Abstract
In 1913, a newspaper reported the death of conjurer and adventurer Marius Cazeneuve:
We have just buried in Toulouse the commander Marius Cazeneuve who was a conjurer of international reputation about thirty years ago, a time when this science was in great fashion. Today, it is difficult to understand the infatuation that lasted more than half a century for the masters of illusions and kings of subterfuge.1
By the eve of the First World War, there was no doubt that the world of conjuring had changed. While conjuring had far from disappeared, its popularity had greatly diminished. Gone were the magic theaters presenting entire programs of magic every night. On opening in 1845, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin had initially attracted wealthy crowds. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, Méliès struggled to fill seats and offered concessions for children.2 In the period between the days of amusing physics at the fairs and 1914, the year Méliès rented his theater out, it was not just the magic trade that went through significant changes, the city of Paris itself was transformed: public fairs closed and cafés, hotels, restaurants, circuses, and theater houses opened. During the nineteenth century, Paris rapidly developed into a site of leisure and consumerism with new boulevards, omnibuses, shopping arcades, magasins de nouveautés, cafés, and theaters of all kinds.
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Notes
See Tout-Paris, “Pasez muscade. Un des derniers grands prestidigitateurs, Marius Cazeneuve, et les célébrités du genre: Comus, Bosco, Robert-Houdin, et Cie,” Bloc-Notes Parisien in Ilusionisme, généralités I, Bibliothèque Nationale de France; and Jacques Deslandes, Le Boulevard du cinéma à l’époque de Méliès (Paris: Les éd. Du Cerf, 1963), 20–21.
On the transformation of Paris during the nineteenth century, see Karen Bowie, ed., La Modernité avant Haussmann: Formes de l’espace urbain à Paris: 1801–1853 (Paris: Éditions Recherches, 2001); Hazel H. Hahn, Scenes of Parisian Modernity: Culture and Consumption in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York and London: Routledge, 2003); Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988); François Loyer, Paris XIXe siècle. L’Immeuble et la rue (Paris: Hazan, 1987); Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Nicholas Papayanis, Horse-Drawn Cabs and Omnibuses in Paris: The Idea of Circulation and the Business of Public Transit (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996); Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and David Van Zanten, Building Paris: Architectural Institutions and the Transformation of the French Capital, 1830–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
See, for example, John Warne Monroe, Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in Modern France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008); Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); and Corinna Treitel, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
On the Lourdes Medical Bureau, see Jason Szarbo, “Seeing is Believing? The Form and Substance of French Medical Debates over Lourdes,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 76 (2002): 199–230. On Lourdes more generally, see Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1999); and Suzanne K. Kaufman, Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).
Anthropologist Graham M. Jones describes conjuring as a “paradoxical form of knowledge: deceptive yet entertaining, concealed yet shared, secret yet performed,” “an expressive form that seems to epitomize both a disenchanted rationalistic worldview and the enduring appeal of the mysterious and irrational in Western modernity.” Graham M. Jones, “Trades of the Trick: Conjuring Culture in Modern France,” PhD diss., New York University, 2007, xii, 1–2.
Jim Steinmeyer, Art&Artifice and Other Essays on Illusion (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2006), 77–98. See also Milbourne Christopher, The Illustrated History of Magic (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973), 266–273.
On the Grand-Guignol, see Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson, Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002), 16–18.
Paul Ginisty, “Choses et gens de théâtre,” Le Petit Parisien. 19, 10 (1928). “Ilusionisme, généralités I,” Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
Louis Figuier, Les Merveilles de la science ou description populaire des inventions modernes 4 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1867–1891); and Les Mystères de la science 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1892–1893).
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© 2015 Sofie Lachapelle
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Lachapelle, S. (2015). Conclusion. In: Conjuring Science. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137492975_7
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