Contemporary European History (2018), 0: 0, 1–10

doi:10.1017/S0960777318000565

REVIEW ESSAY

European Celebrity in Historical Perspective

Holly Grout
Box 820212, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487 USA
*Corresponding author: hlgrout@ua.edu.

Michael Garval, Cléo de Mérode and the Rise of Modern Celebrity Culture (Routledge, 2012),
278pp. (pb), $53.95, ISBN 978-1-1381-0880-6.
Eva Hemmungs Wirten, Making Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebrity Culture in an
Age of Information (University of Chicago Press, 2015), 248pp. (pb), $21.00, ISBN 978-0-2264-
2250-3.
Odile Heynders, Writers as Public Intellectuals: Literature, Celebrity, Democracy (Palgrave,
2015), 218pp. (hb), $99.00, ISBN 978-1-1374-6763-8.
Berny Sèbe, Heroic Imperialists in Africa: The Promotion of British and French Colonial Heroes,
1870–1939 (MUP, 2015), 309 pp., (hb), £75.00, ISBN 978-0-7190-8492-8.

Launched in March 2010 as an academic journal dedicated to ‘the critical exploration of

celebrity’, Celebrity Studies welcomed a range of ‘(inter)disciplinary approaches’ and sought
contributors working within a variety of ‘media forms, historical periods and national con-
texts’.1 The journal’s debut reflected a growing scholarly interest in celebrity and it provided
academics a forum for advancing the field of celebrity studies. In the two decades preceding the
journal’s inaugural issue, scholars of media sociology, film and cultural studies offered valuable
conceptual tools for theorising celebrity. In particular, they constructed useful analytical fra-
meworks for examining celebrity’s cultural meanings within both national and transnational
contexts, and they formulated compelling strategies for untangling celebrity’s complex rela-
tionship to late modernity.2 Despite these inroads, however, researchers paid considerably less
attention to how celebrity operated before the second half of the twentieth century.3 Although
celebrity had emerged as a viable theme within historical studies, most notably within the
specialised areas of art and theatre history and within the genre of historical biography, few

1
Su Holmes and Sean Redmond, ‘A Journal in Celebrity Studies’, Celebrity Studies 1, 1 (2010), 7.
2
Jessica Evans and David Hesmondhalgh, eds., Understanding Media: Inside Celebrity (Berkshire: Open University Press,
2005); Kerry O. Ferris, ‘The Sociology of Celebrity’, Sociology Compass, 1, 1 (2007), 371–84; David Giles, Illusions of
Immortality: A Psychology of Fame and Celebrity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2000); Fred Inglis, A Short History of
Celebrity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); David P. Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary
Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Simon Morgan, ‘Celebrity: Academic “Pseudo-Event” or a
Useful Category for Historians’, Culture and Social History, 8, 1 (2011), 95–114; Sean Redman and Su Holmes, eds., Stardom
and Celebrity (London: Sage, 2007); Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion Books, 2001); Graeme Turner, Understanding
Celebrity (London: Sage, 2014).
3
A notable exception: Chris Rojek and Leon Braudy identify Alexander the Great as the first ‘pre-figurative’ celebrity and as
the ‘first famous person’ in history. Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion Books, 2001) and Leon Braudy, The Frenzy of
Renown: Fame and Its History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

