Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution Paul Metzner

8. Ballooning the Self

Rousseau had a lot of practice painting his own portrait. He did it in “Mon portrait” (10 pages, written sometime between 1755 and 1762), “Quatre lettres à M. le président de Malesherbes, contenant le vrai tableau de mon caractère” (20 pages, written in 1762), Confessions (650 pages, written between 1766 and 1770), Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques (350 pages, written between 1772 and 1776), and Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (100 pages, written between 1776 and 1778 and unfinished at his death in 1778). Rousseau’s first self-portrait set the tone for the rest. It began, “Readers, I like to think about myself and I say what I think,” and ended, “When I am dead the poet Rousseau [Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, no relation] will be a great poet. But he will not be the great Rousseau.” ^[2]

A trend toward increasingly unrestrained self-promotion developed almost imperceptibly in French, indeed Western, society over the course of the second half of the eighteenth century. This trend became unignorable in the first half of the nineteenth century, when the virtuosos could be found in its vanguard.

Rousseau made quite a lot of this dichotomy, treating it in three major works, the Discours sur inégalité (Discourse on Inequality), Émile, ou De l’éducation (Emile, or On Education), and the set of dialogues collectively titled Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques (Rousseau Judges Jean-Jacques).

Why did Rousseau devote so much attention to the analysis of self-love? Most people’s thinking is in part guided by their reading, and Rousseau’s reading included several seventeenth-century French authors who had established a tradition of such analyses. Pascal had written in his Pensées: “The nature of self-love (amour-propre) and of this human ‘me’ is to love only the self and to consider only the self.” La Rochefoucauld had written in his Maximes: “Self-love (amour-propre) is the love of oneself (amour de soi-même) and everything for the self; it makes people worship themselves and it would make them tyrannical toward others if they had the means to be.” In the seventeenth century, no distinction had yet been made between amour de soi-même on the one hand and amour-propre on the other. It was all self-love, and the whole drift of seventeenth-century French thought was to condemn it. In general, the French moralists of that era, following the Dutch theologian Cornelis Jansen, blamed people’s neglect of God for the development of self-love.^[4] By contrast, Rousseau did not condemn all self-love, and for that portion of it that he did condemn, he blamed society.

Even if he had not blamed society, but especially because he did, one might infer that the society in which he lived, as well as literary tradition, influenced his choice of subjects. True, the Jansenists had condemned society before Rousseau. In the Discours sur inégalité, Rousseau’s apparent condemnation of all of human society since human beings first left “the state of nature” seemed to echo the Jansenists’ condemnation of all of human society since “the fall of man.” But for the Jansenists society was essentially static in its badness, while for Rousseau society had definitely gotten worse. In the Discours sur inégalité he argued that the amourpropre of individuals and the inequality of conditions in society had reinforced each other in a widening spiral to the point that both the amour-propre of certain individuals and the inequality of social conditions had become monstrous. In Émile, ou De l’éducation he argued that society taught people to compare themselves to others instead of teaching them to recognize and develop their own interests and capacities. In Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques he argued that other authors’ amour-propre, and maybe some of his own, lay at the bottom of society’s unjust treatment of him.^[5] Clearly, when Rousseau condemned “society” he was often thinking of his own society, that of eighteenth-century Europe.^[6] He took old concepts—self-love, aboriginal golden age, tyranny of the powerful—that had been forged to criticize society in general, and turned them to a new purpose, to criticize his society in particular.

Rousseau did forge at least one new concept, as we have already learned, the distinction between amour de soi-même and amour-propre.^[7] His own society’s particularly serious affliction with self-love he proposed to treat not by discouraging but by encouraging self-love, albeit of a different, nonpathological kind. In the ideal society, Rousseau wrote in Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, people “do not seek their happiness in appearances but in internal feelings,…knowing well that the happiest condition is not the one most honored by the crowd, but the one which most satisfies the heart.” ^[8] The moralists of the seventeenth century condemned all self-love. Rousseau distinguished two kinds of self-love, condemning one and approving the other. How many people in Western society today would condemn even the kind of self-love that Rousseau condemned, the kind of self-love that gives them a sense of honor and prompts them to excel? Rousseau was both an early observer of and an early activist in the legitimization of self-love as a human motivation.

Rousseau appears to have been near the origin of an important reconceptualization of society. From the middle of the eighteenth century onward, rapidly increasing numbers of Westerners placed their own individual self at the center of their social world. Formerly, some figure of authority, the local lord or priest, or the king or the pope, for example, had occupied that position in people’s minds.^[9] In no socially recognized way could Rousseau claim to be an authority figure, yet he persisted in his voluminous writings in making his social world revolve around himself. He simply assumed that his primary function on earth was to do not what the socially recognized authorities told him to do, but what was in his own self-interest. They had greater power, but he had equal right. Other ordinary people began to adopt this view in their own minds, and on paper, after identifying themselves with ordinary Jean-Jacques while reading his works. Rousseau gave countless examples of what it meant in everyday life, while Jefferson inscribed “that all men are created equal; that all men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This revolutionary declaration presupposes both the legitimacy of self-love and a self-centered worldview.

Thus Rousseau was not the only writer of his era to promote a self-centered worldview, although no one else did so at such length, with such intensity, and on such a broad front, in politics, religion, ethics, education, love, psychology, literature. He had the backing of a large chorus, full of other distinguished soloists, whereas his predecessors, such as Montaigne and Cellini in the sixteenth century, were only isolated voices. In the realm of imaginative literature, many mid-eighteenth-century writers, consciously or unconsciously, contributed to the same end. The graveyard poetry of Edward Young and other British authors (1740s) and the Sturm und Drang works of Goethe and other German authors (1770s), for example, tended to encourage self-absorption: “Tempted by hermitages, grottoes in picturesque gardens, or mountain rocks, the reader of Rousseau’s Rêveries, Werther’s confidences, or Young’s Night Thoughts dreamed of intensely experiencing the existence of the ‘I.’” ^[10]

A historian of Western literature, John O. Lyons, argues that one of that tradition’s most significant products, the literary self, began to take definitive form in the 1760s. Lyons thinks that Rousseau, Goethe, and perhaps also Boswell contributed the most to “the invention of the self.” For earlier authors, “experience, personal experience, was largely beside the point and they saw with eyes that they assumed to be no different from any other.” For later authors, by contrast, “seeing became a confirmation of the self rather than a process by which the outer world of nature was understood.” ^[11] It was the end of Western society’s two-thousand-year-old subordination of self to nature. From now on in Western society the goal was to be the domination of self over nature, through literature, through technical skill, through philosophy.

In his Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik (Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics), Immanuel Kant cited David Hume as the thinker who “gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a quite new direction,” ^[12] but one wonders whether Rousseau, whose influence on Kant’s thought in the fields of education, ethics, and politics Kant freely acknowledged, did not also guide him toward his celebrated “Copernican Revolution” in metaphysics of the 1780s. Kant wrote of Copernicus:

Failing of a satisfactory progress in explaining the movements of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that they all revolved round the spectator, he tried whether he might not have better success if he made the spectator to revolve and the stars to remain at rest. A similar experiment can be tried in metaphysics, as regards the perception of objects. If perception must conform to the constitution of the objects, I do not see how we could know anything of the latter a priori; but if the object (as object of the senses) must conform to the constitution of our faculty of perception, I have no difficulty conceiving such a possibility.^[13]

In other words, the universe as we know it—the universe of phenomena, in Kant’s terminology—is largely of our own making, a construction of our perceptual apparatus. More precisely, any individual’s universe is the construction of that individual’s perceptual apparatus, although Kant assumed that for human beings generally this apparatus is fundamentally the same. Kant called his revolution in metaphysics Copernican because he extended Copernicus’s recognition of the role of the spectator in astronomical perceptions to all perceptions. But Kant’s revolution could just as well be called anti-Copernican, since Copernicus had put the spectator in motion around a different fixed center, while Kant again made the spectator, or the spectator’s given perceptual apparatus, the fixed center and put the universe of phenomena in motion around that central self. Kant extended Rousseau’s self-centered worldview into the sphere of metaphysics.

German Idealism, the most important school of European metaphysical thought of the first half of the nineteenth century, based itself on Kant. According to Kant, our perceptual apparatus perceives real things, but we cannot know them as they really are, as “things-in-themselves” or noumena, only as they appear to us, as phenomena. Along one path of German Idealism, these things outside of us, the outside world, diminished from unknowable to insubstantial, and the “we” diminished to “I.” In the system of Fichte, the outside world has no independent existence: “My system liberates him [mankind] from the chains of the thing-in-itself, from everything that affects him from without.” ^[14] It does this by reducing the outside world to an idea. The idea of the outside world comes originally from the “absolute I,” or the “infinite I,” or God, but it also comes from each of us, as an “empirical I.” The world has many centers, although only one original center. In the similar system of Hegel, the “world soul,” or the “world spirit,” or God, creates the world, then sees it as a separate other, and finally recognizes it as part of itself. Again the outside world has no independent existence. And again the world has many centers, but the gravity of the original center seems stronger this time, and the philosopher who simultaneously comprehends, describes, and completes the world system, in so doing, finds himself back in that privileged place. In Max Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and Its Own, 1845), the “I” is all; all things that appear other, even other human beings, aye, even God, exist only in the eye of the I.

