Rethinking the Phantasmagoria: an enclosure and three worlds

The vaults of Memphis

In Chapter 7 of his Mémoires, Étienne Gaspard Robertson, who became famous for popularizing the Phantasmagoria in 1798, recalls an episode that, despite being generally overlooked by scholars, helps frame his main achievement in a new light. While researching the Occult Sciences, the young Robertson discovers ‘an engraving with the illustration of the rituals that initiates have to be submitted to, following the four elements, in the subterranean vaults called Memphis’ (Robertson, 1831: 156). Robertson reproduces and explains the engraving. The first initiation test required the initiate ‘to sink into the earth, at an unknown depth, by a narrow path’ (p. 157); then the initiate entered a large hall consumed entirely by fire, except for a passage over an incandescent grid. The following test required a swim through a channel in absolute darkness. Finally, the initiate, suspended on a drawbridge, in a noisy hall, had to jump from one big wheel to another until he reached the exit. Robertson describes in painstaking detail the initiation rituals, the characteristics of the environment, the machines the initiate encounters, and the fear and excitement that permeate the situation. What he depicts is a grandiose scene that mixes natural elements, technology, suffering bodies, labyrinthine passages, darkness and sound, and that commits the initiate to gaining new knowledge and new life (see Figure 1). This engraving and the complex world it portrayed would exert a permanent influence on Robertson’s career as an inventor, lanternist, and impresario. In his words, ‘It is in these subterranean vaults that the old Phantasmagoria was born’ (p. 162).

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Figure 1.

Étienne Gaspard Robertson (1831), Mémoires,Vol. 1: 162.

Overflowing with anecdotes, documents, gossip, and overstatements, Robertson’s Mémoires are more a boastful self-celebration than an accurate report about facts; ¹ yet, a critical reading is still useful. Chapter 7, in keeping with the whole book, is relevant not only for its silences (Robertson fails to acknowledge the merits of a certain Filidor, who had already offered a first instantiation of the Phantasmagoria in 1792, and who under the name of De Philipsthal brought the show to London in 1801) and for its contradictions (while he praises science for dispelling superstition, Robertson is still captured by the deceptive power of magic), but also for its unexpected revelations. Indeed, Robertson’s statement that the engraving would be a source of lasting inspiration changes our perception of the Phantasmagoria: instead of a ghost show – the characteristic for which the Phantasmagoria was and is best known – the etching directs the reader’s attention towards an immersion in the bowels of the earth, a struggle with the four basic elements of the universe, a challenge against complicated devices, a crossing of well-designed spaces, and the acquisition of new abilities and skills. What comes to the fore is not a mere parade of spirits, but a composite assemblage of elements, operations, and postures that coalesce into a sophisticated perceptual and spatial machinery, and that underpin an exploration of new worlds and a testing of beholders’ emotional endurance.

To perfect this new reading of the Phantasmagoria, I will move away from its traditional interpretations. Terry Castle (1995) has underscored the Phantasmagoria’s paramount place in the history of imagination – and ultimately its capacity to transform thoughts into spectral realities. Stefan Andriopoulos (2013) has shown that the Phantasmagoria was a recurrent reference and finally became an epistemic figure in the German philosophy of the first half of the 19th century. Tom Gunning (2004a, 2004b) has retraced the state of astonishment that the Phantasmagoria elicited, which film later would inherit. Noam Elcott (2016a) has emphasized the sense of co-presence of images and spectators that the Phantasmagoria’s hallucinatory perceptions elicited. In all these approaches, apparitions are the centerpiece. My goal is different: following the engraving, I will contend that the Phantasmagoria was an optical–environmental dispositif that, while feeding spectators’ senses, exposed them to a peculiar spatial arrangement. In effect, if it is true that the Phantasmagoria relied on apparently free-floating images of specters and monsters, it is also true that it gathered its audience in a physical enclosure, where spectators enjoyed an eccentric milieu and at the same time were confronted with their own reactions to the projected images. So, the Phantasmagoria involved a display on the screen, and a venue around the screen. The consequence of such a convergence was counterintuitive. While restraining the audience within a self-contained space, the Phantasmagoria gave viewers the opportunity to explore and appropriate at least three realms: the kingdom of the dead – experienced in its projections; the physical fabric of our world – displayed through atmospheric effects and physics experiments that were associated with the show; and the interiority of spectators – bolstered by the situation in which they were immersed. All three of these worlds were central in contemporary discourse. The emergence of these three worlds, which was strictly tied to, and even dependent on, the concurrence of a screen and an enclosure, underscored the Phantasmagoria’s main characteristics as media, respectively its nature of interface, of environment, and of repository. Hence a conclusion: the Phantasmagoria was more than a ghostly entertainment with multiple paraphernalia. It was a new form of mediation with the other, the world, and the self – thanks to a surface that hosted visual data and that was located in a space that was part of the mediation itself. With the Phantasmagoria, the process of screening, with its perceptual and spatial implications, started to come to the fore.

