MADAME TUSSAUD: And the History of Waxworks

Pilbeam, a professor of French history at the University of London, traces the age-old history of waxworks, placing the story of Madame Tussaud and her eponymous wax museum at the narrative's center. (The museum still operates today with five locations on three continents, including North America.) Madame Tussaud, born Marie Grosholz in 1761, inherited her obsession for wax from Philippe Curtius, who may have been her father (her mother was his housekeeper). Curtius, who owned and operated the famed Salon de Cire in Paris, bequeathed his estate to Marie at his death. Not to be confined by her gender, she had learned from Curtius how to make models of bloodied heads fresh from the guillotine during the French Revolution. She left France in 1802, never to return—probably, according to Pilbeam, to escape a failing marriage. In Britain, Tussaud filled her museum with celebrities as well as an array of criminals and murder victims in the exhibit hall that Punch dubbed by Punch the "Chamber of Horrors." By 1851, the year after her death, Tussaud's had nearly one million visitors per year. Thoroughly researched and intricately contextualized, Pilbeam's analysis of Madame Tussaud as a character is ambivalent at best. Pilbeam is hesitant to herald her as an entrepreneur and innovator, claiming instead that her success was due primarily to business savvy and financial acumen. But Pilbeam's fascinating account makes a solid argument that waxworks provide an ideal lens for examining the popular cultures of France and Britain, and that Tussaud's, in particular, played a major role in the emergence of popular entertainment and the cult of celebrity. Illus. (Apr.)