M. Robert-Houdin goes to Algeria: spectatorship and panic in illusion and early cinema.

In 1856, Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin, the great legitimizer of stage magic, was dispatched to Algeria in service of the French government to perform before tribal assemblies. It was hoped that exposure to French magic would undermine the influence of their own miracle workers, the Marabout. Robert-Houdin's widely disseminated memoirs describe him cowing the Arabs into terror with his illusions, all the better to educate them. This essay draws comparisons between the Algeria expedition and the myth of Grand Cafe, another narrative of 'terror in the aisles' with an emphasis on the dynamic of trained versus untrained spectatorship. Both narratives imagine a naive group of spectators erupting into panic on encountering a new form of illusion. Against them, the superior, trained spectator is constructed. The essay deals with the place of illusion in modern life, as a point of reconciliation between Robert-Houdin's art and the art so many of his successors found themselves in: cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]