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 2 Holly Grout

area studies scholars historicised celebrity while even fewer historians, it seemed, pursued the
study of celebrity at all.4
In his November 2010 contribution to Celebrity Studies, ‘Historicising Celebrity’, and in his
2011 essay for Culture and Social History, ‘Celebrity: Academic “Pseudo-Event”, or a Useful
Category for Historians’, Simon Morgan attempted to bridge the divide between area studies
experts and historians by advocating for more critical debate regarding the ‘historical uses of
“celebrity”’.5 For Morgan, historicising celebrity would challenge a scholarship that often pre-
sented celebrity as a product of late modernity and enable scholars to understand the ways in
which celebrity functioned as a ‘key driver of the modernisation process’.6 Rather than eschew
the application of celebrity theory as anachronistic or anticipate criticism for addressing
‘something so apparently trivial’ as stardom, historians needed, Morgan maintained, to galvanise
celebrity as an elucidatory historical concept and to validate its study within the academy.7 By
critically engaging celebrity theory and by effectively applying it to the past, historians could
demonstrate celebrity’s utility as a driver and as a product of modern consumer culture and they
could uncover its instrumental role in expanding the public sphere.8
To achieve these aims Morgan recommended that scholars challenge periodisation, explore
celebrity’s international dimensions and analyse the multimedia component of its development.9
In addition to embarking upon these avenues of inquiry, the four books under consideration
demonstrate how historicising celebrity opens up a variety of interrelated questions. What is
celebrity? How is it defined, by whom and what are the spatial contingencies and temporal
specificities of that definition? Who is the celebrity and how does an otherwise ordinary indi-
vidual achieve such status? What are the conditions necessary for the development of celebrity
and its derivative culture? How does this culture evolve, what are its principle attributes and how
does it create and sustain its own system of meaning?
Exploring celebrity in various locales from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first
centuries, the four books under review differ considerably in scope, methodology and subject
matter. Yet each of these works examines the expansion of celebrity culture across the twentieth
century: Berny Sèbe through the emergence of the imperial hero in Britain and France between
1870 and 1939, Michael Garval through the career of French stage sensation Cléo de Mérode, Eva
Hemmungs Wirten through the biography of Marie Curie and Odile Heynders through the
figure of the post-war public intellectual. Despite the myriad approaches undertaken, these
scholars have together answered Morgan’s call to historicise celebrity. They have done so by
assessing celebrity’s utility as an analytical category, by investigating its connections to mass
media and consumer society and by scrutinising its multifarious political and cultural meanings
within specific historical contexts.

4
Simon Morgan, ‘Historicising Celebrity’, Celebrity Studies, 1, 3 (Nov. 2010), 366. Some recent celebrity biographies include:
Hugh Cunningham, Grace Darling: Victorian Heroine (London: Bloomsbury, 2007); Oliver Hilmes, trans. Stewart Spencer,
Franz Liszt: Musician, Celebrity, Superstar (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); David Looseley, Edith Piaf: A Cultural
History (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2015); Rohan McWilliam, The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Sensation
(London: Continuum Books 2007); Judith E. Smith, Becoming Belafonte: Black Artist, Public Radical (Austin, Texas: Uni-
versity of Texas Press, 2014); John F. Kasson, The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s
America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2014); Lucy Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2008). Notable exceptions to the claim above include: Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi, eds., Constructing Charisma:
Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010); Catherine Hindson, London’s
West End Actresses and the Origins of Celebrity Charity, 1880–1920 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016); Antoine Lilti,
The Invention of Celebrity: 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Polity Books, 2017).
5
Simon Morgan, ‘Historicising Celebrity’, Celebrity Studies, 1, 3 (Nov. 2010), 367.
6
Ibid., 367.
7
Simon Morgan, ‘Celebrity: Academic “Pseudo-Event”’, 95–7.
8
Ibid., 95, 98.
9
Ibid., 109–10.

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 Contemporary European History 3

Celebrity as a Category of Historical Analysis

In their efforts to define and to historicise celebrity, scholars have focused on what celebrity is as
well as on what celebrity does. Broadly speaking, celebrity connotes a ‘known individual’, a
recognisable, larger-than-life ‘public subject’ who, through the intertwined mechanisms of the
mass media and the mass market, has transformed into a merchandisable commodity.10 Within
this rubric scholars have parsed the celebrity category further, distinguishing between ‘celebrity’
and ‘star’, and they have ascertained the ways in which celebrity both overlaps with and splinters
from analogous categories of charisma and fame.11 By mediating the space between the indi-
vidual and society, moreover, celebrities provide blueprints for social belonging and exercise a
‘lasting effect on everyday life’.12 Despite these commonalities, celebrity does not, as the books
under consideration clarify, come in a one size fits all package. Indeed, focusing on imperial
heroes, stage performers, scientists and intellectuals, these texts introduce four prominent
celebrity taxonomies – the hero, the beauty, the talent and the innovator – who broadened the
definition of celebrity in meaningful ways.
Heroic Imperialists in Africa: The Promotion of British and French Colonial Heroes, 1870–1939
examines how imperial heroes, ‘embodied the symbolic implementation of the colonial project’
(1). Sèbe traces the development of this celebrity type through what he calls the ‘hero making
process’, offering fifteen case studies dedicated to prominent explorers, military leaders and
religious envoys who served as the public faces of the British and French imperial project (17).
Imperialist propaganda portrayed Jean-Baptiste Marchand, Sirdar Kitchener, Cecile Rhodes,
Louis Lyautey and Pierre Brazza, for example, as imbued with ‘charismatic qualities, in the
Weberian sense’, as ‘possessing “a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which
[the hero] is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhu-
man or at least superficially exceptional qualities”’ (176). For Sèbe, as for Edward Berenson, who
also conjugates Weberian charisma with the imperial hero, charisma defines this typology and
provides the rationale for its public appeal.13 Moreover, within an international context in which
imperial power intertwined national identity, propagandists capitalised on the hero’s ability to
elicit emotion, to inspire hope and to epitomise values of ‘duty, respect, and justice’ (1). In these
ways, the imperial hero’s celebrity popularised the colonial mission and fostered national
cohesion around a divisive political issue.
Whereas imperial propagandists mobilised the male hero to cultivate patriotism and national
belonging,14 the female beauty, as Garval demonstrates in Cléo de Mérode and the Rise of Modern
Celebrity Culture, could also unify national publics. Praised for her pulchritude, fetishised for her
ears (or rather their mysterious concealment) and frequently absolved by French audiences for
her limited talent, Mérode exemplified the ‘possibility of a fundamental gap between accom-
plishment and renown’ that would characterise twentieth-century celebrity (35). Although she
ascended to prominence as a professional ballerina, Mérode became famous for her physical
appearance, for her (mostly manufactured if not entirely fabricated) amorous pursuits and for
her uncanny ability to embody a particular kind of Frenchness. Casting Mérode as a prototype
for the late-modern celebutante, and declaring her the ‘first modern icon’, Garval argues that her
story illuminates a key transition in French thinking about fame and that it establishes the salient

