Abstract
Historical context
R-G. Schwartzenberg’s L'État spectacle (1977) was written against the backdrop of France’s long negotiation between republican institutions and mass politics. This covered the Third Republic (1870-1940), the longest-lasting parliamentary system in France since the Revolution.
The author argues that in the effort to establish the Third Republic and intensify the visibility of political life after the Franco-Prussian War, the state increasingly presented itself as the legitimate authority at a time when traditional sources of prestige, the aristocracy and the Church, had waned. It did this through ceremonies, media, art (Impressionist painters) and urban renewal in Paris, designed by Haussmann.
During the interwar years (1918-1939), mass parties, rising nationalism, and the appeal of charismatic leaders across Europe pushed democratic regimes to adopt more dramatic, pageant‑like public displays to mobilise consent. Schwartzenberg argues that these techniques, which consisted of parades, official commemorations, and state-sponsored art and film, became institutionalised tools of governance, used both by authoritarian regimes and by democratic ones seeking to consolidate loyalty without coercion.
After World War II, the expansion of the welfare state and the rise of mass media heightened the need for a visible, reassuring state presence. Schwartzenberg emphasises the role of television, radio, and newsreels in turning governance into a continuous public performance. Policy announcements, presidential appearances, and ceremonial rituals were crafted for broad audiences to create narratives of competence, unity, and historical continuity. The author links these developments to the professionalisation of public relations within ministries and to the increasing centrality of a presidential (Gaulliste) model in France that made the head of state the performative focus of national life.
Schwartzenberg also interprets the phenomenon in social and cultural terms. As citizens became consumers of political spectacle, political expression and dissent were reframed into mediated spectacles themselves: demonstrations, strikes, and electoral campaigns were both acted out and broadcast. He underlines the tensions inherent in this evolution. Spectacle can legitimise governance by producing consent, but it can also mask institutional weakness, depoliticise substantive debate, and enable manipulation through imagery and narrative.
Philosophical context
Max Weber in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society), published posthumously in 1922, defines charismatic authority as obedience to a leader “whose extraordinary personal gifts” win followers’ devotion:
"Charisma rests on the devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual."
Schwartzenberg uses this Weberian notion to read his contemporary analysis as a process where legitimacy increasingly issues from personal magnetism and public visibility rather than from legal-rational institutions. Politicians succeed not primarily by procedural competence but by projecting an aura that audiences experientially accept as exceptional.
Weber warned that charisma is “by its nature unstable and transitory” and must undergo “routinisation” to endure. Schwartzenberg adapts this to argue that spectacle is routinised through party machines, PR firms and media formats. He writes that the spectacle packages personality into repeatable commodities, campaign templates, staged events or branding strategies, so that what began as ephemeral charisma becomes institutional technique. This is a modernisation of Weber’s problem of turning personal domination into durable structures.
Weber highlights that charismatic authority depends on followers’ emotional commitment, an “affective” bond that cannot be secured by legal rules alone. Schwartzenberg shows how mass media cultivate that bond: television close-ups, intimate interviews and social-media “moments” create simulated intimacy and identification. This produces what he calls a politics of presence, where “the electorate loves the image more than the institution", thereby translating Weber’s affective devotion into fandom.
Weber notes charisma’s intrinsic precariousness: without transformation into routine it produces leadership that is “subject to sudden collapse.” Schwartzenberg uses this to explain the volatile careers of contemporary political celebrities: rapid ascents followed by abrupt falls and the consequent need for continuous reinvention. The spectacle demands endless performance to maintain legitimacy, converting Weber’s temporality of charisma into a permanent production cycle.
Weber locates charisma in perceived “extraordinary” personal qualities; Schwartzenberg emphasises manufacture, where image-making, media training and staged authenticity turn extraordinary traits into producible skills. He argues that charisma in the spectacle era is often “crafted” rather than purely spontaneous. This claim modernises Weber by showing how technological and commercial intermediaries mediate in the emergence and maintenance of charismatic effects.
