Canalizing the Flow

Especially in its first six or seven years, prior to the escalation of the Napoleonic Wars in 1805–1807 and the onset of the continental blockade, London und Paris is as successful as the Modejournal and known for the topicality of its hand-colored images. The journal tracks one of the key international rivalries shaping European politics and culture between France and England and fuels curiosity about the many sides of modern urban life.²¹ The journal’s topics include popular theater and vaudevilles; current festivities, spectacles, and exhibitions; street life, customs, fashion, and social habits; the shifting political winds prior to and under Napoleon; collections, shops, and the business of print; and the remaking of postrevolutionary Paris through new buildings, monuments, and museums. For the most part, Bertuch, Böttiger, and their correspondents are ideologically aligned with the more moderate commercialism of England and often take the side of the journal’s anti-Napoleonic British caricature artists such as Gillray and Cruikshank. Images and their commentaries are central in establishing the journal’s critical tone, and the journal lays the groundwork for the spread of satirical print and image-focused cultural journalism in the German-language literary market as the century progresses. Like the Modejournal, London und Paris is an important—yet often neglected—prototype for the Unterhaltungsliteratur of the subsequent century. The journal is part of an early wave of appreciation for the cultural significance of caricature that crested in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

One important way London und Paris builds on the Modejournal’s format and thematic ambit is through its cultural and political commentary that connects the present to antiquity. Throughout most of its seventeen-year run, the journal’s cover features satirical epigrams in Latin, as in the first issue, which adapts lines from Juvenal: “Quicquid, quos Tamisis nutrit, quos Sequana rident / Gaudia, discursus nostri est farrago libelli” (Everything that enriches the Thames and that the Seine laughs at, / enjoyments, diversions are the mixed contents of our little book) (figure 3.1).²² The epigram introduces the journal as an entertaining cultural miscellany, a “little book of mixed contents” (farrago libelli), echoing the use of these lines from Juvenal by other eighteenth-century moral weeklies, including Steele’s pioneering Tatler. The journal addresses an educated readership able to read Latin but also one in search of “enjoyments” and diversions.²³ The journal’s reference to Roman satire is part of Böttiger’s larger project of tracing certain forms of cultural entertainment back to antiquity, and London und Paris is quite clear about the ancient roots of contemporary satire and caricature.

Another striking feature of this title epigram is its evocation of the metaphor of temporal, spatial, and material flow through reference to the cities’ rivers, signaling both the passage of time and a steady stream of new materials to be collected and disseminated to readers. The flow metaphor, which also applies to the aqueous origins of print and paper, is an important part of the journal’s self-understanding, drowning, as it were, in the “age of paper.” In their introduction for the journal in the first issue, Bertuch and Böttiger cite the British and French capitals as the “two main sources” from which “all this knowledge about the world and the times [All diese Welt- und Zeitkunde] flows, pouring out into so many larger and smaller canals.”²⁴ Familiar tropes from the commercial realm, flow and canalization serve as metaphors for how periodicals manage the flood of printed matter, for, according to Bertuch and Böttiger, much of what readers encounter is misleading: “What is seen and written is often quite ambiguous; deceptions and mirages … even the most reliable reports of official daily papers rarely include … the actual why and how.”²⁵ The conceit of canalization visualizes the journal’s position in various communication networks, with the journal gathering time-specific contents—news, fashions, images, and more—from French and English sources and giving it to readers at predictable, periodic installments, while diverting less valuable information.²⁶ Canalization is also a technique of temporal orientation, for the diversion of information into canals sets various chronologies or measurements of time into motion—different kinds of Zeitkunde or knowledge about time or the times—chronologies that correspond to a variety of journals and other serial forms. Readers are asked to envision a network of multiple flows moving in different directions and at varied speeds, converging and diverging in space and time.

To be sure, there is a very material side to the “diversions” from these foreign capitals, and the ephemeral print artifacts produced by Bertuch’s publishing house are essential elements of the flow. Along with their drafts, Parisian and French correspondents regularly send caricatures and other images and documents to Weimar, where they are reproduced, reprinted, and hand colored.²⁷ The journal builds on readers’ desire for various sorts of ephemeral print, including the musical notation of popular ballads or theater tunes; images of bookshops and reading rooms; product catalogues, maps, images of monuments, artifacts, and public festivals; and advertisements for different events or products that might otherwise be discarded or recycled. The metaphor of canalization concretizes the conceit of the literary and journalistic tableau while at the same time reworking it in important ways. The notion of plural tableaus helps to illustrate the journal’s innovative circulation of printed images, yet it falls short in capturing how these images and other print material make their way back to Weimar for reproduction. As much as the journal’s correspondents are peripatetic “painters” of urban scenes en plein air, they are also collectors, archivists, sorters, and cataloguers—canalizers—of a wide range of printed matter. The journal thus comes into view as an ongoing instantiation of—but also self-reflective commentary on—the transfer of information across Europe. The “canals” of communication between these cities become particularly relevant in 1806, when the journal is forced to change its title and format after the French cut off continental trade with Britain for several years. The conceits of the tableau and of temporal and material flow help the editors package their cultural entertainment as an expressly serialized product.

Though London und Paris has not been addressed nearly as much in the scholarship as the Horen, the Athenäum, or the Berliner Abendblätter, it has been recognized as a high-water mark for the reception of political caricature in German letters. Karl Rosenkranz’s 1853 Ästhetik des Häßlichen (Aesthetics of the ugly) cites the journal as a key propagator of caricatures even though nearly forty years of satirical print had added many more examples to this genre, and Eduard Fuchs’s wide-ranging 1921 history of European caricature calls London und Paris “certainly the most well-regarded journal at the beginning of the nineteenth century.”²⁸ More recent scholarship has continued to focus on the journal’s pioneering role in exposing German audiences to British and French Napoleonic era political imagery and in paving the way for later nineteenth-century illustrated serial entertainment.²⁹ Building on this work, I am interested in how the journal prompts an understanding of caricature that applies not merely to images with clearly identifiable genre markings but also to the styles of cultural reportage they engender and the commentaries that accompany them, down to the level of the layout of the journal itself. This expanded sense of caricature will help us to situate London und Paris as a pioneer in the realm of serialized cultural journalism and to appreciate how it processes the temporal reordering underway in the present day age of paper.

“Friends of the Art of Uglifying”

The status of caricature in the aesthetic debates of the day, particularly vis-à-vis debates about classicizing forms, makes a fitting backdrop for the discussion of the manner in which London und Paris presents its readers with ensembles of caricature-like articles and images. Contemporaries of Bertuch and Böttiger are all too aware of their keen interest in caricature, and in particular, Goethe and his circle—in a domestic literary feud that more or less weaponizes caricature—respond with antipathy to their successful promotion of the genre. Goethe dismisses Böttiger as “that constantly industrious distorter” (der allzeit geschäftige Verzerrer) and a hand-drawn caricature of Bertuch by Goethe’s friend J. H. Meyer circulated in the author’s circle in Weimar (figure 3.2).³⁰ Titled “Versuch in der Verhäßlichungskunst, dem großen Lobredner derselben gewidmet” (Attempt in the art of uglifying, dedicated to the great eulogist of it), the image references the Greek architect Dinocrates’s failed project to build a monumental likeness of Alexander the Great into Mount Athos. Meyer depicts Bertuch fused into a mountainside, with Böttiger on his left as the messenger god Mercury with the publishers’ multicolored journals under his arm and Kraus on the right as a devoted portraitist. While spoofing classicizing monumental form, this image also uses water (even the flood) as a pictorial trope for the rush of print products that flowed from Bertuch’s publishing house, the Landes-Industrie-Comptoir, into foreign lands. Here, flow symbolizes a kind of bad seriality, an unremitting production of ugly things that leaves Weimar and Dessau (the two cities Bertuch holds in his hands) high and dry.³¹ Meyer uses distortion and disfiguration against the distorters, casting Bertuch’s prominence in the publishing world as an empty, fleeting greatness.

This image and the cover epigrams of London und Paris give us an initial taste of the central role of caricature in debates about classicism and classicizing form in the period. The journal’s intent in documenting various features of contemporary life frequently has an antiquarian tinge, and the editors’ reliance on conventions of Menippean satire is evident, which, as Mikhail Bakhtin notes, is characterized by “a journalistic quality, the spirit of publicistic writing or of the feuilleton, and a pointed interest in the topics of the day.”³² On the level of visual form, there are of course important affinities between classicism and satirical caricature, including the preference for outline drawing and minimalist backgrounds, and many classicizing artists of the period pursue caricature-like drawing and illustration.³³ At the same time, though, caricature’s emphasis on distortion, exaggeration, and disfiguration stands in contrast to the ideal of beautiful, harmonious form. Winckelmann calls caricature “the complete other [to classicism], which must see it as its mortal enemy.”³⁴ Goethe casts caricature artists as “friends of the art of uglifying” (Freunde der Verhäßlichungskunst), who propagate “a fragmentary and distorted form of entertainment” (eine zerstückelte und verzerrte Unterhaltung).³⁵ Despite being intrigued by caricature and even showing some interest in writing commentaries himself, Goethe never fully embraces the form.³⁶ Bertuch and Böttiger’s journals, in contrast, straddle the beautiful and the ugly with more ease and commercially oriented pragmatism, circulating caricature even while continuing to hold up classical beauty as an ideal in the realm of fine arts and print luxury.