In the following sections, I will outline the Phantasmagoria’s mode of working before turning to a close examination of the roles of both the screen and the setting. Finally, I will discuss the three worlds that the Phantasmagoria tried to explore and appropriate. I will conclude my analysis with some brief remarks on the way in which these worlds were represented – the Phantasmagoria worked as a non-conventional cartography of unexplored territories – and a consideration of the Phantasmagoria’s association with other media.

The Phantasmagoria’s assemblage

As I have mentioned, the Phantasmagoria was born three times. ² It first appeared in Paris in December 1792, as a short-lived attraction offered by Paul Filidor, with the promise of evoking the shadows of celebrities, and with the assurance that the show has ‘no dangerous influence on the organs, no unpleasant odor, and persons of all ages and sexes may view it without inconvenience’ (Affiches, annonces et avis divers, 1792, 16 December: 5189). ³ It reappeared in Paris in January 1798, performed by ‘the citizen E.G. Robertson’ (Affiches, annonces, and avis divers, 1798, 20 January: 2224), ⁴ accompanied by experiments with electricity, and in a format that found its canonization the following year when it moved to the former Convent of Capucines. Finally, it arrived in London in December 1801, as a patented spectacle by Paul de Philipsthal, without the alleged didactic purposes that had characterized its two previous versions – an omission that raised some complaint. ⁵ Especially in England, the show was almost immediately imitated by similar presentations with similar names. ⁶ Despite its sudden initial success, by the late 1810s, the popularity of the Phantasmagoria began to decline; if it survived until the mid-century, it was mostly as a single attraction – ‘Phantasmagoric scene’ – inserted in more composite spectacles. ⁷

From a technical point of view, the Phantasmagoria was a development of entertainments based on the magic lantern. In the second half of the 18th century, projections had experienced an expansion and an improvement, with new devices like Edmé-Gilles Guyot’s ‘nebulous lantern’, and new kinds of shows like the ceremony described by Friedrich Schiller in his novel The Ghost-Seer (Der Geisterseher – Aus den Papieren des Grafen von O**). ⁸ The Phantasmagoria exploited this expansion and improvement, adding two crucial innovations that changed the dispositif. Both innovations were perfectly captured by the English journalist Francis William Blagdon, who in a letter from Paris dated 20 December 1801, claimed to be able to reveal the Phantasmagoria’s secrets (Blagdon, 1803: 429–437). ⁹ The first innovation was that the projection became mobile: the lantern was mounted on wheels, and once it moved closer to the screen, or on the contrary away from it, images would respectively shrink or grow. Adjustable lenses allowed the figures to remain consistently in focus, transforming them into actual presences. ¹⁰ The second innovation was that the lanternist’s ‘operations and optical instruments’ were hidden ‘from the eyes of the public’ (Blagdon, 1803: 435). Images were rear-projected, giving the sense that the apparitions came from nowhere. We must add that the slides had a black background, and consequently the screened figures were frameless. Audiences had the impression that they were seeing real ghosts, moving freely in the theatre.

The mobility of the lantern and the effects of the retro-projection required consummate skill. Robertson, who brought the way of working of the dispositive to its perfection, was proud of his ability. He claimed that his show offered

the veritable proceeding of ghosts, instead of a discontinuous and awkward movement, the life-like and the vividness of the bodies, a wise distribution of light and shadow, a proper size of the specters, their gradual decline, and finally their almost immediate rapprochement under the eyes of spectators, on whom they seem to rush. (Robertson, 1831: 313–314)

A detailed description of the first Phantasmagoria’s instantiation, published in the revolutionary journal Feuille Villageoise on 28 February 1793, two months after Filidor’s opening in Paris, perfectly conveys the sense of astonishment elicited by the dispositif. The chronicle begins in an ironic tone: an ‘English Physicist’ is resuming the old necromantic practices in a spectacle open to everybody, and payable in the new revolutionary currency. ¹¹ Yet the description soon becomes more dramatic: after a pedagogical introductory address, the Physicist would usher the audience ‘into a room covered by black drapes, with images of death on the wall, and enlightened by a sepulchral lamp’ (La Phantasmagorie. Description d’un spectacle curieux, nouveau et instructif, 1793: 490). A magic draft blew out the candle, leaving the room in complete darkness; then a clap of thunder exploded and the spectacle began. Mirabeau’s ghost first surfaced as a luminous spot, circumfused by a sort of cloud that made his figure indistinct; his countenance gradually became more and more distinguishable. The ghost walked in the shadow; he came closer to the point where spectators could almost touch him; then he disappeared.

