Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction - Celebrity and Modernity

Chapter 1 - Voltaire in Paris
“The Most Famous Man in Europe"
Voltaire and Janot

Chapter 2 - Society of the Spectacle
The Birth of Stars: The Economics of Celebrity
Scandal at the Opera
“Something Idolatrous”
A European Celebrity
The Invention of the Fan(atic)

Chapter 3 - A First Media Revolution
The Visual Culture of Celebrity
Public Figurines
Idols and Marionettes
“Heroes of the Hour”
Private Lives, Public Figures

Chapter 4 - From Glory to Celebrity
Trumpeting Fame
Conceptualizing Celebrity
Celebrity
“Chastisement for Merit”

Chapter 5 - Loneliness of the Celebrity
“The Celebrity of Misfortune”
Friend Jean-Jacques
Eccentricity, Exemplarity, Celebrity
The Burden of Celebrity
Rousseau Judges Jean-Jacques
The Disfiguration

Chapter 6 - The Power of Celebrity
A Fashion Victim?
Revolutionary Popularity
The President is a Great Man
Sunset Island

Chapter 7 - Romanticism and Celebrity
Byromania
Prestige and obligations
Women Seduced and Public Women
Virtuosos
Celebrity in America
Democratic Popularity and Popular Sovereignty
“Celebrities of the Hour”
Towards a New Age of Celebrity
Conclusion
Postface to the English edition
Notes
Illustration credits
Index

About the Author

Antoine Lilti is Professor of History at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and former editor-in-chief of the journal Annales. 

Reviews

“Lilti’s achievement is highly impressive. He provides a new perspective on the transformations of Western culture in the age of revolutions, and on the genesis of modern notions of selfhood and personal authenticity. And he reminds us that even as we laugh at contemporary celebrity culture, we need to take it seriously, and not merely as an excrescence or a pathology, but as a constituent element of political and cultural modernity.”
David A. Bell, Princeton University “With The Invention of Celebrity, Antoine Lilti has established himself as one of the most significant and talented historians of eighteenth-century France…It is an imaginative study, at once audacious and theoretically grounded, that establishes celebrity as an object of historical analysis and lays the groundwork for further studies of the phenomenon.”
Colin Jones, Queen Mary University of London

"Exhaustively researched, with in-depth analysis, this book is not a light read, but is definitely an interesting read for those who have more than a passing curiosity for the history behind the rise of 'celebrity.'"
Feathered Quill Book Reviews

"Good history opens up sightlines not only to the past but to the present as well.  It allows us to see aspects of our current circumstances as the product of developments that are deeper and richer than we knew… Antoine Lilti’s The Invention of Celebrity is a book that does just that.  A chronicle of the origins and development of our modern société du spectacle, it provides a genealogy of the media-driven world of celebrities and personalities who now dominate our headlines and crowd (out) our public debates."
Literary Review

"An original and seminal work of outstanding scholarship that is thoroughly 'reader friendly' in organization and presentation, "The Invention of Celebrity" is an impressively informative and insightful work that is enhanced with the inclusion of a section of full color illustrations, fifty-six pages of Notes, and a thirteen page Index."
Midwest Book Review

“This well-written and well-translated study of a central phenomenon of the modern world has a great deal to offer.”
Canadian Journal of History