The Politics and Aesthetics of a Phantom Palace: Le Palais des Tuileries in Charles Soulier’s Paris incendié, mai 1871

This article sheds new light on the work of the French nineteenth-century photographer Charles Soulier by focusing on his hitherto marginalized representation of the ruined Palais des Tuileries in the aftermath of the Paris Commune. Conventional political readings of contemporary photographs of ruins based primarily on thematic content and point of view are eschewed in favour of a close reading of Soulier’s images within their wider technical, commercial, and aesthetic contexts, with evidence of the photographer’s own ideological stance being sought instead in his choice of title for the series as a whole, Paris incendié, mai 1871. In also outlining briefly the history of the Tuileries itself, described by Jean Pierre Babelon as ‘un palais fantôme,’ the article concludes with a consideration of the site of the palace today as ‘un lieu d’oubli.’