Twenty other ghosts follow one another . . . Sometimes the earth seems to produce them; sometimes they seem to pierce the vault and descend from the ceiling; other times it’s the wall itself that seems to open to let them pass. (La Phantasmagorie. Description d’un spectacle curieux, nouveau et instructif, 1793: 508).

The climax coincided with a hallucinatory scene: ‘Finally, I saw my own image; I saw myself, go, come, and get excited in front of me.’ ¹²

In his memoir, Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Chaussard, a prominent figure of the French Revolution, adds a more reassuring note. Speaking of Robertson’s show, he says:

There is something for everybody. We see the Bleeding Nun and Robespierre, Henry IV and Mirabeau, Franklin and Voltaire, Samuel’s and Macbeth’s shadows, smart and stupid people, magicians without malice and characters who are surprised to be in the show. (Chaussard, 1803: 188)

Consequently, the audience’s reactions varied: ‘These representations, despite their grim look, go cheerfully. Laughs follow silence and boos alternate with applauses, according to the grace that ghosts put in their roles, or according to the ideas that they raise’ (p. 187). The show was completed by experiments in physics and by the performance of a ventriloquist. Finally, the audience could take liberties. ‘The fear, the mischievousness, and a bit of licentiousness make spectators move their feet and hands closer to other spectators’ feet and hands. The living is no less busy than the dead’ (p. 187). Hallucination gave way to mere amusement.

Other almost forgotten documents provide further information. For example, the Almanac Les Ombres, ou, Les vivans qui sont morts: fantasmagorie littéraire (1801: 129) underscores an additional reason for the Phantasmagoria’s success: with ‘a happy and truly lucrative idea, the citizen Robertson . . . partly achieved what we read in . . . the black novels which have been published for several years. An audience already familiar with a new narrative flocked to enjoy what the page simply alluded to. ¹³ The notice ends with an ironic poem that recalls Chaussard’s chronicle:

One cannot count the number / of specters of all kinds; / to laugh, we show the shadow / of the most hideous scoundrels, / and, without fear of the blame, / after their death, we bring back / the spirit and the soul / of people who had neither. (pp. 129–130)

Blagdon, the Feuille Villageoise, Chaussard, and Les Ombres bear witness to the Phantasmagoria’s complexity. To an innovative form of projection, the Phantasmagoria added a peculiar ambiance, a composite programme, a prolific series of references, a shrewd ticket pricing policy, and a special ability to keep spectators at bay – after having bombarded them with images to the limits of hallucination. Within this sundry assemblage of elements that delineated the mode of working of the dispositif, three components came forward: the screen, the setting, and the audience. While each played a multiple, even contradictory, role, together they helped to define the Phantasmagoria’s spatial arrangement – in particular, the presence of different forms of enclosure – as well as the threefold world that these enclosures brought out: the kingdom of the Dead, domain of the Nature, and the interiority of spectators.

The screen

There is no doubt that the Phantasmagoria found in the screen its pivotal element. ¹⁴ Both in his Mémoires (1831: 325) and in his Patent (Brevet d’invention du Fantascope, 1799: 9), Robertson notes the importance of creating a perfectly transparent screen – a goal that he proudly achieved thanks to an original mix of Arabic gum and white starch. Yet, what matters is not the screen’s materiality, but its structural role – the position it occupied in the assemblage of elements and the functions it performed.

As I have already mentioned, in the Phantasmagoria, the screen’s most immediate function was to hide the presence of a projector and at the same time to host the images cast by it. The screen was at once a blind that concealed part of the technical apparatus and a support that materialized the rear-projected pictures. One single piece allowed the two functions – to conceal, to reveal – that underpinned the Phantasmagoria’s mode of working.

As a blind, the screen created a divide between two spaces. There was a backstage where the technical apparatus did its work, and a frontstage in which the specters gained substance. The former was the operator’s domain, the latter the space where spectators sat. The splitting was physical, delimiting two different portions of the theatre. It was also sensorial, opposing the visible and the invisible. Finally, it was metaphorical, since it provided a separation between the site of production and the site of consumption, and, in a general sense, between the space of technology and the space of imagination.

As a support that hosted projected images, the screen appeared as a luminous spot – the only one in a darkened room. Such a privilege brought two consequences. On one hand, the darkness of the room marked a discontinuity with the external world – reinforcing the symbolic closing of the doors that occurred at the end of the conjurer’s preliminary speech. Against this discontinuity, the screen’s luminosity granted access to a new kind of reality: the realm of the dead reached our world, thanks to a point of passage – an interface – between the two territories. ¹⁵ We have already heard in the Feuille Villageoise and in Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Chaussard (1803) a description of the ghosts’ parade: for some spirits, it was an opportunity to live again, for others, especially for the heroes of the Revolution, a way to recall their procession to the guillotine. On the other hand, the glowing surface of the screen produced a virtual point of confluence of spectators’ gazes – a point where individual eyes were synchronized and transformed into the audience’s eyes. The creation of such a collective body was helpful: as a reporter noticed, a crowd is able to cope with fears better than are isolated individuals. ¹⁶

