Moving Pictures

Queen Victoria was astonished by the speed of ‘the dreadful events [of 1848] … as if we had gone through 20 years’ experience all at once’. Chapter 2 suggests this sense of speed was the result of a rapidly connecting and newly illustrated media. The lifting of press censorship across Europe unleashed an outpouring of newsprint. The technologies that made illustrations cheap and fast to produce were only just becoming readily available in 1848, so that the sweep of revolutions was among the first news to offer itself to the new visual media techniques. Because of the sharing of ‘stereotypes’ or printing plates, identical illustrations of barricades, insurgent fighting, and newly constituted parliaments appeared in illustrated journals in Britain, Germany and France, Italy, Austria, and Hungary. The result was a new visual praxis which this chapter argues was key to creating a sense of social connectivity and identity across Europe.