The distinction between the two levels never disappeared, however, in part because popular cultural forms remained closer to everyday experience and language than did those that developed inside what Max Weber identified as the separate “aesthetic sphere.” Within that sphere there arose visions and ambitions that crystallized as the modernist avant-garde. In Chapter 14 I will try to show that the avant-garde exhibited a different relationship to the society and culture in which it took form than many of its representatives and supporters wanted to believe: despite the conviction of vanguard artists and writers that their activities were opposed to bourgeois life and promised some alternative to it, the avant-garde drew much of its energy and many of its aspirations from the very features of modernity of which it declared itself the enemy, preserving them in forms supposed to supplant them.
Parallel histories and their outcomes: publishing
We can best make clear the new and palpably public form that culture began to take on as the Old Regime ended, and the new stage of its development that set in after around 1850, by considering the three main cases of publishing, painting, and music in turn, beginning with books and newspapers. The production of printed materials began a rapid expansion during the eighteenth century. In France the number of books published grew threefold between 1700 and 1770, newspapers went from three titles to several hundred, and a veritable explosion took place in the output of pamphlets. An equally remarkable growth took place in Germany: the number of books listed in the catalogue of the Leipzig book fair expanded ten times across the century (from 265 between 1721 and 1763, to 2,821 between 1763 and 1805), while the print run of copies per edition commonly doubled or quadrupled in the same period.2 In Britain books and pamphlets had been part of both the long history of political agitation and the growth of consumption throughout the eighteenth century, but what a recent historian calls “the explosion of reading” only took place after 1774, in part as a result of a legal decision by the House of Lords ending a longstanding regime of copyright restriction that gave London printers and booksellers tight control over sales and prices. By the 1820s, as William St Clair concludes, the changes had produced a significant fall in the cost of books, leading to a “surge in reading” that “marked the start of a continuing self-sustaining expansion.” Before the nineteenth century was much advanced “virtually everyone read books, magazines, and newspapers on a regular basis.”3
The expansion of print and readers was an important ground for the creation of the new power of “public opinion” whose presence was noted in earlier chapters, but especially on the continent it was still limited by low levels of general literacy, and it took place inside Old Regime forms of commerce even as it began to undermine them. In both Germany and France publishing was hampered by censorship that sought to prevent the spread of unwelcome opinions, and by both guild and government regulation aimed at preserving the corporate economy and the hierarchical principles it embodied. The restrictions could be circumvented by putting a false place of publication on title-pages, often Amsterdam for titles printed in France, and forbidden books produced in Switzerland were regularly smuggled across the border, but fears of trouble with the authorities and the still limited scope of the market led many booksellers to accept the limits the system imposed on them, especially since it sometimes also gave them exclusive rights over the titles for which they had obtained a privilège du roi. Even those who sympathized with Enlightened ideas sometimes shied away from trying to publish the texts that contained them, preferring, as one said in 1770 “tranquility to risky benefits.” Already, however, it was clear that the censorship could not prevail over the swelling network of producers and consumers; by the mid century many titles were allowed to appear without official approval, under a regime of “tacit permissions” that forecast the eventual collapse of the system.4
To this evolution the nineteenth century added a number of innovations. A crucial moment came in 1836, when Émile de Girardin (closely followed by a competitor, Armand Dutacq), revolutionized the newspaper industry by setting the subscription price of his new sheet, La Presse at half of what others charged, predicting that he could attract 10,000 subscribers, in contrast to the 1,000 or so served by his rivals; within six months he could boast of 20,000. It was not to larger subscription income that he chiefly looked, however, but to the expanded advertising revenues the enlarged readership would draw in: “the ads will pay for the paper,” he announced, and they did. One reason for Girardin’s success was his decision to draw in readers not just with news, but also by publishing novels, often by well known writers such as Eugène Sue and Balzac, in daily installments as feuilletons at the bottom of the first page. At a stroke La Presse gave form to a new reading public, at once political, literary, and commercial, and extending from the middle- and lower-middle classes to the upper tier of workers (the more politically conscious of whom, however, seem to have been drawn in greater numbers to Dutacq’s rival paper, Le Siècle, which espoused more consistently leftist views).5