However, the screen was also a paradoxical object. While allowing ghosts to become visible, the screen eluded spectators’ perception. Before the show, it was masked by a curtain; during the show, it disappeared under the images that it hosted. This contrast between the screen’s structural relevance and its perceptual elusiveness assimilated the screen into the technical apparatus, which also withdrew from spectators’ eyes. At the same time, the invisibility of the screen had the effect of giving the ghosts a sort of independence. They moved freely, back and forth, often as if they were suspended in the air, and were invading the spectators’ space. A late English report published in The Portfolio vividly describes the audience’s reactions: ‘some thought that they could have touched the figures, others had a different notion of their distance, and few apprehended that they have not advanced beyond the first row of the audience’ (Descriptive account, 1825: 329). Chaussard’s (1803: 187) description is even more iconic. Recalling the show’s climax, he says: ‘Surprised by the harmonica’s sound and by unexpected apparitions, [spectators] try to hit the shadows with their cane. Shadows flee away screaming.’

The seeming independence of the ghosts not only gave substance to the World of the Dead but it also elicited a sense of close contact with spectators. Noam Elcott (2016a) speaks of an ‘assembly of bodies and images in real time and space’: yet, rather than a form of immersive co-presence in which bodies and images were equalized, this assembly was permeated by forms of communication, and even of transaction, that enabled the real world and the otherworld to be in touch without losing their different natures. ¹⁷ Chaussard (1803: 179) recalls that the movement of the ghost back and forth elicited in the audience a corresponding movement of expectation and surprise: ‘You named [a ghost], she appeared . . . then you uttered a cry of dread and dismay.’ Apparitions and audience were in dialogue. At the same time, the exchange was also an appropriation. For a supplementary fee, patrons were able to have an extra ghost of their choice among those in display. ¹⁸ Such a commodification reveals the intimate design to which the Phantasmagoria was an accomplice: the otherworld ultimately worked as a territory to be explored and exploited.

A blind that masks the apparatus, a divide that defines the theatre’s physical organization, a support on which apparitions gain life, an interface that puts two worlds in contact, and a point of confluence of spectators’ gazes that remained invisible in itself: in the Phantasmagoria, the screen played a multifaceted yet crucial role. The Phantasmagoria’s setting echoed and complemented this role.

The setting

Like the screen, the Phantasmagoria’s setting dealt both with deprivation and access. The auditorium where the audience gathered, as well as its immediate extensions, were closed spaces, severed from external surroundings – a separation that reinforced the partition between the auditorium and the space of technology. In becoming an audience, spectators lost contact with their usual world. At the same time, a new world emerged in these closed spaces, in addition to the Kingdom of the Dead hosted by the screen. This new world reflected Nature itself – a Nature reproduced by technical devices in its more expressive aspects, like thunder and rain, or exposed in its basic laws thanks to physics experiments. The Phantasmagoria’s setting was not only a recess, it was also an environment – a technical imitation of the ecological milieu in which spectators lived and which they were asked to leave behind. This double nature of the setting became particularly clear when on 3 January 1799, Robertson moved his show from its previous location at the Pavillon de l’Échiquier to the Convent of Capucines. The new site, a nunnery that had been expropriated by the Revolution in 1789 and transformed into a populated and sometime tumultuous ‘Maison Nationale’, added further fascination to the Phantasmagoria, if only because of the presence of numerous old graves and due to the memories tied to the former residents of the site – a female order of nuns well known for their strict discipline. Yet, it was the general arrangement of the space that was the real key to the new location’s success. Robertson’s Mémoires (1831: 276–278) and the promotional leaflet that he distributed to the public (Fantasmagorie de Robertson, 1800) allow us to cast a glance at this arrangement, through the layout of the new site and the attractions that were offered.

After leaving Rue Neuve des Petits Champs, spectators had to cross part of the Convent’s garden, to approach the proper location of the show. ¹⁹ Since the show was performed in the late evening and in the night, the path inevitably looked mysterious. Once spectators reached the Phantasmagoria’s site, they had to linger in a vestibule called the ‘premier Salon de Physique’ or move to the passage called ‘Galerie de la Femme Invisible’. While the latter entertained waiting spectators with an acousmatic ‘Invisible Woman’, who answered every possible question, and with a ventriloquist, Fitzpatrick, who exhibited his celebrated abilities, the ‘Salon de Physique’ was more austere. It housed a prism ‘reflecting the seven primitive colors’, several anamorphic and illusionistic paintings, a microscope, beetles and fleas, distorting mirrors, and a set of electrostatic devices that produced discharges between two poles. Despite its appearance as a traditional ‘cabinet of curiosity’, the items on display and the presence of scientific experiments – that Robertson widely heralded in his frequent advertisements – gave a slightly different color to the ‘Salon de la Physique’: it was a sort of microcosm, exhibiting natural specimens and natural effects (see Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Etienne Gaspard Robertson (1833), Mémoires, Vol. 2, frontispiece.

