text:
Eugène-François Vidocq and the Birth of the Detective

By Daisy Sainsbury
February 7, 2024

According to his memoirs, Eugène-François Vidocq escaped from more than twenty prisons (sometimes dressed as a nun). Working on the other side of the law, he apprehended some 4000 criminals with a team of plainclothes agents. He founded the first criminal investigation bureau — staffed mainly with convicts — and, when he was later fired, the first private detective agency. He was one the fathers of modern criminology and had a rap sheet longer than his very tall tales. Who was Vidocq? Daisy Sainsbury investigates.

When the Brigade de Sûreté was set up in Paris in 1812, it was a first of its kind: a criminal investigation bureau composed of undercover officers, which would later evolve into France’s national police force. At a time when institutionalised policing was still in its infancy, the Sûreté provided the blueprint for Scotland Yard, established in 1829, and the FBI a century later. At its head, one might imagine someone akin to the men who would follow in this bureau chief’s footsteps: Robert Peel, the Conservative politician and future prime minister who first put Britain’s “bobbies” on the beat, or J. Edgar Hoover, a law student who rose through the ranks of the Justice Department to serve as the American federal agency’s first director. Eugène-François Vidocq (1775–1857), the Sûreté’s founding chief, was nothing of the kind. After a youth of petty criminality, he spent the first fifteen years of his adult life either in prison or on the run, leaving him with little time to pursue a political career. And for a man more at home donning disguises and planning daring jailbreaks, administration wasn’t really his thing.
Vidocq’s tale — one of con man turned detective, poacher turned gamekeeper, the criminal who became a criminologist, and later a best-selling writer — captured the imagination of his contemporaries. He inspired many of the greatest writers of his time, providing the model for Vautrin in Honoré de Balzac’s La Comédie humaine, Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (1865), and Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin. If Vidocq continues to fascinate today, interpreted onscreen by the likes of Gérard Depardieu and Vincent Cassel, audiences are still deciding what to make of him. Was he an opportunist crook who took advantage of the radical political upheaval of post-Revolution France to reinvent himself in the emerging power structures of his day? Was he a law-enforcement reformer, with a strong sense of civic duty, who laid the groundwork for modern policing, forensics, and intelligence-gathering methods?
Whatever conclusion a reader reaches, there is little in Vidocq’s early years that presages the events to come. From his own Mémoires (1928–9), we understand that he was born to a perfectly ordinary and relatively well-to-do family in Arras in northern France, where his parents ran a boulangerie.1 By fourteen, however, he had sold off the family porcelain and run away to Ostend, with dreams of emigrating to the United States. When that plan failed (he didn’t have enough cash for the boat fare), he joined a travelling circus, first as humble stable boy, then as a pay-per-view human cannibal. Despite that apparent promotion, his time in the fairground was an unmitigated failure: he was repeatedly attacked by the monkeys, broke his nose learning to somersault, and was beaten when he refused to eat a live chicken as part of his stage act.
Facing these adversities, Vidocq did what he would spend the next two decades of his life doing: he ran away again. He joined an itinerant puppet show, which quickly went awry when he was caught in flagrante with the puppet master’s wife during a performance of Punch and Judy. After a few more vagrant twists and turns, he gave up and went home — a prodigal son, remorseful but unreformed. His mother, a doting, forgiving figure who would provide one of the few constants in his life, welcomed him back with open arms. By then, however, the young Vidocq had developed a penchant for brawls, boozing, and women, so when he suggested he might join the army, his father leapt at the idea, and his mother reluctantly agreed.
Vidocq’s time in the military was short-lived, a string of desertions and regiment hops, including a brief defection to the Austrians, with whom he fought against the French, followed by a prompt return to his compatriots. This culminated in his enlistment in the armée roulante, a roving militia made up primarily of petty criminals and deserters who, with fake papers and stolen uniforms, would tack onto the regular army’s troops in the hope of one day securing an official post, and, in the short term, enjoying whatever spoils of war they could find.
Between the ages of nineteen and thirty-four, Vidocq spent most of his time in and out of prison. His first conviction — for assaulting his mistress’ other lover — led to a series of incarcerations for a variety of offences, of which just one saddled him with a lengthy, eight-year sentence. In 1798, while already imprisoned in Lille, he was found complicit in forging a release order for another inmate and condemned to spend his days toiling in the “bagne” in Brest. The galleys, notorious at the time for their appalling conditions, consisted of ships moored in ports where convicts were forced to carry out hard labour. Vidocq didn’t much care for hard labour. He escaped in disguise, first as a sailor, then a milk porter, later as a nun. Although the last of these attempts was briefly successful, he was recaptured the following year and sent to the galleys again, this time in Toulon. In the early 1800s, he escaped again, was jailed again, escaped again, leading Vidocq to boast in his memoirs of having escaped from all the galleys of France, and more than twenty prisons. ※※Indexed under…Concealmentas nun
Somewhere in this cycle of escape, re-arrest, re-incarceration, Vidocq decided he wanted to go straight. In 1809, then aged thirty-four and on the run in Paris, he made an unusual move: he turned himself in. It was likely at this stage that he offered to act as an informant in exchange for his liberty, a bargain frequently struck in nineteenth-century France. He wasn’t released, but he was spared another trip to the “bagnes”. He was sent to regular prison, first Bicêtre and later La Force, where, for twenty-one months, he fed information gleaned from his fellow inmates to the authorities. Vidocq must have known better than most which buttons to push to extract a confession, being well acquainted with the compulsion to brag of one’s criminal past.
The authorities were happy with his work, and in 1811, on the condition that he would continue to be an informant on the outside, they helped him stage his escape from La Force, further boosting his street credibility with the criminal gangs he was tasked with infiltrating. Within a year, he was promoted from salaried informant to the head of a newly formed unit, the Brigade de Sûreté, decreed a national security force by Napoleon in 1813.
With offices near the Paris Prefecture on Ile de la Cité, the Brigade de Sûreté began as a five-man outfit made up of Vidocq and four plainclothes, undercover agents. Together, they apprehended murderers, forgers, and thieves, seized stolen goods, and returned escaped convicts to prison. Vidocq’s officers were not paid a salary, but worked on commission, taking a fee for each successfully completed case. The arrest rate rose considerably, and within the first seven years of the Sûreté’s existence, it had, by Vidocq’s count, apprehended more than four thousand criminals.
As the Sûreté evolved, Vidocq developed a number of policing methods still widely used today. Chief among these was the keeping of detailed written records, which may sound prosaic, but was revolutionary in its time. He maintained a card index system, with notes on some thirty thousand criminals, including physical descriptions, aliases, previous convictions, and modus operandi. That proto database, coupled with the practice of sending his agents to prisons to familiarise themselves with convicts susceptible to reoffend upon release, leant a pre-emptive, as well as reactive bent to his police work. Vidocq also lays claim to being one of the earliest proponents of forensics. At crime scenes, he would jot down seemingly irrelevant details that might later prove useful. He preserved footprints with plaster of Paris and, while unable to find an ink that dried slowly enough to take a proper impression, he recognised the forensic potential of fingerprinting long before it became a mainstay of modern policing. He compared forged notes with handwriting samples, and in a rudimentary form of ballistics (an as-yet undeveloped science), unmasked a murderer by matching bullet to gun barrel.
Thanks in part to these methods, the Brigade de Sûreté was a success, and Vidocq’s team grew steadily from four to twenty-eight agents. He recruited several women to his ranks (it took a further century for the British police to employ its first female officer, in 1915). Almost all his agents were ex-convicts. As Vidocq acknowledges in his memoirs, the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1814–15 no doubt facilitated the Sûreté’s expansion. Out-of-work soldiers and prisoners of war flocked to the French capital and, fearing a dramatic surge in crime, the Prefecture was all too glad to increase the resources at Vidocq’s disposal. The fact that he was swelling his ranks with former criminals was not out of keeping with the zeitgeist. Paul Metzner, in a study of the sociocultural circumstances in which Vidocq’s success was forged, explores the complex and sometimes contradictory impact of the French Revolution.2 The rebels that had overthrown the existing order, only to crack down on those perceived as a threat to the newly established status quo, were both sympathetic to the ascent to power of figures from unlikely quarters, but were also acutely aware of the importance of crowd control. They recognised the value of keeping potential troublemakers on the inside.
Beyond the obvious pitfalls of working with former criminals (Vidocq had his watch stolen by one recruit, a notorious pickpocket), the Sûreté came under constant scrutiny on account of its agents’ dubious pasts. Vidocq’s superior, the head of the Paris Prefecture, Jean Henry, fielded frequent complaints that Vidocq and his team were accepting bribes, engineering crimes so as to later solve them, and profiting from the proceeds along the way. In court, defendants caught on quickly, claiming they were victims of another of Vidocq’s elaborate setups.
In 1827, aged fifty-two, Vidocq left the Sûreté. Whether he was sacked or resigned is an open question, but in all likelihood, he jumped before he was pushed. He left a wealthy man, with half a million francs to his name. Quite how he managed this feat is unclear. His annual salary was five thousand francs, and even if he had cultivated investments on the side, his newfound wealth certainly didn’t help the rumours of unlawful enrichment.
Finding himself with time on his hands, Vidocq set to work on his memoirs, which were published in four volumes between 1828 and 1829.3 They were an instant hit, translated into English within a year, and he shot to literary stardom on both sides of the channel. This gained him new friends and dinner companions in the form of France’s greatest nineteenth-century writers — Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas père, Théophile Gautier — all of whom poached freely from Vidocq’s seemingly endless supply of tales about the criminal underworld, and the ingenious feats of detective work that outsmarted it. Metzner writes:
Crime became the object of increasing fear in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, and also of increasing fascination. These were the decades when the many popular theaters founded since the 1790s began to set their violent melodramas locally rather than in exotic places. . . . Reassuringly, in melodramas the good guys always won. Likewise, in his Mémoires, detective Vidocq always got his man.4
In this respect, Vidocq’s memoirs anticipate both the emergence of the detective novel in the decades that followed and the true crime genre that continues to captivate audiences today. This double heritage is particularly apt as, in their fast-paced romp from misspent youth to later reformation, his memoirs are an audacious amalgamation of fact and fiction. The author embellishes some of his more palatable crimes — usually the “victimless” ones, or ones where he was merely avenging himself for an earlier wrong — and plays down others. In the forgery case, for which he was yet to complete his full eight-year sentence, he paints himself as a hapless bystander.
