PART I TABLEAUX MOUVANTS

Ludwig Börne is one of the most adept practitioners of the cultural journalism that is the focus of part I of this book. Active as both an author and editor of some of the most influential periodicals of the 1820s and 1830s, Börne was notably abreast of trends in French and other European forms of publication, and he would end up living in Parisian exile for the latter portion of his adult life. In his early career, Börne was a correspondent for the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände and wrote a series of short accounts, or tableaus, of Parisian life that appeared intermittently and anonymously in the journal over several years in the early 1820s. Such series were a typical genre of urban correspondence and cultural reportage, beginning in the 1780s and stretching into the mid-nineteenth century, and they built on the pioneering work of Louis-Sébastien Mercier in works such as Le Tableau de Paris (1781–1788). In a piece titled “From Paris: Reading-Cabinets [Lese-Kabinette],” Börne sketches the relative continuity of French reading practices from 1789 to the present. Despite the rollback of many of the revolution’s achievements, “reading in general, but especially reading political newspapers, has taken deep root in the mores of the people, and one would have to dig up the French soil from the very bottom if one wanted to wipe out the universal participation in civic affairs.… Everyone is reading, every person is reading [alles liest, jeder liest].”¹ Running parallel to the ups and downs of the previous thirty years’ revolutionary experiment is the basso continuo of the daily and weekly periodicities of journals and newspapers. Portraying reading as a popular national pastime, Börne turns to an outdoor scene:

For a painter of [French] mores, there is no richer view than the garden of the Palais Royal in the hours before midday. Thousands hold newspapers in their hands and present themselves in the most varied positions and movements. The one sits, the other stands, the third walks, sometimes more quickly, sometimes more slowly. Now a report grabs his attention and he forgets to place his second foot on the ground, and for several seconds he stands on one leg like an ascetic on a pillar. Some lean up against trees, others on the railings that enclose the flowerbeds, others on the columns of the arcades. The butcher’s apprentice wipes his bloody hands so as not to turn the paper red and the peripatetic pastry seller lets his cakes go cold because he is reading.²

Börne enacts in miniature the model of multiple ongoing scenes of contemporary life that characterizes the larger series of his correspondent reports, as he describes—“paints”—a sequence of figures, each with a journal or paper in their hands. Collected and republished in 1829 under the title “Depictions” or “Tableaus of Paris” (Schilderungen aus Paris), these pieces are just one of the many ubiquitous literary and graphic accounts of present-day city life in circulation at the time. Indeed, a contemporaneous book of colored lithographs titled Tableaux de Paris may well be a template for Börne’s outdoor scene; there the artist Jean-Henri Marlet depicts outdoor reading as an exercise of civic duty but also as a pleasant and fashionable pastime (figure 0.1).³

Börne’s sketch of the Palais Royal’s garden lends his historical topography of modern French reading habits more fine-grained detail, capturing the diverse, uncoordinated movements of multiple readers as they are entwined with different journals and papers and caught up in other daily habits (which, in Marlet’s image, includes intermittently resting one’s eyes).

This sketch of the present affords a glimpse of patterns of cultural continuity across several decades, but Börne extends this thought experiment a step further by adopting a hypothetical vantage point in the distant future:

If Paris ever were to perish in the same way as Herculaneum or Pompeii, and one were to uncover the Palais Royal and find the people there in the same position in which death surprised them—the paper pages in their hands would be disintegrated—the antiquarians would be at a loss for what these people actually were doing when the lava enveloped them. It is clear that there was no market, no theater at this location. There was no single spectacle to draw their attention, for the heads are turned in all different directions and their gazes directed at the earth. What were they doing? one will ask, and no one will answer: they were reading newspapers.⁴

Zooming out even further from the present moment and its connection to 1789, Börne positions himself as something of a future paleoarchaeologist, reconstructing the daily life of the 1820s as it recedes into an almost inaccessible past. He thereby amplifies the familiar trope of print ephemerality, for the papers are the one thing not entombed by this hypothetical natural disaster. The ephemerality of newsprint is also a sign of its relative newness and modernity, for the more traditional social spaces of the theater and market retain a certain archaeological legibility. Construing the strange poses of modern readers as foreign through historical distance, Börne likewise raises the prospect that it is the lack of the physical trace that holds the truth of the now-past present. As something of an absent archive, these imaginary incinerated papers are both “that which is fleeting and that which remains” (as Richard Taws puts it), at least for the (media) archaeologist in the know.⁵ Börne’s hypothetical memorialization of the print artifacts of the present projects a time of the media landscape beyond individual life and raises the question of what the writing of the future will be after the demise of print (or if there will be writing at all).