The embrace of caricature as an aesthetically valid form of cultural commentary corresponds to a key late eighteenth-century shift in aesthetic discourse from the distinction between the beautiful and ugly to one between the interesting and uninteresting.³⁷ That said, caricature likewise continues to work with an ideal of beautiful organic form as a negative point of contrast. Such an ideal is a common point of reference in satirical treatments of French cultural politics that castigate festival decorations or public monuments for not attaining the proper beauty, monumentality, or permanence. Such critiques only increase as Napoleon’s imperial ambitions grow, and the journal satirizes the neo-Roman mimesis of his grand projects of commemorative monuments. Anti-Napoleonic cultural journalism weaponizes the ideal of classical form and puts it in the service of revealing official cultural forms as ugly, disfigured, or distorted. Despite the editors’ allegiance to classical style in the arts and decorations, they and their correspondents adopt an anti-imperial, anti-Napoleonic stance.

Such criticism of French official culture is an important part of the style of journalism at work in London und Paris, which deploys caricature-like mockery in response to historical events and in opposition to the official cultural politics of postrevolutionary France. The Paris correspondent Winckler is highly critical of the Directorial government, and he views Napoleon’s early years with cautious hope before becoming increasingly critical of his rule. Winckler’s reports, laced with political caricature and satire, readily mobilize a variety of related tropes questioning the permanence of the revolution and characterizing the French people: popular self-determination is a fleeting thing; French governments change so quickly one can hardly keep track; Parisians are a whimsical people who go from one divertissement to the next; and so on. The journal thereby deploys a repertoire of conceptual binaries—ancient and modern, pre- and postrevolutionary, fleeting and permanent, official and popular, fragmentary and whole, and repetitious and discontinuous—that explore the divergence between ideal and reality and reveal the jumbled temporalities of the present. Here the recourse to conventions of ancient satire represents less an attempt to make readers aware of certain cyclical patterns of politics and culture or of the unchanging transience and folly of life (even though this is a frequent refrain of the journal) and more one to shed light on an age of contrasts and contradictions. This mode of cultural journalism is skeptical of notions of historical progress per se and attunes readers to temporal complexity and manifestations of the contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous.³⁸ It is characteristic of this journalism, then, to use caricatures to diagnose various kinds of serially recurring events such as festivals, public spectacles, museum exhibitions, popular theater, and more. Caricatures function as important tools for staging the encounter between patterns of natural and cultural time and the media times of print.

Les Cris de Paris

One way that cultural journals help readers orient themselves temporally and historically is by addressing events that recur across various scales of time—years, months, and days—and tracking what persists and what changes over time. In the case of London und Paris, these events include popular theater and vaudevilles; festivities and exhibitions; street life, commerce, and fashion; popular songs and balladeering; scholarly lectures and public speeches; political ceremonies and rituals; the construction of new buildings, monuments, museums, and the arrival of plundered Italian and Egyptian art in Parisian museums.³⁹ Reports on recurrent events are frequently accompanied by a variety of different artifacts, including the texts of ballads, images of national uniforms and costumes, and lyrics and music from popular songs, as in the case of the Modejournal’s discussion of the text and music of “La Marseillaise,” which as the article notes, “rings out now almost daily in all theaters and public meetings.”⁴⁰ The popularity and serial repetition of this song make it worthy of preservation: “At certain points in time, and in certain political situations, universally popular folk songs sung with enthusiasm are the image and imprint of the spirit of the people, expression of its periodic feelings, and for that reason the most valuable archival objects for the history of the spirit of the nation.”⁴¹ Along with archiving this material for future historians, the journal also includes a plate with the song’s lyrics and melody. This print artifact is a remedial undertaking, allowing German readers to sing, play, and even memorize the song, if they liked.

Depictions of the calls and fashions of peripatetic street merchants and news hawkers (Neuigkeitsschreier or crieurs de journaux) represent a prevalent (and less immediately political) part of this print material. The “cries” of London, Paris, Berlin, and more had long been beloved literary, visual, and musical subjects, ranging from their representations in children’s books to fine art prints and popular theater to classical art music. The calls of walking merchants could be heard in towns and cities throughout Europe long into the nineteenth century and in the literature and journalism of the later part of the century, their gradual disappearance would become an index of modernization.⁴² In the late 1790s, representations of such cries are important for several reasons. They are a vehicle for comparing pre- and postrevolutionary epochs, as in Mercier’s work; one could very well view the representation of these cries as a throwback to earlier modes of characterizing urban life, but I want to argue that they are used to diagnose the specific temporalities of the postrevolutionary era. They are also a key instance of how serial forms across text and image are deployed to represent chaotic urban media landscapes, streets where information and goods circulate and where the wandering observer is inundated by print merchandise. Street criers thus provide an occasion to comment on the daily news cycle, with tropes of time-specific news and the ephemerality of the voice growing intertwined. Finally, the low social standings of many of these vendors lend them to humorous, caricature-like treatments with an aspect of dissonance and ugliness.

The public circulation of the news is the topic of a short article in London und Paris from 1799 titled “Les Cris de Paris.” As Winckler notes, “because every populous city has its own criers with special costumes and melodies, it has long since become a common speculation for image sellers to depict these and sell entire suites of them. One can find collections of figures from Vienna, Petersburg, or Leipzig that are very suitable for being caricatured.”⁴³ To wit, the article then references a chapter from Mercier, citing the author’s impression of these cries as a “une inexplicable cacophonie” and a “discordans” “ensemble” of sounds, reproducing an extended section of his piece in French.⁴⁴ In effect, Mercier’s text is a kind of literary caricature that emphasizes these songs’ dissonant ugliness. In Winckler’s hands, satirical depiction is a natural outgrowth of the literature and imagery of the urban tableau. The correspondent seeks to outdo Mercier, though, by providing yet another representation of the cries, this time via musical notation: “It will certainly be enjoyable for some readers to find these dissonances notated on this supplemental plate.”⁴⁵ Mercier himself eschews the use of actual illustrations in his tableau collections (despite emphatically basing his literary sketches on visual observation), and this plate (Tafel) (figure 3.3) has the effect of adding a new medial layer to the representation of the cries in print.⁴⁶

This plate is a curious artifact, inserted into the middle of the issue rather than placed at the end, as with the journal’s more elaborate, hand-colored images. It captures the cries of a handful of sellers with musical notation, a rather whimsical attempt to preserve the fleeting sounds of the city for future re-vocalization, a sister convention to the one of including sheet music in journals, almanacs, and pocketbooks.⁴⁷ It is a bit unclear, though, how one is to actually use this score. Should a group of people sing the different parts? Should they be played on a piano forte or with several instruments? The fact that these short “songs” are in different keys and time signatures casts doubt on the plate’s functionality as a score. While it was not uncommon for periodicals like London und Paris to include sheet music, this image seems more a silly diversion than any kind of parlor music that one would sit down to play. Along with being a favorite visual genre in the early modern period, the cris de Paris was a popular motif for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century composers, but it is clear that the rather rough plate in London und Paris aims at neither harmony nor beauty. In its ugliness or, rather, its figuration of ugliness in tabular form, the printed page allows readers to imagine a layered multiplicity of fleeting sights and sounds as they occur across space and time.

The shape of time evoked by this small tableau is not merely that of a jarringly dissonant moment but also that of a predictable, intervallic recurrence:

To satisfy incredulous readers who might suspect that I invented the above Cris de Paris for fun, I would like to announce that one can go and hear and see the original of these cries daily, between eleven and one o’clock, as they pass through the Rue de la Loi, formerly the Rue Richelieu, and that they pass through this street so exactly at this time that certain people treat this part of the city as a kind of clock, which takes the place of the ancient slaves who would announce the signs of the sundial out loud.⁴⁸

The correspondent asks his readers to imagine the relationship between the single iteration of these overlapping cries and their daily repetition.⁴⁹ These criers help to measure multiple frames of time: the duration of the cries on a single day, day-to-day repetition, continuities between antiquity and modernity, the disjunction between pre- and postrevolutionary periods as referenced by the altered street names, and, more broadly, the disjunction between manual and mechanical modes of measuring time. These complex temporal coordinates align this scene more with modern caricature’s interest in historically specific temporal frameworks and less with topoi of cyclically enduring popular life, despite the motifs being popular material for such depictions in earlier centuries. As a tableau cutting across both engraved plate and journalistic description, this article imagines the city via a complex, multilayered shape of time, situating momentary, fleeting occurrences as part of a structure of serialized and predictable recurrence. In contrast to Goethe’s treatment of Roman carnival, Winckler treats popular culture and its quasi-cyclical patterns of repetition and recurrence more ambivalently, via satirical distortion rather than classicizing affirmation.

