The Invention of Celebrity

Antoine Lilti, Lynn Jeffress

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781509508778
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Frequently perceived as a characteristic of modern culture, the phenomenon of celebrity has much older roots. In this book Antoine Lilti shows that the mechanisms of celebrity were developed in Europe during the Enlightenment, well before films, yellow journalism, and television, and then flourished during the Romantic period on both sides of the Atlantic. Figures from across the arts like Voltaire, Garrick, and Liszt were all veritable celebrities in their time, arousing curiosity and passionate loyalty from their "fans." The rise of the press, new advertising techniques, and the marketing of leisure brought a profound transformation in the visibility of celebrities: private lives were now very much on public show. Nor was politics spared this cultural upheaval: Marie-Antoinette, George Washington, and Napoleon all experienced a political world transformed by the new demands of celebrity. And when the people suddenly appeared on the revolutionary scene, it was no longer enough to be legitimate; it was crucial to be popular too.

Lilti retraces the profound social upheaval precipitated by the rise of celebrity and explores the ambivalence felt toward this new phenomenon. Both sought after and denounced, celebrity evolved as the modern form of personal prestige, assuming the role that glory played in the aristocratic world in a new age of democracy and evolving forms of media. While uncovering the birth of celebrity in the eighteenth century, Lilti's perceptive history at the same time shines light on the continuing importance of this phenomenon in today's world.

1
Voltaire in Paris

In February 1778 Voltaire, then eighty-five, returned to Paris after a thirty-year absence. This visit created enormous excitement. Any Parisian considered to be a writer made an effort to celebrate the Ferney patriarch, while the elite class outdid itself in finding clever ways to catch a glimpse of the man whose name was on people's lips all over Europe. Visitors in greater and greater numbers flocked to the home of the Marquis de Villette, where Voltaire was staying. The Académie Française received him with great pomp. Benjamin Franklin solemnly asked him to bless his grandson. These tributes culminated in an improvised ceremony at the Comédie-Française where Voltaire attended the production of his tragedy Irène and in front of a wildly excited audience his bust was crowned with laurels, while an actor recited poetry in his honor. This is generally cited as the symbolic sanctification of the writer, the moment when Enlightenment philosophers gained social and cultural prestige, liberating them from their traditional role and giving them instead secular and spiritual power that reached its zenith in the age of Romanticism.¹ The crowning of Voltaire's bust seems to prefigure the official ceremony in 1791 that accompanied the transfer of Voltaire's remains to the Panthéon, the first celebration of its kind, a public tribute to a great man. And this is the way that literary historians have interpreted the episode, as a “triumph” and an “apotheosis.”²

But is this interpretation so absolutely obvious? The scene is almost too good to be true. And in fact, the canonical story repeated for the last two and a half centuries has inspired writings by Voltaire admirers who have given the episode a flattering appearance.³ However, some witnesses to the event mocked it. Adversaries of the Enlightenment philosophers, annoyed by the success of their old enemy, were vocal in their anger.⁴ Other members of French cultural life, although they did not have religious or political motives, were still skeptical and sarcastic, even openly hostile. Louis Sébastien Mercier, a distinguished connoisseur of theater life, wrote in his Tableau de Paris: “This famous coronation was simply a farce in the eyes of anyone with good sense.”⁵ Far from being impressed by the show, he saw only its clownish aspect, orchestrated by enthusiastic fans, which dimmed Voltaire's prestige by throwing him pell-mell into the limelight. “An epidemic curiosity made people rush to catch sight of Voltaire's face, as if the soul of a writer were no longer in his writings but in the way he looked.” Instead of an apotheosis or triumph, Mercier only saw vaguely grotesque buffoonery during which the great writer was overwhelmed with frantic applause and signs of unseemly familiarity. What most displeased Mercier was not the tribute rendered Voltaire but the form it took, reducing the author of Oedipe to the level of a public curiosity, celebrated like an actor with much more excitement than true admiration.