This thought experiment brings key features of the era’s cultural journalism and its self-reflective discourse on serial print into striking relief. On the one hand, Börne’s gesture of likening the present to an antiquity rediscovered is clearly classicizing. The implicit assertion is that current reading practices prove that certain democratic aspects of civic life from the 1790s persist and that these practices and the serial print that enables them point beyond the individual lives of Börne’s contemporaries, extending into the past (at least to 1789) and the future. This is a characteristic strategy of revolutionary cultural politics, which turns to classicizing shapes of time to project permanence—shapes of time, in other words, that are defined by a structure of predictable repetition and by reference back to republican origins. On the other hand, Börne relativizes this sense of duration: from a vantage point far enough into the future, French civic life is just as transient as anything else. The visual humor of his sketch amplifies this point, for the poses of the entombed readers are drawn more from the world of caricature and fashion journalism than from iconic classical sculpture. In Börne’s reportage, realistic accounts of daily life converge with caricature, and the sequential viewing of disparate figures takes precedence over any absorption in classical form. As we will see, this coexistence of classicism and caricature in the characterization of popular life is a recurrent theme in the period’s cultural journalism. In adapting the form of the tableau as a visual and literary genre, Börne’s piece deploys seriality both as a tool of literary representation (e.g., the row of newspaper readers) and as a defining format condition of print. Serial continuation generates a more complicated shape of time than that of the ceaseless production of the new. Additionally, Börne involves contemporary readers in these shapes of time: don’t readers of the Morgenblatt, despite their spatial and temporal remove, partake indirectly in a kind of democratic activity, a contemporaneity with Parisians? Börne’s future history of newspapers must include the journals that his readers hold in their hands and their eventual disintegration, but also their continuation into an uncertain future. This emphasis on the material side of print is typical of cultural journalism and its attempts to survey the range of print on offer, from texts and images meant for careful preservation to out-of-date newspapers discarded for the ragpickers. Throughout this book, we will repeatedly encounter the specific conceptual and metaphorical moves that Börne avails himself of here, including the emphasis, via the literary genre of the tableau, on visual observation in tandem with an archive of assumed or actual images; the notion that the accumulation of multiple sequential sketches of the present can and should access multiple times; the idea that Paris is a central stage for the culture and politics of the postrevolutionary era; the parallel evocation and parodying of classicism; and a keen sense of print’s materiality.

Contemporaries of the French Revolution realize what later historians would confirm: that, as Lynn Hunt puts it, “a new relationship to time was the most significant change, and perhaps the defining development, of the French Revolution.”⁶ It is common for observers in the 1790s to conclude that unprecedented contemporary events follow each other ever more rapidly and that the past is no longer a reliable template for predicting the future. F. J. Bertuch and K. A. Böttiger, for example, introduce their new journal London und Paris in 1798 via a sense of accelerated, disjunctive time: “The new has never become old so quickly and the old of all centuries has never become new so frequently than in the last decade, since revolution has become the catchword of southwestern Europe.”⁷ Acceleration is just one temporal figure available to observers after they realize that earlier cyclical models of time and history have become tenuous and that the past, even when it becomes new again, is relegated to an ambivalent sort of transience in the face of events perceived to be unprecedented and historically unique as well as in the face of an unpredictable future. From its inception, print had always been associated with the perception of time, but the French Revolution heightens the sense that print media enable and shape the experience of historical events. As Bertuch and Böttiger note, the age of revolution is also “the age of paper” and of “newspaper scribbling” (Zeitungsschreiberei), and it “nearly drowns under all the journals and newspapers,” with newspapers having become “the sole form of literature” in France.⁸ Later scholars have deemed the revolution as much a “media event” as a social and political event, and this is especially evident in the mark made on German observers.⁹ German-speaking lands had long had a flourishing network of periodicals and a strong readerly interest in travel writing but the 1790s witness a boom in reporting on the revolution, a clear prelude to Börne’s Scenes from Paris. Periodicals in particular let readers follow the unfolding of events through time.

