Please join the Nineteenth Century Forum (NCF) for a paper workshop with Isabelle Marie Anne Gillet.

At the French Royal Court in 1829, the Duchesse de Berry hosted a themed costume ball, centered on Mary Stuart, and subsequently commissioned Eugène Lami to illustrate the event. Lami’s album, a lavish, hand-colored, extremely limited edition compilation of lithographs, known as the Quadrille de Marie Stuart, raises complex questions about the rhetorical powers of representation in mobilizing collective memory to affect individuals’ understanding of the present. This article argues that the album constructs how the ball should be remembered and that its production served to unify the memory of the event, for the guests, its exclusive recipients, as a visual aide-mémoire of their elaborate costumes and the tableaux-vivants they enacted.

What has eluded scholars is the level to which Berry, a known political schemer, oversaw the spectacle, the audience’s experience, and the production of its illustrated pendant. Following in the footsteps of recent historical scholarship on female figures and their contribution to crafting their public image, I consider how the lithographic album, as a tangible extension of Berry’s image, displays the dexterity with which she manipulated visual and cultural materials to serve her own political agenda. Previously undiscussed letters from the artist reveal Berry’s involvement as well as the rising urgency of the political moment. Masked balls at the court were common in Restoration France; yet the care and attention to the production of the album commemorating this one point to a larger motive, namely the Duchesse’s political aspirations for herself and her son, on the eve of the Revolution of 1830.

To RSVP and receive a copy of the pre-circulated paper, please email Ani Bezirdzhyan abezirdz@umich.edu