A topic closely related to merchant cries is that of the newspaper sellers who likewise engage in the performative street-level circulation of information and hawking of print ephemera in the form of newspapers, pamphlets, and chapbooks. With their penchant for promoting salacious crime stories, such singers are associated much more with the ugly yet perennially interesting features of urban life, and representations of them clearly tap into the European tradition of the “shocking ballad.”⁵⁰ Several articles from a 1798 issue of London und Paris are revealing for how they explicitly thematize the “canalization” of print artifacts dating back to Weimar. These articles describe a gruesome murder that briefly caught Parisians’ attention and discuss how news of this crime had since circulated, with the author equal parts dismayed and entertained by the many sources clamoring to report the story. The first article criticizes the newspaper criers for their rush to judgment and their prioritization of sales over truth and justice, and the second article gives a concrete example of this sensationalism, referring back to previous discussions of this phenomenon.⁵¹ Titled “Supplement to the Previous Article: Murder story, as It Is First Called Out by the Crier According to Its Content, and Then Bellowed Out in a Miserable Ballad,” this piece briefly details the murder in question, and then, “in order to visualize” (als Versinnlichung), includes a reproduction of a pamphlet that one specific Neuigkeitsschreier read and sang from.⁵² Typesetters in Weimar reproduced the French text and layout of the original pamphlet, which contains a prose account of the crime and police interrogation followed by several pages of verse that retells the crime to the tune of a popular song. It is set in Antiqua typeface, a common feature of the journal’s reproduction of foreign words and phrases.

The article calls upon the reader to imagine the crieurs de journaux as they sell their wares on the street, bringing further issues of reproduction and remediation into play: “Now imagine on the Pont Neuf or outside the Louvre several of these kinds of stentorian voices that bellow the headline in your ears and that direct people passing by to the beautiful woodcut, in order to attract customers: that way you have at least something of the beautiful image [of this scene].”⁵³ As with the “Cris de Paris” piece, at stake is an imagined auditory experience of layered, dissonant sounds coming from different sources. Winckler brings this chaotic image of competing sellers into the realm of caricature, sarcastically referring to the “beauty” of the pamphlet’s image, which the editors take the liberty of not reproducing: “The original sent to us from Paris consists of a half folio page of dirty, yellow paper. Above, a woodcut prances along in the most tasteless uniform, which our readers will certainly allow us to skip over.”⁵⁴ An ensemble of different print artifacts, some demonstratively withheld, creates the effect of an extended caricature. The crime is ugly, the voices are ugly, the paper and image are ugly, and even the public’s interest in all of it is somewhat unseemly. The commentary on this local media ecology takes on the status of both social documentary and satirical entertainment.

Despite its ties to an all-too-temporary news sensation, this pamphlet is also associated with preservation: the subtitle of the ballad states that “deux exemplaires ont été déposées à la Bibliothèque Nationale” (two examples have been filed at the National Library). It might seem ridiculous that these pages would be preserved in the most permanent (though only recently refounded and renamed) of “national” archives, yet Winckler would know, working with and under the curator and professor of antiquities in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Aubin-Louis Millin.⁵⁵ Whether we take this peculiar paratext at face value or not, it establishes London und Paris and the Bibliothèque Nationale as two different kinds of material archives: the journal holds one copy, and the library two; the journal “canalizes” the pamphlet in one direction, and the library in another. Indeed, the print run of the journal, with upward of 1,200 copies, amplifies the reach of the pamphlet considerably more than the library. And just like the visitor to the library, readers of the journal are called on to make their way through a heterogenous archive. But in contrast to the library, which preserves sources in their original form, the periodical deals in reproductions. Thus implicit in the circulation of ephemera is a sense that they have been preserved in different, potentially unrelated archives and that multiple copies (and copies of copies) are in circulation. The description and physical reproduction of these proliferating copies make visible and tactile the very undertaking of London und Paris.

Both scenes rely upon a clear notion of serialized repetition: “this song will recur at the same time again tomorrow; this performer first read, then sang the news story, then shoved a pamphlet that he was just reading into my hand (and we needn’t even mention the image),” and so on.⁵⁶ These patterns extend into the past and present, and they presume recurrence and variation into the future: even if the same murder story has faded from public interest, another story will be bellowed out. The logic of the tableau thus organizes a flexible intermedial ensemble that can repeat the same scene in different ways. Here, too, this tableau caricatures the peripatetic merchants and news sellers as well as the gullible public that consumes it, and it also satirizes the canalization of print products, even while participating in it. This piece provides a different twist on the trope of the fashionableness of reading (and hearing) the news from what we encountered in chapters 1 and 2 and shows how a bit of self-deprecation from the journal’s correspondents and editors—who, like the Parisian public, are to a certain extent intrigued by these print artifacts—makes the satirical ensemble of print artifacts all the more entertaining.

“Ephemeral Favorites”

In their introduction to the journal, Bertuch and Böttiger underline the important role periodicals have in tracking the fleeting fashions of the day: “[The journal] will name the daily pages and the writings, which, as ephemeral favorites [ephemerische Lieblinge], characterize the feeling of the public for this moment, but it will not deliver any actual excerpts or critical discussions of them.”⁵⁷ Discussions of contemporary journals and the print marketplace in England and France are a topic close to Bertuch’s heart and pocketbook, yet here the editors suggest that their journal is to function in this regard as something of a reference work that “names” the fashionable publications of the day but avoids the common practice of excerption and review. This peculiar statement presumes that the reader is perusing (or might want to peruse) multiple journals at the same time and that London und Paris is but one of several points of entry into the world of print. Simply documenting these “ephemeral favorites” plays a certain archival function in the service of informing readers about “the times”—a Zeitkunde—allowing readers to at least know of their existence in order to consult them at some point in time.

A specific episode from the seventh issue of 1799 delivers on this promise to reflect on and document the periodical landscape. Napoleon had just seized power with the coup of the Eighteenth Brumaire, and the French correspondent for London und Paris praises the lifting of the Directorial government’s reign of censorship. Referencing Mercier’s praise of robust press freedoms in the early days of the revolution, the correspondent hopes for renewal of this earlier liberal spirit through a free press: “The true freedom of the press is only now starting with the glorious palingenesis of the Eighteenth Brumaire, where a deplorable number of partisan journals soon will disappear on their own and thereby make room for the true freedom of the press.”⁵⁸ Here, the ephemerality of the official journals of the Directory is cast in a positive light, for these journals are simply the biased mouthpieces of a repressive government. The Eighteenth Brumaire is a rebirth, a “palingenetic” recurrence of the revolution itself that leads to the dying off of the official press and the birth of new projects.

This article is situated in the section of the journal titled “French Caricatures” and is a gloss of sorts on a specific image (figure 3.4) attributed to the period directly after the coup: “The page you have in front of you represents quite accurately the moment when the journal criers disperse from the printer’s as quickly as they can with the newspapers they have received there, in order to bring them out to the more remote quarters of the city.”⁵⁹ The many journal sellers personify the new journals reentering the crowded print market; the many titles on view—in neat rows at the top of the image and in the hands of the sellers—and the multiple printing presses enlisted likewise dramatize this scene.⁶⁰ The jumbled, time-specific contents of the public sphere are represented both figurally and literally. Even though the Parisian correspondent is still relatively positive about Napoleon at this point, this caricature is more ambivalent about the periodical landscape, which appears active and industrious but also crowded and unruly.

The fact, though, that a change in censorship laws is configured as a repetition of previous events adds a degree of complexity to this scene, suggesting that the loosening and tightening of the laws recurs intermittently and that such changes indicate shifting political currents. Here we might note one further temporal complexity: the original French caricature on which this is modeled refers not to events of 1799 but to those of 1795, another period of relative liberalization.⁶¹ Though readers would likely have not known that the original image did not apply to the aftermath of the Eighteenth Brumaire, a sense of recurrence, repetition, and layering of previous events is nonetheless strongly present in this image and its commentary. The fact that the image can function interchangeably for different events would seem to suggest that the historical events under discussion might themselves be interchangeable or part of an identifiable pattern and thus registers uncertainty about the meaning and significance of the recent shift in government.