At some point, the public accessed the ‘Salle de la Fantasmagorie’, where the apparitions took place. There were seats, but spectators could also stand. Once the audience entered the theatre, after a brief speech by the conjuror, the doors were closed, and the candles blown out. The darkness – a ‘darkness visible’, as David Brewster (1836: 81) ²⁰ called it – accentuated the creation of an intentional, even artificial enclosure. The theatre was a sealed space within an already enclosed site in a not-easy-to-reach building, producing a ‘Russian doll’ effect. It was in this sealed space that ghosts made their appearance in a ceaseless procession. Yet, as the Kingdom of the Dead was in full display, the natural world did not disappear. Robertson (1831: 358–360) speaks of three devices that were employed during the show, respectively a tool for the imitation of the sound of rain, a tool for producing thunder, and a tool for the simulation of wind and a hurricane. While detailing the technical specification for each machine, Robertson gives a functional explanation of their use. He notes, for example, that the rain noise ‘puts thought to sleep, so to speak; all ideas seem to be recalled to a single object, to a single impression’ (p. 358). Such a state of mind allowed spectators to direct all their attention toward the show, but at the same time it recalled situations they faced when confronted with Nature. What is more natural than essential atmospheric elements like rain, the thunder, and a hurricane? Framed in a sealed space, detached from reality, the Phantasmagoria’s audience was able to enjoy a natural environment by means of technical devices.

So, an esoteric screen and an atmospheric setting. While confining spectators within an enclosure, the Phantasmagoria gave them the opportunity to face more complex worlds, respectively the otherworld of the ghosts and the natural world of weather, optics, and electricity. The two universes may seem to be at odds with one another. Yet, in the Phantasmagoria they coexisted: they were both ‘marvels’, and at the same time they were perfectly factual – combined as just the plate with the vaults of Memphis had already foreseen.

Seclusion, interiority

But why an enclosure? Why a deprivation that must be filled? In a brilliant analysis of visuality between the 18th and 19th centuries, Jonathan Crary (2002) offers useful suggestions. In particular, he claims that the accented visuality so characteristic of the time required various forms of self-control and social restraint, and the progressive commodification of this visuality implied subjects’ insularity as prodromal to the privatization of sight.

There is no doubt that the Phantasmagoria’s layout responded to a disciplinary strategy. ²¹ The clear partition of the interior, while not threatening the audience’s circulation, identified different specialized sites – the ‘Salon de la Physique’ and the ‘Salle de la Fantasmagorie’ – each requiring a specific orientation on the part of their visitors. The points of transition – the corridor and the ‘Galerie de la Femme Invisible’ – fueled spectators’ expectations, and simultaneously channeled both their bodies and their feelings. Finally, the separation from the outside world, particularly apparent in the inner theatre, heightened the intensity of the spectacle, yet created a safer site. On the other hand, the whole building in which the Phantasmagoria was located was associated with forms of discipline. After its expropriation, the former Convent of Capucines had become a tumultuous environment: the reports penned in the early years of the 19th century by Aubert, ‘Architecte de la Regie des Domaines Nationaux’ and supervisor of the entire complex, provide vivid evidence of the need for order in the building. ²² The Phantasmagoria dealt with regulation and control.

We can make similar claims for the second aspect that Crary highlights, the relative insularity of the viewers. There is no doubt that the Phantasmagoria considered its patrons individuals. Tickets were sold in single units, and spectators were able to add a ghost of their choice by paying a supplement. Darkness isolated the Phantasmagoria’s viewers, and the constitution of a collective body never erased their individual differences. Though shared with others, the spectators’ attendance was always a very personal experience.

Yet, Crary’s suggestions also allow us to take a step further. The Phantasmagoria’s spatial enclosure was not merely instrumental in producing discipline and insularity on the part of the spectators, but it also contributed to the emergence of a third realm, in addition to the Kingdom of the Dead and the Spectacle of the Nature: the spectators’ interiority.

The idea of interiority was a recurring feature in the second half of the 18th century. ²³ Despite the prevailing role of Reason, the French Enlightenment also made room for an ‘inner world’ where human beings could come to terms with their deeper emotions and thoughts, and thus come to know themselves. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, posthumously published in 1789, was the book that most contributed to this perspective, with its mélange of memories, revelatory experiences, and fears. A further suggestion comes from the German concept of Innerlichkeit with its different connotations. Indeed, the almost brand-new German term designated not simply a space of intimate thoughts, but rather a site where external data were re-elaborated into a subjective experience and where subjects were able to return reflexively to this process. ²⁴ Finally, interiority took on a spatial connotation. It was associated with a location separated from the outside, in particular the ‘interior’ of a building and consequently promoted as the emblem of intimacy and privateness.

