The Blanc casinos were marketed through the cultivation of an impression of honesty and mechanical universality. The study of probability, which arose historically in relationship to the calculation of gambling odds, provided a way to measure the honesty of a casino. Probability, as it was expressed in the context of nineteenth-century resort casinos, was the object of renewed interest among professional mathematicians and amateurs seeking to understand the logic of the games they played. There are three avenues through which this amplified interest in probability was expressed in the nineteenth century: the analysis of “runs” (a long sequence of identical results), the systems that gamblers developed for beating the odds, and the casino as an experimental space for mathematicians in the nineteenth century. Together, these developments suggest that the nineteenth-century casino provided a novel opportunity for inquiry into areas such as the nature of time, the limits of causation, and the science of probability.

The body was integrated into discussions of gambling, and luck was depicted as a tangible thing that the body could experience. In this chapter we look at the somatic effects of gambling and the ways that gambling marked the body in profound ways, considering the ways that gambling could disrupt bodily boundaries or throw them into confusion. We also consider the ways that luck, chance, and gambling were thought to have left their historical imprint on the human species, looking at the ways that social Darwinist and evolutionary thought wrestled with gambling and sought to understand its evolutionary meaning. Together, we consider how gambling could be understood as an intensely physical activity, rooted in the actions of the body.

Gambling in its modern form was invented in the nineteenth century. The resort casino, built in an environmentally or politically desirable location, attracted a wide range of people from around the world to an atmosphere of luxury, leisure, and cultural cultivation. Visitors to European casinos in the nineteenth century traveled there by steamship or by locomotive; they stayed in hotels and ate meticulously prepared foods; they listened to music performed by artists on tour; and caught up on global and regional affairs by reading newspapers from around the world. And they lost money in the gambling rooms. Built upon an existing network of health-conscious spa towns in the Rhineland, and then relocating to the Riviera in the 1860s, nineteenth-century casino life gave expression to bourgeois demands for leisure, luxury, and levity.

Spa towns experienced a boom with the creation of rail lines that brought tourists to the resorts. These customers, beckoned by the climate and environment, sought healthful cures and leisurely activities. Resorts like those crafted by François Blanc at Bad Homburg and Monte Carlo exploded in part because they offered gambling, but they also grew because they were able to take advantage of the mechanization of travel in the mid-nineteenth century that developed in tandem with a culture of tourism. Industrialized transportation networks promoted industrialized forms of leisure even as they gestured to healthful living.

Gambling affected the mental apparatus that people employed to understand the world around them as well as their own desires and compulsions. Casino gambling established a psychological dynamic perfectly calibrated to drive people to the edge of madness. The “storm” of despair generated by a loss, never compensated by a corresponding elation coming with a win, can overwhelm the player and leave them incapable of self-direction. Descriptions of the psychological effects of addiction – not only how those behaviors were formed through repetition but also how they resulted in a person whose entire world had shrunk – indicate how the machinery of Blanc-style casino gambling affected people in new and profound ways.

Visitors to resorts were enveloped in a new world that had the casino and its pleasures at its core. The novel forms that the institution assumed in the nineteenth century represent a change in the structure as a whole. The casino did important cultural work in the imaginations of nineteenth-century observers, recalling other social spaces, from the court to the church, and offered a contrast to other locations associated with nineteenth-century modernity. The architectural elements that were not directly related to gambling had the subsidiary purpose of keeping people within the physical confines of the building so that they would return to the gambling tables. Nineteenth-century casinos were anchored in attempts to generate and encourage certain forms of middle-class sociability. The casino produced an environment in which the emotions were unmoored, and new sensations attacked any previous emotional core that visitors possessed. Unlike other spaces that channeled emotion – the cathedral or the court – the nineteenth-century casino did so in the service of play, pleasure, and financial gain.

The casino provided a unique location to probe the logic of chance for those seeking to understand fortune and misfortune, causation and correlation. Chance helped generate predictability. When we shift to consider the picture of luck that emerges, we see that it is exhibited in various systems designed to generate wins at the gambling table, lured to a person to through any number of bizarre superstitions, and made the object of social scientific inquiry. Luck was something that people could generate, manufacture, cultivate, or capture. This element of human agency speaks to a vision of the world that promoted the basic idea of human agency while also acknowledging its limits. Gambling systems and superstitions, especially when they did not rest on the foundation of the “maturity of chances,” were at their heart modern attempts to bend luck to one’s side.

The introduction sets out the intent of the book, an overview of the major works in the field, and a view of the arguments appearing in each chapter. Gambling is central to the cultural, social, and intellectual history of the nineteenth century. Studying casino gambling provides a way to see how nineteenth-century Europeans understood their changing world, even as it also reflected those changes itself. In this way gambling was used in an explanatory capacity, one that let contemporaries probe the inner workings of the machine and the creation of knowledge. If we want to understand the intricate dance of society, culture, politics, and ideas, then gambling is a useful tool to pry open these different stories, allowing us to see better large historical transformations.

In descriptions of the interior drama of the wager, or of the game, or of the convoluted sequence of emotions suddenly untethered and allowed free expression, we see not only the ways that gambling generated emotional intensity in players, but also how it invited closely detailed descriptions of the ways emotions were experienced. Play and the creation of Blanc-style casinos created a social space and a set of images of gambling that provided Europeans from differing backgrounds a common language of emotion that was developed through a discussion of the ways that emotion was contained and expressed in the environment of the casino, an entity typically described as being passionless.

Gambling in this period was never just about gambling; it always represented something else or spoke to some bigger set of concerns. It was thought to be a neutered form of aggression, made socially acceptable through the relentless power of the civilizing process but flowering in the novel context of the resort casino. Gambling was a way to connect to prior forms of existence, and it functioned as a substitute for socially unacceptable practices. Gambling is also contrasted with other forms of risk: insurance and speculation. Some observers took a pro-gambling approach, noting the unique skills it cultivates or its basis in nature.

Nineteenth-century European casinos tapped into new transportation and communication networks, and they were flexible enough to take advantage of the changing political map of Europe. The casinos found success amid these large structural transformations affecting the continent. They projected a new type of sociability that exuded a sense of exclusivity and democracy at once. The casino was also an environment that embraced social mixture. The casino attracted a transnational and polyglot clientele. Nineteenth-century casinos were physical expressions of contemporary ideas about fate and agency. The nineteenth-century casino also occasioned a prolonged discussion of the body, feeling, and mind, and there is a wide recognition of culture’s impact on the body. Seeing the effect that gambling had on players, nineteenth-century observers could consider how the self, the environment, and behavior all related to one another.