The Frankfurt School, which included Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm and Jürgen Habermas, was critical of modern capitalist society, culture, and rationality. It provided Schwartzenberg with tools to read state staging as a form of production: the modern state “manufactures representations” and instrumentalises entertainment and mass communication to normalise the social order. This echoes the idea that the “culture industry” standardises tastes and neutralises critique. Schwartzenberg uses this intuition when he writes that public power seeks to
“transform the exercise of power into spectacle in order to occupy citizens’ imaginative space".
This is a formulation that extends the Frankfurt School’s concern that appearance can displace critical experience.
The Frankfurtian notion of cultural alienation illuminates Schwartzenberg’s claim that the state spectacle obstructs the formation of an autonomous public sphere. By monopolising images and legitimate narratives, the state spectacle imposes a “homogeneous staging of reality” that fragments deliberative space. Again drawing on the Frankfurt School’s pessimism about media’s capacity to reduce citizens to passive consumers, he contends that
“the overabundance of official images produces the illusion of democratic debate while annulling it".
Yet Schwartzenberg also departs from the most totalising Frankfurtian accounts by emphasising the strategic and performative dimension of politics. Where Frankfurt School writers sometimes depict a unified logic of alienation, Schwartzenberg stresses the plurality of actors and tactics that make up the state spectacle: institutions, experts, communication agencies, and private media. He retains Frankfurtian distrust toward mass culture, but without reducing all media production to mere instruments of domination. He states:
“the spectacle is a field of forces where hegemony and resistance are negotiated".
Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) sees theatricality in normal life. People are always managing what others see of them. He talks about frontstage (public), backstage (unpublic) and offstage (private) performances. (Example: a person maintains a serious tone in a meeting (frontstage) but jokes with friends afterwards (backstage). He also includes costumes, props, and short rehearsed lines to shape impressions.)
Swartzenberg applies that theatrical idea to the level of the state. Governments stage events and images to make power feel natural and inevitable. He writes about the state creating “spectacles that manufacture consent", from grand parades to perfectly timed photo-ops. A leader might visit a disaster zone for a carefully framed photo and a scripted handshake. This is doing the same kind of impression work Goffman describes, but on a bigger, mediated stage.
Goffman explains the mechanics of how performances depend on audience cooperation and Swartzenberg shows how those mechanics are institutionalised through flags, uniforms, and televised ceremonies in a national performance. That’s also where hope lies because performances can be interrupted. When people refuse to play along, or when protesters and satirists stage counter-performances, the spectacle can be exposed and its power weakened.
Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967) is the most obvious ancestor of Schwartzenberg’s argument. Schwartzenberg repeatedly treats politics as a regime of images and appearances, where electoral life is dominated by mediated simulacra, rather than programmatic debate. Debord’s claim that social relations are increasingly mediated by images is the basis for Schwartzenberg’s diagnosis that political activity has shifted from substantive contestation to staged performance:
“All that was once directly lived has become mere representation."
Mass-media theory in the 1970s drew on Marxist and Frankfurt School critiques, plus emerging cultural studies which emphasised the structural effects of mass communications. These were the concentration of ownership, commodification of culture and the production of passive audiences.
1970s scholars argued that the media reproduce dominant ideology and shape social reality more than reflect it. Schwartzenberg adapts that critique to politics by showing how political power itself becomes theatricalised and personalised. He diagnoses a shift from policy‑centred governance to image‑centred performance: the “star system” in politics turns leaders into actors whose legitimacy depends on staging and media visibility. As he writes about this drift, politics becomes a show where new codes, casting and media reorganise public life.
Where 1970s mass‑media theory focuses on systemic forces such as ownership, ideology and audience passivity, Schwartzenberg focuses on performative tactics within the political sphere. This means the instrumental use of optics, rituals, and celebrity mechanisms to manufacture consent. It yields complementary but distinct claims. Mass‑media theory explains why mediated images carry ideological weight: “the spectacle…is a social relation". Schwartzenberg explains how political actors exploit that power to convert governing into constant showmanship: “politics becomes a show, a parade of power".