Books were not far behind newspapers in acquiring a larger and more material public profile. The “surge in reading” already visible in England, and that seems to justify the notion of a “mass reading public” there before 1840 (by which date W. H. Smith was already selling books, as the firm still does, in railroad stations) only seems to have come to France as the century advanced. A major innovation in this direction was supplied by Gervais Charpentier, the first publisher to market a unified “collection” of titles in a standard format, all displayed together and offered at the same moderate price, and intended to entice buyers to make purchases on the spot. As a business practice, this contrasted with the model inherited from the eighteenth century (and little altered by the expansion that occurred then), whereby books were commonly purchased singly by people from a seller known personally to them; prices were relatively high and the market assumed to be narrow. Book dealers (who were often the publishers) commonly had to wait a long time to recover their investment in a stock of volumes, and failure threatened those whose resources were tied up in unsold inventories when demand slowed. Charpentier sought to avoid this fate by moving to a system that promised a steady flow of sales and income based on a larger pool of consumers. In shifting from a one-on-one relationship between sellers and buyers to a more plural and impersonal one (some historians refer to it as “industrial”), using a collection of goods on display to draw in a variety of possible buyers, and calculating profits on the whole rather than item by item, he resembled contemporary and later innovations in retailing. By the time he died in 1871 he had more than 400 titles in his list, and attracted a number of imitators, both in France and abroad (the German Universal Bibliothek founded by Reclam in 1867 was one). For them as for him, issuing a collection in a standard format “gave a material form to the house’s image in the eyes of the public,” affording a new status to publishers as well as to books, and opening the way to a kind of brand loyalty. Like Girardin, and together with such rivals as the Lévy brothers Michel and Calmann and Louis Hachette, he was part of a shift in the relationship between cultural producers and the public, replacing direct and personal ties framed by corporate membership or official privilege with ones based on expanded connection to a broader and more anonymous body of readers.6
Charpentier’s enterprise extended across the mid century divide and in its later phases it was able to take advantage of the new opportunities opened up by the coming of railroads and the closer market connections they made possible. Overall however these developments marked a new phase in publishing history. Only with them did a mass reading public begin to develop in France; prices for books fell by 48 percent between 1840 and 1870, and another 23 percent by 1914. Elisabeth Parinet refers to the results as a “second revolution of the book.” Publicity for books now reached larger numbers of people; whereas the typical novel was printed in an edition of 1,000 copies in the first half of the century, Jules Verne’s were appearing in runs of 30,000 by the
1870s; by 1904 1.6 million copies of his works had been sold. Many of the buyers were country people now served by small-town bookshops supplied by railroads, a system that wiped out the earlier traveling booksellers, the colporteurs. Their mainstays had been almanacs, religious tracts, and chivalric and heroic literature, sometimes read to others by the few literate people at sewing or work sessions (veillés). The trade came under pressure from government opposition during the Second Empire, based on justified fear that it spread anti-government ideas, but literacy and railroads were the chief reasons for its demise. By the end of the century not only Verne but Victor Hugo, Eugène Sue, and other writers popular in cities were being read in the country too, their success contributing to the new status of novels, which only now overtook drama and poetry as the most popular genres. In every country the new developments in printing and bookselling in the age of railroads included a broad expansion of lending libraries in cities and towns (they, too, effectively established earlier in England than elsewhere), important contributors to the much enlarged and more visible public world of print in existence by the end of the century.7
Museums and painting
Both the structural features and the chronology of the transformation of literature were matched in the visual arts by the emergence of public museums in the run-up to the nineteenth century and the development of a more systematically organized market for pictures in its last three decades. Before around 1750, collections of art and precious objects were predominately private locales, housed in the residences of the rulers or nobles who owned them, and opened to view only for their friends or guests. One reason for showing the works was to let aspiring artists see the great work of the past, but even then the display was expected to serve as a kind of symbolic manifestation of the collector’s grandeur. To this end objects were arranged not with regard to their style or subject, but as what historians have recognized as a “spectacle of treasures.” During the eighteenth century these aims came to be displaced by or, in some cases, joined with the Enlightenment enthusiasm for providing public instruction. This was at least part of the motive that led a British physician, Sir Hans Sloane, to will his large collection of antiquities, manuscripts, and other objects to the nation when he died in 1753, providing the nucleus of the British Museum that opened its doors six years later. Similar aims inspired the Elector of Saxony to make his trove of paintings publicly available in a renovated Dresden stable in 1746, and the Habsburg emperor Joseph II when he moved his to the Upper Belvedere Palace and opened it to viewers in 1770 (small groups had been admitted to the Imperial Gallery earlier). The Uffizi in Florence and the Vatican both became public museums in 1773.8