There then follows a “supplement” (Beylage) to this discussion that lists all of the journals published in Paris from September of 1797 until August of 1798:

On this occasion it is perhaps not displeasing to certain readers of this journal to find all the daily papers and journals of all varieties that appeared between the first Vendemiaire of year VI until the middle of Thermidor here next to each other in alphabetic order, as it was communicated to us by a connoisseur in Paris. Naturally some of these died directly after birth, or were resurrected three or four times in new form, according to the principle of Pythagorean metempsychosis. At the very least one will appreciate the inventiveness that gave rise to these new titles.⁶²

This supplement references a frame of time that is neither the time ascribed to the caricature nor that to which the image had originally referred. Strangely, this period precedes the Eighteenth Brumaire by about a year, though it was in fact a time of strong freedom of the press following yet another coup carried out by the Directorial government. Given this discrepancy between the recent past and present, it is not entirely clear what the reader is supposed to get out of this alphabetic listing. Perhaps the list is meant to play a role as an archival reference work that documents the journals during a particular phase of the postrevolutionary, pre-Napoleonic period. At the same time, despite celebrating the freedom of the press, the correspondent speaks somewhat dismissively of these journals’ brief lives—the freedom of journals to quickly die out is a somewhat unique take on the freedom of the press, to be sure. But there is also a sense that appreciating the inventiveness of journal names on an aesthetic level is itself a suitable response to this supplement—it is an add-on to the caricature section of London und Paris, after all. Editors of individual journals creatively devise clever new names for new journals while the editors of London und Paris pursue a different kind of creative naming, an inventory-like listing of multiple names.

Like the image, this supplemental text helps to evoke the metaphor of print’s essential ephemerality, though here it is done via a list. Titles are placed “next to each other,” including those that access temporal and spatial semantics (nouvelles, magazins, bibliotheque, journal, feuilles, and chronique) and slightly more unusual titles such as le Don Quichotte des dames or the tachygraph, the “speed writer” or writer of shorthand. Both the visual image and the list call attention to the “ephemeral favorites” referenced in the journal’s introduction. This list helps to imagine the potential lifespans of these journals, and it once more positions London und Paris as an archive of fleeting frames of time, marking a yearlong period amid an especially turbulent time in recent history, but also marking the various microdurations suggested by the lives, rhythms of publication, deaths, and rebirths of these journals. It is likewise worth noting that the alphabetic list organizes the frames of time represented by these journals’ lives synchronically, in contrast, say, to a table organized by the dates of these journals’ publication history. This supplement is an excellent example of how the periodical juxtaposes frames of time without necessarily creating a narrativized, linear connection between them and how it draws on the tools of caricature to do so. In the same way that the correspondent praises the inventiveness of French journalists, this list, too, shows off an ability to call on different kinds of caricature-like representation to concretize the trope of the ephemerality of the press.

To the extent that this list turns London und Paris into something of a reference work, it is not one that provides an exhaustive catalogue of the print landscape of the decade after the revolution. Instead it is an incomplete archive that reflects something of the transience of what it seeks to document. Periodicals such as London und Paris are constantly marking and archiving things from the world around them, but lists such as these enable more general reflection upon the periodical landscape as a whole, or at least they give a brief temporal snapshot of that whole, a process of reflection that goes hand in hand with sending various kinds of print artifacts back to German readers.

Linen Monuments

London und Paris expands on the Modejournal’s focus on public festivals of various sorts, an all-important topic of the cultural journals of the period.⁶³ Viewed in tandem, these two journals have the advantage of tracking certain revolutionary festivals over multiple years, and public spectacles come up in the very first issue of London und Paris. Here, too, it is important to have a “tested observer on location.”⁶⁴ The Modejournal lost its Parisian correspondent in 1793 and had no reports from Paris, fashion-related or otherwise, for over two years, while London und Paris began its run with a well-connected pair of correspondents on board.⁶⁵ News about the fate of revolutionary festivals into the Directorial and Napoleonic periods is part of the ever-surging flood of political and cultural reportage from Paris that would last in Germany until the beginnings of Napoleonic occupation. The periodical landscape is a key multiplier of representations of festivities, generating new accounts and recirculating previously published ones. Journals track festivals as they unfold over a given season or year, collate reports about the same celebration occurring at different places in France or in French-controlled neighboring territories, and follow such events over multiple years.⁶⁶ Festivals are also events that generate large amounts of paper. The journal’s correspondents eagerly discuss the advertisements, newspaper reports, and more luxurious print artifacts tied to such events, and they send as much as possible to Weimar: caricatures of spectacles, colored drawings of fireworks, expansive tableaus of public gathering spots, carnival costumes, images of the elaborate thrones for Napoleon’s coronation, and more. Not unlike accounts of the cris de Paris, these images work in a visual register of combining heterogeneous parts into coherent wholes, an aesthetics that mirrors the symbolic function of the festivals themselves.⁶⁷ Such images complement verbal accounts of various processions, spectacles, performances, and the personalities, high and low, who attended them. At the same time as they draw on classicizing iconography in the service of constructing a sense of the unity of the French nation, many festival organizers likewise embrace the provisional and ephemeral qualities of such events and of the print matter that surround them; as Richard Taws has argued in the context of staging and documenting such festivals, “printed reproduction operates as an allegory of the reproduction of Revolution, and provisionality figures as a sign of things to come.”⁶⁸ Ephemerality becomes a conceptual hinge for both the proponents and critics of official cultural politics.

In each of its first two years, London und Paris juxtaposes reports about a specific public event showcasing new spring fashions and reports of an official political festival. Again we find ourselves in the jumbled temporality of the weeks and months leading up to Easter, a focal point of the previous chapter. The “Promenade of Longchamp” is a public procession (Lustfahrt) of sorts along the Champs-Élysées to a rural area near the city, where high society shows off its carriages and the latest spring fashions. Mercier mentions this event in a prerevolutionary tableau, and we learn in the very first issue of London und Paris that the procession had ceased during the revolutionary period and is just starting up again in 1797.⁶⁹ Occurring on the Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday before Easter, this is the place to see and be seen, a “Corso in Paris,” and the 1798 article comments on the personalities in attendance and fashions on display.⁷⁰ This procession was once based on a religious quasi-pilgrimage to an abbey in Longchamp, but its modern form is wholly based on a “mutual desire to see and be seen” (wechselseitige Schaulust).⁷¹

Readers then encounter an article on the “Celebration of the Festival of the Sovereignty of the People,” an event that occurs in the same week as the Longchamp procession.⁷² The Directorial government inaugurated this festival in year six of the revolution (1797), and the event occurs prior to an important national voting day. The Directorial period is a time of bureaucratization and administrative consolidation and the limiting of direct democracy.⁷³ This festival is one of the Fêtes décadaires that is held on the décades, or the days of rest, that fall every ten days in the revolutionary calendar. Intended to encourage election participation and the generational transfer of civic virtues, this event stages ritualistic scenes of the young and old exchanging roles over the course of the festival.⁷⁴ Reflecting on the hypocrisy of celebrating the self-determination of the people at a time of decreased democratic participation, Winckler sprinkles in references to Easter and to other newly created festivals, including ones celebrating youth and old age, noting that the current event is when

the (underage) French people plays and amuses itself a little bit with its sovereignty again for ten days (sit superis placet!), only to then put its sovereignty back into the closet for another year, just like holy Jesus, so that it stays new and lasts all the longer. For Aristophanes has already taught us that citizen Demos is quite the capricious old noggin; daily experience likewise teaches us that old men and children are unfortunately often all too similar, and the fact that children don’t enjoy playing with the same toy for very long is something that we all know from the history of our own and others’ youth.⁷⁵

Winckler manipulates multiple temporal binaries, casting a disparaging eye at the political maturity of the French people and their religiosity, while also castigating the government for cynically celebrating something it does not entirely trust. Accessing the authority of ancient satire with its reference to Aristophanes, this passage relativizes the attempts to promote lasting civic virtue. An image emerges of a culture straddling an older Christian past (and the less distant galant past of the ancien regime) and a new quasisecular postrevolutionary era.

London und Paris returns to both events in the subsequent year with an article titled “Clothes for Watching Ice-Skating. Festival of the Sovereignty of the People in Linen Monuments. Procession to Longchamp. Bockay’s. Overcoats with Eight Collars” serving as a continuation of sorts of the satirical treatment a year earlier, and this new treatment appears at a time of political turbulence, a half year prior to the coup of the Eighteenth Brumaire.⁷⁶ This time around, reports on the different events are bundled together in a single article, and the piece begins firmly in the register of fashion journalism. It has been an unusually cold winter, flooding has led to the Champs-Elysées being temporarily iced over, and the correspondent discusses the ridiculous marketing of clothing not merely to ice skaters but to the spectators (Schrittschuhlaufzusehkleider). The fleetingness of the frozen ice corresponds perfectly with the “ephemeral winter dress” (ephemeres Winterkleid) developed by Parisian designers for the occasion (Winckler also plays here on the term for an animal’s winter coat), and ice skating had long been a familiar motif in the visual culture of preceding centuries as an epitome of the transience of all life.⁷⁷ The discussion of the world of fashion continues as the correspondent turns to the procession of Longchamp, noting readers’ familiarity with the event and referring explicitly back to the previous year’s article.⁷⁸ This year, there is some speculation that the festival would be canceled as an “appendage of the old calendar” (Anhängsel des alten Kalendars), that is, as a relic of the prerevolutionary past, but the livelihoods of too many people would be impacted.⁷⁹

As in the previous year’s issue, the juxtaposition of different events lends a certain smallness and ephemerality to the festival, which is extended by the placement of the reports in the article, even down to the very appearance of the printed page. Though the discussion of this year’s iteration of the festival (“Festival of Popular Sovereignty in Linen Monuments”) precedes the Longchamp procession in the article title, the discussion of the official festival occurs entirely as a footnote, an afterthought, or appendage, if you will, to the extended account of the procession, which takes up most of the article. A glimpse at the layout of the page (figure 3.5) exhibits this plainly. This layout betrays a clear satirical intent and an ingenuity in using the printed page to enact the reversal of high and low and of civic virtue and the whimsy of a fashion show. The layered juxtaposition of the two different processions—two different frames of temporal unfolding and two different tableaus—operates much like the cris de Paris plate above. The page is a temporally complex visual ensemble that renders the contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous visible.