Vidocq’s memoirs have all the chaos and manic energy of the political period in which they took place, and perhaps their greatest appeal for a modern reader is the glimpse they offer of that era, albeit via the gaze of a distinctly unreliable narrator. They document some of the bloodiest episodes of the Reign of Terror, not least the fate of a “M. de Vieux Pont”, outed as a Royalist by his pet parrot’s cries of “Vive le roi!” and promptly guillotined. They also provide one of the most detailed contemporary accounts of the armée roulante.
The memoirs reflect the bellicose spirit of a man who found enemies, real or imagined, at every turn, leading James Morton, in his 2004 biography, to carve up Vidocq’s life into the following chapter headings: “Vidocq Against His Parents”, “Vidocq Against His Wife in Particular”, “Vidocq Against Women in General”, “Vidocq Against the Gypsies”, and so on, until we reach “Vidocq Against Death”.5 But his memoirs also contain a more considered reflection on the author’s own struggles as an ex-convict trying to clean up his act, which would turn him into, if not an altruist, then something of a social reformer. He describes the life-long sentence imposed on former convicts, outcast by ordinary society and constantly lured back to a life of crime:
[I sought] to lay down an impassable line of demarcation between the past and the present; for I saw but too plainly, that the future was dependent on the past; and I was the more wretched, as the police, who have not always due powers of discernment, would not permit me to forget myself. I saw myself again on the point of being snared like a deer. The persuasion that I was interdicted from becoming an honest man drove me to despair.6
Vidocq would later become an advocate of prison reform, travelling to London in 1835 to give evidence to a House of Lords committee on, inter alia, the problems prisoners face upon release. In 1844, he published a tract on crime and recidivism, which, to adopt Morton’s formula, could be summed up as “Vidocq Against the Justice System”.7 The tract addresses a number of questions: Does prison exist to punish or rehabilitate? What are the factors that push people into crime in the first place? What are the solutions? Vidocq’s answer to the last include improving conditions for society’s poorest; making prisons a place of re-education, where inmates can learn an honest trade; and granting them more regular contact with family members while inside to facilitate their reintegration into society upon release. Among other things, the tract takes aim at the white lead industry, one of the few sectors in which ex-convicts could find work, but which led to poisoning and premature death.
Consequently, Vidocq embarked on another major endeavour after leaving the Sûreté. He set up a paper factory in Sainte-Mandé, a village on the outskirts of Paris, with a workforce composed exclusively of former convicts. The project was not a success. It was met with local resistance, proved costly to run, and clients refused to pay the going rates, assuming that ex-convicts meant cheaper labour, and therefore cheaper prices. The factory was forced to close. By 1831, Vidocq went bankrupt.
Fortunately, back at the Sûreté, Vidocq’s absence was palpable. According to newspapers at the time, crime rates had shot up in the wake of his departure; whether he was trustworthy or not was up for discussion, but he was certainly efficient. He returned to the fold, first as an agent, and was soon reinstated as chief. During this second tenure, Robert Peel, who had recently established Scotland Yard, sent a committee to solicit Vidocq’s advice. Within a decade, London had its own force of undercover police officers, which would eventually become the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) in 1878.
Vidocq’s second tenure lasted little more than six months. Facing widespread criticism and a push for greater transparency, the Paris Prefecture instigated a cleanup and started sacking employees with a prior criminal record. In November 1832, Vidocq was forced to resign again. A few days later, he founded what is considered by many to be the world’s first private detective agency. The Bureau de Renseignements’ remit was twofold. On the one hand, it dealt in corporate intelligence, offering debt collecting and due diligence services. Via a subscription model, companies could pay to access a database derived from the elaborate filing system Vidocq had created while at the Sûreté, allowing them to conduct background checks on prospective collaborators and clients. In tandem, the agency also dealt in what it called “intimate” or “confidential” matters. This covered everything from spying on spouses suspected of having affairs (the poet Alfred de Vigny was one such client); hunting down missing loved ones (usually daughters of respectable families who’d eloped with disreputable suitors); and recovering personal possessions (jewellery, watches, Dr Coreff’s pet cockatoo, the Mayor of Rouen’s racehorse. . .)
Vidocq, catapulted to fame by his memoirs, had no problem attracting clients, and at its peak, the Bureau de Renseignements employed some forty agents and saw over forty clients a day. Dominique Kalifa, considering the role Vidocq’s agency played in the development of the private investigation sector, mitigates the claim that it was a world first, pointing to the 250 agents d’affaires already operating in Paris in 1819, whose mission overlapped with Vidocq’s in recovered debts and advising on the solvency of potential clients.8 However, Kalifa argues, the Bureau set the mould for what a private detective agency would become. As well as combining business intelligence with personal affairs, and promoting its services in newspaper adverts, it was the first to seek to lend technical and scientific legitimacy to its work, either by importing the policing methods developed at the Sûreté, or through implementing inventions such as Vidocq’s patented indelible ink and forgery-proof paper. Above all, Vidocq, who never wasted an opportunity to play up his background as a police chief, sought to align his private enterprise with state-run law enforcement.
While this was a selling point, it also had its drawbacks. The actual police, under the distinct impression that the Bureau de Renseignements was encroaching on its own territory, made repeated efforts to close it down, seizing Vidocq’s files and taking him to court in 1837 and 1843. At trial, the agency was accused of a series of offences: fraud, abduction, corruption of civil servants, defamation, pretension of public functions, usury, selling honours, stealing letters, providing substitutes for conscripts hoping to avoid military service . . . the list went on. While Vidocq was ultimately acquitted by a public jury, the lengthy and costly trials, the confiscation of his files, which formed the bedrock of his business, and the disruption to the agency’s day-to-day work took its toll. Ironically, the trials served only to cement the public’s support for Vidocq, but the damage had been done and the Bureau was forced to close.
In 1845, Vidocq travelled to London to explore the possibility of opening a new private detective agency, a project that never got off the ground. While there, an exhibition was held at the Regent Street Cosmorama, showing off his collection of crime paraphernalia, including the many disguises for which he was by then renowned. The Times wrote a glowing review, complete with a fawning portrait of the French spy chief. In the years that followed, however, the press went quiet. Vidocq fell off the radar. Letters he wrote at the time paint a bleak picture of a life of increasing poverty. In one imploring address to the new head of the Sûreté, he appeals for a government pension. It is possible that Vidocq, ever the wheeler-dealer, was playing up the extent of his misfortune; other accounts have him working as a political spy between Paris and London, monitoring the goings-on of figures like Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte.
What is known, however, is that when Vidocq died, on May 11, 1857 at the age of eighty-two, his fortune amounted to less than three thousand francs.9 This must have come as a disappointment to the eleven women who claimed to have possession of his will, in which each was identified as sole beneficiary of his estate. The obituaries came in thick and fast. One, printed in the local newspaper, L’Ariégeois, read:
The death of the famous Vidocq, head of the Sûreté police under the restoration, has been announced in Paris. Since his dismissal, he sought resources from a variety of random industries: for a handsome salary, he spied on husbands for their wives, and wives for their husbands; he also opened an office to track down stolen goods, but whatever his skill and his connections with the capital's crooks, he often failed to find the thieves and nonetheless pocketed the money he had been given to pursue them. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, he died in a very miserable state.10
Other write-ups were more generous. Alphonse de Lamartine, the Romantic poet and politician who briefly headed the French government, said of his close friend and fellow opponent of the death penalty: “I liked him, I respected him . . . I learnt, when I was in power, that he was a loyal and trustworthy servant; I will never forget him, and I can proudly say he was an honest man!”11
Lamartine never put Vidocq in his fiction, but his contemporaries did, thus ensuring an enduring legacy on the page. While he made his way into some of the most canonical works of nineteenth-century literature, providing one of the inspirations for Magwitch in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1861) for instance, he also found a home in the “dime novels” that flourished on the other side of the Atlantic in the ensuing decades. In 1877, pulp fiction pioneers Beadle and Adams published an abridged translation of his Mémoires, “Vidocq, the French Police Spy”, in their characteristic ten-cent, paperback format. Presumably spurred on by its success, they continued to wheel out the cunning detective in a series of fictional reincarnations: “Dodger Dick, the Boy Vidocq” (1888), “Happy Hans, the Dutch Vidocq” (1889), “Old Cormorant, the Veteran Vidocq” (1889)  and “Violet Vane, the Ventriloquist Vidocq” (1891). Since then, he has been the hero of a dozen graphic novels, made a guest appearance in the video game Assassin’s Creed, and enjoyed a long afterlife on screen, from Gérard Bourgeois’ silent, black-and-white film, La jeunesse de Vidocq ou Comment on devient policier (1909) to Jean-François Richet’s L’Empereur de Paris (2018), starring a bloody, brawling Vincent Cassel as the French police chief.
If Vidocq’s legacy was contested at his death, it continues to be so today. He enjoys a cult-like status among certain criminologists, not least the members of the Vidocq Society, an American organisation where forensic experts, detectives, FBI agents, and amateur sleuths get together to solve cold cases, inspired by “the father of modern criminal investigation”.12 For Michel Foucault, however, he represents “the disturbing moment when criminality became one of the mechanisms of power.”13 Echoing this, Graham Robb, reviewing a 2003 re-edition of Vidocq’s memoirs, applauds editor Robin Walz’s new preface which presents Vidocq “as a forerunner of the ‘scammers and scoundrels’ in giant American corporations who profit from state-funded violence and who advertise their greed as a self-righteous war on evil.” “It is nice to see”, Robb continues, “that, after a century and a half of misinformed adulation, Vidocq is finally getting his just deserts.”14
For a man known in his lifetime as a master of disguise, capable of appearing several inches taller or shorter than he really was, it is fitting that today Vidocq lives on in a hundred different iterations, each a projection of what the beholder wishes to see. Hero, antihero, showman, shapeshifter: in the absence of independently verifiable truth, Eugène-François Vidocq will be whatever you want him to be.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: February 7, 2024