10
Ibid., 98.
11
Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown; Berenson and Giloi, eds., Constructing Charisma, 6–7; Evans and Hesmondhalgh, eds.,
Understanding Media, 4.
12
Holmes and Redmond, ‘A Journal in Celebrity Studies’, 2, 4, and 11; Richard Dyer cited in Sean Redmond and Su Holmes,
eds., Stardom and Celebrity, 87. Berenson argues that whereas charisma relies upon an emotional bond between the
individual and the audience, fame merely requires that the individual be an object of discussion among an audience with
whom s/he may or may not cultivate a connection. Berenson and Giloi, eds., Constructing Charisma, 6.
13
Edward Berenson, ‘Charisma and the Making of Imperial Heroes in Britain and France, 1880–1914’, in Berenson and Giloi,
eds., Constructing Charisma, 21–40.
14
Berenson, ‘Charisma and the Making of Imperial Heroes’, 40.

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 4 Holly Grout

features of modern celebrity culture (5). As the ‘reverence for “great men”’ faded ‘to a fascination
with predominantly female stage performers’, Garval explains, Mérode anticipated the ‘para-
doxical place of celebrated feminine beauty within our mass culture, between commodification
and creative self-fashioning, exploitation and empowerment’ (4).
Mérode’s celebrity derived in large part from her extraordinarily pleasing female face; but for
her contemporary Marie Curie, celebrity originated from her exceptionally clever female mind.
As a woman scientist in early twentieth-century France, Curie, as Hemmungs Wirten asserts in
Making Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebrity Culture in an Age of Information, built
her celebrity through achievement (43). Although eventually esteemed for her scientific work,
Curie understood that her talent was circumscribed by her status as a both a woman and a
foreigner (2). Working in a man’s profession in a country that did not recognise women as legal
persons, Curie, a Polish national, could neither rightfully own her scientific accomplishments nor
could she be considered among the masculine cult of heroes that comprised the French intel-
lectual pantheon (13, 36, 59). Aware of these limitations, Curie curated a persona that played to
the French status quo: she dressed simply and comported herself as a proper bourgeois; she
embodied the good wife, memorialising her husband and their collective work in her publications
after his death; and she eschewed the limelight, working to acquire patents for her intellectual
property (59). In these ways, Curie blazed a trail for female celebrity rooted in the mind rather
than in the body.
During the Belle Époque, Curie and her scientific contemporaries garnered considerable
attention; yet their visibility and level of influence would be eclipsed in scope and scale by the
post-1945 public intellectual. In the second half of the twentieth century, as Heynders argues in
Writers as Public Intellectuals: Literature, Celebrity, Democracy, public intellectuals flourished in
a new age of mass media generated ‘infotainment’ (12). Through ‘seven showcases’ featuring
prominent journalists, fiction writers and screenwriters from across Europe, Heynders demon-
strates how in the media saturated modern age, Elif Shafak, Hamed Abdel-Samad and others
achieved celebrity status by ‘advancing a “grand idea” or encouraging a new argument’ that was
simple enough to permeate public consciousness (x, 2, 12). Within the media, and sometimes
within the intellectual works themselves, this grand idea was framed through the writer’s private
life and shaped by his or her personal experiences (13). Thus the ‘celebrity or media intellectual’
became ‘a blended construction, where status, appearance and discursive meaning shift
depending on context, issue, style, and media specificity’ (15).

