Art and The French Revolution - An Exhibition at The Musée Carnavalet PDF

Art and the French Revolution: An Exhibition at the Musée Carnavalet
Author(s): Hannah Mitchell

Source: History Workshop , Spring, 1978, No. 5 (Spring, 1978), pp. 123-145
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4288163
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Photo Pierrain-Carnavalet
Art and the French Revolution:

An Exhibition at the Musee Carnavalet*
by Hannah Mitchell
The Musee Carnavalet, museum of the history of Paris, fittingly situated not far
from the Place de la Bastille, has mounted an exhibition of nearly 350 prints, not, as
the organisers stress, merely produced during the revolutionary years, but directly
elicited and stimulated by those events. However, the prints on display constitute
only a tiny fraction of the enormous productivity of that time and have been selected
from many thousands of surviving examples, of which a large number, owing to
their fragility, remain stored away and never see the light of day.
According to the exhibition organisers, the artistic qualities of the revolutionary
print have remained undervalued and comparatively neglected for the following,
very telling, reasons.[l] First, 'history' took over: the prints provided so much
source material or documentation of events; they were rifled for what they could tell
the historian about the subject-matter, while their worth and interest from an
*The exhibition, L'Art de l'Estampe et la Revolution Francaise (The Art of the Print and the
French Revolution) was held at the Mus&e Carnavalet, Paris from 28 June to 20 November
1977.

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124 History Workshop
aesthetic point of view were virtually left out of account. The second reason for
neglect is their infinitely large, hence intimidating, number.[2] But the organisers
cite two further factors and it is these which are singularly important pointers in
alerting us to how far, and with what distorting effects, we are in the hands of
arbiters of taste, of collectors. The print of the time has been bypassed, they explain,
because, in art-historical terms, it was considered unclassifiable: it escaped the ready
categorisation of styles and pedigrees, due in large part to the anonymity of those
who created it, i.e. it lacked the prestige which a 'signature' would have provided.
(Add to this its problematic status, poised between two centuries, not to mention the
vexed question of the use of colour - whether a gouache-covered engraving
should be called an engraving or a water-colour for example, has exercised the
classifying zeal of the specialists.) The next reason they offer is equally significant,
and my own responses to the exhibition tended to confirm it: namely, that the print
has existed in the shadow of the mainstream tradition of painting, of 'Great Art'.
The very different qualities of sensibility and style to be found in engraving were
barely recognised, much less appreciated.
The exhibition sets out to pose the question: in bearing witness to events, how did
the engravers of the time 'see' the revolution; in visual terms, how did the graphic
artists translate their engagement with it into forms of representation? To capture a
sense of immediacy, to provide a kind of photo-reportage is the organisers' overall
aim. The underlying principle is not that of providing mere 'illustrations' of
historical events, nor a revolutionary chronology, but of bringing before us the
artist's perceptions of the time, both as spectator and participant in the revolution-
ary process. But unfortunately, instead of the symbiosis of history and art which
such an approach would suggest, the organisers direct the main weight of their
attention to aesthetic-technical considerations. Their classification is sometimes by
theme (e.g. battles, revolutionary sites), sometimes by stylistic provenance and genre
(e.g. neo-classicism, Louis XVI style), sometimes by the specialist techniques and
processes involved (e.g. colour-print, engraving types). To be fair, though, they do
have some more inspired and genuinely illuminating ways of grouping their
material: such as the contrast between the immediate eye-witness depiction of an
event, and its portrayal at a distance in time, in place or in legend and myth. But all
in all, they lack a consistent alternative conception to the iconographic approach
which they rightly criticise in traditional, art-historical practices. Perhaps, in their
anxiety to show a neutrality before the events of the French Revolution and to avoid
the partisan passions it has aroused, they fall back on the less contentious position
of valuing its art simply as art.
Before seeing this exhibition, my own mental image of the art of the French
Revolution was made up of the imposing, stern and stoical Roman canvases of the
painter David, like The Oath of the Horatii (actually painted before the Revolution,
in 1784, but often taken to represent its spirit) or his Brutus, exhibited in 1789,
exemplifying civic and patriotic virtue; or the painting to my mind most memorable
of all, Marat Assassine (The Dead Marat), emotionally the more powerful for its
classically sculptural economy of line. [3] A further component of that mental image
was formed by a reading of art history, where the art of the Jacobin period,
following the public and political cult of antiquity, is characterised as being
synonymous with neo-classicism (again exemplified in the work of David and his
school). [41 But perhaps as big an element for me is Marx's comment on the social
psychology of the French revolutionaries, in the familiar opening pages of The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852):

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Art and the French Revolution 125
And in the classically austere traditions of the Rom

found the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptio
to conceal from themselves the bourgeois limitation
struggles, and to keep their passion at the height of the great historical
tragedy. [5]
In the marxist tradition, writers have not viewed the art of the French Revolution
from a substantially different vantage point. Plekhanov, for instance, in his essay
French Dramatic Literature and French Eighteenth Century Painting from the
Sociological Standpoint offers a similar account: the art of David and his school is
the art of the French Revolution. (6] It ousts the frivolities of Rococo style, the
pretty-pretty and the decorative, to replace them with an austere and simple
classicism of form, matched by a revolutionary spirit of content. [7]
Any such idea, indeed any idea of the orderly progression or periodisation of
artistic styles would be seriously challenged, not to say dispelled, by a visit to this
exhibition. And for any of us who have been encouraged to seek stylistic
'equivalents' for particular phases of social and historical development, the
recognition that the print does not follow the same lines of development as paintin
will come as a helpful corrective. For the print gives far greater play to popular and
spontaneous forms; it tends to deal with contemporary rather than historical subject
matter.
The neo-classical style which has been identified with the art of this period is,
indeed, represented, but it is simply one (and a subsidiary one) among a number of
expressive forms. The overall impact is one of stylistic pluralism, of a diversity of
artistic idiom. Here one can see continuities and disjunctions, old and new, jostling
with one another; one witnesses how the revolutionary situation both created new
art forms and borrowed from or adapted the existing pictorial language. In some
prints, all is harmony and order, reason and light; in others, storm and stress. The
viewer is confronted by extreme contrasts and interminglings of style and tone. On
the one hand, the explosive and exuberant images of revolutionary upsurge or the
invective and vituperation of scatological caricature; on the other, a measure and
poise that remind one that these engravers were working within aesthetic tradition
of representation which reach not only far back into the 18th century, but much
further. For instance, there are formalised battle scenes with not a hint of passion or
violence, looking as unruffled and composed - in both senses of the word - as the
aquatints of the late eighteenth century factories, reproduced in Klingender's Art
and the Industrial Revolution. [8] Or scenes where the meticulous precision of the
architecture or gardens dominates, taking precedence over whatever human interest
purports to be the print's central subject matter. In a very different vein you have
the phantasmagoric, the grotesque and macabre or the visionary-imaginative worlds
akin to those of Blake, of Fuseli or of Goya.
Faced with this broad spectrum of stylistic and expressive material, one is
prompted to ask: who then were the engravers, what position did they occupy within
the structure of artistic production as a whole? The exhibition material itself cannot
offer us answers to these questions and therefore, I propose, in the first place to say
something about the social character of print production and the revolution's
impact upon it, and then to look at pre- and post-revolutionary artistic patronage,
before returning to what is a more personal and selective appreciation of the
exhibition.

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PRINT-MAKING
Despite the use of what were technically similar or related graphic processes, the
engravers were in no sense a unified social group. Their working and living
conditions were widely disparate and various; their productions were destined for
quite different kinds of market. Whatever the links, overlaps and mutual borrow-
ings, print production essentially revolved around the two poles of academic and
popular art, so that we can distinguish two broad categories: that of studio, fine art
engraving and that of popular print-making.
First then, the engravers who belonged to the world of academic and fine art and
whose livelihood before the revolution depended largely on private patronage, but
increasingly on a growing middle-class public. In the course of the 18th century,
engraved reproductions of paintings had come to enjoy a wide diffusion and
popularity, especially those portraying the contemporary event. Often the painting
themselves were commissioned with the print market in mind. Thus many engravers
will have played an integral part in the artist's studio - the would-be painter learnt
drawing technique by copying from engravings. Others, as illustrators of fine books,
provided architectural, costume or theatre designs for elegant and tasteful editions
of all kinds. [91 Some of the great 'quality' prints of contemporary history
commissioned by the revolutionary weeklies (such as Louis Prudhomme's Revolu-
tions de Paris) were works of consummate skill, highly wrought and polished. So,
too, were the serial engravings, the most celebrated being the Tableaux Historiques
de la Revolution Franraise (Historic Scenes of the French Revolution), consisting in
all of 144 prints by distinguished contributors. Often these were publicised through
advance press notices in order to gain subscribers. [10]
At the other end of the spectrum were the print-makers catering for a large
popular market to decorate or, following popular superstition, protect the walls of
homes, inns and workshops. From the late-16th until the end of the 18th century
their activity was concentrated in and around the rue St-Jacques in Paris: a bustling
quarter of small trades and workshops near the Sorbonne -the printers' quarter.
There were engravers working all along the street - traditional family businesses -
each with its own 'line' in popular, coloured etching. Few stylistic changes took
place in their production from one generation to the next. One specialised in
proverbs, illustrated by scenes of popular life, another in wall calendars or perhaps
snuff-boxes, another in religious subjects, yet another in 'costumes and court
fashions'. Some would produce a miscellany of different types. In particular vogue
at the time was the peepshow view (vue optique), a coloured engraving or etching of
topographical, documentary or historic interest, intended to be viewed in an optical
box fitted with mirrors and lenses to create the illusion of perspective and space.
Popular subjects were natural curiosities, monuments, firework displays, dramatic
historical events, strange exotic lands - any awe-inspiring or spectacular scene. [1 1
In the workshop the master would execute the print's design, his assistants carry
out the graving or etching, while a host of neighbours and children, armed with
brushes and saucers of paint, did the colouring, glad of the few sous it brought
them. When dry, the prints were tied together in bundles to be sold. Sometimes the
print-maker's wife sold them herself- she might well have a small haberdashery
business, too - but more frequently it was the itinerant hawker (print-sellers similar
to those described at length by Henry Mayhew in London Labour and the London
Poor) who would come each spring and load up with a selection to cater for every