author: Daisy Sainsbur


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Liberal Visions and Boring Machines
The Early History of the Channel Tunnel
By Peter Keeling
January 10, 2024

More than a century before the Eurostar and LeShuttle, a group of engineers and statesmen dreamed (and fretted) about connecting Britain to France with an underwater tunnel. Peter Keeling drills into the history of this submarine link, and finds a still-relevant story about the cosmopolitan hopes and isolationist panic surrounding liberal internationalism.

The English Channel (la Manche, “the sleeve”, to the French) is one of the roughest sea crossings in the world. At its narrowest, in the Strait of Dover, it is a mere twenty miles across, but for those attempting the crossing this brevity is of little comfort. The Strait’s shallowness, combined with its unique tidal streams, ocean currents, and regular fog, make for a turbulent and hazardous journey, and the sea sickness it induces is notorious.
For centuries, the Channel was Britain's bulwark against foreign invasion. The vicious weather was given a divine interpretation as the “protestant wind” which sunk the Spanish Armada in 1588. But this was a double-edged sword: merchant shipping was as vulnerable as Phillip II’s great fleet. With the industrial era came peace and increased trade, and by the early nineteenth century the UK was the largest producer of manufactured goods in the world. Improvements in shipping and port facilities greatly facilitated trade, but the logistical problem of transferring goods from ship to shore remained. Unsurprisingly, faced with this issue, thoughts began to turn toward methods of avoiding the water altogether. In 1785, the trip was first made by balloon, but the first aeroplane would not follow until 1909. In 1851, a telegraph wire linked London and Paris directly. Might it be possible for a railway to follow? Many engineers believed it was: they proposed a tunnel, joining the roads and railways of Britain to those of mainland Europe.
But this was not simply a problem of engineering and geology. The idea of a fixed link was deeply intertwined with the issue of how the British understood international relations and their place in Europe during the age of imperialism. On the one hand stood those who believed in a shared European liberalism, founded on a belief in “the people” and the unifying power of international communications and free trade. For these champions of progress, great railway projects represented the spirit of the age: iron rails “knitting together the hearts of nations”, as one proponent would put it. Opposing this were Britons of a more pessimistic and suspicious disposition, who regarded Europe as permanently riven by diplomatic, military, and imperial tensions. For them, railways were a weapon, and the proposed channel tunnel a military frontier, exposing their wealthy and unprepared island to the massed armies of mainland Europe. It was this clash of worldviews, not the engineering challenge, that would decide the fate of the project.
The French Pioneers
In 1802, during a lull in the Napoleonic wars, an otherwise unknown French mining engineer named Albert Mathieu proposed what is thought to be the first plan to bypass the Channel. He envisioned a tunnel ventilated by enormous iron chimneys, projecting above the sea, as well as an artificial “international island”, relay station (to allow carriages to change horses), and harbour on the Varne sandbank at the Strait’s midpoint. The plans were prominently exhibited at the French school of mines and in the legislature, where Napoleon Bonaparte presumably first saw it. Bonapate brought it to the attention of the British opposition politician Charles James Fox, who is said to have reacted enthusiastically. However, the project was abandoned with the return of war.1
Three decades later, Mathieu’s mantle was taken up by the man most deserving of the accolade “Father of the Channel Tunnel”, Aimé Thomé de Gamond. The very picture of a nineteenth-century renaissance man — alongside his studies in geology and engineering, he also acquired a doctorate in medicine and law — Thomé de Gamond became fascinated by the idea of a link across the Channel while researching rivers in France. By the end of the 1830s, he had produced a wide variety of plans, from vast bridges, to iron tubes, to a masonry tunnel on the seabed.
Thomé de Gamond was not alone in his desire to join Britain to the Continent.2 Due to a lack of geological knowledge, however, few of his peers dared propose a tunnel underneath the seabed. While studies had shown the strata of the English and French coasts to be identical, it was not known whether the Strait of Dover itself had been created by the two coasts moving apart to create a rift valley, or the erosion of an ancient land bridge which once connected Kent to Northern France. If the strait was a rift, then a tunnel would be difficult, if not impossible — any attempt would be tunnelling into unknown and inconsistent geology, potentially containing hard rock requiring an enormous outlay in manual labour or explosives.
After exhausting all terrestrial research methods, Thomé de Gamond set out to solve the mystery of the strait via three extraordinary solo dives in 1855. Weighed down by 160 pounds of flint, he stoppered his ears with home-made plugs of lard, and turned his mouth into a de facto valve, using olive oil to expel air without taking in water. Thus equipped, he successfully descended over one hundred feet to collect soil samples from the seabed, ascending afterward with the help of ten inflated pig bladders. On his final dive, the renaissance man found himself fending off an attack by conger eels.3
The adventure paid off. Examination of the samples confirmed that Britain and France had once been connected by a landmass since eroded away, and that the geological strata were continuous between the two coasts. Because the rock was soft chalk, the work would not require laborious drilling and dynamite. A bored tunnel became feasible for the first time.
The Spirit of the Age
Thomé de Gamond’s discovery came at a fertile moment in European intellectual and scientific history. The Continent’s rapidly expanding technological, industrial, and economic power — and the imperial arrogance it fuelled — had produced an intoxicating cult of scientific progress to whom all things seemed possible.4 Railways were at the cutting edge of this new world. The first commercial railway, between Liverpool and Manchester, had opened in 1830, and by 1850 over 20,000 kilometres of tracks crisscrossed Europe.
Tunnels were an integral part of railway construction from the start, but during the second half of the century they were accomplished on an altogether more heroic scale. In 1871, the Mont Cenis Tunnel connected France and Italy through the Alps, followed in 1882 by the nine-mile Gotthard Tunnel, then the longest in the world. Four years later England and Wales were linked by four miles of tunnel underneath the Severn River estuary. These feats of engineering “incarnated what the age understood as progress”, writes Rosalind Williams.5 The completion of each line was celebrated as a triumph of science over nature, and their designers and builders feted as men at the vanguard of civilisation’s steady march. In this context, the lack of a link across the English Channel was more than an anomaly, it was a failure of economic and social progress. As the engineer and tunnel advocate James Chalmers wrote in 1861:
Glancing over the Railway Map of Europe, the intelligent eye traces numerous lines tending to certain points, almost invariably to great cities. There is, however, one remarkable exception to this general rule: on the Continent, from North, East, and South, and in England from South, West, and North, lines are seen drawing together, stretching out their iron arms as if they would embrace, when, lo! they have stopped.6
The enthusiasm for technological progress went hand-in-hand with the rise of a self-confident liberal internationalism, encapsulated in events such as the 1851 Great Exhibition in London and 1860 Anglo-French free trade treaty. The chief architects of the treaty, Richard Cobden and Michel Chevalier, taught that the underlying forces in history were moving inexorably toward the unity of humanity: improved trade and communications would eventually render warfare obsolete.7 They idealised “the people” and attacked “vested interests” in the armed forces and aristocracy, whom they believed were the real drivers of international conflict. “Free Trade is God’s diplomacy”, Cobden once wrote, “and there is no other certain way of uniting people in the bonds of peace.”8 Both Cobden and Chevalier came to support the Channel Tunnel project, seeing it as an important step toward the eventual unification of Europe, a “true arch of alliance”, in words attributed to Cobden and often quoted by tunnel advocates.9
The fruits of Thomé de Gamond’s labours ripened in 1856, with a comprehensive proposal for a double-track railway tunnel connecting East Wear Bay, near Folkestone, to Cap Gris-Nez in Pas-de-Calais. Like Mathieu, he envisaged an international port on the Varne Bank, with ventilation shafts and lighthouses lining the route. Construction would begin from temporary stone islands built at intervals across the Channel, from which the ventilation shafts would be sunk, and the tunnel would employ steel “shields” of the kind pioneered in the construction of the Thames tunnel. Hailed by leading engineers including Robert Stephenson and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and with the support of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and Napoleon III, the scheme seemed on the road to realisation, “an end”, according to its inventor, “as useful as it is glorious”.10
However, in a series of events which would become grimly familiar to supporters of the Tunnel, the project foundered amid a breakdown of relations between the two nations. Following an attempt on Napoleon’s life by an Italian nationalist with a bomb made in Britain, an invasion scare was whipped up by the British press. This was cynically exploited by the Francophobe Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, who used the opportunity to ring Plymouth and Portsmouth with expensive and useless fortifications. The antithesis of the optimistic liberal, Palmerston thought that a tunnel would remove “our natural defence against a continental enemy”.11 Cobden and Chevalier believed him to be obsessed with the Napoleonic wars of his youth: “his mind is haunted with ideas of a French invasion”.12 This was the world-view, pessimistic and suspicious, which Tunnel advocates would have to overcome if their project was to succeed.
The British Dive In
During the 1860s, Thomé De Gamond was joined by British engineers including William Low and John Hawkshaw, who dropped the Varne bank idea to focus on the stretch of sea directly between Dover and Calais. Extensive soundings and surveys were conducted, and by the end of the decade a joint Anglo-French committee had been established to take the project forward.
In 1872, a British Channel Tunnel Company was established, and a French company appeared in 1875. At the suggestion of the British (Palmerston having been replaced as Prime Minister by the more sympathetic Disraeli), an official joint commission with representatives of both nations was set up to establish codes and regulations for the proposed tunnel.13 On August 2, 1875, both nations passed acts empowering their respective companies to begin work.14 Progress, however, stalled less than two years later. Complete proof of viability was still lacking, denting investor confidence. Stymied by financial problems, the British company had achieved little by 1876, when the concessions granted by the 1875 Act expired.
It was at this point that the Tunnel was taken up by Sir Edward William Watkin, the independent Liberal Member of Parliament for Hythe and chairman of three major railways companies, including the South Eastern, which operated throughout Kent. Pugnacious and stubborn, a consummate businessman and publicist with a mind attracted to large and visionary engineering projects, Watkin possessed a passionate belief in the power of free trade.15 He assembled an eminent scientific and legal advisory committee, including lawyers, electrical, hydraulic, and mining engineers, geologists, soldiers, and the President of the Royal Society. But the key individuals were two Royal Engineer officers, Colonel Frederick Beaumont and Captain Thomas English, who finally proved that the Tunnel was viable.