Both perspectives share a common concern with mediation and loss of substantive democratic deliberation. 1970s media theory warns that media structures produce passive publics and reproduce domination; Schwartzenberg shows the concrete political consequence: policy debate displaced by spectacle, where “leaders” are selected and sustained by visibility rather than by argument or institutional accountability.
Summary
Part 1: The Characters
The Hero
The Hero is the politician who promises to act with bold decision. He plays to the public’s need for clear moral choices and dramatic rescue, someone who looks and sounds like they can resolve, redeem, and save. On stage he seems larger than life through his theatrical gestures, symbolic sacrifices and daring rhetoric. These are his currency, and those displays replace the quieter work of governing.
The Charismatic Leader
The Charismatic Leader gets people onside through presence more than policy. He charms, stages moments, and makes crowds feel seen and heard. His authority grows from performance, not from technical detail. What matters is rhythm, style, and emotional pull. He turns a crowd into an audience that’s willing to follow because it’s moved and identified, not because it’s been persuaded by programmes.
The Father
The Father frames politics as caretaking. He promises protection, order and moral guidance, asking citizens to accept his judgment like family members accept a patriarch. His language stresses stability, duty and tradition. He reassures people scared by change and offers the comfort of clearly defined roles and rules rather than flashy innovation.
Mr. Everyman
The ordinary political leader keeps things simple and familiar. He speaks like a neighbour, emphasises shared daily concerns and presents himself as someone who understands practical problems because he lives them too. By choosing modesty over spectacle, he makes power feel accessible and reduces distance between leader and public.
The Political Wife
Schwartzenberg shows the political wife as a role created by the media more than as a private person. She’s staged to support the leader, anchoring family values, adding respectability or glamour and her small gestures are turned into political signs. That visibility is carefully scripted. When she asserts independence it can strengthen the leader’s credibility or unsettle traditional expectations. Mostly, though, her public presence functions as a symbol that helps turn private life into political legitimacy.
Private Life and Public Office
Politics as spectacle collapses the private into the public. Personal details become material for judgment and politicians adapt by managing every intimate gesture for public consumption. Schwartzenberg warns against two extremes: secrecy that breeds suspicion and complete exposure that trivialises office. He argues for protecting genuine private space while keeping accountability. Public responsibility should rest on political acts, not on turning private faults into moral trials.
Part 2: The Spectacle
Politicised art
The chapter analyses how art is transformed under the rule of the spectacle. Art ceases to be an autonomous critical activity and becomes a commodity integrated into the spectacular system. The artist loses a subversive function in favour of producing images and objects that reinforce the existing order:
"Art addresses only the eye of the market."
The author explains how the spectacle neutralises critique by absorbing artistic forms. Aesthetic innovations are quickly recuperated by commercial and media circuits, emptied of their contestatory potential: "All radicalism becomes merchandise as soon as it is visible." Originality thus turns commercial and circular rather than emancipatory.
The text underlines the complicity of cultural institutions and the media: museums, galleries, the press, and television turn art into a spectacular event, valuing iconography and notoriety over critical depth. Art "serves the celebration of the image economy" and transforms aesthetic experience into mere consumption.
A central consequence is the alienation of the spectator: stripped of an active role, they become a passive consumer of images, losing the capacity to judge or act politically. The spectacle manufactures "spectators rather than citizens" and establishes a distance between the individual and social reality.
The author implies that the only way out is a re-politicisation of art, that is, a return to practices that refuse commodification and favour collective action. Art useful to emancipation must go beyond mere representation to participate in social transformation:
"art is liberating only if it breaks the logic of the spectacle".
The cinema of power
"Le cinéma du pouvoir" examines how modern states use film and cinematic techniques to create, sustain and legitimise political authority. The chapter argues that power is not only exercised through laws and force but staged: the public is addressed through images, narratives and spectacle that shape perceptions, emotions and collective memory. Cinema becomes both metaphor and a technology of power, a way to frame events, direct attention, and produce a coherent political story.
