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August 19, 2009
Hubertus Kohle and Rolf Reichardt Visualizing the Revolution: Politics and Pictorial Arts in Late Eighteenth-Century France London: Reaktion Books, 2008. 240 pp.; 30 color ills.; 156 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (9781861893123)
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CrossRef DOI: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2009.84

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In his pioneering study Understanding Media of 1964, Marshall McLuhan credited Alexis de Tocqueville with discovering in the French Revolution evidence that “the medium is the message.” The “highly literate aristocrat,” wrote McLuhan, had recognized that the Revolution would never have happened had print culture not unified the nation, enabling the conditions for a national uprising (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964, 14–15). Typography had homogenized France. In contrast,...