A new perspective on the transformation of the public sphere. The history of modernity is often narrated as a movement that originated from so-called high culture, from philosophy or poetry, from treatises and novels. Ethel Matal de Mazza, however, demonstrates that popular forms played an equally significant role in the breakthrough of modernity. By focusing on genres such as operetta or feuilleton and their social applications and aesthetic methods, she succeeds in finding the political within the popular and analyzing how these forms respond to it. This has resulted in a new history of the transformation of the public sphere through popular forms, where social poetics and aesthetic sociology are intertwined—and which are directly linked to the fate of what is now called society.