The author outlines three linked functions of political cinema. First, representation and legitimation: official films and state-sponsored imagery depict leaders, institutions and policy as natural, competent and historic. By compressing complexity into clear moral plots: heroes, villains, crises resolved, cinema provides moral justification for rule.
Second, discipline and mobilisation: cinematic techniques (editing, montage, mise-en-scène, soundtrack) shape rhythm and affect, encouraging identification, obedience or mobilisation. Mass spectacles — parades, newsreels, staged ceremonies filmed for wide distribution — operate like propaganda machines that normalise participation.
Third, deletion and memory-making: political cinema selects what stays visible and what is forgotten. By spotlighting sanctioned narratives and omitting contradictions the state cinema manufactures collective memory and marginalises dissent. Archival images, commemorative films and televised anniversaries work to fold messy histories into tidy national myths.
The chapter also discusses techniques and institutions: centralised control of production (censorship, funding, institutional studios), the blending of documentary and fiction to hide persuasion as truth, and new media’s role in multiplying spectacle, while complicating control. The author notes that technological shifts (from newsreel to television to digital platforms) change scale and speed but not the core logic: power seeks to visualise itself.
Resistance through counter-cinema, alternative filming practices and citizen recording can disrupt official frames by revealing contradictions, focusing on marginalised voices, or creating rival spectacles. Yet these counter-efforts face asymmetries in resources, reach and institutional backing. The chapter closes on an ambivalent note: cinematic power is pervasive and adaptable but not absolute, since images can be contested, and attention remains a political terrain.
Mediapolitics
In this chapter Schwartzenberg examines how the state instrumentalises the media visibility of books to shape public opinion and legitimise its actions. He argues that the book, far from a mere cultural object, becomes an "instrument of political spectacle". By controlling media timing and promotional devices, the state can turn a publication into a public event. As he puts it, when the media stages a book it gives certain discourses an aura of authority that exceeds their real value, reshaping relations between power, knowledge, and visibility.
He then examines concrete mechanisms of this mediapolitics: subsidies, literary prizes, selective invitations to broadcasts, and privileged circulation in public and private media. These mechanisms create channels of legitimisation that direct cultural recognition. Schwartzenberg shows that these practices favour authors close to power and topics aligned with governmental agendas, producing a political overseeing of public speech that marginalises other voices.
The chapter also treats effects on the intellectual sphere. Spectacle favours performance over substance, personalises authors, and turns intellectual debates into communication operations. Schwartzenberg observes that the media privilege spectacular consensus at the expense of argued controversy, weakening the book's capacity for independent social critique. He situates this mediapolitics within a broader process of institutionalising the visible, where visibility itself becomes a political resource.
Finally, he proposes ways to resist this trap: diversify distribution circuits, strengthen autonomous journals and publishing spaces and support collective evaluation practices that revive critical work. His concluding injunction is that restoring the book's disruptive capacity requires breaking with the logic of spectacularisation and rebuilding spaces where reading and discussion can free themselves from media imperatives.
The individual on display
The chapter "L'homme en vue" examines how the individual becomes an object of public visibility in societies governed by state staging. Schwartzenberg analyses how state power turns human presence into spectacle: bodies, behaviours and personal trajectories are orchestrated, exposed, and judged according to symbolic frameworks that serve to legitimise authority. This visibility is not neutral. It selects who is shown, how, and why, creating exemplary figures (the model citizen, the hero, the deviant) while rendering other lives invisible.
The text then explores the technical and discursive mechanisms of this staging: official rituals, ceremonies, media, public architecture, and surveillance devices that shape social appearance. Schwartzenberg emphasises the correlation between visibility and power: being "in view" confers influence but also exposes one to discipline and normative judgment. The visible individual is simultaneously valorised and controlled. Their gestures read as political messages.