Along with documenting the revolution’s latest speeches, decrees, and executions, serial print likewise processes the age’s upheaval through the lens of theater, art and architecture, festivity and popular spectacle, fashion, interior design, and more. The cultural journalism pursued by the likes of London und Paris becomes particularly important for spreading news about the times to broader lay audiences, as correspondent reports detailing the latest political, scholarly, or cultural fashions fuel the sense that readers are holding “the times” in their own hands. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witness the founding of many of the most successful German-language journals of the period such as the Journal des Luxus und der Moden (1786), the Zeitung für die Elegante Welt (1801), and the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände (1807). These cultural and fashion journals are particularly apt for capturing the temporal spirit of the age of revolution, for they provide a space for the kind of reflective undertaking of Börne’s on broader cultural trends, on what is new and what persists, on what will change permanently as a result of this turbulent time, and on what will remain a fleeting fashion. Though many of these journals demonstratively claim that they do not deal with politics, the oblique treatment of political topics through a cultural lens is an effective way to engage readers and avoid excessive scrutiny from censors. Cultural journals do the work of “translating” between different realms and spaces of experience that Birgit Tautz has shown to be so central to the literary culture of the era.¹⁰ These journals call on readers to negotiate the interconnected temporalities of commerce, politics, theater, the literary market, fashion, and more, and they establish patterns of continuity through serialized articles that revisit recurring events or places—especially cities, which condense experiences of actuality and noncontemporaneity.¹¹ Bertuch and Böttiger thereby contribute to a style of historical-cultural journalism that mixes historical scholarship and entertaining diversion and that would prove influential in the so-called Bildungspresse of the later nineteenth century.¹² These journals also present readers with a range of different kinds of texts, archival documents, images, and advertisements, training them to be consumers of various kinds of print, including newly emerging forms of print luxury. All the while, such journals have a strong sense of the effects of various print media on the age. As writers and editors self-consciously add yet one more new journal to an oversaturated market, the avid consumption of serial forms comes into view as a sign of the times and a trend that rivals the fashionable ideas and styles of the revolution.

Many of the journals edited by the literary luminaries of the late eighteenth century have been amply studied for how they process the upheaval of the 1790s and its aftermath. These include Wieland’s prescient commentaries on the lead-up to the revolution in Der Teutsche Merkur (1773–1790); Schiller’s Horen (1795–1797) and its turn to the aesthetic realm as an antidote to the terror; the Athenäum (1798–1800) of the Jena Romantics, in which Friedrich Schlegel proclaims Fichte’s philosophy, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, and the French Revolution to be the three greatest tendencies of the day (a provocative statement that affirms the cultural journal’s typical juxtaposition of politics and culture); and Kleist’s Berliner Abendblätter (1810–1811), which weaponizes cultural reportage against Napoleonic occupation. In suggesting that we take another look at the period’s literary and journalistic milieu, I propose that there is still much to learn from specific journals and the different ways that they shape the perception of time. The tools of media history and periodical studies allow us not merely to address the conceptual and aesthetic advances of leading figures as they happen to be articulated in periodicals but also to attend to how serial formats themselves generate shapes of time. Cultural journals are sites where different periodicities and temporal rhythms coexist, where the temporal footprints of individual literary works enter into tension with their textual environments, and where key metaphors such as print ephemerality, tableau-like image flow, and the journal as an archival repository are negotiated.

Bertuch, a publishing pioneer with multiple commercial endeavors—“a regular Citizen Kane of the eighteenth century,” as Seifert notes—was known for having a keen sense of the business of print and was adept at profiling his journals in the contemporary landscape.¹³ He had the luck (and at times misfortune) of straddling pre- and postrevolutionary periods and living through the Napoleonic period, and played a key role in establishing Weimar as a literary hub and as a home for periodicals in particular, founding fifteen journals in eighteen years. In taking a closer look at the projects of Bertuch and his coeditors, the artist Georg Melchior Kraus, and the journalist and antiquarian Böttiger, I draw on recent scholarship that recenters Bertuch’s journals in the publishing and intellectual landscape of the day.

