Picturing the dead and dying in nineteenth-century 'L'Illustration

The birth of the illustrated press opened a new venue for the representation of death. L'Illustration, the first French illustrated news magazine targeting the affluent and growing middle class, was founded in 1843. Its weekly depictions of the dead and dying changed in a discernable pattern over time, as the magazine participated in the cultural, political, pictorial and journalistic environment of the nineteenth century. During the July Monarchy, corpses appeared before the eyes of the reader only where their presence would have minimal shock value, i.e. in reproductions of works of art, fictional illustrations, allegories and cartoons, lying-in-state pictures, and reports from exotic cultures. In the pictures of natural catastrophes, the victims were concealed; images of contemporary murders, suicides and fatal accidents were avoided; and the rare portrayal of casualties of the Revolution of 1848 had an ideological slant.;Responding to competition from a growing illustrated press, L'Illustration moved towards franker, more eye-catching and exciting imagery during the Second Empire. The boundary between news illustrations and reproduced genre paintings of the Salon became blurred. During the crises of 1870--71, the magazine's images of the dead and dying crossed a water-shed, when contemporary French war casualties were presented without the traditional aura of glory. In the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war, L'Illustration 's extensive memorializing of the war dead was an attempt to cope with the nation's grief.;L'Illustration consistently claimed to abhor the sensationalist press. However, during the Third Republic a profusion of detailed pictures about the moment and aftermath of the passing of prominent individuals presented death as a spectacle while revealing the political and cultural bias of the magazine. Cadavers on display, en masse and individually, dominated the reporting of catastrophes and titillating reconstructions of executions and massacres demonstrated the magazine's participation in a pervasive journalistic tidal wave of morbid faits divers. Fashioning and distributing pictures of the dead as a hybrid of news and entertainment, L'Illustration prefigured the next century, when the visual media would increasingly produce the basis for the public's perception of death.