronted with “spectral realities”—with a reality defined by its spectrality and radical state of transmogrification. Nothing is “fixed” or “certain” in the phantasmagoria, or in revolutionary history: all is in a state of change so rapid and unceasing that reality seems incorporeal, pure shadow and light.

The French Revolution's account of history as phantasmagoria evolved out of two essays from the 1830s: “On History” (1831) and “The Diamond Necklace” (1837). In “On History,” Carlyle contrasted the historian as “Seer” from the historian as mere “onlooke[r].”⁵⁷ The onlooker is incapable of recognizing the sublime nature of history as “an ever-living, ever-working Chaos of Being, wherein shape after shape bodies itself forth from innumerable elements” that can never be fully tamed by the linearity and successive format of historical narrative. The “Seer” is an “Artist in History” characterized by his penetrating insights into this “Chaos of Being,” his ability to perceive and arrange it into historical narrative.⁵⁸ “Chaos of Being” evokes a primordial and metaphysical state, like the “formless void” out of which God creates the world in the Book of Genesis. Its infinite bodying forth of shapes from infinite sources constructs historical process as, in Hayden White's terms, “a panorama of happening in which the stress is on the novel and emergent,” turning history into “an arena in which new things can be seen to appear.”⁵⁹ White's metaphoric use of the panorama, a nineteenth-century immersive visual media format, is telling: while the “Chaos of Being” itself is not described in explicitly visual terms, the role of the “Artist in History” as a “Seer” implies that it can and must be visually apprehended.

In “The Diamond Necklace,” published the same year as The French Revolution, Carlyle developed this trope of history writing as seeing by rewriting the “Chaos of Being” as a phantasmagoria. The essay opens by characterizing the history of “our own poor Nineteenth Century” as “the lordliest Real-Phantasmagory, which men name Being.” This phantasmagoria “rose and vanished, in perpetual change”:

Oak-trees fell, young acorns sprang: Men too, new-sent from the Unknown, he met, of tiniest size, who waxed into stature, into strength of sinew, passionate fire and light: in other men the light was growing dim, the sinews all feeble; they sank, motionless, into ashes, into invisibility; returned back to the Unknown, beckoning him their mute farewell.⁶⁰

In this passage, we can see how Carlyle revises his “Chaos of Being” as a phantasmagoria “which men name Being,” one that characterizes the metaphysical process of history through the phantasmagoric visual effects of images that rise, vanish, and metamorphose. The “Real-Phantasmagory” fulfills what White describes as history's arena of novel appearances, as images rise and transform and dissolve into new images before the historian's eyes. At the same time, what I have described as the phantasmagoria's construction as a virtual space and time sculpted out of darkness and light makes it a fitting expression of the primordial “Chaos of Being.” This God's-eye view of history—Carlyle goes on to specify that it is “a sight for angels, and archangels”—is what the historian should aim to represent.

The examples of the oak tree and the “new-sent” men evoke medium-specific features of the phantasmagoria and dissolving view to metonymize history through instances of death and rebirth. Jonathan Potter has argued that the dissolving view functioned as a metaphor for history in the work of Carlyle and Dickens, noting how its principal effect of one image melting into another provided them with a framework for conceptualizing the transitory moments of history.⁶¹ Carlyle's direct reference to the phantasmagoria should be heeded, however: the dissolving view was a successor to the phantasmagoria that used or re-created many of the phantasmagoria's techniques of visual transition and superimposition. “Oak-trees fell, young acorns sprang” references the way both the phantasmagoria and dissolving view show one object transforming into another.⁶² The metaphysical scenes Carlyle describes here, of organisms growing and dying and seeding new organisms, builds on the macabre slipping slide sequences that the phantasmagoria was best known for, like a woman turning into a skeleton or Robespierre evaporating into dust. The men growing from tiny babies, “wax[ing] into stature,” and then “[sinking], motionless, into ashes, into invisibility,” also recalls the phantasmagoria's effect of enlargement created by rolling the magic lantern away from the screen, as in Philidor's Mirabeau growing in size, as well as its virtual images disappearing into thin air. Carlyle maps the birth, maturation, and death of a human being and, by extension, the mysterious and sublime nature of historical being, onto the magic lantern's metamorphic specters. If history is a process in which “shape after shape bodies itself forth,” as he wrote in “On History,” the shapes are images bodied forth from a magic lantern.