Celebrity and the Mass Media

Indeed, the role of the mass media in creating, generating and sustaining modern celebrity
cannot be overstated. Scholars have demonstrated the ways in which ‘celebrity and media are
mutually constitutive’, and they have argued that, as one of a range of ancillary sites, the media
provides a ‘public stage on which celebrities perform’.15 ‘Mass journalism, photography and new,
rapid means of communication’, as Berenson and Giloi explain, ‘helped create cultures of
charisma, celebrity, and fame; cultures that divided societies into leaders and followers, stars and
fans, even as it narrowed the distance between them’.16 Central to the production of celebrity,
media transmission publicises the private person to large audiences and, in so doing, designates
celebrity as a ‘common cultural type’, as well as a ‘new and powerful social force’.17
In the late nineteenth century, Sèbe maintains, imperial campaigns created ‘new regimes of
heroes’; but it was the development of an inexpensive, widely-circulated mass press that catered

15
Evans and Hesmondhalgh, eds., Understanding Media, 2; Redmond and Holmes eds., Stardom and Celebrity, 309.
16
Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi eds., Constructing Charisma, 17.
17
Ibid., 2; Redmond and Holmes eds., Stardom and Celebrity, 310; John Gaffney and Diana Holmes eds., Stardom in Postwar
France (NY: Berghahn Books, 2007), 8.

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 Contemporary European History 5

to an increasingly literate populace which converted those heroes into celebrities (11). A product
of the second Industrial Revolution in which advancements in communications and transpor-
tation facilitated the rise of print capitalism, New Journalism became a prominent conduit of
celebrity’s promotion. Within this new genre, war correspondents, journalists, publishers, editors,
politicians and others functioned as ‘hero makers’, using innovations like the interview and the
photograph to popularise individual personalities (10). New Journalism, Sèbe contends, ‘marked
the beginning of media interest in the lives of famous people: a prototype of “celebrity coverage,”
prefiguring the “human interest” story in popular magazines and newspapers’, and predicting the
media’s central role in twentieth-century celebrity making (60, 61, 65).
Alongside New Journalism, the illustrated press, posters and postcards also shaped how
celebrity was manufactured and transmitted in the late nineteenth century. As Garval argues,
these media transformed Mérode from a young, familiar dancer into a ‘mass culture phenom-
enon’ (133). A master of self-fashioning, Mérode ‘styled herself with confidence, sophistication,
and resolve, prefiguring the movie studios’ publicity machine in the years ahead’ (5). Her
carefully crafted portraits – featured on cigarette cards and pinbacks, circulated within the press
and purchasable in Paris shops – rarely referenced her profession or alluded to a specific stage
performance. In these photographs Mérode ‘performed the spectacle of her own beauty’, offering
her image (rather than her talent) for public consumption (46). Lending her stylised portrait
(often in close-up) to inexpensive postcards, Mérode used the ‘seductive illusion of intimacy’ to
disseminate her image to a global fan base (133). In the process she exploited the postcard’s
‘fame-making potential’ and helped pioneer the ‘visual media-driven, international celebrity that
has dominated popular culture over the intervening century’ (163).
Much like Mérode, Curie also fashioned her celebrity in the media. The ‘mass press and
journals popularizing science’, Hemmungs Wirten explains, offered a ‘new platform from which
the full-blown celebrity scientist materialized’ (5). To the extent that it did not disrupt their
work, the Curies welcomed reportage. They were less enthusiastic, however, about exposing the
details of their private life to public scrutiny (46). Curie reluctantly authorised in-home inter-
views during her husband’s lifetime, but after his untimely death she more carefully managed
her own public image. ‘Widowhood meant that new lines had to be drawn between Marie Curie
and the press, borders that demarcated an unknown territory’, Hemmungs Wirten elucidates.
‘There were familiar enough images and words to describe him, but someone like her had not
really existed before. Marie Curie sans Pierre was a clean slate’ (46–7). In the case of Marie
Curie, the press might have invented the scientist as celebrity but it did not create the celebrity
scientist.
The relationship between the press and the public intellectual proved even more fluid and
symbiotic in the post-war period. Whereas the press made the intellectual knowable to the public,
the intellectual used the press as the primary platform for promoting his or her ideas to non-
specialist audiences (3). Orchestrated through a range of media (interviews, clips, blogs) and
engineered to elicit audience response, the ‘celebrity-intellectual performance’ facilitated and
democratised critical debate (14). Given the public intellectual’s heightened visibility, a large part
of this performance entailed constructing a marketable persona. Thus, in the age of late-modern
mass media, Heynders submits, figures like the French philosopher activist Bernard-Henri Lévy
and Somali asylum-seeker turned Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali became as renowned for their
glamourous lifestyles and fashionable look as for their political message (76, 100).

