Popular Assembly and Political Subjectivity in the European Illustrated Press of the 1840s

Abstract

Historical research on how people have come to identify as part of "the people" as a political collective has not paid much attention to the development of a market for visual news. To show how this market might have shaped political subjectivity, this essay analyses how magazines like the Illustrated London News, L'Illustration, and the Illustrirte Zeitung created a standardized pictorial language for depicting multitudes as political actors. It argues that this language was closely tied to the affordances of the magazines as periodicals, especially their ability to link images serially, and promoted a detached way of seeing popular mobilisation.