In Situ (Sep 2018)
Soutenir l’aérostation pour mieux la tuer. La collection Nadar conservée à la Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris et au musée Carnavalet
Abstract
Nadar is a well-known figure among the prominent French photographers of the nineteenth century, but his role as a supporter of aerial travel is rather less well-known. He showed as much flair and passion into it as in everything into which he put his active mind and considerable energy. From 1852 to 1870 he was successively or simultaneously a caricaturist of hot air balloons, an enthusiastic if sometimes well-worn balloonist, an aerial photographer, an unsuccessful entrepreneur of balloon travels, a National mail balloonist, and a writer of balloons and aerial travel through several genres (a specialised journal, memoirs, a manual). More to this journal’s point, he gathered together an important and original collection of documentation and artifacts on aerial travel, which he committed to the public in the end. This essay will try to give an overview of this collection of everyday objects, works of art, visual representations, publications and archive material, which can be compared to the ones collected by two other French balloonists of the period, Jules-François Dupuis-Delcourt (1802-1864) and Gaston Tissandier (1843-1899), both literary men as well. Collecting such a variety of material registering on a scale going from the commonplace to the epic can be attributed to the will, in everyone of them, of documenting the social history of the conquest of the air as much as its technical history. The archival material held in the Nadar collection of the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris addresses 3 main themes : Nadar’s venture in 1863-1864 of a tourist air travel agency through his huge balloon Le Géant ; his participation during the Paris Siege of 1870 to a service of airmail and military observation via balloons ; his support of the research on aviation and the “heavier than air” principle, rather than on the “lighter than air” balloons, and his collection of research essays on the subject.
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