Against this backdrop, the Phantasmagoria dealt with spectators’ interiority in a twofold way. First, it offered a space where patrons faced their ‘inner world’. The chronicles of the show converge in describing a highly emotional experience. In front of the screen, astonishment, surprise, longing for the deceased, political animosity, and especially fear were common and heightened feelings. Without attempting to make claims about spectators’ psychology, we can nevertheless say that viewers had to cope not only with ghosts, but also with their own way of coping with ghosts. In other words, they had to deal with their own emotional reactions and with the necessity to accept them. The sentence above by the anonymous chronicler of Feulle Villageuse – ‘Finally, I saw my own image; I saw myself, go, come, and get excited in front of me’ – testifies not only to a hallucination, but also to the strength with which the show pushed its spectators to confront themselves and their interiority. Robertson described the same situation in a more ironic – and highly gendered – way. Addressing the female part of his audience, he alerted spectators that the fears they would face were closer to an internal anxiety than to an external shock – similarly to those that often characterize the moods of ladies . . . ²⁵ The Phantasmagoria apparently was a site of self-discovery.

Second, the Phantasmagoria made this ‘inner world’ publicly visible. Thought to be individually experienced, interiority can be put on display, if only in the effects that emotions elicit. There is no lack of testimony of how spectators’ emotional expressions and outbursts were part of the show. Robertson (1831: 222) recalls that in Bordeaux a Professor of Physics, Cazalès, despite his competence, fell prey to his anxiety, and tried to strike the projected ghosts: the audience immediately ridiculed him, creating a sort of spectacle within the spectacle. Such a display of emotions finds its perfect illustration – again, in a gendered way – in Robertson’s gravestone (see Figure 3). On the left side, we see ghosts in the form of frightening creatures and Medieval monsters; at the top of the plate there is a flying skeleton with the trumpet of Death in his mouth; on the right side, the patrons are gathered. Some of them stare at the amazing creatures on the stage, as if they were accepting the challenge; others, while watching, seek comfort in someone else, as a toddler and a woman center-stage do by hugging, respectively, his mother and her partner; a woman in the foreground covers her eyes, overwhelmed by the apparitions, but still experiencing the spectacle; a boy on the right simply turns his back to the show, as if he had renounced his place in the audience. In this modulation of gazes, spectators’ ‘inner worlds’ come to the fore.

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Figure 3.

Robertson’s gravestone.

Accessed by spectators and displayed on behalf of the others, interiority became a realm like the otherworld and the natural world. It became the ‘third world’ to which the Phantasmagoria gave rise in its spatial enclosure.

Mapping the world(s)

So, the world ‘below’ (where ghosts originate), the world ‘outside’ (the natural milieu), and the world ‘inside’ (where spectators’ fears and desires reside): while being performed in a sealed space – and because it was performed there – the Phantasmagoria gave access to these three domains. But what kind of world was made available? And what kind of availability was eventually granted?

Let’s go back to the Kingdom of the Dead. Under the general heading ‘Petit Répertoire Fantasmagorique’, Robertson’s Mémoires recall a list of the most successful acts he exhibited over the years (Robertson, 1831: 294–304). The extent and variety of the topics are impressive. The catalogue includes premonitions like ‘Lord Littleton’s death’; legends related to saints like ‘Saint Nicholas’s Pilgrimage’ and ‘Saint Antoine’s temptations’; historical sets like ‘Druids’ procession and sacrifice’; biblical episodes like ‘Samuel’s spirit appearing to Saul’ and ‘David and Goliath’; classical myths like ‘The rape of Proserpina’, ‘Medusa’s head’, and ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’. The main attractions obviously are witchcraft as in ‘Macbeth’s witches’, ‘Departure to Sabbath’, and ‘Witches’ dance’; necromancy as in ‘The gravedigger’ and ‘Saint Bruno’s convent’; and prurient episodes as in ‘The bleeding nun’ and ‘Venus cuddles a hermit’. Due to the political climate in which Robertson wrote his Mémoires, he does not mention other acts that, according to direct witnesses, he had certainly performed: in particular, the parade of Great Men that included Rousseau, Lavoisier, and Voltaire, and the recollection of the main personages of Revolution, starting from Robespierre (Courrier des Spectacles, 1800: 4).