In The French Revolution, Carlyle extends this metaphor by portraying the events of the French Revolution as scenes from a phantasmagoria. At the same time, he develops an account of history writing as a kind of “See[ing]” that recognizes the fundamentally spectral and metamorphic nature of historical reality. Note the echoes of Carlyle's “Real-Phantasmagory” of history in The French Revolution's description of the Pont Louis XVI. Several chapters after his account of the storming of the Bastille, in which Thuriot looks down from the prison on the “Phantastmagor[y]” in the streets below, Carlyle describes how the Bastille's stones have been recycled in a bridge built over the Seine:

Vanished is the Bastille, what we call vanished: the body, or sandstones, of it hanging, in benign metamorphosis, for centuries to come, over the Seine waters, as Pont Louis Seize; the soul of it living, perhaps still longer, in the memories of men.⁶³

Like the phantasmagorical specters of history in “The Diamond Necklace” that “rose and vanished, in perpetual change,” in The French Revolution, the Bastille has “metamorphos[ed]” into the Pont Louis XVI, a physical reconstruction that mirrors France's metamorphosis from monarchy to republic built from the rubble of the past. Here, Carlyle applies the penetrating form of historical perception that he outlines in “On History” and “The Diamond Necklace.” The figures of the “Seer” and the “onlooker” haunt his description of the Bastille as “what we call vanished”—seemingly absent but actually transfigured into a new form. An onlooker, with his superficial and ordinary ocular perception, might say that the Bastille had vanished because he trusts only in bodies as they immediately appear. The Seer, an Artist in History, recognizes the spectral and metamorphic nature of the apparently physical world. He sees the prison in the bridge, the oak in the acorn, the adult in the infant. By perceiving the world as it is endlessly transfigured and transformed, the Seer recognizes history for the “Real-Phantasmagory” it is.

Unlike in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, where history is an inescapable realm of haunting, The French Revolution portrays the phantasmagoria of history as a primal, ontological condition of transformation and change that can be disciplined into narrative as long as a Seer—a heroic individual characterized by his optical-epistemic virtuosity—applies his talents to the cause. In this sense, Carlyle returns us to the Victorian discourse of disenchanted spectatorship that I discussed in chapter 1. In Carlyle's metaphor, the present is a virtual image—it is what appears to vision, what is immediately perceptible, yet it is also an illusion. History is the technological apparatus that produces the endless stream of present-as-virtual-image—the always unfolding phantasmagoria that transforms infants into adults and prisons into bridges. The Seer or Artist in History is thus a variant of the disenchanted spectator who can simultaneously appreciate virtual images and identify their technological basis—the sovereign spectator who sees the illusion without being tricked. While the Artist in History is not an explicitly British figure, Carlyle's rationalizing perspective and God's-eye view in The French Revolution is imbued with a nationalist partisanship. Disenchanted spectatorship is here an attribute of the British historian, master of the chaos of the French revolutionary scene.

Carlyle's Artist in History is also a magician in his own right: a master showman who makes history's phantasmagorical structure perceptible to his readers, at once enthralling them with images of the past and enlightening them in how those images came to be. In other words, the Artist in History is a British phantasmagoria showman—an Enlightenment hero like the one Robertson makes himself out to be in his memoir. Carlyle therefore works within the tradition of British writers like George Eliot who turned to the framework of virtual images to portray the literary text as an optical technological prosthesis that extends vision into new times and places. Like Eliot, Carlyle appeals directly to “the Reader” as a witness to the scenes he creates, presenting the historical narrative as a virtual scene constituted by virtual images.⁶⁴ Nina Foster argues that Carlyle's historical reconstruction of the events of the French Revolution “involves a dynamic three-way interaction among the author, the reader, and the dead but once living actors of history . . . a ‘willed fellowship of the dead.’”⁶⁵ Another way of describing this fellowship of the dead would be “an assembly of ghosts”—a phantasmagoria. Like Robertson's show, which allows spectators to share space with ghosts, Carlyle's text mediates an encounter between the reader and this fellowship of the dead, rendered as ghostly figures bearing witness to ghostly scenes.⁶⁶

Recalled to Life

To say that Charles Dickens based A Tale of Two Cities on Carlyle's The French Revolution is not, on the face of it, to say anything especially new. Generations of scholars have noted that Dickens used Carlyle's chronology of the revolution, rewrote several of his most memorable historical set pieces, and adopted his key images and metaphors. Carlyle's influence is felt so comprehensively in A Tale of Two Cities that the critic G. K. Chesterton asserted that “it is not entirely by Dickens.”⁶⁷ What concerns me in this final section of the chapter is how A Tale of Two Cities continues in the lineage of Robertson and Carlyle by writing the history of the French Revolution as a phantasmagoria. What Carlyle names the “Spectral Phantasmagory” of French revolutionary history, Dickens prefers to call a “bright continuous flow.”⁶⁸ This is his description of a procession of the carriages of the nobility “whirling by in quick succession” early in the novel, and it represents the carriages as a single spectral optical illusion, one that blends the luminous, quick-changing images of the phantasmagoria with the illusion of motion in persistence of vision toys (117). In an oft-cited passage from the final chapter, Dickens offers his own version of Carlyle's Pont Louis XVI in his description of another procession, this time of tumbrils on the way to the guillotine:

Change these back again to what they were, thou powerful enchanter, Time, and they shall be seen to be the carriages of absolute monarchs, the equipages of feudal nobles, the toilettes of flaring Jezebels, the churches that are not my father's house but dens of thieves, the huts of millions of starving peasants! (385)

The Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein famously described this moment as a cinematic “dissolve.”⁶⁹ Rather than anticipating the formal techniques of cinema, the passage offers something more backward-looking: a descriptive equivalent of a magic lantern dissolving view modeled on Carlyle's Romantic history of phantasmagorical metamorphosis. Just as the Pont Louis XVI hangs as a “benign metamorphosis” of the Bastille, reconstructed from its stones, the tumbrils are built out of the hacked-up accoutrements of the ancien régime, the carriages, churches, and huts that represented and upheld the political system that the French Revolution had overturned. Dickens's ancien régime is, like Carlyle's Bastille, only “what we call vanished.” Rolling toward the scaffold, the tumbrils represent the ineluctable forward momentum of history; but imaginatively metamorphosing into their old forms, like Cinderella's enchanted carriage turning back into a pumpkin, they stand in for a nonlinear historical process structured by spectral returns.

When Dickens analogizes history as a dematerialized visual sequence characterized by visual transformations—when he writes the French Revolution as phantasmagoria—Carlyle's influence is all too clear.⁷⁰ Yet Dickens was not only a devoted reader of Carlyle; he also read Robertson. Fluent in French, Dickens read Mémoires récreatifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques closely four years before the publication of A Tale of Two Cities and wrote a two-part essay on Robertson's life for Household Words, loosely summarizing the volumes of Robertson's memoir. The phantasmagorical motif in A Tale of Two Cities shows his indebtedness to both Robertson and Carlyle. But unlike the intertextuality of A Tale of Two Cities and The French Revolution, the influence of Mémoires récreatifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques on Dickens's spectral and metamorphic approach to representing the history of the French Revolution remains unexamined in Dickens scholarship. Robertson's depiction of the phantasmagoria as a historical return of the repressed in which the ghosts of the revolutionary dead converge on the living is embedded in the narrative structure of A Tale of Two Cities. The novel turns history into a series of spectral recursions in which people and events are “recalled to life.”

To make this case, let us look first at narrative structure. The central characters in A Tale of Two Cities are French émigrés living in London: Lucie Manette, a young woman believing herself to be an orphan; Alexandre Manette, her long-lost father, discovered by the revolutionaries M. and Mme. Defarge after his release from the Bastille; and Charles Darnay, pseudonym of Charles Evrémonde, a French aristocrat who abandons his title in sympathy with the revolution and becomes Lucie's husband. Their relations with one another are fraught with secrecy. While Darnay hides his true identity, Manette keeps secret the true cause of his imprisonment: he was privy to the rape and murder of a young woman by Darnay's uncle, a powerful marquis, who threw Manette in prison to protect himself from exposure. A famous early passage of the novel reflects that “every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other,” a condition that is not unlike death. Death, the narrator reasons, is “the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality” (14–15). This description of the mysteries locked away inside each person is immediately ironic because it opens a scene that sees the banker Jarvis Lorry journeying to Paris to “dig someone out of a grave.” That someone, Manette, is described as “buried alive” and “recalled to life,” at once exhumed and resurrected, a set of metaphors that are literalized in a subplot in which Lorry's porter moonlights as a “Resurrection-Man” (17). Not only does no secret stay secret in A Tale of Two Cities, but the dead do not even stay buried—or dead.

Although “Recalled to Life” is the title of the brief first volume of the novel, which concerns Manette's discovery by Lorry and Lucie, the phrase and concept is woven through the rest of the book. At the beginning of the second volume, Darnay, like Manette, is introduced into the novel as “recalled to life” after being acquitted of the charge of treason in London and saved from the death penalty. In the final volume, he is recalled to life once again. Darnay returns secretly to Paris at the height of the Terror to try to make amends for his uncle's and father's wrongdoing and is immediately imprisoned in La Force by the revolutionaries. Lucie and Manette follow him to Paris, attempting to rescue him, but a manuscript that Manette left in his prison cell detailing the crimes of the Evrémonde family has been discovered during the storming of the Bastille and is used by the revolutionary tribunal to condemn Darnay to death. Darnay is finally rescued from prison by Sidney Carton, the dissolute lawyer who redeems himself through self-sacrifice when he takes Darnay's place at the guillotine. Both Manette's letter and Darnay are, like Manette, “buried” (263), exhumed, and brought back to life. Carton, meanwhile, envisions at his death the new life he will live in Lucie and Darnay's future son, who will “[win] his way up in that path of life which once was mine” (390). Even this final death—the death that recalls Darnay to life—is not a true death, as Carton anticipates becoming a ghost that will haunt the future. “Recalled to Life” is thus more than a motif in A Tale of Two Cities—it is a narrative structure of recursion in which secrets and persons are buried and exhumed, killed and resurrected. The novel's true thesis is not that secrets are like the dead because they are unknowable but rather that secrets are like the dead because they never truly die. “The dead return like anyone else,” Poultier d’Elmotte wrote in the editorial reprinted in Mémoires récreatifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques, and secrets return like the dead. The more they are suppressed, buried, or kept from sight, the more reliably they will, like the specters of Robertson's phantasmagoria, be “recalled to life.”