Finally, the author discusses possible forms of resistance to the state-spectacle. He identifies individual and collective strategies to reclaim the gaze: image diversion, refusal to appear in assigned roles or subversive performances that denounce the staging. These acts reconfigure the relationship between being visible and remaining autonomous, showing that visibility can become a space for challenge as well as an instrument of domination.
The industry of the political spectacle
Schwartzenberg argues that the modern state operates as a political spectacle: legitimacy is produced and reproduced through staged displays, ceremonial rituals, and media-managed performances that turn governance into representation. Rather than functioning primarily through administrative processes and substantive debate, the state increasingly relies on images and orchestrated events to shape public perception and manufacture authority.
This spectacular mode of rule rests on several interlocking mechanisms. Institutions and rituals become symbolic décor: their ceremonial value often outweighs their practical function. Communication professionals (spin doctors, image consultants, and private agencies) standardise political narratives and manage the tempo of public attention, while the state seeks to control media frames and timing to impose its version of events. Conflicts are neutralised by being dramatised and contained within scripted episodes, and the personalisation of power concentrates visibility on leaders rather than on collective institutions or policy substance.
The political and social consequences are significant. Citizens tend to become spectators rather than engaged participants, weakening deliberative democracy and civic oversight. The spectacle manufactures passive consent through emotional and symbolic appeals, increasing vulnerability to manipulation and “soft” forms of authoritarianism. At the same time, the transfer of representational work to private communication industries erodes institutional autonomy and blurs lines between public interest and political marketing.
Schwartzenberg proposes several responses: strengthen independent media and transparency around state communication; cultivate non‑mediated spaces for collective deliberation (local assemblies, public forums); and invest in civic and media education so citizens can recognise and resist performative politics. Re-embedding institutions in deliberative practices rather than theatrical display would help restore democratic accountability.
Part 3: The public
Star power: why?
The chapter shows how political power has been transformed into a form of star performance. Schwartzenberg describes politicians as public figures who must constantly manage their image through carefully staged appearances, televised rituals, and media-crafted narratives. This celebrity-style visibility reshapes how authority is produced: success depends less on bureaucratic competence or policy detail and more on charisma, media savvy, and the ability to deliver memorable moments.
He traces mechanisms behind this shift (professionalised communication teams, spin, televised events, and the centrality of visuals) that compress political time into spectacle-driven episodes and favour dramatic gestures over deliberative processes. The chapter argues that this dynamic encourages personalisation of politics, weakens institutional checks, and incentivises short-term decisions designed to generate favourable coverage rather than long-term public interest.
Schwartzenberg also examines the effects on citizens and democracy: audiences become consumers of political performances, critical scrutiny can be reduced to judging image and rhetoric, and scandals spread faster, undermining trust when spectacle exposes contradictions. Nonetheless, the chapter notes that spectacle can be harnessed positively to increase transparency or mobilise attention on important issues if coupled with substantive follow-through.
He closes by recommending institutional and cultural remedies: strengthen independent media and investigative journalism, restore procedural depth in public decision-making, and cultivate civic education that values policy content over mere appearance.
Star power: to do what?
Schwartzenberg traces the evolution of theatrical forms of power, but insists that contemporary media (especially television and the cinema’s narrative codes) have intensified personalisation and spectacle, shifting attention from parties and policies to individual personae. The chapter explores how this shift changes incentives. As politicians prioritise visibility, style and emotional resonance, complex policy debate and institutional deliberation are pushed to the back. He shows, with portraits and examples, (from De Gaulle to later 20th‑century leaders) how different figures embody particular dramatic types and how the public respond to them.
The author also examines effects and risks. The spectacle politicises appearances, fosters short‑termism, weakens democratic accountability, encourages manipulation of symbolism over substantive governance and can legitimise authoritarian tendencies when charisma substitutes for checks and balances.
Finally, Schwartzenberg suggests remedies: re‑valuing programmatic politics and institutions, resisting the conversion of political life into permanent entertainment and restoring spaces for reasoned debate so that leadership serves public purpose rather than celebrity status.