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taste - from the devotional image to the chapbook or broadsheet. With their large
back-packs containing items of haberdashery, medals and dried flowers in addition
to the prints, these pedlars made their living going round provincial France from
village to village.[12]
Popular print-making (imagerie) was a distinctly urban art practised by those
who either published their own productions or perhaps worked for a particular
printer-publisher. The distribution of the prints - it's difficult to know exactly who
bought them - was both urban and rural, whether through local agents with fixed
premises or by means of travelling pedlars: colporteurs. These colporteurs were the
vital link between the print-makers and their more distant and rural clientele. Their
understanding of popular tastes and demand, of the success or otherwise of a certain
type of print, considerably affected and shaped what was actually produced,
suggesting that they played an important mediating role in the formation of popular
sensibility and culture. The same goes for the colporteurs of popular reading
matter. [13]
Most of the popular revolutionary prints had their origins in the rue St-Jacques.
For example, Basset, a publisher well-known for issuing a substantial number of the
anti-clerical and anti-nobility lampoons, operated from there. Frequently, these
images too were traditional ones: with minor modifications such as costume they
might have been used for generations. Rather than portraying events which are
quickly past and forgotten, these popular images tended to be allegorical and based
on some kind of folklore (e.g. husbands and wives, the evils of drinking etc.). The
old copper-plate could easily be adapted - perhaps by a new title - to make a
topical point. [141 Nevertheless, the social convulsions of the revolution had a
profoundly transforming and overturning effect on this popular art. In the first
place, the historic present, the political event made its impact as never before on its
traditional imagery, mingling and co-existing with its older forms and producing a
curious amalgam of past and present where legend and politics were confounded
with one another. Second, there was the near eclipse of the religious image. Before
the revolution this had formed a substantial part of the print market as a whole,
supplying confraternities as well as private individuals. Pictures of the crucifixion,
the saints, the Passion etc. were its staple subject matter. Now this religious imagery
vanished, at least for a while, and a considerable number of craftsmen whose
speciality it was went out of business.[15]
Given that the revolutionary prints hailed from the rue St-Jqcques, one can
reasonably assume the strong revolutionary sympathies of many of the print-
makers, always leaving aside those who adapted their productions from tactical and
business motives. From Soboul's analysis of popular societies (soci&t&s populaires)
we learn that during 1792-1793 a majority of members of the SocietJ des Hommes-
Libres in section de Pont-Neuf, for example, were connected with one or other
branch of the 'artistic' trades. Next to clock-makers and jewellers, engraver-carvers
headed the list of members. The print-makers therefore, will undoubtedly have
numbered among the politically conscious sans-culottes.[16]
REPRODUCTIVE ART FORMS AND THE REVOLUTION
Intoxicated by press freedom undreamt of under the ancien regime, the very first
days of the revolution saw the swift development of a patriotic press in a spate of

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new publications.[17] And the same unprecedented freedom of expression fired the
activity of print-makers: in flysheets, bills and posters and as part and parcel of the
new journalism. The relaxation of all forms of censorship gave a massive boost to
the production and sale of printed matter of every kind. Significantly, it was in the
early months, in the October days of 1789, that the creativity of engravers was at its
most prolific and intense: an outpouring of expressive energy which in itself suggests
something of the heady elation of a people feeling themselves to be newly
citoyen. [18] (After Robespierre's fall, revolutionary prints disappeared almost
overnight. The post-Thermidor images that do exist are by satirists of the right, as
for example, in a caricature showing the interior of a revolutionary committee, with
its drunken, debauched members etc.[19J) The significance of the poster in
stimulating political consciousness has been particularly noted. During the revolu-
tionary period an absolute riot of placarding took place. In the first few days of
Nivose, Year II (Dec.-Jan. 1792-3) the walls of Paris were plastered with posters
issuing from different factions, and passers-by would gather in small groups to
debate the merits of different standpoints, thus involving even the least educated
sans-culotte in political controversy.[20]
A point of particular interest here is the status of the image as against the printed
word in a society of widespread illiteracy. Like the public festivals and the visual
pageantry of the large-scale spectacle which played such an important role in
reaching and rousing popular consciousness, the graphic image had an immediacy of
impact, could be far more widely understood than anything written. [21] (Newspaper
runs were tiny, a wider circulation of their contents being achieved through public
readings at meetings and in the clubs.)[22] The image, then, was a far more
compelling instrument of persuasion, carrying much that in our culture would be
catered for by print. Our own society, by contrast, is one where the image has
become mere illustration of the word, where instead of 'thinking with our eyes' we
read first in order to find out what we are seeing. [23]
Reproductive art forms, provided that they can be produced and duplicated with
speed at relatively low cost - which is more or less the definition of a viable
reproductive art form as such - are ideally suited as instruments of propaganda and
so come into their own in times of revolution. (Their role in such periods closer to
our own day, and equipped with far more developed reproductive technologies, will
need no emphasis. A new process - for example litho-photography - often goes
hand in hand with a qualitatively new form of message: though whether as cause,
effect or in reciprocal relationship is properly a matter for enquiry and debate.) So
in the French Revolution, it was the etching which became the key medium for swift
expression, for polemic and combat, its expressive freedom allowing for a stylistic
versatility which led it to oust the primacy of the engraving in the preceding
years. [24]
Let me briefly indicate the techniques involved in both graphic forms in order to
clarify why this should have been so. Line engraving on copper-plate is an arduous,
lengthy process. The laborious action of pushing and pressing the cutting tool, the
burin or graver as it is sometimes called, through the metal, rules it out as a medium
of rapid, visual reportage. When we look at an engraving, admiring how the smallest
and finest detail, the very textures and surfaces of objects have been rendered, we
may not consider the difficulties of working with the burin, the patience and
strenuous effort embodied in that image which we appreciate primarily for its
artistry. The etching, on the other hand, involves a much less constrained drawing

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technique; it can be done 'from life' and is altogether much quicker as a graphic
process. The copper-plate is covered with wax and the etcher draws on this with a
needle. Wherever the needle touches the wax, the metal below is laid bare.
Afterwards, the plate is placed in acid which bites into the copper where the wax h
been removed, thus transferring the drawing to the copper-plate itself. The prin
of the plate, whether etched or engraved, is essentially the same. It is done by
pressing the paper hard against the plate whose incisions contain printer's ink. An
etching plate can actually be carried in the pocket, sketch-book style, and a
spontaneous, free and easy drawing - just like a sketch in fact - made on the
spot. [25] (It was Rembrandt who in the 17th century turned the medium of etching t
most brilliant account.)
That the traditional engraving took years to be realised is effectively illustrated,
in its very irony, by the following case. An engraved portrait of Louis XVI, begun in
1785, and promised for the following year, was at long last completed in 1790 and
finally shown at the salon (the Academy's biennial exhibition), no longer too
apropos, in 1791.[26]
If there is a single notion that marks the revolutionary print's radical break with
tradition, its new interdependence of subject matter and graphic process, it is that of
the 'topical'. These etchings were executed, roughly coloured by hand, and on sale
within ten days or so of the event they recorded. For example, prints depicting the
storming of the Bastille - the subject which, more than any other, caught the
artistic, and indeed the public, imagination - were already on the market on 28th
July: a remarkable feat by contemporary standards, though we need to make
something of a cultural leap to grasp the unprecedented swiftness of production. [27]
PATRONAGE UNDER THE REVOLUTION
Altogether, in these years the arts acquired a strategic, a quite explicitly

function. Artists of all kinds were to be enlisted in the service of the re
further and generate the work of political transformation. Art was to
instrument in shaping the new human consciousness, in public instruction and
enlightenment (as, for example, in the campaign of dechristianisation); its role was
to be that of social and moral regenerator- the term one meets most often. In
occupying itself with artistic questions, the Committee of Public Safety upheld the
view that the people's aesthetic needs were as central to its work as military or
financial concerns. The task of promoting the arts through public patronage, often
in the form of open contests, was assumed by the Committee itself. [28]
At the same time, radical modifications in the fortunes and lives of individual
artists were the outcome of an end to private patronage. On the whole, the better
known engravers soon gave up working; there were not enough commissions for
them. Largely conservative in their outlook, their sympathies lay with the old
order. [29] All the same, many prints in the so-called Louis XVI style, depicting
fashionable society, were published during the period; so much so, that they were
denounced to the Convention by Wicar, a pupil of David. [30] The patterns of
change must inevitably have been mixed and in no way uniform, with certain artists
going over to the revolution from conviction, others from expediency, while others
again saw their work ignored or repudiated as out of phase with the revolution's
tastes and values. Iconoclasm, particularly common after 10 August 1792, was