Because of their success, many of the original Phantasmagoria’s acts would be adapted and reproduced by other performers. The surviving Phantasmagoria slides – generally produced later and characterized by a popular style – bear witness to the persistence of the topics listed in Robertson’s ‘Répertoire’. We find slides of the Bleeding nun, the Head of Medusa, witches and devils, skeletons, and skulls, but also mythological scenes and portraits of political figures, including Bonaparte. ²⁶ Their graphic trait is a little rough – after all, the slides were miniatures – but once projected and moving, the figures were effective.

What surfaces is a world in which religion, the supernatural, classical references, current events, and voyeurism converge and often merge. It may look like an implausible world, due to its chaotic and sometimes incoherent composition. And it may look like an unreal and insubstantial world, due to the content and style of its representations. Yet, its fabric is not far from the other worlds that the Phantasmagoria summons. Like the ‘inner world’, it brings to the fore spectators’ recurring anxieties and wishes, intimate thoughts and uncertain beliefs. And, like the natural world – let’s think of experiments in galvanism – it ceaselessly moves back and forth from secrecy to full visibility and from death to life. ²⁷ These similarities allow us to make a decisive step: in bringing to the fore its three worlds, the Phantasmagoria fully retained the imaginary that surrounded them – that imaginary made by expectations and interpretations that according to Edgar Morin (2005[1956]) constantly filters the reality of the facts and that consequently nourishes our experience of things as much as a direct relationship with them. ²⁸ Despite the ‘pedagogical address’ at the beginning of the show or the reference to applied physics in the promotional leaflet distributed to the public, the Phantasmagoria never cast an ‘objective’ look at its worlds; on the contrary, while creating a repository of gestures, situations, elements, and characters, it included the imaginary in it, and in doing so it offered its objects along with the full resonances – a halo? – that accompanied their social presence.

In exchange, the Phantasmagoria’s three worlds surfaced not in all their details, but in their landmarks. This choice reduced the intricacy of the territory on behalf of its saliences. If we look again at Robertson’s gravestone, we can see that it displays canonical states of mind: a fearless attitude, a hesitant gaze, and a retreat from reality. Likewise, the Nature summoned by the spectacle is reduced to its elemental components: weather, electricity, and optical illusions. The episodes listed in the ‘Petit Répertoire Fantasmagorique’ draw upon recurring themes: unexpectedness, heroism, pain, and fate. The slides, allegedly so naive, visualize emblematic moments: Medusa addressing the audience; the skeleton exiting his tomb; the nun with the dagger in her hand; a hero seducing the beauty; a father burying his son. The Phantasmagoria did not produce the coherent, integrated narrative of theatre or literature. Instead, the Phantasmagoria’s audience encountered essential pieces of a multifaceted world that was disclosed in its most fundamental points: loss and desire, death and life, threat and salvation, greed and sacrifice, bravery and fear. In this respect, more than reviving traditional legends, well-known biblical stories, worrisome visions, or magic tales, the Phantasmagoria primarily provided a system of signals that oriented spectators within the labyrinth of the imaginary worlds it explored. In doing so, it ended up drawing a basic map of its three domains – neither a miniature replica of the countries, nor a systematic record of the properties, but the sort of chart, discussed by James Carey (1992: 21–22), that is simply sketched, or even danced or sung, and that nevertheless, with its essential directions, allows a community to appropriate its own territory.

It is thanks to this map that the Phantasmagoria was able to negotiate between the unveiling of new domains and the necessity to provide a clear picture of them, between an unprecedented complexity and the urgency to offer points of reference, between the pleasure of exploration and the need to feel safe. The Phantasmagoria was neither a narrative nor a description, neither an epic nor a comedy: it was a cartography. ²⁹

Phantasmagoria’s legacy

After a very successful decade, ³⁰ at the end of the 1810s, the popularity of the Phantasmagoria started to decline. As it waned, its name flourished. It came to define any sequence of images seen in a dream or in a state of excitation, as well as different kinds of premonitions and apparitions, ³¹ murder or mystery stories, ³² particularly vivid poetical or musical compositions, ³³ and generally any work permeated by imagination. ³⁴ In Feuerbach, it would offer a metaphor for defining a form of knowledge; ³⁵ in Marx, it would designate the illusory value of commodities; ³⁶ and, in Benjamin, it would summarize the complex and kaleidoscopic cultural world of Paris in the 19th century. ³⁷ If Lewis Carroll (1869) entitled a collection of his poems Phantasmagoria and Other Poems, one of the first animated cartoons – a movie by Émile Cohl dated 1908, and characterized by spectral figures – would be entitled Fantasmagorie.