The language Dickens uses to describe this process of recalling to life is also drawn from the visual effects of the phantasmagoria. Lorry first imagines Manette as recalled to life on the long coach ride to Dover, in a sequence that plays out like a phantasmagoria show of the mind. The coach is drenched in “night shadows,” which have their double in Lorry's dreamlike musings, the “night shadows within” (18). These shadows present to him “a multitude of faces,” all of which resolve into “the ghostly face” and “specter” of Manette (17–18). Lorry then imagines himself digging Manette out of his grave, only for him to “suddenly fall away to dust” (18). The diction here mirrors Robertson's, who refers to the virtual images of the phantasmagoria as “shadows” and “ghosts.” Manette's status as both specter and corpse—at once metamorphosing like a shadow and grossly material as he collapses into dust—recalls Robertson's description of his phantasmagoria as an exhumation that produces ghosts. At the same time, the graveyard imagery recalls specific phantasmagoria slide sequences that Robertson lists in Mémoires récreatifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques, such as human figures metamorphosing into skeletons, spirits rising out of tombs, and gravediggers searching for treasure.⁷¹ The image of Manette “fall[ing] away into dust” seems to re-create a slide sequence from Robertson's phantasmagoria in which Robespierre rises from his tomb and then is hit by lightning, causing him to evaporate into dust.⁷² The fact that this scene replays in Lorry's mind over the course of the journey, “the ghostly face ris[ing]” again each time after Manette's corpse crumbles and decays, associates it all the more with the infinitely repeatable narrative slide sequences projected in the phantasmagoria.

Although this scene takes the form of a dreamlike vision, the same phantasmagorical imagery is applied to Manette and Darnay throughout the novel to describe the way their near-death experiences turn them into ontologically liminal beings, at once alive and dead. Lucie's first meeting with Manette is described as a kind of ghost show in which Lorry and Defarge—the wine merchant and revolutionary who houses Manette after his release from prison—are variously identified as “spectators” and “beholders” as they bear witness to the encounter between Manette and Lucie (46, 48). While Manette is “spectral” and “transparent,” Lucie stands near him “like a spirit,” turning them both into ghosts who communicate through glances that pass between them “like moving light” (43–46). What Lorry and Defarge “behold,” in other words, is not only two ghosts but the source of the phantasmagoria's ghosts in “moving light.”

A second ghost show plays out at Darnay's trial at the Old Bailey. The Old Bailey is “a deadly inn-yard” from which those accused of crimes “set out . . . on a violent passage to the other world” (63)—like the rooms in which Robertson exhibited the phantasmagoria, it is a liminal space between life and death. Darnay is introduced into the novel standing beneath a mirror positioned “above the prisoner's head . . . to throw the light down upon him” (66). Thus illuminated, Darnay becomes one of the “crowds of the wicked and the wretched [that] had been reflected in it,” crowds that would have “haunted” the Old Bailey “in a ghastly manner . . . if the glass could ever have rendered back its reflexions, as the ocean is one day to give up its dead” (66). This narrative interjection compares a mirror that could unleash all that has ever been reflected in it to the resurrection of the dead on the Day of Judgment. Read in the context of Robertson's Mémoires récreatifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques, a mirror that resurrects the dead references the phantasmagoria's media effect of projecting a “mob of shadows” that sweep through the theater. As Dickens would have known, Robertson called the transparent screen onto which he rear-projected his lantern slides—the very surface upon which he made the dead return to life—his “mirror.”⁷³ Mediated by this mirror-screen, turned into “a sight” for all to behold, Darnay temporarily joins the crowds of the dead before he is “recalled to life” (61).