The literary movement known as Romanticism also received much of its early momentum, or force in a particular direction, from Rousseau and Kant. “The poet has moved into the center of the critical system and taken over many of the prerogatives which had once been exercised by his readers, the nature of the world in which he found himself, and the inherited precepts and examples of his poetic art,” writes critic Meyer Abrams of Romantic aesthetic theory. “What I see first of all in Romanticism is the effect of a profound change…in the spatial projection of reality,” writes another critic, Northrop Frye: “The creative world is deep within, and so is heaven or the place of the presence of God.” Romanticism was the literary exploration of the self-centered worldview, and of self-love. Abrams sees a similar narrative structure in Wordsworth’s Prelude, Schiller’s Spaziergang, Hölderlin’s Hyperion, Goethe’s Faust, Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, Blake’s Four Zoas, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, and Hegel’s Phenomenologie der Geist. This structure is a spiral, a spiral of consciousness, in which a consciousness recounts the change in itself and in the appearance of the outside world as it turns outward from itself into the world and then back inward into itself again, during which it also revolves from a lower state to a higher state, the substance of its change. Abrams calls this “the circuitous journey.” ^[15]

Although Romanticism first swelled up in Rousseau, the wave seems to have reached its crest in Germany and Britain before rolling cyclically back to France. But it was the same wave. Romanticism “was only to be found within,” wrote Charles Baudelaire in the essay “What is Romanticism?” “The artist never goes outside of himself,” he added in another place. “An artist should only and can only love himself,” affirmed Alfred de Vigny. A bit later the novelist Champfleury, an early Realist disgusted with Romanticism, complained of “the mania of talking about oneself”:

The epidemic of the “I” has so infected the blood of today’s writers that they are hardly bothered by it. This disease, which goes back to Montaigne and which developed considerable virulence in the last century, is borne by every one of us; everyone publishes his memoirs while he is still alive, exposes to the public what he has done, reports without modesty his feelings, his reactions, his sufferings, his passions.^[16]

The rise of the self-centered worldview took place at all levels, from abstruse philosophy and allusive poetry to grammar-school instruction, from the airiest ideas to the earthiest behaviors. Historians Roger Chartier and Dominique Julia have studied elementary books of manners of sixteenth- through eighteenth-century France: “The developments with respect to spitting and blowing one’s nose, are, in their trajectories, quite significant.” As one might intuitively expect, spitting and blowing one’s nose with one’s fingers became less and less acceptable. Perhaps more surprising is the shifting basis for the strengthening prohibition. From the earlier books to the later books, “the discourse…slides from a precept where the principle is the disturbance of others to a recommendation of hygiene for oneself.” ^[17] The celebrated historical sociologist of Western European manners Norbert Elias, whom Chartier and Julia cite, preceded them in the study of books of manners and generalized more broadly than they do. Elias interpreted the strengthening prohibitions against the two expellant behaviors as part of what he called “the civilizing process,” in which force and violence in human relations was gradually replaced by self-control.^[18] In this replacement, the center of one’s attention shifted from people of greater power to oneself.

Another long-term change in mores in which movement is detectable between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries was the growth and spread of a desire for privacy. Several historians, Elias and Chartier and Julia among them, have documented the shift from the communal bed to the private bed. One or two large beds used to sleep whole extended families, including well-to-do families, whose bedmates sometimes included their servants. As material wealth increased, however, the individual bed multiplied and the familial bed retreated down the socioeconomic ladder. By the end of the eighteenth century, even servants had a personal bed, and a personal room. Sébastien Mercier observed: “In the past all the servants warmed themselves at a common hearth; today the chambermaid has her fireplace, the tutor his fireplace, the maître d’hôtel his fireplace, etc.” Of course, other members of the lower classes who had to find their own housing continued to live in more crowded conditions.^[19] If increasing material wealth was the main cause of the proliferation of beds and rooms, an increasing desire for privacy was at least a consequence.

A leading architect of the late eighteenth century, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, took it as a principle that every person needed to be able to be alone. As indicated above, this “need” was promoted by the pre-Romantic literature of Rousseau, of the graveyard, and of Sturm und Drang, and then by Romantic literature proper. While in his architecture Ledoux parceled out private space for the individual, in his urban design he projected unobstructed lines of sight from as many points as possible for the citizen, concentric development for the city, and a panorama for the designer himself. All of this, summarizes historian Mona Ozouf, “allows one to affirm oneself, at a glance, as the proprietor of the world.” ^[20]

Thus, no real paradox existed between the privatization of life touched upon here and the simultaneous publicization of life that has already been discussed at length. What was happening systemically was the division of life into two distinct spheres, private and public, both of them selfcentered. Self-love manifested itself in the private sphere as a drive for the exclusion of others and in the public sphere as a drive for recognition by others. One can see this clearly in the simultaneously reclusive and ambitious Rousseau. Just as the desire for privacy became acute in the second half of the eighteenth century, so too did the desire for fame. In his history of fame, Leo Braudy writes that in that period, “what had been an urge in few, in many became a ‘frenzy of renown,’ as Matthew G. Lewis’s novel The Monk (1796) calls it.” ^[21]

In our glance at private life in the second half of the eighteenth century, let us turn from self-love to love. It is well known that many people in prerevolutionary French society had a cynical view of love. “Love, such as it exists in society, is only the exchange of two fantasies and the contact of two skins,” wrote the salon wit Chamfort in what may be his most famous aphorism. A number of celebrated books of the period seem to have been written to illustrate what he meant: the Histoire de ma vie (Story of My Life) of Casanova, who, although from Venice, lived for a long time in France, wrote in French, and gave himself the French title “chevalier de Seingalt”; Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons) of Choderlos de Laclos; the novels and plays of Crébillon fils; the semiautobiographical, semi-fictional works of Restif de la Bretonne; and the novels of the marquis de Sade. Pornography flourished. The illegitimate-birth rate soared. “Love, properly speaking, no longer exists in Paris, if we dare to face the truth, except as moderated libertinism,” wrote Mercier. “As if love were not the most egotistical of all feelings,” wrote Benjamin Constant.^[22] In other words, for many in this brilliantly disintegrating society, love was self-love.

More specifically, love for them was the kind of self-love that Rousseau called amour-propre.^[23] Rousseau, we recall, dichotomized self-love into amour de soi-même and amour-propre. Amour de soi-même is based on the instinct of self-preservation, leads from the concern for one’s own self-interest to a regard for the self-interest of others, produces humaneness and virtue, and is self-liberating. Amour-propre is based on the comparison of one’s own situation with that of others, leads to aggressiveness toward others, produces a sense of honor, and is self-aggrandizing. The legitimization of self-love and the adoption of the self-centered worldview in the second half of the eighteenth century meant the expansion of both kinds of self-love. The expansion of amour de soi-même contributed to the elaboration of the self-liberating principles of the American “Declaration of Independence” and the French “Declaration of Rights,” and to many of the self-liberating acts of the French Revolution that have been repeatedly mentioned: the abolition of the guild system, the abolition of privilèges, the abolition of internal customs barriers, the institution of democratic government, the institution of freedom of the press and freedom of public expression, the institution of “careers open to talents.” The expansion of amour-propre contributed to the elaboration of the self-aggrandizing principles of nationalism and colonialism, and to self-aggrandizing actions: the confiscations of the property of the nobility and the Church by the revolutionaries, the wars of the revolutionary and Napoleonic governments, and the conquests of the French Empire.

Napoleon extended Rousseau’s approval of one kind of self-love to both kinds, for he was among the first to use the term amour-propre without pejorative connotations.^[24] Like most of his contemporaries, Napoleon had as his first principle the pursuit of his self-interest. He distinguished himself from them by how aggressively he pursued his own self-interest and how little regard he had for theirs. One historian refers to the “hypertrophy of his ego” and concludes that “his egocentrism is almost total.” ^[25] Yet he was a popular leader for much of his tenure as first consul and emperor—that is, for as long as his aggrandizement of himself also aggrandized France and a large number of French people. Thus the emperor became the model of the imperial self. Balzac regretted “the example of Napoleon, so fateful for the nineteenth century in the pretensions he inspired in so many mediocre people.”

