ABSTRACT
Spectacles exist in tandem with spectators, both etymologically and in fact. In the eighteenth century, as many have argued, their relation entailed the growth of an increasingly bourgeois public sphere – an arena whose contours depended on attempts to manage an authoritative distance between the dictates of elite sophistication and vulgarly popular judgement. Eighteenth-century Parisian spectatorship, in its public incarnation, experienced the formation of a morally tinged public opinion and the disciplining of sensible experience. Each struggled against elite culture’s institutional fiat and popular culture’s Rabelaisian undertow. As such, spectatorship was manifested in new forms of art and music criticism, new architectural spaces in which to house public spectacles, ‘bourgeois drama’ and public demonstrations of nature’s truths. All of these were contested sites whose combined propriety and popularity depended on maintaining just the right cultural tension between high and low.1