In The Historical Novel, Georg Lukàcs offers what is now a well-known critique of A Tale of Two Cities: that its portrayal of the French Revolution is merely “romantic background . . . a pretext for revealing [the] human-moral qualities” of the central characters.⁷⁴ A Tale of Two Cities does not meet Lukàcs's criteria for a historical novel, which should integrate characters with their historical circumstances by representing “the social and human motives which led men to think, feel and act just as they did in historical reality.”⁷⁵ My reading of phantasmagoria in A Tale of Two Cities challenges this view. The liminality and spectrality of Dickens's characters, the way their lives are structured by a logic of resurrection, is an index of their complete integration with their historical circumstances. When Lucie, Manette, and Darnay appear as ghosts, oscillating between death and life, they are touched by the same “bright continuous flow” of revolutionary history that turns the carriages of the nobility and the peasants’ huts of the ancien régime into the tumbrils of the Reign of Terror. It is not that the novel segregates the human from the historical but that motives and decision making are not the critical point at which they intersect. Indeed, A Tale of Two Cities is largely uninterested in “social and human motives”—characters are driven instead by a broad, single-minded purpose to commit or reduce harm, from the primal vengefulness of the Jacobins and Lucie's salvific purity.

Why characters do what they do is simply not the right question to ask about the novel's approach to historical representation. We might ask instead how characters are reduced to ghostly specters, dematerialized into an optical “flow” by the violent and sudden political transformations of the revolutionary period, regardless of what they do and why they do it. Fredric Jameson, in his response to Lukàcs in “The Historical Novel Today, or, Is It Still Possible?,” identifies a mode of historical representation that captures Dickens's approach—one that foregrounds the collective over the individual character and is characterized by “phantasmagoric state[s] . . . a dissolution of individuality and a loss of self in the crowd.”⁷⁶ In A Tale of Two Cities, the Jacobins literally lose their individuality to the crowd by taking on nicknames of Jacques 1, Jacques 2, and Jacques 3, absorbing themselves into the collective will of the popular uprising. But so are British characters like Lucie, Manette, and Darnay stripped of their individuality—not as an ideological choice, but as a necessary result of living through revolutionary history.

I have proposed that Dickens's representation of revolutionary history as a “phantasmagoric state” is informed not only by Carlyle's phantasmagoric diction and imagery in The French Revolution but also—and equally—by Robertson's imaginary of the phantasmagoria as resurrection medium in Mémoires récreatifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques. The seeds of Dickens's portrayal of the French Revolution as phantasmagoria can be found in an essay Dickens wrote on Robertson for Household Words four years before the publication of A Tale of Two Cities. “Robertson, Artist in Ghosts,” tells the story of Robertson's supposed invention of the phantasmagoria against the backdrop of the Reign of Terror. “Robertson, Artist in Ghosts” could be described as something between a translation, a précis, and an editorial. It summarizes many of the important anecdotes and events covered in Volume I of Mémoires récreatifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques, but it does so in Robertson's own words, which Dickens translates and freely adapts into his own narrative.⁷⁷ The profound line-by-line similarities between “Robertson, Artist in Ghosts” and passages from Mémoires récreatifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques, including occasional lines and phrases taken from E. Roche's introduction to the 1840 edition, tells us how closely and faithfully Dickens read this book. At the same time, the very coinage “Artist in Ghosts” seems to deliberately echo Carlyle's “Artist in History,” turning Robertson and Carlyle—the phantasmagoria showman and the historian, respectively—into doubles of each other. In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens seems to develop and deepen Carlyle's optical model of history by turning “ghosts” and “history” into synonyms. For Dickens, writing history and staging a phantasmagoria are ultimately two different ways to do the same thing: resurrect the dead. “Robertson, Artist in Ghosts” shows the development of this structure in Dickens's thinking.

Dickens's interest in Robertson's phantasmagoria comes as no surprise. He is among the most flamboyantly optical of Victorian writers, and scholars, including Helen Groth, Joss Marsh, Christopher Pittard, and Grahame Smith, have documented his enthusiastic engagement with stage magic and optical technology.⁷⁸ “Robertson, Artist in Ghosts” betrays his knowledge of and participation in the discourse of natural magic when he lauds the phantasmagoria as a technology designed to demystify the supernatural and promote rational thought. The passages that Dickens chooses to translate or paraphrase from Mémoires récreatifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques reveal his sympathy for Robertson's self-presentation as an Enlightenment hero, destroying mass superstition through optical entertainment. In “Robertson, Artist in Ghosts,” Robertson is a man living “in an age of superstition” who refuses to “trad[e] on the public ignorance by any false pretense,” making “a great point . . . that his entertainments were to show how easily superstition could be worked upon—what dire visions could from very simple causes spring—how groundless, in fine, was the common dread of apparitions.”⁷⁹ Revolutionary France, meanwhile, is characterized by its angry, anti-intellectual peasant mobs “determined upon cheap bread and no optics,” who turn their magic panic into political action when they send the aristocrats and nobility, a “white-headed race of people” at once decadent and guileless, to the guillotine.⁸⁰ The French Revolution appears as a regrettable mass delusion that finds its expression in the fear of ghosts.

