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The Moon for a twopence: street telescopes in nineteenth-century Paris and the epistemology of popular stargazing

Abstract In this article, I explore the epistemology of popular stargazing as it emerged in the nineteenth century. I want to chart the way in which the spectacle of the sky, a powerful metaphor of the Enlightenment, became an object of mass consumption in nineteenth-century Paris. Turning astronomy into a spectacle for wide audiences, I want to argue, went hand-in-hand with the emergence renewed forms of popular observations. To this end, I focus on the telescopes that were set up in public places (boulevards, bridges, and squares). I am trying to reconstruct the workings of these small-scale enterprises, their appeal, as well as the various ways they were perceived by a socially diversified public. In brief, this paper is about how the crowd was convened to spectacle of the sky and about what was the meaning of this transformation in the popular gaze.