Studies of Enlightenment culture have made explicit reference to the importance of the musées. Musées should be placed within the larger context of the emerging public sphere and popular science. Musées gained notoriety by fusing the best aspects of other institutions together in one social space and then adding lecture courses into the resulting mixture. Musée members gained access to the Republic of Letters in all its many manifestations as well as the opportunity to attend classes given by respected thinkers. The Musée de Paris wanted to become a place where "young authors tried out their talents, and where the best known authors presented, for the taste of the public, a manuscript that they were going to have published." There were many people who were upset with the interior squabbles of the Musée de Paris and quickly jumped ship for the relative harmony of the Musée de Monsieur.

The Spanish Civil War began as a revolution and became the most important small war of the twentieth century. Land and Freedom, Ken Loach's film about the Spanish Civil War, explained the complex politics of this war for a new generation when it was released in 1995. Land and Freedom attempts to validate the Trotskyist point of view by means of a narrative in which political processes and a love story are skilfully related. A vigorous anti-Stalinism is inseparable from Trotskyism, but Loach's screenwriter, Jim Allen's remarks on Stalin and Spain in the production notes to Land and Freedom go beyond what is plausible. The Spanish revolution was betrayed by Stalin and by the social democrats because 'they preferred Franco to the possibility of a workers' state'. It is possible to discern differing attitudes towards gender and gender issues among the parties of the Spanish left.

In many ways, popular science fit in quite well with the revolutionary spirit. Beginning in the 1730s and lasting well into the 1780s and 1790s, science formed a mainstay of French popular culture. The invention of ballooning in 1783 reinforced the belief that science could produce nearly miraculous discoveries. In addition to the controversy over divining rods, numerous other scientific debates filled the popular press and the cultural imagination of the French at this time. The revolutionary period saw an emphasis on the potential of science to serve the new, rational state; science education became a significant focus of political attention, as did the ability of savants to provide useful services to the nation. Many people appropriated science through public lecture courses and expressed considerable interest in scientific work through their membership in clubs and their participation in the funding of balloons and the debate over divining rods.

This chapter presents a case study of the photographic archive available on the official website of the Ejército Zapatista Liberación Nacional (EZLN). It discusses the role of photography in contributing to the visibility of the Zapatista struggle and in promoting the struggle to the rest of the world. The internet allowed the Zapatistas and their supporters, activists around the globe, to organise themselves, to form 'cyber-communities' and coordinate 'action in dispersed, non-hierarchical networks'. The most predominant feature of the images available online is the omnipresence of masked Zapatistas. Although the Zapatistas may not wear their balaclavas in their everyday life, they consider them necessary in the presence of the camera. The distance that Zapatistas keep from the model of the foco guerrilla movement is the same distance that exists between the EZLN and Che Guevara's thought and revolutionary praxis.