Star power: the power of illusion
The “power of illusion” arises because spectacle masks the mundane mechanisms of governance and obscures structural inequalities. By prioritising representation over reality, spectacle flattens complex problems into simple images and substitutes theatrical solutions for institutional reform. Citizens consume politics as a show, which weakens democratic scrutiny and enables superficial accountability.
Criticism targets performance rather than underlying decisions. Schwartzenberg warns that when power depends on spectacle, politics risks becoming fragile: legitimacy rests on continued attention and applause, making public life vulnerable to manipulation, short-term optics, and the erosion of meaningful civic engagement.
The last recital
This chapter depicts politics reduced to pure performance, where statesmen become performers whose private lives and staged personas supplant ideas and institutions. Schwartzenberg argues the culmination of the "state-as-spectacle" is a politics that no longer aims to persuade through programmes or collective debate but to captivate audiences through presence, image and emotional display. The chapter traces how media techniques (editing, staging, repetition), turn political action into a series of rehearsed scenes and finales, with leaders treated as stars whose personal narratives and theatrical gestures are the main source of legitimacy.
He points out the dangers: an erosion of institutional checks, simplification of public discourse, replacement of responsibility by image management, and growing confusion between entertainment and governance. The "last recital" is both literal (a final staged performance) and symbolic: a warning that when politics becomes entertainment’s final act, democratic substance risks being extinguished in favor of spectacle. Schwartzenberg closes by calling for a revival of civic seriousness by restoring institutions, public debate and accountability to end the reign of the political show.
Themes
Politics as performance
The state and its institutions increasingly stage political life as theatrical display: ceremonies, media events and choreographed appearances replace deliberative, substantive governance.
General Charles de Gaulle’s 1958/1960 televised speeches and staged public returns used theatrical staging, deliberate choreography and symbolic settings (e.g., Élysée Palace audiences, military parades) to embody state continuity and authority.
Ronald Reagan’s background as an actor and scripted, camera-aware appearances (town-hall-style events, staged photo-ops) used theatrical techniques to convey reassurance and authority.
Tony Blair’s media-trained presentation, spin operation (Alastair Campbell era) and tight message discipline made policy-making follow media timing and soundbite logic.
Personalisation of authority
Power centres around personalities and leaders’ images. Institutions and parties become vehicles for charismatic presentation rather than collective decision-making.
Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign and presidency (intense media presence, flashy imagery and marriage to a political wife) centred power around his personality, diminishing party-institutional mediation.
Vladimir Putin's carefully curated personal-image stunts (judo, horse-riding, shirtless photo-ops) centralise authority in the leader’s persona and project strength through spectacle.
Felipe González's PSOE media management (1980s–90s) professionalised campaign staging, televised appearances and tightly managed interviews, turning leadership into a crafted performance, while consolidating democratic legitimacy.
Rituals and state ceremony
The book analyses how ceremonies, commemorations and official rituals are used to manufacture consent and a sense of unity.
The elaborate coronation ceremony of King Charles III in the U.K., including a divine right of kings anointing moment covered by a screen, reaffirmed the traditional monarchy (Charles I was beheaded by Republicans; his son, Charles II, dissolved Parliament and ruled alone for four years.)
In China large-scale parades, televised party congresses and choreographed mass events create symbolic legitimacy and unity, even when substantive governance issues persist.
On September 11, 2001, George Bush Junior's crisis choreography and symbolic displays, presidential addresses, ceremonies at Ground Zero, and carefully staged security responses used symbolism and narrative control to mobilise public sentiment and legitimise a war of revenge.
Erosion of democratic deliberation
The 24-hour news cycle and televised political talk shows reduce complex policy debates to soundbites and confrontational formats, shaping electoral choices more by performance than detailed programmatic discussion. Cable news incentives and debate formats emphasise conflict and theatre, compressing policy complexity into memorable lines and spectacle-driven coverage.
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