French Literature Reviews - 2026
Vincent Wackenheim, La mort dans tous ses états. Modernité et esthétique des Danses macabres, 1785-1966
Art and Visual Culture
Bringing together 104 modern Dances of Death, over 1,000 annotated images, and 11 thematic focus pieces, Vincent Wackenheim’s book highlights the vitality and enduring relevance of an ancient graphical tradition revisited by numerous artists of all nationalities from the 18th century onward. The central thread is to demonstrate how these creators, guided by the stylistic trends of their time, reinterpreted iconic imagery deeply rooted in the collective imagination since the 15th century. Building upon an original framework shaped by religious history, they integrated new social and political, tragic and burlesque themes, which were also consequences of the two World Wars.
From the mural at the Saints-Innocents cemetery in Paris (1424) and the Basel fresco (1440) to Holbein’s engravings (1538), representations of the Dances of Death have followed codified patterns, achieving a form of universality across Europe. They typically feature pairings of a dead figure—more or less skeletal and fleshless—and a living person, marching in hierarchical order: from pope to hermit, noble to landsknecht, peddler to ploughman.
The framework is thus established, combining a sense of dread with a touch of irony directed at the powerful. For while equality before death is affirmed, equality on earth remains glaringly absent.
From the late 18th century onward, the Dances of Death experienced a striking resurgence of interest, characterized by appropriation, thematic renewal, and a profound distance from the Middle Ages. The genre’s extreme readability—accessible to all social classes—its timeless themes, inherent violence, and deep-seated popularity within collective memory prompted artists to propose bold interpretations that transcended Christian references.
Aided by the widespread distribution enabled by advancements in printing techniques, the rhythm of the Dances of Death became entwined with modern history, marked by revolutions and social unrest, persistent epidemics, and a rapidly changing society.
The sensory, visual, and tangible shock of war was so profound that the First World War of 1914–1918 became the central subject of a vast number of *danse macabre* works in France, Germany, and England, alongside the Second World War to a lesser extent—not to mention depictions of concentration camps or the Allied bombings that devastated Dresden in February 1945. Finally, it is hardly surprising that amidst the tensions of the 1950s and the Korean War, the looming threat of nuclear devastation became a source of profound anxiety for several artists, reflected directly in their portfolios.
While the original Dances of Death offered a reassuring vision of society overall, their modern counterparts leave the individual entirely alone facing death: no grieving families, no professional mourners, no notaries—just a direct confrontation. Death comes to claim the gambler, the libertine, the coquette, and the miser because of their flaws. This suggests that these figures might have, if not escaped death entirely, at least postponed its arrival by leading orderly lives.
Each Dance of Death thus bears witness to the flaws of an era: the characters and situations sketched by Rowlandson, Grandville, Merkel, Barth, or Dyl reveal the perversions, ambitions, and conflicts of early 19th-century England, 1830s France, 19th-century Germany, and 1920s France. Alongside the extreme violence of the plates, they consistently favor satire, irony, and humor.
The eternal fear of dying—and the desire to prepare for it properly, which gave rise to countless editions of De arte bene moriendi and a broader infatuation with Vanitas themes—finds an extension in these striking modern Dances of Death. They present the moment just before demise, when the die is cast and attempting to alter one’s destiny appears futile, as if it were a fragment of eternity.
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Vincent Wackenheim was born in 1959 in Strasbourg. This might mean little had he not subsequently become a second-hand bookseller in Paris, following studies in literature, history, and law, before eventually turning to publishing (until recently heading the venerable Documentation française). This profession, to be practiced with a minimum of seriousness, requires having written a couple of books oneself—works that, for lack of a better category, might be filed under the burlesque genre, assuming such a category truly exists.
He has published Le Voyage en Allemagne (Deyrolle éditeur, 1996), La perte d’une chance (Le Temps qu’il fait, 2003), Coucou (Le Dilettante, 2005), La revanche des otaries (Le Dilettante, 2009), La gueule de l’emploi (Le Dilettante, 2011), Petit éloge de la première fois (Gallimard, folio 2€, 2011), Les décorés — in collaboration with Christophe Mory (Art et Comédie, 2011), L’ordre des choses (Éditions Léo Scheer, 2012), and Chaos (Galaade, 2014); and with our publishing house: Joseph Kaspar Sattler ou La Tentation de l’os (2016) and Bestioles (2020).
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An article about this book can be read on nonfiction.fr:
The tradition of the danse macabre holds a long and significant place in European iconography, originating in medieval wall paintings and engravings that paired skeletal figures with representatives of all social strata. These early representations emphasized both the universal leveling effect of mortality and the rigid hierarchies of earthly society, often blending grim reality with satirical commentary. Over subsequent centuries, the motif evolved from its Christian didactic roots into a flexible visual language capable of absorbing new cultural preoccupations, artistic styles, and sociopolitical changes across the continent.
Vincent Wackenheim examines how artists from the late eighteenth century through the mid-twentieth century reinterpreted this ancient iconography in response to modern upheavals, including industrialization, war, and political conflict. Readers interested in the history of graphic arts, visual culture, and the evolving representations of mortality in the modern era may find this study particularly engaging. The volume traces how creators adapted codified patterns to reflect contemporary anxieties while maintaining the traditional tension between dread and irony inherent to the genre.