Telegraphic Images in Post‐Revolutionary France

Abstract

The development of an optical telegraph network in France in the early 1790s transformed the ways in which information could be transmitted across space and time. This semaphoric system, devised by Claude Chappe, was an important means of state and military communication until the 1850s, and the telegraph became a ubiquitous sight across much of France in the first half of nineteenth century. Operating in public, but conveying secret messages, optical telegraphy emerged at a time when the legibility of signs and the use of images for political ends were increasingly pressing issues. Reading innovations in telegraphy against a range of contemporary images, in particular a print after Lemonnier's 1791 Le Commerce, this essay explores the artistic, social, and historical problems posed by this technology during and after the French Revolution, and considers the political and affective dimensions of visual transmission in France, and beyond, in its Caribbean colonies.