Celebrity and the Consumer Market

It was primarily through the media that heroes, performers, scientists and intellectuals produced
their celebrity; yet as the media and the consumer market intertwined it became almost
impossible to discern the extent to which ‘celebrity status was the result of a deliberate process of
self-promotion and media manipulation’, and the degree to which celebrities ‘were simply
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 6 Holly Grout

objectified by an emerging mass culture based on print and mass-produced commodities’.18

Scholars have disputed this issue throughout the twentieth century – some arguing that because
celebrity is ‘part of an industrial scale of rationalization and standardization’, that it is merely
‘another object of mass consumption’, with others rejecting this notion, maintaining that
celebrity is not determined by an abstracted capitalism but adheres to its own logic and operates
according to its own cultural system.19 In light of these debates scholars have shown that
celebrities both create and are created by the consumer market and that it is through this market
that they achieve status as cultural icons even as they circulate as mass commodities.
Sèbe explicitly connects celebrity production to the consumer market through his exploration
of ‘hero-makers’, intermediaries central to the imperial hero’s cultural and commercial pro-
duction (87). Acknowledging that celebrities always matriculate within a market economy in
which financial considerations dominate, Sèbe illustrates how the promotion of imperial heroes
involved mobilising a variety of commercial forms, most notably advertisements, posters,
postcards and cigarette cards (97). Throughout the book, but especially in his extended analysis
of the production and commodification of Marchand Legend between 1895 and 1906, Sèbe
unequivocally attributes the rise of the imperial hero to the ‘commercial bourgeoisie’. This group,
even more than the celebrities themselves, invented the hero’s persona, mediated his legend and
manipulated his political and commercial capital. Although the imperial hero was perhaps most
admired by the working class, Sèbe concludes, his celebrity was ultimately manufactured and
disseminated by middle-class intercessors who packaged his image for mass consumption.
Much like her imperial hero counterparts, Mérode also relied upon the flourishing Belle
Époque consumer market to expand her celebrity. To this end she performed at the 1900 World
Expo, and she endorsed or lent her name to a variety commodities including cigars, dolls,
artificial flowers, night gowns, skirts and undergarments that were distributed throughout
Europe and the United States (92–3, 131–3). At the same time that she embarked upon these
schemes she also engaged in a process of double commodification that would become the
hallmark of her notoriety. Although Mérode refused to (literally) sell her body, she freely sold her
image through photographic reproductions and peddled her talents through stage performance.
In both venues, moreover, she frequently adopted the ‘courtesan’s pose’, facilitating her own
commodification by brokering her most valuable asset, her beauty. In so doing, she became an
‘article of Paris’, associated with sexualised femininity at home and with ‘over-priced foreign
goods, especially frivolous French ones’, abroad (52–3, 106).
Although considerably more ambivalent about her celebrity than Mérode, Curie nevertheless
promoted her brand. According to Hemmungs Wirten, Curie forged her public persona through
‘her published writing’ but especially through authoring her husband’s biography (25, 28).
Throughout this text she associated the Curie name with ‘radium, scientific progress, and real
science’, relying on the quality of the work to protect the family’s legacy (61). Attempting to
uphold the family name and to associate it exclusively with scientific excellence, Curie simul-
taneously resisted and encouraged its commodification. On the one hand, she fought vigilantly
against fraudulent manufacturers who attempted to promote their products under the Curie
name and without her consent (101). On the other hand, she willingly transformed herself into a
public attraction when it enabled her to promote the family’s work or to further the role of
women in science.20

18
Morgan, ‘Historicising Celebrity’, 366.
19
Evans and Hesmondhalgh highlight the contours of this debate through Daniel Boorstin’s Frankfurt school inspired theory
of celebrity as pseudo-event in The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, 1961 and Richard Dyer’s reception focus
approach in Stars, 1979 and Heavenly Bodies, 1986. Evans and David Hesmondhalgh, eds., Understanding Media, 6.
20
To this end, Curie worked with fan turned de facto publicist Missy Brown Meloney to undertake a paid publicity tour of the
United States; she accepted a gram of radium from admirers for her lab; she became the first honorary member of a female
chemistry sorority at the University of Chicago, and she signed copies of Pierre Curie for fundraisers.