The contents of this two-page footnote extend the satirical reach of this article, turning the fleetingness of the festival against itself. Giving a brief account of the festival’s main monument (a column covered by shields and flags, topped with a liberty tree, and illuminated at night), the correspondent addresses the flimsiness of the decorations, which at first glance reflect poorly on their ostensible function in commemorating the French people’s achievements: “One still has not yet abandoned the strange idea of erecting monuments made of cloth and paper, which can be blown away by the first wind and which give brave mockers opportunity, nay, leave them no choice but to make fun of them.”⁸⁰ As Winckler notes, though, it turns out that this flimsiness is a desired effect intended to allegorize the transition from the direct democracy of the revolutionary period to the elected representatives of the Directory.⁸¹ Though ephemerality is built into the festival’s design, Winckler cannot hold back from mocking its aspirations.⁸² Quoting Horace’s ode on immortality (Exegi monumentum aere perennius), the author closes sarcastically with the hope that the French will someday get their act together and produce more lasting monuments.⁸³

These interrelated tableaus implicitly pose a question at the heart of serial form: what is and isn’t to be continued? Will the fashion show have more staying power than the Directorial government? Will the next festival find a better aesthetic solution to the problem of projecting permanence through ephemeral constructions? Returning to the same spectacles across multiple issues has an entertaining effect, but it also gives a certain shape to time through repetition and variation. The processions of Longchamp and the sovereignty festival began at around the same point in 1797. Yet each hearkens back to different origins—to more or less distant prerevolutionary pasts and to the beginnings of popular self-determination in 1789. Winckler’s satirical jabs at official culture are embedded in a larger set of temporal patterns that provide points of orientation—old and new Paris, and secular and Christian rituals—but do not offer any conclusive, predictive vision for the future, other than that there will be more attempts to mark the passing of time. Classical topoi are deployed to show where festivals depart from classical ideals, but this temporal effect is also achieved by the materiality of the printed page, which situates this material in a cultural hierarchy that casts both events in a ridiculous light through a series of ongoing, caricature-like vignettes.

The Monument as Caricature and as Ephemeral Event

Along with integrating classicizing iconography into public festivities, the French cultural politics of the two decades following the revolution is well-known for its imitation of antique sculpture and architecture. Like many contemporary journals, London und Paris eagerly track the construction of new monuments and buildings as an important form of history writing and of shaping temporal awareness more generally. Examining the journal’s treatment of the famous victory column erected by Napoleon on the Place Vendôme, a monument that would remain a flashpoint in cultural and political debates throughout the nineteenth century, takes us deeper into the Napoleonic period and helps us to conceptualize the relationship of caricature to classical form and to the representation of historical personages. Monuments lend themselves to caricature because the conceit to wholeness, grandeur, and a unified artistic effect is prone to being distorted and disfigured—rendered ugly (verhäßlicht), to use Goethe’s formulation. Napoleon is certainly the most depicted figure of the period; he cultivates a very deliberate public image across multiple media, and yet, of course, he is also a favorite target of political caricaturists. The Vendôme column, with its neo-Roman mimesis and larger-than-life representation of Napoleon in a toga at the top, is an irresistible target for Bertuch’s journal, even after French occupation greatly curtails the ability of journalists to voice critical perspectives.

The Napoleonic occupation of German-speaking lands (1807–1813) is a difficult time for Bertuch’s journals. Beginning in 1806, his journals are forced to reorient their offerings because continental blockades make it increasingly difficult to receive material from England. Bertuch’s son, Carl, takes over editing the journal in 1804 and changes the name in 1811 to Paris, Wien, und London—ein fortgehendes Panorama dieser drei Hauptstädte (Paris, Vienna and London—a continuous panorama of these three capitals). As scholars have noted, the journals of the Landes-Industrie-Comptoir are subject in these years to a shift from the literature of the urban tableau to a “journal for the nobility” (Adelsjournal),⁸⁴ from trend setting to provincial middlebrow, from “political cultural reporting to pure cultural news.”⁸⁵ In effect, London und Paris is a window onto the mixed fortunes of Bertuch’s publishing house, with shifts in access and censorship over the years affecting the quality and relevance of his different journalistic enterprises. London und Paris’s modified title continues to emphasize the journal’s status as an “ongoing panorama” of multiple cities, but at this time, the satirical epigrams fade from its front cover. Both London und Paris and the Modejournal continue to be interested in the arts. In 1813 the title of the Modejournal became Journal für Luxus, Mode und Gegenstände der Kunst (Journal for luxury, fashion, and objects of art) and then in 1814 Journal für Literatur, Kunst, Luxus und Mode (Journal for literature, art, luxury, and fashion). Despite this interest in the arts and the continued reliance on images, the number of caricatures and satirical commentaries declines markedly in both journals in the 1810s.

That said, the anti-Napoleonic sentiments of the elder Bertuch remain strong, and he is a key agent in the development of the nationalist press after the end of the Napoleonic occupation.⁸⁶ The cultural journals of his publishing house do not stop sending back reports on public spectacle and commemorative practices from Paris, Vienna, and London and continue to insert subtle mockery of Napoleon into their pages. In part from the perspective of the anti-Roman and anti-French “barbarian”⁸⁷ and in part as an oppositional neo-Roman mimesis that positions Germans as more capable than the French of imitating the artistic achievements of antiquity, Paris, Wien und London pursues a style of cultural critique that bears important similarities to the more ostentatious satirical material in the early years of London und Paris.

The Columns of Austerlitz

London und Paris contains two different reports on the “Colonne de la grande Armée.” The first was published in 1808 while the column was still being completed, and the second appeared following its dedication in 1811, just after the journal was retitled. This monument was modeled after the Column of Trajan in Rome and commemorated the defeat of the Austrian army at Austerlitz in 1805; the bronze for the bas-reliefs encircling the column was supposedly taken from Austrian cannons. For German-speaking lands, this column is a symbol of humiliation, and the 1808 article’s title provocatively refers to it as the “Column of Austerlitz” and details a visit to the workshop where it is being made.⁸⁸ The symbolic regime under Napoleon is still very much a work in progress, and wondering where it might go and how it might end is a prime topic for contemporary history writing. As the anonymous correspondent notes (Winckler had by this time passed away), the viewer can learn things about unfinished monuments from “seeing something in the process of coming into being [Entstehensehen].” Presuming the work’s completion and function as a whole, the correspondent nonetheless lingers with the merits of partial views and their procedural character: “I like to observe a large totality in parts, … piece by piece” (Ich betrachte gern ein großes Ganze theilweise … Stück für Stück).⁸⁹ Advance viewing of the parts prior to their final positioning is especially instructive in the case of the column’s bas-reliefs depicting the history of Napoleon’s victory. On installation, they wound their way up the column farther and farther from viewers on the ground and would not be visible as a continuous whole from any one location. This scene of viewing the bas-reliefs prior to their final installation functions as yet another tableau mouvant based on shifting spatial and temporal perspectives.