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widespread; countless thousands of prints using traditional imagery were des-

troyed. [3 1]
Henceforth then, the arts were to fulfil a combined aesthetic and moral purpose:
to grace and adorn the new republic, while simultaneously commemorating its
achievements, its models of revolutionary heroism, its mentors and ideologues. [32]
Two projects illustrate the last: Rousseau was to be honoured by a statue (1792-3)
and Voltaire by a mass festival, religious in its ceremonial forms, yet pagan and
anti-clerical in spirit using secular banners, images, symbols and a classical decor. The
purpose of this celebration of July 1791 was to transfer his remains to the Pantheon;
100,000 people were reported to have taken part. [33]
In commissioning art works, the Committee of Public Safety clearly recognised
in engraving a primary form of propaganda and understood the potency of such a
reproducible medium.[34] A few examples will give some sense of this. A certain
engraver, Tassaert, living at 'rue Christophe 9, section de la Cite' was ordered to
produce fifty copies of a print depicting the last moments of Chalier, the Jacobin
hero of Lyons. Described as the Socrates of the revolution, Chalier's portrait
appeared everywhere, even on snuff-boxes. [35] (See the Musee Carnavalet's collec-
tion.) Similar prints were commissioned portraying other revolutionary martyr-
heroes. In a decree of 18 Pluviose, Year 11 (18 February, 1793), the Committee
ordered 150,000 copies of a periodical carrying political and patriotic prints to be
distributed to all municipalities, all army regiments, the patriotic societies and to
every school in the republic. Again, citizen Andouin was invited to print 1000 copies
of a portrait of Junius Brutus, while citizen Mirys, engaged on a pictorial history of
the Roman Republic, was authorised to place a copy in the library of every district
for the instruction of the public. [36]
Other commissions invited designs for a national civic costume - eleven such
engravings were attached to the Committee's minutes dealing with this item. [37]
Political caricatures, too, were commissioned by the Committee -at least three
examples being included in this exhibition. The Committee's instruction of 12
September 1793 reads:
The deputy David is invited to use all the talents and means at his disposal to
increase the number of prints and caricatures which will rouse the minds of the
people and make them feel how odious and ridiculous are the enemies of Liberty
and of the Republic.[38]
A first series of about ten prints directed against the English was completed. David
himself drew two of them: their scatological qualities surprise art historians who
find it hard to believe that a painter of such classical restraint and compositional
rigour could have been responsible for these, also. An edition of 500 in black and
white and 500 in colour was presented to the Assembly on 18 March 1794. Probably
the best known of them (and widely reproduced) is 'The Great Royal Knife-Grinding
Establishment for Sharpening English Swords'. Captioned: 'The celebrated Pitt
sharpening the swords with which he intends to murder the defenders of Liberty', it
shows an obese and panting George III as Georges Dandin (Moliere's weak and
derisory bourgeois character) crouching inside the grinder's wheel, operated and
manipulated by Pitt. [39]
But the most vigorous graphic art was probably a spontaneous affair rather than
work produced to order. The French historian F.A. Aulard, for example, has

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expressed the view that it is not in official commissions

free artistic fantasy, the heroic gaiety and grandeur of t
THE STRUCTURE OF FINE ART PRODUCTION
Until the revolution, the structure of professional painting was prescribed and
controlled by the most aristocratic cultural institution of the ancien regime, the
Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture.[41] Originally founded in the mid-17th
century to free the artist from the guild's restrictive hold, its establishment was
instrumental in severing artist from artisan and brought about an upgrading in the
artist's social status. Paradoxically, the centralising logic of absolutism- Colbert
was the Academy's chief legislator - robbed the artist of real independence, turning
him or her (the Academy did not discriminate against women) into a servant of the
court. [42] So, while enjoying a higher social standing than many of their European
counterparts, the French academicians enjoyed a good deal less artistic freedom.
Both organisationally and pedagogically the Academy was programmed to exert the
maximum degree of control. In its administrative structure it rested on an elective
hierarchy, its protector the king in person. All over the country identical schools
followed the same pattern. Moreover, its influence reached far beyond France,
providing a model for the academies of Germany, Austria, Italy, Holland and
Scandinavia whose teachers were, in many cases, French Academy trained. In short,
it provided the dominant model of seventeenth and eighteenth century art education
as a whole. [43]
The core of its fixed and unchanging curriculum was drawing. First came the
copying of drawings, then drawing from plaster casts, then life-drawing. Life-
drawing was ruled to be a monopoly of the Academy: it was illegal to hold life-
drawing classes elsewhere, even in the artists' studios. And only one style of
drawing, that of king and court, was promoted on the principle: control teaching
and you will control style. It is from the time of the Academy's inception that there
sprang those treatises enunciating a hierarchy of artistic genres, with history
painting at the summit, and moving down the scale to portraits, animal paintings,
landscapes, genre and still-life pictures. [44]
In the course of the 18th century the Academy became increasingly a bastion of
honorary privilege, a virtually closed corporation of some 600 members exercising
an autocratic hold over the painting world and determining in effect who should and
who should not be a painter. If you stood outside it, you could neither exhibit your
work and so become known (only Academy members were entitled to exhibit at the
salon and all attempts to hold alternative exhibitions were despotically suppressed)
nor hope to be awarded a government commission, again reserved for academicians.
Effectively, this meant that you just couldn't practise as a professional painter at all.
Divided into three 'estates', the Academy mirrored and replicated the hierarchical
structure of the ancien regime itself: the officers, the academicians and the
associates (agrees), with the first wielding all decision-making power, the second
merely a party to deliberations, while the third enjoyed no rights whatsoever.
Members were actually seated and their paintings hung in accordance with this
ranking system.
At the time of the revolution, therefore, the Academy served as an arch-symbol
of class distinction and inequality and in 1789 there began a protracted battle for its

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reform, headed by David. The wranglings were endless and, in the absence of any
clear outcome, a group of 300 artists created the Commune des Arts, a revolutionary
club in September, 1790. When later this showed signs of becoming too much of a
closed and elitist body like the Academy itself it was suppressed in its turn by the
Convention. In the Autumn of 1793, a more democratic organisation, La Socikte
populaire et republicaine des arts was formed by a radical group of artists of the
dissolved Commune. [45]
In the course of their tussles with the Academy, David and his supporters issued
an address to the National Assembly which was in the nature of a manifesto. In
stressing the artist's social responsibility towards the revolution and in advocating
that the arts be placed in the service of political and social change, these
revolutionary artists were formulating what was then a quite novel theory: that of
the political utility of art. [46] However, their plea for the freedom of the individual
artist was an equally important part of their agenda. Thus the salon exhibition
catalogue of 1791 declared: 'The arts have been bestowed with great good fortune:
at last the dominion of liberty holds sway over them; it has broken their chains: no
longer is genius condemned to obscurity' (my italics, H.M.). This struck a note
heralding what was soon to become the characteristic bourgeois-romantic view of
the artist's role.
For the painters and their public, the revolution brought about certain democra-
tic changes of real significance. The right to exhibit at the salon was thrown open to
all in 1791 and the Louvre's conversion into a national museum was ordered by the
Convention in September, 1791. For the first time, public and artists alike were now
able to see the treasures assembled from royal collections, wealthy individuals,
churches and monasteries. This was of signal importance to the artists who had had
little opportunity before the revolution to study original pictures outside the studio
in which they learned their craft.
THE EXHIBITION
One of the key motifs running through the exhibition is the relativism of artistic
perception. This is well pointed up by the grouping together of prints which treat the
same historical subject or occasion (e.g. the women going to Versailles to fetch the
King and his family, the storming of the Bastille, the royal family's flight to
Varennes). Of course, it comes as no surprise that these 'accounts' should differ in
their attitudes towards those events, ranging from support and identification to
ridicule or cynicism (the women marching to Versailles, for instance, are seen
variously as bloodthirsty furies, pagan revellers, righteously angry heroines, and so
on). But the more interesting and intractable aspect of any individual artist's 'point
of view' is how the chosen pictorial organisation and stylistic conventions (drawing,
in turn, on a variety of possible engraving techniques) convey a mood, a tone, or a
'feel' of the event, with the result that it is a record of that event yet, in effect, not
the same event at all. Such discussion of the topical, narrative prints as I have met
has largely dwelt on their historical accuracy as records, on 'the authenticity of the
facts'. [47] Commentators have marvelled at how minute details accord perfectly
with eye-witness written accounts, how the drama of the historic moment is frozen,
fixed, so that in casting your eye over a number of engravings you appear to be
watching the instant-by-instant unfolding of events, as in a series of documentary

