Recent resurgences of “populist” parties, from the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany to the National Rally in France, haunt political debates.1 While theorists like Chantal Mouffe present left-wing populism as a necessary strategy against the Right,2 Éric Fassin declares such a strategy ineffective,3 and Jan-Werner Müller even considers it a threat to democracy itself.4 What unites the divergent positions is the claim that there are no people as such preceding the populists’ evocation. Rather, there exist “diverse and even antagonistic images of the people,”5 as Jacques Rancière puts it. Drawing on the insight that these images are fabricated by popular media and forms, Ethel Matala de Mazza’s study The Popular Pact: Negotiations of Modernity between Operetta and Feuilleton (my translation) traces the sociocultural emergence of the elusive foundation of modern democracy: the common folk. At stake in Matala de Mazza’s history of these “small forms”...
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