If the journalistic disarticulation of the whole provides an initial hint that this article might be using the tools of caricature against the unfinished monument, the author’s interest in elements of the structure that are distorted and disfigured leaves little doubt that this is the case.⁹⁰ As the correspondent notes, because manual laborers are doing the work rather than trained artists, “almost all of the figures have become caricatures” (fast alle Gestalten sind Karikaturen geworden).⁹¹ Disfiguration also affects the workers assembling the columns, who appear to have become ill from all the metal and stone dust—there is “not a single healthy figure” among them.⁹² Additionally, the soldiers depicted on the incomplete bas-reliefs stand unnaturally upright and lack heads. “To give the artist’s taste the best possible interpretation, one could almost take them for satyrs, if all joking were not obscene in the face of such dreadful seriousness and the German blood shed so bravely.”⁹³ These images are unbalanced and fragmented; so too is the body of Napoleon, who is to stand atop the column in the costume of a Roman emperor: though the head bears a striking resemblance to the leader, the body is “calculated for its elevation and should not be observed up close.”⁹⁴

Though censorship prevents the correspondent from saying it outright, this article’s aim is to make this classicizing monstrosity seem as impermanent as the journal’s caricatures and tableaux mouvants. Employing satire’s characteristic reversals, the article undermines the sense of the monument as a stable, unified work. By focusing on procedural aspects—how it is being unskillfully built, or viewing it in parts—the article temporalizes and destabilizes the monument. In the context of more modern projects such as the artist Christo’s wrapping of the German Reichstag in the 1990s, the historian François Hartog has described methods of treating a building or monument as a point of reference in a dynamic process rather than as a stable, unified form with a fixed meaning. “One way of introducing something new is to play on the paradox of the durable and the ephemeral, by transforming a monument into an event.”⁹⁵ This unassuming piece of Napoleonic era cultural journalism does just that, for it treats spectatorship of the monument as a process of deconstruction and disfigurement rather than as a process of constructing the object as a unified whole, as an affirmatively classicizing viewing might do. The lightly satirical yet devastating description of the monument as a work in progress rivals the commemorative temporality that the monument is intended to inaugurate. The column’s completion will mark the beginning of its proper commemorative function, yet this account preemptively invests the monument with a different temporality, namely one that envisions its eventual irrelevance and destruction.

Though the second article on the column in the newly renamed Paris, Wien und London lacks any reference to the first article, it might be seen as something of a continuation of it (or as merely another instance in a steady stream of disparaging accounts of Napoleonic rule). This second view also pairs an account of the column with that of a second artwork unveiled on the same day, August 15, 1810. This is the monument built for the Place des Victoires to honor General Louis Desaix, a close confidant to Napoleon who accompanied him to Egypt and died in battle in 1800. Readers are presented with a sequence of discussions of two “products of contemporary art” (Produkte der neuern Kunst) that have attracted the attention of artists and friends of art and the “curiosity of spectacle-seeking public of all classes” (gaffenden Publikums aller Klassen).⁹⁶ In this issue (in contrast to the 1808 article), readers are provided with images of the monuments that bring them both down to fit the size of the printed page (figures 3.6 and 3.7).

The column is no longer in pieces if the image is any guide, and soldiers seem to have already begun to use the Place Vêndome to commemorate the military’s past successes. This article is more matter of fact than the earlier one, even issuing mild praise: it is understandable that this “imitation of the ancient masterpiece” makes a positive impression, for its proportions are taken from “one of the most beautiful monuments of antiquity.”⁹⁷ The correspondent comments on the column’s dimensions and the difficulty of making “continuous bas-reliefs” (fortlaufende Basreliefs) out of bronze.⁹⁸ This description continues to lightly evoke the semantics of progressive, forward movement suggested by the journal’s title (fortgehendes Panorama). A tinge of criticism comes through at the end of the piece, though, with the correspondent noting the “strange contrast” of the soldiers’ modern uniform and Napoleon’s Roman costume: “Perhaps this all-too-conscientious faithfulness of imitation will, after many centuries, cause our descendants to believe that the statue was placed on top of the monument during a different age, and that under certain circumstances, our rulers occasionally made use of the costume of the Roman emperors.”⁹⁹ The journal’s tandem treatment of fashion and broader cultural and political affairs helps to envision a future long after the fall of the Napoleonic empire in which French attempts to find traces of antiquity in the present will border on the undecipherable. Here again, readers are invited to momentarily occupy the position of future historians (or archaeologists, to recall Börne’s thought experiment with which we began this book), and here, too, the call to imagine the present as an ancient past gestures in a classicizing direction without fully affirming classical form.

The second part of the article turns to Desaix, who is depicted in a heroic style, almost naked, next to an Egyptian obelisk and a sphinx head. The monument was panned by the French press, presumably allowing the correspondent to be more forthcoming with his criticism. As in the discussion of the Place Vendôme column, this article addresses the question of historical dress and temporal disjunction. The monument straddles antiquity and modernity and occident and orient (Desaix is pointing East), and the correspondent rehearses complaints about the appropriateness of depicting the general naked (why, for example, isn’t he wearing the cloak he carries on his arm?). The disjunction of antique, heroic style and modern customs could, perhaps, be excused if the form of the body were well carried out, but this statue is little more than a massive caricature-like exaggeration: “Here, however, one views merely a gigantic, trivial statue, entirely common, purely exaggerated forms.”¹⁰⁰ The correspondent has kinder words for the obelisk, but the lack of any correspondence or aesthetic coherence to the ensemble confuses the effect.¹⁰¹ Intended as a fusion of the style of antiquity with the achievements of modernity, the monument manifests little more than the disjunctive coexistence of different temporal frames. A satirical reading of a classicizing statue unmasks the statue as (unwitting) self-caricature.

It is perhaps not an accident that the piece closes on a sartorial note: after being panned by the critics and disavowed by the artist who designed it, the Desaix statue has been covered back up: “It is said that they are in the process of clothing it, in order, if possible, to improve it.”¹⁰² Even as the monuments are being unveiled as completed, they are drawn back into a process of redesigning and reworking. The account of the process of unveiling, reception, and reveiling undercuts these commemorative representations of important leaders and their intended function, namely to manifest Napoleon and Desaix’s lasting and unchanging presence in the public life of the nation. Instead, this report relegates such representations to a realm of temporal uncertainty and flux through caricature-like disfigurement.¹⁰³ Caricature brings down to size, if you will, the aspiration to historical greatness and the commemoration of a would-be permanent victory. The size of these printed images also contributes to this effect, with the plate of the Desaix monument the size of any other plate in the journal.

The consideration of the two monuments one after the other follows to a certain extent the course of official commemoration and its attempt to mark intelligible points in a heroic narrative of history—Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign and the battle of Austerlitz function here as key moments in a series of French victories—yet the journal’s sequence of images does not result in any kind of synthetic, comprehensible unity of ancient and modern or of past, present and future. Seen in the light of the journal’s self-understanding as an “ongoing panorama,” the subtle (and not so subtle) demonumentalization carried out by these pieces situates these monuments on par with other fleeting urban scenes instead of identifying a radically different temporality at work in the monuments that could fix historical memory. Rather than functioning as memorializing devices that one might preserve to remember Napoleon, they come to function as other caricatures in the journal do—as somewhat whimsical pieces that might or might not be preserved by readers as historically specific indicators of national folly. In line with the journal’s aims since its inception, this ensemble of texts and images stresses the monument’s status as an ephemeral process rather than as a commemorative structure that programs its own unchanging future reception into the act of viewing it. In the era when new cultures of monuments are in ascendance, the promise of permanence typical of such cultures is called into question.

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Over the course of this chapter I have explored clusters of articles and images that caricature contemporary Parisian life and reflect on processes of collecting, reproducing, and disseminating various kinds of print products. An expanded concept of caricature is helpful in describing a specific style of ephemeral print that includes journalistic and editorial ploys across text and image and various kinds of print artifacts. Caricature is an inherently temporalized form, and in this period it is an indelible index of the current, the fleeting, the momentary, the fashionable, and the ridiculous, with humorous reversals playing leading roles in the journal’s mise en page. The journal highlights the ephemerality of caricatures as print objects but nonetheless facilitates their preservation. Even while accessing topoi and motifs from early modern visual culture such as the cris de Paris or fashion processions, the journal’s use of caricature, broadly understood to orient readers vis-à-vis the specific temporalities of the postrevolutionary era, confirms Koselleck’s diagnosis of caricature as facilitating the individualization of historical events. In turn, caricature is a key part of a journalistic vocabulary that can be mobilized in different ideological directions; throughout this first part of the book, we have lingered with anti-revolutionary perspectives, while in subsequent chapters we will consider how caricature is mobilized in more pro-revolutionary ways in the works of writers such as Heine and Börne.

In chapters 1 and 2, I explored how Bertuch and his collaborators are keen to promote luxury print as beautiful, while in this chapter I have focused more on his journals’ promotion of print products associated with the ugly. In both cases, though, smallness characterizes the print products that the journal canalizes for readers. Small print objects can be diverting and entertaining and they can commemorate people and events, but they can also be weaponized: sometimes an oblique, biting aside can be more effective than an extended serious treatise. Smallness is also a feature of serial form, with one small thing following another, and Bertuch and his collaborators prove adept at adapting existing strategies (and inventing new ones) of aligning different small forms accidentally and deliberately, even as these figures remain active in negotiating the criteria for canonical literary works and “larger” luxury editions. Bertuch and Böttiger’s brand of cultural journalism is firmly grounded in the expectation that their journals present readers with an ongoing flow of certain print items—images, caricatures, new year’s gifts, and more—and I have situated this brand in contrast to a literary aesthetics that privileges more lasting, stable works and that treats serial flow, ephemerality, and the satire of distasteful subjects as things to be avoided. In the next part of the book, I turn to the author Jean Paul, who treats the context of cultural journalism and ephemeral literary entertainment as a catalyzing and enabling force for his literary experiments.