Both were skilled inventors. During the later 1870s, Beaumont was experimenting with locomotives and trams powered by compressed air.16 English was an expert in steel armour plate, the material needed to build durable mining equipment, and in 1880 patented a new boring machine based on a previous design by Beaumont.17 A year later, the two men produced a tunnelling machine using English’s patent, powered by Beaumont’s compressed air engine. The result was a triumph of engineering, the ideal tool for the job. Featuring a revolving cutter which could dig a seven-foot diameter tunnel at a rate of one yard an hour, and a conveyor for the removal of spoil, the machine required fewer than ten men to operate. Crucially, its power source meant that it not only produced no dangerous fumes, but, by releasing air after use, it ventilated the Tunnel as it worked.18
On October 14, 1880, the Beaumont-English machine began trial borings at Abbots cliff, near Dover. The layer of grey chalk into which the machine dug was easy to cut, yet practically watertight. In September the next year, after boring 842 yards of test tunnel, the machine was moved to a new site beneath Shakespeare cliff, the closest point between England and France. At the end of the year, Watkin founded the grandiosely named Submarine Continental Railway Company to oversee this work. The French Compagnie du Chemin-de-fer Sousmarine soon started boring out from Sangatte, near Calais, using a modified version of the Beaumont-English machine. For the first time in the history of the project, miners were working underneath the sea.19
“It is one of the proudest moments of my life”, declared Beaumont, “to see the probable realization of what has always been a dream of mine.”20 Beaumont dreamed big. He envisioned an international undersea railway powered entirely by compressed air, with carriages pulled by eighty-ton locomotives that would ventilate the Tunnel as they cruised.21
Boring Toward Brotherhood; Digging to Disaster
In June 1881, Watkin announced to a startled nation that he expected to complete an initial “experimental” tunnel within five years, with a view to opening the line sometime in the 1890s. “I was born an islander, but it is my ambition to die a member of the great European Continent.”22 The only apparent obstacle was the small matter of passing a bill in Parliament to allow the company to tunnel under the seabed, which was Crown property.
The Channel Tunnel was to be the crowning achievement of both international engineering and Watkin’s own career, “a work without an equal among all the labours until now accomplished by the hand of man.”23 But it was also something else: a practical continuation of the work of Richard Cobden, and a concrete step toward an eventual European free trade union. By forging economic and personal links between the populations of Britain and France, the Tunnel would help remove antagonism from the bottom up, allowing a new understanding to “permeate through the masses” of both countries. “It is obvious”, Watkin told the Submarine Continental shareholders, “that the Channel becomes every year more and more of a break, retarding and embarrassing the great interchanges of nations.”
Watkin’s was a particularly British vision of European unity. A staunch patriot as much as an internationalist, he firmly believed that liberty, free trade, and peace were the methods by which Britain had achieved its economic and imperial successes. The Tunnel was a method of exporting these values to the European mainland:
. . . so far from England being, as it were, diluted with the ideas and arts of the Continent, the Continent would benefit by better and closer access to the freedom and industry of England . . . the friendly competitions of labour in all its departments would become a common heritage of blessing to the world at large.
This heady mix of scientific, commercial, and civilizational “progress” was most passionately articulated by Watkin’s lieutenant in Parliament, Lord Brabourne:
In spite of all opposition, science ever advances; in such an issue as the present, civilization and Christianity are marching hand in hand; the obstacles suggested, and perhaps for a time sustained, by insular prejudice and professional pedantry, will pale and fade away before the spirit of the age; and, in the triumph of the Channel Tunnel, one more step will be accomplished in the uniting and knitting together the hearts of nations, and in the nearer approach to the full and blessed recognition of the universal brotherhood of mankind!24
Little seemed to stand in the way of Watkin’s Channel Tunnel in January 1882. Public opinion was supportive, while the Liberal government was led by Watkin’s friend William Gladstone, a known Tunnel enthusiast. Gladstone had won the 1880 general election on a platform of internationalism, peace, and free trade; to Watkin, the Channel Tunnel was an ideal match for these policies.
At this moment, however, hitherto suppressed forces burst forth upon the project. Unbeknownst to the public, an official committee consisting of the Board of Trade, the War Office, and Admiralty had been formed in 1881 to examine the implications of the Tunnel. Among the evidence they considered was a memorandum from the Army’s Quartermaster General, Sir Garnet Wolseley.25
While his public image was that of an efficient professional soldier, politically Wolseley was a profound reactionary with an open disdain for the liberal worldview of Cobden, Gladstone, and Watkin. Rather than a measured, technical document, Wolseley’s memorandum on the Tunnel was a furious diatribe against the “specious cry of universal brotherhood” and “selfish cosmopolitans”. In place of Watkin’s optimistic prophesy of Anglo-French amity, Wolseley substituted his own analysis of interstate relations which stressed humanity’s inherently violent and jealous nature.
A chronic pessimist, Wolseley believed that the British Army was dangerously underfunded, a situation he laid directly at the door of liberal internationalists. “Owing to our belief in the virtuous intentions of others”, he wrote, “we live in a constant condition of unpreparedness for war”. In this context, liberal and wealthy Britain was a prize to be seized rather than a civilisation to be emulated. The Tunnel, he argued, would be “a constant inducement to the unscrupulous foreigner to make war upon us, as it would hold out to him hopes of a conquest the like of which the world had never known before”.
Wolseley pointed out that the use of trains during recent wars in the United States and Europe had enabled generals to move troops far further and more rapidly than ever before. To connect Britain with France would expose the UK to the same danger, and he suggested, without evidence, that the Tunnel could be used to bring five thousand soldiers an hour into the country. He imagined a sudden surprise attack during a period of “profound peace”, with no warning and without an official declaration of war, “whilst we gentlemen of England were abed, dreaming of the time when the lion and the lamb are to lie down together”. With London the only unfortified capital in Europe and no large conscript army to rival those of France or Germany, the UK would be quickly overcome. Annexed to the continent and unable to recover behind its protective moat, the British would face “national annihilation”, becoming “the helots of France for ever”.26
But the real bite in Wolseley’s argument was not his future war scenario, but the analysis of British society. Personal freedom, low taxation, free trade, and a small army were made possible by the security offered by the Channel. By introducing the danger, however remote, of land invasion, the Tunnel would fundamentally upset this consensus. The result would infect the country with “panic, that horrid malady from which all nations having insignificant armies, and very powerful neighbours, suffer periodically”. Any movement by French troops near Calais might spark fear in Britain that an attack was imminent. The impossibility of developing a failsafe defence system would trap the nation into an escalating series of panics and enormous military spending programmes, with the result that the UK would eventually have to “imitate Continental nations” and establish a system of universal military conscription. As an aside, Wolseley asserted his belief that such an army would be impossible under “our form of government”, a suggestion that the Tunnel could do away with parliamentary democracy itself. The greatest threat posed by the Tunnel was not necessarily the horrors of an invasion, but the economic and societal cost of insuring against it.
Panic Petitions and Champagne Under the Sea
In February 1882, excerpts from Wolseley’s memorandum were published in The Nineteenth Century magazine, and over the following month he and other Army and Navy officers proceeded to conduct a coordinated public campaign against the Tunnel. In this they were aided by James Knowles, the editor of The Nineteenth Century, who organised a special edition and petition against the scheme, signed by many eminent, if not exactly representative, public figures, including a number of prominent liberals such as T. H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and fourteen Liberal MPs.27 The accompanying essay by Knowles, a diatribe against selfish “company-promoters”, boiled Wolseley’s arguments down to a trinity of terror: a “certainty” of increased military expenditure, a “probability” of panics, and “the possibility of an irretrievable disaster from invasion”. It was clear that the issue had struck something deep within the nervous system of liberal Britain. When it came to the point, many did not believe that “the people” would embrace their new continental connection in the spirit of universal brotherhood. “The alarmists sign [the petition] because they are alarmists”, reflected The Scotsman. “The non-alarmists sign because they do not wish the country to be alarmed.”28
Watkin responded to these attacks with every weapon in his arsenal. He encouraged his friends to write and speak in support of the Tunnel, and soon the papers and journals were consumed with debates about the scheme. He scored a particular success when Sir Andrew Clarke, the Commandant of the Royal School of Military Engineering, published a trenchant article assuring readers that there was no example in history of an entire army being deployed by a single railway line, and dismissing a potential secret invasion as a “simple impossibility”.29 More generally, Tunnel supporters pointed out that destroying, blocking, or flooding the Tunnel would be a trivial matter, especially considering the entrance fell under the guns of both Dover Castle and any warship anchored in the harbour.30 Watkin also employed softer means of persuasion, inviting a wide range of celebrities (including both Gladstone and Wolseley) to visit the Tunnel works underneath the sea, where they could enjoy a champagne reception and examine the boring machine in the glow of electric lights.
These rebuttals failed to stem the tide of public opinion, which, now obsessed with the fear of panic, flowed strongly against the Tunnel. Torn between his personal beliefs and political instincts, Gladstone shunted the issue to a Parliamentary select committee, who failed to come to an agreement, splitting six to four against the scheme. This was the excuse the government needed to extricate itself. Watkin’s Channel Tunnel (Experimental Works) Bill was formally withdrawn from the Commons on July 24, 1883.31
Work on the heading at Shakespeare’s Cliff had ceased in August 1882; the Board of Trade had eventually been forced to secure an injunction against Watkin, who at one point declared his willingness to go to jail for his Tunnel. When the machine at Sangatte was switched off on March 18, 1883, the two companies had tunnelled 3,863 yards (3.5 km) without serious incident.32 The French machine was soon moved to Liverpool, where it dug a ventilation tunnel for the Mersey railway. The British machine was left where it stood, 130 feet below the Channel.33 The name of the Submarine Continental Railway Company disappeared in 1886 when it merged with the Channel Tunnel Company. Watkin campaigned vigorously but fruitlessly for a further eight years. He retired from the railways in 1894, and died in 1901.
If the military objections had been withdrawn, could the Tunnel have been completed in the nineteenth century? Beaumont and English demonstrated how an undersea tunnel might be made, but their “experimental” works were miniscule compared to the full project. Watkin himself admitted that state support was probably necessary before the link could be finished. It is unlikely that Beaumont’s air-powered trains were viable at the scale envisaged, and the problem of continuous ventilation and maintenance would have been immense. On the other hand, the emergence of electric trains by the end of the century would have greatly simplified the problem.34 What is certain is that geology was on their side. At the end of the 1980s, during the construction of the modern Tunnel, a Eurotunnel/TransManche boring machine bisected the Submarine Continental’s heading under the sea.35 The 1882 works were found to be watertight, with rails and handcarts still in place: a reminder that people had come this way before.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: January 10, 2024

