Robertson's phantasmagoria: spectres and apparitions in the Paris of 1798

Étienne-Gaspard Robertson, the fantoscope and the Capuchin convent: how a projection show brought ghosts and spectres into revolutionary Paris.

In a Paris emerging from the Terror, where violent death was a very recent memory, a physicist and painter born in Liège in 1763 offered the public an extraordinary show: making the dead appear. His name was Étienne-Gaspard Robert, but he presented himself as Robertson. From 1798 his phantasmagoria sessions, first at the Pavillon de l'Échiquier and then in the old Capuchin convent near the Place Vendôme, became one of the most talked-about entertainments in the city.

The forerunners: Schröpfer and Philidor

Robertson did not start from nothing. In the 1770s, in Leipzig, the coffee-house keeper Johann Georg Schröpfer held séances in which he claimed to summon spirits, probably using projections onto smoke and sound effects; his fame as a necromancer was such that it attracted members of the nobility. He took his own life in 1774, and his figure fuelled legends for decades.

Closer to Robertson was an illusionist known as Paul Philidor, who in the early 1790s presented in Berlin, Vienna and then Paris a show called Phantasmagorie. It was he who introduced the term and the idea of presenting apparitions as an openly declared trick, while at the same time exposing the charlatans who claimed really to summon spirits. Information about Philidor is fragmentary and his identity is not entirely clear, but historians of optical entertainment recognise his role as a forerunner.

The fantoscope and the scene of the dead

Robertson perfected the technique with a device he called the fantoscope: a magic lantern mounted on wheels, placed behind a semi-transparent screen and therefore invisible to the audience. By moving it towards or away from the screen and adjusting the lens, the figures seemed to grow, advance towards the spectators or withdraw into the dark. The images were painted on glass with a black ground, so that they seemed suspended in the void.

The setting mattered as much as the technique. The audience passed through corridors decorated with funerary symbols, sat in a completely dark room and listened to sounds of rain, thunder, bells and the glass harmonica, an instrument whose sound was then considered almost supernatural. Spectres appeared, Medusa heads, skeletons and figures of famous people recently dead, among them protagonists of the Revolution.

Science, deception and memory

Robertson presented the phantasmagoria as a show of physics, intended to prove that ghosts were optical illusions. Yet the chronicles tell of spectators who fainted, or who asked to see their departed loved ones again. The boundary between scientific popularisation and suggestion remained thin, and it was precisely on that boundary that the show's fascination was played out.

Robertson, who was also an aeronaut and made numerous balloon ascents, told the story of his life in the Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques et anecdotiques, published between 1831 and 1833. He died in 1837. The word phantasmagoria entered the European languages to describe any succession of unreal, shifting images. Robertson's show remains an essential stage in the story that leads from the magic lantern to cinema, and in the way modernity has staged its own ghosts.