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 Contemporary European History 7

Whereas Curie tolerated her branding more than she embraced her celebrity, like Mérode,
public intellectuals found it much more difficult to separate product from performance. As
Heynders explains, public intellectuals not only had to act the part of the celebrity, they also
invited the public into their private lives to bridge the divide between the detached intellectual
and popular culture. The case of Bernard-Henri Lévy, for example, ‘shows that the current media
celebrity intellectual is becoming a more hybrid public figure’. The public intellectual’s visibility,
‘his awareness of acting as a media figure in order to interest the audience in a political case’,
Heynders argues, encourages him to cultivate a marketable persona (94). This process is most
overt in examples such as Lévy’s political diary of Libya. By centring himself in this narrative,
Lévy writes a ‘story he wants to participate in’, manipulating the power of his own visibility to
highlight the ‘intersection of stardom and intellectualism’ (95). In this way, Lévy, like the public
intellectual more broadly, becomes both the producer and the product of his own celebrity.

Celebrity and the Production of Meaning

The media and the market provided the institutional frameworks and technological apparatuses
necessary for the development of a modern celebrity culture; however, they did not determine
how the public consumed celebrity. As Redmond and Holmes argue, celebrities educe public
responses because they are ‘decidedly “personal” in the way that they articulate what it means to
be an individual to another individual’, and they shape ‘our own identity, self-image, and sense of
belonging’, by establishing the ‘boundaries of our aspirations and achievements’.21 This personal
connection, moreover, is what enables celebrities to fuel the popular imagination, to engage
fantasies of the self, to provide aspirational models of human achievement and to foster a shared
social reality. Connecting to the public in these ways, Gaffney and Holmes suggest, celebrities
capture the ‘preoccupations, values, conflicts, [and] contradictions’ of an age and provide a
‘symbolic portal’ into a culture.22 Media generated mass commodities, celebrities enter public
consciousness because they have been deemed exceptional; however, even as they challenge the
limits of social probity, they retain their popularity because they also embody the values of the
dominant culture and so appear to be ‘just like us’.23
Imperial heroes, Sèbe argues, linked the individual to the imperial nation state by encouraging
vicarious identification.24 Unlike the average British or French citizen who never left his native
soil, the imperial hero navigated the globe, encountered exotic peoples, foods and landscapes and
embarked upon exciting adventures. By romanticising the hero’s exploits in the media, middle-
class hero makers fuelled the (targeted) workingman’s desire to escape the mundane at the same
time as they aroused his patriotism. Portrayed as ambassadors of European civilisation and
imbued with the qualities attributed to this designation (culture, morality, Christian religiosity,
etc.), imperial heroes like Horatio Kitchener as depicted in With Kitchener to Khartoum, inspired
national pride and promoted images of cultural superiority intended to strengthen support for
the imperial mission (264–85). Reinforcing ‘the patriotic beliefs of their fellow countrymen in an
age of triumphant nationalism’, Kitchener, alongside Livingstone, Lavigerie, Marchand, Brazza
and others, ‘informed cultural practices and beliefs’ and ‘embodied values associated with their
“exemplarity”’ (15, 194). The work of celebrity in the example of the imperial hero was thus to
secure public investment in shared cultural values and in controversial political initiatives. By
21
Redmond and Holmes eds., Stardom and Celebrity, 257; Holmes and Redmond, ‘A Journal in Celebrity Studies’, 4, 7.
22
Gaffney and Holmes eds., Stardom in Postwar France, 1.
23
Dyer argues that celebrities enable ‘access political matters of class, gender, race, and sexuality that underline the dominant
ideology of that society at the time’. Dyer cited in Redmond and Holmes eds., Stardom and Celebrity, 258.
24
Berenson makes this same point: ‘even when the trails heroes blaze are too difficult for others to follow, charismatic figures
nonetheless open up new possibilities. They do so by demonstrating what can be done and allowing large numbers of people
to associate themselves, however indirectly and vicariously, with what they have achieved’. Berenson, ‘Charisma and the
Making of Imperial Heroes’, 24.

