Page 91 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Louis Alfred Habert + Pierre Adolph Hennetier, + Louis Edmond Cougny (sculptors): Les Diableries stereoscopic pictures 1860s-1870s.
These images, sold as stereoscopic pairs (centre and right), and published first by Francois Benjamin Lamiche, were enormously popular during this period - over 70 scenes were published by Lamiche, and they spawned many inferior copies. Like Mayall’s Royal Cartes, Sarony’s celebrity cartes, and the cigarette cards of the 1880s, the Diableries were an early example of the collectible image. Produced by making a stereo monochrome image on glass, hand-colouring the reverse side, backing with transparent tissue then mounting in stereo cards.
What’s interesting to me about the Diableries, is their semi-anonymous, rather covert ‘underground’ nature. They seem to be a precursor of the soft pornography of the ‘filthy postcard’ popular in the Edwardian period, and their kind of alternative, occult cosmology a precursor to the wave of ‘underground’ anarchistic and idealistic literature that characterised the 1960s - the comics like those of Bob Crumb and Gilbert Shelton, the magazines like OZ and the International Times and the album sleeves and posters of Peter Max, Victor Moscoso, and Rick Griffin. These publications were anarchically unofficial, subversive, alternative. And so it is with the Diableries, which were published in France from around 1860-1900. The London Stereoscopic Company describes them: “ The cards, called ‘Diableries’ (which translates roughly as ‘Devilments’) depict a whole imaginary underworld, populated by devils, satyrs and skeletons which are very much alive and, for the most part, having fun. The cards are works of art in themselves, and are known as FRENCH TISSUES, constructed in a special way to enable them to be viewed (in a stereoscope) illuminated from the front, for a normal ‘day’ appearance in monochrome, or illuminated from the back, transforming the view into a ‘night’ scene, in which hidden colours magically appear, and the eyes of the skeletons leap out in red, in a most macabre way!” Many authors have commented upon the lasting appeal of the occult, and the success of Les Diableries seem to confirm that this was certainly true in Paris in the latter half of the 19th century. For more on the Occult and its lasting impact, see Kurt Seligman: Magic, Supernaturalism and Religion (1971), and Rollo Ahmed: The Black Art (1936), Colin Wilson: The Occult (1984).