author: Peter Keeling

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
The Silent Treatment
Solitary Confinement’s Unlikely Origins
By Jane Brox
October 25, 2023

Characterised today by the noise of banging, buzzers, and the cries of inmates, solitary confinement was originally developed from Quaker ideas about the redemptive power of silence, envisioned as a humane alternative to the punitive violence of late-18th century jails. Revisiting Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary, Jane Brox discovers the spiritual origins and reformist ambitions of solitary’s early advocates, and sees their supposedly progressive desires come to ruin by the 20th century.

On any given day in the United States, of the more than one million men and women incarcerated in jails and prisons, over 120,000 are locked in solitary confinement.1 None have been sentenced by a court to their isolation. They are serving a punishment within punishment, having been placed in solitary by prison officials for a variety of reasons: violent crime, petty theft, speaking out, gang involvement, political activism. Some are in protective custody; others have mental health issues and are considered too difficult to control. A disproportionate percentage are people of color. Their sentence might last weeks or months and is subject to extension. More than a few spend years, even decades in cells whose dimensions are commonly compared to the size of a parking space, but which are often smaller — six-by-nine feet, or eight-by-ten. Reading material is sparse. Confined prisoners don’t participate in educational or rehabilitation programs. Other than meals — which are often more meager than those provided to the general prison population — and an hour of exercise a day, little exists to distract them from the heaviness of time, and nothing at all suggests that the historic roots of such punishment can be traced to the concept of redemption.
The idea of the solitary cell as an integral part of the American prison system arose during the Early Republic, the specific vision of Philadelphia physician and Founding Father Benjamin Rush, who advocated for time in solitude and silence — the active, searching silence of Quakerism — as an alternative to the bodily pain, injury, and humiliation of public hangings and whippings. He saw it as a means not only of punishment but of reformation for housebreakers, forgers, highway robbers, horse thieves, and even murderers, and his vision of justice eventually led to the construction of the world’s first penitentiary, Eastern State, designed by architect John Haviland, and raised on the grounds of an old cherry orchard three miles outside of Philadelphia’s city limits.
When Cherry Hill — as it was sometimes called — admitted its first prisoners in 1829, it stood in stark contrast to traditional jails, where debtors and those awaiting trial were housed in filthy, noisy, and disorderly common rooms. In the penitentiary, not only were the confined to remain in their individual cells for the duration of their sentence, according to the board of inspectors for Philadelphia’s prisons, there was to be “such an entire seclusion of convicts from society and from one another, as that during the period of their confinement, no one shall see or hear, or be seen or heard by any human being, except the jailer, the inspectors, or such other persons, as for highly urgent reasons may be permitted to enter the walls of the prison.”2
Rush began to articulate his ideas concerning justice more than forty years prior to Eastern State’s opening. During the winter of 1787, in Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia home, he addressed the newly formed Society for Promoting Political Inquiries, which was comprised of a dozen or more men — Thomas Paine among them — who’d begun to routinely gather to discuss ideas meant to foster social and economic improvements in Pennsylvania and throughout the young Republic. “I cannot help entertaining a hope, that the time is not very distant, when the gallows, the pillory, the stocks, the whipping-post . . . will be connected with the history of the rack and the stake, as marks of the barbarity of the ages and countries, and as melancholy proofs of the feeble operation of reason and religion upon the human mind”, he declared.3
At the time, Philadelphia had already begun to search for alternatives to the public, provocative blood punishments and the notorious chaos of its overcrowded jails. Most notably, city officials were experimenting with having felons undertake public works projects such as building, maintaining, and cleaning the streets. The felons, known as “wheelbarrow men”, wore brightly colored or boldly striped uniforms, which were meant both to humiliate them and to help identify them should they escape. They attracted crowds — some taunting them, others throwing coins in support and solidarity. Some felons escaped, and some escapees attacked citizens. Both their perceived threat to the public and their degradation created unease, for the wheelbarrow men made punishment publicly apparent in an even more emphatic way than had felons held in stocks or tied to whipping posts: “They were encumbered with iron collars and chains, to which bomb-shells were attached, to be dragged along while they performed their degrading service, under the eye of keepers armed with swords, blunderbusses, and other weapons of destruction”, noted Roberts Vaux, one of the city’s most dedicated promulgators of penal reform.4
Rush had the wheelbarrow men foremost in mind at Franklin’s home that winter evening. Historian David Freeman Hawke even suggests that an encounter with wheelbarrow men fostered Rush’s interest in reform of the justice system. He’d seen a group of them sweeping his street, and offered them something to drink. While talking to them, he found that, as Hawke notes, “he had sympathy, perhaps even respect, for the way they bore their humiliation.”5 Rush insisted to his audience that
All public punishments tend to make bad men worse, and to increase crimes by their influence upon society. . . . But may not the benefit derived to society, by employing criminals to repair public roads, or to clean streets, overbalance the evils that have been mentioned? I answer, by no means. On the contrary . . . the practice of employing criminals in public labour, will render labour of every kind disreputable.6
The spectacle trivialized both criminal and onlooker, he argued, and tended to “make bad men worse” especially by destroying any sense of shame. It was no better than the blood punishments which also failed to create a true change of mind and habit: “A man who has lost his character at a whipping-post, has nothing valuable left to lose in society.”7 Such measures, Rush insisted, also harmed those who witnessed them:
The men, or perhaps the women whose persons we detest, possess souls and bodies composed of the same materials as those of our friends and relations. They are bone of their bone; and were originally fashioned with the same spirits. What, then, must be the consequence of a familiarity with such objects of horror, upon our attachments and duties to our friends and connections, or to the rest of mankind?8
In addition to decrying traditional methods of punishment, Rush offered specific proposals for a penitentiary in which silence would be put toward many ends — ideas that were inextricable from the city’s Quaker roots. Silence in Philadelphia held a profound and specific meaning that harked back to its first days as a settlement. In the spare simple spaces of the meeting houses, Quakers gathered and waited and listened together for the presence of the divine, for a voice that could only be heard in passive, expectant, and profound silence: “By not speaking, not desiring, and not thinking, one arrives at the true and perfect mystical silence, wherein God speaks with the soul”, explained seventeenth-century Italian priest and Quaker inspiration Miguel de Molinos.9
Not only did silence have a particular meaning in Pennsylvania, justice did as well. William Penn, in his new colony, was concerned with fostering a humane and fair means of dealing with transgression, a belief born of experience. As a convert to Quakerism he’d had hard experience with both the jails and courtrooms of London. Since the founding of the religion by George Fox in the 1640s, Quakers had been subject to persecution. In the late seventeenth century, after Charles II passed a set of acts that attempted to weaken dissent and protect the Church of England, besides being stocked, stoned, and whipped, more than thirteen thousand Quakers were imprisoned in England. Hundreds died while incarcerated.
Penn’s Great Law — a series of statutes by which the Colony was to be governed — aimed to ensure the procedures for trial and sentencing in the Pennsylvania colony would be simple, understandable, and equitable. Although the blood punishments didn’t disappear, they were fewer and milder than those in England and in the other colonies. The death sentence was abolished for all crimes except premeditated murder, which was in accord with predominant Quaker thinking on capital punishment. In Penn’s colony, every county prison was to be a workhouse, and felons were either to be fined or sentenced to a certain amount of time at hard labor in a “house of Correction”.
Still, Penn’s laws, though less severe, were based on traditional means of carrying out justice. What Rush proposed was innovative, and in the years following his speech, he more fully articulated specific ideas for the penitentiary. While he emphasized the possibilities of reformation, the horror of confinement was an inextricable component of his vision. The secrecy and sense of the extreme fostered by an isolated location and an austere aura of gloom would work to magnify the wages of such punishment in the public mind. For the prisoner, those same qualities would work to make society feel dear once again. “An attachment to kindred and society is one of the strongest feelings of the human heart”, insisted Rush.10 “A separation from them, therefore has ever been considered as one of severest punishments that can be inflicted upon man. . . . Personal liberty is so dear to all men, that the loss of it, for an indefinite time, is a punishment so severe that death has often been preferred to it.” To counter the dread of an indefinite sentence — commonly endured by debtors and felons awaiting punishment in the jails of the time — Rush advocated terms of specific duration. And he held firm to the notion that silence in solitude would inevitably be redemptive: “I already hear the inhabitants of our villages and townships counting the years that shall complete the reformation of one of their citizens”, he proclaimed.11 “I behold them running to meet him on the day of his deliverance. His friends and family bathe his cheeks with tears of joy; and the universal shout of the neighborhood is, ‘This our brother was lost, and is found — was dead and is alive.’”
