This review of Time Machines: Telegraphic Images in Nineteenth-Century France appears in the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Mating snails are said to retain a lifelong sympathetic bond. It is a dubious fact, but one Jules Allix thought he could use. In 1850, this eccentric political activist and future communard proposed ‘escargotic commotion’ as the key to a new form of human communication – a snail telegraph. Unsurprisingly, it was unsuccessful. But the story exemplifies what Richard Taws describes in Time Machines as the ‘universalising, mystical, and socially generative’ quality attributed to technologies of long-distance communication in the period from the French Revolution to the late 19th century. Relentlessly, even obsessively, exploring methods to collapse time and space, French inventors and experimenters hoped to clarify and accelerate knowledge in a fractured postRevolutionary world.
The telegraph could become an instrument of social harmony, at a time when misinterpretation was rife, and dangerous. ‘Faltering voices, as well as strident ones,’ Taws notes, ‘came to play a significant narrative role in the French Revolution, from Robespierre’s famously quiet oratory to the muffling of Louis XVI’s final speech on the scaffold.’ The snail telegraph was merely the most eccentric of several schemes to facilitate the smooth transmission of information. Others included acoustic and atmospheric telegraphy; the pantelegraph, which distributed images over a century before the fax machine; and even (as proposed in an anonymous pamphlet from 1789) a system of illuminated screens placed in prominent urban locations, in a manner strikingly similar to modern cinema.
Télégraphe Francois Fartempas. Museumstiftung Post und Telekommunikation
Defunct technologies pervade this provocative and meticulously researched book, but Taws’s presiding focus is the optical telegraph system developed in the 1790s by the former priest Claude Chappe and his brothers. First brought into service in the summer of 1794, the Chappe telegraph was ousted by its electrical equivalent in the 1840s. (Samuel Morse sent his first message by wire in 1844.) Yet at its peak – ironically, the same decade in which it was retired – the network stretched 5,000 kilometres across the country. In ideal conditions, its messages could travel through 22 telegraph stations from Lille to Paris, collapsing a distance of 250 kilometres into two minutes. They were transmitted through an articulated ‘T’ shape mounted on a static pole atop a high building or tower: coded semaphore was sent from one station to the next by a mute army of stationnaires, who were oblivious to the meaning of their messages.
On the ground, citizens who saw the machine ‘jerking and fugling in the air’ (Thomas Carlyle’s phrase is typical in its anthropomorphism) were similarly ignorant. They knew its movement signalled incoming news, but whether positive or negative, personally irrelevant, or catastrophic, none could say. Yet neither could anyone ignore it: in large swathes it had bent the landscape to its will. The church of Nôtre-Dame de l’Épine, in Marne, had one of its Gothic spires amputated, to be replaced with the machine’s gesticulating arm; for several years another metal signal clanked on top of the Louvre.
Monument funéraire de Chappe au Père-Lachaise (n.d.), Louis Lassalle. Musée Carnavalet, Paris
The result, Taws suggests, was that the Revolutionary fantasy of simultaneous communication ultimately gave way to a sense of eerie disjuncture. By the 1830s, idealism was succeeded by suspicion. In Gargantua (1831), Honoré Daumier’s explosive visual satire on the corruptions of Louis-Philippe, the telegraph appears as an emblem of the deep state: ‘the silent, sinister means of transmission that enabled the July Monarchy to stay one step ahead of the people’.
The story told in Time Machines will be revelatory to readers primarily familiar with the well-trodden narrative of the electric telegraph and its relationship to modernity. In 1898, the ‘framed and wired confinement’ of a female telegraphist formed the focus of Henry James’s novella In The Cage – in one of Taws’s richest chapters, he discusses her semaphoric antecedents. That said, the book never sets out to offer a comprehensive history of Chappe’s system, or to analyse its development from a technological perspective. Rather, Taws is interested in how the system’s ‘shadow’ fell on post-Revolutionary French visual culture. ‘Clouds, skies, landscapes, bodies, buildings of all kinds,’ he writes, ‘all signified differently in the era of telegraphy.’
Toits de Paris (c. 1830), Étienne Bouhot. Musée Carnavalet, Paris
Taws’s argument is subtle and unfurls steadily, and some of his interpretations are more immediate than others. It is difficult to argue, for example, with the suggestion that Géricault’s monumental Raft of the Medusa (1819) might be ‘the nineteenth century’s most insistently telegraphic work’, uniting contemporary news and communication in its depiction of the ‘frantic semaphore’ of the mangled multiracial survivors of the shipwrecked frigate Medusa (which ran aground in July 1816, prompting a scandal).
More complex – and perhaps, for some, less immediately convincing – is his discussion of Nicolas-Jacques Conté (1755–1805), who invented the modern pencil, but also the engraving machine deployed to delineate desert skies in the illustrated Description de l’Égypte. When the first volume of this monumental text appeared in 1809 it was believed to be the longest book ever published in the West. Edward Said later considered it a key text of Orientalism. Taws suggests we must also consider the conditions of its production, through Conté’s engraving machine. This was an ‘exercise of power camouflaged as a labour-saving device’, the mechanical burin functioning much like its attendant colonial ideology to set Western efficiency against an idea of Egyptian ‘sluggishness and indolence’. Though some may ultimately find Taws’s approach disorienting, few could fail to be drawn in by the lively imagination everywhere at work throughout his book – or by the sheer range and scope of French visual culture yoked together under the sign of the waving arm.
Time Machines: Telegraphic Images in Nineteenth-Century France by Richard Taws is published by MIT Press.
From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.