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stills. [48] That verisimilitude is certainly an exciting a

vicariously experiencing the revolution almost two hund
emphasising that aspect alone you cannot fully do justice
quality of how a scene is rendered as opposed to what is bei
far more elusive kind of question which requires equal v
creative process and historical subject. Of course, the prin
historical evidence, and very effectively, but it is historica
filtered through the perceptions and sensibility of a part
scene has been represented, not simply reproduced. And ho
are a record, or wish to be so, they remain imaginative
requires to be made about photography, despite its appare
As historical evidence, the graphics are qualitatively diff
written or printed word, being subject to the peculiar dicta
the visual medium itself. Thus, an event, somehow or o
image, and every event in time has to be rendered in spat
frame. In the verbal or literary mode, narrative is conv
temporal sequence, rather than by juxtaposition. Then ag
representation - line, light, shadow, colour - which subtly
sive qualities. Combine them ever so differently, make one
or weaker, and you suggest an altogether different emotion
Apart from depictions of the great historic days, the revo
might expect, is particularly strong in satire. Given our o
caricature which are so rich and inventive in this perio
imagery of these prints may not strike an English visitor as
many cases the caricature styles have recognisable Englis
affinities with the line of graphic representation from
Rowlandson and Gillray. [49] (English caricature, in fact, wa
oIn French engravers. [50]) While these satires are certainly
and bite, nothing can quite compare with the savage expr
grotesquerie of Gillray, two of whose cartoons are included
the catalogue aptly observes, no Frenchman came anywhe
aesthetics of violence. [51]
But to appreciate the qualities of these caricatures, yo
anything else, to remind yourself of just how much opini
ancien regime. Voltaire, for example, had to publish much
tinely or have it printed abroad; often it was for nothing
favourable consideration of the ideas of John Locke, the Qu
of Shaftesbury. [52]) Any socially critical discourse had to b
aesopian to have a hearing at all. Perhaps this helps to acc
device of human satire in the guise of an animal fable: on
caricatures, the popular pictorial traditions, too, are steep
Fontaine. [53] And that, for me at least, was one of the
resonances of an older cultural tradition (it might be La Fo
wit of an enlightenment philosophe) and see them deployed i
and climate where, for the first time, the most sacred s
lampooned and pilloried.
The expressive zest and originality of these caricatures -so many of them by
anonymous artists, usually gaily coloured and often accompanied by doggerel
verse - registers a mood of spontaneous upsurge. In their sometimes naive,

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awkwardly clumsy and often amateuri

and bitterness, the force of popular indignation hitherto suppressed. Of the chosen
targets, anti-clericalism (given encouragement by the government) is by far the most
popular. You partake of the artist's often malevolent relish in portraying an array of
avaricious abbots, bloated friars and smug nuns ensnared and chastised. Then there
are the attacks on the aristocrats, the emigres, the royalist troops, the financiers, the
foreigners - Austrians, Prussians and English who side with the counter-revolu-
tionary forces - and the royal family, especially the much loathed Marie-Antoinette.
(In July 1791, a censor of caricatures was appointed, who on several occasions
forbade the sale of prints satirizing the royal family. Towards the end of 1791, or at
the beginning of 1792, the censorship changed hands and from then on worked in the
reverse direction! [54]) As indicated earlier, the print-makers most often availed
themselves of an existing stock of images which they would modify with a fresh
caption to suit the occasion. This accounts for the odd disjunction you sometimes
came upon between image and words. One such adaptation (not included in this
collection) shows Marie-Antoinette as a harpy, based on an engraving of 1771,
originally representing a chimera! [551 (The new caption would not involve more
than a day's work for the engraver. [56]) And of course, while the majority of satires
were motivated by revolutionary feeling, many royalist and counter-revolutionary
lampoons - anonymous, too, for the most part - were being produced. [57]
Those whose acquaintance with the art of the French Revolution is through its
painting will recognise allegory as a distinctive hallmark. In graphic art, with its
wider range of functions, the subject matter is necessarily far more diffuse but here,
too, the allegory makes its appearance. In letter-heads, medals, coins and even
playing cards, we find the new Virtues, most typically in female shape. A small sub
section of the exhibition is devoted to the allegorical genre.
Perhaps our present-day tastes do not make us particularly receptive to the
pictorial allegory: we may find its symbolic stylisation in classical garb too
academic, that its figurative language does not address itself to the 'actual', and
maybe that its moralism is too pious and upright for contemporary sensibilities
(Western at least). Abstract ideas, such as Truth, Reason, Probity, Innocence, are
given human embodiment, but nevertheless remain at the level of abstractions, no
more in fact that the embodiments of ideas. As symbols these figures may strike us
as static and lifeless, too much like emblematic formulae: the allegorical acts as a
facade rather than as a metaphor about the world or about the artist's vision of
it. [58] Marx's analysis in The Eighteenth Brumaire offers us some insight into why
this should be so. Bourgeois society needed myths, the self-deception of the heroic,
he argues, to bring it into existence. Its myths served the function of disguising the
real economic and social processes at work. These allegorical figures carry little
conviction because their myth-making is too transparent. The gap we perceive
between allegorical signification and reality from our own vantage-point in history
creates for us (as it did for Marx), an aesthetic dissonance, too. [591 However, as a
form which figures prominently in trade union and socialist art of the later 19th
century (as, for example, in the work of Walter Crane) allegory in this tradition
deserves the attention of anyone wishing to analyse the relationship between explicit
ideology and art.
But this is where an understanding of the historical context in which those images
were produced can totally revolutionise the way we actually 'see' and appreciate
them. The use of allegory in the French Revolution was as original and as

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innovatory as other representations of the period which we can respond to more

readily, like the images of lived, contemporary experience, full of recognisable
emotions, conflicts and situations, which neither idealise nor borrow the guise of
antiquity or mythology. For it is in the invention of tradition from scratch, in the
creation of a whole new iconography to match a new social order and its aspirations
that the very real originality of these allegories lies. (Originality, in this sense, does
not of course suffice to make a work aesthetically powerful or moving, but it's still
important to recognise the innovatory force of that originality.) One might suggest
that, of all historical moments, the French Revolution was the most creative in
making up new social practices, new ceremonies and rituals, new watchwords to
legitimise and celebrate the birth of a new world. (the republican calendar is a fine
example.) Having swept away all previous deities of church and court, all age-old
objects of veneration at one stroke, it set about replacing the deposed idols and
superstitions with fresh sources of inspiration. [60] Employing a religious style of
ceremonial to invest them with sanctity and authority, the revolution created its own
martyrs and its own saints from the past and from the present: Camille Desmoulins
remarked that 'No saint of the old calendar entered heaven with greater pomp that
"Saint" Voltaire.'[611
A host of emblems were taken from the past and injected with a new, revo-
lutionary meaning. The bonnet rouge, symbol of liberty (its origins in the Greek
Phrygian cap denoting freedom from despotism and the emancipation of the slave in
Roman times); the level, symbol of equality; the pike, weapon of the poor and of
women; the mace, representing universal will; the fasces (a bundle of rods with an
axe at its centre), image of force, representing revolutionary solidarity; the oak, civic
virtue; the eye, vigilance and justice, and so on. [62]
But how to give shape to the new ideals and values, how pictorially to represent
such abstract notions? Drawing on a mixture of classical mythology, Judo-Christian
elements and the heritage of philosophical enlightenment (with Reason and Nature
as its two complementary poles) the artists created divinities which could be playful,
high-minded, charming or imposingly dignified, as the case might be. The imper-
turbable Greek goddesses and beatific, if secularised, Virgin Marys may not stir us
particularly - and the accepted view that allegory creates types while the portrait
individualises does contain a large measure of truth - but even that oppostion is not
so water-tight, on the evidence of the print at least. Looking more closely at the
'Faces of the Revolution in Allegory' (the exhibition's heading for this section) one
can glimpse behind the deceptive robes and sandals the sturdy girl from the
countryside, the plebeian woman of the Paris streets.
There is a dialectic at work throughout the exhibition between the revolution's
conscious self-presentation which aims to project a certain image of itself, in its
heroes and heroines, its sites and settings -and its unselfconsciously spontaneous
and inadvertent self-presentation. The image where you catch something of the real
behind the ideal is of this order.
But, then, many other prints manifest a sharp-eyed realism without trappings
or disguises. Or, again, there are those where allegory has a necessary aesthetic
function in creating new symbolic meaning. One such image 'Citizens born free'
(reproduced here), particularly caught my attention, in being a truly contemporary,
demotic symbol and a marvellous fusion of the allegorical and the realistic. A
woman of the common people, the forbidding, grim set to her features, the sinewy,
brawny arms conveying all the harshness of that life, lifts her skirts to reveal her