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 8 Holly Grout

fantasising about the imperial hero, the ordinary citizen also imagined himself within and even as
an integral part of an internationally powerful empire.
Yet by connecting citizens with states through male imperial heroes, Sèbe inadvertently
perpetuates a masculine narrative of empire that obscures women’s contributions to the colonial
mission and that replicates their exclusion from national politics. Women were engaged in
imperial campaigns, they traversed the colonies and a few, like Hubertine Auclert, influenced
national debates. A feminist activist who established the Women’s Suffrage Society (1883) and
directed the monthly La Citoyenne from 1881–1900, Auclert was a known personality within
France before she travelled to Algeria with her husband in 1888. In the colony she challenged
Islamic law, advocated for Algerian women’s rights and argued for improving female education
and for abolishing polygamy. French imperialists co-opted her work and capitalised on her name
to justify colonialism, which suggests that she shared much in common with the male imperial
heroes Sèbe features in his work. Including women within the cadre of imperial heroes, Sèbe
could more effectively nuance his claims about the cultural work of these celebrities and bolster
his argument about the political and commercial necessity of imperial heroes.
Like the imperial hero, Mérode also stimulated the imagination and invited vicarious iden-
tifications. Exalted for her exceptional physical beauty, Mérode’s body elicited artistic appre-
ciation and incited sexual fantasy. When Falguière immortalised her nude figure in his sensual
statue La Danseuse, he also implicated her within a ‘whole visual culture climate surrounding the
“crisis of the nude” in later nineteenth-century French painting’ (54). Falguière’s sculpture
titillated because it ‘offered a palpable rendering of living, female flesh’, that, Garval maintains,
represented the ‘captivating female performer’s current celebrity, a renown perhaps as fragile and
fleeting as the youthful pulchritude that the work recorded’ (56). At the same time that Mérode’s
nubile body evoked broader aesthetic debates, it also stirred men’s passions and provided women
a model of feminine beauty to emulate. Indeed, Mérode cultivated her fan base by playing on the
desires of both men and women to possess her body. Through her photographic reproductions,
particularly the postcard, she injected her celebrity into the personal lives of her admirers;
dramatising the ‘dynamics of presence and absence, possession and loss’ that would characterise
the public’s relationship to celebrity throughout the twentieth century (148).
In many respects Mérode undeniably foreshadowed twentieth-century celebrity; but to what
extent is Garval’s celebrity genealogy too facile and to what degree is his insistence on Mérode’s
role too limiting? As Garval himself acknowledges, Mérode’s star emerged at a moment when
female performers were overtaking male heroes as consequential public figures and the dancer
certainly had to compete with numerous other women to establish herself as the ‘first modern
icon’. Although he gestures to many of her competitors, Garval minimises their centrality to the
celebrity making process. Known throughout the world, Sarah Bernhardt, like Mérode, endorsed
consumer products, elicited men’s fantasies and stoked women’s imaginations. Yet Bernhardt
had real talent, so Garval dismisses her as a candidate for celebrity. But what of the dozens of
other famous women with whom Mérode competed? Was Polaire’s extremely tight-corseted
waist or Marguerite Durand’s striking blonde hair any less mesmerising than Mérode’s hidden
ears? Did Carolina Otero or Jane Avril defy celebrity because rather than simply act like cour-
tesans they lived as them? By more explicitly delineating the differences among Mérode and her
peers, Garval could strengthen his claim for Mérode and more effectively illustrate how modern
celebrity emerged in late-nineteenth century France.
The meanings attached to Marie Curie’s celebrity had everything to do with her remarkable
role as a female scientist. In contrast to male scientists, Hemmungs Wirten contends, she could
not be abstracted or generalised because as a woman in science she never fit; rather she circulated
‘in a closed loop reserved for a specific historical actor, whose experience as a woman is so
extraordinary’ that “the only story” she can tell us is the ‘one about her’ (2). As a woman Curie
could not lay claim to the values of male heroism (duty, discipline, sacrifice) that she embodied as
a scientist but instead crafted her image through feminine middle-class attributes, notably
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 Contemporary European History 9

