The first celebrity

It’s quite a scene to imagine. A maniacal self-publicist with absurd facial hair takes off in what’s thought to be the biggest hot-air balloon the world has ever seen. Adoring crowds gather to watch the launch. He rises rapidly and sails off towards the clouds — but in due course the whole thing goes arse-up and he comes clattering to earth, narrowly escaping with his and his crew’s life. Never mind: the catastrophe is reported around the world and has made him even more famous than he was before. It was a ‘semi-unsuccess’. And within weeks he’s back planning another ascent in another giant balloon.

As if to bear out the wise view of Ecclesiastes that there is nothing new under the sun, the year in this case is not 1987 but 1863; and the balloonist is not Richard Branson but Félix Tournachon, known around the world by his nickname Nadar. (He was dubbed ‘Tournadard’ as a young man by his friend Auguste Lefranc; which in turn became ‘Nadard’ before ‘the final d dropped off for good in about 1849’.)

Nadar has been having a bit of a moment lately. Featuring heavily in Richard Holmes’s 2013 ballooning book Falling Upwards, and Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life, the same year, this wayward and beguiling 19th-century gadabout is now the subject of a fine short book by John Updike’s biographer Adam Begley.

Nadar was many things in his energetic career. He was a decent caricaturist, a prolific if patchy writer, a first-rate photographer (Roland Barthes thought him the greatest of all time), a reckless aeronaut — and a publicist of preternatural genius. Imagine a cross between Richard Branson, Lord Snowdon, Andy Warhol and Donald Trump (his photographic atelier in Paris was surmounted by a 50ft illuminated sign reading ‘Nadar’, and when Victor Hugo wrote to him it was sufficient to address the envelope ‘Nadar, Paris’); though more charming than all four put together.