The Illustrated Press and the Writing of History: The Recueils of L’Illustration in 1848

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the relationship between journalism and historical representation by exploring the particular case of the recueils of illustrated periodicals. With the adoption of a news section, L’Illustration asserts its ambition to participate in the writing of history and faces its first challenge in this sense during the 1848 insurrections. While weekly issues cover events as they as they unfold, or in their immediate aftermath, the instalments are also collected in biannual volumes. These occupy a problematic space, transcending the realm of the press to aspire to the status of contemporary histories. Chronicling events in real time, articles retain the urgency of tone, freshness of data and limited perspective of eyewitness records. They lack the reflective quality given by composition, temporal distance, and in-depth research. However, through textual and visual discourses that adopt narrative modes, L’Illustration draws attention to the fact that it contributes to the history of the nineteenth century. Retrospectively, the recueils constitute a form of historical account composed in the present.