Vision and Revulsion

In 1790, the Vicomte de Mirabeau (brother of Honoré de Mirabeau, the prominent revolutionary) published a few issues of a pamphlet titled La Lanterne Magique Nationale. These contained some forty-five “changes of picture” directly related to political events, displaying the “marvels” of the revolution, from the “heroes of the Bastille” to the “ladies of the nation and defrocked nuns.” ¹ Around this time, as Laurent Mannoni's research has revealed, the travelling lantern was associated widely with revealing the true state of contemporary France—from an anonymous pamphlet depicting, on its frontispiece, a man operating a lantern on a base decorated with the “Phrygian cap,” or the cap of liberty (a curtain covering the apparatus is drawn aside by “the goddess of truth”), to a number of political engravings, such as the Lanterne Magique Republicaine (The Republican Magic Lantern), which depicted a travelling showman-cum-sanscullote displaying, in his luminous disc, images showing “all that is happening in France.” ² The travelling magic-lantern showmen of the late eighteenth century were closely allied with revolutionary politics: the scenes they projected depicted violent attacks against royalty, and their accompanying patter was “ironic and insolent.” Once an object of amusement to the aristocrat, this optical instrument had become “a weapon in the hands of the people” (98). That pamphleteers borrowed the metaphor of the lantern for their pro-revolutionary polemics suggests that the “lantern of fear,” as it had been dubbed in the late seventeenth century for its association with ghosts and devilry, had come into its own once again—though perhaps, even in the wake of the Enlightenment, the relationship between optical illusion and truth was no less obscure. The term “lanterne,” moreover, had a suggestive second meaning that polemicists were keen to exploit, indicating not only a (magic) lantern, but also the scaffold upon which so many enemies of the revolution were to lose their lives: hence the cry, “Les aristocrates à la lanterne!” (99).