Founded in 1786, Bertuch’s Journal des Luxus und der Moden—the fashion journal (Modejournal), as contemporaries call it—is particularly well suited for exploring reflections on time and the temporal spirit of the age of revolution. Like serial print, fashion is intimately associated with newness and ephemerality. With its rise in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, fashion played a key role in gradually loosening the semantics of the new from the pejorative, religious-philosophical connotations of transience, or Vergänglichkeit. Fashion discourse emerged hand in hand with different print formats, which aided readers in visualizing new fashions and fashions reemerging from the past. The eighteenth-century discourse of fashion prepared the ground for the subsequent development of nineteenth-century historicism, and fashion’s manifestation of the contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous has been frequently noted.¹⁴ At the same time, though, the term Modejournal risks being misleading, for the Journal des Luxus und der Moden takes on many features of what German-language scholarship calls the cultural journal (Kulturzeitschrift), a point that Angela Borchert makes abundantly clear in her work on Bertuch.¹⁵ The Modejournal’s cultural and fashion journalism is intimately intertwined with travel writing; political reportage; the writing of contemporary history; satirical entertainment; theater, literary, and art criticism; and writing about nature.¹⁶ Indeed, this journal and other contemporaneous serial print contribute greatly to the sense that reading about the revolution was perhaps the most fashionable thing to do. Bertuch’s flagship journal comes into view as a forerunner of the topics and format conditions of key strands of nineteenth-century periodical literature, of what was understood at the time under the broad heading of “belletristic” entertainment.¹⁷ So many writers who publish in leading journals are invested in the discourse of fashion and its intersections with the arts, whether it is Jean Paul and Börne publishing in the Morgenblatt, or Heine in the Zeitung für die Elegante Welt, and Bertuch is quite clear about staking out a scope for the journal that is deliberately broader than mere fashion reporting.

You might note that I gravitate toward journals founded on notions of open-ended serial unfolding—the flow and disjunctive juxtaposition of never-ending tableaux mouvants, as we will see in the Modejournal and London und Paris—rather than on the conceit of a select community of discussants, as with the Athenäum journal and its ideal of editorial and authorial “symphilosophy” or as with Goethe’s art journal Propyläen, whose title evokes a portal into an enclosed space for discussion among likeminded friends of the arts.¹⁸ It also stands out that figures of miscellany, serial flow, and the transience or persistence of certain styles depart from the trope of intimate, directed, and cumulative conversation and are more aligned with a sense of heterogeneity and empty diversion (Zerstreuung); as Goethe put it in a letter to Schiller, most journals usually only “add more distraction to distraction.”¹⁹ Though Goethe and other leading figures published multiple pieces in the Modejournal, they also looked down on it as unserious and “confusedly pieced together” (konfus zusammengestückelt), that is to say, as departing from any sense of organic totality characteristic of the self-standing literary artwork.²⁰ This disdain, along with a healthy dose of envy—the journal had a long, successful run, in contrast to many short-lived, more aesthetically ambitious projects—has colored the reception of the journal.

For our purposes, Bertuch’s commercial orientation and his emphasis on the business side of fashion, literary production, and the book market illuminate the commodity status of literary texts, something that authors around 1800 can be prone to downplay via the aesthetics of the autonomous work. Bertuch draws pragmatically and self-interestedly on a range of collaborators, eschewing a conception of the author or editor as solitary genius and instead embracing collaborative, commercial practices of reproduction, copying, and serial production. These collaborators include the antiquarian Böttiger, the artist Kraus, the Weimar drawing school that Kraus ran and that Bertuch was instrumental in founding, and their various correspondents and contributors. Bertuch and his coeditors deliberately situate their journal as part of a spectrum of different kinds of print luxury, thereby mobilizing temporal logics of permanence and impermanence and tapping into a highly competitive market for illustrated print. Indeed, the Modejournal and its “foreign sister” London und Paris both came to be known for their inclusion of multiple images and image commentaries in each installment, including fashion plates (discussed in chapter 1), representations of popular festivities (discussed in chapter 2), and caricatures (discussed in chapter 3). Even though the technologies enabling the easy inclusion of multiple images on the newspaper or journal page were still several decades away, Bertuch’s journals innovatively experiment with text-image ensembles. Presenting readers with series of different images modeled on the visual and literary conceit of the tableau is a key part of how these journals seek to process the age of revolution and, indeed, to write a provisional account of the times.

