Visual Culture in Mid-Nineteenth Century Paris

It’s hard to underestimate the extent to which Paris – and, very quickly in its wake, other major cities in Europe and America – began to reorganize the sense of what it is to be and live in a city. There are many facets of this, but in this blog I wanted to share the extent to which society (or at least urban society) became an increasingly visual culture, in which the world is understood in terms of what can be seen (and so in terms of what is material), where being seen (in the right way) becomes more important to more people (it becomes important to the bourgeoisie and not just aristocrats and the extremely wealth), where seeing things drive the consummation of material goods and services related to leisure and pleasure, and where there is even the idea of “visual consummation,” meaning that one takes delight in simply seeing things.

The prostitute, which became increasingly present in urban society, catches this play of materiality and capitalism: the prostitute is a human reduced to “meat for sale,” an “object circulating in the marketplace,” a “thing” to be consumed (Sanyal 98). This reduction is aided by the rise of the fashion, jewelry, and cosmetics industries, which industries are tied to the rise of the bourgeoisie. These aides help the female to transform mere flesh into a desirable commodity – an object of desire. At the same time, the prostitute is also very much a sign or symbol of the times (this is explained in the next paragraph) and is used as such a sign in art and even as a sign or symbol of the artistic process. For instance, the prostitute weds the material (flesh) and fashion (art), thereby transforming the material into something more significant; Baudelaire (who makes this connection explicitly) see the symbolist poet in similar fashion, insofar as he attempts to transform the material (especially our sense impressions) with art (whether word, paint, or sound) into something more significant.

Insofar as she is transformed by art and is a “meaningful sign,” the figure of the prostitute captures the essence of civilization, which is differentiated from ‘mere’ nature by the presence of signs that point to the dimension of human subjectivity, which is the means by which the human transforms nature into art and culture (Sanyal 104). She is also a sign of the development, in the nineteenth century, of “spectacular displays of commodity culture” (Sanyal 105). These include major expos (expositions universelles, which are world fairs), department stores (especially the rise of window displays, which present both the goods to be desired/consumed and even models (mannequins) to show you what you can/should look like once you’ve ‘consumed’ them), arcades (a shopping environment in which one can see and be seen – and one sees goods, others pursuing those goods, and those goods being worn/consumed), and even public morgues (as citizens would go the Paris Morgue, which corpses were displayed for visual “consummation” by a bored public always on the look-out for something to divert and delight them – especially something that stands out from the many impressions one receives each day in a modern environment).

The images in this post give you some examples of this visual culture. The one at the top is of the Paris morgue, as is the one below. The next two are of the Paris International Exposition in 1867, and the two after that are of Paris shopping arcades. (572 words)