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Throughout history, authority has been staged through extraordinary spectacles, the illumination of sovereign power with flashes of fire and groans of thunder. Most often, these spectacles drew their power from singular, hidden, distant sources–from the depths of history, from divine powers, and from the kingly power that personified both. The dramatic events of 1789 and the decapitation of Louis XVI, however, came to symbolize an important change in the structures of authority–a devolution of the singular authority of sovereign power to the sovereignty of the ‘people’. It also accompanied a shift in political discourses towards a growing awareness and problematization of immanent forms of political power and authority. In this article I draw on archival research on the creative community in finde-siècle Montmartre in order to contribute a genealogical perspective to the attempts in the rest of this issue to theorize the …