1. 1.   Ludwig Börne, “Aus Paris. Die Lese-Kabinette,” Das Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, 17, no. 206 (August 28, 1823): 821.

2. 2.   Börne, “Aus Paris. Die Lese-Kabinette,” 821.

3. 3.   Jean-Henri Marlet, Tableaux de Paris (Paris, 1821–1824), NP.

4. 4.   Börne, “Aus Paris. Die Lese-Kabinette,” 821.

5. 5.   Taws, The Politics of the Provisional, 168.

6. 6.   Lynn Hunt, Measuring Time, Making History (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008), 68.

7. 7.   Bertuch and Böttiger, “Plan und Ankündigung,” 3.

8. 8.   Bertuch and Böttiger, “Plan und Ankündigung,” 3.

9. 9.   See Rolf Reichardt, “The French Revolution as a European Media Event,” European History Online (EGO), Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG), August 27, 2012, last accessed January 27, 2021, http://www.ieg-ego.eu/reichardtr-2010-en.

10. 10.   See Birgit Tautz, Translating the World: Toward a New History of German Literature Around 1800 (State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2018).

11. 11.   As Bernhard Fischer puts it, cities are “spatial condensation points of noncontemporaneity”; Bernhard Fischer, “Paris, London und Anderswo. Zur Welterfahrung in Hermann Hauffs Morgenblatt der 1830er Jahre,” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 51 (2007): 330.

12. 12.   See Gerhart von Graevenitz, “Memoria und Realismus: Erzählende Literatur in der deutschen ‘Bildungspresse’ des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Memoria: Vergessen und Erinnern, ed. Anselm Haverkamp and Renate Lachmann (Munich: Fink, 1993), 286–87.

13. 13.   Hans-Ulrich Seifert, “Die Französische Revolution im Spiegel der deutschen periodischen Zeitschriften,” in La Révolution Française vue des deux côtés du Rhin, ed. André Dabezie (Aix-en-Provence: University of Provence Press, 1990), 170.

14. 14.   See Timothy Campbell, Historical Style: Fashion and the New Mode of History, 1740–1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 26.

15. 15.   See Angela Borchert, “Einleitung,” in Das “Journal des Luxus und der Moden”: Kultur um 1800, ed. Angela Borchert and Ralf Dressel (Heidelberg: Winter, 2004), 19. On the cultural journal more generally, see Alphons Silbermann, “Die Kulturzeitschrift als Literatur,” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 10 (1985): 94–112.

16. 16.   On the more capacious conception of fashion in this time and its relevance for notions of the natural world, see Hopwood, Schaffer, and Secord, “Seriality and Scientific Objects,” 261. In the German context, see especially Daniel L. Purdy, The Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

17. 17.   Sibylle Obenaus, Literarische und politische Zeitschriften 1830–48 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986), 7.

18. 18.   See J. W. Goethe, “Einleitung,” Die Propyläen. Eine Periodische Schrift 1, no. 1 (1798): iii.

19. 19.   “All pleasures, including the theater, are intended to merely distract, and the great desire of the reading public for journals and novels emerges because these writings always and most often add more distraction to distraction” (Alle Vergnügungen, selbst das Theater, sollen nur zerstreuen und die große Neigung des lesenden Publicums zu Journalen und Romanen entsteht eben daher, weil jene immer und diese meist Zerstreuung in die Zerstreuung bringen). Goethe to Schiller, August 9, 1797. WA, IV.12, 217.

20. 20.   This is from an 1814 piece in Goethe’s “Invektiven” titled “Journal der Moden.” WA, I.5, 170.