Michael Marrinan’s Romantic Paris: Histories of a Cultural Landscape, 1800–1850 is an extraordinary book: highly interpretive and synthetic, sprawling in the breadth of visual culture it surveys, yet very readable and entertaining. Those familiar with Marrinan’s previous publications might expect an emphasis on Romantic painting, and there is plenty of that; but this book integrates painting and the pictorial arts into a sweeping narrative that includes museums, collecting, urban planning, architecture, sculpture, artisanal and industrial objects, dioramas, arcades, and more. It relates visual culture to politics, memory, emerging forms of public and private life, and new modes of commerce, industrial production, and technological reproduction. It incorporates the theatrical, literary, and musical arts in meaningful and innovative ways. In short, it offers the most wide-ranging account to date of visual culture in Paris between 1800 and 1850.

Each chapter takes up a different constellation of themes, objects, and contexts. The first relies especially on painting to establish the political, intellectual, and emotional issues that separated post-Revolutionary Paris from the past. The Revolution itself is handled in remarkably summary terms, with the emphasis laid squarely on the new situation faced by the Consulate, Empire, and Restoration. The second chapter examines the traces left by politics on the city proper, as well as the power of images to both represent and affect the events that transformed Paris from the Revolution to the Second Republic. The next two chapters address the ways in which images and monuments shaped history and memory. Individual topics range from the Louvre and the Musée des Monuments français, to city planning, architecture, and the construction of new commemorative monuments, to troubadour painting and the Gothic Revival. While chapter 3 focuses primarily on the political purposes served by the construction or modification of public monuments and spaces, chapter 4 emphasizes the representation or reinterpretation of medieval monuments in both the private and public sphere. Marrinan reveals the immense continuity of interests between the various categories of the visual as artists, designers, architects, curators, collectors, patrons, and writers increasingly sought to redefine the present by reinventing the past.

Chapters 5 and 6 delve into familiar aspects of Romanticism: its penchant for scenes of extreme violence and illicit sexuality, its fascination with the exotic other, the burgeoning interest in the landscape of provincial France, new literary sources often focused on morally disturbing narratives, and the rise of the cenacle, the bohemian, and the virtuoso. Even here, however, the emphases are new. For example, Victor Hugo’s central place in Romanticism is well-established, but Marrinan develops specifically his impact on visual culture. This is not because he directly inspired, championed, or was illustrated by the greatest artists in the period: Marrinan agrees with past judgments that the artists closest to Hugo, such as Louis Boulanger, were by and large second-rate. Rather, Hugo was often precocious in his interests and articulated them in irresistible ways. He made plain the inappropriateness of classical aesthetics to the new realities of the nineteenth century, and he popularized nostalgia for medieval architecture, Napoleonic glory, and the Orient. Marrinan draws broad parallels between the transgressive aspects of Hugo’s Preface for Cromwell (1827) and Eugène Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus (1827), and he uses Hernani (1830) to illustrate the clash of romantic and classical aesthetics. Marrinan also recounts Hugo’s personal development at key historical moments to illuminate larger political shifts, such as his drift away from the Restoration and toward an admiration for Napoleon, and, at the end of the book, his growing disillusionment with Louis-Napoleon in 1848 and ensuing political exile.

These chapters also introduce important period phenomena that have had little place in previous art histories. In an extended discussion of the rise of virtuosi such as Marie Taglioni, Niccolò Paganini, and Franz Liszt, Marrinan offers a meditation on the links between technical ability, celebrity, and the commodity. On the one hand, the virtuoso emphasized the ephemeral, unique qualities of the individual performance and inspired a cult of personality insofar as she or he offered a product that only she or he can produce. Yet, on the other hand, her or his technical ability recalled the powers of a complex machine, an automaton, that could exceed the proficiency of humans and repeat its work again and again. Moreover, the celebrity of the virtuoso was quickly commoditized in prints, medals, and eventually photographs, paradoxically linking its supposed singularity with the uniformity of its consumption by the masses. Marrinan sees in all of this the beginnings of what Walter Benjamin would later characterize as the movie star’s loss of a “unique aura” and speculates that painting, which was neither mechanically reproducible nor a performance art, did not translate the effects of the virtuoso particularly well.

Marrinan’s analyses are both stimulating and brief, often leaving this reader hoping for more. For example, on the topic of vituosi: to what extent were the new emphases on individual touch and spontaneous handling characteristic of so much Romantic painting a part of this phenomenon? Might Jean-Ignace-Isidore Grandville’s machine-performers, or the proliferation of automatons in ballet and opera, be related to the same set of circumstances? Similarly, there is an excellent discussion of satanic imagery in the work of Delacroix, Boulanger, and Jean-Jacques Feuchière that draws links to Hugo, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Heinrich Heine; but given the importance of similarly satanic visions in the work of, among others, Honoré de Balzac and Charles Baudelaire, one longs for a more extended discussion of evil as the very image of Paris. These are not criticisms of Marrinan’s book, which already barely fits into a single volume, but rather an indication of how thought provoking it is.