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progeny, a naked infant-adult, a manikin: this is the new citizen born free! The
stance and gesture of the woman has a sort of stylized poetry about it, but altogether
without sentimentality. Indeed, the anti-romantic presentation of the age-old
mother-and-child theme -for the woman lacks all the conventional attributes of
femininity, modesty for example - makes for a stringent, almost abrasive quality to
the image. Symbolically raised to the status of heroine, this figure represents those
popular, egalitarian elements in the revolution which take it far beyond the
bourgeois aspirations of constitutionalism, civil liberties and private property.
But some of the most captivating items in the exhibition are ones which throw
light in an incidental and oblique way on the texture of daily social life, being neither
objects of art, pure and simple, nor of polemics. These are the wall calendars, the
almanacs, the revolutionary card games and letter heads, the silk printed fans.
There are two examples of headed notepaper which formed a nice contrast. The
first, 'From the supplies cashier, to the army of Sambre and Meuse': a gracefully
decorative, allegorical female figure, part classical, part eighteenth century nymph,
holds a bonnet rouge on a pole in one hand, a laurel wreath in the other, her bare
foot resting on the vanquished royal crown; the words 'Equality', to her left,
'Liberty' to her right. Embellishment and enlightenment all in one, even for the
most mundane administrative, legal or military communication! The second letter-
head, from an unknown correspondent, has none of that light finesse and charm.
It's a rudimentary and naive woodcut, rather home-made looking, and particularly
touching for that. A youth, holding an axe, grasps a coarse rope tied to what looks
like a tree trunk. It illustrates the heroism of the thirteen-year-old Viala who died
attempting to stop the royalist forces by cutting the rope supporting a bridge over
the river Durance. 'Year 3 of the French Republic, Liberty, Equality, the Republic
or Death', are engraved in awkwardly spaced letters, and below you can just make
out the handwritten 'Citoyen' by way of address.
A revolutionary pack of cards is another interesting exhibit. Playing cards are a
traditional popular art form of universal appeal, probably dating from the late 14th
century, as old as woodcut itself. Originally, the card games were mostly produced
in Lyons workshops, but by the end of the 18th century they were a thriving business
in towns all over France. An essential element was their colour: applied with a
stencil, it was always left to the imagination and inventiveness of the individual car
maker. [63]
After 1792, all royal emblems, all insignia of the ancien regime were proscribed
and vanished even from playing cards. And all over France, card-makers improvised
and created varied and new portrait galleries to replace the deposed royalites.
(Similarly, in post-1917 Russia, a game of 'revolutionary' chess was invented, which
substituted 'reds' and 'whites' for the traditional pieces.) Appropriated and adopted
as great common ancestors, a medley of figures appeared, strange companions some
of them, you might think: Cato, Brutus, Joan of Arc, Boilleau, Moliere, Rousseau,
Voltaire, as well as allegorical representations; virtues, spirits of commerce or war;
freedoms (of the press, of worship etc.) or seasons, winds, classical divinities and so
on. Unfamiliar headgear, sometimes a bonnet rouge or a soldier's head-dress, took
the place of the crowns of kings and queens. On the 19 Pluviose, Year II (9
February, 1793) the revolutionary committee of the City of Lille authorised the
widow Mouton to produce playing cards, instructing her to replace the knave, king
and queen with military figures, the queen to represent the Vivandiere or army
provisions seller. [74]

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The result is the delightful pack of cards displayed in the Exhibition. Immedia-
tely striking is the rough realism and energy of these figures; though stylized, they
are anything but static, their expressions, their individualised characters caught in a
few strokes - an effect enhanced by the almost hit-or-miss application of blobs and
patches of colour in tones of rust, olive green and ochre yellow. This energy derives
from a boldly sketched impressionism of outline, a happy coincidence perhaps,
between the technical exigencies of wood engraving and the resulting robustness of
characterisation.
These warrior-like men with stern and dignified faces are quite unmistakably the
venerable burghers of Lille. Each figure has the attributes or symbols of his or her
calling. Thus, the spirit of farming (GEnie Cultivateur) red-bonneted, holds a
shepherd's crook in one hand, some bunches of grapes in the other, as he leans
against a sheaf of corn; while the spirit of war (Genie de la Guerre) stands beside a
cannon, holding an unrolled map, and with a sword at his side. Four warriors
represent Equality, each in different military attire, and a quartet of grave, if rather
more youthful and comely female figures, each clasping a bonnet rouge on a pike,
personify the four Liberties: Liberty of the Press, Liberty of Commerce, Liberty of
Worship, Liberty of the Arts! The last, appropriately, being the most libertarian
figure; her bared shoulder and breast evoking the sculptor's craft. Once again, the
allegorical costume, but the features and expressions are of the ordinary citizens: a
series of character sketches drawn with economy and verve.
* * *
I want now to revert to the more general issues which were touched on at the outset,
that is, to raise the question of how a particular aesthetic, namely that of neo-
classicism, actually comes to occupy a hegemonic position within a culture, and of
how that position becomes confirmed and validated by its inscription into art
history. Enough has been said to suggest that an austere aesthetic such as neo-
classicism is not the most appropriate for popular forms of expression, demanding
as it does a highly skilled drawing technique, especially of the human body, which is
only acquired through the apprenticeship of the studio. The classicism of revolution-
ary art, therefore, has to be sought in its painting, its sculpture and its architecture.
Let us look at painting for a moment. Yet even if we consider this genre where we
would expect to find a predominance of classical pictures, it is astonishing to
discover that, both in theme and style, classical works constituted only a small
proportion of the paintings exhibited at the time. In the salon's exhibition of 1795,
for example, only 16 out of 535 canvases dealt with classical subjects.[65]
What kind of paintings therefore were being done? Fortunately, the contem-
porary salon catalogues tell us: the bulk of work was devoted to genre scenes (i.e.
scenes of ordinary, daily life), landscapes, and increasingly, in the later revolution-
ary years, portraits, the last reflecting the demands of a growing bourgeois
market. [66] In 1796, the Journal de Paris lamented that portraits were crowdi
historical paintings; three years later, the same paper reported 12 historical paintings
as against 200 portraits in a recent exhibition! [67] In numerical terms alone,
therefore, the classical vein was not the predominant one, while remaining the most
influential and prestigious - a question we will return to shortly. Of course, at any

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point in time one finds a range of co-existing sensibilities and styles in painting.
However, there is, I believe, a case to be made for the peculiarly transitional nature
of this period. The multiplicity of contrary modes of expression, the unprecedented
disregard for the traditional subject matter of art, which dates from around the time
of the revolution, is particularly striking if compared, for example, with 50 years
earlier. Moreover, we can chart the rise and wane in popularity of certain types of
painting within the space of a very few years; a fact which further underlines the
quickening formation of new markets and changing tastes. Our example of the
classical history painting provides one instance of this. Its heyday was clearly the
1780s, when Arthur Young was able to write: 'For one history piece in our
exhibitions at London, here are ten.'[68] By the 1790s - and undoubtedly in
response to the revolutionary experience - it had given way to the painting of
contemporary history. A good example of this, and stemming from the English
tradition of journalistic reportage in painting, is David's Tennis Court Oath -the
favourite illustration of the history books. A sense of the range of contemporary
modes of expression is best conveyed by listing just a few of them. Besides historicist
painting -the careful reconstruction of the past, often stimulated by the recently
founded discipline of archaeology - there were works typifying the Rousseauian
cult of sentiment and feeling; the moralising lesson of virtue (appealing to not so
different a public as that of Richardson's novels in England); and the romantic
painting of melancholy, anguish or Gothic horror. [691
How, therefore, are we to account for the pre-eminence of neo-classicism as an
aesthetic? With academic drawing as its basis and a classical culture forming its
frame of reference, it was characteristically a style of the fine art sphere. In our
earlier discussion we indicated how Academy art education by its very structure
fostered and controlled artistic style. In many essentials that structure perpetuated
itself. Despite the changes which swept away the institutional form of the ancien
regime Academy, the principles of art education enshrined within it remained largely
intact and unchallenged. [70] Only now it was a group of Jacobin painters, centered
on David and his studio, who took over the inheritance. The philosophy of art
education expressed in teaching method retained its traditional conservatism,
revolutionary transformations notwithstanding. For example, the practical and
theoretical sides of the artist's training were still kept apart and acquired in the
studio and the drawing school respectively (a state of affairs which was to continue
unbroken until 1863).[71] The teaching monopoly of the drawing school ensured a
continuity of style, and the rationalism of the style made it eminently teachable. It
was in the end to become the stock-in-trade of nineteenth century 'official' art.
Moreover, this was a pure fine art education which served only the aspiring painter:
it could not accommodate the needs of craft and industrial design as happened in
other countries, notably Germany.
Perhaps it is now somewhat clearer why this aesthetic acquired a dominance
which could not be seriously contested by other artistic practices and trends. It was
certainly challenged and there is evidence of a good deal of artistic rivalry, but its
supremacy could not be broken. The attacks launched by engravers against the
aesthetic elitism of David's Commune des Arts - academic drawing was its corner-
stone -are epitomized in a satirical print entitled Les Arts sortant du Temple du
Gout (The Arts emerging from the Temple of Taste). [72] However 'progressive
adherents, the Commune des Arts represented a privileged and powerful position
within an artistic hierarchy committed to a rarefied aesthetic.

