Franz Anton Mesmer, a physician born in Baden-Württemberg who obtained a doctorate in medicine in Vienna, gained international renown during his time in Paris. Officially, Mesmer’s magnetic cures were intended to realign bodily forces with cosmic harmony; however, he might have owed his dubious reputation rather to hypnotic incantations and miraculous massages that promised to harness the attractive powers of “animal magnetism”. Due to his success, the verb „to mesmerize“ has since become part of everyday language, notably in English.

In the 1960s, Robert Darnton recognized Mesmer as a somewhat invisible key figure of the French Revolution, taking his writings as the starting point for a new form of historiography that should also take popular but esoteric literatures into account. A few decades later, COVID-19 restrictions and their various counter-movements provided an occasion for a series of seminars in which collective and choreographed forms of protest or mass organization were documented in the manner of a Warburgian picture atlas, blending Darnton’s interpretation with an art historical approach called „Political Iconography“. This presentation will discuss some of the results and methodological problems that arose during this process.