Thus, advertising lay at the heart of an apparent paradox, in which the principle of pleasing the public was intimately tied to the principle of loving the self. Performers asserted their selves by mounting a stage above the public and then tried to please the public by entertaining it. Technicians asserted their selves by cultivating unusual technical skill, incidentally pleasing the public by astounding it. Self-promoters asserted their selves by expounding on their superiority to the public, perversely pleasing the public by scorning it. It seems almost as though the more extremely an individual expressed self-love and self-centeredness the more that individual was embraced by the public. One ended up being able to please the public simply by publicly distancing oneself from it, by advertising one’s extraordinariness. Naturally, advertising proper contributed greatly to this conclusion.

Reviewing a mid-nineteenth-century play entitled “Le Puff, ou Mensonge et vérité” (The Puff, or Lie and Truth), Théophile Gautier maximized an in-vogue but vague word: “A puff is an announcement entangled with boasting.” The use of “puff” in this sense originated in mid-eighteenth-century English and was imported into French toward the end of the eighteenth century.^[27] It described a form of advertising, indeed a form of culture, highly characteristic of the Western world in the Age of Revolution.

Advertising is many hundreds or even a few thousands of years old, if we consider a wooden sign hanging above the door of a shop as advertising. Such signs are still used, but the spirit of advertising has changed since its earliest manifestations. From the announcement, such as a wooden sign or a notice in a newspaper, to the puff, advertising made a leap. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson appraised contemporary advertising in one of his essays. “The trade of advertising is now so near to perfection,” Johnson wrote, “that it is not easy to propose any improvement.” Johnson was using “perfection” ironically, for he deplored the tricks of the advertising of his time, and the improvement he proposed was “that these abuses may be rectified.” But he was also using “perfection” literally, in the sense of fully developed. However wrong Johnson may have been in thinking that advertising was already in the eighteenth century almost fully developed, the mere fact that he had such a thought is significant. That thought would scarcely have occurred to anyone before his time. Even the idea that advertising was susceptible of development, or that it could be regarded as a trade, or an art as Johnson also referred to it, was new then.^[28] Johnson thought that advertising was approaching its culmination because he was witnessing the leap from the announcement to the puff. The announcement had merely declared, while the puff sought to persuade; the announcement had spoken prosaically, while the puff spoke exaggeratedly; the announcement had emphasized a product, service, or work, while the puff emphasized the person presenting the product, service, or work.

We recall that the meaning of the word publicité, French for “advertising,” changed from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century publicité had meant “the act of bringing to public knowledge,” while in the first half of the nineteenth century it took on its modern meaning of “the act or art of producing a psychological effect on the public.” ^[29] This change in semantics reflected the change in the reality of advertising.

The tremendous proliferation of periodical papers in the eighteenth century certainly encouraged the development of the puff. The sixteenth century saw the first halting attempts in Europe to publish periodicals of greater frequency than the annual almanacs. In seventeenth-century Paris Théophraste Renaudot founded both the Gazette (1631), the first long-lived regularly appearing newspaper, a weekly, and the Feuille du Bureau d’adresse (1633), the first regularly appearing advertising paper, also a weekly; each was the first of its kind in France and perhaps in all of Europe. Not until the eighteenth century, however, were advertising papers able to survive more than a few years or newspapers able to publish daily. In London, the first long-lived advertising paper, the Collection for the Im-provement of Husbandry and Trade, began in 1692; the first daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, began in 1702; and the use of “puff” to describe a certain kind of advertising began around mid-century. In Paris, the first long-lived advertising paper, the Annonces, affiches et avis divers, began in 1751; the first daily newspaper, the Journal de Paris, began in 1777; and use of “puff” began toward the end of the century.^[30] Incidentally, eighteenth-century papers already carried what late-twentieth century American papers call “personals”—advertising of the self.

In the development of the puff, the boasting that became “entangled” with the announcement began modestly but advanced brazenly. The announcement lost its conspicuousness, sometimes overwhelmed by the boasting, other times appearing as a report of a past event. An announcement generally refers to a future event, such as the coming sale or availability or presentation of something. But it might do this only indirectly or only in a general way.

The London Times of 22 March 1794 carried a notice that began: “Mr. Philidor, this day, at two o’Clock precisely, will play three Games at once, against three good Chess Players, two of them without seeing either Boards, and the third on looking over the Table.” The notice concluded: “The Ottoman Ambassador is expected to honour the match with his presence.” A similar notice in the Times of 21 February 1795 mentioned that Philidor’s blindfold exhibition that day would be “the only one this Season.” And a third notice appearing in June of the same year specified that a few days hence Philidor would give an exhibition for “positively the very last time.” ^[31] Although these notices were for the most part simple announcements, each of them contained one stock ploy of modern advertising. The first pointed out the presence of a celebrity at the event; the second, the rarity of the event; the third, the finality of the event. Although we do not know how much of the advertising for the London chess exhibitions was due to the Chess Club and how much to Philidor, we do know that a contemporary chronicler ascribed the advertising of his Paris musical performances to him.^[32]

The poster and newspaper advertisements for Paganini’s concerts were likewise mostly simple announcements, giving the time and place of the prospective performance and listing the works to be performed. They did contain a few flourishes, however. For a concert in Naples the advertisement gave Paganini the title “Filarmonico,” implying membership in the Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna, which he did not have. Shortly after the pope awarded him the Order of the Golden Spur in 1827, an advertisement for a concert in Florence identified him as “Il Cavaliere Paganini.” And after he acquired a more prestigious title and before he discovered its illegitimacy, his visiting cards read: “Le Baron N. Paganini, Commandeur et Chevalier de plusieurs Ordres.” ^[33]

Whereas Paganini’s advertisements emphasized the violinist’s titles, Liszt’s emphasized the pianist’s name. The poster announcing Liszt’s first benefit concert in Vienna in 1838 for the flood victims of Hungary enumerated the concert’s program, listing piece number five, for example, as “Adelaide, von Beethoven, gesungen von Herrn Benedict Gross, auf dem Claviere begleitet von LISZT. ” That is, Liszt’s name appeared more prominently than both the name of the singer he was to accompany, Gross, and the name of the piece’s composer, Beethoven.^[34] Over time, the diminution of the other names next to Liszt’s proceeded from relative to absolute. The advertisements for Liszt’s “recitals on the pianoforte” in London in 1840 caused a stir by announcing a program with only a single performer and by making new use of the word “recital.” A reviewer for the Times, while defending the usage himself, observed that “the choice of the expression has been by some condemned as an affected singularity.” ^[35]

Unlike posters, newspapers and reviews reported on past concerts, sometimes whipping up enthusiasm for a foreign performer whom local concert-goers had never seen, heard, or even heard about. These reports often bore an announcement, sometimes explicit, sometimes only implicit, of a future concert near the reader by the same performer. George Sand’s travel piece in the Revue des deux mondes describing a trip through Switzerland she made in the company of a few friends, one of whom was Franz Liszt, functioned similarly: “It was only when Franz posed his hands freely on the keyboard and made us hear a fragment of his Dies irae, that we understood the superiority of the Fribourg organ over every other that we have heard.” ^[36] The emergence of the touring soloist followed the establishment of local newspapers and of more widely circulating reviews in Europe’s larger cities during the Age of Revolution, depending on and encouraging the development of the puff.

Paganini had much to say about the prices of admission to his performances; he had everything to say about what pieces he played; thus he probably also had at least something to say about the other things appearing in his concert advertisements. This seems all the more likely in that he never had a long-term business manager, instead hiring a new manager whenever his touring took him from one country or region of Europe to another. By contrast, Liszt retained his manager Belloni for six and a half years and several sweeps of Europe. When in 1840 the advertisements of Liszt’s concerts in Leipzig raised hackles, Felix Mendelssohn, who lived there and made the initial arrangements, blamed the manager rather than the pianist. In a private letter, Mendelssohn wrote:

It is a pity that he should be saddled with a manager and a secretary who, between them, succeeded in so thoroughly mismanaging things that the public were furious, and we had the greatest trouble to smooth matters to some extent for the second concert. The advertisements and subsequent modifications, the prices and programme,—in fact, everything that Liszt himself did not do was objectionable; and consequently the mildest of Leipzigers were in a rage.

