This book demonstrates how efforts to capture the overwhelming power and ineffable energy of this natural phenomenon drove generations of artists, engineers and practitioners to pioneer new forms of immersive spectacle, advancing illusionistic scenery, lighting, pyrotechnics, acoustics, kinetic effects, and optical technologies. The volcano has long haunted the French cultural imagination, serving as a volatile metaphor for revolution, desire, transgression, and the sublime. Yet beneath this symbolic heat lies a largely overlooked history of media experimentation and innovation.

The study begins in the eighteenth century, a period marked by the archaeological rediscovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum, the birth of empirical vulcanology, and the seismic political upheavals of the French Revolution. In this context, the volcano emerged as a potent figure of both the violent overthrow of the Ancien régime and the subversive power of the people. The book traces how this disruptive charge continued to be channelled through volcanic representations during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before fracturing at the dawn of the atomic age, when the nuclear threat transformed the very conditions of spectatorship.

Drawing upon media archaeology, the book follows the migration of the volcanic topos across a heterogeneous media ecology in which extant and nascent technologies frequently imitated, absorbed, and reshaped one another. It analyses the diverse forms through which volcanoes were represented, including journalism, fireworks displays, melodrama, Grand Opera, early cinematography, and the radical experiments of the avant-garde, exploring both the technical design of these spectacles and their visceral impact on audiences. The study reveals how simulated eruptions were never merely passive entertainments but were closely bound to socio-political ruptures, burgeoning artistic movements, and recurrent natural disasters, serving as a vital barometer for registering the shocks of modernity.

Interdisciplinary in scope, The Volcano in French Spectacles will be of interest to scholars and students working in French cultural studies, theatre and film studies, media history, and the environmental humanities.

Esmond Easton Lamb is a researcher who was awarded a PhD by King’s College London in 2023 and has lectured at Sciences-Po, Université de Lille and Université Paris-Nanterre.