Grubbs on De Oliveira (2025)

The long nineteenth century in France witnessed the advent of technologies of mobility—from the train to the automobile to the bicycle—that revolutionized spatial, social, and economic networks and heralded the modern age of speed and interconnectivity. Yet, as Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira’s excellent new book Ascending Republic: The Balloon Revival in Nineteenth-Century France demonstrates, between 1870 and 1914, Third Republic France was intensely interested in a vehicle that was neither technologically cutting-edge nor likely to be of practical use: the balloon. How this 100-year-old object (the Montgolfier brothers conducted the first manned balloon flight in 1783) came to be an icon of modernity in the decades between the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War is the central question of De Oliveira’s book. 

Drawing on an eclectic archive of government documents, scientific records, popular press articles, letters, novels, and visual media, De Oliveira argues that the balloon became modern not through technical innovation but through cultural reappropriation: in the aftermath of the Siege of Paris, during which balloons bearing letters and goods soared over the Prussian blockade, the balloon was revitalized as a symbol of French ingenuity and power, a “republican” technology born on the eve of the Revolution, now capable of lifting the nation out of the wreckage of a humiliating defeat. De Oliveira cleverly demonstrates how the spectacle of lighter-than-air flight, whether for scientific experimentation, sporting competition, or military surveillance, allowed the Third Republic to project an image of French greatness that transcended political and social divisions at home and that fortified France’s influence on the geopolitical stage, paving the way for France to become, along with the United States, the center of the aviation industry in the twentieth century.  

As a historical study, Ascending Republic thus not only charts new horizons in the fields of modern French history and the history of technology, but it also recontextualizes the place of both France and of lighter-than-air flight in the history of aviation. De Oliveira reconstructs the players, practices, and institutions that constituted the vibrant culture of ballooning in fin-de-siècle France, and contends that the airplane, rather than marking a point of rupture, grew out of the technical and cultural conditions created by the ballooning craze. To fully capture this complex history, De Oliveira masterfully navigates between the personal and the panoramic, balancing individual stories of aeronautical pioneers (a significant number of whom were women) with a bird’s-eye view of the cultural, technological, and political forces that shaped the history of the balloon. The extensive illustrations, including prints, photographs, caricatures, sketches and paintings, enrich the narrative, and De Oliveira’s clear prose and nimble pacing make for an engrossing and propulsive read.  

The book is structured into three chronological sections, each of which features deft historiographic analysis, engaging biographical portraits, and compelling close readings of textual and visual evidence. Across the two chapters of part one—“Breathing New Air into the Balloon”—De Oliveira traces the trajectory of the balloon from a promising invention in 1783 to an artifact of uncertain cultural and technological relevance by the 1860s, closely associated with popular entertainment and speculative schemes. In so doing, he brilliantly refutes the traditional narrative, established by Third Republic aeronauts seeking to legitimize ballooning as a serious scientific endeavor, that this period represented a decline in lighter-than-air flight. Instead, De Oliveira argues that the entertainers—men and women—who preserved ballooning savoir faire and the artisans who published designs for lighter-than-air systems kept the balloon aloft in the popular imaginary long after military and scientific institutions had abandoned the technology in the early 1800s. This extended prologue concludes with a chapter on the 1870–71 Siege of Paris, during which the balloon dramatically regained cultural visibility. 

In part two, “The Airminded Republic,” the book’s central section, De Oliveira identifies four ideas that tethered ballooning to French identity from the 1870s to the 1910s: “sacrificial patriotism (aeronauts would strengthen France by putting their lives at risk for the nation), aristocratic modernity (elites would distinguish themselves through their ascents), colonial anxiety (the balloon would be used to imagine manage France’s expanding imperial possessions), and technological cosmopolitanism (progress in aeronautics would enable positive exchanges between different nations)” (4). In the chapters devoted to each of these perspectives, De Oliveira argues that the balloon’s unlikely reemergence as an icon of modernity during the fin-de-siècle was not due to technical breakthroughs or to practical utility, but rather to the new meaning with which Third Republic society imbued the aircraft. He identifies and unpacks the narratives of heroism and supremacy that permeated the different spheres of French aeronautics. Thus, men who undertook dangerous high-altitude ascents in the name of scientific progress were portrayed as both the “sober savant and the heroic explorer” (111). The high-society sportsmen of the Aéro-Club de France who broke records in international competitions were avatars of an elite class of modern gentleman adventurers. The protagonists of adventure novels like Jules Verne’s Cinq semaines en ballon (1863) that imagined aerial voyages over inhospitable African territories embodied the mission civilisatrice of French imperialism, even as real-life attempts to use balloons for colonial conquest in Africa and Asia proved unsuccessful. In the last chapter of this section, devoted to the famous Franco-Brazilian aeronaut Alberto Santos-Dumont, De Oliveira incorporates transatlantic perspectives on French aeronautical culture to show that, thanks in large part to the balloon, France was truly a beacon of technological modernity at the turn of the century.

The brief concluding section, part three, “The Soaring Republic,” tracks the shift from lighter-than-air to heavier-than-air flight in the 1900s and 1910s, demonstrating how the balloon revival of the previous decades had established the associational infrastructure, technical knowledge, and cultural willpower to facilitate the rapid, smooth assimilation of the airplane in France. After all, the Wright brothers may have invented the airplane in the United States, but they relied on decades of aeronautical research by French engineers like Octave Chanute to craft the Flyer, and Wilbur Wright performed the first public demonstration of airplane flight in 1908 in France. Ultimately, De Oliveira argues that 1909 marked the end of the balloon craze. That year, the Aéro-Club de France organized la Grande Semaine d’Aviation de la Champagne, which cemented the airplane as a popular spectacle, and the new Ligue nationale aérienne began promoting aviation in nationalistic terms as a source of military, industrial and technological supremacy. The airplane thus became a symbol of French national identity on the eve the First World War, just as the balloon had been in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War.  

Ascending Republic is essential reading for anyone interested in the social, material and technological history of flight and for those seeking new insights into the culture of Third Republic France. It is also a welcome call to resist—in scholarship as much as in daily life—the temptation to overestimate the cultural importance of technological innovation. What is old can always become new again.