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1. 1.   See Ernst Wolfgang Becker, Zeit der Revolution!—Revolution der Zeit? Zeiterfahrungen in Deutschland in der Ära der Revolutionen 1789–1848/49 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1999), 92–93, 130.

2. 2.   See Reinhart Koselleck, “Does History Accelerate?” in Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, trans. and ed. Sean Franzel and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 92.

3. 3.   Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 5.

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

5. 5.   On the metaphor of print saturation, see Multigraph Collective, Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

6. 6 . Friedrich Schiller, “[Ankündigung],” Die Horen, eine Monatsschrift 1, no. 1 (1795): iii.

7. 7 . Schiller, “[Ankündigung],” iv, iii.

8. 8 . As Koselleck notes, “beginning with the French Revolution, we can witness a boom in journals and book series that were to inform the reader about current events.” Koselleck, “Constancy and Change,” 110.

9. 9 . See Horst Walter Blanke, “Historische Zeitschriften,” in Von Almanach bis Zeitung. Ein Handbuch der Medien in Deutschland 1700–1800, ed. Ernst Fischer, Wilhelm Haefs, and York-Gothart Mix (Munich: Beck, 1999).

10. 10.   Daniel Moran, Toward the Century of Words: Johann Cotta and the Politics of the Public Realm in Germany, 1795–1832 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 64.

11. 11.   See Christoph Danelzik-Brüggemann, Ereignisse und Bilder. Bildpublizistik und politische Kultur in Deutschland zur Zeit der Französischen Revolution (Berlin: Akademie, 1996).

12. 12.   James Cuno, “Introduction,” in French Caricature and the French Revolution, 1789–1799 (Los Angeles: Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, 1988), 15.

13. 13.   See Reichardt and Kohle, Visualizing the Revolution.

14. 14.   Reichardt and Kohle, Visualizing the Revolution, 7.

15. 15.   “In the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period[s], dress featured as part of the textual joke in political caricature.” McNeil, “Fashion and the Eighteenth-Century Satirical Print,” 261.

16. 16.   See Reichardt, “The French Revolution as a European Media Event.”

17. 17.   On caricature’s “vocabulary of scale,” see Robert L. Patten, George Cruikshank’s Life, Times, and Art, vol. 1 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 48.

18. 18.   See the famous comments on this topic in Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (New York: Phaidon, 1964), 1–42. See also Angela Borchert, “Charles Baudelaire. Die Karikatur und die Genese einer Poetik des Flüchtigen,” in Flüchtigkeit der Moderne. Die Eigenzeiten des Ephemeren im langen 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Sean Franzel, Michael Bies, and Dirk Oschmann (Hanover: Wehrhahn, 2017), 61–88.

19. 19.   See Reinhart Koselleck, “Daumier and Death,” in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 267.

20. 20.   Bertuch and Böttiger, “Plan und Ankündigung,” 9.

21. 21.   On London and Paris as key points of orientation for Bertuch’s commercial enterprises, see Purdy, The Tyranny of Elegance.

22. 22.   This is drawn from Juvenal’s description of his collection of satirical poems: “Quicquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas, / Gaudia, discursus, nostri est farrago libelli” (Whatever men are engaged in, their wishes and fear, anger, / pleasures, joys, runnings to and fro, form the medley of my little book).

23. 23.   Discursus can mean running or moving around but also conversation. Gerhard R. Kaiser aptly translates discursus as Zerstreuungen, linking it to the French semantics of “diversion” and “les divertissements.” Gerhard R. Kaiser, “ ‘Jede große Stadt ist eine Moral in Beispielen.’ Bertuchs Zeitschrift ‘London und Paris,’ ” in Friedrich Justin Bertuch (1747–1822). Verleger, Schriftsteller und Unternehmer im klassischen Weimar, ed. Gerhard R. Kaiser and Siegfried Seifert (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), 558, note 41.

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

25. 25.   Bertuch and Böttiger, “Plan und Ankündigung,” 4. On the flow metaphor and information management, see Markus Krajewski, Paper Machines: About Cards and Catalogues, 1548–1929, trans. Peter Krapp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 37. On the role of the flow metaphor in imagining economic life, see Joseph Vogl, Kalkül und Leidenschaft. Poetik des ökonomischen Menschen (Munich: Sequenzia, 2002), 223–25.

26. 26.   As Apgar nicely puts it, “Structured by well-defined rubrics, periodicals captured articles, reports, statistical information, texts, and travel accounts swept along by the current. Rubrics, continuing the metaphor a bit further, are the floodgates through which this material flows, organizing material and directing it into different streams.” Apgar, “Flooded,” 28.

27. 27.   On Hüttner, see Catherine W. Proescholdt, “Johahnn Christian Hüttner (1766–1847): A Link Between Weimar and London,” in Goethe and the English-Speaking World, ed. Nicholas Boyle and John Guthrie (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2001), 99–110.

28. 28.   Eduard Fuchs, Die Karikatur der europäischen Völker. Teil 1. Vom Altertum bis zum Jahre 1848 (Munich: Langen, 1921), 183; Karl Rosenkranz, Ästhetik des Häßlichen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1990), 361–400.

29. 29.   See especially Wolfgang Cilleßen, Rolf Reichardt, and Christian Deuling, ed., Napoleons Neue Kleider. Pariser und Londoner Karikaturen im klassischen Weimar (Berlin: G&H Verlag, 2006); and Frazer S. Clark, Zeitgeist and Zerrbild. Word, Image, and Idea in German Satire, 1800–1848 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006), 33–55.

30. 30.   Goethe to Bertuch, January 12, 1802, WA, IV.16, 3.

31. 31.   This metaphor of water flow is also related to the story of Dinocrates not being able to realize the Alexander monument due to issues with water supply. See Cilleßen, Reichardt, and Deuling, Napoleons Neue Kleider, 159.

32. 32.   Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 119.

33. 33.   See especially Bernadette Collenberg-Plotnikov, Klassizismus und Karikatur. Eine Konstellation der Kunst am Beginn der Moderne (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1998).

34. 34.   Cited in Günter Oesterle and Ingrid Oesterle, “Karikatur,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter, vol. 4 (Basel: Schwabe, 1976), 696–701.

35. 35.   J. W. Goethe, “Die Guten Frauen, als Gegenbilder der Bösen Weiber, auf den Kupfern des diesjährigen Damenalmanchs,” MA, 6.1, 842.

36. 36.   See the August 24, 1797, letter to Schiller, where he proposes writing caricature commentary for the Horen journal. Goethe, MA, 8.1, 400–401. Cilleßen and Reichardt describe a process of Goethe growing increasingly ill-disposed toward caricature in the early 1800s. Wolfgang Cilißen and Rolf Reichardt, “Nachgestochene Caricaturen. Ein Journal und sein bildgeschichtlicher Hintergrund,” in Cilleßen, Reichardt, and Deuling, Napoleons Neue Kleider, 12–13. See also David Kunzle, “Goethe and Caricature: From Hogarth to Töpffer,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 48 (1985): 164–88.

37. 37.   See Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, trans. Eva M. Knodt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). On this shift in eighteenth-century art journals, see Hollmer and Meier, “Kunstzeitschriften,” 157–75.

38. 38.   On the departure of London und Paris from the philosophy of history in favor of the theorization of national character, see Jörn Garber, “Die Zivilisationsmetropole im Naturzustand: Das revolutionäre Volk von Paris als Regenerations- und Korruptionsfaktor der ‘Geschichte der Menschheit,’ ” in Rom-Paris-London: Erfahrung und Selbsterfahrung deutscher Schriftstellern in den fremden Metropolen, ed. Conrad Wiedemann (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988), 420–56.

39. 39.   A range of journal topics dealing with serial patterning will have to go unthematized in this chapter, including the book trade, vaudeville theater, the arrival of Roman art in Paris, and more. On the latter topic see Alice Goff, The God Behind the Marble: Transcendence and the Art Object in the German Aesthetic State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024).

40. 40.   Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, “Freyheits-Lied der Marseiller,” JLM 8, no. 1 (January 1793): 21–22.

41. 41.   De Lisle, “Freyheits-Lied der Marseiller,” 22.

42. 42.   See Aimée Boutin, City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 74–81.

43. 43.   “Les Cris de Paris,” London und Paris 3, no. 2 (1799): 129–134, 129, note.

44. 44.   “Les Cris de Paris,” 129–130, note.

45. 45.   “Les Cris de Paris,” 130, note.

46. 46.   Mercier “considered painting an inferior art because it froze the ever-changing flux of life into a fixed form, whereas prose could suggest the constant succession of impressions that was the essence of the urban experience.” Popkin, “Editor’s Preface,” 19.