Indeed, the theater might appear to be an ambivalent setting for an apotheosis. If it was the place par excellence where the glory of heroes was represented in tragedies, of which Voltaire was the uncontested master and had been for decades, the theater was also the place where reputations of actors and authors were made and unmade by public acceptance or rejection, depending on how good the intriguing partisan claques were or how loud the derisive catcalls. The theater was as much a social gathering place for the rich as it was a place of merrymaking for the common people, so much so that the police had to be on their toes to keep order. And above all, theaters were the principal arena for the new culture of celebrity, where actors were the main protagonists, despite their lack of social status. Far from being an official, solemn ceremony, the performance on March 30, 1778 was very much an exuberant party, almost a kind of costume ball, and it is not known if Voltaire particularly enjoyed himself. It appears that he was conscious of the potentially ridiculous nature of the situation; despite the applause, he immediately took off the crown of laurels that the Marquis de Villette had placed on his head,⁶ questioning, perhaps, if it were really appropriate to be celebrated in this way while still alive?

The crown of laurels recalled another famous episode in literary history very much on the minds of Enlightenment philosophers: the coronation of Petrarch on the grounds of the Capitoline in Rome in 1341.⁷ But Petrarch had been crowned by Robert of Naples, the king's representative, one of the most powerful patrons of his time. This alliance between the glory of a sovereign ruler and the renown of a poet, powerfully manifested throughout European courts up until the reign of Louis XIV, was now in crisis. And Voltaire knew this better than anyone. Could the excited public at the Comédie-Française really substitute for a prince? Didn't public homage risk discrediting the author? Wasn't this parody of a coronation more like the tributes paid to actresses and singers than the consecration of a great poet?

What happened on that particular day had to do with the difficult alignment of various aspects of Voltaire's personality: highly respected author of the Henriade and Oedipe; a celebrated writer exiled to Ferney whose comings and goings were known throughout Europe; and the great man he already was for his admirers and the classical author he would become. Because Voltaire embodies for us a great writer of the Enlightenment, the first author admitted into the Panthéon, we see in this episode simply the first step towards posthumous glory. But for his contemporaries and for Voltaire himself, the stakes were more ambiguous. Was it possible to transform the intense public scrutiny focused on his person into an anticipation of his glory? This process was more complicated than it might seem in hindsight because it supposed a solution to the thorny problem of how the fame an individual enjoys while alive relates to the image that posterity eventually receives, the one image that alone assures eternal glory.

“The Most Famous Man in Europe”

Voltaire's celebrity in 1778 was unchallenged. It had largely surpassed the narrow framework of the literary world, the recognition that came from peers and critics. Even those who had never read his books had heard his name. Newspapers detailed his activities. In the Mémoires secrets de la République des lettres, a popular chronicle of cultural life, his name appeared over and over again. Voltaire knew like nobody else how to keep his name in the news through literary polemics and political engagement, through his wit and his brilliance. He had for some time been not only an admired writer but also a public figure who excited curiosity. Beginning writers and those less well known looked for ways to profit from his fame, and as early as 1759 a young Irish writer, Oliver Goldsmith, published the fake Mémoires de M. de Voltaire, playing on the curiosity of the public in order to launch his own career with a stock of anecdotes that were more or less true and others that were totally invented.⁸ The lawyer Jean-Henri Marchand amused himself for over thirty years parodying and publishing works such as the Testament politique de M. de V*** (1770) and the Confession publique de M. de Voltaire (1771).⁹

Voltaire did not need anyone to orchestrate his celebrity. A trip to visit him, exiled now and living in Ferney, became obligatory for all travelers. It was not enough to read his work; one had to see this great figure of contemporary Europe in person. Voltaire greatly enjoyed these visits and jubilantly welcomed visitors with a ceremony, a cross between theater and court ritual, encouraging visitors to spread picturesque anecdotes about the life of the great writer they had just seen.¹⁰ Nonetheless, these visits were also a constant source of embarrassment, a waste of time and energy, and he never hesitated to dismiss importunate people who came to see him out of curiosity and from whom he had nothing to gain. Charles Burney reports on the bad treatment received by some English visitors who were asked by Voltaire: “Well, gentlemen, you now see me, and did you take me to be a wild beast or a Monster that was fit only to be stared at, as a show”¹¹ There was not a lot of difference between a celebrity and a circus animal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Celebrity and Modernity
• 1: Voltaire in Paris
• 2: Society of the Spectacle
• 3: A First Media Revolution
• 4: From Glory to Celebrity
• 5: Loneliness of the Celebrity
• 6: The Power of Celebrity
• 7: Romanticism and Celebrity
• Conclusion
• Postface
• Illustration Credits
• Index
• Color Plates
• End User License Agreement