But Heinrich Heine believed that Belloni was only Liszt’s executor and that, despite the occasional mishap, “no one in the world knows as perfectly as our Franz Liszt how to organize his successes, or rather how to stage them.” ^[37] As Gautier shrewdly implied by using the word “boasting” (hâblerie) in his definition of “puff,” even though it usually appeared to come from someone other than its object, it was almost always to some degree self-advertising.^[38]

If the puff had a natural home in the periodical publication, then it was natural that self-advertisers would want to have their own home. Liszt practically had his own space in the Revue et gazette musical de Paris, publisher of two series of articles written by d’Agoult and himself, “De la situation des artistes et de leur condition dans la société” and “Lettres d’un bachelier ès musique,” which unabashedly took his own personal experiences for their point of departure and thus ensured a considerable amount of self-advertising. The chess masters Labourdonnais, Saint-Amant, and Kieseritzky edited their own chess journals, each the sole French chess journal of its time, in which they blew their own horns.

Vidocq showed great skill at self-advertising. After his second, brief term as chef de la Sûreté, Vidocq founded his information and detective agency, the Bureau de Renseignements, to be funded by subscriptions sold to businesses. He began in 1833 by publishing a prospectus to attract clients. Two years later he published a compte rendu, a report to the subscribers to his service, boasting of its achievements. Periodically Vidocq issued new prospectuses.^[39] These publications of his agency, the letterhead of the agency, and the sign over the door to the agency’s offices all referred to Vidocq as “breveté” or “breveté du Roi.” He had a right to this title by virtue of the patent he had received for his “forgery-proof” paper, but the context in which he used the title implied that he had government or royal approval to operate his agency, which he certainly did not. In fact, the government prosecuted him in two major trials for the agency’s activities. When the first trial ended in his acquittal, Vidocq placarded the capital with posters bearing the headline “ LIBERTÉ! ” After he, and by implication his agency as well, was acquitted a second time in 1843, he repeated the procedure with posters headed, rather too optimistically as events were soon to prove, “ RÉSURRECTION! ” In both trials the judge scolded Vidocq for his use of the term “breveté.” ^[40] The second trial, with the expenses and disruptions it imposed on the agency, ruined the Bureau de Renseignements, but it made the agency’s founder and director more famous than ever.

By the time Robert-Houdin opened his theater in 1845, strident headlines, hyperbolic claims, and pompous titles had become the norm in advertisements generally and particularly in advertisements for magic shows. In his autobiography Robert-Houdin discusses the advertising of the Scottish magician John Henry Anderson. He relates that Anderson, returning to London after an absence, had “gigantic” posters made in the form of “a caricature of the famous painting, The Return of Napoleon from the Isle of Elba ”:

In the foreground, one sees Anderson affecting the pose of the great man. Behind his head floats an immense pennant bearing the words the wonder of the world; behind him, and a little lost in the shadow, the emperor of Russia and several other monarchs stand respectfully. Just as in the original painting, fanatical admirers of the magician embrace his knees, while an immense crowd welcomes him with acclamations.…At the bottom is this inscription: Return of the Napoleon of Necromancy. ^[41]

In his performances Robert-Houdin eschewed ostentatious costumes in favor of regular black-and-white evening attire, and in his advertising he eschewed exaggeration, emphatic italics, and exclamation points in favor of simple statements in plain fonts with standard punctuation. He brought to stage magic the new aesthetic, or advertising technique, of Beau Brummell, the English dandy whose advocacy of the principle that men’s dress should not call attention to itself called attention to himself.

If advertising is “the act or art of producing a psychological effect on the public,” it might involve the media of print, the only mass media of communication during the Age of Revolution, directly, indirectly, or even not at all. A puff might be a puff of ink or a puff of smoke.

The negotiations that failed to bring about a match between Deschapelles and an English champion in 1836 were well publicized, indeed practically conducted, in the chess press. Deschapelles’s initial challenge to the English players was published, at his request, in Bell’s Life in London. ^[42] Subsequent proposals and counterproposals appeared in France in Le Palamède and in England in the chess column of Bell’s Life. When several months of maneuvering ended in a fruitless misunderstanding, Deschapelles reiterated his position in a letter to Le Palamède: “For more than thirty years there has existed a permanent challenge from me to the world of chess: I offer pawn and two moves.” ^[43]

The arrangements for other matches had better success. Two years before Deschapelles declared his desire to play an English champion, Labour-donnais had actually played and defeated the British champion MacDonnell. This match is now seen as the first in a long series of championship matches, while at the time it was seen as an exceptional event, a latter-day single combat in which the best individual warriors fought for the honor of their countries, a sort of duel.

Vidocq tells in his Mémoires of having been a fencing master in the army in the 1790s and of having fought many sword duels during his army years. As chef de la Sûreté in the 1810s and 1820s he found a more respectable outlet for his persistent love of dueling. He pursued most-wanted suspects in the spirit of a one-to-one trial of wits, strength, and skill between himself and the suspect.

Paganini’s onstage violin duels with Charles Lafont, Karol Lipinski, and Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst and Liszt’s public piano duels with Sigismund Thalberg, Felix Mendelssohn, Charles Hallé, and Alexander Dreyschock have already been recounted.

Some of Robert-Houdin’s duels of magic with Algerian marabouts approached the real thing, a violent duel. During his show in Algiers, he challenged a marabout to mark a real bullet, load it into a real pistol, and shoot it at him while he held up an apple on the end of a knife. After the marabout fired, Robert-Houdin removed the marked bullet from inside the apple. Of course it was a trick, in which Robert-Houdin used sleight of hand twice, once to prevent the bullet from actually being loaded into the pistol and again to insert the bullet into the apple. He used a similar trick on another occasion in the hinterlands of Algeria, this time “catching” the marabout’s bullet in his teeth. With a second pistol, Robert-Houdin then fired at a wall, which began to bleed. He had slipped a hollow bullet filled with blood into his pistol.^[44]

Violent dueling experienced a revival toward the end of the eighteenth century. The revival lasted until the middle of the nineteenth century, at which point dueling began to decline into its present state of virtual extinction. Some historians ascribe the revival of dueling during the Age of Revolution to the adoption by the new ruling class of the institutions of the old ruling class, the aristocracy, to which might be added the latter’s last desperate assertion of its characteristic values. Other historians ascribe the revival to the glorification of martial virtues arising out of the large armies and battle-consciousness of a quarter century (1792–1815) of almost continuous warfare in Europe.^[45] But it can also be seen as yet one more blast of hot air from the howling gale of self-advertisement and self-promotion that blew athleticism into the performing arts and whirled science into a race between discoverers and technology into a race between inventors. Activities of all sorts were sucked into the updraft of competition, competition between individual performers for fame among masses of spectators.

Dueling as self-advertising reached its apogee in the Paris balloon duel of 1808. Like many violent duels, this one came about as a result of a quarrel over a woman. Unlike most violent duels, this one had thousands of witnesses, attracted by the sight of two large balloons tethered in the Jardin des Tuileries on a May morning. M. de Grandpré and M. de Pique arrived armed with blunderbusses. They stepped into the baskets of their aerostats, ordered the tethers cut, and began to ascend into the sky. At about 2,000 feet from the ground and 250 feet from each other, the two men of high honor opened fire. M. de Pique’s balloon plummeted to the ground, while M. de Grandpré’s balloon drifted away and landed softly some seventeen miles away.^[46]

What the late twentieth century calls “hype” and the Age of Revolution called “puffery,” Henri Decremps in the late eighteenth century had called “white magic”: the art of making what one does appear more than it actually is. In his book La Magie blanche dévoilée (White Magic Exposed), Decremps was one of the first to subject Kempelen’s Chess Player to a detailed analysis and to point out the principal deception. In the same book he ascribed the public’s failure to appreciate Abbé Mical’s talking heads to the fact that “he did not have that veneer of charlatanism so necessary in this age to win the approval of the multitude.” ^[47]

The word égoïsme first appeared in French around the middle of the eighteenth century and meant either an “excessive attachment to oneself that causes one to subordinate the interests of others to one’s own interest” or a “tendency to talk too much about oneself.” The chevalier de Jaucourt wrote the article “Égoïsme” for the Encyclopédie: “The men of Port-Royal [the Jansenists] generally forbade in their writings the practice of speaking of themselves in the first person, conceiving that this practice, however infrequent, could only derive from vainglory and from a too high opinion of oneself.” But just as Rousseau thought there was a good self-love, which he called amour de soi-même, as well as a bad self-love, which he called amour-propre, Stendhal thought there could be a good reason as well as a bad reason to talk a lot about oneself. To contrast with égoïsme, a “tendency to talk too much about oneself,” Stendhal coined the nonpejorative word égotisme, a “tendency to talk about oneself, to make detailed analyses of one’s physical and moral self.” ^[49]

Stendhal wrote to his publisher apropos of the second of his two autobiographies: “I’m currently writing a book…; it’s my Confessions in a style like that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but with more frankness.” Three-quarters of a century earlier Rousseau had written apropos of his Confessions:

Rey [a publisher] had pressed me for a long time to write the recollections of my life. Although they were not up to that point interesting in their events, I felt that they could become interesting by the frankness that I was capable of putting into them, and I resolved to make a work unique in its unprecedented truth, in order that at least once one could see a man such as he was on the inside. I had always laughed at the false naïveté of Montaigne, who, pretending to admit his faults, took great care to give himself only appealing ones.^[50]

Stendhal had been an army staff officer during the Empire and was a great admirer of the emperor, whose biography he twice began.^[51] In his egotism Stendhal followed the example of Napoleon as well as that of Rousseau. One of the four sets of Napoleon’s recollections recorded by devoted followers who shared his exile on Saint-Helena reports the ex-emperor musing: “In society, one must be a charlatan. It’s only in behaving like that that one succeeds.” In the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, the largest of the four sets and the first to be published, Napoleon creates what historian Jean Tulard has called “the myth of Napoleon.” He presents himself as having saved France and finished the Revolution, both in the sense of ending the excesses of the revolutionaries and in the sense of completing the beneficial social reforms they advocated. The Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, first published in 1823, did much to turn French public opinion from the hostility to himself that Napoleon had generated by the end of his reign back to sympathy.^[52]

The Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène also precipitated a great outpouring of memoirs from civilian and military officials of the defunct Empire. In the heady days of imperial conquests it had seemed to the French as if “there were no longer any old men; there were only corpses and demi-gods.” ^[53] But the intoxicating warfare finally ended and the hangover began. After the Empire collapsed and the demigods of glory, power, and wealth awakened to find themselves mere mortals again, their heads remained swollen with exaggerated memories of themselves and their leader. They were convinced that the story of their deeds would attract a wide readership, especially now that the Empire was being recreated as a legend.

During Napoleon’s tenure as head of state he had in succession three principal private secretaries, Louis-Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, Claude-François de Méneval, and Agathon-Jean-François Fain. Each of the three left a set of memoirs, and to consider them in succession is to retrace the launch trajectory of Napoleonic memoirs. Bourrienne compiled three volumes of notes for his, but he was apparently not sufficiently interested in the project to carry it to completion himself. Instead, he handed it over to the publisher Ladvocat, who had a better estimate of its potential as a best-seller and employed a professional writer to finish the job. The reader gets some notion as to Bourrienne’s sense of his own place in history from an exchange he reports having had with Napoleon. He says that one day Napoleon congratulated him on the fame that was certain to come to him for having been secretary to a great man and that he retorted by asking Napoleon to tell him who had been secretary to Alexander the Great. Méneval believed more in the importance of the role, while not forgetting that it was only a passive one. He recognized that it had made him an eyewitness to many historic events and took his task to be narrating them as he saw them, keeping the references to himself to a minimum. Similarly, Fain says in his preface that he was only an “instrument.” But then, as if offering a rejoinder to Bourrienne’s retort, he lists as many names of secretaries to famous historical figures as he can. (Fain’s preface is dated October of 1829, the same year in which Bourrienne’s memoirs first appeared.) He goes on to explain the evolution of his thinking about publishing his memoirs:

Indeed, several years ago I would not have dared to publish them with as many personal facts in what was only a rough draft intended to be read by my children. A revision seemed necessary, but my laziness for a long time kept me from further work. Today, is one not entitled to believe that this last effort may be dispensed with? Do not the publications that have abounded in recent years free me from such scruples? Now that readers have become familiar with so many “I”s of all sorts, can the “I” of a secretary still be considered shocking?^[54]

Rhetorical questions from a rhetorical age.

Historian Jean Tulard has written a critical review of eight hundred sets of personal memoirs of the Napoleonic period. He opens the preface to his survey by observing that “no period has given impetus to as large a number of memoirs as has the Consulate and Empire.” They began to appear under the next regime, the Restoration (1814–30), and to multiply under the subsequent regime, the July Monarchy (1830–48). Artisanal gave way to industrial production. Publishers hired teinturiers, or “dyers,” who added bright colors to the plain fabric of the narratives furnished by insufficiently literary authors. Sometimes the cloth had to be unraveled and rewoven again a little differently. Sometimes the publishers had to make the fabric for themselves in the first place. Ladvocat created a sort of memoir-factory, turning them out one after another. He employed a teinturier named Villemarest who produced at least three best-sellers, including the memoirs of Bourrienne.^[55]

The proliferation of literary self-portraits of all kinds—journals, memoirs, fragments of souvenirs, formal autobiographies—provides the clearest indication that the Age of Revolution abounded in egotism. In the West such writings date from at least the Confessiones of St. Augustine in fourth century A.D. Several important works of the kind came out of the Renaissance, for example the Essais of Montaigne and the Vita di Benvenuto Cellini…da lui medesimo scritta (Life of Benvenuto Cellini…Written by Himself). But before the middle of the eighteenth century, they were not common undertakings. One literary historian, in fact, asserts that “the eighteenth century was the first great age of biography and autobiography.” A French literary critic adds that “the current of confession and introspection, which had begun with Montaigne and Rousseau, was going to become a great river in the nineteenth century.” By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Revue des deux mondes was complaining:

Just as herds of completely unknown writers and artists are having their busts sculpted or their profiles stamped on medallions as donations to be offered to the national pantheon, so a herd of obscure personages, wrongly taking themselves to be important people, have started dictating their commentaries and making their confessions to their age and to the future.…The memoir-mania, which dates from the last years of the Restoration, is spreading at present like an epidemic.^[56]

Most of the virtuosos were infected with the mania for writing about one’s own life. For the sake of convenience, all such writings are referred to here as autobiographies, whatever their title, and whether or not they would be admitted into the literary genre of autobiography in a strict system of classification. Philidor lived and died before autobiographomania had spread much beyond his one-time collaborator Rousseau. The only sign he himself showed of any such tendency was to provide a few dates and anecdotes from his life to an English chess enthusiast, and perhaps to authorize the latter’s use of them in a biographical sketch.^[57] Carême, Vidocq, Paganini, Liszt, and Robert-Houdin all left accounts of their own lives. The three of them who were adults during Napoleon’s reign had fond memories of that period. The Empire provided Carême with lavish banquets in which to develop his talents, Vidocq with the métier of police detective, and Paganini with the patronage of Napoleon’s sister Élisa, princess of Lucca.

Carême seems to have been working on his autobiography when he died in 1833, the date on the only portion of it that has ever come to light, a dozen-page fragment published under the title “Antonin Carême: Souvenirs écrits par lui-même” by his former secretary Fayot in an anthology of gastronomic writings.^[58] Vidocq had his Mémoires published in 1828–29, shortly after his resignation from the post of chef de la Sûreté, when he was in his early fifties and still had another thirty years to live. He himself only made notes, which two teinturiers stretched into four volumes.^[59] Paganini dictated his two short autobiographical sketches of a few pages each, both of which appeared in print in 1830, toward the beginning of his triumphant six-year concert tour of Europe. The long article entitled “Franz Liszt,” signed J. Duverger, and published in the serial Biographe universel in 1843 when Liszt was in the middle of his eight-year, thousand-concert tour of Europe, is essentially autobiographical. It was produced in the same way that the articles appearing under Liszt’s name in the Revue et gazette musicale de Paris were produced, as a collaboration in which Liszt provided the basic ideas and d’Agoult the finished prose.^[60] Robert-Houdin put out his two-volume Confidences et révélations in 1858, several years after he retired from the stage.

In their autobiographies, the virtuosos do not focus on the great things around them—the events they witnessed, the people they met, or the places they visited—as do many Napoleonic memoirs. Nor do they focus on the ordinary aspects of themselves, in the tradition of Montaigne, Rousseau, and Stendhal. That is, they do not boast merely of their proximity to greatness or of great psychological insight into their ordinary lives; instead, following Cellini, they boast directly of their own extraordinary achievements. Carême boasts of his banquets, his cookbooks, and his pièces montées; Vidocq, of his knowledge of the argot and culture of the underworld, his arrests of particularly cunning and elusive criminals, and the victories won by his Brigade de Sûreté in its war on crime;^[61] Paganini, of how as a boy or in difficult circumstances he amazed his hearers; Liszt, of the triumphal march of his career as a performer; Robert-Houdin, of his blossoming mechanical skill and his normalization of magic.