Even though Dickens uses many of Robertson's own words while paraphrasing his ideas, his own perspective emerges in the anti-French bent of these descriptions. France and French people are characterized by their inherent superstition, and Robertson is a hero who transcends his proximity to Frenchness through his superior rationality. Dickens applies what I described in chapter 1 as the gendered and colonial framework of disenchanted spectatorship to the Anglo-French context. The “public ignorance” and “common dread” of French people translates the feminized hysteria and restless natives we saw in chapter 1 into a nationalist paradigm. Just as French colonial officials in Algeria understood Algerian magic belief to fuel anticolonial violence, so does Dickens portray French superstition and the policy of “no optics” as the grounds for violent revolution. Like Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, sent to dismantle the anticolonial movement by first tricking and then disillusioning his Algerian audiences with his magic show, Robertson is presented here as an advocate of law and order. “His entertainments were to show how easily superstition could be worked upon”: to guard, in other words, against revolutionary mass hysteria.⁸¹

Dickens's initial portrayal of ghost seeing as the product of a French disposition toward the supernatural is in tension with a second explanatory framework. Throughout the essay, his chauvinistic British nationalism gives way to a complex view of superstition as a historical-psychological condition resulting from the lived experience of the French Revolution. In this framework, superstition is not in the essential nature of French people but rather a contingent historical phenomenon affecting visual and mental perception. This second framework comes into view when we look at how Dickens translates and editorializes on a seemingly incidental passage from Mémoires récreatifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques about modern ghost belief. In its original context, the purpose of the story is to defend Robertson's false claim that he was the sole originator of the phantasmagoria against the thesis that modern optical spectacles like the phantasmagoria had their origin in the supposed miracles of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman antiquity. Robertson is keen to discredit this argument because it challenges the narrative of his supposed originality and genius. He does so by inviting his readers to reflect on the persistence of superstition in modern culture: “Have we not seen the shadow of a chimney outline the figure of Louis XVI so strikingly as to attract a large crowd of people daily to the garden of the Palais-Royal?” Among the crowd, he explains, the rumor had spread that the ghost of the king “came every day to show himself to the Parisians. A commissioner of police, followed by some masons, had to put an end to this appearance, and made it vanish in the presence of the astonished spectators.”⁸² Robertson's point is that the history of ghost seeing does not necessarily imply the presence of optical technology. Even in the modern age, in a city like Paris, a visual illusion as tenuous as a shadow on a chimney can strike fear in the hearts of a crowd.

The story about the Parisians and the shadow of Louis XVI has had a textual afterlife as a parable of modernity. In Pensieri (1837), the Italian poet and philosopher Giacamo Leopardi rewrote it to take place in Florence, where “on a corner by the Piazza del Duomo” he claims to have seen “a crowd of people gathered beneath the ground-floor window of what is now the Palazzo Riccardi.” The crowd is “terrified” of the “Phantom”—a “motionless shadow flailing its arms”—seen through a window illuminated only by a streetlamp. A police officer is called to look inside the room, where he discovers that the “Phantom” is in fact the combined shadows of a distaff and a smock flailing in the wind. “In the nineteenth century,” Leopardi editorializes, “in the very heart of Florence, which is the most learned city in Italy and whose inhabitants are particularly discerning and sophisticated, people still see ghosts that they believe to be spirits—ghosts that are distaffs.”⁸³ Tom Gunning has argued that Leopardi's story represents the phantasmagoria's legacy as “an art of total illusion that also contained its own critique,” one in which modernity inheres in “the explanation of the ghosts as a visual phenomenon.”⁸⁴ His analysis is more apt than he perhaps appreciated because Leopardi's story is effectively plagiarized from Robertson's account of the phantasmagoria.⁸⁵ Florence replaces Paris and the Piazza del Duomo replaces the Palais Royal, while the shadow of Louis XVI becomes that of an ordinary woman, but the message is the same: superstition persists in modernity, lurking within the urban crowd, but it can be destroyed through acts of technological and visual demystification.