There had been, prior to the construction of the penitentiary, some partial measures toward reform through solitude and silence in Philadelphia. In 1790 the Pennsylvania Legislature, looking for ways to alleviate the crowding in jails, approved funding to remodel the city’s Walnut Street Jail. When opened in 1773, as was typical at the time, the general prison population was housed together in large rooms, debtors and felons alike fending for themselves. Under the remodeling plan — advocated by the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, of which Rush was a founding and influential member — in addition to other changes, a separate building was erected on the prison grounds, with sixteen eight-by-six-foot cells designated for the solitary confinement of serious and repeat offenders. This was in keeping with Rush’s proposal first articulated in Franklin’s living room that cells be “provided for the solitary confinement of such persons as are of a refractory temper.”12 The Walnut Street Jail eventually came to be known as “the cradle of the penitentiary”.
In general, by the late eighteenth century the country’s attitude toward the blood punishments was changing, and many states were shifting from brandings and whippings to extended confinements for convicts, but no solitude in these prisons was complete. At Auburn, in New York, for example, inmates were housed in solitary cells, but they ate meals together and worked together in enforced silence. Nor was redemption the aim in these houses of incarceration. In fact, the conditions were often entirely brutish. For instance, at New-Gate, Connecticut’s first prison, the incarcerated were housed underground in the tunnels of a depleted copper mine. They were brought to the surface every day to work in shops forging nails or building barrels and casks.
Although Rush would always emphasize the idea of the prison cell as a means of reformation, there was little consensus, even in Philadelphia, as to the purpose of incarceration. “There have been many opinions about the mode of treating the convicts”, remarked Caleb Lownes, the first administrator of the reconceptualized Walnut Street.13
Some seem to forget that the prisoner is a rational being, of like feeling and passions with themselves. Some think he is placed there to be perpetually tormented and punished. Some prescribe a certain time as necessary to his cure. One will not allow him the light of heaven, or the refreshment of the breeze; the comforts of society, or even the voice of his keeper: while another considers a seclusion from his friends and connexions, as a ground for accusation of inhumanity.
At Walnut Street, he noted, they “adopted a plan, which upon full consideration was deemed best, though not perfect.” Lownes further remarked that the prisoners knew that a “second conviction would consign them to the solitary cells, and deprive them of the most distant hopes of pardon. These cells are an object of real terror to them all.”14 The solitary cells weren’t only distinguished in prisoners’ minds. As sociologist Orlando Lewis has noted, they were “at the outset branded in the public mind as punishment cells for the protection of society and the infliction of the hardest possible sentences.”15
Eastern State Penitentiary certainly appeared to be designed for punishment. Its aspect was nothing if not forbidding. The ranges of solitary cells radiating out from a central rotunda were surrounded by a thirty-foot-high wall built of hewn Schuylkill stone. The original entryway stood twenty-seven feet high and fifteen feet wide, and its oaken double doors, studded with iron rivets, weighed several tons. A massive wrought-iron portcullis fronted them. Benjamin Rush did not live to see his vision fully play out: he died in 1813, a decade before construction of Eastern State began. Yet within those walls of stone his concept of the silent, solitary cell as a means of reformation for all prisoners — be it a first-time petty thief or an intransigent and violent perpetrator of assaults — survived, at least in theory.
Prisoner No. 1, Charles Williams, passed through the portal of the still-to-be-completed penitentiary on October 22, 1829.16 The eighteen-year-old Black farmer was sentenced to two years of solitary and silent confinement for breaking into a house and stealing a silver watch, a gold seal, and a gold key worth, in total, $25.00 (about $830.00 in today’s money). His entry ritual in the penitentiary’s central rotunda was meant to be a kind of baptism. After he had his hair cut, he was issued two handkerchiefs, two pairs of socks, a pair of shoes, woolen trousers, a jacket, and a shirt. His identity as Prisoner No. 1 was sewn into his clothing and hung above the entrance to his cell. He would not be called Charles again for the duration of his stay.
He was meant never to know where in the penitentiary his cell was located — while being ushered to it, Williams was hooded. All he was to comprehend of his physical world was the twelve-by-eight-foot whitewashed cell he inhabited: its stone floor; the bed, which could be folded against the wall for more room, with its sheet, blanket, and straw mattress; some scrubbing and sweeping brushes; a clothes rail; a wash basin; a mirror; a crude flush toilet; a tin cup; a victuals pan; a stool; and a workbench where he was to spend his time making shoes. Light from a small ocular window cut into the ceiling was deemed sufficient for his work and for reading the Bible. The window was known as the Eye of God, although architect John Haviland referred to it as a Dead Eye, which could be darkened by placing a half keg over it should a prisoner need to be disciplined. Charles Williams’ individual exercise yard adjoining his cell, and, nearly identical in size to it, was walled in stone. There, for one hour a day, he could look up at a patch of sky.
Williams wouldn’t be able to receive or write letters. Although he might exchange occasional words with a guard or inspector, and he’d have regular visits from moral and spiritual instructors, no friends or family would be allowed to visit him. He was not to talk unless instructed to. He was not to make any unnecessary noise. The guards patrolling the hallways wore socks over their boots to muffle their footsteps. A prisoner would never know when a guard was approaching the peephole in his door, and so always had to expect he was being watched. Likewise, the wheels of the meal cart were fashioned of wool, which caused no perceptual sound when rations were delivered. The food was meant to be plentiful and nourishing: coffee or cocoa in the morning, one pound of bread a day, potatoes and meat at noon, a type of corn pudding called “Indian mush” in the evening. Each prisoner was granted a half-gallon of molasses each month, and could ask for salt. He’d be given vinegar as a favor. (When Eastern State opened, the poorest city dwellers lived in lightless basements, and officials feared that the eight-by-twelve-foot cell and the guarantee of three meals a day might prove attractive.)
In today’s isolation, the food is not only often meager but unappetizing, with few fresh fruits and vegetables, and bread that is often soggy, sometimes moldy. The noise is unceasing. Random cries and howls. Screams. Rattling. Banging. Shouting. Buzzers and alarms. At Eastern State, prisoners resorted to furtive tappings and notes passed over the walls of their exercise yards to communicate with one another. Now there is fishing — a means of passing a note to an adjoining cell by attaching it to a weighted string and slipping it underneath the cell door. The shadows in a cell lit only by a small round window are gone. In keeping with modern times, an excess of harsh artificial light floods solitary cells. Sometimes it isn’t even shut off at night.
Still, an inmate who has spent time in twenty-first century isolation would recognize the dimensions of Charles Williams’ cell, and its toilet, sink, and narrow bed against the wall. And its lack of privacy. A modern inmate may be continually monitored by video feed, which only increases the feeling expressed hundreds of years ago by the Marquis de Lafayette upon seeing Eastern State for the first time: “none have exceeded — none have equaled that single oppression of being . . . exposed to the view of two eyes, watching my every motion, taking from my very thoughts every idea of privacy.”17 Although those in modern-day isolation don’t work, anyone who knows about surviving carceral isolation would certainly understand why some prisoners in Eastern State voluntarily rose before daybreak and began to hammer their leather. As prisoners’ rights advocate and writer Keramet Reiter observes, the inmates who do best in solitary “develop rigid, repetitive routines to get through the long days.”18 Exercise, preparing legal documents, reading, learning a language.
And they would understand just how unprepared Charles Williams must have been for the world he was released into exactly two years to the day after he’d been ushered to his cell. His original clothes had been returned to him, as had his name. He had gained some skills as a shoemaker, and prison officials had given him four dollars, “whereby the temptation immediately to commit offenses against society, before employment can be obtained, may be obviated”, but such things would be of limited help in a world that had surely grown strange to him.19 It’s not likely Williams would have had any word from his family during his confinement. No gossip or news from the outside. He’d know nothing of the inventions or cholera outbreaks or prominent deaths of the past two years. And it’s doubtful that anyone was running to meet him on the day of his deliverance.
Upon his release in October 1831, Eastern State Penitentiary was still not completed, and was not yet full, although it soon became clear that the original plan for seven ranges of cells housing three hundred prisoners was not large enough for the future, so John Haviland revised his design to include more ranges. He added a second story to some of them. Once Eastern State was finally finished in 1836, it could house 586 prisoners in individual cells. Even so, within a few decades, Rush’s concept of redemption through silence and solitude was lost to the exigencies of a system contending with exponential growth and social change. After the Civil War, the demand for space outgrew the complex’s capacity, and the warden had no choice but to double up prisoners in the cells. By the last decade of the century, half of the prisoners had cellmates and there were communal workshops on the grounds. During the twentieth century: a prison newspaper, baseball teams, boxing matches.
Eastern State housed its last prisoners in 1971. By then, the city of Philadelphia had long grown around its walls of Schuylkill stone. Today the penitentiary remains in a state of preserved ruin. Visitors can peer into mockups of the cells as they were in Charles Williams’ time. They can also descend beneath one of the ranges to view four solitary cells constructed in the 1920s — by then Eastern State had become a fully congregate prison — for the purpose of punishment within punishment. They had been carved out of an underground tunnel. No beds. No workbench. No plumbing. No windows. What electric light there was would have been controlled by the guards. In their ruin those four cells now stand for all that became of Rush’s hope for a system to replace the barbarity of the ages.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: October 25, 2023