When the virtuosos refer to other practitioners of their arts, they often cite the animosity of those others, which they generally ascribe to professional jealousy. The virtuosos saw themselves surrounded by inferior competitors envious of their success. “‘How lucky he is!’ people around me used to say, instead of attributing the difference in our positions to that of our efforts, the only thing that distinguishes one artisan from another,” declares Carême. Vidocq defiantly proclaims that officers in other departments of the Paris police force used to call the Brigade de Sûreté “la bande à Vidocq” (Vidocq’s gang), implying that it was more like a gang of thieves than a police brigade. He mocks his own agents for “always thinking ahead to my fall; they used to make predictions about it for their own amusement; and they divided among themselves the inheritance of ‘Alexander.’” Paganini relates this anecdote of antagonism he encountered from fellow musicians on one of his early concert tours:

Leghorn, like so many other towns, had its own exclusive musical society, whose members took offense at my neglect to pay my respects to them and arranged things so that the regular orchestra players did not keep their agreement with me. The concert was to begin at eight o’clock; the hall was full, but not a single player was to be seen. Finally, three or four poor souls turned up. Naturally, I had to select other pieces than those on the program. My ambition provoked, I summoned all my powers, and for nearly three hours I entertained the audience with the liveliest youthful playing. My efforts were acknowledged with the loudest applause, a rebuke to my hateful opponents, so that my next concert in the theater was given to a packed house and had the accompaniment of a full orchestra. The members of the enemy party took that opportunity to excuse themselves, saying they had believed me too young to be able to do everything I had promised.

As for the child-prodigy Liszt on his first tour, “musicians scrutinized first of all with distrust and then with a kind of stunned jealousy all the extraordinary things that the young virtuoso did on command.” ^[62] Robert-Houdin was greeted in Algeria by the miracle-working marabouts with undisguised hostility.

The virtuosos all employ tactics designed to forestall the potential charge against them of self-promotion. Carême’s “Souvenirs” begins with modesty: “My life does not aspire to the highest rank.” That is, he did not aspire to the prominence of the monarchs, aristocrats, diplomats, and financiers who employed him. Yet, “what I am going to say will perhaps not be without interest for our young practitioners and for the elite of Paris; the latter appreciate merit in a variety of endeavors.” ^[63] Paganini responds to Professor Schottky’s request for an autobiographical sketch to include in his book on the violinist with similar humility:

Your readers will have to be content with this; but perhaps this little bit which I am at the moment able to tell you is already too much for them: For an artist remains just an artist, and in our age of outstanding men, I cannot believe that such sketchy notes of my life will find a large readership. If you want rhapsodic phrases, if aphorisms will serve you, and if you have courage enough to bring such things to the public, then I am more than ready to smooth out the creases of my memory a bit and to search for whatever might be hidden there.^[64]

As with Carême, so with Paganini most of what lies “hidden” in the creases of his memory turn out to be his own achievements. Both the chef and the violinist did aspire to the artistic elite, which was at least valued by the social elite if not yet accepted into it. We are left to guess how they felt about that.

Vidocq’s Mémoires ridicule some of the more extravagant things the public is reported to have believed about him. The author apparently intends to amuse the reader and to put the reader on his side as they enjoy a laugh together at the extent of human credulity. The joke is also somewhat at Vidocq’s own expense, or at least at the expense of his superhuman reputation. “We [the agents of the Sûreté] were all colossuses.…We broke arms and legs; nothing stopped us; and we were everywhere. I was invulnerable; others claimed that I was armored from head to toe, which amounts to the same thing when one is not known for timidity.” ^[65] But to accept that the public indeed believed what Vidocq says it did is to be taken in oneself, for the belief itself, however much one makes fun of it, redounds to Vidocq’s credit.

The article “Franz Liszt” engages in preemptive self-criticism, as well as in the pretense that someone else was responsible for the article. He admits that as a youth he had his faults:

Perhaps the exaggerated idea he had of the piano led him too far, or perhaps it was simply the confusion of his unformed mind that manifested itself in his works. He lacked all balance, and every sort of eccentricity seemed to him perfectly normal. In this period of his life, a total disregard for his appearance, an ignorance or rather an absolute heedlessness of good manners, an excess in his sensations and feelings, which manifested themselves in gestures, exclamations, and strange behavior, caused him to be accused of charlatanism. These excesses that were in him so natural, if one may say such a thing, were called affectation and pretentiousness.^[66]

In other words, he loved the piano too much, he was too creative, he worked too hard, he devoted himself too exclusively to music, he was too sensitive, he showed too much enthusiasm. Liszt takes care to give himself only appealing faults.

Robert-Houdin’s discussions of other magicians dilate on their extravagances. He remarks on the flamboyant costume of Philippe, in contrast to his own stage attire of standard black-and-white evening clothes, the flamboyant advertising of Anderson, in contrast to his own restrained advertising, and the flamboyant ventriloquial stunts performed in streets and inns by Comte, in contrast to his own care not to disturb people with his tricks. He neglects to mention in his autobiography that he was the first magician to publish one, and that in doing so he gave himself the most attractive appearance, the longest-lasting advertising, and the best opportunity to put words in other people’s mouths of any magician.

Overt self-effacement effectuates covert self-promotion.

Neither Carême’s fragmentary “Souvenirs” nor Liszt and d’Agoult’s article “Franz Liszt” seems to have been much read by either contemporaries or posterity. Paganini’s two autobiographical sketches attracted a fair amount of contemporary interest, at least among music lovers. The two book-length autobiographical works of the virtuosos, Vidocq’s Mémoires and Robert-Houdin’s Confidences et révélations, had considerable short-term success. Each went through dozens of editions in several languages within a decade or two of its first appearance. But the two most successful writings about the author’s own life during the Age of Revolution, especially in the long run, were undoubtedly Rousseau’s Confessions and Napoleon’s Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène.

The autobiography from Rousseau to Robert-Houdin followed a trajectory from self-deceptive ingenuous self-promotion to self-conscious disingenuous self-promotion. Rousseau observed self-promotion in others, for which he blamed their amour-propre, and he himself engaged in self-promotion, but he had little awareness that he did so, even though he admitted that as an author he too had been infected with amourpropre. In his Confessions, he claimed to have left behind the desire to be the best at something. He also claimed to have little “natural vanity.” He truly believed that his Confessions were absolutely frank and that he would be remembered by posterity for his perfect frankness.

Napoleon was so fully engaged in living his life as to be incapable of taking a detached view of it. He had a remarkable lack of self-awareness, even while recounting the events of his life. It was as if he were reliving those events rather than looking back on them. Napoleon was self-mythologizing in the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, and even disingenuous in his self-mythologizing, but he was so fully engaged in his selfmythologizing as to be unself-consciously disingenuous.

Just as Napoleon believed in the self-made myth of himself as the savior of France and the completer of the Revolution, Vidocq seems to have believed in the self-made myth of himself as, first, the unholdable prisoner and, second, the omniscient policeman. The most successful autobiographies of the Age of Revolution were those in which the authors believed what they wrote, no matter how inaccurate, incomplete, or unbalanced their accounts of their lives.

Paganini gradually learned that the truth about his past did not appeal to the public as much as the tales invented about his pact with the devil, so he gave up denying the tales and allowed his talent to be seen as demonic. Liszt came of age together with the Romantic movement in the arts and already in his adolescence began to create his self-image as a Romantic genius. With d’Agoult’s help, he cultivated it carefully in his twenties and thirties, although he also clearly believed in this creation of himself. Both Paganini and Liszt presented their self-images quite self-consciously but only a little disingenuously.

In writing his Confidences et révélations, Robert-Houdin intentionally invented as much about himself as he related truthfully, because he had the goal firmly in mind to entertain as well as he could rather than to tell the truth as well as he could. Both Rousseau and Robert-Houdin were aggressive self-promoters. Rousseau promoted himself as the epitome of frankness, while Robert-Houdin promoted himself as the most entertaining deceiver. However, Rousseau in his Confessions was less frank than he made himself out to be, and Robert-Houdin in his Confidences et révélations was a less entertaining deceiver than he made himself out to be. Robert-Houdin by acknowledging his own deceptiveness proved himself more frank than Rousseau, but Rousseau by asserting his own frankness proved himself a more entertaining deceiver than Robert-Houdin, for Rousseau attracted the interest and admiration of far more people. In the art of self-promotion Rousseau finally found the art that allowed him to be what he always wanted to be: the best.

Together, swelling self-love and the publicization of social life contributed largely to, or perhaps even created, uninhibited self-promotion. Swelling self-love and the publicization of social life also produced several individual-in-society antinomies. First, these two trends encouraged individuals to seek private space away from others but also to seek public recognition from others. Second, they encouraged individuals to assume a superiority over the public but also to solicit an acknowledgment of that superiority from the public. Third, they encouraged individuals to create a highly personal account of their own lives but also to submit that account to the public in the hope of mass acceptance.

The society of swelling self-love and publicization produced some spectacularly antinomic individuals, perhaps none more so than Rousseau. Rousseau had the ambition to be better than everyone else at something yet found that ambition foolish. He could not live for any length of time anywhere he tried to live—neither Protestant Geneva nor Catholic Savoy, neither cosmopolitan Paris nor provincial France, neither libertine Venice nor liberal England—where his sojourns always ended in either flight or expulsion. Yet he had thousands of adoring readers. Rousseau, ungovernable author of constitutions and meta-constitutions, was a hermitic social theorist.

