Time, Media, and Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France

This book is a delight, and it would be a pity to think that it is only of interest for cultural historians, more specifically for specialists interested in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution (roughly speaking, the first half of the nineteenth century). What Iris Moon and Richard Taws have managed in this exemplarily edited collection is a fascinating attempt to analyze the artistic and cultural changes produced by a historical political and ideological disruption (actually, when reading this book, which covers a very wide range of visual techniques and media, one does not have the impression of reading a collection of essays but instead has the impression of reading a single-handed monograph). The French Revolution remains the prototypical example of such a moment that turned the world upside down, while the postrevolutionary period, actually a sequence of politically very different forms of “restoration,” is no less the perfect...