author: Jane Brox


text:
Cliché-Verre and Friendship in 19th-Century France

By Miya Tokumitsu
November 21, 2023

In the 1850s, as photography took its first steps toward commercial reproducibility, a more intimate use for light-sensitive plates briefly bloomed. It had a few names: heliographic drawing, photographic autography, or, as it is best known today, cliché-verre. Miya Tokumitsu takes us to the towns and forests of France where a group of friends began making marks on photographic plates, and finds their camaraderie cohere in lyrical arrangements of topography and light.

In May of 1853, the celebrated painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot drew his first photographic negative on a glass plate. He was in the northern French town of Arras, visiting his dear friend, Constant Dutilleux, also a painter. It was a festive time: Corot was close with his friend’s family, and the occasion for the visit was the wedding of Dutilleux’s daughter, Élisa, to the artist and publisher Alfred Robaut.1 Encouraged by friends, Corot scratched a stylus around the collodion-coated plate, removing bits of the emulsion in scribbles and wisps. This cliché-verre (glass plate) was then used as a matrix to create the resulting print, The Woodcutter of Rembrandt (Le Bûcheron de Rembrandt). Thus began a spirited but brief efflorescence of cliché-verre making in France. Eugène Delacroix, Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet, and numerous others tried their hands at the newfangled technique, though none besides Corot found it to be a sustaining medium for their work. This story of cliché-verre, from its delightful beginning to its general quiescence a few years later, reveals what a generative — and delicate — creative force friendship can be.
Cliché-verre is a graphic art technique that combines aspects of photography and printmaking. Until the twentieth century, it had an unsettled nomenclature that awkwardly attempted to bridge these mediums and included various knotty terms like “heliographic drawing” (dessin héliographique) and “photographic autography” (autographie photographique).2 In the most common, “drawn” method of cliché-verre that Corot employed for The Woodcutter of Rembrandt, a transparent glass plate is covered with an opaque coating, such as collodion. As with copperplate etching, an artist draws through this coating with a stylus, scratching or flecking it off the surface. Indeed, Corot’s invocation of Rembrandt van Rijn, one of the great masters of etching, in the title of his first cliché-verre, perhaps staked a hopeful claim for the new technique. Once the composition is complete, the plate is a photographic negative; light shines through only the transparent areas of the plate onto light-sensitive paper, creating a photographic image.3 No camera is required.
Alternatively, an artist could paint a composition onto the glass plate. In contrast to the subtractive method described above, this additive method requires the artist to think in reverse, tonally. The most opaque areas of brushed-on paint will print faint or white as they impede the light’s penetration, whereas areas only thinly covered or left untouched will allow more light through and therefore print darkest.4 In Two Boatmen in a Marsh near a Cluster of Trees, Dutilleux created soft tonal variations by brushing and daubing his plate with pigment.
Dutilleux was the nucleus of a lively artistic community in Arras. He owned and ran a lithography printing operation, taught art classes, and painted landscapes for pleasure and portraits on commission.5 And he oversaw a busy atelier that served as a gathering point for artists at various stages of training and professional ambition, including Adalbert Cuvelier, an amateur landscape photographer; Jean-Gabriel-Léandre Grandguillaume, a local drawing professor; and Charles Desavary, a lithographer and photographer who married another of Dutilleux’s daughters and eventually became his business partner. With a rotating cast of others in tow, this merry band took excursions together, sketching, painting, and photographing the countryside, all the time exchanging ideas and exploring new paths forward for their art.6
During one such exchange, Cuvelier and Grandguillaume devised a process for cliché-verre printing, though the precise details of their discovery are unknown.7 It was they who initially urged Corot to create The Woodcutter of Rembrandt, and who subsequently printed his plate.8 Another of the Arras friends took care to document Corot’s early cliché-verre trials for posterity. Impressions of the first three cliché-verre prints by Corot, which were once in Dutilleux’s possession, are annotated with captions such as “C. Corot, 1st attempt at drawing on glass for photography, May 1853”.9 Corot proceeded to produce some fifty clichés-verre from 1853 until 1860, when he paused temporarily. That was the year Dutilleux moved to Paris, thereby decreasing Corot’s regular trips to Arras.10 After 1860, Corot had two periods of cliché-verre activity: one in 1871 and another in 1874.11
He never made these prints alone. Corot did not engage with the technical intricacies of plate preparation or printing himself, and his cliché-verre production was active only when he was able to collaborate with Grandguillaume and Cuvelier, and later on, Desavary, who eventually took over printing his plates.12 In between their meetings, Corot continued to discuss “les verres” with Dutilleux in letters — a testament to his personal investment in the medium, as he seldom corresponded about his paintings.13 These relationships facilitated Corot’s expression in the new technique. But collaborative artistic processes also come with inherent limitations due to factors both mundane, such as schedule alignment, and emotional, like the shifting tides of personal intimacy.
Navigating these sensitive conditions across several intertwined social groups requires a combination of social acuity and energy that Corot possessed in abundance. His plans for the year 1857, probably jotted down in one excited sitting, sound exhausting: no fewer than ten stints as a houseguest in as many towns between May and October. Each visit would be preceded by an exuberant letter announcing his imminent arrival.14 Fifteen years later, Corot continued to be a man in transit. Between July and August 1873, he zipped from Douai (where he visited the Robauts) to Arras (to see Desavary) to Dunkirk (with the artist Charles-François Daubigny) to Ville d’Avray (for his sister’s birthday) to Marcoussis (where he had promised to meet the painter Ernest-Joachim Dumax and others).15 One of the Marcoussis group, E. Forest, captured an understandably tuckered-out Corot in a pair of sketches.16
Meanwhile, the practice of cliché-verre spread from Arras to Barbizon, a town south of Paris in Fontainebleau forest. There, another group of artists had coalesced; they were loosely united in their interest in representing nature and preindustrial life, and often turned to their physical environment for inspiration. As in Arras, this gathering included painters, printmakers, and photographers. Rousseau and Millet are perhaps the best-known figures of this so-called Barbizon School today. Beginning around 1851, members of the Arras group, including Dutilleux and his students, had begun visiting Barbizon regularly. Among them was Adalbert Cuvelier’s son, Eugène, also an amateur photographer.17
In 1859, Eugène Cuvelier married Marie-Louise Ganne, daughter of the innkeeper at the Auberge Ganne in Barbizon, where numerous artists socialized and lodged. The festivities were an enchanting manifestation of the Barbizon group’s rustic ideals and artistic camaraderie. Millet and Rousseau were present as best men to the groom, and Corot led guests in a line dance through an obstacle course of empty bottles.18 Although the Cuveliers are background figures in the history of art, their marriage was made possible by the creative fellowship fostered by the social worlds of Arras and Barbizon.
Eugène Cuvelier remained in Barbizon, introducing the artists there to his father’s cliché-verre technique.19 Rousseau and Millet both gave it a go, as did several other artists settled in Barbizon, or just passing through.20 These Barbizon plates date between 1859 and 1862, a span of just a few years. Daubigny, another dear friend to Corot and regular visitor to Barbizon, took to cliché-verre enthusiastically, producing seventeen of them in 1862. However, his cliché-verre production stopped abruptly this same year.
The primary subject matter of these clichés-verre — richly foliated forests, lyrical arrangements of topography and light — reflect the longstanding interests of these artists. Corot populated many of his cliché-verre compositions with evocative figures that appear regularly in his painted landscapes: shepherds, strolling daydreamers, sweet families. For his part, Daubigny was able to translate the glowing atmospheres of his small etched landscapes into cliché-verre. However, the new cliché-verre medium also offered expanded possibilities for approaching subjects that these artists had explored in other media.
For Corot, cliché-verre provided another method for forming the autographic strokes he cherished in drawing.21 In Death and the Young Girl (La Jeune fille et la mort), Corot used a blunt-tipped tool to remove wide paths of emulsion from the glass plate, creating thick contours and hatch marks in the final print. The heaviness of these strokes makes an assertive reference to the artist’s hand — a literal personal touch that imbues these works with an intimacy that parallels that of Corot and his printers. The wild arboreal growth in another of Corot’s clichés-verre, The Trees in the Mountain (Les Arbres dans la montagne), is a riot of zig-zags. Daubigny’s Cows at a Watering Place (Vaches à l'abreuvoir) dares to approach the abstract; its somber mood comes into focus almost before the cows do.