seriousness and sobriety (45, 49). ‘Her black dresses and grave demeanour epitomized’ not the
radical individualism displayed by other female celebrities but “‘the celebrity of ordinariness”’
admired by the bourgeois readers of Femina (59). Despite her ‘just like us’ appeal, Curie
nevertheless resisted conventional gender norms, fighting for intellectual property rights, con-
testing patent law and working in a male-dominated profession. As a celebrated woman scientist,
Curie challenged the politics of science as well as the politics of gender that together shaped her
celebrity.
Hemmungs Wirten deftly analyses how Curie manipulated social norms and the commercial
media to produce her celebrity; what is less clear, however, is the extent to which Curie drew
upon conventions of gender and genre to author her celebrity. To that end, reception, audience
and the wider context in which Curie worked and wrote could be more fully developed. The
author sketches the public frame of Curie’s celebrity, for example, examining her reception in the
United States and addressing her legacy; however, because she limits her primary source material
to Curie’s writings, intermittent press coverage, professional notebooks and personal corre-
spondences, she misses the opportunity to more firmly establish Curie’s position within an
internationalising twentieth-century celebrity culture.
Whereas imperial heroes Mérode and Curie circulated through the celebrity economy as
value-laden cultural signifiers, post-war intellectuals generated meanings more explicitly in their
capacity as political messengers. In their ‘public intellectual performances, that of ironical cul-
tural critic as well as that of earnest journalist using imagination to give people a face and to
humanize them’, Dubravka Ugresić and Slavenka Drakulić became mouthpieces for Eastern
Europeans under communism, providing a ‘public private voice’ through which shared experi-
ences could be individuated and articulated (52). Public intellectuals like Ugresić and Drakulić
cultivate intimacy with the public not only by inserting themselves into the story or offering their
personal diaries for public consumption, but also by adopting literary techniques that obscure
boundaries between the real and the fictive, between personal truth and social reality. In this way,
they mediate viewpoints, intervene into political debates and even, Heynders suggests, act as
democratic foot soldiers.
Although to a somewhat lesser extent than Hemmungs Wirten, Heynders also privileges the
production of celebrity over its reception. A case in point: while many of the public intellectuals
in her study are recognisable personalities in Europe, they are unfamiliar to Americans for whom
intellectuals generally garner only limited attention and are primarily known only to academics.
Heynders might have more rigorously interrogated this distinction, especially given her insis-
tence on the significance of transnational political exchanges. Such analysis would also enhance
her claim that ideas (especially when linked to charismatic personalities) continue to exercise
power in Europe and therefore position the public intellectual as important interlocutors in late-
modern democracies.

Conclusion
Answering Morgan’s call to scrutinise the ‘historical processes of celebrity’, these recent works
have further legitimised celebrity as a topic of serious academic inquiry. In addition to histor-
icising celebrity, these works also traverse historical periods and work in a variety of national and
international contexts to reveal specific ways that celebrity developed before the second half of
the twentieth century. Although remarkably diverse in subject and approach, collectively these
texts position celebrity at the nexus of complex linkages among commerce, culture and politics,
and through these efforts they have shown, in Morgan’s words, how celebrity functioned as ‘both
a product and a motor of modern consumer culture’. Examining heroes, performers, scientists
and intellectuals, moreover, they untangle the intricate webs through which celebrity became
enmeshed within the modern media machine, and they reveal how market forces mediated
celebrity performance. Media expanded the celebrity’s visibility, providing an inexpensive, wide-
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 10 Holly Grout

reaching public forum for his/her dissemination. At the same time, however, celebrities enhanced
media revenues and (in some cases) ensured commercial success. Packaged as commodities and
designed for mass consumption, media generated celebrities thus served the interests of capit-
alism in provocative and profitable ways.
If the books here are any indication, historians are not only beginning to pay attention to
celebrity, they are making important inroads into understanding how it is produced, how it
functions and how it reflects broader political attitudes and cultural currents. Yet these books
also demonstrate that historians remain reluctant to theorise celebrity or to draw too heavily
upon relevant works outside the discipline. A result of this reluctance is that these scholars have
paid far more attention to the production of celebrity than to its reception. Implicit in each work
are arguments about how celebrities foster social belonging and how they connect the individual
to society by representing a shared fund of cultural knowledge. Yet all of these works stop short
of explaining how, through this influence, celebrities created meaning for their audiences.
The imbrication of celebrity within both the mass media and the consumer market undeniably
positioned celebrities as persuasive cultural brokers. To this end they embodied and defied the
values of the dominant culture; they reflected the interests and challenged the assumptions of the
status quo; they acted as ambassadors, as symbols and as repositories for national aspirations,
collective fantasies and personal desires. It is perhaps in this last respect that situating European
celebrity in historical perspective may be most lucrative for future scholarship. As scholars
continue to excavate celebrity’s relationship to the media, the market and the past we might also
pay more attention to celebrity’s multifarious meanings – especially the meanings it held for the
anonymous publics who make celebrity possible in the first place.

Cite this article: Grout, H. 2018. European Celebrity in Historical Perspective. Contemporary European History. X: 1–10.
doi: 10.1017/S0960777318000565

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