La Mystification Lunaire: John Herschel Et Le Canular de 1835

At the end of the summer of 1835, an extraordinary event set the United States abuzz. The eminent scientist John Herschel, then in South Africa, confirmed the existence of life on the Moon thanks to the power of a gigantic telescope. He is said to have observed, for several days, a variety of flora and fauna, including the discovery of winged humanoid creatures. This scientific discovery, reported by the New York Sun, provoked an unprecedented editorial frenzy thanks to the rise of the penny press. The various articles in the Sun, then the brochure that recounted the extraordinary observation, concurrent with the publication of Poe's "Hans Phaall," enjoyed immense popular success and soon afterward spread to the European continent. This was one of the greatest scientific hoaxes in history, the first "lunar hoax." With the translation of these Discoveries in the Moon, made at the Cape of Good Hope by Herschel the Younger, the French craze took over. The reception in the press gave rise to many debates as to the veracity of such a discovery and the idea of extraterrestrial life on the Moon spread throughout society. Arago, Balzac, or Herschel himself, were indignant, with great reinforcement of scientific or ironic demonstrations, of this hoax. Without success. Thirty years later, Jules Verne would allude to it in From the Earth to the Moon . If the subject did not fail to interest Anglo-Saxon historians and journalists, the introduction of the hoax in France, on the other hand, was not the subject of any research work. Interweaving the history of the press and the history of science, Alexandre Marcinkowski explores the hidden face of this mystification. It shows its tremendous spread in the cultural field: in addition to its adaptation in Picard, the hoax was the subject of vaudevilles, drawings, mentions in novels or short stories of the time, and inspired the lyrics of many songs. Thus, the small and large history of the first large-scale fake news on a Western scale is retraced, well before the radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds by Orson Welles.