Like its cousin, photography, cliché-verre did not come preloaded with the historical legacies of painting, sculpture, or architecture, with their royal academies and pantheons of masters. Nor did cliché-verre and early photography have preexisting audiences of connoisseurial obsessives, as did etching. The same false choice hung over both photography and cliché-verre: were they best suited for industrial use or could they be viable as mediums of fine art? Although photography, as the superior tool for representation, would take hold within and beyond the world of fine art, cliché-verre, it seems, caught on only in highly specific contexts. Arras had a fortuitous confluence of amateur photographers and professional printers that fostered the cross-media experimentation of Adalbert Cuvelier and Grandguillaume. Fontainebleau forest, and its denizens’ enthusiasm for plein-air art-making, proved a welcoming venue for photographers who turned their lenses on the same vistas observed by painters and sketchers. Working in proximity to artists such as Millet and Rousseau, photographers like Gustave Le Gray, Constant Alexandre Famin, and Eugène Cuvelier created painterly landscape compositions and captured, in their own medium, the forest’s changing light.22 Coming from Arras, where he had seen painters persuaded to try cliché-verre, Eugène Cuvelier succeeded in suggesting that the painters in Barbizon do the same.
One appealing aspect of cliché-verre for novices was its low barrier to entry: there was no “right” way to create one, and this open-endedness created room for experimentation. For instance, clichés-verre were typically printed with the emulsion side of the glass facing down, touching the light-sensitive paper. This would lead to a sharp image — as light would not refract through the glass between the image matrix and the paper. Facing the emulsion side down yielded an image printed in reverse to that of the matrix, like one would get with traditional printmaking techniques. But perhaps, on occasion, a softer contour might be desired. Clichés-verre could also be printed emulsion side up. Doing so would leave the image unreversed and produce a soft focus and halo effect around the image contours, as light would refract through the glass plate before striking the paper underneath.23
Daubigny printed his composition Deer (Les Cerfs) both ways. The impression with the lighter, neater lines was made with the emulsion side of the glass plate face down on the paper. The impression with the softer contours was printed with the emulsion side up. By simply flipping the plate, Daubigny was able to create two distinct iterations of his composition, one faithfully documenting his hand-drawn strokes and the other distorting them slightly for moody effect.
Not all of these artists’ experiments with cliché-verre were aimed at discovering new, technique-specific pictorial effects in the manner of Daubigny and his two printings of Deer. Millet applied cliché-verre in a more industrial manner, using it to make reproductions of two painted works, including The Maternal Precaution (La Précaution maternelle). In this instance, Millet drew upon cliché-verre’s potential as a reproductive technology to create a drawn version, in multiple, of his charming painted composition. Corot also reproduced two of his painted compositions in early cliché-verre trials, but ceased using the technique for this purpose, focusing instead on its possibilities for his own creative expression.24 None of these painters, it seems, found cliché-verre to be a satisfactory method for disseminating images of their own paintings. Millet, who was a skilled etcher, seemed to have preferred the inky materiality and tonal richness of copperplate printmaking for creating small-scale works on paper. Finding cliché-verre a bit wan in comparison, and not a convincing medium for reproducing paintings, he gave it up.
In the end, neither the aesthetic effects achievable in cliché-verre nor the technique’s capacity for serving as a means to reproduce images found purchase among the Barbizon group or beyond it. Despite their willingness to experiment with cliché-verre, most of the Barbizon artists set it aside after a few trials. Other than Corot and Daubigny, none of the artists mentioned here made more than a few, and Corot was the only one who continued making clichés-verre after 1862. Many of these works exist in only a handful of impressions. It seems these artists found the technique a passing novelty rather than a generative means for advancing their artistic aims or, for that matter, their success in the art market.
Also at issue was the basic reality that friendship circles are highly mutable social contexts. The magic of a particular month or season or few years is fleeting, as individuals journey along their own inevitably divergent life trajectories. Confluences of specific personalities in one location, all at moments in their lives when they are undistracted and receptive to collaborative experimentation, are rarely permanent or stable. By the mid-1860s, the shape of the Barbizon group and its network of affiliates was shifting. Rousseau and Dutilleux died in 1865. Eugène Cuvelier, who introduced cliché-verre to the Barbizon group and printed their plates, seems to have drifted from pursuing an artistic career, though he remained a skilled amateur photographer.25 Corot was a regular visitor, but not a permanent fixture in Barbizon; in any case, he did not prepare or print plates, and so could not have served as a technical facilitator of others’ clichés-verre.
The technology and materials for making clichés-verre remained known and available, but the highly specific convivial context of Barbizon between 1859 and 1862 came to an end. As this group metamorphosed, the collaborations that nurtured cliché-verre disappeared and were not replaced, even as the individuals involved remained fond of one another.
The failure of cliché-verre to take hold as a mainstream artistic medium, in contrast to lithography and photography, is a story that extends beyond the Barbizon School’s brief romance with the technique. Indeed, near-contemporaneous, niche enthusiasms for cliché-verre bubbled up and dissipated in England and the United States (and later, in the studios of Paul Klee, Man Ray, and several other artists).26 There was, for instance, the not-insignificant matter of cliché-verre lacking a dedicated public audience. The small prints made by the Arras-Barbizon artists may have served as mementos or friendship tokens meant to be kept and exchanged within their social milieu.27 These clichés-verre were therefore rather intimate objects in their initial releases, made for a familiar audience. Lithography and photography, by contrast, were introduced to the public as industrial techniques for producing mass media, and both were more cost-effective than cliché-verre for that purpose.28 Eventually, both would be accepted as mediums for fine art as well.
Meanwhile copperplate etching, a printmaking technique originating in the sixteenth century, was experiencing a revival across Europe as an artisanal medium marketed to connoisseurs in limited editions. The clichés-verre created in Arras and Barbizon never ultimately gained a toehold among the public, critics, or collectors — the main constituencies who determined success in the nineteenth-century art market as well as the narrative of the century’s art history.29
After interest in cliché-verre subsided in Barbizon, many of these worked-up plates remained in the hands of Alfred Robaut and Eugène Cuvelier — the grooms of both weddings mentioned above. Desavary, another of Dutilleux’s sons-in-law, held onto a separate batch. These men, intimately connected to the artists of Arras and Barbizon, were the first generation of the plates’ caretakers. From these primary collections, the Barbizon plates flowed to successive owners. In 1921, Maurice Le Garrec, a Paris-based art dealer who had acquired many of the Desavary plates, had forty reprinted and published in a portfolio, Forty Glass Plates (Quarante clichés-glace).30 Le Garrec released Quarante clichés-glace in an edition of a hundred and fifty plus five expanded editions that had two variant impressions from each plate. The portfolio includes several clichés-verre by Corot and Daubigny, as well as two each by Rousseau and Millet. It also includes Eugène Delacroix’s sole cliché-verre, which depicts a snarling tiger rendered in loose, thin lines.
It was through Quarante clichés-glace that the mainstream art market became acquainted with these artists’ clichés-verre, decades after most of their creators had died.31 The portfolio did not inspire fresh interest in actually practicing the technique, however. Perhaps etymological developments played a discouraging role: just as “cliché-verre” was starting to stabilize as a term for the technique in the early twentieth century, “cliché” on its own had begun to acquire a connotation of hackneyed repetition, akin to another printing matrix affiliated with industrial production, the stereotype.32
After his colleagues left cliché-verre behind in 1862, Corot undertook two later periods of activity with the technique in 1871 and 1874 — years in which it was possible to collaborate with his favored printers. Exactly why Corot bucked the trend is open to speculation. A partial explanation may lie in the sociality of Corot’s cliché-verre practice. Cliché-verre was a process and product of friendship for this artist, a technique facilitated by correspondence and visits, suggestion and feedback, personal contribution and reliance on the expertise of others. Among his other achievements, Corot was a uniquely good friend. He was by all accounts a jocular presence perpetually surrounded by gaggles of companions and visitors, and his generosity matched his capacity for social engagements. When another of his friends, the artist Honoré Daumier, found himself impoverished and suffering from poor eyesight and illness, Corot made him a cash gift, allowing Daumier to purchase the small house he had been renting for nine years.33 Corot also financially supported Millet’s widow after her husband’s death. His skill at maintaining intimacy and understanding with a variety of collaborators bore fruit in numerous ways, one of which was an outstanding production of clichés-verre. Corot made his last group of clichés-verre in 1874, just months before his death, while visiting Desavary.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: November 21, 2023

author: Miya Tokumitsu