These spaces all mixed together the traditional motive of displaying the virtues of an individual patron or ruler with the eighteenth-century enthusiasm for enlightening the public (with a characteristic variation in England, where it was Parliament rather than the uninterested king that accepted Sloane’s gift and sponsored the new institution). The two purposes were especially entangled in France, where the royal collection in the Luxembourg Palace was opened for a few hours on specified days beginning in 1750, and plans made to fit out the Louvre as a museum in the following decades. Louis XVI may have been motivated by competition with a display set up by his cousin the Duke of Orleans in the Palais Royal, and writers at the time hoped that what some saw as a decline in the quality of contemporary painting could be arrested by exposure to great works of the past, but above all the king and his minister hoped to impress “public opinion” with the monarchy’s devotion to art and the nation, and to identify it with ideals of heroism, virtue, and public service illustrated in the “history paintings” that critics regarded as art’s most exalted and instructive genre. The various difficulties confronting the state in the last decades of the Old Regime kept the project from fruition, however, so that it was the Revolutionary state that realized the monarchy’s Louvre project, opening the museum to visitors in 1793.9
Here the public nature of the space made its contrast with earlier collections more evident. Like the king, the republic was determined to present itself as the defender of the nation’s cultural heritage and the vehicle of its unity. The museum was looked to as a riposte to critics who portrayed the Revolution as destructive both of respect for past achievements and of stability in every sphere of life. In addition, activist artists and writers such as Jacques-Louis David took over and recast the pedagogical hopes traditionally vested in art, hoping to make painting serve as a vehicle for inculcating republican virtue and patriotism. By rejecting objects thought to be redolent of tyranny and oppression and providing a new perspective on those that could be made to serve the needs of a free people, they sought to enroll the Louvre in the Revolutionary project of “regeneration,” the renewal of human nature through participation in public activities, ceremonies, and festivals.10
The new setting also put its stamp on the way the objects were displayed. During the eighteenth century the idea that exhibits should serve some educational purpose rather than merely show the magnificence of collectors led to two proposals for how pictures ought to be arranged. The first aimed to make the excellence of a particular artist or technique stand out by juxtaposing works that illustrated commonalities and contrasts. Such presentations were seen as especially useful to young artists, and providing them would remain an important goal of nineteenth-century museums. But the new Louvre adopted the second arrangement, one already tried out in the Luxembourg when it was opened on a limited basis in 1750, and intended to serve the needs of a larger public. Here paintings were displayed not in relation to virtues important to students or connoisseurs, but in order to show the historical evolution of national schools and the place of individual artists within them. The goal, as a government spokesman put it, was to replace a disorderly jumble with “a continuous and uninterrupted sequence revealing the progress of the arts and the degrees of perfection attained by various nations that have cultivated them.” Grouping pictures in this way showed the history of art as a story of innovation and advance (an idea first given currency by the sixteenth-century artist and historian Giorgio Vasari), and it was regarded as encouraging an appreciation of both tradition and innovation, by showing at once how great artists of the past had drawn sustenance from their teachers and the independence they achieved from them. The cosmopolitan edge given to this schema by including a variety of national schools was sharpened by French pride in having brought works thought to be insufficiently appreciated in their own countries to Paris through the power of the Revolutionary armies, giving viewers there access to what one writer described as “everything that may empower the imagination.”11
In these ways the emergence of museums resembled the transformation of publishing, reorganizing the realm of culture by replacing a set of still largely private and hierarchical connections between producers and patrons with a more generally available and explicitly public sphere of interaction. For much of the nineteenth century, however, earlier principles and assumptions still put their stamp on this sphere’s operation. One instance was the persistence of the already-mentioned classifying schema that made “history painting” the highest type, on the grounds that depictions of heroism or public spirit were the best vehicles for inculcating virtue. Such a perspective maintained the ascendency of moral considerations in the realm of aesthetics; because it survived, attempts to undermine the hierarchy by asserting the equal dignity of scenes of everyday life (traditionally called “genre” paintings) became an important front in the struggle to free art from the weight of the past. No less important was the persisting sway exercised over public taste by official guidance, in the form of the salons and official art exhibitions that determined which artists and works would receive a stamp of higher approval. Salons were state institutions, but they were also central to the way the art market functioned: some of the works accepted were bought by governments, and those that were not had a much better chance to attract private buyers than
ones that lacked this cachet. The salon system had already been a central element in the way the market for pictures functioned in the eighteenth century, and dealers were involved in setting up some of the early public exhibitions (this was the case in England too, where a group of art merchants was behind a series of exhibits of contemporary painting beginning in 1760), recognizing that works included in them would have a special appeal to purchasers.
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