In “Robertson, Artist in Ghosts,” Dickens reproduces Robertson's anecdote about the Parisians who mistake the shadow of a chimney for that of Louis XVI. But by taking it out of its original context, he changes its meaning even more than Leopardi does in his much bolder rewriting. Instead of supporting the claim that people throughout history have always been credulous and easily deceived, Dickens uses the story to establish Paris during and after the Reign of Terror as uniquely prone to magic panic:

[Robertson] was bent upon reproducing some of the miracles worked by the priests of old. It was very easy to excite the wonder of the town, even without any great dexterity or conjurer's tools of a refined description. Crowds were flocking daily to the gardens of the Palais Royal to gape at the shadow of a chimney, which, at a certain hour of the day, resembled the figure of Louis the Sixteenth. Thousands believed that the shadow of the king upon whom they had trampled haunted the Parisians by appearing daily in his garden. A commissary of police, by the help of a few masons, at last caused the demolition of the august shade in the presence of a concourse of astonished people. It does not take much to produce a ghost.⁸⁶

This is, in one sense, a quite faithful translation of the original passage in Mémoires récreatifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques. However, Dickens reverses Robertson's original meaning by portraying the phantasmagoria not as a wholly original invention but as a reproduction of the miracles of antiquity: Robertson is “bent upon reproducing some of the miracles worked by the priests of old” (emphasis added). In Dickens's rewriting, the shadow of Louis XVI does not reveal the persistence of credulity throughout history but rather presents revolutionary Paris as a time and place unusually ripe for an optical deception like the phantasmagoria—a place in which “wonder” is “easy to excite.” This diction is Dickens's own addition, as is his remark, “It does not take much to produce a ghost.” It is not so remarkable that Parisians are drawn to the phantasmagoria, Dickens intimates, because they are already seeing ghosts everywhere.

For Robertson, the story of the shadow of Louis XVI is proof of the persistence of ghost belief in the modern age, and for Leopardi it is a parable of modernity's dialectic of skepticism and credulity. For Dickens, the story offers something else entirely: an analogy between phantasmagoria spectatorship and the lived experience of revolutionary history. French people do not see ghosts because they are French; they see ghosts because they lived through the Reign of Terror. For instance, in another addition to Robertson's story, Dickens specifies that the crowds are drawn to “the shadow of the king upon whom they had trampled” (emphasis added), turning what in Robertson's account is simply an especially convincing visual illusion into the projection of a collective guilty conscience. The people who killed Louis XVI now see him wherever they go. Read this way, the line “it does not take much to produce a ghost” is not an indictment of how the French superstition makes audiences easy marks for the phantasmagoria. Instead, it is ironic: if producing a ghost requires an organized popular uprising that executes a king, it is in fact tremendously difficult. Rather than a symptom of the French national character, seeing ghosts is the product of a contingent historical circumstance: revolution.

Although it changes the original meaning of the passage, Dickens's rewriting is true to the general spirit of Mémoires récreatifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques. It captures Robertson's mythographic account of the phantasmagoria as a simultaneous exhumation and resurrection of historical figures killed during the Reign of Terror, seen both in his description of audiences perceiving his virtual moving images as manifestations of the spirits of the dead buried in the Capuchin graveyard and in his reprinting of Poultier d’Elmotte's editorial on the phantasmagoria as an assembly place for revolutionary ghosts. Where Dickens differs from Robertson is in his emphasis on the psychological dimensions of historical experience. He represents the scene at the Palais Royal as a collective folly resulting from collective historical action. The “crowds” that executed Louis XVI are now “haunted” by his shadow, their guilt expressing itself in ghost seeing. Dickens's presentation of the execution of Louis XVI as crowd action—not attributable to any specific historical actors or even specific groups of actors, but dispersed broadly across “crowds”—defines the collective experience of history as a shared state of haunting.⁸⁷ Georg Lukàcs wrote that the French Revolution “made history a mass experience . . . on a European scale,” one that made apparent “that there is such a thing as history, that it is an uninterrupted process of changes and finally that it has a direct effect upon the life of every individual.”⁸⁸ For Dickens, history as mass experience is history as mass delusion. Like Marx's historical ghosts that weigh on the brains of the living, Dickens's Reign of Terror leaves behind a phantasmal residue in the minds of those who experienced it, whether as witnesses or actors. The scene at the Palais Royal is analogous to the phantasmagoria show—it is another kind of assembly of ghosts and spectators, one that reveals Robertson's projection of virtual moving images to be an expression of an already existing historical condition that sees the past returning to life in spectral form.