Consequently, the Phantasmagoria came to be defined in a specific and narrow way. Its essence would be an excited, overloaded, and deceptive vision. Its ancestors would be the dispositifs that produced illusion and hallucination. Its inheritance would be what Tom Gunning (1990) calls, after Eisentein, ‘attractions’. If, instead, we look at the Phantasmagoria as a dispositif in which the physical enclosure elicited the exploration and appropriation of a threefold world – the other, the inner, and the natural worlds – we can extend the range of its operations and consequently of its connections. Two examples, both counterintuitive, can suffice. The first refers to a potential ancestor, quite far from the necromantic rituals with which the Phantasmagoria is usually associated. I am thinking of the Forty Hours’ Devotion – a Roman Catholic practice extremely popular during the Counter-Reformation, characterized by a luminous ephemeral decoration of the altar (see Weil, 1974) a strong delimitation of spaces, and a compelling ritual designed to move the faithful to extreme emotion in order to relive the passion of Christ. ³⁸ The visual and spatial arrangement of the ceremony, the attempt to regain possession of an otherwise lost reality, and the appeal to the inner world of the beholders, based on imaginative homilies held every hour, make the Forty Hours and the Phantasmagoria not unrelated to each other. Despite their different ideological backgrounds – respectively the subduing of the subjects and the empowerment of the citizens – and their divergent goals – respectively the redemption of believers and the enjoyment of customers – the latter may be considered a secular remediation of the former.

The second example pertains to the technological landscape in which the Phantasmagoria operated. In 1792, the French inventor Claude Chappe made an optical telegraph – a line of towers, each in view of two others, and each able to send to the next a message encoded in conventional visual signs. It became possible for once-isolated places to stay in touch with the whole nation. The system proved its effectiveness during the revolutionary wars and lasted until it was replaced by the electrical telegraph. In his Mémoires, Robertson (1831: 198–200) pays tribute to Claude Chappe, a friend with whom he spent happy times, and claims to have played a part in his invention. Though exagerated, his assertion reveals an unexpected parallel between Chappe’s mechanism and the Phantasmagoria. Indeed, Robertson’s definition of the optical telegraph as ‘the art of traversing, through reciprocal communications, the largest country in a few minutes’ (p. 199) could easily be applied to the Phantasmagoria, as well. Both dispositifs reveal an attempt to connect us to spaces from which we are separated. Both display content – messages and worlds – aimed at creating a contact.

My two examples do not exclude an archaeological inquiry into the coeval dispositifs with which the Phantasmagoria was confronted in the context of the urban culture – optical–environmental dispositifs like the Eidophusikon ³⁹ and the Panorama, ⁴⁰ but also wide-format paintings like Thomas Girtin’s Eidometropolis ⁴¹ or spaces for entertainment like La Veillée. ⁴² Nor do they exclude a link with future dispositifs based on artifice and deception, like film or virtual reality. Tracking this kind of lineage is still crucial. However, my two examples call for a larger picture: while reiterating that at the core of the Phantasmagoria there was a seclusion that allowed spectators to come into contact with three worlds, they also suggest the need to investigate whatever is associated with these key elements, independently from strict similarities, causal determinations, or historical correlations. If we follow this path, secluded spaces, intensified views, and reconnections with a multifaceted universe – whatever forms they may take – become the Phantasmagoria’s possible counterpart. The outcome is an extended and horizontal network of elements that, while refusing any hierarchical or causal order, provides an inclusive and varied picture of the Phantasmagoria’s affinities. Thickenings and ripples indicate the points of greatest interest.

It is on behalf of this rhizomatic archaeology – in which influences do not necessarily imply a dominant model and connections do not necessarily entail binding lineages – that I move toward my conclusion. In 1802, Robertson bought a balloon, and shifted his main interest to aerostatic ascensions. He had already tried to fly: few years earlier, in Bordeaux, he had jumped, uninvited, into a balloon’s gondola, and his weight had compromised the ascent (Robertson, 1831: 225–226). The second time, his purpose was firmer: if only because ‘an ascent is visible to a wider crowd and can quickly provide a huge recipe’ (Robertson, 1833: 15). The second volume of Mémoires documents Robertson’s numerous exploits, and includes the reports that the author addressed to various scientific societies – in particular, the long account sent to the Imperial Academy of Saint Petersburg about nine experiments performed during a long ascension in Hamburg for the purpose of checking the physical and physiological effects of altitude on men and animals. ⁴³ Here the tone is more scientific – though his results would be later contested by Gay-Lussac, as Robertson candidly confesses. Beyond the lack of precision and rigor of the experiments, what Robertson’s narrative reveals is the same combination of worlds we found in the Phantasmagoria. His attempts at scientific descriptions of a changing atmosphere mingle with the language of wonder, and emotional accounts accompany the barometer and thermometer readings. Now locked in his gondola, exposed to the openness of the sky, no longer on or below but above the surface of the earth, Robertson reckons again with Nature, the Otherworld, and Interiority (see Figure 4). As Robertson’s Phantasmagoria declined in popularity during the first decade of the 19th century, his aerial explorations were a perfect way to keep it alive.

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Figure 4.

Robertson, Mémoires (1833): 18.