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I want now to make a distinction between the actual pr

at a given period - what I have discussed up to now - a
style has come to be regarded as pre-eminent, i.e. the history of its reception.
Traditionally, art historians have treated the history of style in a hermetic way,
concentrating on the iconographic and formal aspects. They have focussed their
attention fairly exclusively on the 'high art' genres, hiving off other, for example
popular, forms, at best treating them as specialisms.[73] The exclusive tradition so
constructed determines our conception of the prevailing aesthetics of a period. The
historical understanding, which visual material offers, is likewise determined by that
selective representation. It is not simply that critics concern themselves with fine art
to the exclusion of other cultural forms. Even within their speciality- let us say
painting - they rarely confront the problem of the relationship between the
'greatest' and the 'average' work of any given time. [74] Therefore, while art
histories continue by and large to confine their discussion of an artistic culture to the
masterpieces it has produced, we may be led to regard these as, in some sense,
representative or typical: not because the commentator has failed to point out that
they are exceptional -to demonstrate why that is the case is often, after all, the
central purpose of art criticism- but because we are not enabled to situate those
works within the broader totality of artistic production. Further, the critic's
estimation of what constitutes the art of a given period, of what constitutes a prope
account of the succession of styles, is singularly susceptible to the valuations of the
art market. Something of this emerged at the very beginning, when we learned that
the revolutionary prints had attracted little interest, because they were unsigned.
The writing of art history is determined by factors such as these. To make sense
of aesthetic questions, therefore, say of 'style' or the 'popularity' of history
paintings, we need to look closely at the structure of artistic production: the social
status of the artist, patronage, the market, and so on. One cannot simply explain
questions of taste by reference to ideological factors similar in kind, like fashion,
sources of inspiration etc.
I do not wish to suggest that economic and social considerations are the only
ones or that aesthetic questions can be explained by them alone. But they have been
omitted from traditional art histories and they form the essential material basis for
understanding questions of style and reception. To account fully for taste, value
etc., from a materialist standpoint involves questions of psychology and epistem-
ology, which we cannot deal with here.
In theory, then, we must believe the art history of a period should encompass
both high art and the popular and semi-popular traditions which co-exist with it. In
practice, however, both traditional art historians and, indeed, marxists, have tended
to deal with the 'great tradition' and to create typologies and periodisations of style,
very much on the basis of that tradition alone. [75] Generally speaking, popular art
forms have only become of interest when they have been 'colonised' in order to
revitalise fine art. Otherwise, their study has been relegated to a separate sphere. It is
not difficult to understand why academic art historians should have proceeded in
this way. For them, works of art are, first and foremost, aesthetic artefacts - more
or less autonomous objects of analysis (while, of course, taking into account such
factors as sources, stylistic influences, historical 'background', place in artist's own
or artistic school's evolution etc.). Why marxist writers, rather than critically calling
into question how that tradition has been defined and constituted have on the whole
upheld it, only offering an alternative evaluation or reading, is a more complicated
and relevant question for us.

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The marxist tendency to read cultura

bourgeois art is connected with what I believe to be a particular use of reflection
theory in an idealist way. Somewhere behind this is the idea that the highest and
greatest art of an age (in this case, bourgeois art) is the quintessential expression of
the spirit of that age, while at the same time reflecting the ideology of the class or
part of the class, which produces it. [76] An element in this is certainly the legacy of
Marx's personal tastes and values - a product of his own cultural formation which
inherits the German classical tradition from Winckelmann to Hegel. [77] Then there
is the notion that one particular style or form is the most appropriate for expressing
a particular phase of social and historical development (neo-classicism in the case of
the French Revolution) based on the underlying conception that styles, or even the
work of an individual artist, reflect the outlook of different classes or phases in the
development of a single class. This approach will regard one artist, work or style as
'symptomatic' or 'representative' of a whole class ideology. As T.J. Clark put it:
'The notion of the "representative" artist, who gives us a complete depiction of the
"possible consciousness" of a class - a notion dear to a certain brand of marxist
history-seems to me a figment.'[78] Or to put it the other way round, making
essentially the same point: by claiming that the work is homologous with something
outside itself, you reduce and simplify the work itself.
Take Frederick Antal's comment on David's Oath of the Horatii: 'This picture is
the most characteristic and striking expression of the outlook of the bourgeoisie on
the eve of the Revolution'. And a little later, he writes that the classicistic/naturalistic
style (his term for the art of David) is that of the most progressive social class: the
ascendant bourgeoisie; while with the consolidation of the bourgeoisie's position
following the period of revolutionary ferment, 'in the drab reality of bourgeois
existence', classical painting no longer had an appeal. [791 To account for the
emergence of a new style and equally to explain its disappearance, is one very proper
function of a materialist history of art, in the same way as one would want to
understand the rise and eclipse of any other form of consciousness. But it cannot be
undertaken by drawing up such a very general equation between class ideology and
style. Further, according to this argument, not only is a particular style fitting for a
particular historical phase, but it is simultaneously progressive, while later ceasing to
be so. Progressive, because at that moment in time -in the heroic phase of the
history of the bourgeoisie -the artist is capable of incarnating social forces and
trends that are typical, i.e. that reveal the inner dynamics, the historically most
significant processes at work. It is this Hegelian-derived concept of the 'typical'
which lies at the basis of this approach. The finest art, so the argument goes, is able
to represent, to disclose the 'world-historical', but in a richly individualised way. In
this instance, the art of a socially specific group of aesthetically and politically
prominent Jacobins is made to embody more than their own social situation and
experience warrant. I would suggest that a historical model where the whole of social
reality gets absorbed into and subsumed under the vision of a single, ascendant
class - the 'torch-bearing' class - is a wrongly conceived one. By accepting that the
voice of any one social group can effectively represent the totality of social
experience, you lift art out and above the arena of class struggle and endow it with a
false and privileged 'objectivity'. Moreover, this conception is faulty in two further
respects: it assumes too monolithic a uniformity of class outlook; and obversely, it
cannot give due respect to the individuality, both personal and social, of the creating
subject -the artist. Altogether, then, it is the theoretical framework used which

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prescribes the object of significance, confining it, in

bourgeois mode of representation. This blocks out the
the many other existing forms which grow out of quite
class experiences, and so on.
What is lacking then in this approach is any real theory of social relations. A
more valuable approach would be to analyse particular 'ways of seeing' in terms of
the social relations which underpin them. The complex of social relations which exist
between the artistic producers and consumers, and between one artist and another
(e.g. master and apprentice), are highly specific ones. These will be characteristically
different depending on whether they revolve around a large, anonymous market, a
rich individual client or an official system of patronage.
We have taken it as axiomatic that the aesthetic and historical aspects of the print
cannot be divorced from each other, that neither can be treated in a vacuum. The
historian or social critic should resist the temptation to reduce art works to the status
of historical evidence (more tempting with material as patently 'historical' as this);
nor, conversely, should the art historian reduce them to the status of art objects,
pure and simple, where history 'just happens' to provide the subject matter or
background. 'How to exorcise the Revolution?' the catalogue's author ruefully
asks, as if to say, if only one could simply concentrate on the aesthetic pleasures of
the prints and leave history out of it. But like other art forms, the prints constitute a
point of articulation between the social world and the act of artistic creation and
they have an autonomous reality in relation to both these elements. Each print
represents one artist's encounter and engagement with specific historical determina-
tions, with all the available traditions of representation at the time, indeed with the
raw materials themselves. To elucidate the complex and many-faceted links which
are embodied in that new object, the work itself, is a central project of the social
history of art.
Many of the original drawings of Duplessi-Bertaux, one of the best known of the revolutionary
engravers, can be seen at the British Museum.
A reproduction pack of the cards referred to in the text are manufactured in France by J.M.
Simon.
1 For a discussion of the aims of the exhibition see Pascal de la Vaissi&re's introduction to
the exhibition catalogue: L'Art de l'Estampe et la Revolution Franqaise, Musee Carnavalet,
Paris 1977.
2 Catalogue, L 'Art de l'Estampe, p.4. The Carnavalet collection has about 4000 prints in
its 'History' section, nearly twice that number under 'Portraits' (and additionally 610
physiotraces- a method of tracing profiles) and many fine prints in its 'Topography'
portfolios, in bound collections, on decorative boxes etc.
3 Jacques Louis David (1748-1825) was the leading artist of revolutionary neo-classicism.
4 For some representative examples see Hugh Honour, Neo-classicism, Pelican Books
1968, W. Friedlaender, David to Delacroix, Cambridge, Mass., 1952, Fritz Novotny, Painting
and Sculpture in Europe 1780-1880, Pelican History of Art series, 1960, E.H. Gombrich, The
Story of Art, London, 1950.
5 Karl Marx, Selected Works, London, 1933, Vol. II pp 316-17.
6 Published in G.V. Plekhanov, Art and Social Life, London, 1953. Originally appeared
in Pravda Nos. 9-10, Moscow, 1905.
7 However, it is clear that the popular strain of French revolutionary art was well known
to Plekhanov: The bitter struggle raging throughout France, he writes a few pages later, left the
citizen little time for the peaceful pursuit of the arts. 'But it far from stifled the aesthetic
requirements of the people ... To be convinced of this, one has only to visit the Paris Mus6e

