The Imagined Empire: Balloon Enlightenments in Revolutionary Europe

Description

The hot-air balloon, invented by the Montgolfier brothers in 1783, launched for the second time just days before the Treaty of Paris would end the American Revolutionary War. The ascent in Paris—a technological marvel witnessed by a diverse crowd that included Benjamin Franklin—highlighted celebrations of French military victory against Britain and ignited a balloon mania that swept across Europe at the end of the Enlightenment. This popular frenzy for balloon experiments, which attracted hundreds of thousands of spectators, fundamentally altered the once elite audience for science by bringing aristocrats and commoners together.             The Imagined Empire explores how this material artifact, the flying machine, not only expanded the public for science and spectacle but also inspired utopian dreams of a republican monarchy that would obliterate social boundaries. The balloon, Mi Gyung Kim argues, was a people-machine, a cultural performance that unified and mobilized the people of France, who imagined an aerial empire that would bring glory to the French nation. This critical history of ballooning considers how a relatively simple mechanical gadget became an explosive cultural and political phenomenon on the eve of the French Revolution. Cover Page......Page 2 Title Page......Page 3 Copyright Page......Page 4 Dedication......Page 5 Contents......Page 8 Acknowledgments......Page 10 Prologue: Flying through Time......Page 17 Introduction: A People-Machine......Page 34 Color Plates......Page 64 Part I. Invention in Theatrical Polity......Page 74 1. A Rupture of the Equilibrium......Page 83 2. Balloon Transcripts......Page 129 3. True Columbus......Page 176 Part II. Philosophical Nation......Page 226 4. Balloon Spectators......Page 236 5. Fermentation and Discipline......Page 278 6. Provincial Citizens and Their Nations......Page 318 7. The Fall of a National Artifact......Page 361 Part III. Material Empire......Page 402 Color Plates......Page 411 8. Modern Atlantis......Page 419 9. Crossing the Channel......Page 465 10. A Liminal Geography......Page 512 Epilogue: Revolutionary Metamorphoses......Page 554 Notes......Page 574 Glossary......Page 663 Bibliography......Page 666 Index......Page 780