Read the walls of Paris in the 18th century.

As the Italian historian Armando Petrucci (1932-2018) taught, the link is strong and ancient, since ancient Rome, between monuments and writings, both epigraphic writings that manifest the authority of political or religious powers and their reverse, graffiti drawn surreptitiously. in spaces that were not intended for them. The beautiful book by Laurent Cuvelier, The captivated cityadds a new chapter to this long-lasting story.

In the 18th century^my In the 19th century, the walls of large European cities were covered with handwritten posters and, even more so, with printed posters. Present in traveler stories, descriptions of cities and, as the book’s numerous reproductions, paintings and engravings attest, these posters, fragile, ephemeral, torn off, have disappeared en masse. Laurent Cuvelier’s first merit is having found 6,000 of them in archives and libraries, which were stuck on Parisian walls between the mid-17th century.^my century and 1799. 4,300 were during the revolutionary years, after the law of 1791, which established freedom of exhibition.

The book’s brilliant demonstration is based on a series of contradictions. The first opposes order and subversion. The authorities considered that the posters “public writing of power”who published the laws, detailed the regulations, listed prohibitions and obligations. This “wall order” However, he was powerless in the face of the militant use of the posters. They mobilized the writings stuck on the walls of all the crises of the Old Regime: wheat crisis, parliamentary crises, Jansenist crises. They fed the “poster war” who set the course of the Revolution. In dialogue with Arlette Farge and Robert Darnton, Laurent Cuvelier shows that the writings displayed on the walls, read aloud for those who could not decipher them, played an essential role in the constitution of a popular public opinion, far from obedience to the authorities. .

The economics of visualization

A second contradiction is linked to the advances of consumer society during the 18th century.^my century. Although institutional posters were intended to inform and educate subjects and citizens, their massive use by companies and shows of all kinds transformed them into a powerful advertising instrument (including misleading advertising). When launching “storming the walls”18th century commercial capitalism^my The 19th century and the democratization of leisure dominated the entertainment economy.

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