‘That Which We Learn with the Eye'

‘There is’, opined historian Frédéric Masson in Le Théâtre in 1900, ‘a new attempt at a democratic and popular history, inspired by national passion, served by illustrious artists, and towards whose completion no amount of money, work, or research was spared’. He was waxing lyrical about the new realistic and lavish historical tableau, ‘Une soirée a Malmaison’, which displayed forty-nine life-size wax figures of Napoleon’s entourage, thus resurrecting the emperor’s court in 1800 at the Musée Grévin in Paris for full-house audiences. ‘In effect’, Masson enthused, ‘these are no longer wax figures, it’s part of history, it’s History … The best teaching, according to the modern patois, is that which we learn with the eye—the lesson of things.’ ¹ What is noteworthy about Masson’s hyperbolic observation on apparently new forms of popular visual history is neither their novelty—for these forms had developed from the very beginning of the nineteenth century, nor the democratic character of their nationalism, but the relationship between these histories and a ‘History’, of which they were ‘a part’. Masson, a mainstream Republican and popular biographer of Napoleon, incorporates mass-circulated visual representations of the national past into the body of historical knowledge and authority and capitalizes them: they are elevated to History with a capital H.