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Carnavalet. The material in this interesting museum, devoted to the revolutionary period,
shows irrefutably that, in becoming sansculottisW, art certainly did not perish, nor cease to be
art. It simply became steeped in an entirely new spirit ... As for French art of the revolutionary
period, the sans-culottes made it something which the art of the upper classes could never be:
art became the affair of the whole people.' G.V. Plekhanov, Art and Social Life, p. 163.
8 Francis D. Klingender's Art and the Industrial Revolution, originally appeared 1947,
now available in Paladin paperback, London, 1972.
9 Catalogue, L'Art de l'Estampe, p 4.
10 Catalogue, L'Art de l'Estampe, pp 29, 32.
11 See Jean Adhemar, Imagerie Populaire Franqaise, Milan, 1968, pp 5-7, 87, 93, wh
has a brief and interesting section on popular art in the revolution pp 92-96, and French
Popular Imagery, London, 1974, pp 52-3, catalogue of an exhibition held at the Hayward
Gallery.
12 Adhemar, Imagerie Populaire, p 6.
13 See Albert Soboul, The Parisian Sans-Culottes and the French Revolution, 17934,
London, 1964, pp 243-4, Robert Mandrou, De la Culture Populaire aux XVIIe et XVIIIe
Siecles. La Bibliotheque de Troyes, Paris, 1964, pp 19-20. The classic work on colporteur
literature is M. Charles Nisard, Histoire des Livres Populaires ou de la litt6rature du colportage
depuis le XVe siecle, Paris, 1854.
14 Adhemar, Imagerie Populaire, pp 93-94.
16 Soboul, The Paris Sans-culottes, pp 216-7.
17 See, for example, Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution from its Origins to 1793.
London, 1962, p 131; or Robert Darnton, 'The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of
Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France', Past and Present, No. 51, May 1971, p 113. 'Only a
few dozen periodicals, none containing much news, circulated in Paris during the 1780s. At
least 250 genuine newspapers were founded in the last six months of 1789, and at least 350
circulated in 1790.'
19 Adhemar, Imagerie Populaire, p 96.
20 Soboul, The Paris Sans-Culottes, p 242.
21 Grzegors Leopold Seidler, 'The Pathos and Pageantry of the Jacobin Revolution',
Cave, Vol. 2, No. 3, 1977, pp 245-247, 249, 252; Catalogue L'Art de l'Estampe, p 3. For some
data on literacy, see Michel Vovelle, 'Le tournant des mentalites en France 1760-1789: la
'sensibilite' pre-revolutionnaire', Social History, May 1977, pp 609-611. Literacy rose drama-
tically from just over 30% in 1760, to almost 50% just before the revolution. These overall
figures, however, blur the enormous regional differences which existed.
22 See Seidler, 'The Pathos and Pageantry', p 263. An average newspaper edition would
have been in the region of 600 or so.
23 See Kathleen Henderson, 'Pictures in History', History Workshop Journal 1, Spring
1976, p 210.
25 This method of etching is one among a number of different processes used. For an
extensive and historical account of graphic processes see Arthur M. Hind, The History of
Engraving and Etchingfrom thefifteenth century to the year 1914, London, 1923; reprinted in
Dover paperback, 1963.
26 Adhemar, Imagerie Populaire, p 92; Catalogue L'Art de l'Estampe, p 39.
27 Adhemiar, Imagerie Populaire, pp 92-93.
28 For a fine account of the social role of art in the Year II see F.A. Aulard, Etudes et
Legons sur la R6volution Franqaise, Paris, 1893, chapter XII 'L'Art et la Politique en l'An II'.
See also James A Leith, The Idea of Art as Propaganda in France, 1750-1799, Toronto, 1965,
chapters 5 and 6; Seidler, 'The Pathos and Pageantry', pp 241-242, 249; and specifically on the
role of art contests, Dowd, Pageant-Master, p 94.
29 Jean Adhemar, Graphic Art of the 18th Century, London, 1964, p 177. In an English
translation, this attractively illustrated and accessible work devotes an interesting chapter to
graphic art under the revolution, pp 177-191.
30 Adhemar, Graphic Art, p 177.
31 Leith, The Idea of Art as Propaganda, p 147; Catalogue, L'Art de l'Estampe, p 4.
32 See Aulard, 'L'Art et la Politique'; Leith, The Idea of Art as Propaganda, chapters 5
and 6.

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Artand theFrench Revolution 143
33 See Dowd, Pageant-Master, pp 46-54, and Seidler, 'The

248.
34 Leith, The Idea of Art as Propaganda, p 132; Adh6mar, Graphic Art, p 177; Aulard,
'L'Art et la Politique', pp 253-260.
35 By Aulard, 'L'Art et la Politique', p 256.
36 My examples are all taken from Aulard, 'L'Art et la Politique', pp 253-260.
37 Aulard is somewhat scathing about the project to create a national dress which he
considers a fanciful and contrived exercise. There were proposals for one national, civic
costume and others for the individual professions, i.e. the army, the law etc. 20,000 copies of
an engraving of the civic costume, 6000 copies of each professional costume were commis-
sioned. L'Art et la Politique, pp 261-263.
38 Quoted in Aulard, 'L'Art et la Politique', p 264.
39 See Adhemar, Graphic Art, pp 185, 187 (reproduction of this print p 119). Catalogue
L'Art de l'Estampe, pp 10, 11, 62 (reproduction p 61) and Aulard 'L'Art et la Politique'
especially his footnote, pp 265-6.
40 Aulard, 'L'Art et la Politique', p 267.
41 For a detailed account of the nature of the Academy and the battles for its reform after
the revolution see Dowd, Pageant-Master, pp 28-33; also Leith, The Idea of Art as
Propaganda, pp 141-143, and Nikolaus Pevsner, Academies of Art Past & Present, London,
1940, pp 198-199.
42 Women were, in fact, prominent among Academy painters. At the 1787 salon, for
example, the two most outstanding portrait painters were women. The one, Mme. Vigee-
Lebrun, celebrated for her official, dynastic portraits of Marie-Antoinette, fled the country.
Her rival, Mme. Labille-Guiard, on the other hand, sided with the revolution and supported
the radical rebellion against the Academy. It is interesting to note that fifty-odd women
painters exhibited at the salon of 1806. See Wend Graf Kalnein and Michael Levey, Art and
Architecture in the Eighteenth Century in France, Pelican History of Art, 1972, pp 186-188,
194, and Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art, Princeton,
1967, p 46.
43 The presentation of the structure and philosophy of art education offered in Pevsner,
Academies of Art is a rich and suggestive one. See also the introductory chapter to Albert
Boime, The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century, London, 1971.
44 In England, the most distinguished version of this hierarchical view of the arts was
formulated by Joshua Reynolds in his Discourses on Art (1769-90). However, Frederick Antal
attempts to situate these ideas about art socially when he writes: 'For there existed a rigidly
hierarchic scale in the social estimation of the several types of painting, a scale dating from the
time when the artists had to fight for their social position, for their emergence above the artisan
level. On this scale historical compositions were at that time still regarded as the highest
category of painting.' Frederick Antal, Classicism and Romanticism, London, 1966, chapter 1,
p 5.
45 See Dowd, Pageant-Master, pp 94-95 and also Leith, The Idea of Art as Propaganda,
pp 112-116.
46 Dowd, Pageant-Master, pp 32-33; Leith, The Idea of Art as Propaganda, pp 142-143.
47 Much emphasis is laid on this in French Popular Imagery, pp 78-81.
48 French Popular Imagery, p 80.
49 A delightful, popular, illustrated introduction to this tradition was produced by F.D.
Klingender ed., Hogarth and English Caricature, London, 1944.
50 Catalogue, L'Art de l'Estampe, pp 6, 59; Adhemar Graphic Art, p 179.
51 Catalogue, L'Art de L'Estampe, p 6.
52 Take the fate of Voltaire's Lettres Philosophiques ou Lettres Anglaises (first English
edition 1733 and published in France the following year) which dealt with these inflammator
subjects. Following a parliamentary decree condemning the work as 'calculated to inspire
libertine ideas of the greatest danger to religion and the order of civil society', it was torn up
and committed to the flames by the Executor of High Justice. Voltaire, Lettres Philosophiques
ou Lettres Anglaises, Raymond Naves ed., Paris, 1951, p 1. Yet as Robert Darnton has pointed
out, the Lettres Philosophiques may have shaken the social fabric in 1734, 'but by the time of
Voltaire's apotheosis in 1778, France had absorbed the shock.' Darnton, The High Enlighten-
ment, p 114. The next generation of philosophes were incorporated into high society (le
monde) - a world based on protection and privilege. It was out in the cold, in the intellectual
underworld of literary "Grub Street", that revolutionary Jacobinism and its war on the