And the new society, competitive and cacophonous, was a balloon race in a tumult.

Notes

The source of the quotations: Rousseau, “Mon portrait,” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, pp. 1120, 1129. For the dates of composition of Rousseau’s works: Gagnebin and Raymond, “Notes et variantes,” and “Chronologie,” in ibid., vol. 1, pp. 1839–44 and cx–cxvii, respectively.

Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, p. 219.

Blaise Pascal, Pensées, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jacques Chevalier (Paris: Pléiade, 1954), pt. 1 (“L’Homme sans Dieu”), chap. 2 (“Misère de l’homme”), sec. 4 (“L’Amour-propre”); François de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. L. Martin-Chauffier (Paris: Pléiade, 1950), maxime 563. On “amour de soi”: Émile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue français, 4 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1863–72), vol. 1, p. 134. See also Anthony Levi, French Mor-alists: The Theory of the Passions, 1585–1649 (Oxford, Eng.: Clarendon, 1964), pp. 226–27.

Rousseau, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, passim, esp. pp. 668–77, and above all pp. 701, 733.

“J’ai pris en mépris mon siècle et mes contemporains”; Rousseau, “Quatre lettres à Malesherbes,” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, p. 1135.

The distinction was not invented by Rousseau; he was preceded in employing it by Vauvenargues, who himself acknowledged having had predecessors in employing it. However, Rousseau may have independently reinvented it. Luc de Clapiers de Vauvenargues, Introduction à la connaissance de l’esprit humain, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Henry Bonnier, 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1968), vol. 1, pp. 227–28 (in section 24, entitled “De l’amour-propre et de l’amour de nous-mêmes”).

Rousseau, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, p. 671.

Lynn Hunt, in The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), chaps. 1, 2, argues that the psychological overthrow of the king began decades before his actual overthrow, just as the present study argues that the psychological replacement of the king (or lord) with the self began decades before his actual replacement with democratic self-government.

Corbin, Foul and the Fragrant, p. 81.

John O. Lyons, The Invention of the Self: The Hinge of Consciousness in the Eighteenth Century (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), pp. 11–12.

Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. P. Carus and Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1950; first German ed., 1783), p. 8.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1963; first German ed., 1781), p. 22. Smith’s translation of Anschauung as “intuition” has been changed to “perception.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Briefwechsel, ed. Hans Schulz, 2 vols. (Hildesheim: Olms, 1967; reprint of Leipzig ed., 1930), vol. 1, p. 449. For the citation of this passage and discussion of Fichte’s metaphysics: George Armstrong Kelly, Idealism, Politics, and History: Sources of Hegelian Thought (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 201–8; John E. Toews, Hegelianism (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 35–37.

The source of Abrams’s quotation: Meyer H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 29. The source of Frye’s quotations: Northrop Frye, “The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism,” in Romanticism Reconsidered, ed. Northrop Frye (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), pp. 5, 16. On “the circuitous journey”: M[eyer] H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), passim.

Charles Baudelaire, “Salon de 1846,” in Oeuvres complètes, p. 879 (“Qu’est-ce que le romantisme” is the title of section 2 of “Salon de 1846”); idem, “Mon coeur mis à nu,” in Oeuvres complètes, p. 1296; Alfred de Vigny, Le Journal d’un poète, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. F. Baldensperger, 2 vols. (Paris: Pléiade, 1948–50), vol. 2, p. 904; Champfleury [pseud. of Jules-François-Félix Husson], Souvenirs des Funambules (Geneva: Slatkine, 1971; reprint of Paris ed., 1859), p. 73. Goethe had already associated Romanticism with sickness; Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, 2 April 1829.

Roger Chartier, Dominique Julia, and Marie-Madeleine Compère, L’Éducation en France du XVI^e au XVIII^e siècle (Paris: Société d’Édition d’Enseignement Supérieur, 1976), pp. 143–44.

Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 2 vols. (New York: Pantheon, 1978–82; first published in Basel, 1939), vol. 1, The History of Manners, chap. 2, sec. 6 (“On Blowing One’s Nose”), sec. 7 (“On Spitting”); vol. 2, Power and Civility, pt. 2, sec. 1 (“The Social Constraint toward Self-Constraint”).

Ibid., vol. 1, History of Manners, chap. 2, sec. 8 (“On Behavior in the Bedroom”); Chartier, Julia, and Compère, L’Éducation en France, p. 144; Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality in Early Modern France, trans. Richard Southern (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 98–102; Daniel Roche, The People of Paris: An Essay in Popular Culture in the Eighteenth Century, trans. Marie Evans and Gwynne Lewis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 115–20. The translation made by Evans and Lewis of the Mercier passage cited by Roche has been altered slightly, upon consultation of this original: [Louis-Sébastien Mercier], Tableau de Paris, 2 vols. (Hambourg/Neuchâtel: Vichaux/Fauche, 1781), vol. 1, p. 49.

Mona Ozouf, “L’Image de la ville chez Claude-Nicolas Ledoux,” Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations 21, no. 6 (November–December 1966): 1276–80.

Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 14. Although in this passage Braudy speaks of the eighteenth century generally, it is clear he means particularly the second half of it, for that is when the economic, social, and political revolutions he alludes to took place, and that is when the writers—Rousseau, Voltaire, Boswell, Johnson, Sterne, Franklin—whom he alleges whipped up the frenzy (p. 372) succeeded in making themselves renowned.

The source of the quotations: Chamfort, Maximes et pensées, p. 110; Mercier, Tableau de Paris, 1781 ed., vol. 2, p. 25; Benjamin Constant, Adolphe (Paris: Garnier, 1968; first published 1816), chap. 6, p. 92.

On the flourishing of pornography: Jean Marie Goulemot, “Les Pratiques littéraires ou la publicité du privé,” in Histoire de la vie privée, vol. 3, pp. 402–4; Lynn Hunt, “Introduction: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800,” in The Invention of Pornography, ed. Lynn Hunt (New York: Zone Books, 1993), pp. 21–24; Robert Darnton, “Sex for Thought,” New York Review of Books 41, no. 21 (22 December 1994): 65–74. The very word pornographe, the French word from which the English word “pornographer” and all of its relatives derive, was coined in 1769 by Restif de la Bretonne.

On the soaring illegitimate-birth rate: Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York: Basic Books, 1975), pp. 80–83

“Ôtez l’amour-propre de l’amour, il en reste trop peu de chose,” is another famous aphorism of Chamfort; Chamfort, Maximes et pensées, p. 110.

“Amour-propre,” in Trésor de la langue française, vol. 2, p. 853.

Jules Romain, “Mais qui était-il?” in Napoléon, ed. not credited (Paris: Hachette, 1961), pp. 288, 290.

Balzac, Illusions perdues, in Comédie humaine, vol. 4, pp. 517 (first quotation), 588 (second quotation), 637 (Ladvocat’s advertising). On Ladvocat: L. Louvet, “Ladvocat,” in Nouvelle biographie générale, vol. 28, cols. 650–52.

Gautier, Histoire de l’art dramatique, vol. 5, p. 212; Simpson and Weiner, eds., Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 12, p. 759; Robert and Rey, Grand Robert, vol. 7, p. 895.

Samuel Johnson, “The Idler” no. 40, in “The Idler” and “The Adventurer,” ed. W. J. Bate, J. M. Bullitt, and L. F. Powell (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 124–28; “The Idler” no. 40 was first published in the Universal Chronicle, or Weekly Gazette of 20 January 1759.

See chapter 6 above, p. 232.

Hatin, Bibliographie historique et critique, pp. lx–lxii, lxxviii, 3–12, 17–19, 76–78.

The quotation of the third notice is cited in Twiss, Miscellanies, vol. 2, p. 109, where it simply says that this notice was carried in “the newspapers.” The quotations of the first two notices are taken directly from the Times (Lon-don) of the dates indicated.

See chapter 1 above, p. 28.

Day, Paganini of Genoa, p. 127, and illustration between pp. 250 and 251; Pulver, Paganini, the Romantic Virtuoso, pp. 127, 206.

Dezsö Legàny, ed., Franz Liszt: Unbekannte Presse und Briefe aus Wien, 1822–1886 (Vienna: Böhlaus, 1984), illustration between pp. 128 and 129.

“Liszt’s Recitals,” Times (London), 2 July 1840, p. 6.

Sand, “Lettres d’un voyageur. VII.,” La Revue des deux mondes, 4th ser., 8, pp. 440–41.

