The Imagined Empire: Balloon Enlightenments in Revolutionary Europe by Mi Gyung Kim

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Imagined Empire: Balloon Enlightenments in Revolutionary Europe by Mi Gyung Kim Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira (bio) The Imagined Empire: Balloon Enlightenments in Revolutionary Europe. By Mi Gyung Kim. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017. Pp. 456. Hardcover $54.95. The Imagined Empire is a welcome addition to histories of early ballooning that have flourished in the past decade. Drawing from a rich theoretical toolbox, Kim ambitiously "aims at an archaeology of mass silence, a genealogy of the mass public, and a material geography of European Enlightenment to uncover how the flying machine—both imagined and real—stirred utopian visions and patriotic sentiments in revolutionary Europe" (p. 8). In doing so, she presents a survey of early European ascents, a dense analysis of the indeterminacy of scientific artifacts, and something that could cheekily be called the aerostatic origins of the French Revolution. After hearing someone mock the balloon, Benjamin Franklin purportedly quipped: "What is the use of a newborn baby?" Kim's answer to this apocryphal bon mot is that the balloon "weakened the king-machine by opening a liminal zone in which the existing technologies of scientific demonstration, social control, and political machination could no longer contain the audience or the meaning of a mass spectacle" (p. 11). In short, the balloon's advent in 1783 fundamentally shaped the public sphere. The ancien régime was defined by its "king-machine," which molded public culture by controlling the sinews of symbolic capital. The balloon, however, was a "people-machine" that blurred the hierarchies undergirding absolutism. At stake was control over spectacle—the fullest expression of early modern authority. To make her case, Kim sets the balloon against the elitist royal theater, which had lost its capacity to convincingly represent the nation by the 1770s. The analysis unfolds through three parts encompassing ten chapters. Part one is a balloon-centered genealogy of the public sphere. Kim explains the circuitous route the Montgolfier brothers (paper manufacturers outside the realm of official science) took to stabilize the artifact and secure [End Page 628] their status as inventors—something that became more urgent with the appearance of the hydrogen balloon and its champions, led by Jacques Charles. Those in power produced a "public transcript" that minimized the dispute between "Montgolfists" and "Charlists" (each backed by different factions of the royal family), but the dispute signaled the triumph of public opinion over absolutist polity. The idolization of intrepid aeronauts compounded this process, threatening the Old Regime's hierarchical order. Part two shifts to the audiences of balloon spectacles (Parisian crowds surpassed 100,000). Kim unearths "hidden transcripts" that countered the "public transcript," arguing that balloon satires expressed republican virtues and proto-revolutionary fantasies. Pairing the balloon with mesmerism, another natural fluids-based scientific spectacle, she explains how authorities sought to control both fads, since they "multipl[ied] contact zones between the fashionable society and the populace" (p. 149). Meanwhile, provincial elites tried—and often failed—to overcome roadblocks to stage their own spectacles. Riots after failed ascents revealed the fissures in the hegemonic "public transcript," a realization that marked the beginning of the balloon's decline. Part three explores responses to ballooning across Europe. First, we visit London. According to Kim, the city's tepid reaction to the spectacular technology "reveals the importance of gentlemanly scientific culture in moderating royal power, Francophile aristocratic taste, and vulgar enthusiasm" (p. 211). The last chapters focus on Jean-Pierre Blanchard, first to fly across the Channel. His itinerant ballooning enterprise revealed the boundaries of Europe's cultural geographies. Francophile aristocracies brought ballooning to central European states, which in turn prompted patriotic resistances that foreshadowed responses to the Napoleonic Wars. The Imagined Empire covers some familiar territory addressed by works like Marie Thébaud-Sorger's L'Aérostation au temps des Lumières (2009). However, Kim's imaginative framing and meticulous readings underscore the indeterminacy of artifacts—even national symbols. The sections on France are the strongest, since that is where the evidence is richest, but forays into other regions illuminate how an artifact's meanings change as it is translated into different contexts. Kim's effort at integrating the tensions engendered by ballooning...