“Robertson, Artist in Ghosts” can be read as developmental writing toward A Tale of Two Cities—an essay on phantasmagoria and the French Revolution that served as a blueprint for Dickens's phantasmagorical French Revolution novel. Like The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “Robertson, Artist in Ghosts” proposes that ghost seeing is endemic to the context of nationalist revolution. A Tale of Two Cities builds on this theory further when it suggests that revolutions not only make people see ghosts but also make people undergo an uncanny condition of spectralization. Characters not only witness ghosts—as Lorry does when he digs Manette out of a grave—but they become ghosts, as Manette, Lucie, Darnay, and Carton all do at various moments. Becoming a ghost is no longer reserved for major historical actors like Louis XVI. In A Tale of Two Cities, both seeing and becoming ghosts is a condition of living within the historical scene of revolutionary transformation. We do not need the evidence of this essay to place Dickens within a genealogy of writers like Robertson, Carlyle, and Marx who portrayed the French Revolution as a phantasmagoria. What it offers us instead is a map for how A Tale of Two Cities is grounded in Robertson's account of the phantasmagoria as a historical ghost show structured by optical resurrection and spectral returns of the dead. “Robertson, Artist in Ghosts” helps us see that the mode of historical representation that Fredric Jameson calls the “phantasmagoric” is related to the virtual aesthetics of the phantasmagoria show in more than name. A Tale of Two Cities not only draws on the Carlylean phantasmagoric motif but also on the media history of the phantasmagoria and its imaginative associations with the French Revolution.

“Robertson, Artist in Ghosts” returns us to the question with which we began: How is the phantasmagoria bound up in the nationalist imaginary? A Tale of Two Cities is often read as a novel of national difference, written in an era when British national identity was defined—as Linda Colley has shown—against real and perceived military threats from France.⁸⁹ In this argument, France and England are juxtaposed like the “streaky bacon” of tragedy and comedy in Oliver Twist (1838), alternating combustive scenes of revolutionary Paris with the unshakeable orthodoxies of British life. Priti Joshi has challenged the view that the novel is structured by “the old Anglo-French antipathy” that defines English against French.⁹⁰ A Tale of Two Cities is about the making of Britons, she writes, but in this novel “one is not born a Briton but becomes one” through noble acts of adventure and self-sacrifice.⁹¹ French-born characters like Lucie, Manette, and Darnay all become Britons through such acts. Yet if A Tale of Two Cities is not nationalist in the old ways—if it does not define national belonging in terms of geographic boundaries or racial essence—it is imperialist in some new ways. Joshi argues that the novel displaces onto the Reign of Terror the scene of the Indian Uprising of 1857–1858. After the Indian Uprising, France was no longer the primary foil against which British identity was articulated. Now, to be British was to be the erstwhile victims and ultimate conquerors of Indian savagery. Joshi's framework offers one explanation for why A Tale of Two Cities fails to meet Lukàcs's criteria for historical fiction, in spite of how closely Dickens studied Walter Scott: the novel is not a work of historical realism so much as an imperial fairy tale about British heroes triumphing over a savage colonial mutiny.

Although “Robertson, Artist in Ghosts” was written two years before the Indian Uprising, its complex and nuanced representation of that “old Anglo-French antipathy” prefigures the colonial logic of heroes and villains, Britons and natives, that structures A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens defines France as Robert-Houdin defined Algeria and Harriet Martineau and Wilkie Collins defined India—as superstitious and ungovernable. Ungovernable because superstitious, the French are preternaturally prone to magic panic, mistakenly believing they can exchange optics for bread and then becoming what David Brewster called “the dupes of supernatural imposture” precisely because they refused to learn optics.⁹² In other words, we can see how Dickens reanimates the colonial tropes of the pedagogy of disenchantment when he displaces the figure of the savage Indian onto the superstitious French citizen. At the same time, and on closer examination, the bounds of nation dissolve in “Robertson, Artist in Ghosts” just as they do in A Tale of Two Cities. Ghost seeing is not the province of the French but the province of those who have lived through and participated in a revolution, a condition that produces credulity through trauma and guilt. Dickens thus comes remarkably close to Elizabeth Gaskell's position in Cranford when she observes how female magic panic is produced by patriarchal social norms: he implies that seeing ghosts is a structural condition created by contingent historical circumstances, not an essential marker of nationality or race. For Robertson, Carlyle, Marx, and Dickens, phantasmagoria provides an optical framework for historical representation on a grand European scale: “the dead of world history” on ghostly parade, the “Real-Phantasmagory” of the nineteenth century in unceasing spectral metamorphosis.

In chapter 5, I will turn to a quite different optical model for history—the moving-image toy, which I argue serves as a cultural trope for the repetitive and circular rhythms of daily life under industrial capitalism. This is virtual aesthetics in its least exotic and most provincial form—not the imperial gaze of the mirror of ink, the mystical portal of the Indian diamond, or the bright continuous flow of Anglo-French history, but the spinning toy made of paper and its evocations of the urban factory, the agricultural village, and the neurotic compulsions of the working body. Yet in all its humility and stripped-down technological form, the moving-image toy gives rise to a virtual aesthetics of industrial modernity that helped to create the aesthetic and technological conditions for the emergence of cinema at the end of the century.