Belloni was Liszt’s business manager from February 1841 until the end of the pianist’s touring in September 1847; Walker, Franz Liszt, vol. 1, pp. 365, 439. The source of Mendelssohn’s quotation: Felix Mendelssohn, Letters of Felix Mendelssohn to Ignaz and Charlotte Moscheles, trans. and ed. Felix Moscheles (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970; reprint of 1st ed., London, 1888), p. 204; on this incident see also Robert Schumann, Music and Musicians, trans. F. R. Ritter, 2 vols. (London: Reeves, [1877]; first German ed., 1854), vol. 1, p. 149. For the Heine quotation, see chapter 4 in this volume, p. 153.

Gautier makes this explicit when he gives examples of puffs; Gautier, Histoire de l’art dramatique, vol. 5, pp. 212–13.

Vidocq, À M. le Président, pp. 7–11, where the first prospectus and the compte rendu are both reproduced.

The letterhead of the Bureau de Renseignements and the heading of the Bureau’s first prospectus are reproduced in Vidocq, Procès de Vidocq, plates between pp. 48 and 49. The posters headed “LIBERTÉ!” and “RÉSURRECTION!” are reproduced in ibid., plates between pp. 72 and 73. On the judges’ scolding of Vidocq for his use of the word breveté: ibid., p. 117.

Robert-Houdin, Confidences et révélations, p. 313.

An extract of the challenge was also published in “Mélanges et correspondance,” Le Palamède, 1st ser., 1, no. 4 (June 1836): 147–48.

“Défi à pion et deux traits,” Le Palamède, 1st ser., 1, no. 8 (October 1836): 292. It is not clear how often Deschapelles advertised this challenge, but he mentioned it again to a German player in a letter of 1844, when he claimed it had stood for “a half-century”; Berlin Schachzeitung 3, no. 7 (July 1848): 268–75.

Robert-Houdin, Confidences et révélations, pp. 370–71, 393–94.

On the revival of dueling during the Age of Revolution: J[ohn] G[ideon] Millingen, The History of Duelling, 2 vols. (London: Bentley, 1841), vol. 1, pp. 174, 188–89, 207, 228–69; vol. 2, pp. 84–91; Robert Baldick, The Duel: A History of Duelling (New York: Potter, 1965), pp. 42, 89–93, 96, 116, 134–36, 200; V. G. Kiernan, The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 187–88, 199. Robert A. Nye, in Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 132, agrees that there was a revival of dueling during the Age of Revolution, but cites evidence to the effect that in France, in contrast to the rest of Western Europe, there was even more dueling in the second half of the nineteenth century than in the first half (pp. 135–37, 185). For the social class explanation: ibid., p. 145. For the pervasive militarism explanation: Kiernan, Duel in European History, pp. 194–95.

Baldick, Duel, pp. 161–62.

Decremps, Magie blanche dévoilée, vol. 2, Supplément à la magie blanche dévoilée, chap. 4, sec. 7.

Stendhal, Souvenirs d’égotisme, in Oeuvres intimes, ed. Henri Martineau (Paris: Pléiade, 1955), pp. 1428–29 (first quotation), 1394 (second quotation). On the Age of Egotism: Vier, Comtesse d’Agoult et son temps, vol. 2, p. 53; Outram, Georges Cuvier, p. 184.

Robert and Rey, Grand Robert, vol. 3, pp. 822 (definitions of égoïsme), 824 (definition of égotisme); Jaucourt, “Égoïsme,” in Encyclopédie, vol. 5, p. 431; Stendhal, Souvenirs d’égotisme, in Oeuvres intimes, p. 1448.

Letter of Stendhal quoted in Henri Martineau, intro. to Stendhal, Vie de Henry Brulard, ed. Henri Martineau (Paris: Garnier, 1961), p. ii; Rousseau, Confessions, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, pp. 516–17.

Stendhal, Vie de Napoléon, written from 1817 to 1818, was first published in 1929; idem, Mémoires sur Napoléon, written from 1836 to 1837, was first published in 1876; both are unfinished. See Victor del Litto, pref. to Stendhal, Napoléon, ed. Victor del Litto (Lausanne: Éditions Rencontre, 1961), p. 19.

The source of Napoleon’s quotation: Gaspard Gourgaud, Journal de Sainte-Hélène, in Napoléon à Sainte-Hélène, par les quatre évangélistes Las Cases, Montholon, Gourgaud, Bertrand, ed. Jean Tulard (Paris: Laffont, 1981), p. 527. On the myth of Napoleon: Tulard, Mythe de Napoléon, chap. 3, “La Création du mythe”; idem, Napoléon, ou Le mythe du sauveur, pt. 4, chap. 10, “La Légende”; idem, ed., Napoléon à Sainte-Hélène, pref.

Alfred de Musset, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), pp. 20–21.

Louis-Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, ed. R. W. Phipps, trans. uncredited, 4 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1891), vol. 2, p. 102; Méneval, Mémoires, vol. 1, p. vi; Fain, Mémoires, pref. (the quotation is on pp. xv–xvi).

Jean Tulard, Bibliographie critique des mémoires sur le Consulat et l’Empire (Paris: Droz, 1971), pref.; Charles Louandre, “Statistique littéraire: De la production intellectuelle en France depuis quinze ans,” La Revue des deux mondes, new ser., 17th year, 20 (1847, tome 4): 434–35; Frédéric Masson, pref. to Roustam [Raza], Souvenirs de Roustam, mamelouck de Napoléon I^er (Paris: Ollendorf, [1911]).

The source of the quotation of the “literary historian”: Braudy, Frenzy of Renown, p. 379. The source of the quotation of the “French literary critic”: Henri Peyre, What Is Romanticism? trans. Roda Roberts (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1977), p. 112. The source of the “just as herds” quotation: Louandre, “Statistique littéraire,” Revue des deux mondes, new ser., 17th year, 20, p. 435.

Richard Twiss, “Anecdotes of Mr. Philidor, Communicated by Himself,” in Twiss, Chess, vol. 1, pp. 149–71.

Carême, “Souvenirs écrits par lui-même,” in Classiques de la table, 1844 ed., pp. 453–64. An essay by the marquis de Cussy in the same book contains quotations from Carême’s manuscript not found in the above fragment; Cussy, “L’Art culinaire,” in Classiques de la table, 1844 ed., pp. 247–88.

See chapter 3, note 38 in this volume.

There are at least four extant letters of 1842 from Liszt to d’Agoult discussing plans for the article. For a while Liszt wanted it to appear under the name of his business manager, Belloni. Liszt and d’Agoult, Correspondance, vol. 2, pp. 233, 237, 238; letter of Liszt quoted in Haraszti, “Franz Liszt: Author Despite Himself,” Musical Quarterly 33, no. 4, pp. 498–99. In a letter of 1839 Liszt tells of his intention to have Joseph d’Ortigue, who was responsible for an 1835 biographical sketch of him that was printed in the Gazette musicale de Paris, “remake my biography”; Liszt and d’Agoult, Correspondance, vol. 1, p. 296; Haraszti, “Franz Liszt: Author Despite Himself,” Musical Quarterly 33, no. 4, p. 498.

Savant, Vie fabuleuse et authentique, p. 299, suggests that the teinturiers of Vidocq’s Mémoires made him appear more of an egomaniac than he really was. However, many of Vidocq’s contemporaries did find him an egomaniac. Guyon, in Biographie des commissaires de police, p. 230, writes of Vidocq that “souvent il a l’air impudent et porte effrontément ses regards sur tous ceux qu’il rencontre, comme s’il avait le signalement du genre humain.” Gisquet, in Mémoires de M. Gisquet, vol. 2, p. 104, writes that Vidocq was “un peu tormenté du besoin de faire parler de lui.”

Carême, “Souvenirs écrits par lui-même,” in Classiques de la table, 1844 ed., p. 455; Vidocq, Mémoires, pp. 379, 383; Paganini, “Paganini als Knabe und Jüngling,” in Schottky, Paganinis Leben und Treiben, pp. 255–56; Duverger, “Franz Liszt,” in Biographe universel, vol. 5, no. 2, p. 122 (see also p. 154).

Carême, “Souvenirs écrits par lui-même,” in Classiques de la table, 1844 ed., p. 453.

Paganini, “Paganini als Knabe und Jüngling,” in Schottky, Paganinis Leben und Treiben, pp. 256–57.

Vidocq, Mémoires, p. 356.

Duverger, “Franz Liszt,” in Biographe universel, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 140–41.

Hillairet, Dictionnaire historique, vol. 1, p. 93 (rue Antoine-Carême); vol. 2, p. 208 (rue Paganini); vol. 2, p. 266 (rue Philidor); vol. 2, p. 353 (rue Robert-Houdin); vol. 2, p. 600 (rue Vaucanson); suppl., p. 62 (place Franz-Liszt).