The final chapters move squarely into the territory of Benjamin, describing the new urban experiences occasioned by the rise of the arcade, the café, the restaurant, the omnibus, the flâneur, the city as spectacle and stage, and the integration of the quartier into a larger city. We learn of the effect of new materials and business practices on architecture, the incursion of industrially produced commodities into the luxury market, new techniques of reproduction, the vicissitudes of political caricature, and, of course, the birth of photography. Again, these topics are not new, but the synthesis is, and it is enlivened by original, extended interpretations of specific works.

I was especially taken with his account of Pierre-François Henri Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (1843–50). As others have already noted, the building juxtaposes the structural possibilities and formal qualities of iron and stone, and separates the classical unity of decoration and construction by applying the former over the latter. It is also perfectly suited to its purpose as a study library, with an enormous reading room conveniently situated above the book storage areas. Marrinan turns to Hugo once more to introduce his own interpretation, noting that a long excursus on architecture in Notre-Dame de Paris argues that the industrialization of book production through the printing press sounded the death knell for architecture as a leading artistic form. Labrouste, who had read Hugo’s argument in draft form in 1831, seems to have responded to it by introducing book- and print-like forms and regularly repeated, industrially produced parts into his building. The book is recalled in the building’s modularity, pre-fabricated parts, planar forms, rows of letters on the façade, and the spine that runs down the center of the reading room. “Labrouste materialized Hugo’s dictum that modern architecture ‘submit to the rule of literature’ promulgated by ‘the printing press, that giant machine that pumps without rest all of society’s intellectual sap’” (334). Marrinan concludes:

An old adage says one cannot tell a book by its cover: in the course of their trajectory from the street to the desks of the reading room, users of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève discover a spaciousness and light—not announced with fanfare but functionally implemented by the materials of industry—where they might devise their individual wanderings within Hugo’s edifice of printed books. In a parallel manner, the meaning of the decorative program draped over the structure of Labrouste’s library is also driven by user choice. The façade [which is covered with hundreds of authors’ names] really is a catalogue from which we are free to choose. It is not a monolithic statement to which we must submit. Like the display windows of the arcades, the merchandise racks of the magasins de nouveautés, or the multi-page menus of contemporary restaurants, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève configures a relationship among individuals—and with commodities—in a public arena, yet it does not force a choice upon them. In this context, the modernity of Labrouste’s library rests less upon visible ironwork than its frank articulation of open and equal access to the world of ideas—a function shaped by industrial materials, and announced without the fanfare of symbols or allegories from the past. (335)

Perhaps we should question the extent to which readers were truly free or the library truly open, but it is nonetheless striking to find such an ambitious and original interpretation in the midst of an account that surveys literally hundreds of objects and monuments.

In the introduction Marrinan describes his approach as indebted to Henri Lefebvre’s concept of “social space,” in which “people and objects do not simply fill a space, but are engaged in a dialectic that joins separate components into particular configurations of lived experience” (Henri Lefebvre, La Production de l’espace, 4th ed., Paris: Anthropos, 2000 [1st ed. published 1974], 2). Marrinan’s account of viewing and the viewed is indeed intensely social in this manner, even as it attends to both personal and shared forms of visuality; nonetheless, it is his vivid and imaginative accounts of specific objects and spectacles, and viewers’ encounters with them, that evokes this “lived experience.” Thus, while Lefebvre remains theoretical, Marrinan is colorful and concrete. For example, Marrinan gives real force to Lefebvre’s distinction between “a work” and “a product” in his discussion of a number of disparate objects (ranging from painting and sculpture to teakettles, water services, lithographic reproductions, and daguerreotypes) that reveal the tension between hand-worked and mass-produced forms of production. Similarly, he fleshes out Lefebvre’s distinction between abstract and historical space by contrasting the taste for historical monuments and cultural heritage with the homogenizing, reproducible effects of modern city planning and commercial culture.

A central claim of Romantic Paris is that many of the essential characteristics of modern urban experience fell into place or were at least adumbrated during the period under discussion, and to this extent the Revolution is posited as a fundamental historical rupture. Yet because of Marrinan’s insistence on building his account out of the interactions of people, objects, and spaces, readers come to understand modernity less as a result of certain social and political changes or events, and more as a set of experiences and circumstances. This leads to an account that is less focused on historical causes than on evoking the effects of historical change.

The book’s narrative flows smoothly and is enlivened by ample quotations that reveal a wide reading in the literature and criticism of the period. Marrinan often cites the observations of English visitors to Paris to point up the unique aspects of the city. The focus is squarely on Paris, but given the city’s prominence in European and especially French culture, that hardly seems like a limitation. Art historians may miss discussions of some of the major paintings of the period. No mention is made, for example, of such warhorses as Jacques-Louis David’s Coronation of Josephine (1807) and Leonidas at Thermopylae (1814), Théodore Géricault’s portraits of the insane, Delacroix’s Barque of Dante (1822), and Jean-Auguste-Dominque Ingres’s Apotheosis of Homer (1827). The late work of the Davidian school is hardly mentioned, and Thomas Couture and Charles Gleyre not at all. But such omissions seem a small trade-off for the larger picture offered of Parisian visual culture.

No history of Parisian visual culture in this period can pretend to be exhaustive, and as Marrinan’s title indicates, he intends to offer only a number of “histories” that “intersect, interweave, and sometime clash with one another” (2). The result is nonetheless a singularly complex and fascinating account that should seize the attention of anyone interested in European culture of the early nineteenth century, scholars and casual readers alike.