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'aristocracy of the mind' were bred. Darnton proposes that both the scurrilous satirists
(libellistes) of that underworld, and the philosophes have their place among the intellectual
origins of the revolution.
53 Jean de La Fontaine, French seventeenth century writer of animal fables in the tradition
of Aesop.
54 Adhemar, Graphic Art, p 183; Adhemar Imagerie Populaire, p 96.
55 Adhemar, Imagerie Populaire, p 94; Adhemar, Graphic Art, p 179.
56 Just what metamorphoses a single print could undergo is ironically illustrated in the
three successive versions of one engraving - not included in this selection, but part of the
exhibition of popular imagery shown at the Hayward Gallery in 1974. The first version entitled
'Vive le Roy' (1789) celebrates Louis XVI's visit to the Hotel de Ville, on 17 July 1789. The
scene is the interior of a Normandy farmhouse, where a veteran soldier, surrounded by an
eager audience, recounts the events of this memorable day, holding up a portrait of Louis XVI
for all to see. The title reads, 'To all well-born Frenchmen, this picture is dear'. To the right of
the scene the print pedlar having just sold the portrait, is to be seen counting his coins. The
second version of the same print appeared in 1794, this time dedicated to 'The worthy dwellers
of farm cottages'. Through an open door you see the tree of Liberty crowned with a bonnet
rouge. The engraver has added two allegorical prints of Liberty and Equality on the wall. In
place of the effaced portrait of Louis XVI there is a bill declaring: 'The decree of the 18th
Floreal. The French people recognise the existence of the Supreme Being and the immortality
of the soul'. A new title at the foot of the print proclaims: 'To the glory of the new official
religion as defined in this decree'. The third version dates from 1797. The tricolour has
replaced the bonnet rouge, and the two wall prints represent General Bonaparte and an
allegory of Peace. The title reads: 'The joy of the French people at the announcement of a
peace treaty with the Empire'. Another bill, praising one of Napoleon's victories, falls from
the pedlar's box. French Popular Imagery, p. 84.
57 See Adhemar, Imagerie Populaire, p 54 and Catalogue L'Art de ('Estampe for
descriptions and illustrations of counter-revolutionary prints.
58 The contrast with Delacroix's well-known painting of the 1830 barricades, Liberty
Guiding the People, will underline the point. Here, the allegorical female figure brandishing
the tricolour, is set in a scene of ruthless naturalism, albeit with Byronic overtones. The
allegory works in a double way. First, the living drama of terror and slaughter explodes the
abstract character of Liberty and ironises it; second, and conversely, this treatment extends the
significance of the specific historical moment, raising it to the status of allegory.
59 Marx, Selected Works, p 318. Unlike earlier revolutions, we no longer need - or should
not need - to 'waken the dead' in order to glorify our own struggles. 'The social revolution of
the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future'.
60 For a discussion of the revolution's wholesale invention of tradition, its improvisation
of new divinities see J. Renouvier, Histoire de l'Art pendant la Revolution considgrM
principalement dans les estampes, Paris, 1863, pp 391, 400 (Renouvier's History is the classic
work on the revolutionary print) or Harold T. Parker, The Cult of Antiquity and the French
Revolutionaries, Chicago, 1937, p 139, on the development of symbols during the revolution's
early stages. See also Leith, The Idea of Art as Propaganda, pp 96-128.
61 Quoted in Dowd, Pageant-Master, p 51 and Seidler, 'The Pathos and Pageantry', p 248.
62 See Renouvier, Histoire de lArt, pp 394-399; Leith, The Idea of Art as Propaganda,
p 109; Seidler 'The Pathos and Pageantry', pp 250, 252.
63 For a detailed account of card games see H.R. D'Allemagne, Les Cartes d Jouer, Paris,
1906, Vol. II, p 176. Otherwise there is an interesting section in French Popular Imagery, pp
136-139.
64 Catalogue, L'Art de l'Estampe, p 62 and the French version of the Hayward Gallery
catalogue: Cinq Siecles d'Imagerie Populaire, Paris, 1973, p 305.
65 See A. Schnapper's introduction to exhibition catalogue De David d Delacroix, Grand
Palais, Paris, 1974.
66 Leith, The Idea of Art as Propaganda, p 145. Unfortunately, the author's own
standpoint makes for a highly tendentious account. Essentially, Leith argues that the
revolution failed (mercifully, he implies) in its campaign to rally artists to its cause and this is
reflected in, among other things, the small and decreasing number of paintings dealing with
revolutionary and patriotic subjects. However, in accounting for this he is certainly right to
stress the economic factors - the artist's need to do what the customers want - and the
political circumspection demanded by the times. The tables at the end of his book, based on the
contemporary Livrets (exhibition catalogues of 1789-1799) give a detailed breakdown of the

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number of pictures of any given genre. See Appendix: Table

with sculpture, Table C, p 177, with engraving and Table D, p
67 Leith, The Idea of Art as Propaganda, p 146.
68 Quoted in Kalnein and Levey, Art and Architecture, p 177.
69 For a detailed account of late eighteenth century painting, see Rosenblum, Transforma-
tions.
70 See Pevsner, Academies of Art, pp 192, 199-200.
71 By drawing school, I am referring to those institutions which took the place of the
Academy, like the Commune des Arts. Here, the most radical change in the curriculum was the
substitution of life-drawing by drawing from classical statues. After the revolutionary years,
the Academies were re-established in all but name.
73 'Even the abundant literature on popular and semi-popular art is not, I believe,
particularly frowned upon so long as it is kept well apart from the general stylistic developmen
or at any rate can be considered diverting or charming.' See Antal, Classicism and Romanticism,
chapter 6, pp 187-8.
74 John Berger's Ways of Seeing, London, 1972, chapter 5, pp 83-112, makes a related
point, though his argument is focussed on the tradition of European oil painting. 'Art history
has totally failed to come to terms with the problem of the relationship between the
outstanding work and the average work of the European tradition.' p 88. He emphasises that
of the many hundreds of thousands of canvases and easel pictures, a great number have not
survived, and of those which have, only a small fraction are seriously treated as works of fine
art. Of these, a smaller fraction still make up the actual pictures repeatedly reproduced and
presented as the work of the 'masters'. The average work, he argues, was produced 'more or
less cynically' to fulfil the demands of the market. 'And it is in this contradiction between art
and market that the explanation must be sought for what amounts to the contrast, the
antagonism existing between the exceptional work and the average.' It was the medium of oil
paint itself, according to Berger, which in its 'substantiality' celebrated the new buying power
of money. But looking at the relationship between the 'tradition' and its 'masters', we see,
paradoxically, that it was the latter, i.e. the exceptional artists, who struggled with the given
medium, broke free of the tradition's norms and produced work against the grain of its values.
Ironically, it is they who are then acclaimed as the tradition's supreme representatives.
This account unfortunately is rather too neat and schematic to be altogether convincing
and one can object to it further on the grounds of its technological determinism (it is the
medium, the raw material itself - oil paint - which is made to embody material social values).
But my central purpose here is to quote Berger's argument for the ideas it stimulates rather
than to pick a quarrel with it.
75 Of course, there are some important exceptions, notably Klingender, whose work on
popular art forms (some of it, like Goya and the Democratic Tradition, relatively little known)
is unique and deserves much more consideration from us. Another exception is the German
critic, Walter Benjamin, whose whole temperament and cast of mind led him to explore the
cultural by-ways rather than the well-trodden high road. Antal, too, is certainly conscious of
the problem (see footnote 70), although his own discussion of French revolutionary art falls
into a more traditional mould in this respect.
76 This is a dominant strain in the thinking of critics as representative of the tradition as
Plekhanov, Georg Lukics and Lucien Goldmann. In the sphere of art criticism, Antal's
'Reflections on Classicism and Romanticism' (chapter 6), is based on assumptions characteristic
of this approach. Arnold Hauser's The Social History of Art, London, 1951, is an even more
extreme example.
77 Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768), founding father of neo-classicism and an
exceptionally important figure for the revolution. By connecting Hellenic culture with the ideal
of the citizen, he made classical Greece relevant to contemporary Europe.
78 T.J. Clark, 'The conditions of artistic creation', Times Literary Supplement, 24 May
rather elliptical form in the introductory chapter of T.J. Clark's Image of the People. Gustave
Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, London, 1973, pp 10-13 especially.
79 Plekhanov makes the same point, Art and Social Life, pp 158-159. For another
example of the equation between qualities of artistic style and class ideology see Hauser, Th
Social History ofArt, Vol. 3, p 137: 'The precision and objectivity, the restriction of the w
the barest essentials and the intellectual energy expressed in this concentration were more in
harmony with the stoicism of the revolutionary bourgeoisie than any other artistic trend.'

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