47. 47.   See Heinrich W. Schwab, “Musikbeilagen in Almanachen und Taschenbüchern,” in Almanach- und Taschenbuchkultur des 18. Und 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. York-Gothart Mix (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1996), 167–201.

48. 48.   “Les Cris de Paris,” 131.

49. 49.   Elsewhere the criers of Paris and London were called “living clocks”; see “Lebendige Uhren. Die Notwendigkeit der Zeiteintheilung in Paris,” London und Paris 18, no. 6 (1806): 146–55.

50. 50.   On this tradition see Tom Cheesman, The Shocking Ballad Picture Show: German Popular Literature and Cultural History (Oxford: Berg, 1994).

51. 51.   “Mordgeschichte, wie sie der Ausrufer erst dem Inhalte nach ausschreyet, und dann in einer kläglicher Ballade abheult,” London und Paris 1, no. 3 (1798): 250.

52. 52.   “Mordgeschichte,” 251.

53. 53.   “Mordgeschichte,” 251.

54. 54.   “Das uns aus Paris mitgetheilte Original besteht aus einem halben Foliobogen von schmutziggelben Papier. Oben an paradiert ein Holzschnitt in der geschmacklosesten Uniform, die uns unsere Leser gewiß gern schenken werden” (“Mordgeschichte,” 251, note).

55. 55.   Millin was an important connection of Böttiger’s, and Winckler worked as Millin’s amanuensis until his death in 1807; see Sternke, Böttiger und der archäologische Diskurs, 124.

56. 56.   On the “episodic visual seriality” of headline, image, and text in ballad pamphlets, see Andrew Piper, “Transitional Figures: Image, Translation and the Ballad from Broadside to Photography,” in Book Illustration in the Long Eighteenth Century: Reconfiguring the Visual Periphery of the Text, ed. Christina Ionescu (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 161.

57. 57.   “Sie wird die Blätter des Tags und die Schriften nennen, die, als ephemerische Lieblinge, die Stimmung des Publicums für diesen Augenblick bezeichnen, aber sie wird keine eigentlichen Auszüge und Critiken liefern.” Bertuch and Böttiger, “Plan und Ankündigung,” 8.

58. 58.   “Die Freyheit der Presse,” London und Paris 4, no. 7 (1799): 259.

59. 59.   “Die Freyheit der Presse,” 260.

60. 60.   This lends itself well to being read as an early version of nineteenth-century caricatures that enlist the “scene of printing,” or Druckszene, as Borchert terms it; see Angela Borchert, “Die Produktion von Karikatur in der Karikatur: Zeichnungs-, Schreib- und Druckszenen in der französischen und deutschen illustrierten Satire-Journale (1830–1848),” Colloquia Germanica 49, nos. 2–3 (2016): 201–34.

61. 61.   See Cilleßen, Reichardt, and Deuling, Napoleons neue Kleider, 188–89.

62. 62.   “Beylage,” London und Paris 4 (1799): 262–67, 262.

63. 63.   In founding the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände in 1807, Cotta places popular festivities—“the characteristic features of nations, distinguished public festivals [Volkscharacterzüge, öffentliche ausgezeichnete Feste]”—near the top of his list of intended topics for the journal. Cited in Bernhard Fischer, “Einleitung,” in Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände/gebildete Leser (1807–1865): Register der Honorarempfänger/Autoren und Kollationsprotokolle, ed. Bernhard Fischer (Munich: Saur, 2000), 14.

64. 64.   Bertuch and Böttiger, “Plan und Ankündigung,” 5.

65. 65.   On the dearth of reports between April of 1793 and July of 1795, see Pia Schmid, “ ‘… Das Rad der Kleider-Moden mauerfest und täglich neue überraschende Phänomene.’ Die Französische Revolution im Journal des Luxus und der Moden 1789–1795,” in Französische Revolution und deutsche Öffentlichkeit. Wandlungen in Presse und Alltagskultur am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Holger Böning (Munich: Saur, 1992), 419–38.

66. 66.   “We tend to speak of the Festival of the Federation, the Festival of the Supreme Being, forgetting that, duplicating and echoing the celebrations in Paris, there were thousands of festivals of the Federation, thousands of Festivals of the Supreme Being.” Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, 13.

67. 67.   See Günter Oesterle, “Suchbilder kollektiver Identitätsfindung. Die öffentliche Feste während der Französischen Revolution und ihre Wirkung auf die Deutschen,” in Vergangene Zukunft: Revolution und Künste 1789 bis 1989, ed. Erhard Schütz und Klaus Siebenhaar (Bonn: Bouvier, 1992), 129–52.

68. 68.   Richard Taws, The Politics of the Provisional, 141.

69. 69.   Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris, vol. 2 (Amsterdam: 1782), 53–55.

70. 70.   “Promenade von Longchamp,” London und Paris 1, no. 1 (1798): 51–57.

71. 71.   “Promenade von Longchamp,” 52.

72. 72.   “Feyer des Festes der Volkssouverainetät,” London und Paris 1, no. 1 (1798): 60–65.

73. 73.   See Jonathan Sperber, Revolutionary Europe: 1780–1850 (Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2000), 105–7. On the difficulties faced by the directorial government to continue to implement and reshape revolutionary festivals, see Joseph F. Byrnes, Catholic and French Forever: Religious and National Identity in Modern France (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 47–68.

74. 74.   See Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, 194.

75. 75.   “Feyer des Festes der Volkssouverainetät,” 61.

76. 76.   “Schrittschuhlaufzusehkleider. Fest der Volkssouverainität in leinwandenen Monumenten. Procession nach Langchamp. Bockay’s. Ueberröcke mit acht Kragen,” London und Paris 3, no. 4 (1799): 314–21.

77. 77.   See Koerner, Bosch and Breugel, 336–37.

78. 78.   “Schrittschuhlaufzusehkleider,” 316–17.

79. 79.   “Schrittschuhlaufzusehkleider,” 316. As the correspondent notes, a certain sense of propriety led it to not be started on the day of rest (décade) on which the Festival of the Sovereignty of the People began, but this was not an important day for the fashion display anyway.

80. 80.   “Schrittschuhlaufzusehkleider,” 317.

81. 81.   “Schrittschuhlaufzusehkleider,” 318.

82. 82.   On deliberately ephemeral monuments such as festival and theatrical preparations, see Michael Diers, “Ewig und drei Tage. Erkundungen des Ephemeren—zur Einführung,” in Mo(nu)mente: Formen und Funktionen ephemerer Denkmäler, ed. Michael Diers (Berlin: Akademie, 1993), 2.

83. 83.   Horace, Odes and Epodes, ed. and trans. Niall Rudd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 3.30.1–7. “May an impending peace soon allow Minister François de Neufchateau to have monuments erected to which the Horacian topos would apply!” (“Schrittschuhlaufzusehkleider,” 318).

84. 84.   Deuling describes the Modejournal this way; Christian Deuling, “Die Karikatur-Kommentare in der Zeitschrift London und Paris (1798–1815),” in Cilleßen, Reichardt, and Deuling, Napoleons Neue Kleider, 91.

85. 85.   Seifert, “Die Französische Revolution im Spiegel,” 178.

86. 86.   He founded the journal Nemesis. Zeitschrift für Politik und Geschichte (Nemesis. Journal for politics and history) (1814–1818) with Heinrich Luden, which would be an important organ of contemporary history in the years prior to the Congress of Vienna.

87. 87.   See Hell, The Conquest of Ruins, 243–55.

88. 88.   “Die Säule von Austerlitz,” London und Paris 22, no. 8 (1808): 265–71, 266.

89. 89.   “Die Säule von Austerlitz,” 265–66.

90. 90.   The column will function as an “enduring memorial of this martial time and its heroes” and that “after Rome only Paris can lay claim to such a triumphant monument.” “Die Säule von Austerlitz,” 271.

91. 91.   “Die Säule von Austerlitz,” 269.

92. 92.   “Die Säule von Austerlitz,” 266.

93. 93.   “Die Säule von Austerlitz,” 267.

94. 94.   “Die Säule von Austerlitz,” 268.

95. 95.   Hartog, Regimes of Historicity, 159.

96. 96.   “Die Colonne des Place-Vendôme und die Statue des Generals Desais zu Paris,” Paris, Wien und London 1, no. 3 (1811): 199.

97. 97.   “Die Colonne des Place-Vendôme,” 200, 203.

98. 98.   “Die Colonne des Place-Vendôme,” 202.

99. 99.   “Die Colonne des Place-Vendôme,” 207.

100. 100.   “Die Colonne des Place-Vendôme,” 213.

101. 101.   “Die Colonne des Place-Vendôme,” 213–14.

102. 102.   “Die Colonne des Place-Vendôme,” 214.

103. 103.   The monumentalizing representation of historical personality is related to portraiture’s aim of “representing the subject as actually present.” Daniel Cooper, “Portraiture,” in Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500 to the Present, ed. Nicholas J. Cull, David Culbert, and David Welch (Santa Barbara CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003), 306.